[Youngian]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... it-emotion

Rather thoughtful Marina Hyde piece on what we might see unfold in the coming days.

The opposite scenario ran through my mind; People get used to the King quicker than Ringo replacing Pete Best (it helps that much of the public have the political memory of a guppy fish). And its back to business with a new season of the Crown and the same old tabloid tittle tattle (Megan this, horsey royal brat that, blah blah). Everyone has grown up with Charlie as much as the Queen and you can see why the continuity argument is a strong card for those arguing for the monarchy’s retention.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

John Crace continues to be unimpressed with Jacob Rees-Møgg and Thérèse 'Granulated' Coffee:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... are_btn_tw

And a candidate for Paragraph of the Year:

But she has at least chosen her new health secretary wisely. Because when you’ve got no ideas, who better than Thérèse Coffey? A woman of no imagination and no great brain. But someone who can be relied to come up with some nonsense on the back of a cigar packet.

Sure enough, Coffey did not disappoint, coming up with – in the absence of a plan – a memory game. A was for Ambulance. B was for Backlog. C was for Care. D was for Doctor. And E was for total fucking Eejit. Poor Thérèse. She didn’t realise how shabby and half-arsed her ideas were.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -liz-truss

Too many highlights, all brilliant. But this stood out:

The presence of Rees-Mogg in the key quad of Truss’s ministers really is something, given all his gaffes, given the fact he has never “delivered” in any previous job at all, and given he has to be lowered into a priest hole for the duration of every election campaign the Conservatives actually want to win. Yet Mogg has never been more important than he is now. Maybe the Tories really are trying to throw it; the mere presence of his name on the teamsheet screams “far east betting syndicate”.

[davidjay]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -liz-truss

Too many highlights, all brilliant. But this stood out:

The presence of Rees-Mogg in the key quad of Truss’s ministers really is something, given all his gaffes, given the fact he has never “delivered” in any previous job at all, and given he has to be lowered into a priest hole for the duration of every election campaign the Conservatives actually want to win. Yet Mogg has never been more important than he is now. Maybe the Tories really are trying to throw it; the mere presence of his name on the teamsheet screams “far east betting syndicate”.

It was a work of genius, but my favourite was the line about it all being part of our new defence strategy - we're too stupid to bother nukeing.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... chancellor

We may be on a highway to hell, but there's at least one person who makes it grimly funny.

It really takes a special class of no-matery to spend £45bn (in old money) and have even rich people you helped actively deplore or pity you. And not just them, but markets too. Imagine spending your entire career extolling the value of free markets, but the first time the free markets get to seriously value you results in a bond market meltdown, the pound hurtling towards dollar and euro parity, and a bleaker prospect for your country than the one opened on Black Wednesday.

Friday saw him rising above the bed he’d just shat, declaring: “I don’t comment on market movements.” Righto. Amazing that Kwasi has previously issued comments on everything from statue nonsense to Labour failing to condemn a rail strike, but is not moved to open his trap on the full-spectrum credibility-torching that provoked one bank’s chief economist to observe mildly that “investors seem to regard the UK Conservative party as a doomsday cult”.

“FURY AT THE CITY SLICKERS BETTING AGAINST UK PLC”. Yes! Why do they hate Britain? Is it something to do with avocados? Are they in league with Meghan and the BBC? Are markets woke? Is the Mail on meth?

Treasury minister Richard Fuller, who looks like he’d list his hobbies as “prefer not to say”

Britannia Unchained, which always sounded like a version of Atlas Shrugged set in a Surrey business park. Let’s face it, if someone said “come to my club night – it’s called Britannia Unchained”, there are various possibilities of what could be involved. But none of them are good, are they?

Yup, it might seem unthinkable, it might be invisible to outsiders, and it does require a kind of next-level freeing of the mind. But there might – just might – come a time when the Conservative party begins to look a shade chaotic.

Great stuff. She be on fire.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... er-britain

Marina Hyde on you know who.

Truss’s government is now too weak to implement its maddest plans and too ideological to implement its most sensible. Last night it emerged that the government has blocked a public information campaign to help people save money on energy – and, by extension, to conserve usage in the face of suggestions that rolling blackouts could be in the post for this winter.

Apparently Truss regarded it as too nannying, despite it having been drawn up by her own business secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg (a 53-year-old who admittedly still has a nanny).

