My YouTube rabbit hole turned up these comedy bits:
The conservative MP’s won’t be technically voting.
I believe there are 357 Conservative MP’s and all of them are able to put their name on a nomination. I assume they can only put their name on one nomination (but I’m not sure on this). Only those candidates with 100 or more nominations from the 357 Conservative MP’s are eligible. If there is only one, that’s it. If there are 2 or 3 candidates with at least 100 MP nominations, then it goes to a vote from the full party membership.
Did anyone think of the scenario where no one gets 100 nominations?
I think they should lock all 357 Conservative MP’s in a room with 356 chairs. Play music and when it stops, the person who does not get a chair has to be the Prime Minister.
Seems the only fair way to do it.
(Edit: Maybe give them all a ball peen hammer as well…)
An election. Their defeat is inevitable; there is no possibility whatsoever that the Tories can win the next election. But, legally, an election is not required until January 2025. The Tories would like to wait until closer to then in the desperate hope that events might occur in the meantime which would make their defeat less crushing. Polls suggest that if an election were held immediately they would be more-or-less annihilated.
Seen on the interwebs:
“Liz Truss, whose distinguished career as Prime Minister spanned the reigns of two monarchs…”
First PM in 70 years to serve under two of 'em!
I’ve never heard that when I studied in Quebec. “On” is informal, but “nous” is used as well.
Quebec French and Metropolitan French can be very different, especially the profanity.
I’ve generally found that highly exaggerated.
Always optimistically over exaggerated, and weather dependent.
Usually “nowss”, if you mean the posh word for savvy/streetwise/clued up/on the ball.
I am not worthy, sir.
My bet is Boris as next PM (the electorate never rejected him) and quite likely Boris wins the next election as well. Boris’s “person in the street” supporters love him and will forgive him the sort of transgressions over which he resigned. Just as Trumpsters don’t give a damn about Trump’s much more serious transgressions.
The UK comprises (amongst other demographics) a tiny but extremely powerful and wealthy upper class, a moderately sized middle class that can eloquently and correctly point out where the fuck the country is going wrong, and a much larger class of small c conservative xenophobic Little Englanders.
The eloquence and media reach of the chattering middle class tends to obscure the reality, which is that the upper class are very good at manipulating the Little Englanders into voting in a way that amounts to smashing themselves in the face. It seems completely obvious - based on the bombardment of good sense put out by the middle class - what should happen, then it doesn’t once it goes to a vote.
Around here we obtain much factual background and commentary from, say, The Guardian. The Guardian’s circulation is tiny compared to say the Daily Mail - a notoriously reactionary and conservative publication.
I’d be very happy to be wrong in my predictions.
I really really really really really really really hope you’re wrong too. Sadly your description of a large part of the British public is pretty much spot on. Mass Stockholm Syndrome in action.
Johnson’s popularity peaked shortly after the 2019 election. It took a sharp dive at the start of the pandemic, entering negative territory from which it never recovered. Thereafter there were ups and downs but the basic trend was steadily downwards; by the time he quit he had negative popularity of 53%. And this wasn’t the result of the manouvrings of his enemies; he had extremely favourable press, far more than he deserved. This was entirely the result of his own faults and failings. Even today, when he compares favourably with Liz Truss, he has negative popularity of 36%
Basically, the only time Johnson was popular was when nobody had any experience of what he was like as Prime Minister. They more they saw, the less they thought of him.
Nobody who knows Johnson thinks that his flaws and failings are something he is capable of correcting, so there is no reason to think that voters would like him any better at the end of a second term of office than they did at the end of the first. The party dumped him some months ago for good reasons, mainly to do with the fact that they saw no path to electoral victory with Johnson at the head of the party. Those reasons are every bit as valid now as they were then.
It only counts if you also eat tofu.
But seriously though, this is exactly why I want to get to rock bottom. It’s what we need to be able to get better. A small step up from Truss and the confused, working class Tory voters will forget everything.
The next PM must cause further Tory poo slinging and disaster. It’s not nice to hope for but it’s necessary.
I know, right?
His mayoralty was a string of scandals and inffectiveness and he was re-elected. His PM-ship after May was a horror show. He was elected in a landslide.
I hope you’re right.
I don’t think the UK electorate is the same as the US. Johnson’s name is mud across the board, except for the die hards (and often the bots dumping out pro-Johnson nonsense on twitter). He was so unpopular when he left (and let us remember this was about five months ago), he was going to lose his seat in Parliament, a sitting Prime Minister, as far as I’m aware, has never had that happen.
He was ousted because he was unpopular with the electorate (but perhaps not the loonies in the membership, but they voted for Truss, so that shows the insanity of that 80K). They were heading towards a landslide defeat.
The question then is, is there as many as 100 tory MPs who are deluded enough to put him back in place, either via a direct win vs a split other, or going to the membership who will vote any old loon in as a point of principle? Then the Conservative party will be out of power for a very long time at the next election.
I don’t think the tories will win the next election in any case, but it is whether their name because so tainted once their curtain has been pulled back, the fraud and corruption exposed, and Brexit failures actually detailed (the rational press like BBC and ITN are not doing this at the moment). This is the point where their choice of whether Johnson was there recently, or that nonsense is behind them, will make a difference.
There has been a point that he managed to overturn the problems of him being Mayor of London, but he didn’t. The Londoners remember him, and he isn’t liked there. What he did is managed to convince the other parts of the country that his Mayorship was a success, with some Olympics idiocy, and nicking Livingstones bike scheme and renaming it to take the credit. That is a trick you can only do once, you can only move onto the next town when there’s more than two towns…
I was aware of an astroturf campaign to bring Boris back after his resignation / ousting, but I’m still surprised to see it actually play out. Aside his numerous failings and unpopularity, British political standards are nowhere near so low (yet) that the public would tolerate this – at the least it would trigger an immediate election, that Boris would lose.
In terms of the Conservative party, it needs to essentially die at this point. And I’m saying that as someone who represented the Tories once. Whether it’s Daily Mail inspired nonsense about “wokeism”, processing refugees in Africa, accusing each other of “project fear” (when many of the things formally called “project fear” turned out to be correct), they need to get the fk out and grow the fk up.
And it’s an interesting test bed for US politics: can a party that has become incredibly immature, cynical and pandering, learn maturity from electoral defeat?
And once upon a time, a new PM would have been able to nominate an inconvenient predecessor to a lucrative commissionership in Brussels…