[Andy McDandy]

"You left nothing out" - you did everything you could. There was nothing more you could have packed into your performance.

"You left everything out" - we saw you try every tactic until you had nothing left to give.

Both work.

[Boiler]

... and both seem remarkably clumsy phrases, to this old fool at least.

[Crabcakes]

Sunak does seem the sort of middle manager who you could very easily fool with fake/deliberately mangled corporate buzzwords. We used to do this to a guy at a publishing place I worked at in Oxford. Some of us would throw something into a conversation or meeting, and a few days later he’d use it himself with no clue it was nonsense.

Best one we managed was “run up the flagpole to grab the low-hanging fruit”.

[davidjay]

I know it as more of a boxing saying - you give your all and leave everything in the ring. Either way, it shows how politicians invariably sound false when they try the common touch.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Sunak does seem the sort of middle manager who you could very easily fool with fake/deliberately mangled corporate buzzwords. We used to do this to a guy at a publishing place I worked at in Oxford. Some of us would throw something into a conversation or meeting, and a few days later he’d use it himself with no clue it was nonsense.

Best one we managed was “run up the flagpole to grab the low-hanging fruit”.

In our college it was commonplace to call the Principal 'The Prick'. In fact it got into the student paper.
My old English Tutor, Minnie Bird, picked up on this and started calling him 'Prick' in academic board meetings.

My other English tutor had to take her aside and have a word...

[Youngian]

"You left nothing out" - you did everything you could. There was nothing more you could have packed into your performance.

"You left everything out" - we saw you try every tactic until you had nothing left to give.

Both work.

You gave it 110%

[Yug]

Good grief! Isn't there enough *real* stuff to bash the slimy fucker with without having to waste time and energy on arguing about a clumsily-worded tweet?

[Boiler]

^^THIS^^. Absolutely THIS.

[kreuzberger]

We are not allowed to criticise the Nationwide's first billionaire regional manager for his inability to address, or better converse with, all those over whom he has Solomonic power?

Broken brake-lights: ignore the trivial and be prepared to reassemble the car crash body parts. Put otherwise, in the interests of 60m people, the stupid disconnect is as real as it is dangerous.

[mattomac]

The guy is slogans and spin it’s his only perceived talents so I’m going rip the piss. If he was actually doing anything on his 5 promises instead of just mentioning them I might feel differently.

Guy pretends he is a tech bro while he can’t even use a contactless card.

[Yug]

Carrying on in the finest tradition of Johnson A.

Rishi Sunak is facing questions over a possible conflict of interest after it emerged that a private healthcare firm handed a government contract to reduce regional NHS waiting lists is linked to a No 10 policy adviser.

Bill Morgan, a founding partner of the PR and lobbying firm Evoke Incisive Health (EIH), joined Downing Street as a health policy adviser last November to help drive through NHS efficiencies.

InHealth, a fee-paying client of EIH when Morgan was a founding partner, has since been awarded a contract as an independent sector-led diagnostic centre, to run the south-west network...

https://amp.theguardian.com/society/202 ... s-contract

It's not "politicians", it's Tory politicians who are all the same.

[Youngian]

Runaway Rishi employs the Johnson fridge strategy.

Regional journalists were banned from photographing or filming Rishi Sunak – with one even being denied access to the toilet – when the Prime Minister visited their patch.

Reporters in the East Midlands were subjected to the “genuinely troubling” restrictions during a visit by Mr Sunak to Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire.

Nottingham Post agenda editor Oliver Pridmore was shut in a football club changing room, along with three other journalists, for more than an hour while waiting for more than an hour to interview the PM in West Bridgford on a “baking” hot day on Wednesday.

They were then given one question each, rather than the total 10 minutes apparently promised to them, and were barred from taking pictures.

Oliver, pictured, wrote in a first-person piece about his experience for the Post: “It was not just the short amount of interview time that was troubling about Rishi Sunak’s Nottinghamshire visit either.

“Being kept inside the changing room meant that we were not able to observe any other aspect of the Prime Minister’s visit, and we were also banned from taking our own pictures, relying instead on an official Downing Street photographer.

The most farcical moment came when the Prime Minister left us, after having joked that being interviewed in a changing room had given him a “football manager vibe”. We were told that we could not leave the changing room for a few minutes, seemingly to allow the Prime Minister to completely clear the site. https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2023 ... he-toilet/

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Endgame.

[Boiler]

Bell-end games.

[Crabcakes]

If this is a low-pressure scenario 6-12 months out from a GE, I’m predicting Rishi will barely register in the campaign - he clearly crumbles under the slightest push. Starmer will more or less have the platform to himself, which is ideal as the more people see of him the less they are likely to buy into any ropey narrative.

I suspect the face of the Tory push will be Anderson in some futile attempt to retain the red wall by making use of ‘a working class northerner’. And after they lose, he’ll be demoted by the next leader and never seen again.

[Boiler]

If this is a low-pressure scenario 6-12 months out from a GE, I’m predicting Rishi will barely register in the campaign - he clearly crumbles under the slightest push.

All the consistency of a white dog turd.

[Andy McDandy]

I suspect that if you remember May's "how many people can we pack into a lay-by holding signs?" efforts, you can expect more of them.

Most of the cabinet are either deeply dull or disturbingly distasteful. Any photo-ops will be very carefully staged to avoid any potential clash with voters. What I can see happening is Gove and co deployed to argue the toss at every opportunity over airtime, column inches and so on, and hope to run the clock down like that.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Running the clock down when you’re losing isn’t a good idea.

I expect they’ll do the “media watch” Tom Hunt rubbish, plus swing wildly on tax cuts.

[Youngian]

Seems a long time ago when it looked like Sunak might be a slick centrist technocrat who’d make the Tories look less looney.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... itying-era

Nesrine Malik not pulling any punches either:

It seems a surprise to him, or at least something that has not yet sunk in, that being prime minister is not about his own personal martyrdom.

On some level, Sunak’s pained parent doling out hard truths persona is familiar from Thatcherite ideology: a morality tale in which self-sacrifice pays out. But Sunak delivers it with condescending impatience rather than sobriety, revealing something deeper about himself. It is hard to avoid the impression that here is a man who has eschewed a peaceful private life making even more exorbitant sums of money in finance in order to publicly serve – and is now annoyed that it’s all a bit more of a pain than he frankly has the patience for.

What is exposed is an isolated man who is out of moves.

He is restrained even further by his own fractious party. There is no amount of hard graft that will vanquish the troublesome Johnsonites, Brexit obsessives and loudmouths who say refugees should “fuck off back to France”. They can only be appeased and domesticated with jobs in cabinet....

....He is a man, to adapt the words of the comedian Stewart Lee, “trapped between two different forms of cowardice”.

Both party leaders agree that people’s expectations must be tempered, horizons narrowed. It speaks volumes about the direction of British politics that, as a general election looms, their job is finding more ways to promise nothing.