Anyway: the anti-growth coalition. This is a shadowy group bent on scuppering our heroine. It includes, but is not limited to: TV pundits, Extinction Rebellion, markets, unions, possibly Jamie Oliver, all other political parties, thinktanks, people who voted remain, podcasters, Twitter users, people who “taxi from north London townhouses to the BBC studio”… the list goes on and on. Liz Truss appears to hate more elements of Britain than the hard left. Worryingly, this was the most popular bit of her speech in the hall.

Liz Truss is like that relative who no longer trusts what the government says about anything, and prefers to “do her own research”. The trouble is – and I’m sorry if this is one of the many things she doesn’t like to hear – TRUSS IS THE ACTUAL GOVERNMENT. Creating some mad conspiracy to explain your shortcomings really is the last refuge of the loon. On this form, Liz is very close to claiming that paedophiles are using BBC taxis to transport children to remoaner pound-shorters.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... celled-bbc

Marina Hyde on John Cleese joining GB News, and the cancellation paradox.

Explaining why he was about to become a presenter on GB News, the 82-year-old declared loftily: “The BBC have not come to me and said: ‘Would you like to have some one-hour shows?’ And if they did, I would say: ‘Not on your nelly!’ Because I wouldn’t get five minutes into the first show before I’d been cancelled or censored.”

Now, I'm not a BBC person, but I doubt many people get called up out of the blue and asked if they want to make some TV shows. Perhaps they did in the 1960s when Cleese decided he wanted to work in television. And why would anyone want to when he hasn't exactly been brimming with fresh content in recent years, the way that, say, Michael Palin has?

In the strictest interests of accuracy, we should note that he was recently given a whole two series of a sitcom on the BBC, with the last episode of Hold the Sunset broadcast in 2019, a few months before the pandemic hit.

Ah yes, that sitcom he did with Alison Steadman, that was basically a cross between No Place Like Home (the William Gaunt/Martin Clunes 80s sitcom) and Three Up Two Down/Don't Wait Up/No Frills/add your own 80s generation gap sitcom of choice here. What was the verdict?

Criticism was particularly aimed at the series' dated plot and gags, and Roger's unlikeability.

Cleese suffers one of the great afflictions of our age, a kind of delusional broadcast disorder that can make the sufferer believe they have been cancelled by the BBC even while they are literally on the BBC. The worst part of it is that we are not allowed to discuss this social sickness because of political correctness. I tried to tell my husband about it at breakfast yesterday – he works at the BBC – but he told me to be quiet so he could listen to John Cleese on the BBC. Like Cleese, I had been silenced.

You can look at Cleese, or Noel Edmonds, or Nigel Farage, or Laurence Fox, but you’re banned from saying what you see. You have to pretend that women are out there every five minutes wanging on about how they’re not allowed to have a primetime show forever, as well as a bus pass or leadership of a political party, and how their only alternative option is presenting hours of gloriously bitter live telly every week on one of our bazillion-pound news-o-tainment channels.

Finishing on a thorough demolition of GBN's claims to free speech, accuracy, balance and commitment to truthful reporting.

[Yug]

John Crace doing his thing

Dead-eyed AI robot Ai-Da sets the bar high for Truss and Kwarteng

A robot addressing a Lords committee evinced a clarity and personality all too lacking at the top of the Tory party

https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... d-kwarteng

I'm not quoting highlights as there's so much to choose from

[davidjay]

Same with Marina Hyde's latest.

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... eremy-hunt

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Andrew Rawnsley. A man of some integrity.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... raitjacket

The biggest fact about the next prime minister is that they will preside over a punishing combination of tax rises and spending cuts. The pain was foreshadowed by Jeremy Hunt when the chancellor spoke of “eye-wateringly” difficult decisions. The hurt will almost certainly be even more severe under a renewed Johnson premiership because financial markets will demand a “Boris premium” for the additional risk of lending to Britain if the Tories are demented enough to go that way.

In their beginning was their end. Whoever becomes prime minister, we are going back to Tory austerity. The sequel will feel much worse because it will be accompanied by the ravaging effects on living standards of higher inflation and elevated borrowing costs.

Sir Keir Starmer is right to demand a general election and sensible to expect that the Tories are not likely to concede one when they face electoral evisceration.

