It's hard to overstate the utter shambles in the government's handling of the A level fiasco. The newspaper headlines this morning are absolutely horrendous even by Johnson's standard with plenty calling for Gavin Williamson's head. Even The Telegraph are at it with the headline: A-level chaos threatens to toxify the Tory brand for a generation. Max Hastings, Johnson's old employer had a piece in The Times last Friday where he suggested the prime minister's "insistence on blind loyalty has left talent on the back benches and led to a series of missteps and failures".
With Williamson, I'm not even sure it's loyalty, probably more fear of the damage the former chief whip could inflict from the back-benches. He knows where a lot of the bodies are buried.
On the A-levels thing, as with coronavirus and Italy, they didn't need a crystal ball because they had the book and the film to watch to see where the pitfalls were. Exactly the same thing happened in Scotland where the Tories were quick to criticise Sturgeon and the SNP.
With Williamson, I'm not even sure it's loyalty, probably more fear of the damage the former chief whip could inflict from the back-benches. He knows where a lot of the bodies are buried.
On the A-levels thing, as with coronavirus and Italy, they didn't need a crystal ball because they had the book and the film to watch to see where the pitfalls were. Exactly the same thing happened in Scotland where the Tories were quick to criticise Sturgeon and the SNP.
Among the other weak members of the government is Minister of State James Cleverly who would be well advised to change his name by deed poll. After the Scottish A-levels fiasco he took to Twitter with a now deleted tweet:
Why delete it, @JamesCleverly? pic.twitter.com/7VMT0TSdko— James Foster (@JamesEFoster) August 17, 2020
What a fool and he is by no means the stupidest. That role must be Johnson himself. He clearly did not want anyone in his cabinet to outshine him intellectually and given his IQ is pretty well as low as you can go he was left with little choice but to pick men like Gavin Williamson and women like Priti Patel.
As Hastings says:
A year into the Johnson government, the prime minister suffers few such embarrassments [ministers criticising him]. It would be hard to identify a cabinet member who has got into the papers for abusing their leader behind his back. His is the most loyal administration of modern times.
No, the present façade of solidarity is absolutely not the way normal government is. It has been brought about by the insistence of Johnson and Cummings upon fidelity to themselves, and to their interpretation of Brexit, as almost the sole qualification for office.
This is why today’s cabinet is the least impressive of the past century, granted the exceptions of the chancellor and Michael Gove. Power is monopolised by No 10 in a fashion unknown between 1940 and 1945, and indeed during the Thatcher era.
I take issue with Hastings when he singles out Gove since I think he is just as culpable as all the others. He is a stupid man hidden inside what looks on the surface like intelligence but isn't. After all, he was the one who first brought Cummings into government and look where that has got us.
No major decisions are taken in government that have not been approved by Dom. This is according to Sir Nicholas Soames in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Republicca the other day:
“Well, I saw a minister this morning who's a very good friend of mine. I said: “What’s it like working for the government?”. The response was: “It's very interesting, I’m loving my job, but every decision that any minister has taken has to all be referred back to number 10… it is absolutely insane”. And this is the grip, the iron grip of the number 10 policy thing.
Essentially the government is being run by a psychopath who is also an egomaniac and a control freak. Decisions take ages because he is simply overwhelmed. He is supposed to be undertaking a sweeping review of defence spending - presumably when he's got a couple of hours to spare sometime - as well as approving every major decision taken across Whitehall. I noted Carole Cadwalladr was asking on Twitter yesterday who had written the A-level regrade algorithm with more than a hint that she thought it was Cummings. Madness isn't it? But maybe not, I'm sure he would have done if he had the time - and perhaps he did! Who knows?
In my experience nobody is that clever or capable. It is simply impossible, although Cummings seems to have convinced people like Gove and Johnson that he has supernatural powers, a sort of human Skynet out of The Terminator series, capable of controlling the entire planet.
When you think about it, this is only possible when the cabinet is full of weak placemen and placewomen of no great intelligence but easily blinded by science. I've tried to read some of Cummings' blog posts but they are virtually unintelligible with vague references to obscure academic papers that I am certain he doesn't understand anyway.
I honestly think that what the public yearn for isn't world-beating this, that or the other but basic competence where simple things are done reasonably well. At the moment we're going backwards.
As talks in Brussels start again this morning, Politico publish eight U turns by Johnson in eight months and this doesn't go back as far as the Irish sea border that he would never accept until he accepted it. Expect the biggest U-turn of all very soon - on fishing and the level playing field.
In my experience nobody is that clever or capable. It is simply impossible, although Cummings seems to have convinced people like Gove and Johnson that he has supernatural powers, a sort of human Skynet out of The Terminator series, capable of controlling the entire planet.
When you think about it, this is only possible when the cabinet is full of weak placemen and placewomen of no great intelligence but easily blinded by science. I've tried to read some of Cummings' blog posts but they are virtually unintelligible with vague references to obscure academic papers that I am certain he doesn't understand anyway.
I honestly think that what the public yearn for isn't world-beating this, that or the other but basic competence where simple things are done reasonably well. At the moment we're going backwards.
As talks in Brussels start again this morning, Politico publish eight U turns by Johnson in eight months and this doesn't go back as far as the Irish sea border that he would never accept until he accepted it. Expect the biggest U-turn of all very soon - on fishing and the level playing field.
