The tories have managed to persuade the North “Labour have failed you”. The fact people can’t understand having a Labour MP doesn’t mean Labour are in charge says it all really.

Trumpism/Bannon politics works because people are a bit disinterested in actual politics.

Is it just me, or does this have a really strong “together, but not together” vibe?

I reckon Private Eye would do a right number on that.

Johnson: Thank heavens for a nice bit of window dressing.

Symonds: The actual window dressing cost £1000 per curtain, not a problem now I’ve got to where I want to be.

It is a business arrangement, no more, no less.

I think we have to admit the voting public is like one of those girls that seems to enjoy the drama and attention that comes from picking the abusive, unfaithful “bad boy”…

A pretty good analogy. And while he’s beating somebody else up, he’s not hitting them.

I think I’ll try and avoid all forms of media today. We’re going to be treated with that fly-tipped sofa looking even smugger and more pleased with himself than ever

Is it just me, or does this have a really strong “together, but not together” vibe?

I don’t think theres any doubt who’s wearing the trousers in that relationship. They’re underneath that Laura Ashley monstrosity.

He looks like a schoolboy being dragged off to somewhere he doesn’t want to go by his mum

We’re going to be treated with that fly-tipped sofa looking even smugger and more pleased with himself than ever

Maybe not so smug when the Scottish results come in (hopefully)

He looks like a schoolboy being dragged off to somewhere he doesn’t want to go by his mum

Or; being lumbered with taking totally embarrassing recently divorced dad to your graduation because he paid for you to go to St Andrews

It is a business arrangement, no more, no less.

Yep. Boris was installed as the inside man to facilitate a smash and grab operation. This is his actual job and is ongoing…

It was interesting listening to R4 this morning, I get the feeling that these local elections have been seen variously as a “protest against Labour” and/or “support for the government”… TBH I’m not quite sure what can be read into them yet

Anyway Labour are about to start a second round of infighting as a result I reckon, the results being interpreted by some as a signal to lurch left and others as a signal to lurch more to the centre (right)…

Wow…

– history made as Tory mayor Ben Houchen is re-elected by a landslide- with 73% – among the smokestacks of the Tees Valley

– Houchen only got elected with 51% back in 2017

— Jim Pickard (@PickardJE) May 7, 2021

Today a woman wearing a hat made from precious jewels and gold will tell us that her govt intends to enact measures to suppress democracy by making it harder to vote, will reform the judiciary to stop it from challenging illegal things her govt does, and will tell us that they intend to make it harder to protest about any of it.

Great, our country just gets better and better

Disappointed that she didn’t wear that hat made from gold and jewels, as that was the least unpleasant prospect from your post

Another apology from the BBC for blatantly misrepresenting the facts…

BBC press release:

We accept that Sir James Dyson is not a prominent Conservative supporter as was stated in some of our coverage of his text messages with the Prime Minister.

The James Dyson Foundation made a charitable gift to support the Wiltshire Engineering Festival for school children.

We accept that this does not signal affiliation to any political party and we would like to put the record straight.

Sir James also raised concerns about the accuracy of other aspects of our reporting.

We wish to make clear that Sir James contacted Number 10 in response to the Prime Minister’s direct request to him for assistance in relation to the urgent need for ventilators and incurred costs of £20 million which his company voluntarily absorbed in trying to assist in the national emergency.

His text messages to the Prime Minister were also later sent to officials. We are sorry that these facts were not always reflected in our coverage, and we apologise for not doing so.

Response from Sir James Dyson:

“The BBC now acknowledges that it was wrong and has issued an apology – which I accept.

To justify its claim that I am a “prominent Conservative supporter” the BBC shamefully twisted our charitable gift to school children to suit their political narrative.

The Prime Minister asked Dyson to help at a time of crisis, in the national interest, and we did just that.

We dropped everything and focused on the national effort.

Far from any gain, the project cost us £20 million – a sum we voluntarily bore.

I am proud of the efforts of every Dyson person who contributed and we would do precisely the same again.

