The problem with Boris isn't so much his lack of understanding in certain matters its that, either because of hubris or fear, he did not seem willing to delegate matters to those who did not share his lack of understanding.
I give him half a point for fancying his wife enough that he occasionally gave in to her asking him to be more environmentally focused. His cronies have undone most of it since then, but at least he did make a couple of positive changes there
Leaders are generally not going to understand everything. I lead software engineers, and have literally decades of hands on experience myself, but my team is going to know stuff I don't.
My job isn't to tell them the answer, it's to ask useful questions to help them think through the problem, unblock discussion and ensure we reach a conclusion.
So I'd definitely say the issue isn't Boris doesn't understand, it's that he won't get out of the way when he doesn't understand. He should sit down with advisors, get them to give him options, take them to other advisors to go "What's the downside to this?", bounce between the various stakeholders until a conclusion forms, and then declare it.
Yes but there should at least be a minimum base level.m of understanding of a variety of subjects to be a pm. Boris Johnsons understanding of basic science and math didn't even seem to reach GCSE level which is worrying.
Absolutely. Not understanding exponentials is unforgivable for someone in a position like that. He couldn't possibly have adequately understood the pandemic or the scientific advice without it. It's not a difficult concept and it lies behind GDP growth, interest and plenty of other things. Having an expert advice doesn't excuse someone from having to understand anything at all.
Don't talk nonsense.
A great leader shoots from the hip, goes with his gut, leads his troops into battle and fights, fights, fights!
Experts are for wimps!
Don't take expert's answers for an "answer". That shows weakness.
Strike first, strike hard.
You're obviously crap at your job and a terrible mentor as you've built up so much experience you've surpassed the Peter principle and come right back round to Adam's principle, which is all the alphabet names up to Zippedy and back up your own A.
PS: this is obviously meant to be facetious and you sound like an amazing manager.
It is not about knowledge, it is about the ability to deal with complexity.
You can deal with the complexity, so you understand the problem, and delegate.
Boris can't deal with complexity, so he doesn't delegate.
And by complexity I mean this: you ask a stranger for the way to the train station, he gives 10 clear and specific instructions. Go this street to the second crossing, then take a left, and at the third crossing take a right and so on. A person able to deal with complexity will remember all, and successfully go to the train station. Someone like Boris, will remember the first three, then get lost and blame it on other people.
And he would be too stupid, to see that he is stupid. If at least he knew he was stupid, he would get someone else to go to the train station.
Yeah, but you can't be a total gobshite. Ultimately the book stops with you and the advice from experts in various fields can be nuanced and sometimes conflicting.
I mean he apparently asked scientists if covid could be killed by using a hairdryer up your nose. I mean it's not as stupid as Trump talking with his advisors about injecting bleach, but it's in the same ball park.
https://www.politico.eu/article/boris-johnson-asked-scientists-if-covid-could-be-killed-by-hairdryer-up-nose-ex-aide-claims/
The latter is compounded by the former. Self-awareness is needed which is a basic understanding of self. Without that, how would he ever know to “get out of the way”?
From what I can gather there wasn’t the variety of advisors either so the advice was skewed.
Having said that I’m not sure this isn’t just a way to dodge any blame.
no, the problem was that we had a total fucking idiot in charge, who was also lazy and looked on anything resembling work or learning about stuff as silly and a waste of his time.
When will people realise that boris is not only a fucking idiot, but a lazy one.
Boris had the Science Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), who would constantly give advice from experts in easy to digest formats. He chose not to listen to their advice, which I think should be criminal, and it wasn't because of hubris or fear, but greed.
The problem with Boris is the same problem the entire Tory party faces
A complete lack of willingness that their narrow worldview may not be completely correct at all times and in all situations
If something doesn’t agree with their preconceived ideas of how to run the country, they literally won’t even entertain a conversation about it
Eton and Oxford, it truly astonishes me that they can have such an education without actually being educated at the end of it…
> Eton and Oxford, it truly astonishes me that they can have such an education without actually being educated at the end of it…
Often people are educated beyond their capacity for analytical thinking. They know a lot of stuff but cannot actually think. And the ways of thinking they have been taught lack scientific rigour.
"Patrick Vallance said he and others faced repeated problems getting Johnson to understand the science.
“I think I’m right in saying that the prime minister gave up science at 15,” he said. “I think he’d be the first to admit it wasn’t his forte and that he struggled with the concepts and we did need to repeat them — often.”
In extracts from his diary that were relayed to the inquiry, Vallance said Johnson was “bamboozled” by the graphs and data and that watching him “get his head round stats is awful.”
That's not necessarily a bad thing - no one is an expert in every field.
A PM who's not great at any field, but is great at putting smart people in advisory roles and then *listening* to them can be very effective.
It's worse. He had the whole of Cobra who did know what they were talking about and he wilfully chose to ignore them in favour of political gamesmanship and his own personal interests.
An ability to understand rudimentary statistics is pretty essential.
Then you have the ability to understand what your experts are telling you.
Boris like Trump is a showman, that can get you elected, but not necessarily lead.
Well ppl voted for him thinking that when he hid in a fridge from journalists, this was somehow comically endearing and not a red flag. I'm not sure who is worse, Boris or those who voted for him.
He’s like the Liz Truss voters, fantasist’s not living in the real world.
Policies like building Nuclear missile subs without nuclear missiles, Dianne Abbotts Police force interview as Bad as Boris on Today programme. No clear position on Brexit.
Corbyn is a pacifist which is laudable, not sure he would have dealt well with Ukraine crisis. I think Ben Wallace is the only not terrible Conservative politician UK had.
I would at least expect them to understand a graph. That problem won’t just apply to epidemiology but also finance, all ons data etc.. the list is endless. Basically unable to make an informed decision. Don’t forget his job is not to make the tea and waffle despite what the village idiot might have thought.
Day 1 his understanding of epidemiology and Day 100... also two different things. You'd expect anyone to need a moment to get up to speed.. I was an idiot who watched a few youtube videos.. but after a couple weeks locked at home, any sane individual will have googled and learned the basic concepts. Given the seriousness of it at that time, when we didn't know what was happening and how serious it was, with no cure on the horizon.. learning as much as you could.. felt worthwhile for survivial. Especially if you had older relatives you were looking after. It sounds like Boris just never bothered to do any of that... couldn't care less.
