PMQs is good fun today. As predicted, an easy point for Sunak when pressed on his COVID fine. He brings up Sue Gray's report and says Starmer's had more contact with her that he has.
This will be the sad spectacle of a British PM spouting excuses he knows are fake. Worse still we know they're fake ... ... worst of all he knows we know they're fake. Will that stop him, of course not ... he still believes ruffling his hair, grinning and joking about everything will fool everyone he sees as gullible and help him win the argument. The Sue Gray report was irrelevant. It was basically a yes/no answer to the question 'Were the Met right to fine the PM and if not why did he pay it?' The report was basically irrelevant and only started as a convenient reason for Ministers to avoid answering embarrassing questions.
It seems the crime was how he fraudulently paid her ... ... not that he thought money is always the way out of every problem.
So, leaving do's and birthdays, end of a hard week drinks etc all are not parties and not subject to rules???
So basically, any party was OK providing there was even the most tenuous link to people you might work with. And where did these much repeated assurances, given to the House of Commons, come from? From two people who were actually at the parties and risked being fined if rules had in fact been broken. So these assurances weren't from top government advisers ... ... just a couple of spin doctors who's job, as Johnson knows, is to lie through their teeth
Nope. Is it equivalent of watching the head boy in a private school, mouth covered in chocolate, trying to convince sir that it was not he who snuck into the tuck shop after lights out?
I like the bit where he said it couldn’t have been him, he was in Pizza Express at Woking at the time...Sorry, wrong bloke, I get mixed up with these lying bar stewards
Fascinating stuff. He's going to get off on a technicality, or at worst muddy the waters so any decision against him will remain contentious.
This is a man who clearly sees himself as smart and intelligent ... ... but has to be advised whether the party he's at, with his wife and interior designer, is a work event or not
I'd get repeated assurances that I'm a handsome chap if I repeatedly ask my Mrs and my mam. If you only ask the people who tell you what you want to hear, then you never get the truth (that you definitely know already).
He may as well have stood up in Parliament and said 'I've been repeatedly assured (By a bloke I met in the commons bar) that no rules were broken, hic. Funny to see him march in with his lawyers, present a huge defence dossier, thump the table then, at the end ... ... say 'please please please don't sack me'
Unfortunately it probably doesn't matter. We're into the deep waters of post-truth politics now and if the result goes against him, he'll carry on with his own narrative that he did nothing wrong and it was a stitch up.
The problem with all people like Bonko (bullshitters) is that they think they are cleverer than everybody else, and everybody else will be fooled by their lies. Problem for people like that is that they are not cleverer than anybody else and nobody believes them. That's when the hissy fits come out. Bonko was showing signs of this today....