After the last few days, the government is obviously becoming nervous about their own future. Following a 3,000 word rebuttal of Peter Foster's Twitter thread about ventilators, they have now issued a similar rebuttal to the accusations of complacency and nonchalance made by The Sunday Times yesterday. If this becomes a habit ninety per cent of civil service time will be spent crafting rebuttals - many of which are non-rebuttals anyway.
The government's defence against the ST claims is a mere 2,000 words long but came out later yesterday. It is detailed and must have taken quite a bit of effort to produce. My guess is that a lot of different people must have been involved in checking dates, facts and so on. I mention this because it's a measure of how much they want to change the narrative.
One of the claims made is that the PM skipped five COBRA meetings. The rebuttal doesn't deny this is true but suggests this is perfectly normal for other ministers to chair COBRA meetings, which is true. But the article did not claim it was abnormal only that it was unusual on such an important issue. As a former FCO employee tweeted, the fact that Johnson failed to chair five meetings on the trot about the number one risk (and a pandemic has been No 1 for years) to the nation tells you a lot:
For the avoidance of doubt (on basis of 16+ years in FCO), it is NOT normal for a PM to chair *every* COBRA but IS normal for PM to chair COBRA when the matter *is* a national emergency.The PM’s presence is a good yardstick of how seriously the PM takes the issue.— Arthur Snell (@SnellArthur) April 19, 2020
I imagine many of the rebuttals are carefully drafted to rubbish claims that were never made but will seem to answer Johnson's many and growing critics
Another tweet showed a video clip of Johnson from his Greenwich speech:
Here unseen footage of @borisjohnson on 3rd February stating the UK will stand alone against world wide lockdowns like some kind of superman. The market trumps everything and that he will fight stopping economic free movement. This is why we took so long to lockdown. #Covid19UK pic.twitter.com/kviVGn8DgI— One eighth of a mile (@EighthOfAMile_) April 18, 2020
These are precisely the words I quoted on this blog yesterday. They shout out 'scaremongering' and 'I am not taking any of this seriously' after which he went off to spend nearly two weeks at Chequers with his girlfriend. It is this perception, some would say reality, that the cabinet office are battling to oppose.
Whether or not any of this made a difference is hard to say. The veracity or otherwise of the claims made by The Sunday Times will also have to wait for the inevitable public inquiry. But in a way that does not matter. What Downing Street's reaction tells us is that (a) they are worried and (b) they know from their own experience, that a lie can be as powerful as the truth
With the economy suffering massively, Johnson the journalist will be in the bad news business for the rest of his premiership.
