Foot in mouth awards 2020

Baffling quotes by public figures

Toby Young (winner)

“I’m going to go out on a limb and predict there will be no ‘second spike’ – not now, and not in the autumn either. The virus has melted into thin air. It’s time to get back to normal.”

Foot in mouth award runners-up

Donald Trump

“They are dying, it’s true, and it is what it is.”

"I say flames, we'll put out the flames. And we'll put out in some cases just burning embers. We also have burning embers. We have embers and we do have flames. Florida became more flame like, but it's -- it's going to be under control."

“And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and does a tremendous number on them, so it’d be interesting to check that.”

“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to … find more cases. So, I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please’.”

“The closest thing is in 1917, they say, the great pandemic. It certainly was a terrible thing, where they lost anywhere from 50-100 million people. Probably ended the Second World War. All the soldiers were sick.”

Boris Johnson

“I’m afraid that your grades were almost derailed by a mutant algorithm....And when you’ve been struggling with something in the classroom or whatever, some concept that you can’t get … like the supine stem of confiteor, nuclear fusion or … is Harry Potter sexist? Answer ‘No’, by the way.”

“We have talked for a long time, or I have, about the distant bugle of the scientific cavalry coming over the brow of the hill... And neither mass testing nor progress on vaccines – both vital arrows in our epidemiological quiver, both key parts of our fight against Covid – are at the present time a substitute for the national restrictions, for social distancing, for hand hygiene and all the rest.”

Priti Patel

“Through the governments ongoing monitoring and testing programme, as of 9am today there have been: 300,000; 34; 974,000 tests carried out.”

Kanye West

“Harriet Tubman never actually freed the slaves. She just had the slaves work for other white people.”