There is no one better informed of the adequacy of the Prime Minister's response than Sir Alex; and there is no judgment of its adequacy that he could make more damning than this one.
In one very plausible future world, the most appalling, unexpurgated, account is given under oath of Patel's conduct in an Employment Tribunal and @BorisJohnson then has to defend her conduct because of what he has said today.
Putting the matter another way, Johnson has managed to be ethically deplorable and strategically inept all at once.
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Here is an extract from the leaked Govt document about Moonshot with that £100bn+ number.
We need to catch up with updating the media but I can confirm we have issued judicial review proceedings in relation to (sound familiar?) the Government's (1) choice of weird contractual counterparties and (2) failure to consult with its own expert advisory body.
We also have profound concerns - which we are pursuing with Government lawyers - about the fact that consent was never sought from Parliament for this absolutely mindblowing spend (the NAO report is about 'only' £18bn of spending.)
Lots of - quite proper - outrage at the PPE VIP Channel, largely filled with contacts of Ministers. Institutionalised cronyism.
Worth remembering that @GoodLawProject ran this story back in October - and the only newspaper to pick it up in a serious way was the Daily Mail.
The Mail under Geordie Grieg is a very different newspaper to what it was under Paul Dacre (and a very different newspaper to its sister Sunday Sewer edited by Ted Verity). It has the appetite to lead and not just follow public opinion.
Here's the story we ran about VIP channels goodlawproject.org/news/special-p… (which the Government never denied, by the way) but which even the Financial Times lacked the courage to run.
Yep, the National Audit Office report on PPE - well the first part of it - is out at midnight and it tackles Ayanda, Pestfix, VIP channels, Clandeboye, Public First, failures of transparency.... all those drums we've been banging, the whole timpani, for the last four months.
Tomorrow I'll be doing some detailed threads on different aspects of the report. It makes for striking reading - even after having been 'fact-checked' by Government. (Yes we have asked the High Court to order Government to supply the pre 'fact-checked' version.)
We're pleased the press is taking this stuff seriously now. The governance failures around the £15bn of PPE spend are dreadful. But they are as nothing compared to where Government is on its £100bn+ "Moonshot" project, still apparently run by Dominic Cummings, esq.
Lots of headscratching about Pestfix and its facemasks. It has at least one contract, for £168.5m, to supply facemasks to the NHS and the Health and Safety Executive says it rejected some Pestfix facemasks.
But this report, of Pestfix facemasks that failed a safety check, and that was in HSE files, seems to relate not to the facemasks the subject of the HSE email but facemasks that Pestfix sold privately.
Pestfix sold privately - and then either had to or chose to - recall three different types of faulty facemasks it had sold to the private sector.