30 %
40 %
20 %
10 %
Stanley Johnson A hereditary peerage in recognition of his work for violence against women and for his extraordinary versatility. He is an example to all of us of the importance of having no principles whatsoever. He taught me everything I know. And it just so happens that when he dies, I will end up with the title. Fancy that.
Paul Dacre The best of the best. The man who embodies the very highest principles of a democratic free press. Polite at all times. Thank you for always answering the phone when I was in trouble and going the extra mile to provide helpful stories in the Daily Mail. For you, nothing less than a peerage is a good enough. From now on you shall be known as Lord Fuck of Fuckshire.
Nadine Dorries The most loyal and stupidest of colleagues. Supporting me even through the really tough times – mainly because she knew no one else but me would ever consider her for a cabinet post. For her the Order of Merit for her services to wrecking the BBC, Channel 4 and literature. Her books are unique. Thankfully.
Matt Hancock I know how desperately you and Gina want to be Sir Matt and Lady Hancock. Which is why I’m not going to give it to you! Your neediness is just far too enjoyable. Dream on.
It was fainting room only at the Cinnamon Club for Penny Mordaunt’s leadership launch. There were no restrictions to the guest list – a welcome change from the Team Rish! campaign – and the private dining room was packed from at least half an hour before the start.
In the front two rows were some of the MP backers. Mordaunt might have hoped for a rather more stellar collection than Andrea Leadsom, David Davis, Maria Miller and Sarah Atherton – not to mention inadequates such as Michael Fabricant and James Gray. Still, she does have George Freeman, the new Oliver Letwin who is so indecisive he has an existential crisis just choosing what to eat for breakfast, and Charles Walker, the sweetest and most gentle of MPs. So she must be doing something right.
After a brief introduction from Leadsom, who has surprised everyone by not being delusional enough to have a third crack at the leadership, Mordaunt fought her way to the lectern. She had spent much of the past few days doing parliamentary speed dating with Tory MPs, she began. And what she had found was an abundance of humility and an unswerving sense of duty.
Which was astonishing. Because anyone else spending more than five minutes with many Conservative MPs would have found a dysfunction of raging narcissism. ..
...Only a week previously, Johnson had been insisting he would fight on and win. The Thousand Year Reich. Now his party could barely bring themselves to acknowledge his existence. Liz Truss looked as though she was only sitting next to him on sufferance. Being seen as the Boris continuity candidate is proving to be a niche marketplace. One largely frequented by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries who cosied up to her ostentatiously.
The Labour leader hardly even pretended to acknowledge the Convict’s existence, directing all his questions at the integrity of the Tory leadership contenders. Johnson looked just as bored. He wasn’t going to be silenced, he said. He would continue lying right up until the end. It still hasn’t registered why it is that his party has belatedly got rid of him. “You’re Captain Crasheroony Snoozefest,” he said lamely...
...At 5pm precisely, Tory MPs were again squeezed into a rammed committee room for the results of the first round of voting. Sunak was ahead but not by as much as he would have hoped. Mordaunt was strongly placed, Truss less so. Zahawi was out. “I love my country,” he sobbed. Only his country didn’t love him. Jeremy Hunt secured the stunning result of getting even fewer votes than he had the day before. Classy. Still, at least we would be spared Esther McVey as deputy leader. You take your consolations where you find them.
https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ics-sketch
She was robotic, brain dead, managing to make Theresa May sound engaging, animated and personable. A laugh a minute. If this is the prime minister the country has been waiting for then we have all been lobotomised.
As she left the room, she headed for ... the window. The launch may have been bad, but it hadn’t been that much of a disaster. Eventually as she walked through a cluster of camera tripods, a snapper took pity on her and directed her to the door. Classico. She couldn’t find her way into the room and she couldn’t find her way out. I’ve never loved her more. Obviously she would be a total disaster as prime minister, but she’d be great material for the sketch. Someone worse than the Maybot. Sign me up for Team Liz.
The first question was one of trust. “I’ve delivered the impossible,” said Truss, blinking rapidly and sounding like a superannuated 1980s Amstrad computer. As AI goes, Liz makes the Maybot look human. At least Theresa May was vaguely aware there was a reality from which she was detached. Truss is just some free floating atoms in search of a personality and ideas. Virtually nothing she said made any sense. And if it did, it was entirely accidental. She is everyone’s preferred comedy candidate.
So most of the rest of the debate consisted of Liz fantasising about uncosted tax cuts and trying to sound human – next time out, someone should restore her to her factory default settings – and Mordaunt sounding surprisingly wooden and clueless. Someone should teach her to smile and not talk in banalities. She even forgot her own promises to cut tax. Just trying not to screw up on live TV is setting the bar a little low for a wannabe prime minister.