It was deeply disappointing, for me and for the hundreds of Dyson people who gave it their all, to have our efforts developing an emergency ventilator mischaracterised and used for political mudslinging.”

Source: Guido

I can’t think of anything more insulting than being accused of being a prominent Conservative supporter. Quite outrageous really. It was very good of him to accept their apology.

Interesting that no one knows what his CCJ is about yet. Assume there is some sort of injunction as surely the creditor would be only too keen to hoof him in the balls.

Dyson has been scrupulous about keeping out of politics, so it’s outrageous that he should be be treated like this.

Oh wait:

Sir James @Dyson says Britian should "walk way" from the EU without a deal. "If you walk away, they will come to us" #marr pic.twitter.com/oY61JgnRtF

— The Andrew Marr Show (@MarrShow) November 12, 2017

Interesting that no one knows what his CCJ is about yet.

Will be some sort of childcare provider who has fallen out with the delightful Carrie.

Supporting Brexit doesn’t make you a Tory supporter. He may feel the Tories are too left wing for him.

I’m hoping it’s more a dodgy lockdown breaking champagne and strippers night that he ran out on. Or perhaps an unpaid utility bill on the new mistresses’ flat.

Dyson, like Cummings, isn’t a Tory. But they both supported, and worked in the interest of, Johnson and Vote Leave. Any ‘returning favours’ concerns come from that, and is personal to Johnson, not his party.

Supporting Brexit doesn’t make you a Tory supporter. He may feel the Tories are too left wing for him.

It was more aimed at his distaste for ‘political mudslinging’ in general, rather than his direct affiliation.

Assume there is some sort of injunction as surely the creditor would be only too keen to hoof him in the balls.

Unlikely since if you can be arsed to sort out an injunction then paying off the creditor would be easy.
Might be a valid case with a professional company who wouldnt want the bad press or given it was a default judgement which didnt use his real name or address I wonder if it is some anti lockdown nutter who decided to bill him for their holidays and it somehow slipped through.

Imagine being the bailiff though? Every time you pick something up to repossess it “No, that’s not mine, it was paid for by the taxpayer” “No that’s not mine, it’s Carrie’s, though it was also paid for by the taxpayer” “No that’s not mine, it was paid for by a mysterious secret benefactor”. Seriously mate, is there anything that actually belongs to you? “Well, about 19 illegitimate kids?”

Still, the gunboats probably helped getting the vote out, and that’s what matters at the end of the day

CCJ has been cancelled, probably a spurious claim in the first place, I imagine most people Boris owes money to won’t be collecting via the small claims court.

CCJ has been cancelled, probably a spurious claim in the first place

My guess seems to have been fairly close. Still begs the question how it was ignored to allow it to be passed.

One of my friends in the US just sent me a link to this video and highlighted a direct quote from our PM:

“You can’t rule out the possibility that beneath the elaborately constructed veneer of a blithering idiot there lurks a blithering idiot.” – Boris Johnson

He said that his friends in the US don’t normally follow UK politics but for some reason have been intrigued by how he ended up as PM and have been looking at YouTube videos of his time on various TV shows. Some of them even voted for Trump the first time round but their general consensus is “How the hell did you lot vote him into power??”

I genuinely don’t have an answer to send back other than “We’re more moronic as a nation than you lot.”

I genuinely don’t have an answer to send back other than “We’re more moronic as a nation than you lot.”

Agree, Americans moving on from trump (republicans stop split Tbf) but in Britain vista seem to be doubling down on Johnson 😬

https://twitter.com/WinstonCProject/status/1393321256552996865

Bent as a nine bob note. But talks posh, so people who should know better give him a free pass.

https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI/status/1393680376967614467?s=19

Seems fairly standard. Outside of Twitter, does anyone care anymore?

Blatant corruption also seems to have been ‘priced in’ to People voting for Boris and co. I mean look at all the stuff that came out the other day about ‘Call-me-Dave’ – cronyism on an industrial scale – and it was just met with a collective shrug.

