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

Was there an equivalent spike in Liverpool since the game with Atletico? Smaller crowd but still.

I can remember a short segment on what I think was played on the bbc news last month - a humorous interview with two drunk looking Chelts revelers joking about how much they didn't give a shit about the Rona.

Most ICU patients leave hospital in a wheelchair. They suffer from exhaustion, muscle wastage and other chronic problems. The prime minister appears to be in much better shape.

This will be handwaved as Johnson just being tough and his positive attitude getting him through. He was reported as being dismissive about sickness in the past like it was a failing. The question remains how many people he may have passed it on to himself with his idiotic attitude.

The Atletico Liverpool game definitely accelerated things - given the scale of the outbreak in Madrid at the time it absolutely should not have gone ahead.

tbf our PM was mortally wounded by a plastic fork during a champagne picnic that week, he needed a week or two to recover from that terrible injury, leaving a power vacuum that meant all that went wrong in that period was everyone else's fault!

> Cheltenham hospital

that's the one my dad was in a couple of weeks ago getting his pacemaker (and the one i was born in)

Passed 15k.

reminder that new zealand have had 11 deaths

The government has emphasised repeatedly that the relaxation of the measures is provisional and that continued progress will require the development of sophisticated contact-tracing programmes, including the controversial suggestion that smartphones be used in a widespread programme to track interactions between citizens.

yikes seems like that would be particularly fraught in germany, world capital of privacy*

*freikörperkultur excluded

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EV0dBtLXYAEeamt?format=jpg&name=large
Only bad thing about this is it makes it difficult for them to publish lies/blatantly antisemitic cartoons and leave a physical record.

I thought they might have already stopped free paper print editions, which invariably get abandoned on bus/train seats + end up being handled by multiple people. Especially such a riveting read as the ES.

That's it - it's dead, no one is going to willingly go to the Evening Standard website.

Think they’re ready to swap out Boris

Remarkable from senior No 10 adviser: “What you learn about Boris was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends ... There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared” https://t.co/rvWh9xYQFq

— George Eaton (@georgeeaton) April 18, 2020

goodbye xunt

Can't see them getting rid of Boris unless that poll ratings is really thrashed for the next three years.

Absolutely damning report in tomorrow's Sunday Times:

"Boris Johnson skipped five Cobra meetings on the virus, calls to order protective gear were ignored and scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears. Failings in February may have cost thousands of lives." https://t.co/81AanvTUmU

— Jakub Krupa (@JakubKrupa) April 18, 2020

This is pretty brutal given its the Sunday Times.

That’s the one I linked. The Times is performing the legwork to get him out. Ofc the Times itself is just a perfectly neutral observer in all this.

Well done Gideon, fucked up a country and fucked up a newspaper, next go fuck up a thinktank or a crap NGO.

now we've got a lame puppet LOTO perhaps we get a GNU but they demote Boris or something? This country is so diseased and rabid he'll still have a sky high approval rating even when the Murdoch press are exposing him as an incompetent lying lazy twat.

Unless he looks like a wreck when he emerges and can "take a back seat while recovering" I'm not sure how they'd pull this off

Owen Jones has a thread with some of the key points

The Sunday Times investigation into the government's catastrophic handling of the coronavirus is one of the most important things you've read.

It's behind a paywall, so here's a thread with the key points. Make sure everyone sees it. pic.twitter.com/m0yERyf1Uj

— Owen Jones🌹 (@OwenJones84) April 18, 2020

Full story archived here

https://archive.is/20200418182037/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/coronavirus-38-days-when-britain-sleepwalked-into-disaster-hq3b9tlgh

This is big and unexpected from a Tory point of view. Somebody's obviously out to get him. The thing is, anybody they could conceivably replace him with would be less popular with the public, and that's before the fun of a full-blown party knife fight. So why now and who's behind it I'm not sure?

Boris’s popularity isn’t organic. The press built him up and they’ll drag him down again.

this is all part of tom tugendhat’s long, long game

Murdoch wants Gove, who's far less of a populist and completely loyal, right? The electorate would just have to lump it.