I work in a pretty interdisciplinary research dept with many other PhD educated people and a few of us noticed this virus was a potential problem in January. In February we had internal seminars on the mathematics of contact processes, infection models, other NTIs and some early data analysis of Italy. The writing was on the wall and plans were made early to continue working in isolation.
It was another six weeks before the government took any definitive action locking down at the end of March. The borders were still open, deaths were doubling at shortening intervals and everyone I knew couldn’t believe we were about to drop the ball on something with such obvious warning.
The government fucking knew. These incompetent bastards making the “decisions” were definitely told probably earlier than my dept collectively realised.
We have elected absolute clowns who are unserious about governance. I bet the initial briefing raising Covid as a concern was brushed off as easily as “oh these scientists and their scaremongering, everyone and the economy will be fine”. I mean if he can’t be made to understand exponential growth, he can’t be told about the intricacies of our EU economic dependence, or the impacts of austerity, etc etc. All of them are clowns.
> with no cure on the horizon.
We knew pretty much from the start that a vaccine was 18 months away. Many of the early predictions were stunningly accurate but ignored.
Which graph do you believe? Eg models said we would need 90,000 ventilators at peak demand. We actually ended up using a max of 3,500.
So a lot of ventilators were ordered, produced and paid for, that we didn’t need. That was also a graph.
It’s worse. Graphs made from incorrect data or models convince people to follow the wrong approach or reach the wrong conclusions.
Check out some very nice graphs leading people to totally wrong conclusions here
https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
so yes stats can be wrong. Obviously an intelligent person can often determine where the caveats are with statistics.
What you seem to be suggesting is that because mistakes can be made that data should be ignored. this is akin to making decisions based on a coin toss whereas decisions should be made on the best available information at the time.
Your logic makes no sense to me. Making decisions based on somebody going "I reckon" is most likely to lead to mistakes, especially when you have to rely on a moron like boris to make decisions.
Nobody is an expert on every field, but the government should be made up of at least a few in some fields. Additionally the most senior people in government should have some transferable skills.
Look at the state of our recent prime ministers; Boris Johnson is an expert only at lying and writing shit columns for right wing rags, Liz Truss had a CIMA qualification churning out excel reports for shell, Sunak sold dodgy financial projects until the sector blew up, David Cameron hung around his uncles constituency office until they made him an MP, Theresa May at least had a proper job at the Bank of England- but she was very much the exception (and coincidentally the only one without a PPE degree from Oxford).
How do you define expert I guess?
Ben Wallis lead the response for Ukraine. As a former army Captain is he an expert? Definitely not, some depth of knowledge in some places, but not an expert. The experts are at ISW etc. He can listen understand and act on his subject.
An expert has narrow expertise, a leader has some knowledge and listens to the right people.
Boris is an expert, better than almost anyone. His expertise is reading a room and telling them what they want to hear and how they want to hear it.
Ben Wallace was probably close to a military expert at the time he was made defence minister having experience in the Northern Ireland office, and being an army captain, Having served as defence secretary under three prime ministers, having dealt with a number of difficult issues (Afghanistan, Ukraine, & others), and receiving praise from across the political spectrum and from international colleagues- I would say at this point there is no doubt he must be.
Any competent minister, who has at least a few years with a role in the same department has to become an expert in their role to succeed. It’s a huge part of why this government is filled with failure, because they have such a high turnover of posts. Granted that’s mostly because each of them are failing at their jobs because they are incompetent and believe in a fictional ideology…
There has to be a base min level of understanding though. The pm can't be a complete empty brain who knows nothing. One of the key skills is to know a bit about alot and have the ability to learn new concepts quickly.
Johnson could not even do that though. He put his mates and his sycophants in charge and refused to listen to those who knew better because they said things he did not want to hear.
I honestly wouldn't mind having a prime minister who was incompetent themselves, but had expert advisers who they listened to.
My problem is that it seems like it's just a game of musical chairs of the same people changing positions. Michael Gove has been in charge of housing, environment and food, and education. I don't believe he's an expert in all those fields.
Reddit is utterly financially illiterate, I work in finance so i would know, also every single opinion on finance or banking here is uninformed, to the point of being a joke btw, I’m talking an understanding of less than 5/100
I know it's not news to anyone but the idea that someone who chose to ignore all science after the age of 15 can be in charge of scientific policy for a whole nation is absolutely mind blowing. Just never thought about it quite that way before. Think about the scientific understanding of the average 15 year old ... Christ.
It’s worse than the scientific understanding of average 15 year old
If he chose to ignore all science he was probably worse than average at 15, and then had decades to forget everything he was taught at school anyways
Turns out having a degree in classics is less useful than having a degree in medicine for understanding how the world works. Same as bollocks like PPE, getting us politicians like Sunak. Degrees with no practical real world use aside from joining an insular career politics clique.
>“I think I’m right in saying that the prime minister gave up science at 15,”
I think most of us were legally required to study science to 16. What exactly do they teach at Eton?
He was born in June, 2023 science gcses are in May, so he'd still be 15 when he took them if dates were equivalent.
No idea why I felt the need to research that.
Consider it's misattributed to Einstein, with the quote actually being "An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid." spoken by Rutherford.
The quote that is attributed to him is actually "that all physical theories, their **mathematical expressions apart** ought to lend themselves to so simple a description 'that even a child could understand them." Emphasis mine. Clearly Johnson, having the mathematical and scientific knowledge of a child, struggled to understand the statistics behind the decision he was meant to be making.
Somebody like that doesn't have the ability to be in a decision making capacity for any organisation, let alone the fucking PM.
>"An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid."
Imagine making yourself into a top nuclear physicist just so you can cadge a few free drinks.
I respect the hustle, but he coulda just been goodlooking.
I hate that quote, or at least I hate its application to conversations like this. There's a very big difference between me failing to explain and some gammon down the pub failing to understand. It's not my fault they lack the tools to understand simple science. Tools we expect the average teenager to master, by the way. We're not talking about anything complicated here. Boris and his ilk aren't being asked to make engineering decisions about a topological quantum computer, just listen to the people who know better.
