Nepotism/Cronyism Watch

I included the key part of the quote - showing that Cummings saw the relationship as a benefit and not a problem.

Unfortunately for you (and any government desperate to avoid scrutiny) awarding the contract based on an existing relationship, is not grounds to ignore due process and it should have been offered elsewhere.

You can dance around the point as much as you like, but you dismissing this as just a ‘social media conspiracy’ and ‘just a nut job with a vendetta against the government’ looks very foolish now.

If you just admitted that I would have a lot more respect for you.

T.R.O.Y. wrote:I included the key part of the quote - showing that Cummings saw the relationship as a benefit and not a problem.

Unfortunately for you (and any government desperate to avoid scrutiny) awarding the contract based on an existing relationship, is not grounds to ignore due process and it should have been offered elsewhere.

You can dance around the point as much as you like, but you dismissing this as just a ‘social media conspiracy’ and ‘just a nut job with a vendetta against the government’ looks very foolish now.

If you just admitted that I would have a lot more respect for you.

Jesus you are hard work.

The complainant TRIED to make that exact point by claiming the awarding of the contract and the length of it was unlawful - the judge rejected their argument and threw them out!!!

It is there in her findings in black and white.

What bit are you having trouble understanding???

As for Maugham he can whip you and everyone else up as much as he likes but he still hasn't proved anything other than a few civil servants made a number of  unintentional mistakes during the world's worst pandemic probably since the Black Death about 700 years ago!

And you really think I'm the one who is being irrational in all this???

If he's got proof, then take it to the police and throw all the guilty party's in jail - I have no problem with that whatsoever.

The question is why doesn't he...?

Well what's your explanation why he doesn't?

Because the question is about wasting public money. As explained over 300 posts ago - as I’m sure you well know. But rather than admit a fault on the internet you’d rather kill a forum off - I must admit, even I am amazed at the lengths you will go to.

T.R.O.Y. wrote:Because the question is about wasting public money. As explained over 300 posts ago - as I’m sure you well know. But rather than admit a fault on the internet you’d rather kill a forum off - I must admit, even I am amazed at the lengths you will go to.

Hahaha!!!

Yes right, I'm such a nutjob that I rather throw the forum under a bus than admit to being wrong!!!

See post 342 where I've already done that.



And you've changed your tune, it is all wasting public money is it, only a few posts back you were telling me it was all about contracts being awarded on personal relationships!!!

Unfortunately I'm not amazed at the lengths you will go to to contrive to argue on and on and on until ad nauseam...

Does it make you feel superior or something or can you just not accept that other views than yours might just prevail instead?

And I thought this was quite ironic - this is the first post on this thread -

xmiles wrote:Yes we need a separate thread to keep up to date with the level of corruption we are seeing with the Boris regime.

Today let us look at Kate Bingham, appointed by Boris as head of Britain's vaccine task force without any proper process or knowledge of vaccines. However she is married to a Tory minister who was at Eton with Boris, went to school with Boris' sister and was at Oxford with Boris.

She leaked confidential commercially sensitive government information to her financier chums and lied about it to a joint select committee.

She has wasted £670,000 of taxpayer money on a team of boutique public relations consultants who merely duplicate work done by about 100 communications staff at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Of course she has not given up her role as managing director of a private equity firm and you have to wonder whose interests she is actually serving.

[source: Sunday Times 8 November 2020]

Birthday Honours 2021: Covid vaccine heroes recognised by Queen

Key figures from the UK's Covid vaccine programme, and community volunteers who helped during the pandemic, lead the Queen's Birthday Honours list.

Oxford vaccine developer Prof Sarah Gilbert and the former chair of the UK vaccine taskforce Kate Bingham are both recognised with damehoods.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57427788

Well, well well!

I've just noticed Good Law Practice latest court action against the government and they've changed their strategy completely!

No more crowdfunding...

...I wonder why?

And court action based solely on APPARENT bias - now where have I heard that term recently?

They obviously believe they are on to a winner now!

And if they do win they'll bombard the government over everything they've done as being 'apparently' biased.

Should be very interesting to see how the government defends its position.

I foresee legislation changes happening in regards to the use of Judicial Reviews in the not too distant future if they lose this one.

https://goodlawproject.org/news/handing-out-peerages/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social%20media&utm_campaign=cruddas%20tw%201206

Good to see some sort of action being taken on peerages to be honest they really have become a complete sham.

