I hope it is Truss, she will be a disaster with all but the die hard tory voter.
I joined the conservative party last year just so I get to have a say in the next PM if they change between elections.
Did a chargeback on the £4 membership donation too!
Your style, I like it.
Bookies seem to favour Johnson going next year, as in 2022.
As for the next leader odds, Sunak at near 3/1... followed at a distance by Gove, Truss, Hunt, Patel, Javid in that order, before the odds get decidedly long.
Not a wholly encouraging outlook is it?
143 pages and I'm now angry enough to comment...
France have just cancelled talks on immigration over Johnson's open letter of demands.
Surely you could see this coming from a mile off? Playing straight into his hands and giving him the opportunity to bang the nationalist drum and spout more anti French, anti-EU crap.
And oh look, headlines back onto his agenda again.
He's a master at this and they fall for it every ****ing time.
'they' voted him in fairly recently so to now admit 'they' made a mistake is going to be hard for them.
Yeah, but the French don't really care what happens here? They've got their own issues to work on and elections coming up? Far more important that playing tricks on Boris.
Doesn't matter though does it? Job done.
‘they’ voted him in fairly recently so to now admit ‘they’ made a mistake is going to be hard for them.
Support might be falling for Johnston, but here in the former red wall, the justification has always been that there was no other choice. Those in the centre ground are probably now wavering on that school of thought, but it's still a strongly held belief amongst a great many people, that this is simply the least worst option we have.
Why would the French have any concern over internal UK politics? they don't and should not.
France have just cancelled talks on immigration over Johnson’s open letter of demands.
Surely you could see this coming from a mile off? Playing straight into his hands and giving him the opportunity to bang the nationalist drum and spout more anti French, anti-EU cra
But the French now have their own nationalist populist on the rise. Their own Boris, if you like:
‘Immigration is war’: an interview with Éric Zemmour
So Boris is bright enough to know exactly the reaction he'd get. nationalist tub-thumping works for both him and Macron right now, and he needs to revive his Brexity, anti-immigrant, anti-EU nationalism as its never failed him before and it won't now
That's exactly my point.
The French reaction was entirely predictable. Both governments in power are far more concerned about their own short term electoral needs rather than the lives of migrants, and are probably happy to feed each others tub thumping nationalist rhetoric for now.
What's French for ****?
migrants people, men women and children don't do the fascists de-humanizing job for them.
France have just cancelled talks on immigration over Johnson’s open letter of demands.
You could argue that the letter wasn't actually to the French at all, it was to the national right-wing press in this country; an ill-concealed, self-congratulatory way of shifting blame away from his own breathtaking incompetence and once again painting the French / the EU as the enemy.
I don't think it would have mattered what France had done, the press here would still have spun it as King Boris telling those pesky forriners what to do.
Ironic that, having left the EU in order to take back control of our borders, we're now asking France to do more to control our borders. Turns out that borders have two sides. Who knew?!
In or out and it’s the pesky EU/France thwarting the plucky U.K.
Still someone’s sat happy looking at his grand a roll wallpaper that someone else paid for,sipping a nice Chablis.
A nice little ‘migrant Chrisis’will happily pull the carpet over the big pile of other issues till the next one.
It’s nice at the top table always something you can use to blame someone else for the problems.
Like a form of surfing, you don’t actually have to do anything just ride the waves(of Chrisis).
More cake Carrie.
Agree migrant deaths are exactly the sort of divisive nationalism Johnson needs right now
https://twitter.com/PedderSophie/status/1464139057915650061?t=XxKGs865kv_QRDO3bh13EQ&s=19
And you just know that the flag-waving morons who voted for him to ‘Get Brexit Done’ will be lapping this up
I *ing despise what this country has become, and the fact that a * like Johnson has ridden the toxic wave he helped create to such a calamitous degree
Even by his gutter-level standards, exploiting the deaths of people like that is appallingly cynical. He really is a piece of work
Sunak is publicly complaining about the chaos next door. I take that as a bid of sorts. I think Gove's image these days is a bit too flakey. Truss is not bright enough to fend off penetrating questions. Johnson seems to be falling apart, Cash'n'Carrie checking the front of his trousers, porkie pies, porcine speeches to the CBI, going on the nod, U-turns. Even with their majority, a good few will be anticipating a car crash with Captain Corpulence at the wheel.
Great create an international arguement with a nationalistic country about to have an election from whom we imported 43 terawatt hours of electricity last year. What could possibly go wrong?
Does this guy ever think further ahead than the next morning’s headlines?
What could possibly go wrong?
Not all politicians seek to avoid crises... some love the attention and support it gets them. If you can't govern in a way that impresses the voters, you can always be a catalyst for conflicts where you get to "stand up for British [ or French ] interests". You don't even have to be successful in any meaningful way when it comes to defending or supporting those interests, just be very vocal about who's "side" you're on.
Does this guy ever think further ahead than the next morning’s headlines?
It was always inevitable once the idiots decided to give the top job to a third rate tabloid hack
I think that UK foreign policy can be summarised thus…
Speaking of foreign policy, has anyone heard from Liz?
On the other side of the Channel the debate is around the Touquet agreement. Priti Patel isn't paying as agreed so why should France maintain the border in Calais? Can/should France pull out of the agreement, pull down all the fencing around Calais and return the border to the UK ports. It must be very tempting, it's what Boris would do.