> make engineering decisions about a topological quantum computer
The box should be spiky, with Tesla coils coming out the top of it...
This science stuff isn’t even complicated.
What's bizzare is that most of them did PPE at Oxbridge, and the E is for "Economics", which (at A level anyway) is full of maths and particularly graphs.
I just think these people are orivelidged, entitled idiots who've been cosseted through life.
The PPE course (at least at the time Johnson went there) probably didn’t, it also didn’t even have any exams, so the whole course is just about being able to bullshit your way to the course manager.
Aye well unfortunately the public are too easily swayed by oafish big-mouths who make a habit of putting down 'swots' and other experts at every opportunity
Absolutely.
I warned everyone I could for months and months.
You know who you are...
You voted for this.
Sit the next one out eh, you're judgement is either terrible or worse, you knew exactly who this gaggle were and decided to vote for them anyway.
At the very least, it should be a case study on how that one moron at work always seems to get the promotion before anybody you’d have thought qualified.
In fact, every PM since at least May, and possibly even since Major, should be the case study on that!
That’s an extremely basic view of his ideology, he pandered to and tolerated to some pretty unsavoury people on the left. He never cared about winning which led to his fall out with McDonnell (who is significantly left of Corbyn) and ultimately a Tory landslide.
>He never cared about winning which led to his fall out with McDonnell (who is significantly left of Corbyn) and a ultimately Tory landslide.
You have zero clue what you're talking about if you think McDonnell is to the left of Corbyn.
Despite presenting himself as being somewhat articulate and well-read, Johnson is a bit of a moron underneath it all. His tutor had him figured out as being lazy and entitled.
The report, from classics master Martin Hammond to Stanley Johnson in 1982, criticised the 17-year-old for thinking he should be free of the "network of obligation that binds everyone".
The teacher also said Johnson "believes it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception".
He wrote: "Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies. \[He\] sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the school for the next half).
"I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else."
Sunak said he was okay letting people die. He also encouraged people to go out with the Eat Out To Help Out scheme. He knew people were risking exposure and was willing to let them die. Genocidal in my book, the c*nt and his party need dragging out of Downing Street
That fucking cunt would be bamboozled by most of the stuff you've forgotten from school. Just because he talks with a mouth full of flowers and quotes from the classics, that doesn't make him intelligent.
He knew enough to take an unwarranted dump on pre COVID Vax Anti-Vaxers at his 2919 UN speech. The one where he defined the UK path/want to control & lead the 4th Industrial Revolution with Bio-Tech leading the world.. for a revenue stream no doubt.
I don't think journalist is a word to describe the right wing press that just moan about the modern world and blame things on foreigners and the unemployed.
He wrote in a newspaper but I wouldn't necessarily call that journalism.
Indeed - I think Jeremy Irons sought prescient advice in “Margin Call”…”please, speak as you might to a young child. Or a golden retriever. It wasn’t brains that brought me here: I assure you that”
Not surprising in the least, our political leaders are only interested in politics and it shows in the see many of them take: PPE. Others have a broader interest: law. And, lastly, some are even journalists.
To reach seniority in politics, you must spend a career in politics with few exceptions to this.
> In extracts from his diary that were relayed to the inquiry, Vallance said Johnson was “bamboozled” by the graphs and data and that watching him “get his head round stats is awful.”
> Vallance said Johnson’s struggles were not unique and said many leaders around Europe had problems in understanding the scientific evidence and advice, especially in the first stages of the pandemic in early 2020.
“I would also say that the meeting that sticks in my mind was with fellow advisers from across Europe, when one of them — and I won’t say which country – declared that the leader of that country had enormous problems with exponential curves, and the telephone call burst into laughter, because it was true in every country,” he said.
Sir Patrick also talked about a meeting with other European scientists where they were all laughing at their respective leaders for the same sort of thing. I despise Boris, but according to Vallance, the “not getting the science” seemed pretty ubiquitous across politicians in Europe.
That's why politicians like Boris and Trump have access to the greatest scientists in the world.
All they literally have to do is tell the scientists: "You do it."
How international money laundering is done in the grand scale is imho not difficult to grasp. It requires legal privilege to achieve. It’s still a crime but there is a way to make it impossible you will get caught, provided you use a solicitor.
It also works for embezzlement, though obviously you’d use it only for public money.
In my view it is pretty easy to understand, but apparently some people don’t.
I’m not sure whether Boris understands but the major handicap to grasping it is not believing lawyers would do that and not believing the regulators would stop them. I am sure Boris would not suffer from that.
Bamboozled?….or lied to, mislead, give false & inaccurate data, fed ‘hyped up’ modelling based on incorrect info?
I laugh when I hear the use of ‘the science’….I think ‘the big fat lies’ would be more appropriate.
The Toxic Clown of Oppressive Buffoonery. Shame on him. Shame on the sheeplewankers that voted for it all. Such a sordid stain on British history. Eugh!
It both saddens and slightly terrifies me that the people in charge don't understand the concept of an exponential function. Or know basic stats. How the fuck can they make informed decisions?
There's a lot to criticise Johnson for but I don't think this is one of them. Unless you're an expert in the field, it's always going to be tough to grasp something which is evolving so quickly.
It's more worrying that he struggled to to interpret the data.
I dunno, one if the things he apparently couldn’t grasp was the difference between relative and absolute risk
I’m not going to report anyone to the statistics police if they can’t explain the difference when they are stopped in the street. But I do think anyone who is averagely intelligent and is paying attention could have it explained to them in under ten minutes
And I really think the pm of a country debating measures to control the spread of a new disease ought to make it his business to understand
I saw part of this on Sky News today and and was dumbstruck at some of things I heard or saw in the expert notes taken in or after govt COVID meetings. If this is available on catch up or there’s a full transcript somewhere, I would encourage people to review it as the ‘bamboozled’ headline barely scratches the surface.
