Genuine scientists make mistakes, Iains. Isaac Newton believed in alchemy. The great thing about scientists is that we never appeal to authority, unlike you. Au contraire. There have been too many bad scientists. In my own field, John Heslop-Harrison was revered. Look him up. When I was at Imperial College we raw students hung on to his every word, though his Lamarckism seemed dubious. Well, what a fraud he was. Scepticism is built into our bones. We dismiss all notions that can't quickly produce backup evidence. Of course, you don't understand these things. For a start, you rely on Guido, the Mail, the Telegraph and the Express. You don't see the obvious problem with that. You choose sources that massage your visceral need for confirmation bias, just about the most unscientific defect that anyone can suffer from. You remind me of those pseudo-scientists who work for some pharmaceutical companies, one of those guys who suppresses adverse evidence that doesn't fit your mission (which is why we got Vioxx killing thousands of people). You are tabloid-brainwashed and can't see things objectively, and your ego won't let you back down when you get things wrong, which is an unfortunately-frequent occurrence. On this occasion you have demonstrated that you can't, or won't, distinguish between antimicrobial and antibiotic, despite plenty of prompting in the right direction. When Jim, Dave or I get something arse about face, we back down and, if necessary, apologise. It's an important attribute of being a balanced human being that, so far, has evaded you.

Insult away. Diminish yourself further. Or be dignified. Your decision.

Anyway, back to the substantive. Here's Boris on the Irish border issue:

"We think that we can have very efficient facilitation systems to make sure that there's no need for a hard border, excessive checks at the frontier between Northern Ireland and the Republic," he said.
"There's no border between Islington or Camden and Westminster... but when I was mayor of London we anaesthetically and invisibly took hundreds of millions of pounds from the accounts of people travelling between those two boroughs without any need for border checks whatever."

Profound stuff, eh? :-)