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Months in and years to go, it’s still far from clear what the point of this inquiry is. Fortunately today they had called in that famously plain-speaking Boris Johnson to de-muddy the waters.
Mr Johnson began with an apology, but his opening statement was soon interrupted by a group of protesters. Baroness Hallett summoned her most stentorian tone. “Please sit down!” she bellowed, releasing her inner headmistress. Boris instinctively hung his head and looked at his shoes, a Pavlovian response to being told off even when – at this stage at least – it wasn’t actually directed at him.
He solemnly declared that he “understood the feelings” of the protesters. In fact, as they were escorted to freedom from the street, he probably wanted to sign up for them. Hugo Keith KC went on to list the jobs Boris has had over the years, ending with the honorary appointment that MPs get in the event of resignation, the Chiltern Hundreds. Providentially, the automatic captions accompanying the investigation video recorded this with a spelling mistake and thus named Johnson as “the administrator of 300 children. “So there you have it: confusion between an absolutely nominal role for Boris, which he only played for five minutes before moving on to the next occasion, and control of the Chiltern Hundreds.
Finally, Keith moved on to the genuine topic: the curious incident of WhatsApps’ disappearance. Johnson feigned ignorance, as a teenager caught watching pornography on his family’s computer would. He said he didn’t know what a factory reset was, which the KC tried to explain. In this case, a factory reset occurs when unnecessary knowledge is erased and the device returns to the simplest exercise of its original purpose – research can learn a lot from it.
Then there are the disputes over mortality data. Mr Keith said Britain had one of the highest excess mortality rates in Europe. Boris resisted this, so the KC replaced its scope to “Western Europe”. Statistics fly, claims and counterclaims. It was like watching an argument about which football team won the Copa de la Leche in 1984. Or, more accurately, as if your head slowly and repeatedly suffers against a brick wall. Of course, no one talked about a specific country, which is at the back of the ranking: Sweden.
As usual, personalities dominated the discussions; hours and we couldn’t escape them. Keith insisted that the investigation “had no interest whatsoever in the lewdness or nature of Dominic Cummings’ linguistic taste on WhatsApp. “Which explains why many of them were read aloud, uncensored, and over a very long period of time.
Schadenfreude’s meanness and air led me straight into the usual sixth-grade classroom of my girls’ school. Mr Keith pointed Boris Johnson to the WhatsApp between Simon Case and Mark Sedwill, describing the former prime minister as incompetent for the most sensible. work. It’s research language to say, “I heard Sarah hit you near the vending machine. “Mr. Johnson, however, seemed reluctant to be dragged into the game of mutual acrimony; “If they’d had the tangerinate’s perspectives on the Thatcher government in unedited WhatsApp messages,” he says, they probably would have been “pretty fruity. “It’s all very entertaining, but it doesn’t tell us much about how to fight the next pandemic. .
Subsequent consultations have shifted – inexorably – to the big issue that threatens the current debates. Had Mr. Johnson done too little, too late?It was obvious, Keith suggested, that Britain deserved to pursue a policy of “repression. “Johnson responded that it would have been “unwise” not to assess the effect on lives and livelihoods. When he described the difficulty of responding to a disaster that occurs once every century, I almost felt sorry for him. The research had at least returned to its factory setting; An odd combination of devout inquisition, HR meeting, and panto.
The good news (if you are a lawyer) is that this charade is costing taxpayers more than a million pounds a week and will last for years. The bad news for the rest of us? I may not reach the end yet.
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