UK government advisor caught out by Wayback machine
thenational.scot
thenational.scot
It feels like she was the last of her kind, and it is governments of salesmen from here on in.
If you encounter someone in your life who exhibits the culture of rule bending, bring technically correct, or trying to get away with something, then please hold them to a higher standard, especially if they have any kind of public role.
The alternative is these double speaking wheeler dealers — in this example, one who is concocting a self serving interpretation of the lockdown rules — who break that most golden of all rules: do unto others as you would have done to yourself.
Or as I like to say it — what if everyone behaved like you did?
But as much as I disliked her for her stance on surveillance, I do have to say that she had an impossible job in that limbo state after the brexit vote.
She used the same tactic as Boris Johnson by calling an election to try and get a big majority which could implement the referendum in the face of opposition parties who had voted for it but now refused to actually abide by it. She was such a poor politician she instead lost her majority and ended up in a limbo controlled by her opponents. She had a party filled with MPs who openly lied to the voters during her disastrous GE campaign, saying they'd implement the Brexit vote and then immediately turning around and doing everything they could to stop it once elected. She did nothing to get a grip on her party and just drifted, completely lost and weak.
Then Boris Johnson stepped up.
1. He won the party leadership.
2. He kicked out a huge number of MPs (>40?) that had openly betrayed the voters, in some cases by switching after being elected to a party with the exact opposite of the policies they ran on. This plunged him deep into minority territory.
3. Parliament was filled with MPs who knew they'd lose the moment an election occurred due to those betrayals, and thus for the first time in history Johnson was faced with an opposition that kept voting against a chance to take power - the entire reason for their existence! Yet he still managed to get another general election.
4. He forced all of his prospective MPs to take a public oath that they'd actually implement what they said they'd implement in the party manifesto this time. He flushed out huge numbers of them that were untrustworthy.
5. He ran a strong campaign that gave him a huge majority.
6. He filled the cabinet with people who were committed to "getting brexit done" as he put it. He brought in a notoriously tough advisor who has already supposedly squashed multiple plots to reverse the referendum.
7. He replaced the Brexit negotiator with someone who is actually interested in negotiating and who believed in British independence, vs Theresa May's picks who didn't.
Except for the first step these are all things Theresa May could have done but was too weak or politically un-astute to do. Hardly impossible, it just required political strength and leadership.
Realistically, the EU holds all the cards here.
But I'm not going to argue much on this, as I strongly dislike here actions as home secretary, and believe she would have gone further on mass surveillance after Brexit - I'm not here greatest fan.
I am outraged that he didn't at the time realise that others may need to do similar, and issue clarification on the rules to publicise that this sort of thing was permissible.
Lots of people did follow the guidance despite it being really difficult for them to do so, and it's yet another story where it seems to be a case of 'rules for thee, but not for me'.
The right way to handle this would have been to confess and apologise and say it was a lapse of judgement - I think lots of people, understanding the difficult situation he was in would have accepted that. To brazen it out and claim it was good judgement and responsible behaviour is to admit that the government guidance and response as a whole was flawed.
Of course when making the rules you should bloody well get them right in order to be fair to people with the first kind of attitude.
*if I remember correctly from my previous work on the british social attitudes survey
Have you got a source for that? Sarah Gilbert, last month thought it was possible to be infected more than once: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/health-52344676/coronavirus-poss...
And the questions about how long the immunity lasts are about how many months not how many days.
At the time, tests were strictly rationed to hospital patients and healthworkers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist)...
What made that tactic especially fragrant was the fact that Cummings also had a dying family member in hospital who he and his other family members couldn't visit, comfort, etc during the same time period and rather than consider that maybe this might be a reason to step away from that argument, everyone seems to have doubled down and used his family's grief as proof that they were right.
Saying "he was just being a good father" is insulting to all the other dads who didn't break lockdown.
Also, the rewriting of history, implying all along that you were just meant to use good judgement.
There's is no fathomable justification for that and exposed his contempt for the rules.
Stated reasons were (1) reducing load on health services from road accidents (which has worked - my friend in A&E says he's "never sat around on his arse so much at work before"); (2) reduce transmission of virus at fuel stations, risk to breakdown services, etc
I feel for people stuck in apartments!
