Lobbying-row critics and partisan glare

TBoris Johnson/dyson text messages were largely considered to be have been exaggerated both by the media and Labour, columnists concluded, and, on Earth Day, the Met Office supercomputer was discussed.

Daily Mail

Stephen Glover said the Johnson/ Dyson texts ranked about three out of 10 on a sleaze scale “breathlessly reported by the BBC’S Laura Kuenssberg”.

“While mildly embarrassing, they were far from being a damning indictment,” he said. “Fair-minded people will say that when the texts were sent in March 2020, we were in the middle of a national emergency, facing a potentially catastrophic shortage of ventilators. As for Boris, he was seeking no favours for either himself or his party. He simply wanted to lay his hands on as many ventilators as possible.”

He said even if the Prime Minister did break the ministerial code, he did so in the best possible cause.

“The fact remains that despite Sir Keir Starmer’s somewhat theatrical anger yesterday (‘sleaze, sleaze, sleaze’), this was definitely not another example of discreditable Tory lobbying.”

Daily Express

Leo Mckinstry said the Government’s critics were in danger of badly overreaching themselves.

“In their eagerness to score political points, they have started to invent wild charges and concoct baseless conspiracies,” he said. “With ill-contained glee, the BBC turned its partisan glare on revelations about Boris Johnson’s contacts with industrialist Sir James Dyson in the early stages of the pandemic last year.”

He said said the rules on tax were openly debated and agreed by the Commons.

“Rather than a reason for any embarrassment, the conduct of both Sir James and the Government was commendable,” he said. “The real scandal would have arisen if Sir James did nothing or the Government had stuck rigidly to pre-covid tax rules. As in war, it was a time for creativity, innovation and flexibility to save lives. But egged on by the BBC’S overblown coverage, the Labour Party pretends this episode is a new “jaw-dropping” low in Tory cronyism.”

The Scotsman

The newspaper’s leader said the Met Office’s planned supercomputer would be able to give more accurate predictions of extreme weather and would inform decisions about flood defences as climate change increases the risk of dangerous storms.

“While the world has largely woken up to the need to stop global warming from reaching dangerous levels, we are still falling alarmingly short of the actions required to actually prevent this,” it said.

“As we grapple with this most pressing issue, we clearly need all the brain power we can get – human or not.”