George Cazenove

I don’t get this. I thought RFK was supposed to be massively anti-processed food and there he is with a big Mac and a full fat Coke?

Ah but then I would have missed Afghanistan!

This is *exactly* how I feel about football.

Ah now if you check my feed on the other place, you will see I said that during the Truss PMship! But I don’t think Sunak is Campbell comparison (as yet).

No cricket, Phillips. A significant issue….

I'd love to say who this was as they were exceptionally good but I think the talk was under Chatham House rules!

Heard a senior Labour-learning public affairs person speaking earlier this week: polls will narrow as it's not possible for as many Tory 2019 voters to be saying to pollsters they definitely won't vote Tory; they won't vote, they don't know or they'll vote Reform. Some will come home; worth c.5%.

Yes! Of course! That’s not to say it wasn’t right to lock down - but it’s still the bluntest possible tool to use. My point is that - then as now - there’s just no nuance at all.

I think you fail to appreciate how blunt lockdown is as a tool and its downsides and it's going to be a spectacular waste of this enquiry if all it does is examine how much of a twonk Johnson is. We know that....there's so much to learn around national health, diet, trends etc. 2/2

I don't think you can know that. Locking down early helps you in the short-term but there's an immunity benefit to those early waves. The UK covid performance reflects lots of factors alongside timing of lockdowns including obesity levels, type 2 diabetes, population density etc. 1/2

Why? The whole point of this is that government is an exercise in managing different impacts and searching for compromise. You might not like the language but it’s surely not unreasonable for a PM and CX to discuss the economic impacts of lockdowns etc.

The problem that Johnson faces throughout is that Covid isn’t quite malign *or* benign enough.

I totally disagree: the second lockdown was much harder decision given that Johnson / govt knew so much more about the virus at that point esp it’s lack of lethality to younger age groups. The economic and educational trade-offs are much clearer (and therefore harder) in Autumn 2020.

I can't remember what people were saying about schools but by September most kids had been out of school for 6 months so they had to go back and it's why the November lockdown excluded schools. 2/2

From memory, the no. of cases post 1st lockdown and into what was a lovely, hot summer was very small but people still being careful, no schools. Cases began to rise in August and were clearly rising as schools thought about opening hence the argument for an autumn lockdown. 1/2

Not binary? I'm pretty sure the cranks at Independent SAGE were wholly binary on this.

Also, the substack you've linked to quotes Pagel, Ferguson, Horton and Edmunds all of whom have skin in the blame game and all come from a particular school of pandemic thought.

We're already seeing the cost in school children and university students in attainment, attendance and mental health which the binary debate about lockdowns doesn't help.

I don't agree. The problem that Johnson had was that the disease was close to trivial for a huge % of the population and esp. almost everyone under 50. If he'd shut schools in Sept '20, some children would have missed almost an entire year of school at an incalculable future cost.

Have blocked 2 people on this site just for being tedious. Makes a change from blocking pornbots on X.

He’d already made close to $200m out of the sale of PayPal (2002) by the time he got involved with Tesla in 2008.

I really don’t want to be a defender of Musk but the idea that he’s become (at times) the world’s richest man despite being an idiot is not credible at all.

Disagree. He’s been there since 2008! The progress Tesla has made on battery storage has been astonishing and we will benefit from it.

Yes, if he had any sense he’d talk to Musk about Tesla and battery storage. That’s where Musk may well leave his mark on history.

I think Iain Martin once pointed out that Teresa May was PM 2016-19 despite obviously being toast for most of 2018&19. And yet being PM for three years sounds more convincing in the history books. So….PM Sunak, 2022-25 sounds a lot better than 2022-24.

I do read it (I promise); just not *every* day.

1997 & 2010 GEs tells you that they will wait until the very last possible moment in the desperate hope that something turns up. Which it won’t.

There’s not a lot of cricket on here. This feels like a considerable flaw…