What interests me is that very few people have made any reference to the Le Touquet agreement that has the UK border effectively at the Chunnel and Channel ports. If Boris and Pritti really wind up the French all they would have to do is suspend this agreement and then the Merde really would hit the fan regarding keeping the border secure. But since the French seem rather more civilised in terms of keeping promises hopefully this won’t arise
Edit: Doh, beaten to it by a couple of minutes
Kelvin I completely agree however if you are going to do that it might be sensible to work out who holds all the trump cards first (electricity, being the primary route for a lot of our food supplies etc) before you wind up an equally bellicose and self aggrandising politician who is fighting an election campaign and is only likely to win electorally by deciding to make a point.
Boris seems to be basing the great new age of Britain on the Tudor playbook. What will be his next move? Sending the navy out to hijack American or Chinese treasure galleons?
be sensible to work out who holds all the trump cards first
Why? If the French can damage us... that's a win for a politician who wants to campaign by "standing up for Britain"... it is never about making lives better here for Johnson... it about winning votes off the back of making noise sticking it to "them"... he doesn't have to get the upper hand over other countries, he just needs to vocally fight our corner. Retreat can be easily painted as a success don't forget, once you have patriotic fever on your side.
If the French can damage us… that’s a win for a politician who wants to campaign by “standing up for Britain”… it is never about making lives better here for Johnson… it about winning votes off the back of making noise sticking it to “them”
I don't know so much, if his standing up backfires and causes economic pain on voters, they won't thank Boris for that. He may be pushing that rhetoric, but I reckon he'd pull back from significant action.
Yep, I suspect we'll see more flag poles and Union flags* going up in gardens soon.
*Made in China.
Can/should France pull out of the agreement, pull down all the fencing around Calais and return the border to the UK ports. It must be very tempting, it’s what Boris would do.
If the migrants were going the other way and it was France asking us to stop them making the trip* then do you think Johnson and Patel would do anything about it? No, of course they wouldn't. They'd be more likely to commission a launching strip for the boats and ensure someone eaves them off! They're playing a very dangerous political game on this and the repercussions will roll on for decades.
* I fear this will be the situation soon once they've completely destroyed the country.
if his standing up backfires and causes economic pain on voters, they won’t thank Boris for that
You'd think so. But economic damage can be excused if you can find some seemingly simple but fundamentally flawed reasoning to explain what it's in our national interest.
Speaking of foreign policy, has anyone heard from Liz?
She's off opening new pork markets or sorting out the apple crisis.
If you can’t govern in a way that impresses the voters, you can always be a catalyst for conflicts where you get to “stand up for British [ or French ] interests”.
(1) invent / manufacture a problem
(2) look like you are solving it / supporting people who are solving it
(3) repeat
as a country, we have munchausen-by-prime-minister syndrome
Negative economic impact doesn't guarantee a change. There are plenty of adults around here who have nothing but a car and a phone who continue to vote Tory, DM ideology has amazing resonance. I've spent 9 years arguing the case but you end up being typecast as a bit of a misguided loon. Happily I shall be installed next week in a long-term Labour authority where the barman in the best local bar describes himself as a Marxist and the biking is superb.
Negative economic impact doesn’t guarantee a change.
Nor does this :
https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2021/nov/16/uk-unemployment-drops-furlough-scheme-covid
I think we are currently seeing unemployment levels which haven't been seen since the 1970s, and with it 1970s style issues such as inflation.
The new variant... it will change the narrative for Boris BUT he'll also be making some important decisions that will be unpopular either way.
Anyone suspecting he'll be hitting the bottle hard this weekend?
Anyone suspecting he’ll be hitting the bottle hard this weekend?
he hits it hard every day regardless, it's free.
I often wonder if Gove really did “put the knife in” when Johnson was going up against the others to replace Cameron. Or if he knew he didn’t have the support to win at that point, so wanted to pull out of the race to avoid losing, and to do so without looking frit. Johnson and Gove have been very supportive of each other since.
Undoubtedly that’s what was going on. Did you see Boris’s face the morning of the result? The plan had backfired spectacularly. The PM job then was a poisoned chalice, and he knew that. Pity May didn’t but hey ho.
BUT he’ll also be making some important decisions that will be unpopular either way.
Nope - he will be avoiding making decisions as usual and then telling both sides of the debate what they want to hear.
Always found it weird that government policy and announcements are made on Twitter - a yankee social media platform. Often before they are made in parliament....
it's like a massive crisis in confidence by our government. Like.. they need to see how many likes their policy got? Like an attention grabbing selfie?
Always found it weird that government policy and announcements are made on Twitter – a yankee social media platform. Often before they are made in parliament….
The Speaker is trying to crack down on this.
You’d think so. But economic damage can be excused if you can find some seemingly simple but fundamentally flawed reasoning to explain what it’s in our national interest.
Yep,got rid of freedom of movement and looks like the right to protest is going next with the extra tweaks to the ‘policing bill’,not forgetting the annoying things that need redress in the human rights act.
You’ll be better off without these things so the borders can be protected 🙂
Some really horrific things are happening in the shadows whilst you giggle at Boris de Peppa.
Always found it weird that government policy and announcements are made on Twitter – a yankee social media platform. Often before they are made in parliament
As Trump showed, if everything you do is based around lies and misinformation then it’s best to do that in the least regulated space available
And probably most direct/real time feed.
(1) invent / manufacture a problem
Like closing all routes to asylum from outside the UK, and upping the security on other routes into the UK, leaving dangerous sea crossings as the only route for asylum seekers…
https://twitter.com/natalieben/status/1464262672699043850?s=21
Good, thought - provoking post, thanks kelvin.
Well done that man.
