Wednesday 12 January: It is for Boris Johnson to look in the mirror and ask himself a question

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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747 thoughts on “Wednesday 12 January: It is for Boris Johnson to look in the mirror and ask himself a question”

  5. Heyup All!
    A distinctly chilly -2½° outside, but at least it’s dry with a reasonable day forecast.

      1. I need to get a bit more done, if only to use up some of the stone I’ve got stacked for it, so it’s on the cards as a possibility.

        1. Enjoy a double whammy. You can cut down on your indoor heating (and thus your electricity/gas bills) and keep warm by doing all the hard outdoor work. Also burns off calories and reduces your waistline – that’s a win/win/win.

          1. Given the temperature outside, I’m going to give it an hour or two before i get started.

      1. Boris’s replacement must come from the backbenches. Those in the current government are woefully inadequate.

  7. SIR – I am a simple man who believes in right and wrong. Although I have never voted Tory, I needed Boris Johnson to get us out of Europe.

    As for parties at No 10, forget about the party-political posturing and the call for investigations. The solution is simple. Mr Johnson should go into the bathroom, stand in front of the mirror and ask himself the question: “Did you break the Covid rules you told everybody else to obey?” He alone knows the answer.

    If it is yes, he should resign immediately; if no, he can let nature take its course.

    Richard Massey
    Belper, Derbyshire

    It would be too good to be true if you were the brother-in-law of Dr ‘lockdown’ Ferguson – please let it be so!

  9. SIR – Boris Johnson has had three astounding successes: Brexit, an 80-seat Conservative majority and the rollout of vaccination.

    However, there now seems to be a drip-feed of lockdown revelations coming from inside the Government. If true, these represent a huge contempt for the British people. Mr Johnson should now rest on his laurels and recognise where the buck stops. The Conservative Party must then insist he spends more time with his family.

    F W Binns
    Sedgefield, Co Durham

    Cummings is rolling out the heavy artillery from his local pub.

  10. My family benefited from slavery. Why can’t we accept white people still owe a huge debt? 12 January 2022.

    In my view, white people in Britain have a special responsibility when it comes to this legacy. After all, the vast majority of those who transported the captured Africans to the Caribbean were white. Similarly, the vast majority of those who “bought” these enslaved people and made them work on the appalling sugar, cotton and coffee plantations were white. The same is true of the shipowners and sailors, bankers and insurance officers, traders, dockworkers, shopkeepers and countless others involved in selling the commodities back in Britain. This includes my own family, who made money importing tobacco from American and Cuban plantations that were worked on by enslaved people. As to the general population who gained from the enormous wealth that poured into Britain on the back of slavery, again the vast majority were white.

    In my view white people in modern day Britain have no responsibility whatsoever for events that occurred 300 years ago. The very idea that people in the present bear any responsibility for the actions of their forebears is inherently ridiculous. It would leave us seeking reparations from the Italians for Roman War Crimes; France for the Norman Invasion and the Harrying of the North; let alone Denmark, who would be responsible for the raid on Lindisfarne. This said it does not even cover the moronic assertion that the vast majority of the English population (who’s living conditions at the time were little different, and in many cases worse) benefited from Slavery. Britain’s future prosperity came from the Industrial and Scientific Revolution and even that was not felt by the general population for many years.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/11/slavery-enriched-family-accept-white-people-owe-huge-debt

    1. The principle of modern generations being responsible for the actions of their forebears can be shot down by one simple question. Are Germans today responsible for the actions of the Nazis between 1933-1945?

      2. Please call them Germans. the term “Nazi” is a get out of jail free card for Germans. (The number of members of the Nazi Party rose substantially during WW2.)

        1. I referred to ‘Nazis’ as I was alluding to the political party in power. Most Germans may have been party members, but they would not have been personally responsible for the criminal activities of the state, in the same way that our British ancestors were overwhelmingly not responsible for the slave trade or in any way profited from it.

          1. Yes, I accept that. My real irritation is with the BBC et al who describe the UK as having been at war with the Nazis, when they should have said that the Conservative/Liberal coalition government were at war with the Nazis.

      1. Remind me again which two languages are spoken in South America??
        Another massive slave trade that seems to get a free pass

    4. “My ancestors were slaves. I feel so lucky. They were captured in a tribal battle and sold to Arabs who took them to the coast and sold them to American slavers. If they had not been sold into slavery, they would have been killed or castrated. Had that happened I would not be alive in the Twenty-First century, with free education, free health care, good job and clothes, house and home cinema. All of these things are the products of white men. I cannot believe how very lucky I am”
      No darkie has ever said.

        1. I don’t owe you anything, kid. You ignore those families who fought to end slavery. Same as the Irish forget those blocade runners who tried to bring food in.

          Roll the guardian paper up, bend over and shove it up your backside.

      2. I remember seeing a news report on television about 50 – 60 years ago. There was an affluent black American who decided to visit the land of his forefathers in Africa. When he saw the poverty and misery that the native black people were enduring since the British colonial system had disappeared he exclaimed:

        “Thank God for slavery! Had my great grandfather not been a slave who was brought to USA I would be like these poor wretches. And thank God for British colonialism which at least brought the indigenous people some temporary relief before they left.”

        I bet this report has been removed from the BBC’s archive!

      1. Smart move by the black chieftains.
        Would that we had a government bright enough to off load its criminals and wasters for cash.

        1. Instead of which, our government is spending cash we don’t have by bunging it to France and still importing criminals and wasters.

    6. Oh not again. When are they going to start campaigning for the Arabs to pay for the thousands of years they have spent trading in slaves?

  11. SIR– Lots of us thought the Government’s lockdown rules were unnecessarily draconian. What an inspiration, then, to discover that so many people in Downing Street felt the same way and were prepared to go so far as to break the law to express their opposition. If only we knew who had made those rules.

    Julian Gall
    Godalming, Surrey

    2. The Covid rules were blatantly ignored by Johnson and Sturgeon in 2021 at the G7 in Cornwall and Cop26 in Glasgow. No fuss made about these in the media.

    1. Yet no MP has died of covid, more have died of Islamic terrorism.
      But they don’t want to talk about that.

      1. This morning’s sermon was about people who had been killed for their faith. The elephant in the room was that most of them had been murdered by muslims (the exception was the German pastor killed by the Nazis), a fact that never got an airing.

    2. Since Fox hunting with hounds has been banned, it seems to have been replaced by ‘the unwashed in pursuit of the unelectable’ with newshounds baying for blood!

  13. It is for Boris Johnson to look in the mirror and ask himself a question

    I would never look in the Mirror, let alone read it.

  14. I saw this on FB

    If those people who attended parties at no 10 all worked there together- then after-works drinks outside in the garden were fine, but if outsiders came in then that was illegal

    1. Cummings has said that many of the garden gatherings were work meetings but the 20th May wasn’t because it was relaxation.

  15. I saw this on FB

    If those people who attended parties at no 10 all worked there together- then after-works drinks outside in the garden were fine, but if outsiders came in then that was illegal

  16. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/571716c362b5ef00c0ce775ae02143ba588ffa32/0_0_1500_998/master/1500.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=100e15d1ae15faaed296cc85b11aa71d
    Kilifi was an 18-month-old rhino and his keeper, Kamara, was hand-raising him with two other baby rhinos at Lewa wildlife conservancy in Kenya. Kamara would spend 12 hours a day watching over them. Kenya’s black rhino population plummeted to near extinction but numbers are rising due to efforts by the people and government to protect them.’

        2. Who remembers when racing cars were being tested on the then new motorways? One of the factors that led to the introduction of the 70mph speed limit.

          3. Sounds about right!
            I remember a cartoon shewing the hard shoulder of the M1 taken over by race track pits.

    3. Those killing them for the Chinese should be skinned, flogged, flayed, dismembered and then beaten to death.

      Keep them alive through an adrenaline bag.

    1. Hollywood will barely dare whisper it but the woke revolution that has driven out white men and ensures that every production is ideologically sound will kill the entertainment industry.

      One of the by-blows of Cultural Marxism is the promotion of people not for their abilities but their ethnicity, colour, gender etc. As can be seen from the UK’s institutions (since Government is largely complicit) this leads to incompetence and lack of vision. Such a system must inevitably collapse!

      2. The white men should just start up their own productions elsewhere, with talented people. Problem is, most of them believe in this BS, they just didn’t think it would be applied to them.

          1. Mugged by reality, perhaps? Shows what happens when one goes along with stuff that one knows is wrong!

          3. Mortgage, French cottage, Rupert and Jacinta’s school fees, not to mention pony upkeep and replacing the SUV ……
            Hypocrisy pays far better than honesty.

    2. Morning Sos, interesting read and I think we are already seeing the effect of woke in the quality of their productions. I ask myself what new movie release would I be willing to queue for outside a cinema these days and the answer is none. Television productions are the same, nothing strikes me as worthy of a streaming subscription. Pickard or Dr Who just two easy examples of programs that I would rather miss.
      The line in the article “They were scared of what was happening. The fear, one prominent director said in an email, is ‘the audience stops trusting us “ made me smile, it has already happened.
      Thanks for posting.

      1. Every Monday I go to the local cinema to watch a recent film release and find myself browned off with all the “woke” gender inclusivity. On every other day of the week I watch an older film from the 20th century. The older films don’t have this ridiculous agenda and are usually much the better for it.

        1. Good morning to to you, I found the same. I sometimes think I am retreating into myself and shutting out all the t*ts determined to make life a misery.

        2. I have stopped buying new novels. Anything published since about 2017 is just annoying. I refuse to encourage them, so I only buy second hand books nowadays.
          I’ve gone on strike!

          1. I’ve only bought second hand books for decades! I don’t read much, if any, non-fiction anyway.

    3. An excellent article, sos. But as a side issue: why is it unacceptable to talk about “a colo(u)red person” but acceptable to use the convoluted linguistic expression “a person of colo(u)r”? Yours sincerely, Elsie Bloodaxe (a person of whiteness).

      1. Perhaps we should insist that everyone who calls us “white” should instead refer to “people of whiteness.”

        1. I think we should abandon this dribbling nonsense that someone’s skin colour is anything but a description.

          He is black, I am white. It doesn’t define me.

          1. Actually, it does, in very deep ways. Everyone prefers to be surrounded by people who look and behave like them. It’s a tribal thing. All this forced diversity goes against our deepest instincts honed in ancient times.
            It’s why we genuinely feel uncomfortable in “diverse” society. If you don’t notice that, it’s probably because you are used to that level of stress.

      2. That’s simple to explain. A similar expression was used during apartheid from 1950 until 1991 to label ‘non-whites’ who were not particularly dark skinned and/or not of African appearance. It was derived from the label ‘Cape Coloured’.

        So ‘coloured’ can be derogatory, whereas ‘person of colour’ adds a touch of dignity.

      3. That’s simple to explain. A similar expression was used during apartheid from 1950 until 1991 to label ‘non-whites’ who were not particularly dark skinned and/or not of African appearance. It was derived from the label ‘Cape Coloured’.

        So ‘coloured’ can be derogatory, whereas ‘person of colour’ adds a touch of dignity.

      4. God only knows. I certainly don’t.
        My guess is that the criteria are changed constantly so that white people can be caught out and cancelled.

      5. It’s a psychological war. If people are kept in a permanent state of doubt about what they can say, they stop talking and let things pass in silence i.e. no opposition.

  19. ‘Morning All

    It appears the knives are out again for Boris

    Once again,why now,Cui Bono???

    A quick look at Italy (and other parts of Europe) may provide some answers………..

    “Mario Draghi’s decision

    to introduce a Covid vaccine mandate for all citizens over 50 has

    understandably sparked an intense debate here in Italy. Most

    commentators, however, miss a crucial point: that vaccines are, de facto, already mandatory for most Italian citizens.

    For months, everyone over the age of 12 has been required

    to hold a “Covid passport”, or “green pass” — proving that they’ve

    either been vaccinated against Covid-19, recently tested negative or

    have recovered from the disease within the past six months — to enter

    most public spaces, as well as all workplaces, public or private. This

    meant that anyone who couldn’t afford to get tested several times a week

    — in Italy Covid tests have a validity of 48 hours and can cost

    anything from 15 to 50 euros — had little choice but to get vaccinated.

    However, these rules have now been tightened even further. As of

    yesterday, with the introduction of the so-called “super green pass”, a

    negative test will no longer be valid to access most public spaces. This

    means that anyone over the age of 12 will no longer be able use public

    transport, go the gym, dine (in or outside!) a restaurant or bar or

    enter a hotel or cinema unless they’re vaccinated or have recovered from

    Covid (and the latter is only valid for six months). In other words,

    millions of people will effectively be excluded from public life and

    reduced to a state of apartheid if they don’t get vaccinated. If this

    doesn’t amount to a regime of compulsory vaccination, I don’t know what

    does.”

    https://unherd.com/thepost/italys-vaccine-mandate-is-purely-political/

    Meanwhile in Germany a few dozen Extreme Right Wing troublemakers (@Al-Beeb)

    https://twitter.com/aginnt/status/1480808094842212352?s=20
    I suspect BoJo’s crime is not following NWO orders quickly or harshly enough just as the Covid narrative unravels,time to be afrraid,cornered rats are at their most dangerous

    1. Quite. The rules here are pretty relaxed compared with many other countries. Better the buffoon than that.

    1. I wouldn’t mind betting that the dog in the bottom photo is likely to end up with a flea in its ear……

      1. Comments below from those who believe it – brainwashing works. “Bullshit baffles brains”.

    3. I regularly tell my green zealot friends that it’s that big red thing in the sky that really determines the climate. Few of them agree with me.

      1. I was shocked at the magnitude of the propaganda being aimed at the very young. It pervades their lives. I guess they won’t question it until we experience another very hard winter or two with deep snow and ice on the ground for several months…..

        1. Oh for a repeat of late 1962 to early 1963. IIRC the snow started on Boxing Day and was still around under sheltered hedges in late March early April . My school’s cross country run, from Earls Colne across the valley to Colne Engaine, and back was a real bugger in ’63.

          2. I have a very clear memory of travelling to visit my Mum’s family in northern Scotland around Easter 1963. Cleared snow was still piled higher than the cars alongside the A1 in Northumberland even in mid-April. What it was like elsewhere on the journey, I have no recollection.

          3. 1963, what about 1947? Freezing cold followed by floods, and food & fuel rationing was still in place.

          5. I was just under 3 years old in 1947 but I remember the snow coming up to my chest but I was warm in my ‘siren’ suit.

          6. The snow came to the top of the balcony in our London flat.
            I remember going with my parents to bombed out factories to get firewood and even a working light bulb.

          7. You should have tried standing at the top of Wormingford hill for a bus that was 2 hours late.
            Thinking back, it was a miracle that it ever got up the hill.

          8. That is a bad one, I’ll admit. My route took in the hill leading down to Ford Street (Aldham), the one from Wakes Colne down towards White Colne with the tight left hand bend at the bottom and a few less impressive ups and downs: couldn’t get to school for a week. Who said East Anglia was flat?

          9. I remember that there was very little snow in Newbiggin by the Sea at that time, largely due to the effect of the sea.