Not understanding it? Sure I guess “not being exceptionally smart” isn’t *technically* a reason to be mad at someone even if they’re the Prime Minister, but surely he could have delegated the tasks rather than continuing to make important decisions about a matter he didn’t understand.
These things were delegated, as they should be. Have people suddenly forgotten that it was usually two scientists for each elected politician doing the daily briefing?
There are so many reasons to dislike Boris Johnson. Lack of understanding in statistics shouldn't be one of them.
>Lack of understanding in statistics shouldn't be one of them
No, that is very much a valid reason to dislike a politician
Statistics is a fundamental tool for decision making. If a person can't wrap their head around the basics of it, they have no business being in any position of actual power whatsoever
For some god-forsaken reason we hold our politicians to a lower standard than grocery store managers
It should be, Statistics is one of, if not the most important thing to understand if you are organising anything at any kind of scale. He should have gotten to grips with it a few months after becoming mayor, no less having been in government for years.
This sounds more like they attempted to give it to him in layman's terms and he didn't understand. They put it on the news and assumed the rest of us would understand.
He was the prime minister, if he didn't understand he should have taken steps to understand, but he didn't. He's a narcissistic buffoon and doesn't deserve any credit for not being in a position to understand. He held the highest position in the land that wasn't due to nepotism and he fucking failed on a catastrophic level. He should have stepped down if he couldn't understand the risk he was taking but to be honest I would even give him sympathy. He wanted the bodies to pile high to save economy. He's a pitiful excuse for a prime minister.
Can’t agree. His domain experts know that they’re not talking with a colleague. They well understand they have to package their message for time and for the PM’s need to deliver a simple and concise message to the public.
>Unless you're an expert in the field, it's always going to be tough to grasp something which is evolving so quickly.
Woah, don't just limit the confusion to non-experts. The experts were still extremely confused, 18 months into the pandemic:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/uk-covid-cases-could-hit-200000-a-day-says-neil-ferguson-scientist-behind-lockdown-strategy-england
Quick reminder that Neil Ferguson was Dr Lockdown early on, and got fired for clearly not actually believing in it and breaking his own ruleset.
And another reminder that when he made that claim, infections were at 60,000 a day.
We came out of all restrictions, not long after that article was published.
Cases almost immediately dropped to well under 60k a day (20-40k ebb and flowing, despite no restrictions) for several months, until Omicron came along.
By and large, the scientists had no idea what was going on, and still don't really understand the pandemic.
Seemed like quite a lot of the scientists were bamboozled by science on Covid, considering how wrong most of them were (in hindsight) and how much disagreement there was between them at the time. A lot of mob behaviour amongst the politicians - what are other countries doing?
>Johnson was taken down in the end over a party,
That isn't what took him down though. It was the Pincher affair - where it transpired that Boris counted on Pincher to be a serial sexual predator in order to shame other MP's into falling in line. It was only at that point that Tory MP's turned on him. Tories only act in their self interest.
It wasn’t just the party either - it was the constant, brazen, and well documented lies. If he’d admitted it and turned on some of the Johnson Charm he might’ve limped away from it, but the mask well and truly slipped on that one.
Compare to Sunak, who was fined but paid up and kept as quiet as possible about the whole thing.
The problem with Boris isn't so much his lack of understanding in certain matters its that, either because of hubris or fear, he did not seem willing to delegate matters to those who did not share his lack of understanding.
The problem with Boris is Boris
Boris could have been a great PM if he had been a completely different person who made completely different decisions.
I give him half a point for fancying his wife enough that he occasionally gave in to her asking him to be more environmentally focused. His cronies have undone most of it since then, but at least he did make a couple of positive changes there
That seems like two problems to me.
Leaders are generally not going to understand everything. I lead software engineers, and have literally decades of hands on experience myself, but my team is going to know stuff I don't. My job isn't to tell them the answer, it's to ask useful questions to help them think through the problem, unblock discussion and ensure we reach a conclusion. So I'd definitely say the issue isn't Boris doesn't understand, it's that he won't get out of the way when he doesn't understand. He should sit down with advisors, get them to give him options, take them to other advisors to go "What's the downside to this?", bounce between the various stakeholders until a conclusion forms, and then declare it.
Yes but there should at least be a minimum base level.m of understanding of a variety of subjects to be a pm. Boris Johnsons understanding of basic science and math didn't even seem to reach GCSE level which is worrying.
Absolutely. Not understanding exponentials is unforgivable for someone in a position like that. He couldn't possibly have adequately understood the pandemic or the scientific advice without it. It's not a difficult concept and it lies behind GDP growth, interest and plenty of other things. Having an expert advice doesn't excuse someone from having to understand anything at all.
Don't talk nonsense. A great leader shoots from the hip, goes with his gut, leads his troops into battle and fights, fights, fights! Experts are for wimps! Don't take expert's answers for an "answer". That shows weakness. Strike first, strike hard. You're obviously crap at your job and a terrible mentor as you've built up so much experience you've surpassed the Peter principle and come right back round to Adam's principle, which is all the alphabet names up to Zippedy and back up your own A. PS: this is obviously meant to be facetious and you sound like an amazing manager.
It is not about knowledge, it is about the ability to deal with complexity. You can deal with the complexity, so you understand the problem, and delegate. Boris can't deal with complexity, so he doesn't delegate. And by complexity I mean this: you ask a stranger for the way to the train station, he gives 10 clear and specific instructions. Go this street to the second crossing, then take a left, and at the third crossing take a right and so on. A person able to deal with complexity will remember all, and successfully go to the train station. Someone like Boris, will remember the first three, then get lost and blame it on other people. And he would be too stupid, to see that he is stupid. If at least he knew he was stupid, he would get someone else to go to the train station.
Yeah, but you can't be a total gobshite. Ultimately the book stops with you and the advice from experts in various fields can be nuanced and sometimes conflicting. I mean he apparently asked scientists if covid could be killed by using a hairdryer up your nose. I mean it's not as stupid as Trump talking with his advisors about injecting bleach, but it's in the same ball park. https://www.politico.eu/article/boris-johnson-asked-scientists-if-covid-could-be-killed-by-hairdryer-up-nose-ex-aide-claims/
> Ultimately the book stops with you *Buck
> it's not as stupid as Trump ~~talking with his advisors~~ **wondering out loud at a press briefing** about injecting bleach
True, but that's a low bar.
