Now look – I know I’m straying into the realms of the QAnon loons who have nothing better to do with their lives than dream up absurd and unevidenced conspiracies to give themselves the sense that they have some significance. It saves them having to confront the sobering fact that their – in fact everyone’s life – is just a fleeting moment, a brief spark of random consciousness that fades to nothing in a cosmic instant.
Their conspiracies convince them that they and their pathetically pointless fellow-conspirators are smarter than the supposedly smart people who can’t see what they, the conspirators, have so cleverly discerned from the obscure clues they have deciphered. Sitting at their kitchen tables, strewn with mouldering crisps; congealing dregs of cheap instant coffee bloom in the bottom of chipped mugs; cat turds grow their own fur coats among the plated remains of the gourmet Alphabetti Spaghetti they have prepared in a rush to get back to the laptop chat they were having with SpyOp1776 about Trump’s Second Coming. Crusted lips are wiped absent-mindedly with the filthy tea towel stiff with weeks of semen spilled during quick visits to Vegetarians’ Delight on Porn Hub as brief relief from the intensity of decoding the latest drops from Q. Blinds are drawn across filthy windows to keep the sunlight from searing their wafer-thin, blue-green skin and damaging the red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes that stare unblinking at the screen in rapt attention. The saucepans that litter the floor have been filled with weeks of pungent urine; the pressure cooker that sits strategically on the coffee table spills over with cold hard faeces forced in agonising, sphincter-splitting, eye-popping moments of desperate evacuation. This is the environment of the conspiracy loon.
So here I am.
Now, bear with me. I promise I’ll finish this and have a shower. But first I have to get this off my chest. I’ll be brief.
The story about Hancock’s affair, the PM standing by his Minister until finally the pressure of public opinion becomes too much and Hancock has to resign seems, on the face of it, perfectly plausible. But something has been niggling at me since I first saw that cringeworthy video of the clinch in the office.
Something just isn’t right about it.
So I looked at the video again and I am completely convinced that it is a set-up, a fake, a make-believe ‘caught-on-camera’ moment. The more I look at it the more obvious it seems that it has been prepared and badly acted to appear as if this supposed snatched moment of passion is spontaneous.
It looks anything but spontaneous when you look at it with a sceptical eye.
Here it is. Take a close look. It’s ok – after a while the awful nature of what you think you’re seeing disappears as the stilted action of the scene begins to take over. After a few viewings all you see are two bad actors in a perfectly framed shot.
- First, a couple of technical reservations which are not my real concern. A fixed-camera CCTV shot catches only what takes place in its field of vision. So why is the camera waving backwards & forwards at the start? It gives the impression that it’s a shaky video but why would it waver and then settle down to catch Hancock in action? Is it, therefore, a hand-held camera? Am I supposed to believe that this camera operator is hanging from the ceiling by wire. Standing unobtrusively on a ladder such that Hancock can’t see them? I know it has been said that the footage is copied from the screen – mobile phone video of the original. Maybe.
- After 4 seconds there is a neat fade edit so someone has packaged the footage for others to view.
- After the edit the camera has pulled out from a close-up of the door and Hancock’s head to a wide shot of the whole corner so someone is operating it. It isn’t a fixed shot as in most standard CCTV cameras. Why would the operator pull back to a wide shot if Hancock has just walked into the room, looked back through the gap and closed the door? It’s where he works. It’s a presentation room judging by the screen in the left corner – supposedly his office. Why would Hancock entering a room where he works warrant a CCTV camera operator’s particular attention? If it’s a clandestine CCTV installation then why on earth focus on the door and not the office space where action might be expected to be caught?
Now the first 3 points are not significant, just odd, but can be explained, perhaps. However, here’s the bit that gets me: at 7 seconds Hancock closes the door, looks down at the carpet to check his position and then stands dead centre shot ready for Coladangelo’s entrance. Look at his body language. He positions himself squarely, dead centre, readies himself, arms slightly extended and his feet don’t move. He’s (forgive the phrase) as stiff as a board. That’s not a natural pose. Does that look like a passionate lover just about to steal a few seconds’ clandestine grope in the store cupboard to you? Because, to me, it looks like a man doing what he’s been told to do – “Close the door, stand on your mark. Enter Gina.” (For God’s sake, leave the smutty innuendo aside!)
Look how perfectly framed the kiss/grope is. It’s supposed to be CCTV evidence but Hancock clearly positioned himself to be centre. Look at Coladangelo’s body language as she approaches – one hand casually on her left hip. Look at the clinch – does that look like a snatched moment of office passion to you? That looks like a staged moment between two bad amateurs following a pre-planned scene to me. “Ok, we’ll do that but don’t let it get too raunchy – no dirty touching or anything porny, Matt. I don’t want you uploading us onto Vegetarians’ Delight again.”
It’s the look down at the carpet and the careful positioning that does it for me. So the question arises: why?
Some have already suggested that, of course he stood in front of the door to stop anyone from opening it from outside. So you’re so concerned about being caught in flagrante that you move away from the door you were guarding and have a little dance – still in perfect shot? This is absurd. It’s so badly concocted it’s laughable. It’s so badly acted, so stilted, so hammy that that’s what’s cringeworthy about the video, not the content.
Why would Hancock and Coladangelo submit themselves to a little bit of amateur dramatics, to provide ‘incriminating’ footage? What cover does it provide?
Only these two and the camera operator needed to know about this video – not colleagues or families – unless it was taken without their knowledge, as we are led to believe.
If it was taken as clandestine footage then there are serious security questions to be answered. Who sited and operated the camera: another government department, elements of the security services, police, private contractors? That shouldn’t be difficult to discover.
What is the role of The Sun and Murdoch in this? Knowing the connections between Carrie Antoinette & Harry Cole this muddies the waters somewhat.
The questions remain – why?
“I woke my child at 2.00 in the morning to tell them that I was a cheat and I was leaving in 24 hours.” Oh come on! Gina might be pulling your plonker but please stop trying to pull mine. That’s as absurd as asking us to believe that “I get up every morning and ask myself: ‘What can I do to save lives?'” This slimeball has previous. He’s lied his way through our pandemic at almost every turn and been responsible for corruption on an epic scale. He’s appointed people to positions without interview, awarded contracts for PPE to friends and Tory donors without competitive tender and been found to have breached the law twice. He’s allowed Covid 19 into unprotected Care Homes killing tens of thousands of residents and carers and on his watch he’s seen us lose 130,000 fellow citizens through incompetence, maladministration, dogma and corruption. Now we discover he’s been conducting official business using his private email account, making an audit trail much more difficult to follow.
This is a crook who is not to be trusted in any way.
I don’t believe this video, this story, at all.
It doesn’t ring true, It certainly doesn’t look right. Something else is going on here and I have a feeling we, the public, are being played for fools.
BREAKING NEWS: Cabinet Office Minister Julia Lopez confirms in the House of Commons, in answer to urgent security questions today (28.6.2021), that the video footage was NOT covert surveillance. Thus, the camera was official CCTV.
The picture below purports to be Hancock’s office – the scene of the video. I note there’s a lock on the door. You’d probably use that if you were nipping in for a quicky, rather than standing by it.
I presume Hancock would have known the camera was there. It seems pretty obvious to me – not what I would call ‘hidden’. As Chris Bryant MP said, if he knew it was there that makes him the stupidest man in the world.
Or, it was done for a purpose.
Now, if you’ll excuse me I have a plate of Alphabetti Spaghetti to finish.
To be continued, no doubt.
The Cynical Squid 