T.R.O.Y. wrote:Good to see some sort of action being taken on peerages to be honest they really have become a complete sham.

Apparently the Judicial Review will based around the following legislation -

Rather than challenging Johnson's exercise of the prerogative power to grant honours, the Good Law Project say they are seeking a judicial review of his use of a power under the Life Peerages Act 1958.

I've not read it and have no idea yet as to what civil servant involvement was but I suspect it is probably to do with the recommendation submitted to Johnson by the House of Lords Appointments Commission against awarding a peerage to Cruddas.

We are getting into very, very deep waters though if the government - and I mean any government such as a future Labour one - is to be judged on a continual 'apparent' basis of facts rather than the 'actual' ones.

Dominic Cummings tried to bypass rules over £530k grant, emails suggest

Interesting little story this.

Basically Cummings told people a grant had to be given PDQ without any going through due diligence etc and the Civic Servants simply wouldn't do so!

As I've ALWAYS said, no one in the public sector would do anything like that without covering their own backs first.

It is the nature of the beast if you will.

And that's why I maintain that NO corruption or cronyism could have happened in the awarding of contracts without a civil servant themselves being involved in it.

And I don't believe anyone at that level of authority in the CS would have done the years in the job to be promoted so highly to be the sort of person to do such a thing - it isn't inherent of such a persons character.

Full story here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57531636

There's a lot of truth in that clip.

The top public servants are the ones who tend not to hold very strong political views simply because they see them change so often in their careers.

The job is more about administration and implementation as efficiently and effectively as possible, all the while knowing that whichever party is in power, there will be those in other party's strongly against what you are doing - indeed sometimes jettison it even when it is their turn in power.

Simply because you know that somebody, somewhere, at sometime will want to hold you account for the decisions you take in your job, it becomes second nature to always cover your back - make sure you have things in writing authorising/instructing/complying with legislation/etc, to do what ever it is you've done and that's why I'm so certain that no PPE contracts have been awarded illegally by any civil servants.

For all the hoo-ha and bluster we've had for well over a year now, the worst that has been found is that the government was late in publishing contracts awarded within 28 days (in the midst of the pandemic) and that it 'might' look to some that a contract could have been awarded biasedly BUT there is NO PROOF that it actually was!

Still let us see what more is there to come, maybe someone will turn up a smoking gun eventually?

Hahaha...

This has just made me laugh from Maugham and his Good Law Project -

It’s been a while since you heard from us in our ‘Jobs for the Boys’ case so we wanted to give you an update. As you’ll remember, the case focused on the appointments of Dido Harding – wife of a Conservative MP and friend of David Cameron – first as Head of Test and Trace and then later as Head of the National Institute for Health Protection without any adequate process. Later in the process, we asked about Kate Bingham and Mike Coupe.

We continue to await a hearing date from the High Court – but we have had an explanation from Government of the process that was followed for Kate Bingham to be appointed. That process was less poor than Government had previously led us to understand and so we will not challenge her appointment.



https://goodlawproject.org/update/appoint-based-on-merit/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social%20media&utm_campaign=harding%202306

Let me explain why it made me smile.

This was what GLP said originally - look at the first person they name...

...and also their stated reasons for applying for a Judicial Review...

Jobs for their mates: We’re suing

Kate Bingham heads up Britain’s vaccine task force. She’s a venture capitalist with no public health experience, married to a Conservative minister. Dido Harding leads the Test and Trace system. She has no public health experience and is the wife of a Conservative MP. Mike Coupe, is head of COVID-19 testing, and has – you guessed it – no public health experience. The list goes on.

Why – when facing the single greatest threat to public health this country has ever seen – would the Government of the day not want the best-qualified people to lead the response?

Thousands of lives depend on these public bodies. Yet this Government has handed them over without competition to cronies who’ve channelled billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to private companies and their associates – while the Test and Trace system fails.

In response to our pre-action letter demanding ministers reveal how and why these individuals were chosen to lead vital public health bodies, Government failed to produce any evidence. But they concur that the roles were not openly advertised: there was no proper recruitment process. A number of people – who just happen to share the quality of being friends of the Conservative Party – were just given the nod. This is not the Britain we should be, and we don’t believe it is lawful. So we’ve taken the next step in our claim with the Runnymede Trust and filed for judicial review. In accordance with our desire for transparency, we have posted the bundle so you can read it.

