Joking footage
Oops now she’s had to resign.
Allegra Stratton has stepped down as the government’s spokesperson for the Cop26 climate summit after footage emerged of her joking about a party at Downing Street during the peak of lockdown rules in December last year.
Where’s everybody’s sense of humor? Pandemics are funny, dammit! People who impose rules on underlings that they flout themselves are funny. Do what I say not what I do is funny. Hypocrisy is funny. Privilege and contempt are funny.
Yeah, entitletards are fecking hilarious, like a toothache. :P
So, she could have gone the Kavanaugh route from his affirmation of beer-loving in responding to Amy Klobuchar.
“I like wine and cheese, okay! It was a business meeting!”
Wealth confers immunity, don’t you know?
Michael@2: Oh lort, now I really want to rewatch that SNL cold open with Matt Damon as Kavanaugh, I think I laughed myself silly when it first aired!
Rule number one for dealing with a political scandal: find a woman who can take the fall!
There are many men are sitting around laughing in that video. their jobs are safe apparently.
@james, done and done!
It’s bad, of course it’s bad.
And it’s bad that the press spokesperson, useless though she seems to have been since taking her £125k job, has had to take the fall. Johnson and his cabinet are all saying they have “been assured that no rules were broken”, but refusing to say who did the assuring. They are all ‘disgusted’ by the woman laughing on the video though, so forcing her to resign is the same thing as an apology, right? It makes all the bad not have happened, doesn’t it?
But what’s even more bad is the fact that Patel is trying to hide a horrible anti-protest bill among all the bad press. This includes such marvels as:
* Up to a year’s jail time for protesters who chain themselves to railings etc.
* Sweeping new stop and search powers during protests. Police no longer need there to even be suspicion of a crime.
* New ASBO-like orders can be imposed on protesters, even if no crime has been committed. These will drastically limit their freedom of speech and assembly
* Courts will get powers to prevent protesters from participating in future protests, even if they’re not convicted of a crime.
* Trespass will be criminalised, with severe implications for travellers and gypsies, including seizure of their vehicles (homes).
* New stop and search crimes allowing discrimination against previously-convicted people, allowing they to be searched without suspicion of a crime. We know which demographics will be most discriminated against here.
And as far as I can tell, it’s working. I haven’t seen anything about this so far in the mainstream media.
I’m fairly confident that the bill won’t make it through the House of Lords, but you can never tell.
I’m going to be the unpopular one here, no doubt, but I’m bothered about her resignation.
Stratton’s job is – ooops: was – to talk to the media; and so predicting and crafting answers to potentially tricky media questions is what she was for. One can’t really suggest that doing that is a resigning offence.
Perhaps the idea might be that governments shouldn’t employ spin-doctors. That position is coherent, but I don’t think that it’s tenable. Granted, there is here a blurring of the lines between senior civil servants and political appointees, and we might worry about that; but it’s got nothing to do with her, nor with this case, and any worries that we have will persist long after she’s vanished from memory. It’s not obvious that her very holding of the position is a resigning offence.
The next candidate explanation is that she, and her colleagues, made light of either (a) the COVID situation generally, or (b) this alleged party in particular. This may be true. But so what? Everyone makes light of everything all the time. Have you ever engaged a doctor, lawyer, or undertaker in conversation? Have you ever been in any kind of meeting whatsoever? Jokes are part of the deal. They are not incompatible with taking serious situations seriously. On the contrary, they may be what makes it possible to take serious situations seriously.
Were Stratton to turn out to have been at the party in question, then that may be a resigning issue. But this? It just ain’t. Her crime seems to have been to have been recorded behaving in a way that anyone would have behaved, while doing a job that nobody is seriously suggesting shouldn’t exist.
Still, Johnson now has his scapegoat, so everything’s going to be OK. That’s how it works, isn’t it?
Enzyme,
Not unpopular with me, at least, I agree. She certainly shouldn’t be the one to resign.
latsot#6: Yes, that bill, and others on drugs & immigration, which are intended to display that the Tories are ‘tough’ & mean business, worry me a great deal more. Allegra Stratton’s forced resignation is another little display, one that is intended to distract: well, look, we took responsibility and ejected her from the Augean stables, and they’re now so clean you could eat your dinner off the floor!