            However, there were a couple of winters where the road from Middleton Hall into Wooler got snowed up.

        2. The sooner the better, there will be a tipping point beyond which Britain will find it very hard to go back.

    4. Given the current Government’s Energy Policy, it looks like all that old fashioned brown wooden furniture that no one wants to buy these days could become a valuable source of fuel for those that have wood burners!!!

      1. To be honest many of us like our brown wooden furniture and have no desire to change it.

    5. Good morning BoB.
      Good job I scrolled through the comments first – I was going to share the link too.
      The real ‘climate deniers’ are those who refuse to consider these inconvenient facts.
      The net zero emissions nonsense will do nothing but impoverish us while we freeze to our ends.

  24. It looks like the old Obsessive Covid Disorder psychosis is going to do far more damage than covid ever did.

  25. Excellent TCW

    Take ‘man-made climate change’, now a settled science according to

    the BBC – no further debate is required or allowed to pollute the

    airwaves.

    Armed with this ‘settled science’, journeyman policymakers have led

    the charge towards a world where fossil fuels, which have created then

    serviced what we know as civilisation, are no longer needed … because

    the world is warming, because of the burning of fossil fuels, because of

    free market capitalism which relies on fossil fuels, burned by man.

    The consequences of the political consensus being wrong on this would

    be catastrophic and yet, ominously, the evidence is beginning to stack

    up against the United Nations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

    Change, the EU, Davos and poor henpecked Boris Johnson in a way that

    should alarm us all.

    It would, if we were allowed to know what the science was really saying out there beyond the cultural Marxist firewall.
    Rest here

    https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/as-earth-cools-an-arctic-future-threatens-but-warmster-boris-wont-be-told/

    2. If you allow an alternative view to the narrative then you get dissent, you have people seeing another choice.

      If you want to frighten them into the belief that robbing you of tax will magically sort out the planet then you cannot allow dissent and so ‘the science is settled’ becomes the mantra. Of course, that science is never settled is beside the point. The state does not tolerate, permit or allow dissent. If people start to think then they’ll challenge and then they won’t want to pay the offensive taxes and they won’t believe the state line.

  26. ‘Morn all
    Alison Pearson’s piece today.

    Headline:-

    “Never again will these hypocrites take us for fools”

    I have to disagree here, they always have and always will, no matter which hue, from the reddest of red to the deepest of blue.
    For historic precedent – Jeremiah 13:23.

    1. Worse, I think pepole want to be taken for fools. They like the ignorance. Having to think, having to take responsibility for their lives is terrifying for them.

      We’re also not helped by the astonishingly low intelligence of far too many people.

      1. Yes Minister, Yes Prime Minister, House of Cards ,The thick of It and in the media 2012 and W1A all lay out undiluted the elitism , perfidy , hypocrisy and contempt for all to see and yet they still get away with it.

  27. Prince of Wales: Holocaust survivor portraits in Buckingham Palace will be a ‘guiding light’ for society. 12 January 2022.

    The Prince, who has been working on the project since March 2020, said: “As the number of Holocaust survivors sadly, but inevitably, declines, my abiding hope is that this special collection will act as a further guiding light for our society, reminding us not only of history’s darkest days, but of humanity’s interconnectedness as we strive to create a better world for our children, grandchildren and generations as yet unborn; one where hope is victorious over despair and love triumphs over hate.”

    The P of W may feel we need a “Guiding Light” but I do not. The country that provided a safe haven for the 10,000 Jewish children under the kindertransport system and fought Fascist Germany from the very beginning to the end of WWII; impoverishing ourselves in the process, needs no illumination!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2022/01/11/prince-wales-holocaust-survivor-portraits-buckingham-palace/

    1. Morning Minty, I see like myself you commented on the Hollywood article. Isn’t it strange how so much published in the MSM featuring articles which the P o W is just one example immediately makes people think, oh another woke t*t preaching to the world.
      I can’t see the monarchy surviving after Betty has passed on.

      1. Morning VVOF. I’m not sure that I want it go on after Her Maj has departed. She is the last of the old world that you and I and all Nottlers were born into.

        1. From my POV, a powerless fool at the top is better than an egotistic President in power with a majority…..

          1. Agree, but a (constitutionally) powerless fool who is hand in glove with a bunch of foreign billionaires who want to reduce us to digital feudalism?
            Charles has been pushing in the direction of “you will own nothing” for a long time now. Remember when he voiced his opinion that the peasants’ houses should be built in rows, because it uses less land?
            If it is true that the Windsors are among the owners of Vanguard, then they are one of the wealthiest families in the world, so not as powerless as they might seem. After all, Mr Global’s tentacles are everywhere in British life.

          2. As Ian Hislop said on HIGNFY. ‘I saw the latest Bond film Spectre, I didn’t realise it was a documentary’.

    2. Under the official definition of a “holocaust survivor” (I read somewhere) HM the Queen is one. So also is anyone who was alive in Europe having lived through WW2.

    3. And his grandparents restricted themselves to war time rations and discipline; unlike many now in power in this country.

  28. For future reference from a BTL comment on TCW:

    Why listen to the House of Savile, its real audience is the same as the Guardian’s, ie. 21 sad old trots in Islington……

  29. Narrative crumbling and the truth that the “vaccine” is of no real value (against covid at least) is being revealed. People were lied to and coerced by fear or promises of normality being restored to take a gene therapy. So what was the point of inoculating millions of UK citizens? Time will answer that question.

    As for Pfizer’s Omicron jab, at the rate that this variant is working its way through populations that jab will likely be obsolete by March. However, I expect Johnson et al. will attempt to convince people to take it: the show must go on.

    https://twitter.com/AllisonPearson/status/1481164861962866692

    https://twitter.com/fredponders/status/1481053975818702848

  31. Chris O’Shea, Centrica boss, has just been on BBC Radio 4 saying that whatever the Government tries to do in alleviating the inevitable consequences of the global demand for gas, either the tax payer or the gas consumer will have to bear the brunt of the impending gas energy hikes brought about by the net zero policy.

    He points out that gas has become a transition fuel to net zero as a result of the global acceptance that reliance on coal for energy must be urgently reduced to zero.

    There is no silver bullet to resolve the world’s reliance on carbon for energy.

    1. That is why so many conditions have been medicalised; or, as in the case of blood pressure, the readings deliberately lowered so more people are popping pills.
      Largely, AHD means a spoilt little sh!t who needs a clip round the ear. Few are genuinely disturbed to the point of being uncontrollable.

  33. ‘Morning, Peeps.

    Allison Pearson today:

    COMMENT
    Never again will these hypocrites take us for fools
    Downing Street’s ‘bring your own booze’ shindigs are an outrageous betrayal of our sacrifices – what the hell were they playing at?

    ALLISON PEARSON
    12 January 2022 • 5:00am

    What were you doing on May 20, 2020? Not a lot, obviously. The country was in full lockdown. We were not allowed to have anyone who wasn’t a member of our own household in the house or garden. Under national Covid restrictions, only two people were permitted to meet outside while staying at least two metres apart. Bombarded with instructions to stay home, stay safe, nearly all the people I know were jumpy and obedient to a fault. We were all in it together.

    May 20, 2020, was the day that many 15-year-olds should have been taking their first GCSE. A big day. Cancelled, along with so much else in their young lives. Parents were soon dealing with moody, depressed teenagers who yearned to be with their peer group, not shut up with mum and dad. It was about then that reports of anorexia and self-harming rose alarmingly.

    May 20, 2020, was the 60th birthday of a friend’s son. His party was cancelled, of course, and his mates, who should have been having fun in the garden, brought presents which they posted over the gate. Not for them a chance to “make the most of the lovely weather”, as Martin Reynolds, the Prime Minister’s principal private secretary, urged in an email inviting a hundred Downing Street staff to a bring-a-bottle garden party.

    If ordinary people attended such a gathering, they were arrested or fined. Four students in Nottingham were fined £10,000 after police broke up a party attended by 30 people. A 22-year-old was found guilty of “holding or being involved in a gathering of more than 30 people in a private dwelling contrary to Health Protection Regulations 2020”. He was fined £1,000.

    Students who struggled to make friends without flouting restrictions were even demonised for daring to travel to their hometown, and then fined. To hell with their mental health; rules were rules.

    Some sacrifices on May 20, 2020, are almost too painful to write down. Annie recalls: “The day they had that party in Downing Street, my son was dying in hospital 160 miles away and nobody was allowed to visit him. He didn’t even have Covid. He died alone not seeing his pregnant wife.”

    Millions like Annie were not permitted to visit their wives, husbands and elderly parents in care homes on May 20, 2020. Through windows or on FaceTime, they looked on helplessly as that beloved person dwindled. Care home residents, effectively prisoners of lockdown, were not permitted to “make the most of the lovely weather” as they were doing in Downing Street.

    What the hell did No 10 think they were playing at? Holding a party at that time was a clear breach of faith with the British people, an outrageous, tin-eared, tone-deaf betrayal of all the sacrifices we were making. Did they really make no connection between the solemn briefings in which they warned us of the dire consequences of breaking the rules and the grotesque inappropriateness of a jolly email inviting a hundred people to “bring your own booze”? At least some members of staff were in possession of a working conscience. “Is this for real?” wrote one official. “Um. Why is Martin [Reynolds] encouraging a mass gathering in the garden?” said another. Quite.

    In an address to the country on May 11, 2020, the Prime Minister reiterated the importance of everyone following the rules. “You can meet one person outside of your household outdoors, provided you stay two metres apart,” rumbled Boris in his best historic statesman voice. “The social distancing measures remain absolutely crucial.” Is it really possible that, just nine days later, Boris and Carrie Johnson attended a party which drove a fleet of coaches and a herd of stampeding stallions through those restrictions? Surely not.

    People who say “they were working incredibly hard and deserved to let off steam” miss the point. We are talking about an unprecedented stripping away of the liberties of an entire nation. It caused an ocean of suffering. Thousands of businesses would never reopen. The father and stepmother of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes were free to torture that dear little boy at will because Government rules had shut primary schools and prevented concerned relatives from entering the house.

    If you inflict such harsh, draconian measures on 65 million people, if police chastise pensioners for sitting too close on a park bench, then you’d better be damn sure that your own conduct is beyond reproach. Look at our faultless Queen, quite alone at her husband’s funeral, putting herself through what so many of her subjects had endured. She got it.

    It’s not just the hypocrisy that enrages me. All the people who attended that party in the Downing Street garden knew full well that Covid wasn’t the plague – not even close. They had access to all the data. They weren’t scared to attend a boozy party because they seemingly thought it wasn’t a risk for them. (It wasn’t a risk for the majority of us, certainly not for students or children.) Yet did they withhold that knowledge from the public? They continued to ramp up the propaganda to spread fear so that people would blindly obey the rules which some of them were cheerfully breaking.

    If there’s one thing human beings cannot abide, it’s unfairness. This is not something that will easily blow over. Like me, you may find yourself feeling slightly sick at the thought that we were not, as advertised, all in this together. The Prime Minister’s unprincipled principal private secretary has handed a baseball bat to Labour, which they will use with relish. Downing Street said that Martin Reynolds has the PM’s “full confidence”. Well, he hasn’t got anybody else’s. Reynolds is a damn fool who should resign immediately, if he hasn’t done so by the time you read this.

    As for Boris, with the Metropolitan Police now looking into this latest party, the PM is going to need a bigger bus to throw people under. We await the findings of Sue Grey, a senior Cabinet Office official, who is conducting a probe into allegations of No 10 rule-breaking events during the pandemic. If she finds that Downing Street staff did attend an illegal party and were “outside the home without a reasonable excuse”, then I reckon they should be fined, exactly as all those poor students were fined for the crime of being young and having a good time.

    On May 20, 2020, as my calendar reminds me, I did as I was finally allowed to do. I dashed through the rain to a park where I saw my friend Lou for the first time in two months. Gosh, we wanted to hug each other so badly. Instead, we stood “at least two metres apart” and opened our arms wide in an imaginary embrace, grinning like idiots.

    Actually, we were idiots. We know that now. Complete and utter fools. How stupid to feel so anxious that we might have misunderstood the rules and were doing something wrong (but we did). What madness to accept being told it was OK “to meet one person outside – provided you stay two metres apart” by our alleged betters who were throwing a boozy knees-up that very night. Never again.

    Never again must we let a government assume so much control over our lives. Never again should we accept the imposition of cruelly disproportionate measures by rank hypocrites who knew what the real risks were and did as they pleased.

    Let me leave you with the anguished reaction to the No 10 party of Robert Styler, a lifelong Conservative voter and donor, who was not permitted to visit Josephine, his “teenage sweetheart” and wife of 60 years, in her care home. “Allison, I sit here in the beautiful home that Josephine made. Still grieving, like many thousands of others who were not allowed to cradle their loved ones into the unknown, with my imaginary size 15 boots on, ready and willing to kick out the occupants of 10 Downing Street. I will not be resigning my membership of the Conservative Party, because I want to use my vote to help to remove our current Prime Minister from office. He has become a liability, untrustworthy and presiding over an administration whose judgement must now be called into question.”

    I know millions of loyal Tories will share Robert’s distress.

    What were you doing on May 20, 2020? Nothing much – just being taken for fools by the people who rule us.

    * * *

    A leading BTL:

    Anne Laidler
    2 MIN AGO
    Well done Allison! You speak for all of us who have obeyed the rules to the letter, as we all pulled together, the blitz spirit. You have put into words exactly what I feel: the anger, the frustration, the sheer unfairness of it all, at the manipulation (for we now know that’s what it was), the arrogance, the absolute bloody mindedness of it all. I have always defended Boris up till now (“I t’s a pandemic, there’s no handbook of instructions for him to follow; he’s doing his best to keep us all safe”). But no longer; he must go, and soon. We just cannot have such a self-serving buffoon leading this country any longer.

    * * *

    Hear, hear!

    1. An excellent article, exposing the politicians’ hypocrisy and the public’s anger. But be careful what you wish for unless you have a better replacement. Just like the BLM activists who want to defund the police.

    2. We even had Covid marshalls in our village reminding youngsters and anyone else not to hang around in groups , yet all the Leicester and Derby folk / foreign day trippers were streaming down to Durdle Door, beyond the rules .

      We all had to queue outside the chemist, local shop, etc just 2 at a time , and we were stopped by the police for travelling 2 miles to the heath by car with the dogs because our local sports field and local dog walks were topped up with growly dogs . That was the time my hip started to give me gyp because there was no golf , no nothing , and we were allowed just 1 hours exercise walking around the village on hard uneven pavements .

      We were scared stiff by all draconian rules , Moh was sheltering , so he didn’t shop with me . We didn’t even see our neighbours .

      Boris has not led by example .

      It was first announced that Johnson had tested positive for Covid-19 on 27 March 2020, just four days after the imposition of the UK’s first strict lockdown.

      On 5 April, with his symptoms persisting, he was admitted to hospital for tests, and was moved to the intensive care unit the next day after his condition worsened.

      Johnson left intensive care on 9 April, and left hospital three days later to recuperate at Chequers, returning to Downing Street a fortnight later on 26 April.

