Tuesday 11 January 2022

Bring a bottle Mark

 

A mały ptak [a Polish little bird] tells me that in March 2020 Mark Drakeford and Nicola Sturgeon went to swingers weekend in Bute House. It was a bring your own bottle weekend but everything else was free. The purpose was research into the questionnaire that Sturgeon intended to give to school pupils about their sexual habits. The task for both her and Drakeford was to answer each question in the affirmative. For this reason, upon Mark’s arrival, he immediately switched clothes with Sturgeon and became for the weekend Marcia while she switched clothes with Mark in order to become Nicholas.

The question was could a transwoman (Mark) have vaginal sex. He answered in the affirmative by insisting that transwomen were just the same as women and so had cervixes. Sturgeon’s task as a transman was to determine whether he could have anal sex with a man and whether this made such a relationship homosexual or heterosexual. Nicholas reasoned that if a transwoman could rape a dog he could do just as well if he asked nicely. The dog of course knew quite well that the transwoman was in fact a man having been on the receiving end. Nicholas’s partner unfortunately found this method of having sex unfulfilling. Something was lacking.



As observers at this weekend were various members of the Scottish press, but despite being witnesses to a reincarnation of the Two days of Sodom nobody noticed anything untoward and the Monday editions of both the Herald and the Scotsman merely had the latest reports about how there would be an independence referendum next year and analysis of the twentieth opinion poll since the pandemic began about Scottish voters voting intentions on independence. In other news a ferry had broken down between Arran and Oban and Nicola Sturgeon fresh from her relaxing weekend was telling us how she would eliminate Covid from Scotland that summer if only we did what she told us to do.

Does it matter that Mark travelled to Scotland in breach of both Welsh and Scottish regulations and that neither of them practiced social distancing during their swingers weekend. Fortunately for both Mark and Nicola they each campaigned for Remain and so their lapses can be ignored, unlike that wicked Boris.

It was clearly foolish for Mark and Nicola to have a party when everyone else in the country was locked down by them, but did it change the course of the pandemic in any way. Was it a super spreader event? Well Mark did an extraordinary job of spreading himself very widely, but Covid was already endemic in Britain at that time and so Mark’s best efforts probably didn’t make much of a difference.

The rather more subdued party that happened in London involved people who worked closely together, frequently in the same room. If they were going to catch Covid from each other, they could just as well have done so any day of the week prior to the bring a bottle party.

Did any of the people in the Downing Street Party have a loving relationship with someone else who was there? Did some of these people go back to each other’s houses even though they didn’t live together and hadn’t formed a bubble? It’s truly shocking that during the pandemic people continued to meet other people they hadn’t known previously on dates and then went on to have sex with each other.

How many people in Britain from March 2020 onwards went to someone else’s house in order to have dinner or a bottle of wine? How many of us broke lockdown at least once?

I think that Nicola Sturgeon may well have had her haircut by a professional when she wasn’t supposed to. I don’t know whether she did or she didn’t. But I think she might have done. I think it’s also possible that Sturgeon one Friday night had a few drinks in her office with her colleagues. I don’t know if she did. The Scottish press wouldn’t tell me if they did know. After all, when Alex Salmond was accused by multiple women of sexual assault and attempted rape during the year of the independence referendum, we heard not even a rumour. When it seemed as if the whole of the SNP inner circle was plotting against Alex Salmond we never really got to the bottom of the story. We still don’t know what Sturgeon knew and when she knew it. The SNP’s inner circle remains more secretive than that of the Corleone family.

But in London there is a genuine opposition and there is a press and media that are determined to dig out negative stories about Boris.

In my view it was foolish of him to allow such events. Why leave yourself open to scandal if someone finds out? It’s not worth it for the sake of a drinking some bottles of wine in the garden. But does it matter? No. Not really. No one died because of a bring a bottle party. Covid was spread no more that day than any other day at that time.

Should a government always follow the rules that it imposes on the people? No. What matters is that a government governs effectively. If a bring a bottle party made a government govern better it would be justified. We didn’t after all expect rationing to apply to Lancaster bomber pilots. They might have eggs and bacon for breakfast while everyone else had none. Winston Churchill no doubt received brandy and cigars that were unobtainable for ordinary people.

It is easy to accuse Boris of hypocrisy, but the truth is that we are all hypocrites, because hypocrisy is part of the human condition.  I would have preferred that all Covid rules were voluntary. Let people assess their own risk and act accordingly. But the truth is that lockdown was mostly lightly enforced. I kept away from other people, but otherwise drove where I wanted and did as I pleased. Lots of other people visited friends and relations and lovers surreptitiously. I am not going to judge them. They may have spread Covid by doing this, but they equally well might have spread it by legally going to the shops.

I don’t want Britain to turn into a country where we judge each other’s moral lapses. If people needed to let off steam in Downing Street or even in Bute House good luck to them.

The pandemic killed over one hundred and fifty thousand people. The only thing that stopped that number being greater was the decision by Boris to gamble on their being vaccine. But by all means get upset about a bring a bottle party if it makes you feel better.

I don’t know if Mark Drakeford and Nicola Sturgeon broke any of their own Covid rules, my little Polish bird unfortunately was so traumatized by events in Bute House that it has disappeared out of fear that either Marcia or Nicholas might view it as a suitable object for their next conquest. But I strongly suspect there are SNP and Labour politicians who have broken lockdown rules to a greater extent than a bring a bottle party in a garden. Which SNP MP or MSP visited his lover when he shouldn’t have? Which had a party after work in someone’s house?

The real hypocrisy is that if my little bird told BBC Scotland, or the Herald or the National about such an indiscretion they would shoot it and pretend that such things couldn’t possibly happen in Scotland. After all we never have parties. We are much more virtuous than that wicked Boris.