[Boiler]

From the Guardian's former crime correspondent:

Cressida Dick could not solve the Met’s problems. She could barely admit they existed

Speaking after the revelations that two male officers had taken pictures of the scene where sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry lay fatally stabbed, Dick’s apology was so heavily qualified as to be no apology at all.

“If those officers’ actions have added to the family’s unimaginable distress then I apologise,” she said.

The mayor of London was true to his word, when on Thursday he withdrew his support, and she was forced to resign.

[Andy McDandy]

Marina Hyde on Cressida Dick. An absolute cracker of a column.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ad-coppers

Hard to pick out highlights, because it's just that good. But still, the opening paras made me chortle:

“I was absolutely outraged by the level of casual and extreme corruption that was being portrayed as the way the police is,” Dick told the magazine. “It’s so far from that. The standards and professionalism are so high.” Mmm. It was left to the show’s creator, Jed Mercurio, to offer a little background. “My inspiration for creating Line of Duty was @metpoliceuk shooting an innocent man and their dishonesty in the aftermath,” he explained icily, “so thanks to Cressida Dick for reminding me of our connection.”

And it gets better!

“The moment when the home secretary made a pass at the protection officer was just beyond me, I’m afraid.” And yet, beyond her how? Beyond her why? In recent memory, a police protection officer had been dismissed for allegedly having an affair with the wife of the then home secretary, Alan Johnson. At the time, the special operations directorate to which he reported was being run by one Cressida Dick.

Ending on this sober note:

Trust is the very hardest thing to get back, and trust in the police and in politicians is demonstrably nosediving. Both have only themselves to blame. If there’s some great moral difference between police officers making rape and domestic violence jokes, and politicians claiming it doesn’t matter at all if the prime minister breaks the law, then I’d love to hear it. But there isn’t.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ter-system

Not many laughs today, but a powerful piece on the Post Office scandal.

Post Office CEO Paula Vennells gets a CBE in the year 2019 (TWENTY NINETEEN), and then gets made both chair of London’s Imperial College Healthcare NHS trust and something called “a non-executive board member of the Cabinet Office”, presumably because the government thought it important to bring in our brightest brains from business. By way of an inspired satirical touch, Paula also moonlighted as an Anglican priest and as a member of the Church of England Ethical Investment Advisory Group. (She has since “stepped back” from these positions.) In 2019, after the Post Office agreed to pay nearly £58m to settle claims, Vennells issued a statement saying “I am truly sorry we were unable to find both a solution and a resolution outside of litigation and for the distress this caused.”

Ah. Students of apology types may have identified this as the classic sorry-that-we-just-HAD-to-hound-you-into-court apology. It’s a real pro move, and your inability to execute it is why you, an amateur, live in fear of losing your livelihood, while hotshots like Paula & Co take millions and get bumped up into first class on the gravy train, no matter how monstrous their screw-ups.

[Andy McDandy]

I said this earlier on That Twitter:

Admit a system failure which will mean replacing it (£££), dismissing senior staff (£££) and compensating the wrongly accused (£££££)? Or blame underlings and hope the next software patch fixes it (££)? And that hopefully you can ride it out as "just following the rules"?

Which I suspect was the reasoning. See also the narrator's "Do we order a recall?" monologue from Fight Club.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... sexist-rot

I think we missed this. A nice weekly summary of things by John Crace.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ar-on-woke

Marina Hyde on culture wars, erasing people from history, and why it's all bloody stupid.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ian-leader

Marina Hyde takes a break from Johnson and turns to Putin. Not her best, going not much beyond "What is it with these sad needy bastards crying out for special attention when they've already arguably won?". Still though, better than 99% of columnists out there.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... -partygate

John Crace on the decision to scrap Covid rules. He's not impressed.

The Labour leader had grabbed the stick by the wrong end yet again, he said. Except he really hadn’t. Only Johnson didn’t care. No more than he did when other opposition MPs asked why it was that the World Health Organization and the British Medical Association weren’t backing the changes. Or that there were no safeguards to protect the clinically vulnerable from being infected by their carers. Or countless other serious objections to plans that had been made on the hoof. Just rely on personal responsibility. Said the man without any.

Because this was all about him feeling the love from his own backbenchers. A national health policy designed only to please 250 or so Tory MPs. And in that respect, it appeared to be wholly successful. Because not a single one found fault with a word he had said. The intellectually challenged Graham Brady sought guarantees that there would be no more lockdowns. The equally intelligent Edward Leigh merely asked for a guarantee of no more lockdowns for 10 years – the length of time he expected the Suspect to remain prime minister. Really.

