LAST Friday evening on Sky News, Tim Montgomerie was one of the Press Preview panel, scrutinising the newspapers that would be on sale the following morning.
In what has become a regular pairing, he appeared alongside Susie Boniface, aka the Mirror’s Fleet Street Fox, with Montgomerie ostensibly being the counterweight to snarky Susie’s anti-Tory scorn (which increasingly is justified, unfortunately).
Montie is an amiable fellow, a committed Christian Conservative, instigator of Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice and an early anti-lockdown champion.
However, he’s become someone whom the Sky and BBC news channels can safely book and bill as a ‘Conservative commentator’, secure perhaps in the knowledge that Tim’s conciliatory ‘conservatism’ will seldom stray beyond what his Leftist hosts regard as acceptable opinion.
Disappointingly, on Friday evening Montgomerie appeared to have no opinion at all, far less a forthright one, on several of the controversial topics under discussion.
In particular, one of the papers being reviewed – Saturday’s Telegraph – led with the headline: ‘PM will be forced to decide on child jabs’.
The front-page story quoted a ‘source’ from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI): ‘It’s likely that the JCVI will come up with a menu of options saying what the consequences of each of them would be, rather than making an actual recommendation.’
The threat to minors from Covid-19 is negligible. Yet still this grievous government contemplates injecting children with serums which Kate Bingham, former head of the task force that secured the antigens, categorised as ‘adult-only vaccine, for people over 50, focusing on health workers and care home workers and the vulnerable’.
Bingham, though, is not to blame for this government’s iniquity. Much more culpable is malevolent Matt Hancock, who recently threatened to start injecting children later this year: ‘We have procured enough Pfizer to be able to offer it to children should it be approved here … we have a couple of months before we need to make and operationalise a decision.’
Yet only last November, mendacious Matt had assured Parliament: ‘This vaccine will not be used for children. It has not been tested on children. And the reason is that the likelihood of children having significant detriment if they catch Covid-19 is very, very low. So this is an adult vaccine for the adult population.’
Instead of deploring the deceit of the Health Secretary and his baneful boss, Montgomerie feebly equivocated that the plausible prospect of government needlessly jabbing children is a ‘very sensitive issue’.
He hopes that the ‘options’ which the JCVI will present to government, leaving the PM and Cabinet to decide, will be ‘transparently published (to) give us all the information on what the pros and cons are of vaccinating children’.
Tim further prevaricated by setting out what he regards as the ‘pros and cons’: ‘We know some people want young children vaccinated. We know that younger people are at the moment leading the spread of the Indian variant. But at the same time, as with the clotting issue that was associated with certain vaccinations, do we want to expose children – who (in) very, very few cases die of Covid – to the small but nonetheless sometimes real risks of a vaccination?’
In fact, the ‘young people’ assumed to be ‘leading the spread of the Indian variant’ are lower age group adults – also unlikely to be at risk of serious illness – rather than children. Aside from which, even his own summing up of the ‘pros and cons’ ought to have been sufficient for Montgomerie to conclude that the perturbing possibility of the state forcibly injecting minors, for spurious reasons, is way beyond being a ‘sensitive issue’.
The Government treating the youth as vectors of disease is a degeneracy which should disgust every self-respecting conservative. Lamentably, however, instead of being the principled voice of the Right, Tim tergiversated: ‘So, a very difficult decision for the Government coming up.’
No, Tim – it is simple and straightforward. Administering unproven serums to children, fallaciously for protection from a virus which does not threaten them, would be an authoritarian abomination; just by considering it, this egregious government again confirms that it is not remotely conservative.
Later in the same programme, Montgomerie attempted to reassert his credentials: ‘I’m a conservative. I’m a supporter of Boris Johnson in most respects.’
But the apparent willingness of the Prime Minister unnecessarily to shoot up healthy children is the latest reason why it is nigh impossible to now be both a freedom-fighting conservative and a supporter of Johnson’s dictatorial and depraved government. Before you next appear on TV, Montie, make up your mind which side you are on.
Montgomerie’s disappointing appearance can be seen here, beginning at 2:00.
