TRUMP 2.0?

I did an interview for @hitsradiouk on the second Trump presidency (broadcasting tomorrow).

A few points.

👉🏼USA has 93,000 elected governments - the President is only one of them. Presidential power is limited by multi-level governments, and separation of powers 👉🏼Trump 2 is a one term President. The succession fight starts now. The MAGA movement is full of contradictions and is already fragmenting

👉🏼There are mid-term congressional elections in 2 years. Strong chance Republicans lose control of Congress?

A short photo-thread of just some of the responses to the D Day Dodger …

THE REVERSE HALO EFFECT?

There is a theory called the “Halo Effect” where everything a successful organisation or individual does is seen as “good” or even “excellent”. Everything is coloured by success.
1/ When this happens everything they do - even things we'd normally think were bad - are somehow magically transmuted by their success. Or ignored (wilful blindness).

Until The Fall. When things start to go wrong people's perceptions of attributes and actions start to change.
2/

CORONAVIRUS: LESSONS LEARNED

I am going to try to tweet my reactions as I go thru it in depth. Including things I think they have missed or got wrong.

(Might take a while as distracted by sick son (17) who may have finally gotten the bloody virus.) EXEC SUMMARY

First 3 months UK Govt reaction framed by groupthink amongst scientists and politicians.

One crucial issue (for me) was fear that any ‘lockdown’ would not hold long. WHERE DID THIS IDEA COME FROM? Hope this is explained later?

VAX CHALLENGE

Reminder of the size of the vaccination challenge.

First, the size of the priority groups who need to be vaccinated. The Government say they want to have given at least one dose of a vaccine to the first 4 groups - nearly 14m people - by mid Feb.

That means getting the rates of vaccination up to at least 2.5m a week, or 359,000 a day, within a week or two.

Hi all. I’d really like to know if there is enough interest to make going ahead with this worthwhile tomorrow?

Please email me if its ‘yes’, so I can share a Zoom link.

Thanks. Colin Some questions that HAVE come in:

Will the NHS ever be taken seriously enough as a highly valuable, and hard-to-repeat, asset to be run by a cross-party entity rather than by the given incumbents? Rebecca Peyton

VAX CHALLENGE

Rough calculation. To reach 13.9 million (single dose only) by the middle of Feb this is the sort of rate at which vaccinations need to be delivered.

If the target is 2m a week (as seems to be the case) then it would be very unlikely to hit the 13.9m. VAX CHALLENGE /2

If vaccinations (single dose) carried on at the rate of 2.5m a week (357,000 a day) it would take until the MIDDLE OF APRIL before the 9 priority groups in Phase One had any protection (35m people).

If 2nd doses are being given the challenge gets even bigger.

THREAD: Russia, Resilience & Covid-19

The security and intelligence agencies are getting some stick over Russia. So here's a small corrective.

Having worked as adviser to GCHQ for 8 years and having had DV security clearance, I have some small idea of how this world works. First - the agencies do what their political masters task them to do. They have some small strategic and a bit more operational autonomy but their broad priorities are set by Ministers.

If Ministers are not interested in Russia there are limits to what the agencies can do about.

I have been pondering the question I posed y'day about why a Government so supposedly interested in “data science” seems incapable of handling data about C19 with any semblence of competence?

Testing, PPE, cases, you name it they seem to have gotten it wrong. Badly wrong. Why? The usual assumption in cases like this is its a choice between cock-up and conspiracy. There's clearly an element of both, but I think it goes deeper than that.

We have a Govt led by bullshitters. And this is the key to understanding this issue.

100k tests.

A great example of why, sometimes, targets are extremely damaging.

Not, I hasten to add, because measuring performance is always wrong.

Targets and performance measurement are not identical.

Targets need performance measurement, but PM does not need targets. Badly designed and used targets can encourage dysfunctional attempts to meet the target, but miss the point.

In this case an arbitrary target - 100k tests - replaced a clear idea of what, and who, we needed widespread testing for.

We needed enough to test, trace and isolate.

The UKs inconsistent ways of making constitutional changes are being cruelly exposed by the Brexit maelstrom.

Take the Fixed Term Parliaments Act.

It was clearly a signficant constitutional change, but introduced by a simple series of majority votes in Parliament.

1/ It tried to introduce a check on the Executive (PM) arbitrarily overturning it and calling Elections by introducing a requirement for 2/3rds of MPs to vote for an election.

BUT it only needs a simple majority to overturn the Act, by passing another Act to temporarily suspend it.

Quick thread on Parliamentary (representative) democracy versus direct (referendum) democracy.

The EU Referendum was sold initially as subordinate to Representative democracy. It was to be purely advisory to Parliament. But once it was passed into legislation the Tory Govt (and others) started behaving as if it was superior to representative democracy - whatever the outcome it would be a mandate Government and Parliament could not ignore.