Under pressure

The summary of the rest of this post, is that, the best case scenario is that the UK failed to participate in the EU's procurement scheme because that the invitation arrived via e mail and went into the junk folder, so was missed. That it was missed, hundreds perhaps thousands of people died due to lack of equipment.

Sir Simon McDonald, head of the UK's Mission to the EU (now the UK is no longer a member state), was quizzed by a Select Committee, and undre cross-examination stated that the decision not to join previous rounds of the procurement program was a "political decision".

This statement confirmed rumours and a large amount of circumstantial evidence that this was the case.

The BBC did not report on this, right away.

But news came from Whitehall that a clarification letter from Sir Simon was coming.

Three hours later, it arrived, and it said in four paragraphs that he had got this 180 degree wrong.

But.

And there is a huge but.

This morning the EU confirmed that at the end of March that the UK formally invited.

And.

Well, a few months ago, there was a Twitter meme along the lines of "if you werre kidnapped but still allowed to Tweet,m what would you say to alert friends?"

In this I lean heavily of David Allen Green, former Government lawyer and has worked in Government procurement; this letter shows signs of it being heavily negotiated, and the language used, using long sentences where short ones will do, and stating the UK Mission rather than Sivil Service, shows how language was being used to hide some greater truth.

This all might be true, or not.

The Government is now run and advised by those who ran the Vote Leave campaign, who lied and broke the law back in 2016, and have not apologised or been charged, as it is they who are in control now of the evidence.

"There is something either falling in the gaps between the sentences or being cloaked by the definitions (eg Scheme) used, but that is not the natural way for a civil servant to make such a "clarification" That wording has been negotiated to the point of strangulation. Each sentence of that letter may well be strictly correct, though some phrases seem vague. There is something falling through the gaps. That letter savours of evasion and misdirection. The supposed "clarification" has made things far more unclear. To take one example

Why write: "Ministers were not briefed by our mission in Brussels about the scheme"

Instead of: "Ministers were not briefed about the scheme"

Or even: "Ministers were not aware of the scheme"

Longer sentences do not happen by accident in such formal documents. A similar approach can be employed for almost every proposition in the letter. And that is odd: for a skilled wordsmith like a senior civil servant would usually make such a forensic approach difficult. Something is up here. It's like a coded cry for help from someone kidnapped. And why in paragraph 2 does he go for scheme (singular) but switch to the four schemes (plural) for the comms excuse in paragraph 3? In casual writing, it would not matter. But here, it means para 2 and para 3 are about slightly different things. A Derren Brown-like misdirection" https://twitter.com/davidallengreen/status/1252683231981338626