Camilla Tominey Through The Looking Glass

As the conflict in Ukraine continues, and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his gangsterist régime in Moscow keep up their assault on civilian targets - the latest being a mosque, following on bombing a children’s hospital - so the sanctions against oligarchs, especially those believed to be close to Putin, are ramped up. In this, the UK has been worryingly slow to act. Unless you read the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph.

This is my article here, and as you can see, it's total shite

Such is the Tel’s dedication to wiping the backsides of alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and his coterie of ineptitude, and such is the willingness of its supposed journalists to join in the cheerleading, that the paper’s already seriously misinformed readers are now being told that the EU is the one who’s lagging behind.

This time, it was left to over-promoted former Royal correspondent Camilla Tominey to proclaim “The Ukraine crisis has humiliated the EU … Bitter Remainers refuse to accept it, but Brexit Britain deserves credit for standing up to Russia”. In support of this position, she proceeds to trot out a string of irrelevance, false equivalence, and falsehood.

“I had already had it up to here with unrepentant Remainers refusing to admit that they might have got it a little bit wrong about the bully John Bercow” she begins, but this is irrelevant. Another irrelevant line follows. “French President Emmanuel Macron achieved so much by being humiliated for 90 minutes at the end of Putin’s socially distanced dining table, returning to the bloc with less than Neville Chamberlain’s piece of paper”.

None of this supports the headline. Nor does the customary abuse. As in Ms Tominey’s targeting of “Brussels’s foremost fangirl, Helle Thorning-Schmidt”. Because she appeared on BBC Question Time. This is wrong as she is “married to the Labour MP Stephen Kinnock - son of Neil and Glenys, who have made millions from the EU”. No citation.

In any case, she’s on to shouting at someone on Twitter. “Some of the criticism of the Government this week from the FBPE (follow back, pro-EU) brigade harks back to when they supported Sergey Lavrov against Liz Truss before the first missiles landed on Kyiv”. No examples, no citation. So how slow and humiliated has the EU really been?

Labour MP Chris Bryant had an example. “The EU yesterday sanctioned a further 160 individuals. The UK has just managed 7 today”. That’s 160 individuals across every one of the 27 member states. And he had a follow-up. “The EU has sanctioned Andrei Melnichenko and Italy has seized his yacht. He was one of the oligarchs summoned recently by Putin. [Liz Truss] guaranteed £50.94 million of credit for Melnichenko's company Suek and has failed to sanction him. Why?” No sloth, no humiliation.

Thus the reality. Meanwhile, Ms Tominey dribbles on “Britain … [is] sanctioning more Russian assets than the US and EU combined” seemingly without realising that there is a difference between where the assets are held, and who has sanctioned them. And then comes the Pièce de Résistance: “[The EU] has been excruciatingly slow to react (in part, because so many of its members are compromised by their links to Moscow)”.

Bozo and the Lebedevs ring a bell? Donations to the Tory Party? Evgeny Lebedev being given a peerage over the concerns of the security services? Oligarchs laundering their dirty money in the London laundromat? Give it up, Ms Tominey. Your credibility is shot.

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