[Tubby Isaacs]

Barrister thinks Rishi's going to lose.

[Andy McDandy]

I'm guessing they're aiming for the long grass here. Drag it out over the summer and hope something happens.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Wouldn't that bring the shit nearer to the general election?

[mattomac]

I’m beyond knowing what their big plan is

I don’t think mentioning Dale Vince when there seems to more issues with the bloke they put in the Lords is going help (it’s also not a place they want to go) and the other is women with penises.

Suppose they could go for a GE but I don’t think that is in Sunak’s mind. Though it could create selection headaches for Labour.

[Andy McDandy]

I think they're doing the culture war stuff to shore up their core vote and avoid leaking to the right. After 13 years, "at least we're not a bunch of fookin' hippies and queeahs" is all they've got left.

[mattomac]

They are talking about inheritance tax again so I now assume it’s effectively just let’s see if any of our old hits stick.

Problem wasn’t it moved the polls for a couple of weeks it was the delay in the election to after the world economic crisis.

Even if it worked today they are the government not the opposition and I really wouldn’t get that Ghoul Zahawi to front it, previously been removed for err not paying tax.

[Tubby Isaacs]

You could actually raise more money and cut the rate by scrapping some of the reliefs which disproportionately favour the very rich. per Dan Neidle. I don't know if there's any reason Labour couldn't do this, and stick it to Sunak and Zahawi in the process. They wouldn't need to cut the rate down to 25%, as Dan suggests (which would I assume make it fiscally neutral). Do it to 30%, and raise more than now, with most people paying less.

It's stuff like this which makes me very impatient with the "they're all Tories, I don't want to hear any clever details from Rachel Reeves" stuff.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Here's a recent example of a difference.

https://www.ft.com/content/e3680abf-6e8 ... 99050ddd5a

Tory Rachel Reeves to raise tax on Private Equity. Useful amount of money (estimated £440m a year). While also engaging with the industry because their investment is needed. I prefer this to the Corbyn approach.

[Tubby Isaacs]

This doesn't sound great for practical government man, Rishi Sunak.

Eat Out To Help Out introduced without any consultation with the Health Secretary, or SAGE by the look of it.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... id-inquiry

In his recently published book Johnson at 10: The Inside Story, Anthony Seldon says that the then health secretary, Matt Hancock, first found about the scheme when he read a press release about it. Asked to comment on the claim on Saturday, Hancock’s spokesperson did not deny the account but said he was unable to comment before the inquiry.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

This part is telling:

Insufficient consideration had been given to the trade-offs between the economic and health impacts of the policy. Given Covid’s still high reproduction rate, the snowball of infections was bound to be affected by it before the winter. Later research suggested that the scheme, costing a total of £850 million, caused around 5,000 additional symptomatic infections in the period it was active – responsible for between 8 and 17 per cent of all newly detected infections in late summer. Sunak had inadvertently subsidized the virus, with the Prime Minister the complicit bystander.

The tension between prioritizing health and prioritizing the economy that the Treasury imagined during the second wave was a mere artifice, with many officials now believing that the Treasury had missed an obvious lesson: that doing the best thing to fight the virus was the best thing for the economy for most of the pandemic. ‘Eat Out to Help Out was a complete disaster. Not linked to health at all, the result of having two warring stations of power [the Treasury and DHSC] and no coordinator to keep them in check,’ agrees another.

Seldon, Anthony; Newell, Raymond. Johnson at 10: The Inside Story

Given that, this seems to be at least a partial explanation of the delay over releasing the What's App messages and the barrage of dead cats we've seen in recent days. And Dacre's hysteria...

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

Sunak under fire as ‘stupid’ Eat Out to Help Out scheme to be focus of Covid inquiry

Last Thursday the Cabinet Office launched an unprecedented attempt in the high court to avoid handing over Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApp message and diaries to the inquiry.

The action is believed to have been driven by a belief that if Johnson’s material were submitted in full, then the Cabinet Office would have to do the same in respect of messages and other information held in the phones and diaries of serving ministers, including Sunak himself.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Alex gets it.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Oh man.

The other day Rishi said that funding Bozo's defence was a longstanding principle because it related to his government duties. He didn't say "But if he undermines me, the principle doesn't apply".

[Youngian]

Johnson’s loving this one. Whatever criticisms emerge of his handling of the Covid crisis, he gets to walk away. Sunak gets a big pile of shite poured over him.
Boris’s brother Jo was a reluctant MP but was persuaded to stand by Cameron and Osborne because he was one of the few people in their circle who understood numbers and economics having been a financial journalist of some repute.
This is how Sunak bagged his safe seat, one of the chaps who worked in banking so he would understand that stuff.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Oliver Dowden isn't a prolific tweeter, but if I were him and this story about the Cabinet Office were completely and outrageously untrue, as the Secretary of State I'd have been up late last night or up early this morning tweeting exactly that out.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Ha ha ha indeed.

Politician going abroad, meeting another politician, and announcing something warm and fuzzy that likely would have happened anyway. This is truly unprecedented. They really are pushing the "Egghead Colossus Rishi", aren't they? Quite where that leaves Bozo and Truss, God knows.

[Andy McDandy]

"Sink some cash into this and hope the tech Johnnies know what they're doing" is about the limit of his "know-how". This was, after all, the guy suggesting the government issued a bitcoin just as cryptocurrencies and NFTs were taking a massive dive, and were being roundly mocked (including in the Beano).

[Tubby Isaacs]

Surprising to me that Sunak hasn't done more big speeches on tech if he's so on top of it. Tech by its very nature is positive sounding and would be growing even if Lee Anderson were Prime Minister. Are his advisers worried he'd sound too much like Will out of the Inbetweeners? If so, why make him PM?

[davidjay]

Johnson’s loving this one. Whatever criticisms emerge of his handling of the Covid crisis, he gets to walk away. Sunak gets a big pile of shite poured over him.
Boris’s brother Jo was a reluctant MP but was persuaded to stand by Cameron and Osborne because he was one of the few people in their circle who understood numbers and economics having been a financial journalist of some repute.
This is how Sunak bagged his safe seat, one of the chaps who worked in banking so he would understand that stuff.

The narrative is being written as we speak. The three months leading up to lockdown, when we squandered weeks of notice and a 21 mile natural barrier on the grounds that Johnson needed some time off, have been forgotten. This man almost died for us, got the big calls right, rolled out the vaccine personally and it would all have blown over by winter 2020 were it not for Eat Out to Help Out and the Christmas lifting of restrictions. And we all know which little darkie fellow was responsible for them.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I forgot this.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Egghead Rishi ahead of the game again.