They will not be able to forever avoid a verdict from the voters. And their opponents have already been furnished with the question to put to the country: what was the point of all these wasted years of Conservative misrule – except to make most Britons poorer and turn our country into an object of ridicule and pity abroad?

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ter-system

Marina Hyde on the new dawn.

Liz Truss addressed the nation in Downing Street, and shared the key takeaway of her stint as the shortest-serving prime minister in British political history: she was right, and everyone else was wrong.

Who is this new leading man, with the hair of a latex Ronald Reagan mask, and the smile of a guy informing the camera: “Like Lord Sugar, I play to win”? ........ Who is this guy whose most relatable personality trait seems to be “Star Wars fan”, yet who genuinely described The Rise of Skywalker as a “great night out”?

Ouch!

The government of the United Kingdom has been effectively paralysed since Boris Johnson’s July resignation statement, even as the country slid deeper into its many interwoven crises. We’ve just witnessed seven weeks of pure chaos, which have demonstrably and measurably made an already dire situation worse for people in a way that now has to be part of future calculations. Huge thanks to all these guys wanging on about the system working, on the very day our third prime minister in 50 days is appointed, but DO ME A FAVOUR. Get out of your wing-backed armchair or your web browser and wander down any high street in the land going, “Well, sir, I think you’ll find the system has worked!”, and see how you get on.

I see that Sunak has brought the sensationally low-competence, low-calibre Suella Braverman back as home secretary. What has she ever achieved, bar “annoying all the right people”? She’s only had one week off after her security breach! Oh my God, hang on - Oliver Dowden too! Dowden! Dominic effing Raab!

Great as always.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... on-founder

Marina Hyde on Jeff Bezos, the parable of the widow's mite, and tax matters in general.

Looked at one way, then, Jeff’s benevolence would be the equivalent of donating £34.56 to charity. Have YOU ever donated thirty-four quid to charity? Do you pay your taxes? If so, you’re actually being more generous than Jeff Bezos, who, famously, avoids almost all of his.

Do recall he was only dragged kicking and screaming to the giving-a-shit game, having spent years accruing billions before it was finally pointed out to him that not having some kind of philanthropic arm looked fairly abysmal. In 2017 Bezos asked Twitter users for ideas on how to help the world “in the here and now”, before embarking on a truly committed programme of ignoring every single one of them who suggested paying his workers properly and contributing fair tax.

A year later, he actually uttered the words: “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel.”

Moving billions to non-profits you control, effectively awarding yourself tax breaks, buying media fawning with one of the lamest possible sleights-of-hand: these things, self-evidently, are a whole lot easier. What’s hard to understand is why on earth we’re still buying into this obvious bullshit from some of the most selfish people in the world.

[Rosvanian]

Guardian long read. "Things were worse therefore they were better". My generation but definitely not my world view.


https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/n ... tain-today

[Andy McDandy]

As a bit of light relief, here's Marina Hyde taking the piss out of the world cup.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/20 ... olor-qatar

Ho ho:

David Beckham is reduced to promoting Doha by claiming “it’s one of the best spice markets I’ve ever been to”. Surely not better than the Say You’ll Be There video, the spice market where he chose his wife? (And which, coincidentally, was also desert-based.)

Good point well made:

The Fifa boss went on to tell fans to shut up about Qatar and love the World Cup, because: “No one people or culture or nation is ‘better’ than any other … this is also one of the core values of football.” To which the only decent reply is: what are you talking about, you grasping shitmuncher? The entire point of your tournament is for one nation to be better than any other! That is literally what international sport is!

Image you'll never shift, but it's still funny:

I like the fact that as part of their attempts to create some kind of fan Stasi, the hosts have reportedly paid for some of the England Band to attend. That means that every time you hear arguably the nation’s most annoying sound (including a reversing Securicor vehicle), you’ll forever know that some of its purveyors have shown their arses for coins.

[Yug]

A mildly humourous piece on the forthcoming strike action by workers in such disparate fields as transport, health, education, and communications. It reads as though Mr Crace has decided the situation has become too serious to just simply take the piss, and instead, a more thoughtful tone has been adopted.

Urgent question on railways chaos sends the Tories running for the hills

John Crace


https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... derailment

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ign-office

Marina Hyde is more than a match for Dominic Raaaaaab.

