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I can see that the Dominic Cummings issue will run on for some time before being resolved , and here is one reason why. The story broke the weekend of May 23rd  after a month of investigative journalism that started after a mid-April phone call to The Guardian with the extraordinary news that Dominic Cummings was not in his London home, as one would have imagined from the Spectator article, but was in fact in Durham. Now it tuns out that his presence there was by then an open secret in the local community. Whatever the recent explanation has been, I would expect that a large percentage of those who knew in April would  have been unimpressed that Cummings did not "Stay Home" -  when as we've seen in national reactions many people had made great sacrifices in order to literally "Stay Home" ,  Initially there were denials that Cummings had ever left the Durham farm; as far as I can see it was only when witness evidence emerged that the Barnard Castle trip was adm

See the link to this video - I will write this up more fully What can project management tell us about coronavirus in the UK?

From: Mike Cashman Sent: 22 May 2020 06:56 To: 'iain.stewart.mp@parliament.uk' <iain.stewart.mp@parliament.uk> Cc:  'michael.gove.mp@parliament.uk' <michael.gove.mp@parliament.uk> Subject: RE: The need to consider seriously how to implement the proposed Northern Ireland protocol Dear Iain Stewart INTRODUCTION I write in connection with previous correspondence (December 2019) where I observed as follows (full email in email chain below) . Before retirement one of my major roles was to help UK Governments – and others - out of significant problems with major programmes and projects The potential Northern Ireland protocol is clearly a business and systems disaster waiting to happen. There’s an unclear requirement, a management imposed-deadline with no reference to feasibility, an uncertain regulatory environment with two supervisory bodies renegotiating their relationship, a large and diverse user base including government and businesses

The UK Government demands a high degree of rigour for all UK public money spent to alleviate emergencies. I know this well from conversations with Department for International Development people across the table in Kenya, in Ethiopia, in Sierra Leone during recovery from Ebola, in Jordan in preparing education work in rebel-held Syria territory - as also elsewhere with other funders. .Or. to be more precise - the UK Government demands a high degree of rigour in all countries  where our Government spends such money, with ONE exception. That exception is money spent in the UK, where Government Ministers are blatantly allowed to mark their own homework without independent evaluation of the plan and the results, Yes, even in an emergency, even in the toughest times with Ebola in Sierra Leone, we were required to be rigorous. And if we had not we would not have succeeded in eradicating Ebola from Sierra Leone with less than 4000 deaths. If I had said to DFID people "the test is in t

Dear Tory friends and Tory trolls I am trying to prevent people dying by making constructive suggestions as to how the likely future death toll could be reduced. The following are not valid reasons to stop me trying to do this Boris Johnson is trying his best. He has been working hard ever since he became Prime Minister (He hasn't) There's a picture of BJ looking a bit wrecked from 18 years ago.(and your point is...?) No-one foresaw this epidemic (They did). He is following the science. (He is not, SAGE is secret and infected by Dominic Cummings and has been attended by Cummings associates with commercial interests. Science involves publishing results so that other scientists can comment). Other Governments would have done just as badly. (Not if they hadn't run down stocks of PPE). We should not compare with other countries (like the UK Government did until the comparisons became embarrassing) Many other Governments around the world are doing just as badly, (T

There has been much attention on seeing the covid-19  reproduction ratio below 1.0, and an assumption in some quarters  that 0.9 is “good”. In fairness Prof Whitty emphasised that much lower would be better. It is true that at 0.9 the disease should eventually die out in a given population. But if the disease follows the mathematics, then an initial 1000 cases will cause, during successive generations of infection, the following numbers of cases: 900, 810, 729, 656, 590 etc …. approaching another nine thousand cases  in total The expected further cases for various values of R,, the reproduction ratio on the same basis, are as follows R Expected further cases 0.9 9000 0.8 4000 0.7 2333 0.6 1500 0.5 1000 0.4 667 0.3 429 0.2 250 The dramatic difference in further cases between 0.9 and 0.8 demonstrates the value of effect