This is mad. No one – NO ONE – should have time for this stuff right now. It’s like the Republicans spending the buildup to the Iraq war making sure the French fries in the Congressional cafeterias were renamed “freedom fries”.
Their own Commons chamber is leaking to the point of occasional closure, this week saw a four-day fire on Salisbury Plain, and temperatures of 40C are forecast for next week. I’m not sure how much more the gods of metaphor can do to make the situation readable for these people. Let’s face it, they did pestilence for the past two years and got nowhere.
The Convict opened up by saying he couldn’t understand why Labour had tabled the confidence debate. The Speaker had to gently point out to him that it was the government’s own motion. Johnson waved him away – details have never been his strong point and he wasn’t about to change now – and went on to deliver what was, even by his own standards, one of his more shambolic speeches. Up there with Peppa Pig in its chaotic delusion. Almost as if he were still hung over from the previous day’s Chequers’ party as he went into a Biggles extended air force metaphor.
Rish! was especially keen on mansplaining over his rival, though both gave the impression they would happily see the country on its knees and let the planet burn in exchange for 24 hours in Downing Street. Each accused the other of being a dangerous halfwit. The worry for the country is that they are both right. Lucky us.
...the UK has been blessed with the tedium of the Tory leadership psychodrama. Hard to believe we still have the best part of a month of it to go. Far worse that we will have to live through it. Where is the induced coma when you need it?
https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... -campaigns
“They even broke into my safe!” Lest you imagined you had hallucinated this attack line, Donald’s etiolated adult son Eric could be found honking it over on Fox News, where, as I am typing this, the story is currently being headlined “BIDEN’S FBI RANSACKS THE HOME OF POTENTIAL 2024 OPPONENT”. As Eric declared with incredulity: “They broke into a safe?! … I mean gimme a break!”
You’ll be hugely taken with this notion that a safe is your special private place that NO ONE should ever touch, a kind of supra-legal repository whose contents are automatically placed beyond the legitimate attentions of any and all law enforcement agencies, no matter the gravity of federal crimes being alleged, and no matter how loudly your political opponents shriek “but his safe!”
Not for the first time, much of the most unwittingly revealing commentary on it all comes from Trump himself, who says of the raid, “nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before”. Well quite. Meanwhile, plenty of his most powerful supporters have lost no time in informing Americans that if this can happen to the former president, then the ordinary people are next. And yet, and yet … are they? Of all the things to lose sleep over in the contemporary US, the imminent peril of dozens of FBI agents turning up on your doorstep and finding classified presidential records among your ironing is arguably not one of them.
After days like these, what does he really have to lose, barring other people’s money? Each new probe is an added incentive to win and shut it down, pausing or permanently halting any number of lawsuits, and painting all reasonable investigation as clearly politically motivated, or – just like before! – an attempt at simple electoral theft.We've missed you, Reenie.
The hustings now take place at a pitch only 75-year-old sociopaths can hear, so I’m afraid I’m don’t know whether bubbly detention centre redcoat Liz Truss last night promised to “look again” at bringing back the poor laws, though I am enjoying the doomed efforts of the Sunak campaign to insist that their guy gets it. “For too long, water hasn’t had the attention it deserves”, burbled Rishi, on the same day the Northern Echo ran an aerial photo of the huge swimming pool complex Sunak is building at his constituency home in Yorkshire, under an authority that this morning announced a hosepipe ban.
Today’s splash headline in the mild-mannered Metro newspaper is: PM TURNS UP FOR MEETING. This was the story about Boris Johnson unexpectedly presenting as the “surprise guest” at a Downing Street meeting with the energy bosses who are about to plunge an unspecified but hefty percentage of the country into dire financial distress. The meeting resulted in the government announcing precisely zero new measures.
As for Kwarteng, it feels ironicidal that he was one of the Tory MPs (along with Liz Truss) who once wrote a book claiming that British workers were “among the worst idlers in the world”. High praise! The UK “rewards laziness” apparently, which feels accurate in this case, given that 10 years on, Kwarteng is now a cabinet minister whose job is being done by TV’s Martin Lewis, along with those of about four other secretaries of state.She finishes with some musing on "the blob", which is blamed for the government's inability to do anything. Mainly because it sounds all deep state and sinister in a way that "can't be arsed" doesn't.
You may keep hearing Truss supporters say: “You underestimate Liz at your peril.” But the UK is already in grave peril, so … I’ll take that bet. Presumably I’ll be permitted to collect on it in a couple of years, if not in cash, then certainly in some form of subsistence bartering in District 11 of the sunlit uplands.
Her political philosophy appears to consist of only two immutable tenets: that tax cuts are the answer to everything, and that British workers are incredibly lazy.
