Though I liked a quote from twitter today:
“Being fat and drunk does not a Churchill make”.
I’m with you all the way.
Thanks for the reference to Chris Grey. I wasn’t aware of him.
I get most of my prejudice from The New European. Miraculously, it was quoted on Radio4’s newspaper review last week: the first time ever, that I can remember!
After the North Shropshire byelection, it’s clear that Johnson is finished. I don’t think he can come back from this. It’s only a matter of time now.
The Liberal Democrats have won a stunning victory in the North Shropshire byelection, taking what had previously been a safe Conservative seat by a margin of nearly 6,000 votes, and capping a disastrous few weeks for Boris Johnson.
Helen Morgan, the Lib Dem candidate, won 17,957 votes, ahead of the Conservatives’ Neil Shastri-Hurst, on 12,032, a majority of 5,925. Labour’s Ben Wood was third, with 3,686 votes. Turnout was 46.3%.
The calamitous collapse in Conservative support – a 34% swing in a seat where they had a near-23,000 majority in 2019 – will prompt significant jitters among many Tory MPs, and is likely to raise questions about Johnson’s future.
That was quite remarkable. North Shropshire is a very long standing Conservative constituency. It has elected Conservative politicians for 200 years. Instead they elected a Liberal Democrat.
When MPs die or resign there is a by-election outside of the national political cycle of general elections. They are sometimes protest votes, and this one certainly was. A protest about their former MP, who resigned because of political sleaze - he broke the rules regarding accepting money from companies trying to buy political influence. It was also a protest at the goings - on in Boris Johnson’s adminstration, which has left many Conservative politicians shaking their heads at the mismanagement.
I expect Johnson will have a clear out of advisors and his inner circle. Try to re-launch his administration. But those who are kicked out will go with mud to sling later. There will be a jockeying for position by rivals who smell blood. There are factions within the Conservative party and Johnson is losing a grip on them. The Conservatives won 70 new seats from former Labour areas. That faction is being promised resources (the ‘Leveling-Up’ policy in the North. Traditional Conservative areas are not happy about that.
If there is another big screw up, there will be a challenge.
So…next Tuesday?
Christmas comes at a rather useful time for Mr Johnson.
Last winter, Boris Johnson:
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Ignored until it was too late clear warnings that the Alpha variant was going to spread rapidly and kill tens of thousands unless he instituted restrictions on public gatherings, saying “Let the bodies pile high as long as the cash registers keep ringing”. (They did, to the tune of tens of thousands of excess deaths, of people who could have been alive and vaccinated right now if he’d just acted in time).
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Zoom hosted an office Christmas party, largely attended by people who’d already spent all day in the same office.
The second one was bad, no question. But he got away with 1) even as the bodies were piling high, and basically still has because while he’s being pilloried for 2) no one is even talking about how he got all those people killed by being too fucking stupid to understand exponential growth at the third time of asking.
I don’t object to him being disgraced, but it’s really very weird that we needed the personal hypocrisy angle to get upset about.
Ha. Love that.
Churchill:
Johnson:
Unless something very dramatic happens and Johnson resigns, he will be around for a while yet. The process of removing a Conservative prime minister is painful and drawn out. It is not the sort of thing a party would want to do while there is an ongoing national emergency and a general election is still quite far off.
However, I expect there will be a few scandals that may be reveal which well connected individuals made huge amounts of money out of the Covid emergency.
If Johnson wants to change his public image successfully he might want to start by looking like he treats the job seriously. He looks like Benny Hill there.
His deliberately messed up hair (and witnesses say he does do that before he goes out) has been combed a bit recently for a change. His appeal always seems to be like Benny Hill, and also a Cosplay Prime Minister where he’ll go and dress up as various professions to be photographed driving a tractor/tram.
I don’t think he can change that. it’s all he’s got and appeals to his type of voter, who want a dancing buffoon for a PM than anyone serious.
The trouble is that there has been a LOT of scandals before this. The difference in the last few weeks is that the press actually covered them, there was a bunch of shockingly awful revelations (he paid 127K of public money to a stripper to get her to screw him), has been found guilty by the ethics commission, then basically removed it. They tried to get an awful extreme right wing man in charge of Ofcom, which monitors the TV channels, and it was all set up, and the man managed to fail to get the job twice. I’ve given up keeping track of it.
There was a “this week in Tory” on twitter which often listed over 50 things which went wrong with the Tory party on twitter. It gave up. There was too much. More U-turns than an Escher roundabout on a weekly basis.
Here is one from October 2020, which includes the delightful line: “Accidentally made it illegal to drive to Wales”
never mind
Well, that’s the Brexit negotiator (which they shouldn’t need because Brexit was done two years ago) resigned, Lord Frost, a useless man who seemed to only be around to shout No. Now Truss has been assigned the impossible task, so she’ll either fail completely or give everything away for nothing in return (like her Ozzie and New Zealand trade deals which undercut UK Farmers)
Johnson appears to have disappeared now, like he often does during crisises. A former Brexit Negotiator Stephen Barclay (which nobody noticed for about a year) is attending COBRA meetings in his place. You’d not mind those holidays so much if he was any good when doing actual work, but that’s not true. He’s done this even back as London Mayor, where he refused to cut a holiday short and the riots in London spread around the UK. Why this man still had a political career after that baffles me.
Because there’s no-one else. We have an “opposition” that keeps voting with the government, which replaced an “opposition” that tried their hardest not to be elected, and there’s nobody in the Tory front ranks who’d be any better than Johnson.
Better at what? He used to be good at convincing people that he was a nice bloke who they would want to vote for. Even that is probably a thing of the past now. There is nothing else he is good at (sure, there is if you count bs-ing, lying, blaming others, etc.).
You missed out the word “some” before people there.
I’ve been unable to watch him on TV without being queasy since 2015. Only ever seen a hateful false bastard.
I have no problem with your description of the last opposition, which I regard as a joke candidate made nightmare, but the accusation can’t be made of the current one. Voting with the government when bringing in Covid rules, perhaps, but not when its worth it, it’s failure to throw out the corruption, hold them to account, and stop the NHS being privatised failed due to numbers rather than opposition.
Usually there’s a tory rebellion “pantomine” which the media focuses on. Bunch of tories get bribed. Disappears. It’s hard to tell if it’s simply self-serving or all part of the performance for the media.
I’ve noticed that’s a bit of a toff habit isn’t it.