If I remember rightly, there was actually a bit of a controversy over this because the police in some areas got it into their heads that no-one should be driving to places to walk full stop and started pushing that message and complaining about people not following it, even though that wasn't actually a rule. Though it's entirely possible a lot of the media coverage of that has also been memory-holed and only exists in the Wayback machine; the BBC in particular have been completely rewriting articles a lot lately.
(The restriction to one session of exercise per day was also only legally enforceable in Wales and not England, for some reason, even though it was part of the advice in both.)
There was a law mismatch here. The government were saying you can't do that, however the legal powers they had (and the powers they delegated to the police) were not sufficient to actually stop people for some of the things they were stopping them for.
I think Derbyshire police were the worst for that.
So it's possible here that Dominic Cummings didn't break the lockdown laws, but he certainly broke the lockdown rules his own government were telling the public.
He's so blatantly lying about the "eye sight test", it shows a total lack of respect for the public and his role as part of the UK government. They should be, if anything, following the rules more than anyone else in order to set an example.
The lockdown rules the country was under set these rules as a condition - you may leave the house only to exercise, and you may not travel to get to a place to exercise. This was to stop people going to tourist spots, petrol stations and other places they may interact with others.
You're right in a way - a single family doing it probably causes no actual harm because they're the only people present. Now - who gave this unelected government advisor special permission to go there and be that single family, while nobody else could, and was locked down hard?
He drove from an area with high rates of Covid-19, with his covid-19 positive wife, to an area with low rates of Covid-19.
This is entirely the point of lockdown -- to reduce the spread of the disease.
Quite frankly, I think a lot of people don't like him and they're putting the boot in to get him to resign.
He claimed he put his child and covid-19 positive wife in a car and drove 250 miles to get child care. But he had childcare available to him locally, and he didn't make use of the childcare when he got to Durham.
He then claimed that he didn't know if it was safe for him to drive or not (his wife can drive, why didn't she?) so he put them all in the car and drove to Barnard Castle.
He's trying to make use of the safeguarding exemption in the law to say he fled London because his family was at risk. But that would only cover the travel from London to Durham. It doesn't cover the travel from Durham back to this risky dangerous home in London.
But his account of his actions is so untruthful. It is obvious to most that being on a remote farm would be a nicer environment to isolate than a house in central London. This simply _must_ have been a factor in his decision. He did not even contemplate seeking childcare support at home, he stated this himself in his press conference, it hadn't even crossed his mind.
His trip was not safe, and should have been used as a last resort. Is that the impression you got? That he had exhausted all other options?
If you had, then I would say you are even more political motivated than those you are saying are looking to give him the "boot".
Who, Theresa May? She was a big user of 'spin' and chicanery too, only -- she wasn't very good at it. She had her own "master of the dark arts", Nick Timothy, who was fired after her embarrassing loss in the polls.
I think you'd have to go to John Major if you want an old-style Tory. Tony Blair himself was a big user of 'spin' and media management. IMHO, and this may be controversial, there's nothing wrong with spin and media management if there's some sincerity behind your beliefs, and Blair was an unabashed left-of-centre neoliberal, like him or hate him. Obama had a very good spin machine too, but of course there was a fair amount of substance to the man -- I say this as someone who laughed at his Nobel Prize win.
The current lot are very empty in the ideas department, are incompetent, and are only clinging on to power thanks to the first past the post system which makes it hard for a divided Opposition to win a plurality of seats. That is, any pretence of governing from the centre is gone. They're happy to use data science to ferret out the path to victory and use polarizing social media messaging tactics to win key seats.
“The NHS is about as safe with them as a pet hamster would be with a hungry python”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/05/john-major-...
But I wouldn't hold Theresa May up too highly.
Here is Theresa May deleting her 2009 blog post with her strong opposition to the 3rd runway at Heathrow...
https://www.tmay.co.uk/news?page=31
After she reversed her decision as Prime Minister betraying her electorate who are under the flight path.
https://web.archive.org/web/20111007162146/http://www.tmay.c...
