If you want to know who's running things over there, London is about to go into strict lockdown. But in any case the rules will be lifted December 23-27 because, well, Pickwick and Cratchit and oranges around the fire. I don't know.
This has changed to a strict lockdown covering London and "much of the south and east," whatever that means. Households outside this area can now mix with other households on Christmas Day only.
When "Brexit" goes to hell, and it will, soon, the parliamentary party will fast put Johnson in a gibbet and all that Churchill garbage, which not even his allies really believe, will go up in smoke forever.
When Johnson was Mayor of London he won because -- I never tire of saying this -- I am not exaggerating -- people thought he was "a laugh." That is why he's Prime Minister now. Because the British have a fatal weakness for that type of buffoon. But only to a point.
The parliamentary party is leaking that Johnson knew earlier this week he would impose the new, tight, amorphous lockdown, and delayed it until Parliament left town. "That is a resigning offense."
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
The House of Commons this week voted down providing free school meals to children during the Christmas break. Local councils are now stepping in, spurred by the footballer Marcus Rashford, who shamed the government into acting once already.
Nothing changed. Trump spoke English, as he sometimes does, and did a reasonable job of hitting his marks. And that’s all it was—his marks. His relative fluency will make for horse race-type speculation but he only repeated what he’s done for six months and more.
Biden was sharper than the town hall, and as I said, did a good job of knowing when to talk to the camera for brass tacks: “You’re poor, you’re sick, I’m here for you.” It sounds simplistic but he was for the popular things and spoke of them in reasonable detail.
Trump sneering at Biden when he talked of the kitchen table will come back again.
Brooks Robinson in the ‘70 World Series is the single greatest all-around performance by a third baseman ever. Fifty years later, anyone who saw it gets reduced to stammering.
Robinson was the MVP. He won a car. Pete Rose said, “If I’d known he wanted a car that badly, I’d have bought him one.”
There have been other great players at third since, but to play like Robinson did, and Schmidt too, they did all the stuff with numbers and probabilities they do now, but in their heads. There’s good and great, but playing like a ghost is another thing entirely.
Harris did her job. She’s lockstep with Biden and often did better at explaining his positions than he does. The main thing is she did nothing to become the story.
Pence hitched himself to Trump tight on his own, but in complete sentences and with a plastic preacher sort of warmth. Harris hit him best when she broke the stitches of his words and exposed the Trump original underneath.
Women will hate Pence running his mouth—note the look in his eyes as he was admonished. Don’t mistake his relative fluency for success. The goals have moved. He spoke too often in stock phrases where Harris went for the kitchen table.
There was some question about the reaction to Boris Johnson's diagnosis. We answered it but perhaps it's better to do so for everyone. Namely, Johnson's diagnosis resulted in goodwill which he then turned into political advantage. I doubt that will happen here.
First, Johnson had not ground the country down over years as Trump has. Second, Johnson is, if you squint, and in a way only they are familiar with, likable. It's the only reason why he's in the job at all.
And perhaps most important, they were clear on the diagnosis. He spoke to the country at length. He quarantined. He went to the hospital when necessary, and clear, if discreet, updates were given from there.
I've said it before but I think in the coming years Albert Speer is someone who will be more relevant than he's been in a long time. The Gitta Sereny book.
If you don't know, Gitta Sereny came to know Speer after his release. She liked him. Because of this she, through a series of interviews and research, proceeded to destroy beyond a shadow of a doubt all his claims of innocence.
Her book seeks to understand how a man can become "not just amoral, but morally extinguished."