Tamesaint

Oh yes. Most definitely. He is "camping". Well there is a tent in the garden of the house where he is staying. The thought of a 55 year old bloke, who from the size of his belly clearly enjoys fine dining, taking his girlfriend, his 3 month old baby and dog on a camping holiday stetches credibility. Mind you some people believed the Barnard Castle eye test theory so they will believe anything.

I wonder how much longer this Johnson government can continue. The Guardian calls this past week in government an "omnishambles".... but they of course are a "lefty" rag so they would wouldn't they? The Times is openly taking the piss out of hapless Williamson and Mail headlines told him to "get a grip".... both a bit more concerning for Johnson. The time for him to really worry however is when the Telegraph, the newspaper for which until recently he used to write and which has in the past been such a loyal supporter, talks about "the stench of incompetence" that surrounds the Government. The Major government had an air of incompetence which damaged the Tory brand and kept them out of Government for well over a decade. I am sure that the Tory party does not want a repeat. The Parliamentary majority is large and an election is far away so there is no need to panic but this mess will not be allowed to continue indefinitely. The Conservative party is ruthless with its lame duck leaders and Johnson is definitely hobbling. A sweepstake anyone on when and how the Conservatives will boot Johnson out ? I go for early next summer and it will be justified on the grounds of "ill health".

Probably best not to go to Pompey Poly. You run the risk of ending up a bigoted, arrogant fool.😀

Good post. There are sone real crackers there. The Spurs goal was great but I think you cannot beat the second goal against Chelsea.

They only had 5 months to devise a fair way to estimate grades - clearly not long enough.

You don't need to have social distancing in schools. Pupils stay in year group bubbles and each year group has a particular area of the school. It will be chaotic as the teachers will move to the pupils so who will supervise the pupils in the classroom as the teachers move about ? You need additional teachers / teaching assistants for this role and in many cases additional space. Hence the need for "Nightingale schools" , rental of nearby closed buildings etc and a call for recently retired teachers to help out. None of which has happened or even been encouraged by dopey Williamson.

The sad thing is that some Americans will believe this tosh.

The same issue came up with hospitals... so they built Nightingale hospitals. Where are the "Nightingale schools"? What attempt is being made / was made to rent space in buildings which closed due to the pandemic? Recently retired NHS staff were encouraged to return to the Health Service ... but no similar call to teaching staff. Hancock has made many mistakes as Health Secretary but at least he has been in the limelight and attempted to solve problems. Williamson seems to have taken the opportunity afforded by Covid for a long holiday.

He has been incredibly quiet during the covid crisis. You would have thought that there would be some sort of plan if schools are so important that pubs will be shut to ensure that they can stay open. Has one been formulated? Has one been announced? What measures have been introduced to resolve the issues of distancing in the classroom? Maybe something is coming but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Dont worry. Sir Major Tom earned a fifth of the money that the Government's inefficiency wasted. If he could have walked a bit further he would have paid for the entire spaff.

Did Boris also ennoble Lord Duckhunter for his Brexit views? 😂

Oh the irony!!

Never mind. I am sure that his eyes will need testing so he will be able to break any quarantine rules.

Wait until Batman sees that!! I reckon that Batman's first prediction of our relegation will come in the first week of October.

When you are in a hole, why don't you just stop digging ?. Man up for once, admit that you were wrong and move on.

Interesting. I remember meeting Hughes when he was a player after the Great Escape match at Wimbledon. He signed quite happily then - much to my nipper's delight.

Stop being such a precious tart. You made a statement supposedly based on apparent facts and then got a hissy when it was pointed out that one of your "facts" was wrong. Most people in life base their opinions on facts. You seem to prefer opinions, don't like your "facts" being corrected and don't care if the facts don't support your opinions.

Steve Coogan

September 1977/78 - saints had just been thumped away by Millwall. I had travelled down from Brum for the match (where my parents lived at the time) and was returning home by train afterwards when I saw our centre half Chris Nicholl on the train. He had just signed from Villa and was still living in Brum. I asked him to sign my programme and he invited me to sit with him for the rest of the journey. When the train stopped at Coventry 2 Middlesborough fans got on the train. They had been playing at Coventry that day. The 2 Boro fans had been detained by the police after the game for "misdemeanours" and had missed their coach home. They joined our conversation and we had a great laugh for the rest of the journey. When I left them all at New Street to catch my bus home, Chris was helping the 2 reprobates to get back home. He was a lovely bloke and a real gent.

That may well be the case and I agree it will take time to assess the true impact of the virus. Duckie however was justifying a change of policy due to the "lack of mayhem" in Sweden and Japan when in fact these countries have suffered a great deal from their apparently lax lockdown measures.

You need to re consider the evidence. Sweden's deaths per capita from Covid is one of the worst in the world - worse than covid hotspots like Brazil and USA. Swedish opinion is that their government got it wrong. Japan has certainly had its own regional lockdowns. It also has the benefit of a public health system enabling track and trace that this country can only dream about. Your thought processes are seriously flawed if you have based your opinions on these countries.

I watched Who wants to be a Millionaire last night with Jeremy Clarkson as the host. In true Clarkson style he made a few contentious statements - partly to obtain a reaction. Duckie is very similar. He says things for effect to get a reaction. Dont take him seriously, laugh at his provocative comments and dont spend too long in spotting his inconsistencies.

The counter argument to this is that towns like Fleetwood and Accrington are right shitholes and that no right minded person would want to live there. Portsmouth on the other hand is .... Sorry, I see the flaw in my argument.

or we hadn't conceded that last minute equaliser at the Emirates.