This is the now missing article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130103045701/http://www.tmay.c...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/heathrow-expa...
If you really liked Theresa May, perhaps she was just more successful at selling to you than the others.
Because clearly her biases are better than evidence driven policy. Was glad she only lasted a year or so.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tories-blasted-links-...
Hells no.
Repeatedly ignored real scientific evidence in favour of her own authoritarian bias when it came to a whole bunch of stuff. Dreadful attitude.
A pox on all their houses.
Thing is, the law doesn't allow one class of persons to be held to a higher standard.
Everybody is supposed to be held to the same standard.
Of course, it seems in this situation that certain people in public service can exempt themselves from the common standard altogether with no punishment.
Misconduct in Public Office isn't used very often, but it exists and is there ebcause we do hold people in public office to a higher standard.
There's a bunch of stuff that you and I can do, but that we couldn't do if we were in public office.
I don't understand how a law that applies to a certain class of people, but not everybody, is not treating that certain class of people differently.
The law creates the higher standard. Behaviour that's perfectly legal for most people becomes illegal for people in public office because we expect higher standards from those people and we expect these higher standards so strongly we created a law to enforce it.
The "sound" old public-school-boy* persona that used to rule Westminster used to be considered trustworthy by the ruling class. Now it's widely seen as risible. Wherever we see honour or holiness we should be very careful IMHO, it's often two-faced.
Theresa May's "selfless-public-service" persona represented inflexibility to the point of negligence. I don't doubt that she did personally suffer for it. But in taking the lines she did, she inflicted far more suffering and pain in some of the most vulnerable in society. She persisted with a disasterous public policy with Brexit. Whatever the politics of it, the inflexibility that formed the subtance of her persona was dysfunctional.
She'll be remembered for her "hostile environment policy" and "Brexit means Brexit".
* "public school" = private, often elite, schools
The article which he quoted in length in 2019 [0] hasn't been modified and did mention both SARS and Coronavirus. He's just amending the quote he took from it.
Obviously the first time he quoted it, he didn't think it was relevant to show the example, so contracted it by hand to "[An example]" [1].
In 2020, he realises that specifically mentioning SARS and Coronavirus in a blog post about the dangers of biolabs causing a global pandemic will either seem relevant or look prescient so he adds it back into the quote [2].
This implies that in 2019, he had read the article and was aware of threats like coronavirus/SARS, but didn't think it was the important aspect of what he was discussing. So his crime here is a bit like rewriting your CV for a new job -- not lying about what you know or have done, but using different words that emphasize new aspects to the new audience.
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-error-in-high-bioconta...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190331190550/https://dominiccu...
[2] https://dominiccummings.com/2019/03/04/the-most-secure-bio-l...
And that’s the problem isn’t it? He claims that he talked about the risks of Coronaviruses before the pandemic, and yet the only evidence is an article about biolab security (frankly not particularly relevant unless he’s insinuating that’s the origin of this virus too) amended well after the current pandemic began.
> Experiments on viruses that could cause a
> global pandemic killing many millions were
> halted but were recently cleared to resume
> and will be conducted in these ‘top
> security’ labs.
This is a tiny gotcha "oh but you didn't technically use the word SARS or coronavirus yourself when quoting the article the first time so it doesn't count".
Editing old blog posts is probably not the right way to do this. But bear in mind the whole biolab escape theory is entirely plausible. Such things have happened before. The 2007 foot and mouth epidemic in the UK was traced back to an escape from a lab at Pirbright. There were at least two outbreaks of Marburg Virus (ebola) in the USSR due to lab escapes.
I don't really understand the certainty many people here seem to have, about how it couldn't possibly have come from the Wuhan lab. How could you know that? Such escapes have happened repeatedly, that was sort of the point of Cummings' blog post.
At his press conference Cummings said that he was definitely not in favour of herd immunity, and was not against lockdown. And he said that he could prove this because of his writing about coronavirus.
To me the problem isn't that he edited the blog to include the word coronavirus (because I agree, it's pretty clear he was talking about coronaviruses and flu viruses). The problem is that his blog post says nothing about lockdown or herd immunity. It's a moderately interesting idea about increasing security at biolabs. So his blog doesn't support his claims.