Though I don't think anything will actually come of this, mind you, except maybe some good acting for the cameras. That's all Johnson is good at.

Murdoch paper, lots of people suggesting Gove is KRM’s chosen replacement.

just when you thought things couldn't get any worse. In some ways I think a power vacuum or a lazy useless Boris would be safer than Gove, because he has lots of shit ideas and has that possessed ventriloquist's dummy energy to see them through.

Can't believe I'm saying this but I think Gove would have handled this whole thing much better. So from that perspective... preferable.

he probably would have done ... something at least!

that comical ali downing street spokesman response at the bottom of the Times piece could only come from a completely dysfunctional government. It's like they are still trying to carry on like it is 2010.

"David Davis and Iain Duncan Smith have teamed up with Keir Starmer..." https://t.co/oxFMEVyw7Z

— Trizzy Gillespie (@BlackXList) April 18, 2020

so Starmer's line of pushing the govt on an exit strategy is in concordance with the Daily Mail, IDS, various right wing think tanks, Donald Trump... I know there has to be an exit strategy but how about a staying alive strategy instead until a more opportune moment for an exit one arises?

god only knows

i know it's a grim thought btw but to some extent BoJo's popularity is "organic", or at least people have bought into the long-established persona. nobody wd've been praying for Gove to recover.

and of course he got Brexit done

Gove can't even drink a glass of water without looking like a tralfamadorian exile. He's never going to have the approval rating Boris has right now, even if he did good work and saved thousands of needless deaths.

lol "saved"

saved them for ron, later ron!

i know it's a grim thought btw but to some extent BoJo's popularity is "organic", or at least people have bought into the long-established persona. nobody wd've been praying for Gove to recover.

I sometimes wonder about the veracity of his approval ratings but this is a cursed country

12 Mar 2020 - 'Herd immunity' will be vital to stopping coronavirus

18 April 2020 - I am literally gobsmacked https://t.co/U5eYQJEiZT pic.twitter.com/bfoSNJgdZa

— 'Client Journalism' Expert (@PopulismExpert) April 18, 2020

this cunt get's to be "literally gobsmacked" in the same week he asks in the spectator: has the furlough created a lazy arsed degenerate welfare state. cunt!

Boris-as-meme definitely cuts through, and resonates either as an icon of gumption & general good energy or as a sloppy privileged buffoon amongst ppl who will never really give a shit abt politics

Note to people sharing the Sunday Times article by cutting and pasting snippets: you are not helping. Newspapers are dying right now. If you want to support journalism, link to the newspaper itself. People get 2 free articles a week from the Times when they sign up

— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) April 19, 2020

u loves to see it!

oh no, what if people are spreading the word about how awful Bojo is but killing the Sunday Times at the same time? disaster

I would say these people "cutting and pasting snippets" and not also linking the full archived version could do better

"Newspapers are dying right now"

A pity some of our most superfluous workers who write for these shitrags don't seem to be dying in great numbers.

Boris popularity isn't organic per se, but it could become so. He got Brexit done single-handedly and the potentially risky ICU stunt seems to have worked as intended

There could be more to come on the ICanseeU stunt!

In some ways I think a power vacuum or a lazy useless Boris would be safer than Gove, because he has lots of shit ideas and has that possessed ventriloquist's dummy energy to see them through.

I dunno, we have Dominic Cummings to be a shit idea possessed ventriloquist's dummy right now. I go back & forth on which sounds worse tbh

(DC was originally Gove's man and might stay on but any attempt to oust Boris might take them both out... or not, because nobody seems to care about anything behind the scenes, and Gove probably has an address book full of creepy shit-idea weirdos to replace him with anyway)

even if he did good work and saved thousands of needless deaths.

iirc the lesson of y2k is that if you stop bad things from happening nobody ever says "thank you", they just say "you made it up, bad things were never going to happen and we'll use this as evidence that listening is bad and we can do what we like in all sorts of unrelated circumstances, thanks"

Of course Hadley Freeman is upset at any harm coming to her favourite terf rag.