An interesting piece in today's Times from Matthew Parris - a lifelong Tory. I am sure that there will be derision from the usual suspects on here and talk of "pinkoes" and swamps. Sensible Tories however may well take heed of articles like this. Johnson definitely should. “The point about the Mafia is that people must be scared. As Boris Johnson approaches his first anniversary as prime minister next week, he could do worse than remind himself of the 1972 blockbuster, The Godfather. The film brings it home. The important thing is not to be disregarded. You can do some seriously crazy stuff with horses’ heads in victims’ beds but only so long as people can see there’s method in your madness. Only a year into Mr Johnson’s tenure at Downing Street the outside world has noticed the madness but begins to doubt the method. And once people start deriding you, you’ve lost it. This week’s shenanigans over the chairmanship of the intelligence and security committee provide a gruesome illustration. The ISC is a body of MPs and peers nominated by the prime minister in consultation with the leader of the opposition and provides a measure of democratic scrutiny of our spooks. The rule is that it elects its own chairman. Instead Johnson tried to impose a chairman on the newly-appointed committee: Chris Grayling. And failed. A cross-party majority was secured by another of its Tory members, Julian Lewis, who is much better qualified for the role than Mr Grayling. Downing Street responded by expelling Lewis from the parliamentary party, claiming he lied to the whips. I doubt it. This is just madness. Among those who take these things seriously, the immediate response will have been horror. Then bafflement. And, as I write, bafflement yields to derision. As one former cabinet minister put it, “There’s nothing worse than being an ineffectual bully”. Downing Street is now trying to blame the chief whip for messing up the whipping, inadvertently admitting there was whipping. So Downing Street wanted this vote whipped. Let’s not get too deep into the weeds of custom and practice with the ISC. I do realise any prime minister is bound to have an interest in who chairs such an important body. The tension between the whole theory of independent committee-work by MPs, and party whips’ discipline, results in a messy and delicate compromise involving nods and winks and a mutual understanding about how far things can be pushed. So it should not shock us if rumour had reached the ears of Tories on the ISC that No 10 would like to see Grayling in the job. But this would have to have been attempted so diplomatically, with Downing Street ready if necessary to yield gracefully, privately and early. Instead Johnson has simply jackbooted his way into a public confrontation, lost it, then tried to kick a respected colleague out of the party. Was it really Johnson? Or Dominic Cummings, who famously believes backbenchers are pond life and can be disregarded? So far, so Mafia. But it’s no good being a bunch of bullies, twisters and worse if people start to think you are losing command. Colleagues’ attention will start shifting to conjectured successors. I said “bullies, twisters and worse”. There exists a very great danger that 21st-century cynicism encourages the mistaken belief that all governments are like this, and that there is no honour in public administration. The huge crop of new (and often unexpected) Tory MPs who think of themselves first and foremost as local heroes have arrived at Westminster with, perhaps, youthful memories of The Thick of It or even House of Cards, but less grasp of the part that personal honour and collective integrity have always played in parliamentary party politics. Honour has not always won the contests. There has always been deceit, corruption, self-interest, cowardice and unscrupulous careerism. But honour, and its counterpart, shame, have always been there, always active, sometimes victorious, and always in the fight. Until Johnson. It is he who sets the tone. Selected by his party for no known personal qualities except a brassy and shallow appeal to voters that colleagues (correctly) thought might win them an election, he now sits atop an administration more as mascot than commander: but a mascot, the public face of a government, can set the tone. Watch him flop and teeter as he did yesterday at his Covid-19 press conference: not so much a prime minister as a chap doing his variable best to put across the message he’s been handed to deliver. Not for a moment does he look like the architect of the policy. Imagine Margaret Thatcher in Johnson’s place at that lectern yesterday, and the command she would have conveyed. Johnson’s combination of insouciance, dysfunction and shamelessness is a modern wonder. Forgive my dwelling on the shamelessness, because it’s so important for both the media and the public not to shrug this off as normal. But it isn’t normal for your principal adviser to behave as Mr Cummings did in his flight to County Durham, claiming his boss knew nothing of it, and then carry on as if it didn’t matter. I understand what he went through and might have done as he did. But he’s one of the most important men in the government. It is not normal for such behaviour to be without consequence. The stupid scrap with the ISC is not normal, and the whipping (which failed) was shameless. The attempt (which also failed) to bury the ISC’s report on Russian interference was shameless. The removal from her post of the senior civil servant Helen MacNamara, who has completed a report into allegations of bullying by the home secretary, Priti Patel, is shameless. If the report is ever published we’ll never know if it has been doctored. This is not normal. Robert Jenrick’s behaviour as communities secretary was not normal when he intervened to force through a huge planning application that had been turned down at every stage in the process, potentially saving the applicant, a Tory donor whom he had met at dinner, some £40 million. He should have been moved from his post. Jenrick’s still there, given cover by Johnson. This is shameless. But his colleagues always knew his shamelessness from his personal history. That he isn’t even clever, however, they are only now discovering. If competence shone through then I think the shamelessness would remain an embarrassment that his colleagues would be prepared to suppress. But he’s losing, and the combination of incapacity and shamelessness is beginning to curdle. Boris Johnson’s colleagues see, and for the most part shrug, look away, or bite their tongues. I don’t believe this can last — but then I never thought he’d make it to the top in the first place. I now believe he won’t survive as prime minister through the year ahead — and maybe I’m wrong again. But as long as he lasts, his shamelessness shames Britain.