      Nearly two months after the initial announcement of him testing positive for Covid-19, it is highly unlikely the Prime Minister would have still been infectious at the time of a 20 May Downing Street gathering.

      1. Was anyone suggesting BJ was still infectious at that stage?

        I do remember when you were stopped by the police from walking your dogs on the heath.

        I did the weekly shop at Morrisons as normal all through that time and we were not obliged to wear masks then either. We did have to queue outside but the weather was fine.

        They’ve been gaslighting us all right through this. I think people are beginning to open their eyes now.

        1. The most frightening thing for me was how quickly the British could be cowed into compliance. Not only did they behave like sheep, they were quite happy to rat on their neighbours and create a fictional enemy (the unvaccinated rather than Jews).
          RIP The Great British Bulldog.

    3. “It’s not just the hypocrisy that enrages me. All the people who attended that party in the Downing Street garden knew full well that Covid wasn’t the plague – not even close. They had access to all the data. They weren’t scared to attend a boozy party because they seemingly thought it wasn’t a risk for them. (It wasn’t a risk for the majority of us, certainly not for students or children.) Yet did they withhold that knowledge from the public? They continued to ramp up the propaganda to spread fear so that people would blindly obey the rules which some of them were cheerfully breaking.” Exactly so – if Covid was really so dangerous to fit people with no serious health problems then surely these hypocrites would not have been gathering for parties, or nipping out ot see their mistress?

    4. Isn’t it about time that everyone wakes up to the fact that covid-19 was a fabrication, a hoax to, firstly, scare people and secondly to open the door to what we now know are ineffective “vaccinations”. Johnson has more serious questions to answer than those arising from a ‘garden party’. Certainly, the latter is a serious breach of trust but does expose the lack of seriousness of covid-19 that people in the halls of power knew it to be. What now for the serious faces and tones of Whitty, Valance et al. at the press conferences? Actors all, performing for their masters. Will anyone ever again believe a word they utter? Best they resign and scuttle under a rock somewhere, their credibility shot to pieces.

      1. Will this ‘exposure’ give them an excuse to bring the covid farce to a halt? The government is now feeling like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice; it started something that it can’t stop.

    5. Who give s a trouser addled feck. The entire edifice is corrupt. The whole thing is a broken, twisted farce.

      These useless fools don’t represent us, don’t speak for us, ignore the laws they set down, impoverish us, create specifically spiteful and abusive methods to rob us, they destroy our wealth, waste it and laugh at us in doing so.

      I am long passed waanting them to face any consequences as they won’t, they’ll just fiddle, cheat and lie their way out with chums and favours. I hate them. I want the entire edifice burned, with them inside. I want them to know who did it and why. As they scream and run for the exits, desperate to escape the heat, smoke and the coming pain, I want them to know the fact they cannot escape and that they’re going to be hurt – what they do to us with their petty, arroant, spiteful nonsense every day.

    6. I agree with wibbling. This article just annoys me.
      The bad thing is not that the elite rewarded themselves, it’s that the public believed the nonsense being churned out by the media in the first place.
      Switch off your damn television and stop letting them control you.
      Boris is about to swan off to a fat retirement, courtesy of the the compliant media whipping up this “scandal”, enter the next WEF man or woman.

    1. That dog is bored! He’s bright enough to tell you so, give him things to do! Play with him.

      Perhaps we should do the same with Boris. Start a war with France. At least that would be useful activity unlike the rest of his absurd, miserable, spiteful policies.

    1. Good morning, Bill. But… don’t you dare call me Sonny, my name is Elsie. And what has Frosty the Snowman got to do with it? Lol.

  36. Uff Da

    “The best thing we can do is not fall into the trap.

    The press politicians and Big Pharma didn’t all just realise the

    truth, they’re just using some small parts of truth they’ve been

    ignoring for two years to fortify their position.

    But that doesn’t make it a bad thing.

    The very fact they feel the need to do so shows that the resistance

    is building, and that they’re are trying to lull us into relaxing.

    Now would be the worst time to stop fighting.”

    https://off-guardian.org/2022/01/10/what-they-really-mean-by-living-with-covid/
    An Off-Guardian piece that describes EXACTLY what we are seeing I commend trhe whole article to you all

  37. ‘Morning again.

    The words ‘heroic’ and ‘inspirational’ seem appropriate here:

    Lieutenant Keith Quilter, Fleet Air Arm pilot decorated for bravery after a kamikaze attack – obituary

    In 2012 he was funded by a Lottery grant to travel to Japan, where he found the grave of a fallen comrade and laid a wreath

    By
    Telegraph Obituaries
    11 January 2022 • 8:08pm

    Lieutenant Keith Quilter, who has died aged 99, was a naval fighter pilot who was awarded the DSC for flying combat missions over Japan in 1945.

    On July 28 1945 he flew off the aircraft carrier Formidable with other Chance Vought Corsairs of 1842 Naval Air Squadron to attack shipping off the coast of Honshu.

    He and his friend Ian Stirling attacked a frigate anchored near Owase, but both were hit by anti-aircraft fire and ditched close inshore. Before his Corsair sank he inflated his rubber dinghy and “paddled like mad for the open sea” to avoid capture.

    Eventually he saw a submarine coming towards him. He thought it must be Japanese, but to his relief it was the USS Scabbardfish, one of a number of boats deployed close inshore to pick up airmen who had been shot down.

    The sub went on to pick up Quilter’s friend Stirling, and both were still on board on August 15 when the war ended with the Japanese surrender.

    Harold Keith Quilter was born in London on March 6 1922; he was adopted by Arthur Quilter, company secretary of the Berger paint company and his wife Harriet and they lived in Walthamstow. He was educated at Bishop’s Stortford Technical College and from his earliest years had a fascination with aircraft and the sea.

    On September 1 1939 his father drove him to the de Havilland Aeronautical Technical College in Hatfield, where he was to study engineering.

    In his spare time he volunteered for the Upper Thames Patrol, “a sort of floating version of the Home Guard” as he put it, but after an enemy air attack on the college in October 1940 he decided to get more directly involved in the war, and applied to the Navy to become a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm.

    He was eventually called up in November 1942 and, after basic naval training, was sent to the United States to learn to fly.

    Quilter was commissioned as a Sub Lieutenant RNVR in 1944, and joined 1842 NAS, embarked in Formidable. In August he took part in Operation Goodwood, a series of air attacks by the Home Fleet on the German battleship Tirpitz, moored in Kaa Fjord, inside the Arctic Circle in Northern Norway.

    After his ship joined the British Pacific Fleet in 1945, Quilter was strapped into the cockpit of his Corsair off the coast of Formosa (modern Taiwan) waiting to take off when he saw a flag hoist on the ship’s foremast warning of an imminent kamikaze attack. In seconds he switched off his engine, leapt out of the cockpit and managed to get off the flight deck before the enemy aircraft hit.

    When Quilter emerged back on deck he found a shambles, with planes on fire and a number of casualties, but within a few hours the ship was back in action.

    In July his close friend Walter Stradwick was shot down and killed while strafing a Japanese airfield east of Tokyo.

    After the war Quilter returned to de Havilland and then moved to the aviation division of Smith’s Industries, who made aircraft instruments.

    He rejoined the RNVR in 1947 and flew with 1832 NAS at RNAS Culham until 1952 when he married Eileen (née Baker), who asked him to stop as she did not want to become a young widow.

    They had no children and after her death Quilter retired and moved to Arundel, where he met and, in 1989, married Judy Culpin, who died in 2008.

    In 2012 Quilter was awarded a Lottery grant which enabled him to travel to Japan, where he found his fallen comrade Stradwick’s grave and laid a wreath.

    He continued to fly until his 90s, set up a branch of the Royal British Legion and toured schools to talk about his wartime experiences.

    Keith Quilter, born March 6 1922, died November 18 2021

    (Edited for finger trouble.)

  38. Russia’s belief in Nato ‘betrayal’ – and why it matters today. 12 January 2022.

    The current confrontation between Russia and the west is fuelled by many grievances, but the greatest is the belief in Moscow that the west tricked the former Soviet Union by breaking promises made at the end of the cold war in 1989-1990 that Nato would not expand to the east. In his now famous 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference, Vladimir Putin accused the west of forgetting and breaking assurances, leaving international law in ruins.

    The truth?

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/bfe118fbe4595cab74acd04377c082e59d5e80956c09bda698e9c3ed0b053ac3.png

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/12/russias-belief-in-nato-betrayal-and-why-it-matters-today

  40. Bread and circuses. More baloney from the Beeb. This person will outwit Putin. Good to know that in advance.
    Meanwhile a new British armoured brigade has been put in position. (https://auctions.curranddewar.com/catalogue/lot/3649cf0699571b8ede8eb3eaf0e940de/d338147dbc5ec45e7daf1932de062906/auction-sale-of-antiques-quality-furnishings-and-colle-lot-157/)
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/02f3ba7713a2d14dcf18acc810748bcfbad7d038c84f3e0d3cb55b03a6a7414f.jpg
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-59946364

    1. Don’t give the MoD ideas. They’ll think we have endless legions of Churchill’s just waiting for deployment.

    5. Good morning Horace.
      They’re a nice honest firm. Do you know Steven, or did you know his father?

      1. No. I’ve been to a few auctions though. They often have stuff of”Scottish East Coast interest”. As they are at the posh end of Dundee (Broughty Ferry) there are sometimes real gems from the couthie bungalows of the bourgeoisie.

  43. 344028+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    Wednesday 12 January: It is for Boris Johnson to look in the mirror and ask himself a question

    NO bloody way is that the answer,
    The answer is for the whole electorate to look in the mirror , if they dare
    after major, the wretch cameron, leg over clegg, treacherous treasa and now the treacherous turk, also their political allies need seriously checking out from the toilet attendant anthony charlie lynton, brown, werzel gummage, starmer the leader of the paedophiles R us, cover ups a speciality party ALL in collusion in the daily reset,replacement campaign.

    These party’s have over the last near four decades totally destroyed any trust in governing politico’s they have, without doubt made childhood a very dangerous gauntlet to run, neglected mental health issues BIG TIME as for the elderly I really can see DNR becoming mandatory.

    They the overseers, have NEVER left the eu in any real sense as for the
    electorate what satisfies them is ” I done my bit I voted tory (ino) you cannot vote for the opposition”

    May one ask WHAT BLOODY OPPOSITION.

    All I can see is the making of political millionaires via investing scams
    house flipping, corridor deals, exs,etc,etc ALL with the peoples consent.

    1. I agree with you ogga except the consent- we only get asked once in 5 years and none of this has been with my consent.

      1. They never do ask us though. There is a conspiracy of silence over the important issues at election time.

          1. 344028+ up ticks,

            N,
            There is always choice, currently it is
            submit & quit or fight.

            I and many more did NOT vote this odious political pelt in again,again,& again.

        2. 344028+ up ticks,

          Morning BB2,
          If that be the case then surely one must go on party’s historical past and vote accordingly.

          In a land of decency that would blast lab/lib/con well out of the water.

      2. 344028+ up ticks,

        Morning N,
        The majority vote, every opportunity to vote is, sad to say, on party name
        and NOT on party beneficial to Country actions.

        Hence the close shop lab/lib/con spewing out the same vile agendas as a coalition, the best of the worst seems to satisfy many and they vote accordingly.

    2. Good point.
      The media will no doubt run with the Rishi-will-save-us narrative, as though he’s a fresh new face. Expect the digital currency by June.

        1. Do they need the EU when they control us in so many direct ways? Part of the narrative seems to be paying lipservice to democracy.

  44. God visited a woman and told her she must give up smoking, drinking and sex if she wants to get into heaven.
    The woman said she would try her best.
    God visited the woman a week later to see how she was getting on.
    “Not bad” said the woman, “I’ve given up smoking and drinking but then I bent over to get some stuff out of the freezer and my boyfriend caught sight of my long slender legs, he pulled up my skirt, pulled my knickers to one side and made love to me right then and there.”
    “They don’t like that in heaven”, said God.
    The woman replied: “They’re not too happy about it at Tesco’s either.”

    4. “Could you pass me up that box of Findus battered haddock please, love, while you’re down there?”

  45. Q: Is Google male or female?
    A: Female, because it doesn’t let you finish a sentence before making a suggestion.

      1. 344028+ up ticks,
        R,
        No fears of shortages in that department
        lab/lib/con coalition supporters / voters will keep the country well supplied.

    2. 344028+ up ticks,

      Morning OLT,

      Because many of the political overseers are of a worse calibre.

  47. If the more libertarian Conservative MPs on the backbenches fail to take this opportunity to get rid of Johnson and most of his equally odious cabinet then the Conservative Party is finished.

    This time, Boris may not survive the fury at No 10’s flagrant rule-breaking
    Downing Street has made the public look like fools, when we shouldn’t have been in lockdown anyway

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/11/time-boris-may-not-survive-fury-no-10s-flagrant-rule-breaking/

    A BTL Comment under Philip Johnston’s article in today’s DT which which I agree.

    Is it or is it not very sinister indeed that the PTB want children, who are not at all at risk from Covid, to be vaccinated?

    Sir Tony Blair’s knighthood has, quite rightly, provoked intense anger and a petition with over 1,000,000 signatories. But the honours given Dame Harries and Sir Christopher Whitty should be attracting the same opprobrium.

    I would have never thought of myself as being a conspiracy theorist but the politicians are doing their best to turn me into one.

    1. 344028+ up ticks,

      Morning R,

      “Downing Street has made the public look like fools”

      The electorate needed no help whatsoever in that department.

        1. 344028+ up ticks,

          Morning W,
          I do beg to differ, much truer to say the “fools have been taken, again”
          So regular now the politicos can count on it.

          Party before Country short term win / long term Country loss.

        2. Less of the ‘we’. A great many people, including NOTTLers, have been pointing out the simultaneously farcical and sinister developments of these past two years.
          A very dangerous precedent has been set. Our freedom is now in the gift of arbitrary government.

      1. 3445028+ up ticks,

        Morning PM,

        If you reconstruct a lamb in joints via supermarket current prices it would hover round about £10/£15 grand so I believe lambs to be safe from Sunday dinners for quite a while.

  50. Need some IT techie advice .. I have asked the DT , but they are not helpful.

    I subscribed to the online DT thing early new year.
    Filled out my details , email etc just for me .

    Idiotic DT has not used my name ..I am so cross because all my DT comments are now under Mohs name .

    I am crosser than cross, I am recieving drivel via email from the DT to me under my name of course, but they just don’t respond to my query.

    2. There was some discussion in the comments recently, and it can be done. If you go to the top of a Telegraph page you will find an “account” tab or a person icon. Click on that to find details of your account, the name in there is editable and I assume that is the one that will come up in the comments. If it doesn’t, the facility is in that area somewhere! https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c645329d5ea9118ff8fadb61db4e61e248d46d4a5daaba11c2da926f3e7fd556.png

  51. To show that they are truly penitent about the garden party the Conservatives held on May 20th 2020 they must actually do something to show that they are repentant:

    How about:

    Every single fine that has been paid for lockdown violation during this lockdown should be repaid with interest and the money to be paid from Conservative Party funds?

