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Comment by swebs | Hacker News Reader

>Citing unidentified industry and government figures, the FT said Johnson now intended to move the date forward again to 2030 in a speech on environmental policy he is expected to give next week.

>The BBC reported a similar plan earlier on Saturday, without giving any sources.

So it didn't happen yet, but they think it might. Why not just wait a few days to report it when we have something more concrete than anonymous sources?

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This is how policy is proposed these days. “Anonymous sources” brief friendly reporters, who float it in the mainstream. If it gets shot down, the big speech is replaced with a neutral one; if obvious gotchas are pointed out, the speech is tweaked to pre-empt them; otherwise, the speech happens, friendly reporters are happy, and the policy basically is set out to get on the books as a non-event - which is a big win for a government.

Because anonymous leaks are the way the UK government announce policy decisions...

Indeed, it’s been known for a long time that when the BBC say “sources close to the Prime Minister” they mean “Dominic Cummings, who is too slippery to put anything on the record”.

The Times, and BBC’s Kuenssberg have had recent success over these tidbits longer than Cummings has been with the PM. He was with Gove for a while.

Yeah, it's a tradition that stretches way back, to the Blair years at the very least - when "King SPAD" was Alastair Campbell, also known as the main inspiration for the character of Malcolm Tucker in "The Thick Of It".

Because competition.

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