[Tubby Isaacs]

Assuming it actually happens.

Reform have aleady chickened out. The Tories did surprisingly well in the local elections. But the problem is that lots of those Greens and Lib Dems are likely to vote Labour to get the Tories out. This would suggest to me that the Tories are toast, though maybe this'll change if Skidmore delays too long.

[Abernathy]

Labour List had an interesting take on a possible Kingswood by election this morning

Skidmore has represented Kingswood, in suburban Bristol, since 2010, when he took the seat from Labour. In 2019 he had a healthy majority of 11,220. However – and here is where things become more complicated – the seat is set to be abolished at the next election, and scattered pretty definitively to the four winds (aka the neighbouring seats).


Kingswood 2019 vote share

Labour should fancy their chances of taking the seat ("We've got a really good chance at winning this", one longtime Bristol Labour activist told me), but whoever took it would end up being an MP for not very long at all before the seat was abolished (six months or so if there's an autumn election; a matter of weeks if Rishi is fooling us all and the big event is, actually, set for May). As such, it might seem an ambiguous prospect for people like Damian Egan and Claire Hazelgrove, the selected Labour candidates in the neighbouring seats of Bristol North East (a new seat), and Filton and Bradley Stoke (a slightly changed seat), respectively.

Bristol mayor Marvin Rees – who lost selection to Egan, and whose office is being abolished later this year in favour of a committee system – is another name to watch in the candidate pool, but the mayor often divides opinion locally.

A final thought on the mess of boundaries, people and prospects around Kingswood: the seat borders Jacob Rees Mogg's North East Somerset constituency, a seat that is famously not as safe as Rees Mogg's more Tory than Tory persona implies. A high profile loss to Labour next door months before he faces the polls is not the kind of thing likely to delight Rees Mogg. It has been commented on to me, however, that the fact that Labour has yet to select a candidate in that seat does leave an opening for any potential by-election winner to pocket the electoral benefits of name recognition and incumbency as an MP and slide over to take on the former leader of the Commons in the back end of the year.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Am I missing something? Why shouldn't Damian Egan go for it? No doubt he's already thought a fair bit about what he'd like to do as an MP, and hitting the ground running would be an advantage when he's the candidate in the successor seat. The Tories had a problem in Tamworth in that their GE candidate was an MP for another seat which was being abolished, and concluded that he wasn't going to chuck that away to lose in Tamworth. Which left some other poor chap to play Helen Hurford in the by-electtion.

[Tubby Isaacs]

It's on. Big Chris has come through.

[Andy McDandy]

Ouch! No greatest hits list, no apologies, no promises of support from wherever he goes. Also interesting he's sent it to Hunt.

Quite a change to have someone resign over something political for once.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The Chancellor presides over the Chiltern Hundreds and Manor of Northstead. appontments. (So I've read 10 seconds ago).

[Abernathy]

I take it we have already noted that Skidmark is a grade one Tory cunt, who is also the often overlooked fifth author, along with Truss, Patel, Kwarteng, and Raab, of the infamous Brittania Unchained ?

[Tubby Isaacs]

He's got better since then, by the look of it. And was always the least gobby of those. Probably just became an MP far too young.

[Abernathy]

Reading his letter, he ‘s actually quite right about how shite Sunak’s backpedalling on Net Zero opportunities is.

[MisterMuncher]

There's definitely a case to be made that one could be the least cunty of the present crop of tories and still be a complete shit

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Nailed on cert.

[Youngian]

Thatcher accepted the scientific consensus on climate change and made speeches about it. But it’s been a long time since new right was a small bunch of influential egg heads instead of a collection of infantile dimwits and bad faith actors.

[Tubby Isaacs]

[Arrowhead]

I just noticed that, although he is only about 40 years old, Damien Egan first stood as a Labour candidate way back in 2005, contesting Weston-super-Mare. He could only have been in his very early twenties at the time.

[davidjay]

I've no idea how accurate these things are but I hope the answer is "very".

[Tubby Isaacs]

Reform are actually running a candidate. They said they wouldn't because something something Chris Skidmore- which surely meant, you'd welcome him resigning and the chance to replace him?

Rupert Lowe was a no deal genius. From 2019, where he was clearly unaware of non-tariff barriers.

"The cost of accessing this “frictionless” trade is also worth considering," Mr Lowe added. "Had the UK had been outside of the EU in 2018 then tariffs on our exports to the EU (£5–6 billion) would be half the size of our EU membership fee (£10-12 billion – once you have removed the rebate and EU spending in the UK).

"Thus in the event of a clean-break Brexit the government would be able to cover the increased tariffs faced by UK exporters whilst signing trade deals to remove tariffs with the rest of the world."

[mattomac]

Former chairman of Southampton.

There is something in the water from that era at Southampton, I assume Marian Perhars ended up in a far right Latvian political party.

Edit: He actually did run for a centre right party on Latvia called “Honor to Serve Riga, however they weren’t absolutely silly as they went into a coalition with a centre left party.

[mattomac]

Anyhow I heard some positive vibes coming out of this and the candidate is quite fit.

[davidjay]

Former chairman of Southampton.

There is something in the water from that era at Southampton, I assume Marian Perhars ended up in a far right Latvian political party.

Edit: He actually did run for a centre right party on Latvia called “Honor to Serve Riga, however they weren’t absolutely silly as they went into a coalition with a centre left party.

Who did so well at Southampton they ended up in League One on minus ten points after going into administration.