    Anything less will prove to us all that Boris Johnson and his odious cronies don’t give a toss about anybody other than themselves.

    1. Your last sentence Rastus. I’m afraid that’s crystal clear already.

      Morning all. Very frosty. But a lovely clear blue sky and a beautiful sunrise this morning.

  52. Good morning. How many of us would be having bright conversations about a murderer standing bathed in blood needing to look in the mirror? How many of us would give anything but zero shits as to which party he belonged to? How many of us would be prepared to listen to a word from him except from the bar of a court, let alone debate on the criminal’s own agenda?
    That is where we are with this creature Johnson and his revolting cohorts,.
    We need to stop the false debate and start the forensic Inquiry,

    tarableu.com

  53. My thoughts on the 20th May2020 fiasco is … the arrogance of the 100 who attended that day must have thought they were all immune to the highly infectious virus.

    I wonder how many of that 100 caught Covid , and how many were super spreaders.

    It is the sheer arrogance of people that I find unforgiveable .

    Whoever is ousted out of power, because they are ALL guilty , yes all parties , all those who are black/ brown / white and pink broke many rules , of that we can all be certain .

    Cummings is the weasel in the rabbit colony!

    2. Belle, they weren’t scared because they knew it was a giant con, highly exaggerated and mostly only dangerous to the elderly or chronically sick.

    4. About 40 – but still enough to notice in a smallish city centre garden.
      We’re not talking about Chatsworth’s rolling acres.

      1. It’s well screened by trees. Not really visible and Downing Street is more than just no 10 & 11.

    5. They are arrogant but they knew they were quite safe as they all worked together. I doubt if any of them caught anything or spread it.

      Any more than our neighbours did when we gathered in the garden next door on 5th May 2020 to celebrate a 70th birthday.

      The whole lockdown scam ws an imposition not to fight a virus but to keep the population cowed and fearful.

    6. Cummings is getting his revenge – best as a dish served cold. I wonder what he will come out with next.

  54. Air raid sirens hooting – very loud, and scary.
    The echo is amazing…
    It’s the 6 monthly test at 12:00 Wednesday (I hope…)

    Now, the all clear.
    It doesn’t half make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck…

  55. I suppose the RSPCA would object to the reintroduction of the practice of throwing folk to the lions even though it has the merit of ending all the current speculative drivel….

    1. They might not object to that – but would be against lions being thrown to the people….

      I’ll get me chair.

  56. Horrifying footage emerges of young women being groped by huge mob during NYE celebrations in Milan: Attacks mirror infamous Cologne 2016 sexual assaults. 12 January 2021.

    Horrifying footage has emerged of two young women being groped by a huge mob of men during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Milan.

    The attacks, reminiscent of the infamous New Year’s Eve assaults in Cologne in 2016, occurred as people were partying in the city’s Piazza del Duomo (Cathedral Square).

    Italian police investigating the attacks carried out raids on Tuesday after 18 suspects – described as foreigners or Italians of North-African origin – were identified.

    Surprise. Surprise!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10393625/Horrifying-footage-emerges-young-women-groped-huge-mob-NYE-celebrations-Milan.html

    3. In Rome in 1964 some English girls in my school party were complaining of being groped – by Italian Italians. Plus ça change …

  57. Still sunny. But still a sharp, lingering frost though the temp is about 5ºC.

    G or P deposited a large VERY recently dead rat on the doormat last evening about 9 pm…. Full marks to them.

    1. Excellent to know that one or both of them is a ratter! That is a very handy attribute in a cat.

      1. Our old cat, Sam, was a great ratter………he brought all sorts of prey in through the cat flap. Some of them still alive.

        1. In the absence of a muggy, I have been elected mouse catcher this week.

          Honors are somewhat uneven:
          One mousetrap has gone missing.
          One mousetrap has been broken but they ate the bait.
          Only one trap has been productive and has lured a number of mice to their peanut butter nirvana.

        2. My cat Basil once brought in a live chipmunk. Kindly he put it on the floor in the dining room. Chipmunk ran followed by the cat, the dog, small son and two adults- what a circus! We never did find the chipmunk or any remains.

  58. QUICK! Bring home the bacon ….

    From Bloomberg:
    “A deadly pig disease has spread further in western Europe, increasing the risk of more export restrictions for the world’s top pork shipper.

    Major shipper Germany has been battling African swine fever for more than year, prompting key buyers like China to ban imports from there. But in a potentially significant escalation, a case was detected in a wild boar in northwest Italy late last week. That’s pushed the virus closer to Spain and France, two of the European Union’s other important suppliers.

    The EU is already already facing a glut of pork that has sent prices near multiyear lows. While Italy is a small exporter, any trade restrictions could exacerbate Europe’s oversupply and squeeze farmers’ profits at a time when they’re also dealing with rising feed-grain costs.

    “ASF is not only a German problem or a Polish problem or an Italian problem, it’s a European problem,” said Miguel Angel Higuera Pascual, director of Spanish pig-farmers association Anprogapor. “The disease is moving. It’s a nightmare to think about how we can control the movement of wild animals.”

    You may recall that in 2019 China slaughtered millions of Pigs reducing its swine herd by 50%…

    2. No doubt Pfizer is already producing batches of vaccine, not so much a cash cow, they would like to think along the lines of a cash pig.
      Written in jest but I would not be surprised if it comes true.

    3. “It’s a nightmare to think about how we can control the movement of wild animals.”
      Just tell the Frogs to stop supplying them with inflatables.

    4. I was quarantined in Macaé, Brazil in 2010 for 10 days due to the Swine Flu ‘pandemic’ because I had a high temperature.

    5. In Germany, free range pork is terribly expensive, and the reason is all the regulations with which you have to comply to keep the pigs separate from wild boar. Double, boar-proof fencing is needed.

      1. And they have to find a slaughter house staffed by people of European descent. I assume the others decline to participate where pigs are involved.

      3. The pork i buy comes from the New Forest on the South Coast of England. They wander around the forest eating acorns. Not sure if there are any wild boar there though.

    6. Oh, Swine Flu; how unimaginative. I was expecting another letter of the Greek alphabet to brought into play.
      Does this put the heart transplant chap at risk?

  59. 344028+ up ticks,

    In my book the herd has been conned openly since the 24/6/2016 but they
    will NOT acknowledge that fact especially from a tagged far right, knuckle dragging fruitcake one, Gerard Batten.
    .
    The taggers in the main support the governing overseers, and is used by many as a salve for voting consciences.

    https://gettr.com/post/pnv92ld0f5

  60. 344028+ up ticks,

    May one ask,
    Would one not find more warming satisfaction in hugging the local mp
    around the throat area say

    breitbart,
    Hug Your Dog: British Energy Company Gives ‘Dickensian’ Tips to Stay Warm Amid Soaring Prices

  62. This needs repeating

    New satellite research published by the GISS (Goddard Institute for

    Space Studies) NCDC (National Climatic Data Centre of the National

    Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the UK Met Office Hadley

    Centre, has shown a rapid cooling of Earth’s surface temperature over

    the last five years.

    SAY the Earth is cooling.

    https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/as-earth-cools-an-arctic-future-threatens-but-warmster-boris-wont-be-told/

    The Copernicus climate change report says the opposite.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10386743/amp/Climate-change-seven-years-hottest-record-clear-margin-EU-scientists-warn.html

    Copernicus is a creation of the EU.

    5. I would bet that these scientists cannot predict tomorrow’s weather, let alone long term climate changes.

      Let them explain our temperature swings –

      +1C this morning, down to -28C yesterday, +2C and rain on Saturday but -11C on Friday.

      1. The first lot are scientists and the second lot are interpreting data that suits the narrative they have signed up for.

    1. Remember the parody of Longfellow’s poem about Hiawatha?

      He killed the noble Mudjokivis.
      Of the skin he made him mittens,
      Made them with the fur side inside,
      Made them with the skin side outside.
      He, to get the warm side inside,
      Put the inside skin side outside.
      He, to get the cold side outside,
      Put the warm side fur side inside.
      That’s why he put the fur side inside,
      Why he put the skin side outside,
      Why he turned them inside outside.

      It was an amusing game we played when we were students to speak in trochaic tetrameter. For fun I shall write some posts in the future using this rhythmic form.

      1. “It was an amusing game we played when we were students to speak in trochaic tetrameter.”
        Did you all Minnie-Ha-Ha?

    1. My follow up question would be…Do you normally take a bottle to a work event and conversely …Do you take work to a party?

      2. My company had what were called Working Parties.

        As a project manager I funded a working group of all those involved in the project to boost the morale of those who were particularly stressed in trying to meet their ambitious targets. Because the success of the project relied on the cooperation of contractors who were not employees of the company I ordered champagne and nibbles for the whole team within the company hospitality rules to thank them for the progress they had made to date and to incentivise them to successfully complete the project on time and within budget.

        Yes, it did look like a party to the casual observer but I was flying very close to the permissible limits of my authority. Thankfully we all survived.

        2. Aye, we too have a bit of a bash, usually a barbecue or sausage rolls and what not.

          That work people come along and usually bring their children and partners is fine. It’s supposed to be fun.

          However, we didn’t have one the last couple of years because the oaf told us we shouldn’t.

    2. If he thought that was fine rather than against the rules he’d made then he’s clearly too thick to be PM.

      1. Or that he always uses the condom or the rhythm method while his paramour always uses the coil, the Dutch cap and the contraceptive pill. I think that all that should be left to him now is the withdrawal method.

    4. Pull the other one. He lied. He lied because he either forgot (most likely) or didn’t think.

      1. Better still, send them up with the pruning saw. They’re obviously better at working at height.

        1. Maybe not for Bill but a chain saw six inches above the ground is quite effective. Apple wood makes a good fire as well.

          2. I wouldn’t trust me with a chain saw.

            I had a client back in the 1960s who climbed a tree to give it a good sorting out with a chainsaw. As he sat on a branch, the chain caught something in the timber, bucked, cut the main artery in his thigh – and he bled to death in five minutes,

            I have never used a chain saw since.

  67. I wonder how many of the 140,000+ fined for breaking Boris’ laws are going to appeal on the basis they were ‘attending a work event’?

  68. 344028+ up ticks,

    This latest is surely going to tax the brain cell shared by the lab/lib/con
    member / voters, we now have the “PM” admitting to the fact there was a party he believed to be of a working environment type, bring a bottle optional, and the very pro eu, foreign paedophiles R us, long term cover ups guaranteed leader ( I’m addicted to covid) calling for the fat turk to resign, that’s bloody rich.

    As I say for the majority lab/lib/con supporter / voters the next selection is going to be one hell of a task, what with a nose clamp in place whilst selecting the best of the worst knowing the end result is guaranteed shite
    is one hell of an odious legacy to leave ones children, bad enough having them raped & abused, condemning them to ongoing political SHITE of this nature is unforgivable.

  69. just how bad are our politicians.Johnson is beneath contempt with his high handed attitude.

    1. They are all surviving on the understanding that there are no better leaders waiting in the wings. Anyone that might be a good leader is vilified by the mainstream parties and made unelectable.

      Unfortunately it’s the same in every country.

  70. So now the premier of Quebec is introducing fines / charges taxes on an unvaccinated person seeking hospital care (nomentaclure is changing because Canadian law prohibits charging for care).

    Trudeau (the black faced groper himself) has announced contracts for one hundred million vaccine doses a year.

    It isn’t going to be over for a long time.

    1. So how will that work then?
      Bills for everyone if they can’t prove vaxx status?
      Or only if testing positive for covid, i.e. if you break your leg and go to hospital, and after a week in hospital, you test positive for covid, are you going to get a bill for your treatment?

  71. Good afternoon.
    After a lovely walk with Spartie, I have a question for NOTTL ornithologists.
    As we walked past a couple of tall trees, the topmost branches were occupied by 30 – 40 jackdaws; from a distance they looked like large black leaves.
    As I watched, some jackdaws appeared to fly away in pairs. Was this a jackdaw speed dating party in preparation for the breeding season?

    2. No, they were just egging each other on!
      (You can tell by the absence of cheese and wine on the treetops)

    3. They do seem to love dogfighting as a mob against another mob of jackdaws. Our village’s jackdaws often get visited by another mob and the aerial fights are a good view. Maybe they had an appointment with another mob that had the coach break down and some just couldn’t be bothered to wait. They seem to fly around in couples all year as far as I can make out.

    4. Hmm, Anne, are you sure that they were jackdaws and not a murder of Crows?

      Crows that carry within themselves some sort of murderous intent.

      Je ne sais pas but there is an evil stalking this land.

      1. Rule of thumb

        If you see a field full of Crows, they are Jackdaws
        If you see a solitary Jackdaw, it is a Crow

      2. Definitely jackdaws.
        We have lots round here, probably a hangover from the days when many houses had stables. There are several ‘cottages’ round here that are obviously mews. This area was a prime Victorian professional and business folk development; they had pony and traps as transport.

    5. Are you sure they had not just heard about a breeding session but it is really a garden party in Downing Street.
      The email invite should have been clearer.

  72. That didn’t take long…

    Kazakh President: Withdrawal of CSTO Peacekeeping Forces to Begin on Thursday

    The CSTO forces were deployed to Kazakhstan amid mass protests that turned violent in the country in early January following a twofold rise in fuel prices.
    The withdrawal of Collective Security Treaty Organisation forces from Kazakhstan will begin on Thursday, 13 January, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said.
    “Tomorrow the organised withdrawal of the CSTO peacekeeping contingent begins. I had negotiations with the leaders of the respective states. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the command of the contingent for the work done during these few days,” Tokayev told a response centre meeting.
    He added that the mission has been successful and that the Kazakh forces managed to oust terrorists from Almaty thanks to the support of additional forces, including those sent by the CSTO.
    On Tuesday, Tokayev said that the phased withdrawal of the united CSTO peacekeeping contingent “will take no more than 10 days.”

          1. Muslims have lived in Russia since the reign of Ivan the Terrible.
            Maybe the West should learn…don’t fcuk our countries up and we won’t fcuk yours up.Just a thought.

          2. It would be rather naive to believe that of people who follow a book that speaks explicitly about the violent conquest of other countries and the murder of anyone who rejects their movement.

          3. In 480 years they haven’t attempted to take over Russia.
            You see in Russia they’re Russian first and Muslim second.

          4. Sorry, but again that is naive.
            Algerians were Algerian first, and muslim second, until suddenly many of them were muslim first, resulting in a great terrorist problem in the 90s. The islamists DID attempt to take over Algeria.
            They were stopped by a strong secular President. Other countries haven’t been so lucky.
            It just hasn’t happened in Russia yet because the islamists don’t feel strong enough, that’s all. As long as they feel that a bigger boot is on their necks, they are the meekest, most obedient citizens you can imagine.

          8. ‘Afternoon, BB2, “Other countries haven’t been so lucky.”

            …and that includes the UK.

            Had we stamped on them with great force from Day 1 and threatened closure and destruction of their Mosques and Madrassas we wouldn’t be in the pickle we are currently in, due to appeasers, Brown Cameron/Clegg, Cameron, May, Johnson.