John Redwood wondered if the same ingenuity that Johnson had used on the pandemic could be applied to the cost-of-living crisis. That would be billions of pounds of state aid and several tax rises. So much for the free-marketeers. But the prize for maximum stupidity and toadying went to Matt Hancock. He declared it was entirely down to Johnson’s self-restraint and personal responsibility that the UK was now the first country to have seen the back of the pandemic. To think he was health secretary once. How badly must he want to be loved by Boris.

[Bones McCoy]

The fact that Hancock is getting wheeled out to perform this public rimming act demonstrates the depths they have sunk to.

[Boiler]

Simon Jenkins is going to have a quandary soon - which one of the new arseholes he's been torn in the comments on his Guardian article to use.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -donations

Marina Hyde casts a cynical eye over Londongrad.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... e-refugees

John Crace examines business in parliament, and Patel's shameful performance yesterday.

There was far too much chance of us taking the wrong kind of refugee. People who could have been better accommodated by other European countries. Criminals with fixed penalty notices for breaking lockdown rules. Russians masquerading as Ukrainians. Or “the” Ukrainians. Patel insisted on calling Ukraine “the Ukraine”.

It was all very confusing. Patel was adamant that the visa requirements were being made more generous, only for her to contradict herself by saying that the new rules would only let in people with immediate family in the UK. She didn’t sound at all pleased to be allowing up to 100,000 of the Ukrainians into the country. Not even the thought that other European countries were taking in significantly more people could cheer her up.

The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, tried to make sense of the muddle. So were we making it easier for refugees to get into the UK or not, she asked. Because it wasn’t at all clear from what Patel had said so far. Vacant looked vacant and did what she always does when she’s on the back foot. She snapped and got angry. She had said all that needed to be said, and if no one had quite understood everything then it was their fault. She couldn’t be blamed if no one could quite keep up with her.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... heroes-war

Marina Hyde on the armchair generals in general, and most of the leading cunts in particular:

Take George Galloway – please – who’d like you to know he was right again. As he puts it: “Me Farage Hitchens Carlson and Rod Liddle are a pretty broad front of people who think Nato expansion to the borders of #Russia was a pretty bad idea. Maybe pause and think about that?”

I know what he means. Me and the three Spider-Men I‘m pointing at are a pretty broad front too. We actually bonded when we divorced our MJs and they turned the Spideykids against us.

Meanwhile, Farage himself has performed a 180-degree pivot to demanding things like: “Why is Biden not in Europe taking the lead?”, which is a fairly selective form of rectitude for a man who spent years praising the way Putin operated. Poignantly, Nigel’s obsession with wars never quite runs to understanding which side he’d have been on in them. His ability to form alliances with far-right German parties at the same time as twatting on about Winston Churchill, for instance, indicates a truly remarkable flexibility.

I’m sure Nigel’s bitterest regret is that he’s not quite flexible and sprightly enough to rock up at the Ukrainian embassy and offer to fight, as some British guys are now doing. I know you have to say “I admire the bravery”. But reading about one man with no military experience who hadn’t even told his family he was off to Ukraine – he has children – we might instead point to the defence secretary’s caution against this kind of action.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... his-parade

John Crace on fiery form.

And step forward Ukrainian journalist Daria Kaleniuk, the executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, whose two and a half minute intervention was less a question and more a howl of pain. People were dying, friends were terrified, she said.

The reason Johnson was in Warsaw was because it was safe. There was no way he or any of his family would set foot in Kyiv but the people of Ukraine had no choice. They had been left to fight the Russians single-handedly while western leaders did little more than offer expressions of solidarity.

Boris might have been enjoying the opportunity to do his Churchill tribute act on a world stage – at the very least it was a distraction from his troubles at home – but for all his muscular rhetoric, the expressions of solidarity and calling out of Putin’s war crimes, he was essentially operating with two arms tied behind his back.

By the time that sanctions really hit, Kyiv could be rubble. The bottom line was that, stripped of his front and grandiosity, The Suspect is as much an onlooker to The Horror as the rest of us.

It was way beyond Vacant’s intellectual pay grade to come up with any answers so she did what she always does when she feels challenged.

She got stroppy and picked fights with whoever she could. She had a go at Cooper for not being supportive enough and then at the SNP for being a security risk who couldn’t be trusted with sensitive information. This from a minister who was sacked for moonlighting with her own foreign policy agenda.

“The British government is the first government to outline practical measures for bringing Ukrainian refugees to the UK,” she said. To everyone’s surprise. It would be a turn up if the Poles had determined UK refugee policy.

Though not Edward Leigh. He wondered if we had done far too much already and thought his constituents had had enough of Ukraine. So sweet. Patel breathed a sigh of recognition. At last. She was back among her people once more.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ne-at-pmqs

More from John Crace, covering yesterday's PMQs.

Back came the bluster and the shiftiness. The tugging on his Toddlers ’R Us haircut. The childish outbursts of narcissistic rage that he can’t control when challenged. Anything that is not on his terms cannot be tolerated. Come the end of PMQs the new, not entirely convincing, statesmanlike Boris was beginning to look very much like the old, self-centred Boris.

