Sunday 4 June 2023

Johnson and Trump come under pressure

There was always a strange parallel between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump and perhaps between them, Brexit and Vladimir Putin. There is pretty compelling evidence to connect Russia with the rise of both and if Russia’s intention was to destabilise the West, these two men went a very long way toward achieving that goal as we are now seeing. But both (and all three if you include Putin) are now coming under serious pressure as investigations uncover just now appallingly badly qualified they were to govern anything.

If Putin had wanted to undermine the West’s collective self-confidence it’s hard to see how he could have done a better job.

First, Johnson. The Covid inquiry under Baroness Hallett is struggling to get communications between ministers, particularly WhatsApp messages concerning the response to the pandemic, from the Cabinet Office. The government is seeking a judicial review to try and prevent the inquiry from seeing all the messages in unredacted form. Most lawyers think they will lose.

The government claims many messages are ‘unambiguously irrelevant’ and they want to have the right to determine which ones fall into that category. Hallett doesn’t agree.

Johnson is apparently happy to hand them all over while Sunak is behind the legal action. You can see who has the most to lose, and it isn’t Johnson. An inkling of why they’re so keen to avoid these WhatsApp messages becoming public can be seen in The Guardian. There is a report with some blistering criticisms of how the pandemic was handled: 

"The president of the British Medical Association, Prof Martin McKee, also criticises the 'dysfunctional' way in which the government, including the Treasury under Sunak, overlooked scientific advice throughout the pandemic."

And talking of the Ear out to Help Out scheme, Prof John Edmunds of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a member of the Sage committee of advisers to ministers, said:

“If we had [been consulted], I would have been clear what I thought about it,” said Edmunds. “As far as I am concerned, it was a spectacularly stupid idea and an obscene way to spend public money.”

Edmunds also claimed that Sage scientists had no real role in shaping policies across government. “We were asked questions and gave scientific answers but we didn’t know what strategy was being discussed by the government. It was written by them and we saw it the same day that the press saw it."

“They never said: ‘Here’s the strategy, what do you think of it?’ That’s not how it worked and that is why it’s always been so misleading for the government to pretend that it was following science. That’s just nonsense.”

This will, I’m sure, be the final nail in Johnson’s coffin, quite apart from Brexit and all the other infidelities, policy mistakes, and all-around corruption.

Across the Atlantic, legal troubles continue to pile up for Trump on several fronts most notably in the investigation over whether he knowingly removed secret and top-secret documents from The White House before he left in January 2021.

The Department of Justice is now said to have obtained recordings of Trump after he left office, in July 2021, openly talking about these classified documents. The BBC says:

"...people familiar with the matter told CBS that Mr Trump can be heard acknowledging there are national security restrictions on a military memo because it details a potential attack on Iran. He says it is still classified and should have been declassified before leaving the White House, one person said."

And as if that wasn't bad enough, Trump's son-in-law received $2 billion from Saudi Arabia in August 2021 and the file Trump was talking about in the leaked audio included plans for a US attack on Iran and is now missing:

All of this ten years ago would have been absolutely unthinkable, a work of fiction, something out of the wilder end of Hollywood. But now we apparently have credible evidence both real and circumstantial, appearing to show that an ex-President of the USA has sold or at least was prepared to sell, secrets to America's erstwhile ally about plans to attack a sworn enemy of Washington!

It is literally unbelievable and still less so that Trump is still the front-runner to be the Republican candidate for the presidential election in late 2024!

I honestly think Trump could wind up in jail

The thing both men have in common is the ability to lie and keep on lying, even when presented with clear evidence of wrongdoing on their part. With the rise of AI, it's possible to fake almost anything and I could easily see Trump claiming the audio and every shred of evidence is simply a giant conspiracy involving thousands of individuals acting together and alone to bring him down - and I can also see a big section of US voters believing it.

Johnson isn't going to hear a cell door slam behind him, you can be sure of that and there are still voters in Britain for whom he is more popular than Sunak and probably other possible Tory leaders.He is a mini-Trump in that regard but the Covid inquiry will trash whatever is left of his reputation as will Brexit.  But as for admitting to getting all the 'big calls' wrong, he will never do that, because he can't.

Polling

The polls continue to show support for Brexit on the slide. The latest from BMG is reported in The I newspaper, showing "rising support for rejoining the EU, with almost half (49 per cent) of voters now wanting to reverse Brexit – the highest level recorded by BMG Research in its exclusive surveys for i."

"More than one in 10 Leave voters (11 per cent) also want to rejoin the EU, while more Brexit backers (14 per cent) say they would vote the opposite way in the 2016 referendum if they could go back in time, compared to just 4 per cent of Remainers (4 per cent)."

"It comes amid very negative views about the effects of Brexit.

"Many more voters said Brexit had a negative rather than positive impact on the economy (net score -42 per cent), the NHS and public services (-34 per cent), the political situation in Northern Ireland (-33 per cent), the UK’s ability to influence other countries (-28 per cent), the UK’s standing in the world (-27 per cent) and the laws and regulations people and businesses had to follow (-21 per cent)."

Which makes Starmer's position even more bizarre than ever.

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