If they "followed the science" and "got all the big calls right"

[verdantverdure]

And protected the people of Britain, and our economy...

Then Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock and all the Cabinet Ministers of the Conservative government since 2019 have nothing to hide

And can hand over any and all communications to the Covid Inquiry.

Yep.

What is it that they're trying to hide, I wonder?

I really don't understand all of the government arguments about privacy for politicians and MPs and not wanting to share their personal communications etc. Surely they are not telling us that high stakes govermnent business is being conducted on personal mobile phones, with all of the security risks that that would entail? Or, if they are using work devices for government business as I would expect, surely they are not using these devices to text their spouses/friends as well?

A separation of professional and private communications is the bare minimum for cyber security in most organisations, so I'm left wondering if a)our politicians and top civil servants have just operated with an incredible lack of basic professional boundaries or b)their real worry is not actually about private conversations at all but about the potentially incriminating implications of their professional interactions.

My money is on the latter. Either way, they don't come out of it looking good at all.

It's not so much about hiding/not disclosing Covid related decisions, it's because there'll be lots of other unrelated discussions about things that might be NDA mixed up with them.

For me it highlights why the Govt is using WhatsApp for confidential conversations anyway - I hope they and other businesses will now think twice about that.

Well, I would hope that they aren't sharing classified information in a WhatsApp conversation, personally. And certainly not on a phone that apparently also contains personal conversations with their partners/spouses etc.

Well whatever is on that phone it is not going to put them in a professional light.

I think there will be a lot of things about manipulating public opinion to create a certain effect and there will be unprofessional words about how we the public are idiots. Possibly things about how they can turn a crisis to their advantage too. Possibly other implications about using QE for a particular purpose to manipulate the financial and housing markets too.

Let's face it - if they were partying behind our backs, they obviously didn't see it as much of a threat to themselves as they were portraying to the general public. Many of them did very well out of the pandemic when the rest of us are now taking the hit through higher taxes, inflation and interest rates. There has been a huge wealth transfer abd I don't think this was accidental.

Yep, it's nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with ensuring the public never find out what utter self serving cunts they are.

What is your AIBU?

It seems a pretty foregone conclusion that they are...

I guess YANBU that if they followed the science and got all the big calls right and protected our people and our economy then there's no reason not to hand over everything the Inquiry they set up has asked for, is there?

And YABU The government don't need to hand over the evidence that the Covid Inquiry they set up is asking for. They are above British law. Unlike rape victims who always have to hand over their phones.

There has been a huge wealth transfer and I don't think this was accidental
seeing an opportunity to make out like bandits they milked it for all it was worth, poor poor Rishi the rich, what IS he hiding😈

Well, to play devil's advocate, I suppose there is how a decision was arrived at, and the discussions that surround it. Say, they did make all the right calls (not saying they did!) but had to have some pretty cold and calculating discussions to reach that point.

E.g. "We can do x which will kill 65% of the over 80s, or we can do y which results in a lower death rate overall but with significantly more long term sick."

There's no nice way to have that debate.

Or we could decide not include delivery spending in the Eat Out To Help Out scheme to encourage people to mingle during an airborne virus, kicking off the second wave which caused more economic damage and killed more people than the first wave and cancelled Christmas?

(But ask our friends in the media to keep it quiet that numbers have been rising in intervention areas during the scheme.)

I don't either.

All those PPE contracts and testing contracting, and storing PPE contracts, and burning PPE contracts seem to have gone to friends of the Tory party don't they?

Test and Trace were paying so many £1000 a day "consultants" they were a government sanctioned money laundering scheme putting billions of our money into private hands for...What?

The covid support schemes were abused because the government did no checks and refused to investigate. More wasted billions.

The Tories saw covid as an opportunity to pump unprecedented amounts of our country's money into their mates' pockets.

I haven't verified these figures but if memory serves they look pretty accurate to me

I think it will be good for the country.

I still meet people who think the Nightingale hospitals were a wonderful thing that really helped instead of primarily a bit of fake theatre to fool us all.

it was too big of an opportunity to let it go to waste, the public all scared/cowed, they had SO MUCH cover to get away with all manner of shenanigans, one could almost characterize covid as a honeytrap for corrupt politicians.
Power corrupts, people who seek it should not be trusted with it, they all need to be kept under the spotlight because they WILL do whatever they think/feel they can get away with.
And didn't they just!
It will surely all come out in the wash and this now is the spin cycle

Follow the science? Not according to Prof Edmunds

Rishi Sunak didn't seek any scientific advice before launching Eat Out to Help Out.

SAGE scientist Prof John Edmunds: "If we had [been consulted], I would have been clear what I thought... that it was a spectacularly stupid idea".

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/03/sunak-under-fire-as-stupid-eat-out-to-help-out-scheme-to-be-focus-of-covid-inquiry

Rishi is terrified of being made to look utterly incompetent due to his "Eat Out to Help Out" program.

