Ctrl V to the rescue?

Has copy and paste saved the day for Boris? Probably not..

Mr Gove's levelling up white paper arrived yesterday and now that it has received some detailed scrutiny, some alarming features are being flagged up.

Lib Dem MP Tim farron is quoted by the Independent as saying "The Levelling Up White Paper read like something which had been cobbled together in a rush, with no mention of the rural communities which have been long forgotten by this Government. So it's not at all surprising to see entire sections lifted from Wikipedia.
"The Conservatives can't even muster up the effort to properly invest in some of our most deprived regions, so anything beyond a copy and paste job would have been surpassing expectations.
"But as ever, this Government can't even meet the low bar they have set of themselves. Their hollow promises to families facing a cost of living crisis aren't worth the paper they're printed on."

The Independent article "said the white paper includes large sections of padding, with three pages devoted to the history of Jericho, Rome, and renaissance Europe.
But bits of this section appear to have been lifted directly from the popular internet encyclopaedia. One off-beat part of the report reads: "Constantinople was the capital of the Roman/Byzantine Empire (330-1204 and 1261-1453), the Latin Empire (1204-1261) and the Ottoman Empire (1453-1922)". The text is identical to the first line of the Wikipedia page for Constantinople, right down to formatting and punctuation.

Another section of the report includes a full-page timeline of the largest cities in the world since 7,000 BC which is identical to a table on Wikipedia's "List of largest cities throughout history" page.

Elsewhere, a paragraph about the history of the ancient city of Jerico is repeated twice on the same page - apparently not caught by proof-readers!

Must try harder Mr Gove!