One thing I wasn't aware of is that the Govt are now being criticized for sending PPE to Wuhan, I didn't know we'd done that, fair comment, perhaps we should have adopted Germany's attitude and told countries who were in dire need to *** off.
So a few bullet points from The Guardian article:
“Most Cobra meetings don’t have the prime minister attending them,” Gove said. “That is the whole point.” Cobra meetings were “led by the relevant secretary of state in the relevant area”, he argued.
“Whoever is chairing those meetings reports to the prime minister. The prime minister is aware of all of these decisions and takes some of those decisions. You can take a single fact, wrench it out of context, whip it up in order to create a j’accuse narrative. But that is not fair reporting.”
Gove is correct in that prime ministers do not always, or even routinely, chair Cobra meetings. But it is common for them to do so during a major crisis.
The five meetings Johnson missed came during a period in February where he spent an entire parliamentary recess out of sight at his official country retreat of Chequers, prompting Labour to accuse him at the time of being a “part-time prime minister”.
Gove told the Ridge show that it was wrong to argue that Johnson had been “anything other than energetic, focused, determined and strong in his leadership against this virus”.
“The idea that the prime minister skipped meetings that were vital to our response to the coronavirus I think is grotesque,” Gove said.
On the shipment of PPE to China, in his interview on the Ridge show, Gove refused to say three times whether this had happened, saying only that some aspects of the Sunday Times story were wrong.
A shortage of PPE for NHS and care home staff has been a repeated criticism of the UK response to coronavirus, with the Guardian revealing on Friday that NHS staff had been told to wear plastic aprons if stocks of protective gowns ran out.
But on the Marr show he accepted it was true, saying this was done “to help with the most extreme outbreak in Wuhan”. The PPE had not come from pandemic stockpiles, Gove said, and since then the UK had received “far more” PPE from China, he added.
Asked whether the government had made mistakes in its response to the pandemic, Gove accepted this broad point: “All governments make mistakes, including our own. We seek to learn, and to improve every day. It is the case, I’m sure, at some point in the future that there will be an opportunity for us to look back, to reflect and to learn some profound lessons.”
So a few bullet points from The Guardian article:
“Most Cobra meetings don’t have the prime minister attending them,” Gove said. “That is the whole point.” Cobra meetings were “led by the relevant secretary of state in the relevant area”, he argued.
“Whoever is chairing those meetings reports to the prime minister. The prime minister is aware of all of these decisions and takes some of those decisions. You can take a single fact, wrench it out of context, whip it up in order to create a j’accuse narrative. But that is not fair reporting.”
Gove is correct in that prime ministers do not always, or even routinely, chair Cobra meetings. But it is common for them to do so during a major crisis.
The five meetings Johnson missed came during a period in February where he spent an entire parliamentary recess out of sight at his official country retreat of Chequers, prompting Labour to accuse him at the time of being a “part-time prime minister”.
Gove told the Ridge show that it was wrong to argue that Johnson had been “anything other than energetic, focused, determined and strong in his leadership against this virus”.
“The idea that the prime minister skipped meetings that were vital to our response to the coronavirus I think is grotesque,” Gove said.
On the shipment of PPE to China, in his interview on the Ridge show, Gove refused to say three times whether this had happened, saying only that some aspects of the Sunday Times story were wrong.
A shortage of PPE for NHS and care home staff has been a repeated criticism of the UK response to coronavirus, with the Guardian revealing on Friday that NHS staff had been told to wear plastic aprons if stocks of protective gowns ran out.
But on the Marr show he accepted it was true, saying this was done “to help with the most extreme outbreak in Wuhan”. The PPE had not come from pandemic stockpiles, Gove said, and since then the UK had received “far more” PPE from China, he added.
Asked whether the government had made mistakes in its response to the pandemic, Gove accepted this broad point: “All governments make mistakes, including our own. We seek to learn, and to improve every day. It is the case, I’m sure, at some point in the future that there will be an opportunity for us to look back, to reflect and to learn some profound lessons.”