I see they’re firing up the next stage of the culture war. We can look forward to the opening of the Jim Davidson wing of the V&A

Accounts of British history must 'not start from a position of guilt and shame or a denigration of this country's past'.🤦‍♂️
Sunday Telegraph. pic.twitter.com/3F1hWc3oqw

— Seán William Gannon (@swgannon) May 16, 2021

To summarise Oliver Dowdens article: we should be proud of our slave-trading past and anyone who says we shouldn’t celebrate it is probably a communist that hates Britain 🙄

You know it’s bad when folks starting quoting Guidofawkes as a “source” 🤣

Blatant corruption also seems to have been ‘priced in’ to People voting for Boris and co. I mean look at all the stuff that came out the other day about ‘Call-me-Dave’ – cronyism on an industrial scale – and it was just met with a collective shrug.

I think the elephant in the room with CMD isn’t the cronyism it his absolute abject failure in his attempts to be a crony.

A corporation hires the ex Prime Minister with the aim of leveraging his influence with his former friends and colleagues in government for its benefit – a government that is openly and blatantly not adverse in handing out money and favours like sweets to their friends and don’t even care off they get caught. And he fails. And the company that paid him richly for his services goes bust. He thought these people were his friends. But they obviously didn’t think he was one of theirs.

I don’t think the word ‘blithering’ gets used enough these days.

Cameron’s “failure” is more to do with the way German institutions treated those he was shilling for… they smelt a rat and refused any closed door dealings to help out.

“I don’t want to take a Maoist approach but a Moreist approach to our heritage”.

Do you think he misread his job title as ‘Culture War Secretary’?

That “We won’t allow Britain’s history to be cancelled” That’s literally what false history does, it cancels the real history and replaces it with lies.

If you can’t love your country warts and all, if you can’t live with the reality of what it’s done badly as well as what it’s done well, you don’t love your country at all. You love an imaginary country, you don’t even know the real one, you’ve never lived there.

But then this is Boris Johnston’s government, the man who wrote a fanfic about Churchill without actually knowing anything about the man, and for whom “Churchillian” literally means “doing what I want and then just claiming Churchill would have done the same, even though he’d have kicked me in the balls for it”

If you can’t love your country warts and all, if you can’t live with the reality of what it’s done badly as well as what it’s done well, you don’t love your country at all. You love an imaginary country, you don’t even know the real one, you’ve never lived there.

That needs putting on t-shirts and banners and shouting from the rooftops

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/18/nurse-who-cared-for-boris-johnson-resigns-over-lack-of-respect-for-nhs-workers

A nurse who cared for Boris Johnson when he was gravely ill with Covid-19 says she has handed in her resignation, such is her disillusionment with the “lack of respect” shown by the government for the NHS and healthcare workers.

She also lacerated the government’s handling of the Covid crisis, saying: “Lots of nurses felt that the government hadn’t led very effectively – the indecisiveness, so many mixed messages. It was just very upsetting.”

McGee recalled the situation leading up to Christmas last year – a period when the government was coming under heavy criticism for not acting sooner to impose new restrictions as data suggested that measures at the time were not limiting public mixing as much as during the March lockdown.

She described what took shape in her hospital as “a cesspool of Covid”.

“This time there was more than the first surge. The nurses are stretched even more. An absolute shitshow to be honest. At that point, I don’t know how to describe the horrendousness of what we were going through. We were desperate.”

The buck stops with the PM. He made the choice to accept an NHS run to breaking point (it was his stated target) rather than try and prevent that occuring. And then, when staff are exhausted after a winter wave that everyone saw coming, and he refused to act to prevent, he sits back and expects them to work harder than ever to catch up with services lost, for a real term pay cut. And a clap or two.

“I don’t want to take a Maoist approach but a Moreist approach to our heritage”.

What an arsehole.

Just thought that Dowden quote deserved to be aired again to appreciate it’s toe-curling combination of cynicism and arrogance.

What an arsehole.