Keep in mind he is actually operating under rhe delusion the Tories still have a chance in the next General Election (circa end of 2024)

Those messages will effectively destroy him with how the public views him.

It would be over for his chances (no matter how delusional they may be).

Thats why Simon Case is now trying to blackmail Boris with the legal costs. This is really desperate stuff by Case.

I don't care one iota about Boris, but its pretty clear now that Rishi & Case have been completely out-manouvered by Boris, and he (Boris) fully intends to destroy Rishi for engineering his downfall (thats how he views it).

Personally I thought it was just common sense that Eat Out To Help Out would lead to a resurgence of the virus and I couldn't imagine what kind of scientists would think differently. You'd have to be a stranger to both logic and maths to think Eat Out To Help Out was a good idea.

I didn't know if the government were delusional or just don't care how many people would die, and how many businesses would be damaged by giving the virus a good head start like that.

At the time people called it Eat Out To Help The Virus Get About and things like that didn't they?

Based on everything they'd told us so far in the pandemic it was fairly obviously a bad idea.

And it cost almost a £million then the case numbers it led to screwed the hospitality industry's most productive of the year: Christmas.

Well Johnson so far has only handed over messages from his new May 2021 phone and only ones he decided were relevant, around 40 messages.
His claim that his old phone shouldn't be turned on for safety reasons has been ridicules by experts.

Yes it's common sense but seeing the conversations surrounding it in black and white will kill dead any further attempts to gaslight the guillible. Imagine messages from Whitty saying this is absolute madness and will lead to thousands of deaths and Sunak dismissing him as it's a price he's willing to let others pay, then Johnson piping up to hilariously point out it'd sort out the social care crisis.

It's really not about the public seeing what was said about whatever. It's about a retired High Court Judge seeing those things, and then deciding if what is revealed is pertinent to the scope of her enquiry.

So if there is chat about their personal lives of about anything out with the scope of the enquiry, she will not disclose those things.

it's clear to me that there is a number of things that are relevant to her enquiry, which the government does not want to be revealed. That seems to me to be the only reason why the government is taking the enquiry (which they ordered, they chose the chair of and they decided the scope of) to judicial review.

the government has well and truly cocked this up and are making themselves look ridiculous, as well as mendacious.

But we already know.

Unlikely much will be found now everyone has had plenty of time to go through and delete messages.

Well, perhaps there isn't a nice way to have that debate, but don't you think the covid enquiry should have access to those conversations regardless? What's the point of an enquiry at all if they aren't able to examine the decision making processes properly?

In any case, the govermnent claims to have handed over all "relevant" conversations. It would be hard to argue that a conversation like the one that you describe is not relevant, regardless of whether you think this should be in the public domain or not.

Nobody is arguing that the messages should all be published for the general public/media to pick over, merely that the enquiry should have access to them.

If conversations pertaining to the government of the country were carried out on appropriate work devices, and if people kept their personal communications to their personal devices as most people might reasonably expect, then there should not be an issue with sharing the content of any messages. If there was top secret, classified information being shared, then this should obviously have been done through secure official channels and not on WhatsApp. So what could possibly be on those phones that the enquiry shouldn't legitimately be allowed to see? If there are conversations pertaining to other government business that had absolutely no bearing on covid, then I'm sure that the enquiry will just ignore it.

I don't think there can be any doubt hat the government has something that they're desperate to hide here. The only real question for me is what exactly that is.

I think it's important to remember that, at the time of eat out to help out, right wing commentators like Juilie Hartley Brewer and Toby Young were openly saying that there would be no second wave.

Both of them repeatedly maintained that the growing number of covid cases was an artifact because nobody in the scientific community properly understood about false positives in PCR tests. A significant number of tory MPs went along with this. I am a retired scientist and used PCR in my work for years..the idea that these people have any idea about this is just ridiculous, but people lapped it up.

They also repeatedly stated that scientists underestimated the degree of acquired immunity to Corona virus because they only measured antibody levels, not T cell mediated immunity. This was another reason there would be no second wave of infections. Once again, it is utterly nonsensical and these people know nothing about immunology (I know very little myself). Nevertheless, sitting Tory MPs repeated this and criticised the government for over reacting to the pandemic.

This fuelled nonsensical conspiracy theories with protesters outside hospitals abusing medical staff for lying about covid. A colleague is a cardiologist in Swansea...he was subject to this sort of abuse several times after spending exhausting shifts watching his patients die.

There was a clear strand of public opinion that the government had completely over reacted to Covid, and many accepted this. I have heard people say that the reason they were partying in Downibg street was because they knew that covid was far less dangerous than generally thought....and that the restrictions were all part of a plot. Some described it as a right wing plot, some as a left wing plot. One Tory mp described social distancing regulations as a "Socialist wet dream" foisted on us by government scientists.

How this enquiry will sort this out I have no idea....