Despite being a message somewhat questionably suited to the times, this has apparently caused a twitch in the phantom loins of the 0.42% of British voters who will be deciding the next prime minister. With just the two weeks left to run in a leadership contest that has been going on since sometime in the early Mesozoic period, Truss remains an absolute mine of withheld information.
There will be those of you feeling pessimism is the rational response, and it’s hard to disagree. I think we used to produce hope, but as part of some efficiency drive or other we have run down the industry and allowed other nations to corner the market in it.
Once again, you really do have to marvel at the cheapness and beaten-ness of the UK. At least in the US, it costs lobbyists untold millions to get individual politicians to sell their soul, and do grotesque things to benefit the industries they represent. Yet every time you see footage of raw sewage power-hosing out on to a UK beach in the constituency of someone who voted for it to be allowed, do reflect on the fact that it probably only cost some public affairs wanker a couple of Champions League tickets.
No water company boss should be allowed to collect their salary or bonus unless they take a long and exhaustively reported dip in the waters of one of the beaches they’ve pumped sewage into that same morning. Just think of it. The first wild swimming article you’d genuinely want to read.
Yup, welcome to Shit Creek. Population: us.
Despite the fact that a bizarre amount of journalism has now made itself about predicting events as opposed to reporting on them, I do aim to avoid any serious forecasts in my columns. But an internet search reveals that back in the day, I suggested that by the time the Festival of Brexit came around we would be “pooling our corned beef and lightbulbs”. A reminder that pretty much the only thing recent administrations have delivered on is making grimly facetious jokes come true.
Lowlights are too numerous to cover in full here, but special mention must be made of the unwatchable (and indeed unwatched) video content culled from some misconceived lamplight/drone event on the Norfolk Broads whose wildly expensive funding would arguably have been better handed to the disadvantaged women and victims of abuse who somehow found themselves participating in it.
The entire thing clocked in at £120m of taxpayers’ money, which – strangely – has yet to prompt a government minister to fume about how many nurses it could have paid for instead.
Rees-Mogg himself was back then touting a “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Canada” Brexit model to the party faithful, explaining: “That is a word developed by a nanny, and nannies are jolly good things.” “Brexit will be a success,” he added, “because it is a Conservative thing to be doing.”Preaching to the choir he may have been, but had anyone from any other political party come out with something so cretinous...
Truss uses the word “delivery” a lot for someone whose own delivery would lose the Bafta to an HGV announcing “This vehicle is reversing”.
Nigel Farage has just launched a personal red-white-and-blue gin range – a reminder that 40% proof spirits are the perfect accompaniment to the ongoing fallout of his political philosophy. He says his gin is “a taste of Brexit”; certainly, the blue liquid is the precise shade of the contents of a chemical toilet.
The current bookies’ favourite to replace Liz Truss as Tory leader is … Boris Johnson.
All in all, a nation in rude political health, and absolutely not a deeply necrotic political culture where a significant number of grownups spent two days wetting their pants over a comedian pretending to take Truss seriously.
Sayonara, too, to Nadine Dorries, who seems to have identified the moment of maximum opportunity for a peerage outside of a dream sequence. And the seal on the “brain drain” description remains unbroken with news that Lord Frost, the worst negotiator since France sold Louisiana, will also not “serve” in a Truss cabinet after rejecting two roles. Just assume he’ll be trying to unpick this decision in two months, like he did with his own Brexit deal.
Meet the new Boris. Exactly the same as the old Boris. A whining, bad-tempered, self-pitying narcissist. Playing the victim card to the last.https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ic-victory
There was no expression of remorse. No empathy for people wondering how they were going to pay their bills. No apology for having done nothing for the past few months.
Je ne regrette rien. No recognition that he and he alone was the architect of his downfall. It had been he who had repeatedly broken the law. It had been he who had lied and lied and lied. It had been he who had tried to cover up financial and sexual misconduct by MPs in his own party. The only real question he should have been asking himself was why it had taken so long for the Tory party to get rid of him.
IDS punched the air. He was no longer the most disliked Tory leader of all. That was quite some title for Liz to live down to. It wasn’t just the entire country and two-thirds of her own MPs who didn’t want Truss. It was well over half of the Tory party membership. Of a possible 170,000 votes – assuming all Tory members are actually alive – Radon Liz had secured just 80,000. But that was apparently enough to make her the UK’s next prime minister. Good luck to us. Democracy moves in mysterious ways.https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ace-sketch
It was as though Kuenssberg and Sunak both knew they were filling time. That there was no point discussing his plans as they were never going to happen. Though even an abject, beaten Rish! somehow seems more plausible than Truss. The Tory party members have played a sick joke on the rest of us.
“Please do come back on the show,” Kuenssberg said to Sunak. Though not any time too soon. She reluctantly turned to the panel for their verdict. “You might as well have got Peter Andre,” said Lycett. Turning the screw to the last. Harsh but fair.
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