Thread by @jonworth

OK, the anatomy of the #Perugia story, and why - now with a considerable degree of certainty - Johnson was *not* there on the weekend 12-13 September, and why I was wrong

First of all 👏 @marklowen who got to the bottom of this better than anyone else

The whole thing stemmed from this piece by @antoguerrera for Repubblica:
repubblica.it/esteri/2020/09…

Some are pointing the finger at the paper, but look at the statement the airport gave - "al Premier Inglese Boris Johnson, preceduto da Tony Blair" - it's categoric

There was one part of the story that did not work - the dates. Johnson was in a Zoom call at 1700 CET.

Telegraph even reported some MPs thought his location to be abnormal:

But these screens would have been v hard to fake:




So *if* Johnson had gone, it'd probably have to have been on 12 Sept, not 10 or 11 Sept.

That - we now know from this thread - was *not* the case:


There was 1 passenger on the flight 12 Sept - not Johnson. And the person on the flight 13 Sept inbound and 14 Sept outbound was Tony Blair

So I got it wrong.

I assumed the airport was more likely to have got its dates confused than get its whole story wrong.

That assumption I made was wrong.

Also a note of thanks to @timmermansr & @littlegravitas for all the flight data. That was all spot on - but the assumption as to who was on the planes that were found... was based on the statement from the airport that turned out to be wrong.

We still do not know if there was a baptism, or where it was. Plenty of the incorrect conclusions are still online right now (mine are not - tweets have been deleted in light of what I now know).

I hope that sets the record straight.

/ends

Update: we know there was a baptism, in Westminster. We do not know who attended it.