            Time to rise up in our own Jihad – Nick Allah and Eff you Mohammed.

          9. ‘Afternoon, BB2, “Other countries haven’t been so lucky.”

            …and that includes the UK.

            Had we stamped on them with great force from Day 1 and threatened closure and destruction of their Mosques and Madrassas we wouldn’t be in the pickle we are currently in, due to appeasers, Brown Cameron/Clegg, Cameron, May, Johnson.

            Time to rise up in our own Jihad – Nick Allah and Eff you Mohammed.

          10. Most of the 72% of Kazach muslims are the happy clappy type. But then it is always the minority be-heading type that cause all the trouble.

          11. A large part of Russia to the south (Ukraine etc) was under Ottoman rule from 1529 to 1792. God bless Empress Catherine II.

          12. The whole point of islam is submission (it’s what it means). They intend to establish the caliphate and extend the ummah. They don’t require anybody to mess with their countries, they just need to read the koran.

      1. She has not estimated this site correctly, as she is more likely to be warned that she will shortly become blind than to catch victims of her scams!

  74. I trust that Jessica Johnston is not a nottler who has been forced into nefarious money making schemes.

    If so, sorry, you have just been banned / deleted.

    2. At least those porn queens seem to delete their own posts for some reason. They are not quite so intrusive as the last wave.

      2. When I ban them, I also ban all their IDs listed, and set the banning function to delete all previous posts. Might be that you see.

  75. I have waited a while to post this as I am upset and angry. Some of you may recall me telling you about a dear friend who suffered a serious stroke about 3 years ago. (He was my ex’s best man at our wedding.) He’s a bachelor and lives alone. I sent him a birthday card in July and usually he writes a short note in response. Nothing. I sent a Christmas card but didn’t receive one in return. I knew I had his phone number somewhere so searched my many notebooks and finally found it. 2 days ago I phoned but got no reply but this morning my phone rang and it was him. When I answered the phone he cried; his speech is very poor and he kept apologising for that. We had a conversation but it was difficult a) to understand a lot of what he said and b) because I was getting increasingly upset. Apart from a cleaning lady who comes in twice a week, he has been alone except for occasional hospital follow-ups.
    He is so depressed and lonely and can’t see the point of going on…the lock downs and restrictions on social contact have damaged him greatly and he isn’t the guy he used to be. He spends his days alone, is also physically challenged now so even outings are short.
    MH, obviously a closet masochist, wanted to hear PMQ’s today. After a few minutes of the lies, half truths and bluster from that pompous nitwit masquerading as prime minister, I had to leave the room. All the restrictions and stupid rules that they inflicted on us, the people of this land, meant nothing to them as they partied and socialised and presumably laughed at the gullible populace. Boris claims he talked to people who’d lost loved ones during all this, as did I, but not all the victims died. How many others, like my friend, have suffered loneliness, depression and feel that they cannot go on?
    This government is made up of liars and cheats; MPs rarely, if at all, answer emails, they do as they wish and sod the rest of us. It should be obvious to a blind mole that these people care nothing about the people of this land and the same applies in Wales, Scotland and NI.
    I have my friend’s number in my phone now and will contact him on a regular basis.
    Sorry about this long post but rarely have I been as furious and upset as I am right now.

    1. I feel for the guy Lotl – I’d be in a similar situation if it weren’t for driving the recovery truck although thankfully I’m in good health. Living in the wilds means there are less (fewer?) people who you could meet anyway even if it were allowed and if they weren’t shit scared of their own shadows. The Westminster bubble has much to answer for – personally I’d put the lot ( every MP regardless of party) up against a wall and shoot them.

    2. No problem, LotL, many of us have crosses to bear and, therefore, you are not alone on this.

      All I can offer is that you give your friend as much love, care and support as you deem necessary, to try and help him out of this Slough of Despond, the poor fella appears to be mired in.

      1. Yo Lottie

        Can you not get him to post on here?

        There maybe even someone who lives close to him

        1. He hasn’t got the manual dexterity- I tried emailing him but it didn’t work. He can barely write.

    3. Oh Lottie I am so sorry to hear this. Fully understand you being angry and upset. I was extremely angry some weeks ago and wrote to my MP who wrote back saying he would cease correspondence with me. There is so much to be upset and angry about. Alf is able to not exactly accept things but just doesn’t get so worked up about things as I do.

      Your poor friend must have been so grateful to hear from you so well done for not just leaving things. What has been done in the way of psychological warfare is appalling and although recently MSM has been kind of back pedalling the Great Reset agenda hasn’t gone away it is merely in abeyance as TPTB regroup. You have done a lovely thing by phoning your friend and I know you will keep your word about regular contact.

    4. There must be many people who have been affected by this whole thing as your friend has been. Lonely people who are even lonelier now due to not being able to see people or go out. People in poor health whose health has declined even further; and people living on their own who don’t have the companionship of a partner or friend to talk to. Keep in touch with him and hopefully he will begin to feel better.

      I know I’m lucky to be in good health, have a good relationship and live in a healthy part of the country. I’ve been more fed up by the restrictions imposed on us than I have worried about the virus – our whole social fabric has been torn apart by this, although life has been fairly normal since last summer. All the cancelled events and trips and social things have taken their toll, even on me and I’m one of the lucky ones.

      I can’t get that poor little Arthur out of my mind – and all the other children whose fate has not yet come to light who also suffered during the lockdowns.

      1. I am sure there are thousands, if not more, affected in this way. I too am haunted by that little guy Arthur and just wonder how many other vulnerable children have slipped through the cracks because of this nonsense.
        What these morons don’t understand is that there is more to life than physical health; mental health is important also. And, it’s not just book learning that kids miss when they’re not in school, it’s social skills, team spirit and so on.
        Going to try and calm down so I don’t become a statistic;-)

        1. Wearing masks in schools is so damaging – there is no proper interaction or facial expression – and to see the kids get off the bus and walk home while still wearing them – you know they have been brainwashed into accepting it as normal.

    5. Rightly so.
      Your calls may be the lifeline he needs, good luck, but be careful you don’t become depressed too; it can happen so easily.

    6. Good on you for following up, LotL. You likely have saved his life. Does he live far away, can you visit or even offer him a room for a few days / at the weekends?
      You are right to be upset about it, and I agree, the treatment of the population by the fascists in government and the police has been an eye-opener. No longer can we say “Nazism would never have happened in the UK” as clearly it would and is, and quite easily worse than in Germany, too.

      1. We’re on the south coast and he’s in London; we had planned to visit before all this started up. We don’t have space to have any one to stay sadly.

    7. Nothing that you can do except try and stay in touch. We also have a friend who has locked herself away for two years now, scared to go out. All we can do is talk and send emails.

      Another friend had some lung troubles so he isolated at home for two years, never went out, did nothing and just sat around the house. He died after a massive heart attack in November. Not covid related, more ptb related.

      1. A friend of mine with COPD and now breast cancer hasn’t been out since all this started, except for Dr appointments. Fortunately she has a husband to look after her but it’s just an existence, not living. i went to see her at the beginning of December – that was the first time in two years.

    8. Hi LotL. I wrote to my MP, Sir William Cash, on a similar subject about 6 weeks ago.

      Not a sausage, not even an acknowledgement. And we pay their wages! For what?!

      1. They are all useless…I haven’t posted this tonight but I had a text- he called the police as he was suicidal; they have referred him for a mental health evaluation. I hope he makes it that far.
        He was a Professor of Astronomy at UCL and is such a nice bloke. I feel like a cat on hot bricks.

          1. That would have been up to him. I called the Samaritans once and they were no help at all.

          3. Not sure what happened. He’s not himself at all. To say I am worried is an understatement. Not sure he knows what he’s doing.

          1. Haven’t heard today but the ambulance people and police referred him so I will wait a day or two then call again. Don’t misunderstand this but I can’t take any more on right now.
            My feeling is that he is incredibly lonely but he’s not all that mobile and has lost much manual dexterity; the texts hardly made sense. He has brothers but I am guessing there’s been a rift as he hasn’t mentioned them.
            Iffy, I will do what I can but am miles away and on a very limited income so it’s tough.
            Thank you for asking- means a lot.

          2. You don’t need manual dexterity to make texts make sense, you need mental dexterity. He may not have mentioned his brothers because he might have forgotten about them. Are you in touch with them at all? If you are it would be worth getting in touch. If not, back to Plan A, contact social services in a day or so.

            Good luck, keep smiling.

            Edit – the positive thing is he contacted the police because he was feeling suicidal. The (two) people I have known who took their lives went somewhere private and quiet and just did it.

          3. As did an uncle of mine…disappeared, a man hunt was launched and he was found hanging by the neck in a bothy in the Highlands. Never said a word to anyone.
            Yes, I will keep on it but I also have concerns here.
            Thanks again, Iffy.

          4. Keep a stiff upper lip. Just above your lower, quivering one!

            You’re doing what you can, no-one can ask for more.

    9. Isn’t there an organisation that could operate a befriending scheme he could take part in? RAFA/the RAFBF do one, but that’s for ex-RAF members. Someone rings up and chats, even if they can’t visit.

    10. Totally understandable; one of the most upsetting NOTTL postings I’ve ever read.
      I will neither forgive nor forget the past two years.

      1. Thanks Anne- am starting to wonder if I have kicked something off… He’s been on my mind for a while but I had so much going on here- finding a new home in pandemic era etc that it kind of got pushed aside.
        I just hope he can get some help- right now I cannot leave my husband.

  76. Gorgeous afternoon. Sunny and no breeze. Sorted out half of one of the most complicated trees (Blenheim Orange). The ladder work was draining – one kept twisting and bending. Time for a cup of tea.

  77. 344028+ up ticks,

    breitbart

    FRANCE FLOATS EU-UK CHANNEL DEAL THAT’S UNLIKELY TO REDUCE MIGRANT NUMBERS

    A pro United Kingdom government would find an answer and in doing so would immediately trigger a return to country of origin with a few bob
    resettlement ( do not return) money of course.

    That is the ONLY way these Isles will survive, if NOT in agreement then
    continue the coalition voting pattern, you will soon be enlightened and answering to the imam.

    1. Well if the Danes can dump them off the african coast in a dingy, there can be no EU rules against a return to Calais.

      It could be like the great rescue in WW2, except that the boats will be returning empty.

  78. Afternoon all.

    If I may add my two pence to the Party-gate scandal. For me, the infuriating thing is not the utter hypocrisy, but the fact that they clearly know that they are lying to us. If there really was a terrible plague stalking the land, then they would not be sending cheery emails to 100 people inviting them to BYOB parties. They know there is no real threat, this is all just theatre. It is the same with climate change. if they really thought that there was a “CLIMATE EMERGENCY!!” then they would not invite 30,000 people to fly from around the world in private jets (in the middle of a pandemic too!). Joe Biden alone had 85 limousines.

    I hope that this will be the beginning of the end for not only Boris Johnson but any further attempt to impose restrictions on our lives. What moral authority can these liars and charlatans possibly have?

    1. They have no moral authority – we know it and so do they – but they think we don’t and they don’t care what we think anyway. All I can say in their favour is that it has been worse in other places with their strict mandates and vax passes and police brutality whenver they protest.

      1. The response to this virus has been political, they do what they think they can get away with in each country. The more left-wing a government, the stricter the rules!

        Let us hope that Britain can set an example of courage for the rest of the world and push back against this creeping totalitarianism,

        1. Although I agree with your first sentence as to the last, please no.

          Almost EVERY time Britain has set an example of courage it has backfired badly, from abolition of slavery to net zero CO2, from dismantling the Empire to splitting the atom, etc etc. It always seems to come back to bite us.

      2. The response to this virus has been political, they do what they think they can get away with in each country. The more left-wing a government, the stricter the rules!

        Let us hope that Britain can set an example of courage for the rest of the world and push back against this creeping totalitarianism,

    2. ‘Afternoon, Kuffar, Johnson, Biden, Schwab, Gates, the whole Brussels loada shiite, need being collected and a mass hanging involved,

      Traitors one and all. Treachery against the whole of humanity – let’s exorcise the canker.

      1. Yes unfortunately so. It was disappointing to see that in the two recent by-elections the sheep still voted Tory or Lib-dem. To really send a message they should have voted for the one of the smaller parties.

          1. Indeed. A Richard Tice/Laurence Fox/David Kurten ticket would be one worth voting for.

            And Farage needs to get back in the fray…

        3. 344028 + up ticks,

          JK,
          Once again I do beg to differ the sheep are completely innocent tis the peoples every time.

    4. All they have to do is mention a new variant and off we’ll go again. The majority of the public is only too willing to lock themselves down and self isolate. TPTB will not willingly relinquish the control they have taken and not enough people are willing to rebel or protest. And even if there were large protests the police and army are ready to step in unlike when XR were so active. Then there will be carnage.

      1. I have a theory that about 10% of the population are like myself, cynical and unwilling to comply since the start. At the other end of the scale you have the 20-30% who are personally invested in lockdowns, either financially or because they are loving the work from home/easy life it brings. Maybe 50-60% of the population have accepted the lockdowns and restrictions in good faith. They wore their masks, took their jabs, clapped for the NHS and generally believed what the Prime Minister and the BBC told them. It is my hope that this mass of the population are finally waking up to the fact that they have been lied to and manipulated by people who knew that there was no ‘deadly pandemic.’

        Once the decent people who went along with it start to wake up, hopefully the house of cards begins to tumble…

      1. 344028+ up ticks,
        N,
        ” My initial thoughts” at the outset. not those who never let a good scam go by and recognise one when they see it.

        I do not know how to say SHOOO in Chinese maybe with the eyes semi closed.

  80. With regard to Johnson: I understand the argument “better the devil you know …”. However, I want him gone because he will take Nut Nut with him.

    2. Given how successful she has been with her policies it wouldn’t surprise me if the next PM took her on as a special advisor.

      1. Well she chose the wallpaper at no 10, of course she will do her best to stay.

        Her, Lammy, Abbott and Blair would be perfect.

      2. The Conservatives are probably stupid enough to appoint Gove as the temporary PM until there are elections for the position. If they then choose an authoritarian remainer then that will be the end of them.

    4. Anyone got any contacts at Ladbrokes?

      If Johnson resigns then how long will his most recent wife stay with him?

      I am beginning to think she was a plant by some unfriendly enemy power. Before landing Johnson she cast her net before both Squalid Jawdrip and Nadhim Zahawi and there are photos on the internet of her cavorting with both of these Middle Easterners.

      1. Beginning?

        Richard – it was obvious from the “wine incident” and the police being called that he was set up by the green eco-freaks to impregnate her – he was (and remains) trapped by this vile and dangerous woman.

      1. If Andrew has dirt to shed on prominent Americans he must show that he is prepared to shed it.

        1. He won’t. Too cowardly. Doesn’t want to end up like Epstein.
          Andrew’s reputation was irreparably damaged when he started hanging out with the daughter of a thief.

