love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

being able to fire cummings is still a degree of control, which they wouldn't have over a lot of other things the public could be writing letters to their MPs about atm. johnson might personally be in poor health and not feeling up to managing the cabinet but while I seem to think cummings is more effective than a lot of ppl, no player is bigger than the club esp w/ the tories, and even if johnson loses control of the cabinet it doesn't benefit anyone good

Mark OTM. Also they are looking less and less like get-shit-done types by the day and this episode has only exacerbated that.

Question is whether they're keeping Cummings on out of dependency, expediency or fear.

whether he eventually gets sacrificed or not the longer this goes on the less time the uk death toll is in the headlines

You say this like anyone gave a fuck when the UK death toll was in the headlines - people didn't, it was succesfully diverted on to "wankers going out to the park, grr" type feelings. Now thanks to the Cummings thing that's pretty much gone and tons of people who were previously apathetic or giving the government the benefit of the doubt are actively angry.

The daily death toll has been going down for some time and it's becoming less newsworthy in any case with a few exceptions like care homes. Question is what happens if it starts going up again an, as others have pointed out, we're reaching the point where VE Day and subsequent relaxation of the lockdown might start having a noticeable effect on that.

yeah the death toll in itself is too gradual and slow-building to cause a crisis by itself, but the underlying suffering makes it if not inevitable then at least v likely that public anger wld coalesce around something/s sooner or later, as part of a collective display of grief and so on. the state is much better at nudging/fabricating public outpourings than it is at dealing with pandemics

As has been said on this thread, I think the govt's reasoning until now was that the anger would coalesce around having us turn on each other. And that seemed to be working fine.

still a lot of boot-throaters on my facebook feed saying 'well philip schofield broke lockdown and he got to keep his job' and comparing the very unfair media treatment of poor wee domcum to caroline flack

xp that's always their first choice

still a lot of boot-throaters on my facebook feed saying 'well philip schofield broke lockdown and he got to keep his job' and comparing the very unfair media treatment of poor wee domcum to caroline flack

I've seen a grand total of one person supporting Cummings on FB, one of those Rangers supporting fat bald mods my sister knows... Actually there was one more guy, who was not quite supporting him but using it as an excuse to attack the hypocrisy of the SNP, I go to his homepage and there he is standing in Ibrox Park with the scarf on. These guys are just born trolls, it's almost like they can't help themselves.

Also, to hazard a guess, much of the conversation in this country is currently happening on WhatsApp groups, including with family members people can't see. They'll be absolutely full of ranting and grumbling and sharing stupid anti-Cummings memes and the government has little to no visibility over them. The way that influence and sentiment evolve and spread in that kind of ecosystem in a lockdown is new and it's difficult even for galaxy brained data gods to know how that's going to play out.

Oh for the days of the giant lasagne.

a friend well-versed in such things pointed out that focus groups are currently more or less impossible

the right has generally done p well in arenas with lowest common denominator, unedited viral/meme content on social media, it's one of the reasons for the pivot to flooding, it plays on all sorts of cheap feelings while also lowering trust

Lol can’t believe I’m going to watch the daily briefing again but here we are. It’s a good thing our tv is on its last legs in case Pesto appears again.

it might just expire in frustration like the rest of us

gaslighting fucks. You only need to review fines if something has changed – and the whole argument is that DC was within the law at the time

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52797859

This'll be an interesting test of how far Johnson can stand up to the lunatic fringe in his party, and the US.

I guess the good news is that there'll be fewer 5G masts for people to set fire to.

Peston trying out a short question, but with no follow-up he's sunk

Montie says another government resignation tonight

boris is gonna resign

Junior Minister for Paper Clips and Office Requisitions no doubt.

he's still dead

lol a survey conducted in scotland before the cummings story broke puts sturgeon 50 points ahead of johnson for people thinking she’s done a good job in handling the ‘rona

You try telling that to fat Rangers supporting mods.

Hoi that was only a childhood dalliance

there's something really heartbreaking about seeing Scottish Unionists fall over themselves to claim Sturgeon and the SNP have failed as badly as Westminster, it's like watching people stick their fingers in their ears and know you're never going to change their mind on anything - and I say this as someone who remains skeptical about independence and critical of the SNP for various other reasons

Politics in scotland is dead. Culture war bullshit between nats and yoons ad nauseam forever

when I used to be on twitter I would get abused for being a unionist despite having been a nat my whole life and mainly voting for nat parties (SSP in my first election, Nats and Greens, until Labour under Corbyn)

IndyRef exposed a lot of people in Scotland as being basically indistinguishable from NI Unionists/Loyalists, something that was partly hidden by pretty much all of that energy being channeled into supporting Rangers - plus the fact they all voted Labour. Now, the genie's out of the bottle a lot of them are not only proudly Tories but they've got that Orange Walk strut and swagger about the fact.

Yoons both sides of the Irish Sea the exact same kind of tragic

And this is the Danny Kruger note pic.twitter.com/7YBdh2dO1A

— Nicholas Watt (@nicholaswatt) May 26, 2020

That’s Prue Leith’s son btw

cool, nice to have a yardstick by which to measure the continuing calls for domcum’s head

jeremy just high as shit in the back garden today, chugging litres of apple juice and going "the world's just kind of like... a big allotment man" https://t.co/WQz0PQ9Get

— joe (@spinningjoe) May 26, 2020

GET-BREXITDONE
LEVEL-UP-THE-REGIONS
FIX/WHITEHALL

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcSOlkK9Q99uFf6ZGdZw6BZWZsKeVJqMqhdDZGYgp9MqIq1NteDU&usqp=CAU

EXCLUSIVE: Police break up illegal #lockdown birthday party at Tory MP's house#Coronavirus #DominicCummings #Cummingshttps://t.co/Y7Svhied2j pic.twitter.com/V8m2S1O31d

— Mirror Politics (@MirrorPolitics) May 26, 2020

Mail moves Cummings off the front, Telegraph puts him on.

a) the fuck is that guy only 40 and b) he has the most minimalist Wikipedia entry I have ever seen on an elected representative. Basically it says "this guy exists".

he has that great aged well tweet in the early days of corona

I can't get the face of that tory mp out of my head, he looks like they are lancing piles from Boris's arse and raising them in a petri dish where they are never ever told they shouldn't do something until they are released into parliament.

large adult mp

He’s basically a rung below a fictional American baseball player with that name.

He looks like he's been raised on an unregulated battery farm

Bit of a shit story from the Mirror however, although the party was at his house he wasn’t actually at it

he's basically Baron Harkonnen after a pustule removal makeover

It was his wife’s birthday!

Should have driven her to Barnard Castle as a treat and everything would have been fine.

tories can have a little barnard castle, as a treat

Conservative poll lead cut by 9 points, the biggest sudden drop in a decade pic.twitter.com/KBxD6r4XCJ

— Jim Pickard (@PickardJE) May 26, 2020

Amazing
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EY-QmdeX0AEjW9n?format=jpg&name=large