What was I thinking? Merely, I guess, that Raab would one day be played by Jonny Lee Miller in a three-star ITV psychological thriller called Something Wicked This Way Comes. That now feels naive to the point of twee. It has this week been placed on the record that Dominic Raab is in fact the sort of man whose obsession with correctly formatted documents left his officials being told that “people had died” during the UK’s chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan last year.

Raab sniffed to the Northern Ireland affairs committee: “It’s not like a novel, you sit down and say, ‘Do you know what, over the holidays, this is a cracking read.’” I mean, it’s 36 pages? You’re the Brexit secretary?

Then again, maybe the Good Friday agreement wasn’t correctly formatted, which should certainly induce an enduring sense of failure in all those involved in getting it over the line.

I’m sure we’ve all seen many instances of the “I-make-no-apology-for” device out there in the wild, but this is surely its final form. Sorry Dominic, but no. MAKE AN APOLOGY FOR IT.

Then again, where would you even start? This week’s horribly clarifying revelations come hot on the heels of the discovery that not a single Afghan affiliated with the British government has been accepted and evacuated under the Home Office resettlement scheme, almost a year after it was launched. Those who survive face torture and death; many have already lost their lives.

We made promises to those who served us, then let them down in the most borderline homicidal way possible, while Johnson spaffed out some disgraceful bollocks about the shambolic exit being “one of the outstanding military achievements of the last 50 years”.

No punches pulled, and rightly so.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Not that I take Rishi Sunak seriously (we'll be lucky if he ever mentions maths again, or maybe unlucky) but why do the Guardian employ Simon Jenkins? What on earth is the "cult of maths"?

[Andy McDandy]

Marina Hyde takes on the Prince Harry circus.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... nest-spare

Or consider instead the BBC royal veteran Nicholas Witchell. Witchell is arguably the second most damaged creature of all. Openly detested by the family whose lives he so obsequiously covers, even now he seemingly regards it as his duty to tour various studios and grimace about the disservice done to a king who is literally on camera saying of him: “I can’t bear that man … He’s so awful, he really is.”

What does it say about Britain that this fractured and pain-ridden lot are our first family? On an immediate level, the past week has presented as yet another way for the UK to look mad, weird and chaotic on the world stage.

What a sad state of affairs that all seems, though it’s always amusing to read frothing online comments from people whose personal understanding of duty extends to the tax on booze.

Above all, this epochal saga reminds us that there is more than one way to look at that chilling term for the monarchy, “the institution”.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ter-policy

Marina levels with us on levelling up.

Levelling up now turns out to be a sort of inter-constituency Squid Game, in which MPs who voted for various stripes of self-harm are now forced into trial-by-combat against each other in the hope of appealing to the caprices of shadowy gamesmaster Michael Gove.

If you wonder what Squid Game is, imagine a cross between 80s gameshow Ultraquiz (in which hundreds of contestants were whittled down to one via a series of multiple choice questions, and the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic, "The Running Man".

“I’ve got shops without roofs and whole streets of boarded-up houses and some people are getting cash for adventure golf.” Which is, by coincidence, exactly the picture in the political glossary next to the phrase “sunlit uplands”. Another Tory MP described the policy delivery as “a fuck-up of epic proportions”

And that's what it is - an opportunity to apply for matched funding for stuff that really ought to be within local councils' remits, or in the private sector. It's the Lottery fund, basically.

He seems to have just the two speeds: dewy-eyed prefect delivering a supposedly inspirational speech to much, much younger children; and high-financier unable to fully hide his impatience that he should be required to answer questions from lesser mortals. Neither seems immediately obviously likely to endear him to the British public.

Hard to argue with that. But he's not alone.

Jeremy Hunt could be found this week leaning fully into the latte-sipping insult his side have long weaponised, by making his own painful social media video in which he explained inflation to the masses via the medium of him ordering a flat white. Is this necessary? I know Jeremy likes to think of himself as one of Britain’s most advanced entrepreneurial brains – he ran a course-listing directory in civilian life – but we must at least consider the possibility that British people currently get a hard lesson in inflation every time they do a shop.

Hard to argue with that either. But they're not alone.

Truss herself and her former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng have both set up firms to manage their next steps, while Jacob Rees-Mogg is said to be joining GB News to host his own show. Johnson is being Johnson, and seems well on the way to persuading far too many MPs to give their abusive relationship with him another chance.

Read it and weep.

[Watchman]

Here’s how you do it Dickie

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... nquisitors