    1. The party’s over
      It’s time to call it a day
      They’ve burst your bloody balloon
      And taken the moon away
      It’s time to wind up the masquerade
      Just make your mind up the piper must be paid

  83. ‘Prince Andrew’s reputation is damaged beyond repair’: Experts say Duke of York’s public image will NEVER recover as judge denies bid to throw out sex assault lawsuit that will now ‘tarnish’ the rest of the royal family

    Specialists in reputation management told MailOnline that allegations against the Duke of York (pictured with Virginia Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell) have tarnished the Royal Family.

    The moral to be drawn from this is that never again should a member of the British royal family have any sexual dealings of any sort with an American: just look at the miseries of Edward VIII, Prince Andrew and Prince Harry

    3. Beautiful cats , real hunter killers , so handsome , like their dad!

      Moh played in a golf competition today

      We have a clear fading blue sky here , we had frost this morning , warm day and now the temp has plummeted to 2c within the past half hour .

      Moh has just washed the younger dog , Pip always rolls in fox poo.

      I had a lovely walk with them this afternoon , the RSPB at Arne was full of cars , walkers and cyclists, so I wandered onto NT territory where they were gorse burning , Can you believe the mild weather has brought the gorse out in flower.

  89. Midget Gems renamed after disability campaigner claims word is ‘hate speech’ to people with dwarfism
    M&S rebrands sweets as Mini Gems, but Dr Pritchard claims more companies need to follow suit to abolish ‘deeply insulting’ word
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/12/midget-gems-renamed-disability-campaigner-claims-word-hate-speech/

    Any MG Midgets still on the road will have to be renamed. And as for the midget submarines which attacked the Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord during WWII, well… that’s just plain insulting (and I don’t think the Germans would have been too pleased about it, either).

      1. Make people unsure of what is acceptable speech to unnerve them. All part of the plan. See Orwell/Frankfurt School.

        1. To be honest, Phizzee, I say what I think and if people are offended, that’s just too bad. If I get banged up, send me a cake (chocolate would be nice) with a file in it! 🙂

    3. I gave up when the outlawed dwarf tossing – not that I’ve ever felt the need to toss a dwarf!

    2. The statue of Queen Victoria was shifted off its dias by Italian bombs in Malta. They left it as a reminder. Never trust a Spic.

  92. At last, something to laugh about. From today’s Grimes – two “academic” coons sniping at each other about offensive language referring to another coon.

    “A war of words has broken out between two Cambridge professors after one suggested the other was racist for describing a black presenter as eloquent.

    Priyamvada Gopal, who teaches postcolonial studies at Churchill College, accused David Abulafia of dismissing writers of colour after he used the word in reference to David Olusoga, the black history professor and broadcaster.

    Abulafia, a bestselling author and historian, had published an article about the acquittal of the protesters who toppled the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020. Olusoga testified at the trial. Abulafia argued that “the choice of targets” by protesters avoided “those who are icons of the left”.”

    I TOLD A LIE –David Abulafia is a WHITE, brilliant historian whose books and lectures are simply outstanding.

    He was complimenting the half-caste Nigerian and the other coon Gopal objected. Because he is thick as bricks.

        1. The bames are having hissy fits about colonial slavery. Which our nation put an end to. The Americans revolted over it and betrayed their lawful King and guess what? The majority of slave owners in the modern world are…bames.

          They can all fuck off.

    3. Remember how pleased Dogberry is when he is described as being tedious in Much Ado About Nothing? He thinks this is a great compliment !

      LEONATO : Neighbours, you are tedious.

      DOGBERRY : It pleases your Worship to say so, but we are the poor duke’s officers. But truly, for mine own part, if I were as tedious as
      a king, I could find it in my heart to bestow it all of your worship.

      When our boys were little we cited this Shakespearean reference when they were being annoying.

      “Stop being so kinglike, Christopher (or Henry) ,” we used to say.

      And remember that Alastair Stewart got into trouble at the BBC when he quoted these lines from Measure for Measure:

      But man, proud man,
      Dressed in a little brief authority,
      Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d;
      His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
      Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
      As make the angels weep.

      The ethnically diverse thicko with whom Mr Stewart was talking said that Stewart had racially abused him by comparing him to a monkey.

      The most ignominious thing about this was that the BBC supported the thicko and Stewart had to leave the BBC and now works for GB News.

      1. Each to their own, Eddy. I cannot stand the self-obsessed “professor” who hogs every scene and gets in the way of the actual work being done. The professionals must dread it when they hear she is coming to show off.

      2. I love watching it to , I love searching for fossils as well.

        The archaeologist is Matthew Morris from Leicester University, I think he is reall gorgeous , sigh !!!

        1. Going back nearly fifty years, Erin and I quite often drove to Dorset around the Easter holidays time, when my sister BiL and their two youngsters had a break in a cottage at Charmouth. I collected quite a large a bag full of fossils once after the tide had been hammering the cliffs. Mainly ammonites and belemnites of course, i presented them to a school teacher where I was working in Chiswick just before we left the UK for Oz. He was over the moon with them. I still have a few some where at home.
          The local Pub in the high street use to sell scrumpy in anything you took for them to fill.
          I liked Alice until she tried to make out that one of the people founds skeletons found at Cheddar was Black I suspect she was following the agenda at the time. I expect he walked across. 🙄 Just try to the imagine the options he had was difficult enough unless he had a ‘motor bike’ it would have taken a couple of life times to get here.

      1. 344028+ up ticks,

        Evening M,
        But the hump under the carpet is becoming more noticeable by more peoples asking “how did we allow that to happen”

          1. 344028+ up ticks,

            M,
            That hump under the carpet wanted controlled immigration the electorate wanted “anything” that put their “party” in power they even accepted the rape & abuse of their kids by foreign paedophiles introduced to these Isles via supporting the lab/lib/con mass illegally controlled immigration coalition,ongoing, not just once but time & time again.

            When the young victims grow a little and if the odious voting pattern does not radically alter then it will be explained to them they were comfort items and heroines of the “party”

    2. Remind me, when did Omicron raise its head? A “vaccine” by March gives these miracle workers around three and a half months to research, assemble, manufacture and test. I am one person who will not be at risk from the crowds rushing to get jabbed. By the way, will Omicron still be the variant of choice by March?

      1. 344028+ up ticks,

        Evening KtK
        You are not alone in the no jab department, plenty of bona fide jabs, yellow fever,cholera, etc etc steered clear of this dodgy shite.

        I believe it will tail off now and acid rain ( mac melters) meteor storms etc
        will make an entrance cut down casualties by 75 % be staying indoors
        alternating days of the week.

    5. It’s the look on her face that gets me…”Look at me, aren’t I terrific?” No.

      1. Well, she is running what passes for the government. She would look pleased with herself.

      2. It’s not just her face, her whole outfit screams “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!” She looks very self-satisfied and smug.

      3. Her face could just look like that because she knows she is being photographed. She would never make an influencer on social media. But then…she hasn’t had to.

    6. I thought Climate Barbie’s mirror must be broken.
      Perhaps it’s a coat though, and her dress is much nicer.

  98. Have Labour politicians and those that seek to thwart Brexit and impose totalitarian rule upon us reached a new low with this partygate nonsense?
    Don’t get me wrong what happened was terrible for some people, they are grieving, angry and emotional about what they have been through with the pandemic.
    Politicians now cynically whipping up more anger for political gain is the pits really.
    Typical self serving as usual.
    They will even use those that have lost friends and loved ones for their own self advancement.
    Then they will drop them when they have their prize.

    1. 344028+ up ticks,
      Evening B3,
      Have lab/lib/con coalition politicians do you mean, if so they have been doing it quite openly these past near four decades.

  99. 344028+ up ticks,

    There’s a question asked by a Lord of decency & integrity Lord Pearson so unlike the other tripe.

    Plus bear in mind that the instruction manual, oath taker, permit to lie to NON believers rests between the dispatch boxes, and halal is on the parliamentary canteen menu.

    https://gettr.com/post/pnvasb958b

  100. Another corker (sorry Korky!!) from The Grimes about cosy palsmanship in Whitehall.

    “Sarah Healey, permanent secretary at the DCMS, told the culture select committee that she did not seek any references from the charity despite Thomas being chairman there for a number of years. She said it was not departmental policy to take up references for any of the public appointments it made, but insisted that due diligence was carried out.”

    Well, if you don’t take up references, what sort of due diligence DO you do? Ask around the St James’s Street clubs? Check with the PM and the Cainet Secretary to see if they know the chap (or chapess – see Bidet Harding)?

    The mire into which this appalling bunch of people is falling is getting deeper and deeper…

    2. At this moment in time, I just hope before i rearrange the position of the proverbial bucket, the army will take over Westminster and Whitehall and lock all the offending political nonces up for the rest of their lives. No chance eh ?
      Look at what they did with Elizabeth Filkin.

  101. Drink o’clock hoves into view. I will leave you after a very nice day – with that stunning sunset. And useful ladder work completed!

    Tomorrow looks good, too – market day. Then to finish the Blenheim Orange. More trees remain after that…!!

    Have a jolly evening.

    A demain

  102. I’ve cracked it.
    I’ve solved the conundrum.
    Do not open if you’ve just eaten.

    Boris Johnson was found in Gordon Brown’s shit, after he picked his nose and ate the bogey.

    1. Like the figure or hate it, I would have been tempted to remove the ladder.

      Ideally just as he was about to step on it on the way down.

    3. Just been reading up on Gill. A revelation to me, I just wasn’t aware of some of his activities, yuck. But his dog! Beyond the pale.

      1. Lovely – and the first fine day for a while. I pottered in the garden for a while this morning – should have gone for a walk really.

        1. Best day for a long time and walking Oscar on Kit Hill was magical this morning, and he didn’t roll in fox poo.

      1. I have seen on You Tube posts, possibly somewhere else, by a guy named Amin Youshed. The reply, when he blasted all the “infidels” who responded saying they’d searched their sheds and he wasn’t in there, was hilarious.

    4. We used to watch Eastenders – but gave up on it years ago. It was the only soap I watched – I’ve never had any interest in any of the others. I find I’m watching less and less telly these days. We got the free licence for a couple of years, but OH dutifully started paying up again. He does watch more than I do – especially the sports.

      1. I like to watch Rugby Union, Tennis, Sailing and F1 – not much joy on BBC.

        Cancel the Compulsory subscription – or face a revolt.

        The BBC has lost its soul …

      2. The sports I watch are on ITV. The Beeb is not even showing Badminton Horse Trials this year. It’s a pre-booked ticket only event and there’s no free to air coverage. I was considering buying a ticket and going, but their mercenary attitude has convinced me I can do without it.

  107. Midget Gems renamed after claims name is hateful towards people with dwarfism
    M&S rebrands sweets as Mini Gems, but campaigner claims more companies need to follow suit to abolish ‘deeply insulting’ word

    “If companies still use the word in their products and branding they should stop now. It’s offensive and unacceptable to disabled people,” she said, though she acknowledged it would be impossible to rename products no longer in production, such as the iconic car the MG Midget or the Daihatsu Midget mini van.

    https://twitter.com/True_Belle/status/1481351316815372291

  108. I was duped by the Covid lab leak deniers

    That senior scientists saw evidence for theories that they trashed in public has shattered trust in science

    MATT RIDLEY • 12 January 2022 • 5:48pm

    Inch by painful inch, the truth is being dragged out about how this pandemic started. It is just about understandable, if not forgivable, that Chinese scientists have obfuscated vital information about early cases and their work with similar viruses in Wuhan’s laboratories: they were subject to fierce edicts from a ruthless, totalitarian regime.

    It is more shocking to discover in emails released this week that some western scientists were also saying different things in public from what they thought in private. The emails were exchanged over the first weekend of February 2020 between senior virologists on both sides of the Atlantic following a meeting arranged by Sir Jeremy Farrar, head of the Wellcome Trust, with America’s two top biologists, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

    Freedom of Information requests sent last year produced farcical results in both Britain and America: ghost emails with all the contents redacted. Now, the US government has been forced to make unredacted versions available to Republicans on the House of Representatives’ oversight committee for an “in camera review”.

    Thankfully, staffers transcribed some of the contents. They show that Dr Fauci, Dr Collins and Sir Patrick Vallance, our Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, were briefed, on and after February 1, by several virologists who thought at the time that the new virus showed signs of having been manipulated in the laboratory.

    Not only did they never breathe a word of this suspicion to the media or the public, they rubbished it. The meeting on February 1 led to an article from the very virologists who were making the case that the virus showed signs of having been in a lab. Yet, in the words of Dr Collins, the job of that article was to “settle” the matter and “put down this very destructive conspiracy” lest the rumours do harm to “international harmony”.

    Three of the five authors in that paper are shown in the emails to be leaning towards the conclusion either that a key part of the genome of the virus had been manipulated in a laboratory, or that the virus had mutated in human cells while in a lab. Yet they dismissed both possibilities in the paper they drafted.

    We do not know what was in the first draft, prepared just three days after the meeting, but the final article, published in Nature Medicine on March 17, concluded that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.

    By then, two other articles had been rushed into print. One, in The Lancet, set out to “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. The other, in Emerging Microbes and Infections (EMI), by Liu Shan-Lu and colleagues, found “no credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering” of the virus. The Lancet article failed to disclose (for 18 months) the conflict of interest of several authors including Peter Daszak, a close collaborator of the Wuhan Institute of Virology who secretly orchestrated the article.

    The EMI article failed to disclose the fact that a senior virologist, Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, had agreed to help edit it, saying: “Sure, but don’t want to be cited in as having commented prior to submission.” Scientific journals have not behaved with transparency.

    At the time, given that I had written extensively on genomics, I was asked often about the chances that the pandemic started with a lab leak and I said this had been ruled out, pointing to the three articles in question. Only later, when I dug deeper, did I notice just how flimsy their arguments were.

    For example, the Nature Medicine paper included a passage saying the virus “would have then required repeated passage in cell culture or animals with ACE2 receptors, but such work has also not previously been described”. It is surprising to learn now that Sir Jeremy Farrar himself thought this very “passage” operation was a “likely explanation” of how the virus came to have its unique features. At the time, I trusted senior virologists who told me the lab leak could be dismissed. Frankly, I was duped.

    Matt Ridley is the co-author of ‘Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19’

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/12/duped-covid-lab-leak-deniers/

        1. A real scientist and humanitarian. I found his concluding comments comforting and so at odds with the tyrannical attitudes of so many in the medical establishment, Fauci etc.,

    3. Well we knew all this last year, didn’t we? We know the MSM has suppressed dissenting information but are we to believe Matt Ridley really didn’t know about this?

  109. 344028+ up ticks,

    This Tommy Robinson chap yet another far right, knuckle dragging drunken skinhead ex EDL for that he was castigated in the main by
    many a lab/lib/con member / voter the very peoples that consent via the polling booth to mass controlled illegal immigration, riddled with paedophilia artists.

    That’s a fact,

    https://gettr.com/post/pnv8u92d31

  113. This’ll get ’em going!

    We must preserve British English from ignorant, senseless Americanisms

    The game Wordle, players complain, treats US English as the ‘correct’ form – the latest example of a dispiriting trend in many areas of life

    SIMON HEFFER • 12 January 2022 • 3:45pm

    The old joke about us and the Americans being two peoples separated by a common language is resonating again because of the success on the internet of the game Wordle. Although invented by a Briton – a Welshman who now lives in Brooklyn – the game (in which competitors have to guess a five-letter word) uses American spellings as a default. So one would have to guess “color” and not “colour”, or “honor” and not “honour”.