Closed recruitment particularly discriminates against Black, Asian and minority ethnic people, and disabled people. The Government’s practice of offering these roles unpaid rules out those without family wealth. Those who don’t rub shoulders with high-ranking Ministers are often shut out. And public confidence is undermined: how can we see, without transparency, whose interests this serves? The public’s – or the private interests of friends of the Conservative Party? Government now has 21 days to respond.

When we come to look at the evidence of how we managed the pandemic – with both excess deaths and the hit to the economy among the highest in the developed world – what will we conclude about who benefitted from giving jobs and contracts to friends?

If our politicians care in the slightest about public trust, public service needs to be exactly that, not a cloak for the advancement of private interests.

https://goodlawproject.org/update/jobs-for-mates-jr/


So a substantial part of their court action is to do with discrimination that is racial and against the disabled and poor's ability to be considered for those specific jobs

Why then does that exclude Kate Bingham's appointment?

Answer is that it doesn't!

Why have they now dropped their action in relation to Kate Bingham?

Could it be because she happened to do a bloody good job and been made a Dame because of it?

Nothing else has changed has it - still appointed in the same way she had been last year and she's still a venture capitalist and married to a Conservative minister...

If in the words of GLP her appointment is less poor than what they thought it was, then did the government advertise the job, hold interviews, make the job salaried, and all the other stuff GLP claimed illegal...?

Nope, it was just the same as the others they have objected to.

And if it was still just 'less poor' doesn't that still mean by definition that it was still poor, and if so why the change of heart in not progressing with the case against her...?

I mean they are going to be in court any way, so it won't cost them anything (not as though it was costing them anything anyway - being crowdfunded as they are!).

If I was the QC representing the government I'd be letting the judge know at every opportunity that Dido Harding and the others were appointed in exactly the same way as Kate Bingham was - which the GLP by withdrawing their action in respect of her clearly indicates that they were satisfied that her appointment was made correctly - so how come they don't believe Harding and the others were not???

Oh and by the way, they've seem to have gone awfully quiet about this too!!!

Kate Bingham reports directly to the PM. She’s the wife of a Tory Minister, who went to school with Rachel Johnson. The public needs to know why she’s using vast sums of taxpayers’ money on her own PR gurus https://t.co/sdwDSONgiS

— Good Law Project (@GoodLawProject) November 7, 2020

...wonder why???

Covid-19 contracts smell of cronyism – so I'm taking the government to court
Jolyon Maugham

There is an England of my mind. And in it those who have made their fortunes offer their time and talents in service of the public good, modelling self-sacrifice and respect for good governance to ensure the nation thrives. But that England is no longer this England.

Take the story of Kate Bingham. She is wife to a Treasury minister and cousin by marriage to Boris Johnson’s sister. Despite having – by her own admission – no vaccines experience, she was appointed by the prime minister, as far as we know without competition, to head up the “vaccines taskforce”.

With this role came responsibility for investing billions of pounds of public money, a task she performed while remaining managing director of a private equity firm specialising in health investments. While in post she gave, again apparently without competition, a £670,000 contract to a tiny PR firm, whose last accounts show net assets of less than a third of that sum. Its directors include Collingwood Cameron, a longstanding business associate of Humphry Wakefield (better known as Dominic Cummings’ father-in-law).

The Good Law Project, which I run, has received what I consider bullish legal advice from a leading procurement specialist that the letting of the contract to the PR firm, Admiral Public Relations and Marketing, was unlawful.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/16/covid-19-contracts-cronyism-government-court

Seems Maugham is at long last contacting the police!!!

Why we are referring a series of transactions involving the Prime Minister's advisor Munira Mirza, Priti Patel and Matt Hancock to the Serious Fraud Office. THREAD.

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) June 25, 2021

Fwiw I've read his thread and the best it can come up with is asking the Serious Fraud Office to look into what happened to the money the 'middlemen' between the companies seeking PPE contracts and the government awarding them earned as their 'commissions'.

They got themselves a vast wodge, no doubt about that - but that in itself doesn't make them out as crooks.