Well, we already know that he was actively pushing for earlier lockdown within the SAGE meetings (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-28/top-aide-...) so he should be off the hook for that bit of misinformation (earlier in the year the media were trying very hard to make it seem like he was the architect of "herd immunity").
Imagine CNN has a report on the chances of Hillary and Donald in 2015. A few weeks later someone copies the stuff about Hillary's chances and makes no mention at all of Trump.
After the 2016 election they then edit their post to paste in the Trump stuff and use that new edit to claim they were writing about Trump's chances a year before the election.
Is that pretty close to the truth or is it virtually the complete opposite of the truth?
> But he contracted discussion of SARS and coronaviruses to "[An example]".
Not sure why you keep saying this. [An example] refers to the example that follows those words, about CDC labs, not an example that he specifically didn't mention.
It's not that big a deal IMO.
No need to lynch the guy over this.
That isn't what happened.
He copied a wall of text about Holland, the US, the UK, the CDC, influenza, H5N1, bird flu, Ebola and specifically snipped out the part about SARS/coronavirus and China. (The text he edited in just last month, in bold.)
He basically did the opposite of what he lied about doing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190331190550/https://dominiccu...
I'm not sure from your post if you've noticed that he yesterday held a press conference with the national UK media in which he cited the fact that he predicted the threat from coronaviruses a year previously.
This is a tiny gotcha "oh but you didn't technically use the word SARS or coronavirus yourself when quoting the article the first time so it doesn't count".
I also disagree that people that had read his blog and that article in particular didn't see them as connected. I had read that article earlier in the year, and I remember being surprised that the UK lockdown hadn't happened earlier since in 2019 he appeared to understand the dangers.
* recent zoonotic origin (closely related to bat coronavirus samples, with likely pangolin recombination - https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0092_article)
* initial spread at an open-air market
Whereas our evidence for spread from Wuhan is mostly wild speculation about research on the same very broad family of viruses.
"Although the Wuhan market was initially suspected to be the epicenter of the epidemic, the immediate source remains elusive. The close relatedness among SARS-CoV-2 strains suggested that the Wuhan outbreak probably originated from a point source with subsequent human-to-human transmission, in contrast to the polyphyletic origin of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (14). If the Wuhan market was the source, a possibility is that bats carrying the parental SARSr-BatCoVs were mixed in the market, enabling virus recombination. However, no animal samples from the market were reported to be positive. Moreover, the first identified case-patient and other early case-patients had not visited the market (15), suggesting the possibility of an alternative source."
And there are people online that read it very differently from you (https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/1263536558482866176).
He did, at least about viruses in general. I was specifically remembering him warning about pandemics preparedness when this started. I assume others familiar with him were well aware, too and that it was partially why he played such a big role in the UK's response.
The blog does mention the serious risk of pandemic, but it doesn't mention the other stuff. And it's not talking about public health measures to reduce the impact of pandemic, but using the idea of tiger teams to test biolab security.
He lied about the content of the blog.
To give our non-UK friends a bit more context (in case anyone thinks “flimsy excuses” is applying a bit of bias) he was caught going on a walk in a little town near his second home (itself a few hundred miles from where he probably should have been). His excuse was that he was feeling ill and had troubles with his eyesight so he decided to go for a (30 mile) drive to check ... I dunno, if he could see I guess? That thing you do when you have trouble with your eyesight, jump into a car and go for a drive.
Update: the “upvote” point was because your comment was greyed out, and after I upvoted you were still greyed out, suggesting you were fairly deep in the -ve at that point
Going for an hour+ drive just to see if your eyes work is not a reasonable excuse.
Edit: Though under reasonable terms, including exercise and food shopping. If you have only obeying the slogans, which was my point, well that's unfortunate
Again, only with reasonable excuse. He didn't have a reasonable excuse. The law says
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/350/regulation/6/ma...
> 6.—(1) During the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse.
It then lists some reasonable excuses. Travelling to a second home is not listed in the reasonable excuses.
The government guidance is important because it provides context to "reasonable" -- it expands the list of reasonable excuses.
