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Dmitry Grozoubinski Profile picture
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Jan 28 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Um. This isn't great.

People were running around and borrowing the PM's authority without authorization for matters relating to an ongoing military operation and evacuation in a city actively falling to the Taliban?

You guys get that's not great, right?
There's literally a West Wing clip about this:

The @BBCNews story that quote is from is here, if you want to read it in context and in full.

bbc.com/news/uk-politi…
I can't get over that there was a meeting somewhere in which it was decided the GOOD spin on this is to say that in the evacuation of Kabul decisions on prioratizing evacuation spots were being made by people pretending, or wrongly perceived, to be wielding the PM's authority.
Even if this was a simple misunderstanding, it's an obscene failure of chain of command and procedure for there be any ambiguity whatsoever about what the Prime Minister has and has not ordered under any circumstances, but especially during a crisis.
Legitimately the most comforting outcome here would be if it turns out the Prime Minister is simply lying about who he authorised saved from a falling city.

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More from @DmitryOpines

Dmitry Grozoubinski Profile picture
Jan 28
1/ I'm inclined to agree with this, but more because of how I think narratives and media work than anything else.

The last month has revealed not only that a god can bleed, but exactly where his unhealed wounds may lie if one but pokes hard enough.

Some thoughts.
2/ A narrative can be extremely powerful in determining what makes it into the media we consume and how it's framed.

There's a reason news stories around a particular theme seem to happen in clusters. Nothing for a year, then relentlessly one after another.
3/ As a general rule media organizations like stories that align with established narratives and those that are directly and shockingly in contrast to it.

What they don't like is a story that runs contrary to narrative, but only mildly. No one reads those.
Read 8 tweets
Dmitry Grozoubinski Profile picture
Jan 27
David Frost should be explicit about what he's proposing here.

The maximally charitable (least Bolshevik) interpretation is that he wants to move the UK to a US-like model whereby most senior positions in the civil service are political appointees who resign after each election. Image
The less charitable interpretations are all too stupid to contemplate.

Is your woke purging going to mean you fire everyone with pronouns in their e-mail signature when Frost comes in as PM, then fire everyone without them a few years later when a Labour PM takes over?
If Lord Frost's premise is that policy can only be delivered by a civil service where all individuals fully align in their hearts with the ideology of the government of the day then you are going to need a very different model of governance to the one you've had for centuries.
Read 4 tweets
Dmitry Grozoubinski Profile picture
Jan 25
As a Ukrainian, watching obvious Boris Johnson superfan accounts cynically deploy the looming re-invasion of my birth country as a talking point to try and save their boy is gross, and the desperation pathetic.
FAQ #1: "The UK response has been great, shut up!"

A: Yes, it's been good! Certainly better than Germany's. And all that despite taking place in the middle of this crisis so by your own admission, partygate hasn't impeded it. UK walking and chewing gum same time, no problem.
FAQ #2: "This is in fact media criticism, why aren't they reporting more about Ukraine?"

A: Unless you're sending this tweet from inside a trench northeast of Mariupol, you likely know about what's going on in Ukraine from the same media you claim isn't reporting it.
Read 4 tweets
Dmitry Grozoubinski Profile picture
Jan 19
As a former negotiator who now teaches this stuff, I promise you it makes a difference when the Minister in charge is seeking warm working relations and a path to progress instead of social media acrimony and a pretext for trade war.

It just does. 🤷‍♂️
The gaps toward a final-final 'resolution' after which Northern Ireland is working to the full satisfaction of everyone are immense.

However, on a volatile issue in a volatile area and during a volatile time, the UK under @trussliz is no longer gleefully lighting fuses.

Good.
A slide from a training on negotiation skills I recently did for the NHS.

"What does a win look like for the person with the authority?" is a critical question to consider in any negotiation.

A 'win' for David Frost was not incremental progress, it was collapse and Article 16.
Read 4 tweets
Dmitry Grozoubinski Profile picture
Dec 27, 2021
1/ Habib's argument, that the TCA is preventing the UK from massively deregulating and thus delivering the "traditional Tory Brexit" he envisaged, is in direct contradiction to the UK government's repeated claims it had no intention of deregulating to race Europe to the bottom.
2/ Let's recall the horrors of the TCA negotiations.

The EU:
- was offering full market access, but wanted legal commitments that the UK wouldn't deregulate in areas like environment and labor rights to "exploit" that access.

This was the dreaded "Level Playing Field"
3/ The UK:

- Argued its regulations in these areas were world/europe leading
- That it had no intention of undermining them and never would
- That the level playing field commitments the EU sought were an unacceptable loss of sovereignty and more than you see in other FTAs
Read 5 tweets
Dmitry Grozoubinski Profile picture
Dec 17, 2021
1/ Five reasons I think the Christmas Party scandal is so damaging:

Because they denied the (many many) parties happened at all, every new detail released is breaking news, and the potential sources for @PippaCrerar, @Annaisaac et al are legion.

The news cycle just won't end.
2/ It plays into not only the one narrative that has ever actually hurt the government (rules hypocrisy), but the one they were actively embattled in thanks to launching the world's dumbest attempt to rescue Owen Patterson from the consequences of his own actions.
3/ It is fundamentally a lockdowns thing occurring right as lockdowns are once again foremost in people's minds.

It doesn't feel like ancient history because Omicron has made this Christmas feel a lot like the one they partied through.
Read 5 tweets

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