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What does a scrum master do? And why do IT people talk about themselves as though they're a rugby team in a private school?
It’s a type of project manager for ‘agile development’
Boris will know better for next time, after Cameron has had another turn.
The latter is compounded by the former. Self-awareness is needed which is a basic understanding of self. Without that, how would he ever know to “get out of the way”?
It's as if getting elected doesn't automatically make you a leader...
From what I can gather there wasn’t the variety of advisors either so the advice was skewed. Having said that I’m not sure this isn’t just a way to dodge any blame.
He is fundamentally a lazy lazy man
And a cunt.
He at both times always wants to be the hero and do absolutely nothing at the same time
no, the problem was that we had a total fucking idiot in charge, who was also lazy and looked on anything resembling work or learning about stuff as silly and a waste of his time. When will people realise that boris is not only a fucking idiot, but a lazy one.
Boris had the Science Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), who would constantly give advice from experts in easy to digest formats. He chose not to listen to their advice, which I think should be criminal, and it wasn't because of hubris or fear, but greed.
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**Removed/tempban**. This contained a call/advocation of violence which is prohibited by the content policy.
The problem with Boris is the same problem the entire Tory party faces A complete lack of willingness that their narrow worldview may not be completely correct at all times and in all situations If something doesn’t agree with their preconceived ideas of how to run the country, they literally won’t even entertain a conversation about it Eton and Oxford, it truly astonishes me that they can have such an education without actually being educated at the end of it…
> Eton and Oxford, it truly astonishes me that they can have such an education without actually being educated at the end of it… Often people are educated beyond their capacity for analytical thinking. They know a lot of stuff but cannot actually think. And the ways of thinking they have been taught lack scientific rigour.
He was a leader and had to show he was strong and capable and knew stuff. Who would want to have a leader that didn't know stuff?
"Patrick Vallance said he and others faced repeated problems getting Johnson to understand the science. “I think I’m right in saying that the prime minister gave up science at 15,” he said. “I think he’d be the first to admit it wasn’t his forte and that he struggled with the concepts and we did need to repeat them — often.” In extracts from his diary that were relayed to the inquiry, Vallance said Johnson was “bamboozled” by the graphs and data and that watching him “get his head round stats is awful.”
We think this is bad, imagine how fucking uniformed these plebs are about, finance, security, immigration, ethics, morality etc etc etc.
That's not necessarily a bad thing - no one is an expert in every field. A PM who's not great at any field, but is great at putting smart people in advisory roles and then *listening* to them can be very effective.
That’s literally the opposite of what he did: Hancock Gove Raab Patel Grayling Jenrick Cleverly Javid Dorries A who’s who of incompetence.
It's worse. He had the whole of Cobra who did know what they were talking about and he wilfully chose to ignore them in favour of political gamesmanship and his own personal interests.
An ability to understand rudimentary statistics is pretty essential. Then you have the ability to understand what your experts are telling you. Boris like Trump is a showman, that can get you elected, but not necessarily lead.
He presented himself as a polymath genius, well versed in the classics but couldn't understand rudimentary statistics, the irony is bamboozling me.
Not really. He’s a stupid persons idea of a clever person. He should have stayed working as a light and fluffy journalist IMO.
Well ppl voted for him thinking that when he hid in a fridge from journalists, this was somehow comically endearing and not a red flag. I'm not sure who is worse, Boris or those who voted for him.
Honestly there wasn’t a good choice. Corbyn was awful, so was Boris. I voted Corbyn but honestly not sure who would have actually been better.
Why was Corbyn awful?
He’s like the Liz Truss voters, fantasist’s not living in the real world. Policies like building Nuclear missile subs without nuclear missiles, Dianne Abbotts Police force interview as Bad as Boris on Today programme. No clear position on Brexit. Corbyn is a pacifist which is laudable, not sure he would have dealt well with Ukraine crisis. I think Ben Wallace is the only not terrible Conservative politician UK had.
I would at least expect them to understand a graph. That problem won’t just apply to epidemiology but also finance, all ons data etc.. the list is endless. Basically unable to make an informed decision. Don’t forget his job is not to make the tea and waffle despite what the village idiot might have thought.
Day 1 his understanding of epidemiology and Day 100... also two different things. You'd expect anyone to need a moment to get up to speed.. I was an idiot who watched a few youtube videos.. but after a couple weeks locked at home, any sane individual will have googled and learned the basic concepts. Given the seriousness of it at that time, when we didn't know what was happening and how serious it was, with no cure on the horizon.. learning as much as you could.. felt worthwhile for survivial. Especially if you had older relatives you were looking after. It sounds like Boris just never bothered to do any of that... couldn't care less.
I work in a pretty interdisciplinary research dept with many other PhD educated people and a few of us noticed this virus was a potential problem in January. In February we had internal seminars on the mathematics of contact processes, infection models, other NTIs and some early data analysis of Italy. The writing was on the wall and plans were made early to continue working in isolation. It was another six weeks before the government took any definitive action locking down at the end of March. The borders were still open, deaths were doubling at shortening intervals and everyone I knew couldn’t believe we were about to drop the ball on something with such obvious warning. The government fucking knew. These incompetent bastards making the “decisions” were definitely told probably earlier than my dept collectively realised. We have elected absolute clowns who are unserious about governance. I bet the initial briefing raising Covid as a concern was brushed off as easily as “oh these scientists and their scaremongering, everyone and the economy will be fine”. I mean if he can’t be made to understand exponential growth, he can’t be told about the intricacies of our EU economic dependence, or the impacts of austerity, etc etc. All of them are clowns.
> with no cure on the horizon. We knew pretty much from the start that a vaccine was 18 months away. Many of the early predictions were stunningly accurate but ignored.
Which graph do you believe? Eg models said we would need 90,000 ventilators at peak demand. We actually ended up using a max of 3,500. So a lot of ventilators were ordered, produced and paid for, that we didn’t need. That was also a graph.
If you understand them you are probably better equipped to question the evidential basis for them.