The guidance at the time was "You must stay at home", "you must not travel", "you must not travel to a second home".
The Crown Prosecution Service guidance is important because it curtails police action. The CPS guidance was similarly clear: travelling to a second home is unlikely to be reasonable, unless it's someone fleeing domestic abuse.
Police guidance tells us how they would have handled Cummings if they'd stopped him as he travelled from London to Durham. The police have said that they'd have turned him back.
Very many people have been fined for doing exactly what Cummings did, and those fines are not going to be withdrawn.
https://twitter.com/davidallengreen/status/12649555774715043...
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/350/regulation/6/ma...
> 6.—(1) During the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse.
He claims his reasonable excuse was to get childcare from his family in Durham. That might cover his trip from London to Durham, but it doesn't cover his trip back again.
I'd argue it doesn't cover his trip from London to Durham because he had childcare available in London which he chose not to use.
I suppose though, it does help for context.
It's basically Steve Bannon all over again.
I think another poster said it best, this is about him suggesting he did something he didn't to try and look clever. It's pretty interesting in itself, because Dominic Cummings stands on his body of work as a self styled paragon of scientific governance.
Him being an arse is probably somewhat apart from that.
Pretty sure he referenced various forms of 'scientific advice' a couple of times in that interview too. We could start leading this discussion towards the subject of him attending impartial scientific advisory meetings (the SAGE scandal).
Or we could have a lengthy discussion about his eyesight...
I think it's worth drawing a line around stuff like that.
If we want to have a wide open political discussion about a key government adviser, we should probably base it on a more relevant story. But it probably would flounce HN rules.
Also "RTFA"?
Let's be polite. we should be sharing news sources.
Not beating each other over the head with them.
But not specifically about his journey to Durham.
Is that fair?
It's a bit worse because it's not just "advice" or "guidance", it is also the law. He broke the law. Plenty of people have had fixed penalty notices as a result of breaking that law.
There was a recent story about Neil Gaiman travelling from New Zealand back to his home in Scotland. He was given a strict talking to by the police and issued a public apology – and that, as far as I understand, was the end of it. Is Cummings held to different standards?
Also we could hold him to the same standards as his peers - fellow politicians. The closest case I can think of is Catherine Calderwood ...
He needs to follow the Nolan Principles of Public Office and he needs to follow the Special Adviser guidelines.
Both of those contain clauses about openess and honesty.
2. Cummings hasn't issued a public apology.
3. Gaiman isn't an advisor to the Prime Minister, and wasn't intimately involved with the drafting of the rules he broke.
Dominic Cummings is a senior political advisor to Boris Johnson himself. His thinking helps shape the country, and therefore he needs to constantly in top mental form, especially during this crisis.
So, if he feels the need to travel the country as he did, everyone should support him, or face the consequences of having a mentally distracted political advisor trying to help run the country
Dominic Cummings was infected with the Coronavirus and by moving to a second home and by his own admission using the local healthcare resources in that area he was risking spreading the virus.
It's an analogy, you bobblehead.
> Dominic Cummings was infected with the Coronavirus and by moving to a second home and by his own admission using the local healthcare resources in that area he was risking spreading the virus.
One person's effect is so slight, it's negligible. However, having an advisor helping shape the laws and policies of the country not being in top form, is much more dangerous. Bad policy can kill thousands of people.
Not quite sure if that's a slip or a deliberate jab, but it's a great phrase!
Which is a pity because he's clever enough already. His blog post about existential threats was good enough, if long winded.
He's ideas about tech aren't exactly original, but his writing is detailed, and covers a lot of ground.
The WHO is literally still advising people not to wear masks: https://youtu.be/Ded_AxFfJoQ?t=33
...and I wish more people would be angry about it.
/whataboutism
https://twitter.com/davidallengreen/status/12649555774715043...
> 6.—(1) During the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse.
That has to be read in conjunction with the government and crown prosecution guidance about what reasonable means, and both the Government and the Crown Prosecutuion Service are very clear: that type of travel was not allowed.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/05/scotland-chi...