    Of course, standard orthography is a pretty recent thing, as anyone reading a text printed in the first half of the 19th century or earlier can testify. But since we have developed it, and are happy with it, there seems to be no need to chuck it away and follow the spelling that our American cousins have decided to use – spelling that, in many cases, and like other usages, ironically reflects the usual spelling of English in England in the 17th century, when our fellow countrymen were crossing the Atlantic to people the 13 colonies.

    The Americans may have a laudable sense of tradition in sticking to the spellings the Pilgrim Fathers took with them; and the English may have chosen to alter that spelling for entirely inexplicable and unjustifiable reasons. However, the fact remains that we did, and generations have become accustomed to it. If people want to play word games on the internet then they do so, as with everything else in life, at their own risk – even at the risk of having to adopt American orthography if they wish to compete. It just seems rather a shame that a man from Wales should feel pressured into adopting American spellings in order to ensure his game is a success. Perhaps he should circulate a dedicated British English version as well.

    But then it isn’t just American spellings that are undermining British English. Thanks to the ubiquity of (often excellent) American television programmes, where the spelling is generally invisible, rather too many people who would otherwise pass as British seem to speak American. Hear a fellow Briton talk about someone “taking the stand” in a court case and you know at once that the speaker has devoted rather too much time to watching American courtroom dramas.

    Possibly the most offensive imported usage – though each will have his or her own especially loathed violation, according to taste – is the substitution of the verb “get” for the word “have”. When giving an order in a tea-shop, one might ask “could I please have a toasted tea-cake?” The Briton who speaks fluent American will instead say “can I get a toasted teacake?”, not only eliminating the conditionality of the auxiliary verb, but conveying to a speaker of British English the sense that the client is expressing his or her intention to get up, go the kitchen, fetch the teacake, and return to the table with it, dispensing with the need for a waiter. It is only marginally less ignorant than those who, replying to a polite inquiry about their general health, say “I’m good”, as if they had just been asked to give an assessment of their moral condition.

    Two other popular infringements of our linguistic heritage are those who now say that a boy is “named for” his grandfather rather than “named after” him; and those who, instead of starting again, “start over”. A command of such usages certainly allows the speaker to slot in effortlessly if attending a clam bake in Connecticut; in England they just sound odd or silly.

    And, rather shockingly, we are now routinely assisting our American friends in their campaign to assassinate the preposition. It is normal in this country to appeal against a decision, or to protest against, or even in some contexts about, it. The Americans simply appeal it or protest it.

    It is their culture, and they can do as they like in the evolution of the language that we and they still broadly share. They have retained usages in their version of our language that render it superior to ours in what it can do and in the nuances it can express, such as in their devotion to the subjunctive mood. In those courtroom dramas, one sometimes hears the judge order “that he be removed from the court”, whereas we would now feel the need to say that he “must be”, or “should be”, removed.

    But it is our language too, so it affects (or, as the Americans say, in another usage that we are soaking up, “impacts”) our culture – and we should defend that heritage. There is nothing wrong with our English being different from (or as they would say, “different than”) theirs. And there is certainly no reason for us to engage in a cultural cringe that entails our throwing our brand of English overboard in favour of theirs.

    America has done quite enough damage in the world by imposing McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken on the rest of us, without taking over our language too. So those who are angry about the assumption that Wordle must default to American spellings are justified in their wrath, and they should let it rip – whether the Americans think such a protest is alright [sic] or not.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/news/must-preserve-british-english-ignorant-senseless-americanisms/

    1. Very olde worlde.
      What about the Welsh journalist who fought on both sides of the American Civil War and then went to Africa looking for a doctor?
      “Doctor Livingstone, I guess?”

    2. I attended many parties in CT but never a clam bake. BTW- I was not PM and it was legal;-)

        1. Isn’t that the best musical? The music is sublime. And for the last couple of years we have indeed been walking through a storm, with our heads held high- as best we could.
          Sod Boris.

    3. We’re also crucifying our own language.
      Train station instead of railway station
      Bored of rather than with
      Haitch instead of aitch
      And many more.

      2. The one that got to me most was the American CEO of the company who was producing work for us in Singapore, when he told me that I would soon get ‘acclimated’ to the Singapore weather. I told him of the correct verb being acclimatised and then lambasted him for the use of burglarized rather than being burgled.

        It al put me in mind of the American braggart who tried to tell my father that the American language really shortened so many words, at which point he was silenced by my father saying, “Is that why you call it an elevator rather than a lift?”

  115. A mark deducted for the use of ‘atrocities’.

    Forcing people to die, give birth or be gravely ill alone was wrong and inhuman

    Our pandemic toolkit of lockdowns and other restrictions turned a blind eye to millions of individual tragedies

    KATIE MUSGRAVE • 12 January 2022 • 5:23pm

    It is difficult to keep track of quite how many parties were held in Downing Street at the height of the national lockdowns. The hypocrisy smarts. Column inches are being filled with stories of isolation and distress on the very same date as the Prime Minister and Carrie Johnson were scoffing vol-au-vents (OK, I made up that detail, but there was wine…).

    Do we, in all sincerity, believe the rule breaking was the primary issue, or might we reflect the rules themselves were at fault? In a crisis, occasionally the ends genuinely do justify the means. Nevertheless, there have been multiple points in the Covid response where rules have remained in force despite being nonsensical or inhumane.

    Throughout the pandemic, we have looked on as atrocities have taken place. The dead were removed from homes by men in hazmat suits, leaving grieving families in isolation. I have been told stories in my GP surgery that have reduced me to tears. I think of a pregnant girl who attended hospital with stomach cramps, having tested positive for Covid. The maternity unit, alarmed by her positive ‘status’, asked her to stay in the car park and update them on her condition by telephone. Tragically, this young woman went on to deliver a stillborn baby in her car without medical assistance. Her whole life will have been changed by that trauma. Can this ever be justified?

    Many will think of the Queen, sitting alone at Prince Philip’s funeral. An emblem of pain and isolation. How desperately she must have wanted to have her children and grandchildren around her. Everyone knew she was double vaccinated at this point – so why wasn’t she given the choice?

    Many regulations remain in force today which reach beyond the necessary, and cause harm to millions. We continue to treat those who test positive for Covid (symptomatic or not) as lepers. With the transmissibility of omicron, coupled with a highly vaccinated population, the question lingers: is this proportionate? At what point will individuals be allowed to make pragmatic, informed choices again? Rules for rules’ sake can be enormously damaging.

    As a society, we have accepted lockdowns and isolation guidelines without significant protest. The public believed they were necessary, although we now know government advisors were surprised by our compliance. However, as knowledge of Covid-19 grew, the government clearly relaxed their own approach. Our leaders knew full well their individual risks were lower than publicly implied: especially those previously infected, or after vaccination. Would Matt Hancock have been caught snogging Gina if he truly believed she might carry the plague?

    There are huge implications for public trust, which extend beyond the hypocrisy of holding parties while the population were obeying lockdowns. For example, trust in medics and authorities at large must be diminished by a disingenuous representation of risk. Likewise, if doctors are willing to collude to profess that an unvaccinated 18 year-old is at the same risk as a diabetic 80 year-old, what else might they be willing to collude about? Even in a pandemic, integrity remains paramount.

    The decision to lock down was taken when it was believed the deaths from Covid would prove catastrophic. Indeed, Boris was right: many lost loved ones. But once such an enormous (previously inconceivable) societal intervention has taken place it becomes far more probable it will be repeated. Yet to normalise lockdowns as just another measure in our pandemic toolkit is to knowingly turn a blind eye to millions of individual tragedies.

    The country must strive never to go there again: our humanity should always come before infection control.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/12/forcing-people-die-give-birth-gravely-alone-wrong-inhuman/

    1. If it makes people think the rules are OTT and should be ignored, then some good might come of it, but I’m not holding my breath.

      1. I’ve always been one, Connors who considers the ‘rules’ to be a load of psycho bollox and refused to abide by them but, I live with a lady who I love very dearly but she follows all the bollox and looks aghast at me for refusing the jab.

        She is only now realising that the jab would kill me because of my heart condition but still sticks a rag on her face, leaving me in the car with the blue-badge prominent, while she takes my debit card to go provisions shopping in Aldi/Morrisons or whatever.

        There’s none so blind as those that will not see.

        1. Has she read the rules about the use of a Blue Badge? She shouldn’t be leaving you in the car in a disabled space while she goes off shopping!

    2. Would Matt Hancock have been caught snogging Gina if he truly believed she might carry the plague? And that’s the point – would Fergusson have nipped off to shag his mistress if the plague was that deadly? Would people have happily gone to Number 10 parties? Would world leaders have gone, unmasked, to COP26 and the G8?? I know people who have been quite ill with something [most of them fully vaxxed], but why do the elite seem to know that it won’t get them?

      2. Because it has been lies from start to now and it will continue. It is up to us to ignore these oiks and live our lives as we would wish to.
        I have just poured myself a very rare Scotch and soda because I am so distraught. I think you may have seen my post earlier. Have since had a text to say he’d called the police as he was suicidal. He’s been referred for mental health evaluation- I hope he makes it that far.

        1. Oh. lord. Hope he gets sorted quickly, and you can wind down, Lottie.
          I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

          1. I don’t know what to do- can’t get up there and I hope I haven’t opened a can of worms by getting in touch. And there is another issue closer to home which means I must stay here.
            What this govt has to answer for…. sorry, I am upset.

          2. Being upset just shows your humanity. And, what normal person wouldn’t be upset?
            Don’t apologise.

          4. I am sure your call has helped your friend to realise that he needs help. And now he has reached out for it so he has benefited enormously from your chat with him, take comfort from that Lottie.

        2. The societal damage caused by the mad lockdowns and farcical rules, some apparently made on the hoof but otherwise preplanned at Davos is immense.

          Those responsible will be brought to account as the results of their wicked policies become yet more apparent.

          There are sufficient numbers of the ‘unvaccinated’ to challenge those responsible for the harms done to those coerced into taking the poisonous jabs.

          Likewise there are many thousands of accomplished epidemiologists, biologists and immunologists challenging the insane narratives promulgated by SAGE behavioural scientists and mad modellers such as Ferguson at ICL and the prat at the London School of Hygiene .. at UCL.

          At this point in time everyone should resist and refuse any mandates for ‘vaccinations’ and try to return to normal life and activities. The ‘vaccines’ have failed completely to halt the spread of the disease and have and will lead to great harms to the immune systems of many.

          Thousands have already died and many more have been hospitalised and otherwise harmed as a result of adverse reactions to the jabs. It is now apparent that adding booster after booster to the initial failed ‘vaccines’ will exacerbate auto immune issues as opposed to assisting in countering them. Junk in junk out, junk in junk out… ad infinitum.

          Likewise face coverings are harmful to public health and their use should be disdained. Children in particular should be free of masking and other inhumane prescriptions and on no account should be coerced into taking experimental gene therapies aka jabs.

        3. The societal damage caused by the mad lockdowns and farcical rules, some apparently made on the hoof but otherwise preplanned at Davos is immense.

          Those responsible will be brought to account as the results of their wicked policies become yet more apparent.

          There are sufficient numbers of the ‘unvaccinated’ to challenge those responsible for the harms done to those coerced into taking the poisonous jabs.

          Likewise there are many thousands of accomplished epidemiologists, biologists and immunologists challenging the insane narratives promulgated by SAGE behavioural scientists and mad modellers such as Ferguson at ICL and the prat at the London School of Hygiene .. at UCL.

          At this point in time everyone should resist and refuse any mandates for ‘vaccinations’ and try to return to normal life and activities. The ‘vaccines’ have failed completely to halt the spread of the disease and have and will lead to great harms to the immune systems of many.

          Thousands have already died and many more have been hospitalised and otherwise harmed as a result of adverse reactions to the jabs. It is now apparent that adding booster after booster to the initial failed ‘vaccines’ will exacerbate auto immune issues as opposed to assisting in countering them. Junk in junk out, junk in junk out… ad infinitum.

          Likewise face coverings are harmful to public health and their use should be disdained. Children in particular should be free of masking and other inhumane prescriptions and on no account should be coerced into taking experimental gene therapies aka jabs.

      3. Would our “glorious leaders” been so comfortable and unconcerned standing together having drinks last year at the G7 event in Cornwall in the midst of such a killer pandemic? No, of course they wouldn’t, they would have stayed away living in hazmat suits in their mansions, wetting themselves every time someone came near them.

    3. Would Matt Hancock have been caught snogging Gina if he truly believed she might carry the plague? And that’s the point – would Fergusson have nipped off to shag his mistress if the plague was that deadly? Would people have happily gone to Number 10 parties? Would world leaders have gone, unmasked, to COP26 and the G8?? I know people who have been quite ill with something [most of them fully vaxxed], but why do the elite seem to know that it won’t get them?

    4. The MSM was more than willing to silence any dissenting medics. It is disingenuous of Ms Musgrave to bemoan lack of trust now when she has been part of the conspiracy to shut out anyone with a different opinion about this disease. BTW let’s not forget that the virus in question has never been isolated. Psychological warfare at its best.

    5. Another ‘journalist’ jumping on the bandwagon. Where have you all been for the last 2 years. Yes, it’s you who had the opportunity to listen to proper scientists rather than modellers with their garbage in, garbage out predictions. And didn’t you listen to the proper scientists and medics who were barred from papers like yours because the wouldn’t follow the narrative?
      You lot make me sick, you’re as bad as the sheep like politicians who wouldn’t call out the lies and deceit being foisted on the population. You had the opportunity and shirked you duty and responsibility.

      1. Your comment is worthy of a million upticks, I raised the point yesterday in the Sherelle Jacobs article, she spread blame far and wide but the MSM never had a mention, totally without any blame it seems.
        I do consider her one of the better journalists but her article brings shame on her.

        1. Someone earlier posted the column by Matt Ridley… he was on GB News tonight. To hear and read that Patrick Vallance, one of the two Ronnies of doom as Littlejohn calls them, knew about this and yet stood there and endorsed all the bollocks that Boris was spouting….and he’s got another gong for his lies- or economy with the truth.
          Get rid of these people asap.

      2. ^^ This^^

        Exactly this,the gutless MSM bought and paid for now looking to absolve themselves of their crimes
        No way,the internet never forgets

        1. Many people in this country will never forget or forgive. As Lady Allan said earlier. I never shall.

  116. Evening Standard Comment: The public deserve far better than Boris Johnson
    https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/boris-johnson-downing-street-party-lockdown-covid-b976253.html
    The mood within the Conservative Party is bleak. Cabinet ministers and backbenchers have a decision to make — stick with Boris Johnson, a man whose personal behaviour invites endless inquires and investigations — or twist.

    There are two schools of thought. The first is the fear of what, or rather who, replaces him. But even putting personality and political positioning to one side, any of Johnson’s potential successor’s would face an angry public enduring a cost of living crisis and the prospect of bruising May elections.