If the money found itself back in say Hancock's bank account then yes, something would seem to be very dodgy indeed but I still say that the contract is awarded by civil servants and Hancock, Priti Patel or any other Tory MP's have no say in that decision.

I don't know what 'tests' (if any?) the SFO do in order to even take on a case, I don't even believe Maugham has any proof that anything illegal has even happened other than his circumstantial evidence he's already posted up on social media about a million times already and presumably by now must have caught the eye of the SFO by now - and they've not reacted so far have they?

Anyway, let us see how this plays out.

If there is corruption then send them all to jail.

If there isn't then an awful lot of people have been duped by Maugham's agenda and his numerous innuendos!

Quite funny really, Bonce!

Sluffy wrote:Quite funny really, Bonce!

Room for a few more. Irrespective of party.

Turns out Hancock used his personal email while working on official business, so the government don’t have complete records of his contract dealings during the pandemic.

Wonder why he would have done such a thing.

Government reply to Labour's Angela Rayner's hyperbole over sleaze and cronyism

13:19
Government had to act with 'extreme urgency' on Covid contracts

In response to Angela Rayner, Julia Lopez, the Cabinet Office minister, says no one is suggesting "everything went smoothly" at the height of the pandemic.

She highlights a number of challenges including extra staff being drafted in to help with personal protective equipment (PPE) contracts - meaning people were working remotely with others they didn't know and on products they weren't familiar with.

The minister says the pressure people were under also accounts for the lags in publishing contracts and the government had to act with "extreme urgency" to secure PPE.

On concerns about a "VIP fast-track lane" for companies offering to supply equipment, Lopez says this was actually a mailbox set up by officials to consider offers of assistance.

She says leads were coming in faster than they could be processed and the mailbox was needed to manage "the influx of offers".

On the use of personal email accounts to conduct government business, she says government advice is that official devices and email accounts should be used for communicating classified information but other forms of communication may be used in the course of conducting government business.

Where government business is conducted on non-official IT, relevant information should be recorded on government systems, she adds.

Lopez stresses all PPE offers went through the same eight stage checks and 90% of offers through the priority inbox were rejected.


13:24
Concerns over reports ministers are using private emails

Labour MP Meg Hillier asks about reports cabinet ministers have been using their private email addresses for government business - meaning MPs and the public do not know what is being said in these exchanges.

She says this raises concerns for taxpayers about how their money is spent.

In response Julia Lopez says Hillier has raised an important issue but she cannot comment on email conversations she has not seen.

However, she adds there are procedures to make sure taxpayers' money is spent correctly, including an eight stage process for Covid contracts.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-57648685

Statement from Lord Bethell himself to the House of Lords.

15:29
Health minister defends use of private email

Health Minister Lord Bethell has said it is not wrong for ministers to have personal email addresses under government guidelines.

According to a report in the Sunday Times, a senior official in the Department of Health says Lord Bethell “routinely uses his private inbox” and concerns have been raised that some ministers could be using private email accounts for government business, including to discuss Covid contracts.

However, Lord Bethell says he does not "recognise the substance of those comments”.

He's told the Lords: "The guidelines are clear - it is not wrong for ministers to have personal email addresses and I have corresponded with a very large number of members in this chamber from both my parliamentary address and from my personal address and that is right and I will continue to do so.

"In their enthusiasm, third parties often seek to engage ministers through whatever means they can find and that includes their personal email. That is not the same as using a personal email for formal departmental decision-making."

He says contracts are negotiated by officials, not ministers, and submissions from officials are handled through departmental digital inboxes.

"Official decisions are communicated through secure governmental infrastructure," he adds.

Well, well, well!

Article here from the right wing Guido Fawkes ripping Maugham to shreds!!!

Certainly worth a read about why he's dropped his Judicial Review in respect of 'Lord' Peter Cruddas - I thought it was very odd that he had not sought crowdfunding for the action - seems like there was never any intent to seek a judicial review and it was all about a publicity stunt to raise his and GLP profile with the multitude of numb nuts who seem to believe every tweet he sends!!!

Click the blue 'order-order' link on the Tweet to read it.

Jolyon Loses Legal Action Against Boris Over Cruddas Peerage https://t.co/gYvdV3EOn7 pic.twitter.com/6apJi5B6M2

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) July 9, 2021