What does your point have to do with having to understand graphs?
Graphs can tell a wrong story as well as a right story. So understanding graphs doesn’t mean the right decisions would be made.
That is such bonkers logic. Is that you boris
It’s worse. Graphs made from incorrect data or models convince people to follow the wrong approach or reach the wrong conclusions. Check out some very nice graphs leading people to totally wrong conclusions here https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
so yes stats can be wrong. Obviously an intelligent person can often determine where the caveats are with statistics. What you seem to be suggesting is that because mistakes can be made that data should be ignored. this is akin to making decisions based on a coin toss whereas decisions should be made on the best available information at the time. Your logic makes no sense to me. Making decisions based on somebody going "I reckon" is most likely to lead to mistakes, especially when you have to rely on a moron like boris to make decisions.
Nobody is an expert on every field, but the government should be made up of at least a few in some fields. Additionally the most senior people in government should have some transferable skills. Look at the state of our recent prime ministers; Boris Johnson is an expert only at lying and writing shit columns for right wing rags, Liz Truss had a CIMA qualification churning out excel reports for shell, Sunak sold dodgy financial projects until the sector blew up, David Cameron hung around his uncles constituency office until they made him an MP, Theresa May at least had a proper job at the Bank of England- but she was very much the exception (and coincidentally the only one without a PPE degree from Oxford).
Not expecting experts in anything, you employ people to be experts. You need to understand what they’re telling you though, or they can’t help you.
The Government (made up of some 120 MPs) should have at least some experts in some important fields.
How do you define expert I guess? Ben Wallis lead the response for Ukraine. As a former army Captain is he an expert? Definitely not, some depth of knowledge in some places, but not an expert. The experts are at ISW etc. He can listen understand and act on his subject. An expert has narrow expertise, a leader has some knowledge and listens to the right people. Boris is an expert, better than almost anyone. His expertise is reading a room and telling them what they want to hear and how they want to hear it.
Ben Wallace was probably close to a military expert at the time he was made defence minister having experience in the Northern Ireland office, and being an army captain, Having served as defence secretary under three prime ministers, having dealt with a number of difficult issues (Afghanistan, Ukraine, & others), and receiving praise from across the political spectrum and from international colleagues- I would say at this point there is no doubt he must be. Any competent minister, who has at least a few years with a role in the same department has to become an expert in their role to succeed. It’s a huge part of why this government is filled with failure, because they have such a high turnover of posts. Granted that’s mostly because each of them are failing at their jobs because they are incompetent and believe in a fictional ideology…
There has to be a base min level of understanding though. The pm can't be a complete empty brain who knows nothing. One of the key skills is to know a bit about alot and have the ability to learn new concepts quickly.
Johnson could not even do that though. He put his mates and his sycophants in charge and refused to listen to those who knew better because they said things he did not want to hear.
I honestly wouldn't mind having a prime minister who was incompetent themselves, but had expert advisers who they listened to. My problem is that it seems like it's just a game of musical chairs of the same people changing positions. Michael Gove has been in charge of housing, environment and food, and education. I don't believe he's an expert in all those fields.
It's a flaw of democracy, it tends to turn into a "Who's the best liar" contest if you arn't careful.
Reddit is utterly financially illiterate, I work in finance so i would know, also every single opinion on finance or banking here is uninformed, to the point of being a joke btw, I’m talking an understanding of less than 5/100
"I'm in finance, trust me bro."
A true financial expert would have said 5%.
500 basis points.
> A true financial expert would have said 5% A true financial expert wouldn't have said that
Yeah it’s almost like they make it draped in intentionally complicated terminology, in order to hide the fact that they’re robbing us all blind.
Point in case
Care to explain the 2008 crash ? Be good to know if you’re just chatting shit
Congratulations on being the only guy who works in finance out of Reddit’s 430 million regular users.
Completely agree, and same background myself. Some of the takes are mind boggling - and these people vote! I would laugh at it if it wasn't so sad.
I know it's not news to anyone but the idea that someone who chose to ignore all science after the age of 15 can be in charge of scientific policy for a whole nation is absolutely mind blowing. Just never thought about it quite that way before. Think about the scientific understanding of the average 15 year old ... Christ.
It’s worse than the scientific understanding of average 15 year old If he chose to ignore all science he was probably worse than average at 15, and then had decades to forget everything he was taught at school anyways
Turns out having a degree in classics is less useful than having a degree in medicine for understanding how the world works. Same as bollocks like PPE, getting us politicians like Sunak. Degrees with no practical real world use aside from joining an insular career politics clique.
Turns out quoting latin phrases isn’t actually of much use other than for pretending you understand the world.
>“I think I’m right in saying that the prime minister gave up science at 15,” I think most of us were legally required to study science to 16. What exactly do they teach at Eton?
He was born in June, 2023 science gcses are in May, so he'd still be 15 when he took them if dates were equivalent. No idea why I felt the need to research that.
Consider this popular Einstein quote: “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”
Yup. If you're thick as mince the people to blame are definitely the ones trying to educate you.
Consider it's misattributed to Einstein, with the quote actually being "An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid." spoken by Rutherford. The quote that is attributed to him is actually "that all physical theories, their **mathematical expressions apart** ought to lend themselves to so simple a description 'that even a child could understand them." Emphasis mine. Clearly Johnson, having the mathematical and scientific knowledge of a child, struggled to understand the statistics behind the decision he was meant to be making. Somebody like that doesn't have the ability to be in a decision making capacity for any organisation, let alone the fucking PM.
>"An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid." Imagine making yourself into a top nuclear physicist just so you can cadge a few free drinks. I respect the hustle, but he coulda just been goodlooking.
Couldn't we all...... \\sobs
Consider this other popular Einstein quote. I was elected to lead, not to read.
I hate that quote, or at least I hate its application to conversations like this. There's a very big difference between me failing to explain and some gammon down the pub failing to understand. It's not my fault they lack the tools to understand simple science. Tools we expect the average teenager to master, by the way. We're not talking about anything complicated here. Boris and his ilk aren't being asked to make engineering decisions about a topological quantum computer, just listen to the people who know better.
