Ms Braverman had previously resigned from the role because she had been using a personal email account to send classified material, including to someone who should not have seen it. But today, Michael “Oiky” Gove rocked up on Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC politics hour and trotted out the official line that she had said sorry, she had resigned, and that we should get over it.
The problem was that there was rather more to it, as Byline Times’ political editor Adam Bienkov noted. “Michael Gove says Suella Braverman immediately owned up to her ‘mistake’ and then informed officials … The BBC then shows him a leaked email showing her asking a recipient to ‘delete the message and ignore’ it, hours before officials were eventually told”.
In other words, it appears that Ms Braverman, or someone on her behalf, has been seriously economical with the actualité. And those touring the TV studios are effectively covering it up by claiming that there is Nothing To See Here. But a more explicit, and worse cover-up, appears to have occurred concerning the person who first made Ms Braverman Home Secretary.
“The breach was discovered when Truss, then the foreign secretary, was running for the Tory leadership in the summer, but details were suppressed by the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson, and the cabinet secretary, Simon Case”. Not to ease her way into Downing Street, surely?
Once again, it is the willingness to cover it up, to hope it all goes away and the Tories’ political opponents don’t notice. But Labour’s Chris Bryant has noticed, asking “Have I got this right? The Foreign Secretary’s phone was compromised by [Russia] and Braverman as attorney general and Home Secretary compromised national security and the two Prime Ministers covered it up. The UK is not safe in their hands”. There was more.
So not only is the pressure maintained on Sunak to do something, and thus quell the talk of his agenda being sidetracked because of perceived sleaze within his own cabinet, but also the suspicion that Perfidious Albion once again cannot be trusted will gather force among all those countries with which we are supposed to have close, and indeed trusting, relationships.
The idea that getting rid of disgraced former alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, and his habit of leaving his mobile number lying around, together with those visits to the Lebedev palazzo in Umbria where he was for some reason not accompanied by his security detail, would stop any talk of information getting into the wrong hands is no longer credible.
Sunak can make the sacking decision now. Or he can watch his credibility diminish, only to have the decision forced on him later. Decisions, decisions.
https://www.patreon.com/Timfenton
The Russians! THE RUSSIANS! THE FUCKING RUSSIANS!
ReplyDeleteHave we learned nothing since The Charge Of The Light Brigade?
Ooooooh!
ReplyDeleteTouched a sensitive, not to say sentimental, nerve there, Tim.
As if the Russians would have any interest in a British PM, the Tory party, British media, rather nice mansions in Highgate, places in British public schools, money-laundering in British institutions, Harrods, British cabinet members or ancient Wiltshire cathedral tours with regular stop-offs for poisoning opportunities!
I bet you don't even believe the Ukrainians requested the 'special military operation' the Russians are now having to pay for out of their own pockets.
And I've said it before. It'll get worse. Much worse. No, much much worse, before it gets batter.
Except it won't get better.
17:27.
DeleteWell, why not? It's a "free market" for all oligarchs, assuming they have enough of other people's money and stolen assets. It's how "free markets" work everywhere.
I bet you don't even believe nations around the world requested invasion, occupation, genocide and theft of their national assets by British/American and European Empires during the last five hundred years. Even unto Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia "police actions" and political assassinations.
Or that Britain hasn't improved during the last four decades, that a quarter of Britain lives in poverty, and that the British Union is on the verge of disintegration.
Yep. Everything is "batter", Daily Heil and flag-shagging wise.
Or something.
IT security experts recommend changing your Prime Minister every six weeks.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteTankie logic declares:
Britain is historically culpable
Ergo, Mother Russia is as pure as the snow on her boots.
And as Nostradamus, Old Moore, the Daily Worker(1956), Mystic Meg and I said before: it will only get worse. Much worse. Much, much worse. No, even worse than that. Worser, in fact.
(Quiff, mef, Rachel Reeves, spiv,Ramsay Mac, cess pit, Bliar, M25 splutter, pffffft!)
22:34.
ReplyDeleteSee, there's your red tory propaganda problem right there in one incoherent dimension.
A complete inability to see that ALL wars are evil and unnecessary, including the latest one in Ukraine. Which draws a curse on ALL those who caused it and perpetuate it. There's enough guilt to go round. Even a cursory honest glance at the history of Eastern Europe (let alone British and Western Europe) will tell you why. There's nothing new at all about this most recent malevolent atrocity.
It's exactly that kind of wilfully ignorant mentality that drew Orwell to write 1984. He recognised that fascism and its successors would always require perpetual war and a Goldstein. And that's exactly what we have, as the public record shows. Umberto Eco labelled the current version "urfascism".
In Britain it gives "legitimacy" to various incarnations of the Winston Smith propaganda day job. One tiny example is Polly Toynbee of the Grauniad. Who, with the Middle and Far East strewn with millions of dead innocents and destroyed countries, urged useful gullible idiots to "put a peg" on their nose and vote for the perpetrators of the evil genocidal malevolence. That kind of disgusting hypocrisy and moral corruption makes Winston Smith's daily work activities look almost mundane.
That's the kind of society created by this osmotic and predictable horror. But I don't expect a red tory propaganda troll to understand that.
Have a "nice" day.
The Graun’s Pippa Crerar has Braverman using a personal e-mail account for official communication SIX times during her first tenure as Home Secretary. Which has led some to wonder whether this habit is one she only acquired on taking the job or whether she was at it for the two and a half years she was Attorney-General under Bloody Stupid Johnson. I rather suspect she was.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing new under the sun. This is from Shakespeare’s Language* by Frank Kermode:
ReplyDelete“Coriolanus, the last of Shakespeare’s tragedies, is his most political play – not in the sense that it alludes openly to the politics of 1607-8, its probable date, but more abstractly. It is a study in the relationship between citizens within a body politic; the relationship of crowds to leaders and leaders to led, of rich to poor. The polis has its troubles: dearth, external enemies, enmity between classes. The patricians have a ruthless but narrow and selfish code of honour. The people are represented by tribunes who are in their own way ruthless, scheming politicians. The monarchic phase of Roman history has recently ended, the kings replaced by an oligarchy tending to be oppressive, committed to warfare as the ultimate proof of valour and worth, and largely indifferent to social obligation.
Coriolanus is their great warrior, bred to believe that personal merit can be measured by the number of wounds sustained in battle, saviour of the city but inept in dealing with the commonality, an ugly political innocent. The early years of King James I had seen popular disturbances in England, and a royal proclamation of 1607 stated “it is a thing notorious that many of the meanest sort of people have presumed lately to assemble themselves riotously in multitudes.”
......
But Coriolanus is not a veiled comment on contemporary politics. Its application is far more general: it concerns the education of an elite, the relations of power and need in a state......”
Kermode wrote that after a few years of Bliar/Brown and 18 years of inflicted tory misery. Since then.......
So here we are, four hundred years later and back to square one (again).
*The Penguin Press, 2000. Hardcover, pages 243-244.