I wouldn’t be surprised if Dom was manipulating the press (with a false story about Italy) so other stuff gets by largely unnoticed (dropping the dead cat on the table)

I’ve lost track of what the dead cat is even masking. It’s like the ‘Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly’

I’ve lost track of what the dead cat is even masking.

Well there is the embarrassing story about just how heavily tied Lubov Chernukhin is to Putin still.

cash from russia is good now

No wonder he’s pleading poverty. I guess super injunctions aren’t cheap.

Haven’t you just contradicted yourself?

Not really I have worked in hierarchical companies where the top people really do deserve to be there and take responsibility for systematic failures. The ones I’m arguing against are the ones which are lead by BS merchants who wouldn’t know what responsibility was if it punched them in the face (I bit like the current cabinet).

I don’t know who should be most offended by this:

President of #Perugia airport tells me #BorisJohnson ‘definitely’ did not come through here this month. Says original press release confused him with Tony Blair, who did #perugiagate

— Nick Squires (@NickSquires1) September 21, 2020

What’s the Tory party rules on getting to choose the new leader? If I sign up now do I get to pick if Boris quits in the new year?

What’s the Tory party rules on getting to choose the new leader? If I sign up now do I get to pick if Boris quits in the new year?

Don’t you have to prove pure Aryan blood back three generations, or is that just if you want to marry a party member?

Ygh

The maps make a shortlist and then the members vote

Looks like you need to be a member for 3 months before contest.
Membership is a short form and a donation of your choosing via PayPal.

Have signed up so I can choose our next PM when BoJo quits – assuming he makes it til January

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/22/boris-johnson-westminster-thames

Another excellent article from Marina Hyde.

Johnson is a clown beyond compare

But it’s not funny anymore

I have watched this clip a few times now. The anger has passed and sadness has remained.

Sadness that a PM has to resort to populism of the worst kind to distract from his abject failure.

pic.twitter.com/Fz2mb8RANs

— Alexis Conran (@alexisconran) September 22, 2020

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/22/starmer-labour-leader-brexit-johnson

Not sure if this should be in the Keir Starmer thread or this but it follows on well from the tweet linked above.

kimbers’ video, Jesus Christ. He’s going full Trump but he’s not even as convincing. Urgh.

Johnson is the school bully. With his gang behind him he uses his cruel ‘humorous’ cleverly-worded barbs to humiliate people.

Like all bullies, deprived of his gang, he shrinks like the coward he is. Stripped of his cover, all that’s left is his nastiness

Seeing that clip makes me very angry. He really doesn’t give a toss does he?

Caring it the ‘NHS test and trace’ because no one wants to criticise the NHS is a particularly scummy tactic. It’s Serco with NHS branding isn’t it?

That’s just embarrassing. He’s floundering around now like a beached manatee. Fat knacker

Jeremy Hunt has just done the most passive aggressive analysis of Boris on Newsnight

He clearly doesn’t expect him to be there for much longer and is lining himself up for the inevitable leadership election coming soon.

The world’s gone mad.

Just watched Newsnight and up pops Jeremy Hunt speaking like a sensible adult. Again. He’s starting to make a habit of this.

EDIT:

Beat me to it Binners.

Yup Hunt all over the place at the moment he knows the Tories will defenestrate Johnson soon

Jeremy Hunt – took the rhyming slang mantle from James Blunt

Maybe it was Cummings plan all along, Hunt just said he wouldn’t have got an 80 seat majority cos Farage wouldn’t have pulled out his minions . So they needed fat boy populist clown to appeal to everyone and knock some polystyrene blocks down with a JCB

But really Hunt, who everyone thought was a stone cold psychopath when he was Health sec, is least likely guy in the frame to be pulled into Cummingses black hole / theatre of cruelty / atrocity exhibition / vortex of hate

At least James Blunt can be very funny at times

I like james blunt, his Twitter work is inspired.

Hunt is a godsend for the Disaster Capitalists.

They still get their insider trade and the gradual repairing of the damage is portrayed as a remainer conspiracy in cahoots with the evil EU.

What he really meant to say was, ‘the British working class had to fight for freedom of expression (unstamped press etc), the right to vote (Peterloo, Chartism) and were met with violent suppression by my political predecessors. That’s why I bought the water cannons and rubber bullets, much better than the sword and cudgel.’

Just watched Kimbers link – jesus, that’s embarrassing. And as BillMC points out, a proper distortion of history.