    That is why some Tories prefer to stick with the incumbent. Not out of love and certainly not trust, but because they would rather he continue to soak up public discontent over sleaze and preside over falling living standards until someone else can take over shortly before the next general election.

    Other Tories believe it is a risky political strategy for the party. There are many who believe that Johnson is trashing the office of prime minister and is taking a proverbial axe to whatever residual trust in and respect for politics the public might still hold.

    Some senior Tories fear that keeping him in post, even temporarily, runs the risk of looking like an act of indulgence at a time when Britain urgently needs sound stewardship.

    They are considering whether the Prime Minister should stay on to oversee a disastrous set of local elections for the Tories — something now priced into the market — but it is hard to see how his party will be better off for it.

    Yet Johnson’s latest crisis is also an opportunity for Sir Keir Starmer. Napoleon Bonaparte’s quip that you should “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake” often works well for opposition parties, but now is the time for Starmer to make his mark.
    Not only to contrast his avowed probity and integrity with the cosmic vacuum where Johnson’s should be, but also to set out his vision for Britain. He has been given a hearing — something not all leaders of the opposition get — he must not waste it.

    One thing is clear. The public, exhausted after two years of on-again-off-again restrictions, traumatised by the loss of loved ones and outraged by the behaviour of our most senior politicians, deserve better.

    1. We need to remember though that the “eeeny Stannert” is George Osbourne – arguably an even worse prospect than Fataturk!

  117. The Downing Street party row has finally woken us up to the madness of lockdown

    Overnight we were plunged into a surreal, paranoid, despotic bureaucracy and yet we had largely blanked that out

    MICHAEL DEACON

    To Boris Johnson, it may not feel like it. But at least one good thing has come out of this row about the Downing Street garden party.

    It’s finally waking us up to the sheer loopiness of that first lockdown.

    Right now, the Prime Minister is being eviscerated for doing something that wasn’t actually dangerous. He and his colleagues were out in the fresh air. The risk of catching or spreading the virus was minimal.

    Yet people are angry – and with good reason. Because, back in spring 2020, the PM himself was telling us that such events actually were dangerous. As a result, we’re starting to think harder about the rules we were forced to live by. Not just because they were so draconian but because some, in retrospect, were just bizarre.

    Forget garden parties. Even when we went to the park, we weren’t allowed to meet more than one person from another household. If we spotted a third person we knew, we were under orders to ignore them or go home.

    Even more oddly, we were permitted to exercise for a maximum of one hour a day – and go for only one walk. People lived in fear of their neighbours grassing them up to the authorities. “Calling all cars. We’ve got reports of a man on Church Lane leaving his property for a second walk. Repeat, a second walk.”

    Such fears were not unfounded. The police became fanatically overzealous – in some cases enforcing laws that didn’t even exist. Police in Derbyshire used drones to track people walking their dogs (as shown in the video below). Police in Warrington, meanwhile, reprimanded a member of the public for “going for a drive out of boredom”. It made no difference that, within the confines of his own car, this member of the public couldn’t have passed the virus to anyone but himself, if indeed he actually had it in the first place. Rules were rules. Even when they weren’t.

    Most absurdly of all, though, an officer in Rotherham berated a father for playing with his children in his own front garden. This happened a mere month before the Downing Street garden party.

    Benches were taped off to stop people sitting on them. Swings were removed to stop children using them. Supermarkets imposed one-way systems so that if you forgot to pick up an item from the fruit and vegetable aisle, you were expected to go all the way round the shop and back to the start. Councils tried to stop shops selling Easter eggs, because they weren’t “essential items”.

    It wasn’t just the authorities who were heavy-handed, though. We were, too – because we imposed draconian rules on ourselves. We weren’t ordered to spray disinfectant on our morning post, or to quarantine the groceries we’d had delivered. Yet people did it anyway, of their own volition.

    It was a mad time. But even when that first lockdown ended, the madness didn’t. Children returning to school were told not to sing Happy Birthday – just to whisper the song, instead. Waterstones announced that, whenever a customer touched a book but didn’t buy it, the book would be placed in quarantine “for at least 72 hours”. Scottish pubs were allowed to reopen – but not to sell alcohol. Meanwhile, the Government decided that you could only order an alcoholic drink if you had it with a “substantial meal”. There then followed a month of heated debate over whether a scotch egg should count.

    The memory that will stay with me, though, is of the advice given by the Terrence Higgins Trust, a charity that promotes sexual health. Lovers, it said, should stay safe by “favouring positions where you’re not face-to-face”.

    To be clear: I’m not saying it was mad to have a lockdown in spring 2020. It was right to be cautious, given how little was known about the virus and how precisely it spread. And in those days, of course, there was no vaccine.

    All I’m saying is, I don’t think we’ve seriously reflected on how nightmarishly weird that first lockdown was. Overnight we were plunged into a surreal, paranoid, despotic bureaucracy – East Berlin meets Alice in Wonderland – and yet we’ve largely blanked that out, or shrugged it off. In fact, some people seem to remember that period almost like a kind of holiday. Lovely weather, no more commuting, boredom yet to set in…

    But we must never forget how awful it was for children. My son, who’d only just turned six, created a “wish jar”. On scraps of paper, he wrote down the things he most longed to do when the pandemic was over, and placed them in the jar. This week, we opened it. Among his distant dreams were “go to seaside”, “go on a train” and “go to Scotland” where his grandparents live.

    The final wish he’d included was “go to a party”. If only I could have pulled some strings and got him a little Saturday job in Downing Street.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2022/01/12/downing-street-party-row-has-finally-woken-us-madness-lockdown/

      1. We had a friend who went through all that farrago.
        He is one of only 3 people we know who caught covid.

      2. I watched a masked couple yesterday evening enter M&S food hall via the back door (which we all had to use during the lockup – to avoid the rest of the store) and make a big performance of wiping their basket handles with hand sanitiser. Which would achieve precisely nothing?

        1. While I don’t make a big deal of it, I do wipe basket handles (and the sides) with anti-bac wipes. In my experience some shoppers have unhygienic habits!

      3. I hate to tell you this, but one of our daughters and her husband did! Mortified, I was!

      4. I must confess to quarantining the post in our lobby for a few days until rationality returned after a few weeks and I thought ‘what on earth am I doing?’ I never wiped the groceries with anti-bacs, but I never buy from the selection offered at the front of the shelving, I always rootle further back. I have never used the offered hand-gel stuff, either. Ugh.

        For more than quite a few years I must admit to the fact that I have wanted to use plastic/latex gloves when using baskets and trolleys. I read a report of the bacteria sliding around on them.

        1. Popsy, I have said many times that, as a former teacher, I wash my hands all the time anyway. You never knew what the little sods had been up to and when I come in from the shops etc… first thing I do is wash my paws.

    3. We ought to quarantine the HoC and cut off their internet & mobile phones. Everyone can then breathe a sigh of relief….

          3. There is no reason why they shouldn’t get a taste of what life is like for the rest of us.

      2. 344028+ up ticks,

        Evening S,
        We could always try boycotting the lab/lib/con
        paedophilia R us coalition in the polling booth
        or would that seem an act of treachery
        to many a voter ?

    4. How is it that Michael Deacon has only just woken up to the horrors the population has been put through? Some of us actually used our common sense and ignored the crazy disgusting rules and regulations and did not wear a mask ever or social distance, have track and trace on our phones or use QR codes etc. aFor goodness sake the virus could tell if you were in a pub standing up or sitting down and would disappear at a certain time of the evening? Utterly nonsensical. Why is everybody only just waking up to this psychologically induced period? Mass psychosis.

      1. 344028+ up ticks.

        Evening VW,
        Following lab/lib/con coalition party policies to the letter, this is nearing the endgame for what has been happening via the polling booth for nigh on four decades.

        Many of us tried to tell them, but in protecting the lab/lib/con coalition organised treachery took a deciding hand

    5. It’s taken Michael Deacon nearly two years to discover this is the biggest fraud ever to be visited on the world. Journalists have stopped being sceptical of absurd rules and regulations without questioning them
      I would have been ashamed to admit in an article like this.

  119. I have assumed this is genuine (until someone tells me otherwise) From ZH:

    Professor Ehud Qimron (center) at Tel Aviv University (Haaretz)

    Original letter in Hebrew: N12 News (January 6, 2022); translated by Google/SPR. See also: Professor Qimron’s prediction from August 2020: “History will judge the hysteria” (INN).

    ∗ ∗ ∗

    Ministry of Health, it’s time to admit failure
    In the end, the truth will always be revealed, and the truth about the coronavirus policy is beginning to be revealed. When the destructive concepts collapse one by one, there is nothing left but to tell the experts who led the management of the pandemic – we told you so.

    Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame.

    You refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge. You insisted on attributing every decline of a wave solely to your actions, and so through false propaganda “you overcame the plague.” And again you defeated it, and again and again and again.

    You refused to admit that mass testing is ineffective, despite your own contingency plans explicitly stating so (“Pandemic Influenza Health System Preparedness Plan, 2007”, p. 26).

    You refused to admit that recovery is more protective than a vaccine, despite previous knowledge and observations showing that non-recovered vaccinated people are more likely to be infected than recovered people. You refused to admit that the vaccinated are contagious despite the observations. Based on this, you hoped to achieve herd immunity by vaccination — and you failed in that as well.

    You insisted on ignoring the fact that the disease is dozens of times more dangerous for risk groups and older adults, than for young people who are not in risk groups, despite the knowledge that came from China as early as 2020.

    You refused to adopt the “Barrington Declaration”, signed by more than 60,000 scientists and medical professionals, or other common sense programs. You chose to ridicule, slander, distort and discredit them. Instead of the right programs and people, you have chosen professionals who lack relevant training for pandemic management (physicists as chief government advisers, veterinarians, security officers, media personnel, and so on).

    You have not set up an effective system for reporting side effects from the vaccines and reports on side effects have even been deleted from your Facebook page. Doctors avoid linking side effects to the vaccine, lest you persecute them as you did to some of their colleagues. You have ignored many reports of changes in menstrual intensity and menstrual cycle times. You hid data that allows for objective and proper research (for example, you removed the data on passengers at Ben Gurion Airport). Instead, you chose to publish non-objective articles together with senior Pfizer executives on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.

    Irreversible damage to trust
    However, from the heights of your hubris, you have also ignored the fact that in the end the truth will be revealed. And it begins to be revealed. The truth is that you have brought the public’s trust in you to an unprecedented low, and you have eroded your status as a source of authority. The truth is that you have burned hundreds of billions of shekels to no avail – for publishing intimidation, for ineffective tests, for destructive lockdowns and for disrupting the routine of life in the last two years.

    1. Yes – it was shared yesterday – from the Swiss Policy research. I’m pretty sure it’s genuine as I ‘ve seen it elsewhere as well.

  123. A headline from the DT this evening,

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/12/boris-johnsons-fate-now-lies-hands-sue-gray-does-dare-pull/

    Boris Johnson’s fate lies in hands of Sue Gray – but it is rare that civil servants dare to pull trigger

    No, you are wrong DT, Johnson’s fate ultimately lies in the hands of people like me, eligible voters at the next GE, and if they all think like me, he is f*****g toast
    Being thrown out of Downing Street tarred and feathered would be a let off for him compared to what he deserves.

      1. Anyone want to start a list of candidates in UK….anyone, anyone.
        Obviously nobody here has watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

    2. 344028+ up ticks,
      Evening VVOF,
      NONE, should be returned to positions of political power
      that is NONE, this shite we are suffering has been under construction for four decades and is now coming to fruition,big time.

      The dangerous fools within the electorate, the majority,
      are digging a cesspit via a metal detector wilst wearing toetectors they are dangerously stupid and peoples are going to needlessly DIE as I am certain they have already.

  126. I could chat for a little while if there are any takers. Have enough trouble sleeping right now not at all sure about tonight.
    Anyway, it doesn’t matter really.

    1. I snoozed earlier, but will have trouble sleeping shortly

      The fire is warm and cosy and I nodded off during the news , then I had to encourage the dogs to step into the frosty garden for a last minute wee, and the grass was stiff with frost , a shiver went through me , brr then rush to the loo.

      The stars look extra twinkly, and no 1 son who has to get away to work early in the morning will have a frosty windscreen to clear because he forgot to cover the windscreen before he turned in , I did remind him!

      Sleep , does your mind chatter too much or what ?

      It is so difficult , I wake up at about 3am and find it difficult to get back into my dream mode .

      Moh has several loo visits , and then the dogs stir, they sleep on the bed , the fight for the duvet is a battle !!

      Moh is watching the snooker with halfclosed eyes, load of old balls to me .

      1. Some nights I go to bed and fall asleep immediately; but lately, although I am tired, I find it hard to sleep. I hate tossing and turning because it does no good to me and disturbs MH.
        Today, as you have seen, has not been a good one. And all this BS from our so-called government is no use.
        I never thought that at my age I would be as distressed and as disturbed at what is going on as I am. I am not religious but god help us all.

        1. I’m still here- OH has settled down but I’m not sleepy. But he gets annoyed if I keep the light on too long.
          So I’ll say “good night ” and hope we all get some sleep. I usually go off quite quickly but wake up in the small hours and it’s hard to get back to sleep again- usually thoughts whirling in my head.
          Nighty night 🌙

        2. I echo your worries.

          I felt very very depressed when Tony Blair took our guys into Iraq , but I feel very fed up now to see that Boris hasn’t quite got the big picture , I saw the Maybot smirking behind her mask, she was also responsible for deviating off the Tory manifesto .

          In these countryside parts a friend and I had a chat this afternoon , she was walking her dog , and I was just coming back from mine , and we both commented that we had seen strange people in the area who MAY have been dropped off by boat , wandering in a country lane , with bags , and as one has to be so careful about being racist and suspicious etc , and because we live in a military area .. Anyway she had reported them to the police , thank goodness.

          Boris has messed up, I blame his wife for distracting him from one of the most important jobs in the world , you cannot have a man worrying about divorce , older children, new wife , new job , sprog on the way and a major disaster like a virus and an half hearted Brexit .

          The idiot is similar to one of those circus plate jugglers , trying to spin them all at the same time !

          Hey ho .. I do not want to be dictated to and told my car is not green enough, don’t want any interference in how we heat our home ,and we can’t afford any extra bills at our time of life .

          That is what keeps me awake , anxiety .

        1. MH was watching it too but has now gone to bed. I am waiting until I get sleepy enough.

    2. Like you I have difficulty in sleeping at present. Chronic Sinus Disease, diagnosed by my BUPA dentist (NHS referral). This has given me a dreadful congestion in my throat which causes me to sleep upright in my wingback chair as if I try to lie horizontally on bed I just wheeze all night and cannot sleep.

      This event will pass as with all other ailments.

      The point of my comment is that whatever our hardships we need to hold on to our principles and the Truth.

      It is now bloody obvious to anyone with a few braincells that we have been conned by governments, their suspect medical advisors and those also promoting big Pharma for their own enrichment.

      We have witnessed something so horrible and despicable in the deliberate manipulation of Covid information as requiring the consignment of the government, its agencies and its medical foot soldiers to Nuremberg Trials 2 for their crimes against humanity.

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