The wider Conservative Party do not hold him in high regard. Cummings isn't even in the Conservative Party. The Daily Mail is a good bellwether on this - there is no love for Cummings except from Boris. And Boris has got Brexit done so doesn't need his chum. But he has also been isolated from others during this infatuation with the Cummings.
Without having researched Cummings in much detail, I certainly don't like the political causes he has supported but I have vaguely got the impression he might (despite his history degree) be quite intelligent at managing teams that make good use of data to drive policy - something which would appeal to the HN crowd. Does anyone know am I justified in thinking this, or is it all spinning smoke and mirrors?
So yes, I suppose he'd fit right in to the ad-tech world, if he does find himself wanting a career change.
Without Cummins’s insight Brexit would not have happened and Boris Johnson would not be prime minister of the UK.
It's an interesting parallel universe. Cameron had a slim majority in 2015, and likely would have hung on, but he'd have been up against Miliband for a May 2020 election, which would have had to be postponed. We'd likely have had a government of national unity in Feb 2020
But much like yourself, I find his political views abhorrent.
There's a great deal of spin doctors on all sides that will do anything to make the party they're in look great in-front of the 'media' in order to sweep scandals under the carpet. So it's both.
The guy is undoubtably clever, something like an evil genius here and he knows the mainstream media is on his case for sometime with lots of skepticism of his own story if proven to be completely false. His attitude to answering questions in the Q/A was nothing more than a lure to show the extreme hysteria and anger the media has towards him, just as they ran with a story of 'allegations' of a second trip with no evidence. [0][1] Such stories without evidence are very dangerous.
> No photographic evidence has been published, and the reports are based on the testimonies of two eyewitnesses.
The UK didn't take the lockdown measures and this pandemic seriously from the start and was slow to act and testing targets were not met. The media compared it to the 'flu' and played down the death rates when comparing it to the 2003 SARS outbreak. Perhaps those who weren't socially distant and were clapping close together at Westminster Bridge [2] were just as bad as Cummings 'breaking' the lockdown, shouldn't begin to point fingers. It's everyone's fault.
[0] https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-dominic-cummings-made...
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52786206
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-...
Being able to catch lying politicians is really, really good return of investment:
I really hope Internet Archive manages to keep what it is doing.
Cummings said he had warned about the dangers of pandemics.
The original archived version of his blog post obviously warns about pandemics.
Archived version from 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20190331190550/https://dominiccu...
"Last year I wrote about the possible threat of coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dominic-cummi...
> Last year I wrote about the possible threat of coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning.
There are three key bits there:
> I wrote
The blog post is some 1800 words, two-thirds of which is a verbatim quote from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Once you taken away the leading epigraph from David Deutsch and the rather long title, there are barely 400 words of actual content from Cummings.
> about the possible threat of coronaviruses
In its original form, the post does not mention coronaviruses. The only pathogens mentioned are Ebola and various types of flu, and those only appear in the extensive quote from BAS.
> and the urgent need for planning
The only planning it refers to is greater security for laboratories studying dangerous pathogens, specifically the use of red teams to test the security of British research facilities. There is nothing about preparing for pandemics, whether stockpiling equipment, contingency plans for dealing with a pandemic, emergency powers legislation, determining criteria for imposing or lifting lockdowns, etc.
Given that Cummings appears to be using this post as a refutation of the accusation that he initially favoured "herd immunity" as the strategy for dealing with COVID-19 in the UK, his representation of it seems a little disingenuous.
His blog does show the danger of pandemic, but says nothing about herd immunity or lockdown.
Does HN have a "hide" function, or demote to the darkest depths, and, if so, what triggers it?
. Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
and:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.
So this has probably become over-lively.
Shame, though, I had been enjoying it.
Thanks for your explanation.
He was indeed warning about pandemics in 2019. ...which is close enough for me. Looks like he added a tag about coronavirus, but there were cases where he mentioned prior coronavirus outbreaks, like SARS/MERS/etc...
On top of the existing allegations I don't think this is significant.
He already seems to be running the UK.
>On top of the existing allegations I don't think this is significant.
Given that he is currently being accused of a very relaxed attitude to the truth, I think it is highly significant.