Much as I despise him, even Hunt is looking like a least worse option, along with a couple of others who have tactically kept their heads down to avoid being tarnished with being part of the current shitshow. I’m sure that’s just a very weird optical illusion, and his strings will be being pulled by a different set of self interested puppet masters.

When the answer to the question “Who can save us from this mess” is Jeremy Hunt you know that we are all ****

From Kimber’s link…There’s a point ( at about 50secs in) when Boris is spouting on about advancements “Democracy, free speech..” where he’s just about to say “rule of law” and at the last minute manages to check himself…

What a pillock

Just been watching some PMQs stuff and I think Boris is an absolute idiot –  I mean that in sense he lacks any sort of logical thinking and common sense. Hes moaning labour are “attacking” track and trace and not getting behind it same thing he always says really. Its like hes forgot what the opposition is for they aint there to pat him on the back and tell him hes doing an amazing job. Every day some how he manages to surprise me.

. Its like hes forgot what the opposition is for they aint there to pat him on the back and tell him hes doing an amazing job. Every day some how he manages to surprise me.

He hasn’t, but he is trying to make them look to be the villians to the less critically thinking parts of the electorate. Emotions trump (heh) facts.

From the Marina Hyde piece linked above

By the time of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff – though still so short of money that he has only two servants, neither of which is a nanny – is performing work he is far more suited to. Namely, trying to shag two married women with as little effort as possible, being hidden in smelly laundry baskets, getting his arse justifiably handed to him in public, and ending up having a laugh about it all. This is a much better biographical arc than the one we’re stuck with: when this character type has to boss Agincourt/a deadly pandemic and its hideous economic fallout.

As for whether Johnson himself will be able to move from history back to comedy, that in itself increasingly feels like something that only happens in fiction. He won’t be short of money, of course – no ex-prime minister is – but that has never really been the thing he seems to have thought would fill his inner void. Far from sealing that chasm, the job he always wanted seems only to be making it deeper – in fact, there is no longer a bottom to it.

And surely part of Johnson’s widely briefed gloom is the realisation that even his plan for a prime ministerial afterlife has developed fatal flaws. Pontificating on what he’d do if he were in charge – well, even Telegraph readers will have been more than sated by having to live through the period when he was.

Love the contradictions in kimbers video clip. We cannot tell the British public what to do, but they must do what we tell them!

He hasn’t, but he is trying to make them look to be the villians to the less critically thinking parts of the electorate. Emotions trump (heh) facts.

Exactly, just lie and half the electorate will believe it as they are unable to know otherwise. Only yesterday Johnson was stating that we had the best track and trace system in Europe. We know that is not true, he knows that is not true, but 50% of the electorate probably now think we have the best track and trace system in Europe.

Hes moaning labour are “attacking” track and trace and not getting behind it same thing he always says really. Its like hes forgot what the opposition is for they aint there to pat him on the back and tell him hes doing an amazing job.

Yes but that approach worked perfectly well for the last 4.5 years over Brexit where it’s been a case of “we won, you lost, get over it” and the idea that if you just believe in it rather than trying to tear it apart, it’ll all work fine.

Brexit isn’t working not cos it’s a complete disaster managed by a bunch of clueless morons but because the EU and Remoaner traitors aren’t believing hard enough in Making Britain Great Again.

Same with T&T. That’s not working but that’s the fault of Labour for attacking it and the general public for (shock horror) wanting to use it. Not because it’s been farmed out to a bunch on Tory mates with zero experience of public health systems!

It’s standard Boris. Find an “enemy” and tear it apart to deflect from the multiple failings within the Tory party. Problem when the enemy is your own ineptitude that it’s difficult to distract from that cos it’s on show every time you don’t answer a question…

Just seen the GBBO intro

Welcome to a new series of The Great British Bake Off – and a big hello to our new presenter Matt Lucas! #GBBO pic.twitter.com/0sa8NxTJtE

— British Bake Off (@BritishBakeOff) September 22, 2020

I imagine the will be a fair few complaints about that, tbh. Partly from the Tory middle classes complaining that they watch bake off to get away from all that, mainly for poking fun at Boris, ‘he’s doing the best he can’ etc

I like the ‘depending on how tall you are bit’ !!

I love the ‘if you have to bake in a tent, bake in a tent, but don’t bake in a tent.’ Saw it straight after the actual announcement. matt Lucas was more priministerial and made more sense.