wtffashionshark

Hallo Readers,

Never say that Britain is not a place of opportunity. Because it is not true.  It does not matter whether you are untalented. It does not matter whether you or your company has a history of serial failure. It does not matter whether your company has no history at all. You could receive a very lucrative contract, courtesy of Tim and Tilly Tosser the taxpayers. And if you mess it up, do not grieve – like London buses, there is another contract on its way, even better than the previous one…. 

European law stipulates that public bodies must put contracts out to tender. But that rule does not apply in an emergency, and we are in the middle of one hell of an emergency. And so contracts for PPE and Track and Trace can be awarded without tendering, which means that a number of companies have held their aprons open to catch the golden eggs. A few weeks ago we considered the case of Ayanda Capital, an investment company registered in Mauritius with no experience of PPE, not even of any kind, which ended up with an order for £160m of face masks. Sadly, the face masks were unusable.   The original contract was awarded to a person called Andrew Mills who advises the Board of Trade, chaired by Liz Truss, Secretary of State for International Trade.  Mills then asked for the contract to be transferred from his little £100 company to Ayanda, to which he was a senior board adviser. Now we learn of TAEG Energy, which got orders for £50m worth of hand sanitiser. The company has one director and four employees and works out of a farmhouse near Hitchin in Hertfordshire. Another company, Meller Designs, which normally designs and makes fragrances and homewares for M&S, has managed to land several contracts for PPE to a value of some £140m. It is of course a complete coincidence that the owner of Meller is a Tory donor.

And then there is Serco, paid millions to run the Track and Trace system, a project which has been cocked up royally, failing either to track or to trace a large number people who may or may not have been infected. Nor is this the first contract Serco has botched, including its dismal performance on the tagging system for prisoners on release, which saw it fined £19m for fraud and false accounting. Yet here it is, back again and in charge of a crucial project. This week we discovered that Serco is paying outside consultants £7K a day (OUR £7K a day). And yet the whole project is so inept that WTF harbours doubt whether this lot could find an elephant in a cupboard.

And let us not forget Baroness Dido Harding, who was appointed recently to run the new National Institute for Health Protection, and is also heading up the aforementioned Track and Trace system. To describe her as useless and unqualified would be unduly flattering; nor is she the person you would want in charge of people’s confidential information, given that she presided over Britain’s worst ever data breach whilst at Talk Talk.  In 2015, 157,000 customers had their data hacked, for which the company was fined a record £400,000 by the Information Commissioner for ‘abdicating its security obligations’. Harding is married to John Penrose, a Tory MP who is mates with Boris Johnson and Co. Again, this is doubtless a coincidence.

But Readers, be of good cheer! There is a Government Anti-Corruption Champion. Surely he is the man to look into these matters and ask why these people keep getting awarded top swag work without proper process. Hurrah! His name is John Penrose MP.  Oh….hang on…..

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We  start our review of the week’s clothing crapulence with rapper Lil Nas X, wearing Gucci at the Billboard Awards

If you want to wear fancy dress, why go to Gucci when there are  perfectly good costume hire shops available? And why would you want to go anywhere dressed as Kaa the Snake in The Jungle Book?

Next we have glamour model and demi-celebritee Demi Rose in the Maldives, wearing Fashion Nova. Well, I say wearing….

WARNING – MINGE MOMENT ALERT!!!

Bloody hell, that waxing must have hurt. Like, bigly hurt. It makes your eyes water just looking at it. Not to mention the scrunching of the thong over her lady parts. This is a veritable Call for the Canesten moment. If a zebra wanted to flash her minge, Demi would be her inspiration.

Here is singer Jason Derulo, whom we haven’t seen for a while, wearing Louis Vuitton at the premiere of the new Disney thing, Clouds…..

More proof, were proof required, that Louis Vuitton is having a laugh. Take a  jacket from a pile of discarded denim jumble destined for homeless persons, stick a few patches of LV monogramed fabric on it and charge $700. Jason compounded his offences against retinas by pairing the aforesaid jacket with a pair of snow boots last seen on Nanook of the Frozen North.

Making a return to these pages is singer Gwen Stefani, wearing tat for a photoshoot.

WTF does not even know what this is supposed to be, and why a pair of very manky shorts is paired with fishnet tights and cowboy boots. Gwen looks as though she has gone several rounds with a pissed-off leopard, and she has the blood in her hair to show for it.

This is Gossip Girl actress Roxane Mesquita at Cannes Series 2020 (she is one of the judges) wearing who can even say what?

So we have had the tit window and now we have the pins pane. The whole thing is dreadful and seems to have been made out of one of those paper concertina lanterns.

Now say hallo to rapper Cardi B at her 28th birthday party, wearing Lena Barisha.

If Cleopatra was ever forced to dash out of the Royal Palace in the middle of the night, clutching a bedsheet around her, she would have looked just like Cardi.

Finally, we have NFL player Cam Newton arriving for training with The New England Patriots, wearing who knows what?

Goodness me. He resembles a bowl of custard in silly shoes…..

This week’s It’s Got To Go comes from WTF aficionado Yvonne from Jedburgh, who spotted this photo tweeted by Lucy James, a fellow Geordie who lives further away from Newcastle than Yvonne does, namely in San Francisco. Lucy posted a photo of a Halloween display in a store,  featuring Oogie Boogie, a character from Tim Burton’s The Night Before Christmas. For the uninitiated, Oogie Boogie is a burlap sack filled with insects and spiders with a snake for a tongue.

The American obsession with Halloween is absolutely nauseating at the best of times, but this takes the biscuit as Oogie seems to have gone trans and is displaying a very prominent camel toe. This is not what you want to see when you nip out for a pumpkin and a can of tinned tomatoes.  It’s Got To Go.

OK Readers, that’s your lot for this week. Do not forget your excellent suggestions for It’s Got To Go. Let us meet again next Friday. Be good, be careful, and keep washing your hands! x