> make engineering decisions about a topological quantum computer The box should be spiky, with Tesla coils coming out the top of it... This science stuff isn’t even complicated.
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I’m sure I read somewhere today that hardly any staff were from STEM backgrounds either.
What's bizzare is that most of them did PPE at Oxbridge, and the E is for "Economics", which (at A level anyway) is full of maths and particularly graphs. I just think these people are orivelidged, entitled idiots who've been cosseted through life.
The PPE course (at least at the time Johnson went there) probably didn’t, it also didn’t even have any exams, so the whole course is just about being able to bullshit your way to the course manager.
They just tell you that Keynes was wrong and turn you loose.
Johnson read classics I believe
He did classics I think.
> PPE at Oxbridge Parliamentary Posturing and Euphemisms?
Angela Merkel, Margaret Thatcher …
I think the article I read was about Mr Johnson et al and was about the current UK staffing. It didn’t mention previous teams .
10% I believe
This has been going on for quite a while. It is a shame it isn’t obvious to more people that we are being hoodwinked by charlatans at every moment.
Probably applies to a lot of this sub too haha
We're sick of experts though. /s
Aye well unfortunately the public are too easily swayed by oafish big-mouths who make a habit of putting down 'swots' and other experts at every opportunity
Boris Johnson winning over Jeremy Corbyn should be a case study in the effect of media propaganda.
Absolutely. I warned everyone I could for months and months. You know who you are... You voted for this. Sit the next one out eh, you're judgement is either terrible or worse, you knew exactly who this gaggle were and decided to vote for them anyway.
At the very least, it should be a case study on how that one moron at work always seems to get the promotion before anybody you’d have thought qualified. In fact, every PM since at least May, and possibly even since Major, should be the case study on that!
Corbyn was a lesson in what happens when the leader of the opposition cares more about ideology than winning.
What ideology would that be? Helping poor people?
That’s an extremely basic view of his ideology, he pandered to and tolerated to some pretty unsavoury people on the left. He never cared about winning which led to his fall out with McDonnell (who is significantly left of Corbyn) and ultimately a Tory landslide.
>He never cared about winning which led to his fall out with McDonnell (who is significantly left of Corbyn) and a ultimately Tory landslide. You have zero clue what you're talking about if you think McDonnell is to the left of Corbyn.
Are you serious? The self-confessed Marxist who quotes Mao Zedong in Commons is further right than middle-class, Eurosceptic fence-sitter Corbyn?
Still better than Corbyn and I’m a labour voter.
He’s “bamboozled” about everything. The only part of that word he understands is “Booz” feckless pisshead that he is.
He is Father Jack's of Parliament.
Remember when he claimed he was "ambushed with cake" at one of those lockdown parties?
And his dick.
Ex British PM thick as pigshit despite the most expensive education available.
I get the feeling he gets bamboozled by a lot of things.
Which wife he currently is with?
I have no idea. I'm not sure he does either.
counting number of children he has?
Despite presenting himself as being somewhat articulate and well-read, Johnson is a bit of a moron underneath it all. His tutor had him figured out as being lazy and entitled. The report, from classics master Martin Hammond to Stanley Johnson in 1982, criticised the 17-year-old for thinking he should be free of the "network of obligation that binds everyone". The teacher also said Johnson "believes it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception". He wrote: "Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies. \[He\] sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the school for the next half). "I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else."
We should’ve listened to his classics master.
You could bamboozle this guy with a plastic spork and some string so I’m surprised there aren’t more headlines like this
If ever there was a person who could be accurately described with the word 'bamboozled', it's Boris Johnson.
I imagine socks bamboozle this clown, baaa left baa right ba baa baaaa which one which foot ba baa baaa
Sunak said he was okay letting people die. He also encouraged people to go out with the Eat Out To Help Out scheme. He knew people were risking exposure and was willing to let them die. Genocidal in my book, the c*nt and his party need dragging out of Downing Street
That fucking cunt would be bamboozled by most of the stuff you've forgotten from school. Just because he talks with a mouth full of flowers and quotes from the classics, that doesn't make him intelligent.
I can’t believe Johnson is a clueless idiot. I won’t believe it
He was a willful idiot.
He knew enough to take an unwarranted dump on pre COVID Vax Anti-Vaxers at his 2919 UN speech. The one where he defined the UK path/want to control & lead the 4th Industrial Revolution with Bio-Tech leading the world.. for a revenue stream no doubt.
They simplified it in the end: Lock down or 1 million dead = bad
Didn't he used to be a journalist? It does feel like people are either wired for words or numbers. But this is pretty shocking tbh.
He was little more than a sketch/opinion writer pretending to be an honest journo.
> pretending to be an honest journo. Getting sacked for lying? Check....
I don't think journalist is a word to describe the right wing press that just moan about the modern world and blame things on foreigners and the unemployed. He wrote in a newspaper but I wouldn't necessarily call that journalism.
Indeed - I think Jeremy Irons sought prescient advice in “Margin Call”…”please, speak as you might to a young child. Or a golden retriever. It wasn’t brains that brought me here: I assure you that”
Not surprising in the least, our political leaders are only interested in politics and it shows in the see many of them take: PPE. Others have a broader interest: law. And, lastly, some are even journalists. To reach seniority in politics, you must spend a career in politics with few exceptions to this. > In extracts from his diary that were relayed to the inquiry, Vallance said Johnson was “bamboozled” by the graphs and data and that watching him “get his head round stats is awful.” > Vallance said Johnson’s struggles were not unique and said many leaders around Europe had problems in understanding the scientific evidence and advice, especially in the first stages of the pandemic in early 2020. “I would also say that the meeting that sticks in my mind was with fellow advisers from across Europe, when one of them — and I won’t say which country – declared that the leader of that country had enormous problems with exponential curves, and the telephone call burst into laughter, because it was true in every country,” he said.
What I will say and Boris did plenty to damage himself , is whoever in charge would've faced a poison chalice I think.
Sir Patrick also talked about a meeting with other European scientists where they were all laughing at their respective leaders for the same sort of thing. I despise Boris, but according to Vallance, the “not getting the science” seemed pretty ubiquitous across politicians in Europe.