If the Suspect wanted to prove many people’s suspicions that the Tory party is in hock to Russian money, he couldn’t have made a better job of it. At the very least he made it look as if he wasn’t that bothered about London’s status as the world’s laundromat. Or about the extent of Russian influence in British politics.

This was a point Labour’s Bill Esterson made when he invited Johnson to donate the £2m the Tories had received from Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of Russia’s former deputy minister of finance, to the Ukrainian war effort. Just to clear the air and to show that the Conservatives had nothing to hide. Now Boris lost his temper.

Meanwhile, in the gallery, Prystaiko was anxiously checking his phone. Watching British politicians trade words had a limited appeal when his countrymen were fighting for Ukraine street by street.

[Bones McCoy]

This was a point Labour’s Bill Esterson made when he invited Johnson to donate the £2m the Tories had received from Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of Russia’s former deputy minister of finance, to the Ukrainian war effort. Just to clear the air and to show that the Conservatives had nothing to hide. Now Boris lost his temper.

And what a racket his backbenchers raised as soon as Russian money was mentioned.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... dian-as-pm

A long one from John Crace covering the last 24 hours or so. Worth a read.

The Ukrainians voted for a comedian and got a leader. A man with an unerring moral compass. We in the UK also voted for a comedian and got exactly that. Except his act had long since stopped being funny. It never occurred to us that the world was going to get this serious. First Covid. Then this.

We only signed Johnson for the good times and it’s far too late for buyers’ remorse.

Onto Williamson:

Williamson was the worst minister, a close-run thing with Chris Grayling, of his generation. Useless at defence – he told the Russians “to shut up and go away”: that worked – and a disaster at education.

Not much more need be said there. Onto Damian Hinds:

Hinds did have the lost cause of trying to explain the government’s sanctions programme. It was like this. We were definitely a global leader in imposing the toughest penalties, which is why it made sense for us to be always a bit behind everyone else.

In any case, it wasn’t a competition, he went on. And if we were to tell everyone what we were going to do before we did it then they would find ways to get round them. The BBC’s Simon Jack couldn’t believe his ears. He was dealing with a halfwit.

Still got room for some more? Step up, Liz Truss:

“Sanc-shuns are wor-king. Un-i-ted with U-kraine,” she said over and over again in that slightly robotic voice that suggests there is even less going on in her brain than first appears.

And finish off with a dose of Dorries:

Tories had flooded the all-party parliamentary group on Russia in an effort to get Bryant removed as the committee’s chair due to his hostility to Russia. Neither Vlad nor the Tories had found it useful for parliamentarians to be making life difficult for Russian kleptocrats. But that was then, and this was now. Everyone’s a democrat. Even Nad. What’s a war good for, if not a bit of revisionism?

[Andy McDandy]

Marinatime!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... in-cronies

Sir Gav, the Dorries, and many other predictable topics covered in her inimitable style, as we say hello to the Wallygarchy:

How hard can NOT honouring the worst secretary of state in recent memory really be? It is suspiciously unclear what the man sacked as both defence and education secretary is being honoured for. Services to making Russia go away and shut up? Leaking from a top-level National Security Council meeting and consequently undermining the trust of the intelligence services (denied)? Presiding over an epochal failure of British children, from which significant numbers will never recover educationally or in terms of life chances?

The Johnson administration doesn’t do immutable principles. They only do expedience. In fact, it’s occasionally hard not to see in Dorries a watered-down version of higher skilled monsters such as Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who yesterday claimed the BBC was being used to undermine Russia’s internal politics and security. She should speak to Nadine. I keep hearing from her and half the rest of the cabinet that the BBC undermines the UK’s internal politics. I can never remember exactly why – I think it’s something to do with talent salaries or running stories about the government that they don’t like.

[Andy McDandy]

Marina Hyde on fiery form. No quotes, just read it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... on-ukraine

John Crace not mucking about either.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... principles

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... lin-russia

Marina Hyde on Abramovich and the careful blind eyes in football.

Tomorrow Chelsea will host Newcastle, who are now owned by a group led by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia – but remember, those guys are the good autocrats, because they buy our weapons. And use them in a war in Yemen that has thus far gone on for seven years, killing or starving hundreds of thousands, the vast majority believed to be children under five. But of course, the sovereign wealth fund isn’t the same as the Riyadh government. They just have a good relationship with it, same as Roman Abramovich just has a good relationship with Putin. “Which owner knows the guy who’s killed more babies?” is a question you won’t be seeing on any banners at Chelsea-Newcastle.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... k-refugees

John Crace on Gove's meltdown yesterday, as his visa scheme unravelled.

All good stuff, just read it.