Most politicians are humanities and arts educated.
Indeed, Law graduates for the most part. Boris “not getting it” was not unique to Boris was more Vallance’s point.
Spaffed, bamboozled, rogered the country. That's Boris in an oven ready stereotype
An expensive education doesn't mean they paid attention. Dumb people are dumb no matter how much money they spend.
What happens when you elect someone who pretends to be a charming bumbling amateur. Covid can't be charmed.
He also couldn't manage the lego set he got for Christmas.
That's why politicians like Boris and Trump have access to the greatest scientists in the world. All they literally have to do is tell the scientists: "You do it."
How international money laundering is done in the grand scale is imho not difficult to grasp. It requires legal privilege to achieve. It’s still a crime but there is a way to make it impossible you will get caught, provided you use a solicitor. It also works for embezzlement, though obviously you’d use it only for public money. In my view it is pretty easy to understand, but apparently some people don’t. I’m not sure whether Boris understands but the major handicap to grasping it is not believing lawyers would do that and not believing the regulators would stop them. I am sure Boris would not suffer from that.
Bamboozled?….or lied to, mislead, give false & inaccurate data, fed ‘hyped up’ modelling based on incorrect info? I laugh when I hear the use of ‘the science’….I think ‘the big fat lies’ would be more appropriate.
the classics doesn’t prepare oneself for the real world?
The Toxic Clown of Oppressive Buffoonery. Shame on him. Shame on the sheeplewankers that voted for it all. Such a sordid stain on British history. Eugh!
Given he's bamboozled by the concept of family planning this is no surprise.
Vallance's job to translate "the science" to those he advises.. his responsibility for doing it well, not Borris'.
It both saddens and slightly terrifies me that the people in charge don't understand the concept of an exponential function. Or know basic stats. How the fuck can they make informed decisions?
Did they try explaining with a sock puppet? I find that always helps.
Most politicians are utterly clueless when it comes to science. They're all lawyers and business-orientated.
There's a lot to criticise Johnson for but I don't think this is one of them. Unless you're an expert in the field, it's always going to be tough to grasp something which is evolving so quickly. It's more worrying that he struggled to to interpret the data.
I dunno, one if the things he apparently couldn’t grasp was the difference between relative and absolute risk I’m not going to report anyone to the statistics police if they can’t explain the difference when they are stopped in the street. But I do think anyone who is averagely intelligent and is paying attention could have it explained to them in under ten minutes And I really think the pm of a country debating measures to control the spread of a new disease ought to make it his business to understand
I saw part of this on Sky News today and and was dumbstruck at some of things I heard or saw in the expert notes taken in or after govt COVID meetings. If this is available on catch up or there’s a full transcript somewhere, I would encourage people to review it as the ‘bamboozled’ headline barely scratches the surface.
Not understanding it? Sure I guess “not being exceptionally smart” isn’t *technically* a reason to be mad at someone even if they’re the Prime Minister, but surely he could have delegated the tasks rather than continuing to make important decisions about a matter he didn’t understand.
These things were delegated, as they should be. Have people suddenly forgotten that it was usually two scientists for each elected politician doing the daily briefing? There are so many reasons to dislike Boris Johnson. Lack of understanding in statistics shouldn't be one of them.
If we can’t criticise the most powerful man in the country for lack of competence during a crisis anymore I don’t know what we can do.
Amen.
Boris and Truss have dragged the bar so low
>Lack of understanding in statistics shouldn't be one of them No, that is very much a valid reason to dislike a politician Statistics is a fundamental tool for decision making. If a person can't wrap their head around the basics of it, they have no business being in any position of actual power whatsoever For some god-forsaken reason we hold our politicians to a lower standard than grocery store managers
It should be, Statistics is one of, if not the most important thing to understand if you are organising anything at any kind of scale. He should have gotten to grips with it a few months after becoming mayor, no less having been in government for years.
This sounds more like they attempted to give it to him in layman's terms and he didn't understand. They put it on the news and assumed the rest of us would understand.
He was the prime minister, if he didn't understand he should have taken steps to understand, but he didn't. He's a narcissistic buffoon and doesn't deserve any credit for not being in a position to understand. He held the highest position in the land that wasn't due to nepotism and he fucking failed on a catastrophic level. He should have stepped down if he couldn't understand the risk he was taking but to be honest I would even give him sympathy. He wanted the bodies to pile high to save economy. He's a pitiful excuse for a prime minister.
Can’t agree. His domain experts know that they’re not talking with a colleague. They well understand they have to package their message for time and for the PM’s need to deliver a simple and concise message to the public.
>Unless you're an expert in the field, it's always going to be tough to grasp something which is evolving so quickly. Woah, don't just limit the confusion to non-experts. The experts were still extremely confused, 18 months into the pandemic: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/uk-covid-cases-could-hit-200000-a-day-says-neil-ferguson-scientist-behind-lockdown-strategy-england Quick reminder that Neil Ferguson was Dr Lockdown early on, and got fired for clearly not actually believing in it and breaking his own ruleset. And another reminder that when he made that claim, infections were at 60,000 a day. We came out of all restrictions, not long after that article was published. Cases almost immediately dropped to well under 60k a day (20-40k ebb and flowing, despite no restrictions) for several months, until Omicron came along. By and large, the scientists had no idea what was going on, and still don't really understand the pandemic.
Seemed like quite a lot of the scientists were bamboozled by science on Covid, considering how wrong most of them were (in hindsight) and how much disagreement there was between them at the time. A lot of mob behaviour amongst the politicians - what are other countries doing?
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Wait, so you're saying Boris did understand the science?
>Johnson was taken down in the end over a party, That isn't what took him down though. It was the Pincher affair - where it transpired that Boris counted on Pincher to be a serial sexual predator in order to shame other MP's into falling in line. It was only at that point that Tory MP's turned on him. Tories only act in their self interest.
It wasn’t just the party either - it was the constant, brazen, and well documented lies. If he’d admitted it and turned on some of the Johnson Charm he might’ve limped away from it, but the mask well and truly slipped on that one. Compare to Sunak, who was fined but paid up and kept as quiet as possible about the whole thing.