True. Just wanted to show off my classical education. 
And still he wriggles:
This is the mad scheme of Priti Patel, Home Secretary, to send refugees to Rwanda and fester there while their cases are heard. It is a ‘red meat’ policy to appease the most anti-immigration sentiments that emerged during Brexit.
I don’t doubt that the timing is to take the heat off Boris. Priti Patel’s role is to take a lot of flak away from Boris by coming out with unworkable and simplistic solutions to difficult problems. The Home Office is a joke in British politics. Politicians go there to shore up support from the right wing of their party. So it is all prisons, police, immigration, terrorism, border security policies were the government has to appear strong and assertive. Patel has copied most of her policies on immigration and refugees from Australian politicians.
However, attitudes towards refugees have changed dramatically in the past few weeks and this policy will face a lot of scrutiny. Even Theresa May is unimpressed and she spent many years at the Home Office, so she should know that this is a poor policy.
I can’t see the Rwanda thing actually happening. Too controversial, too expensive, the courts will block it, and Johnson’s government will perform one of its famous and routine un-turns.
Meanwhile, despite or because of yet more U-turns on his personal issue, he has lost control of his backbenchers:
Conservative MPs appear to be focused on one thing and one thing only this week:
Sex.
And the backlash starts to make itself felt, even if not (yet?) overwhelmingly so:
“Not Tory” is doing well. Labour qua Labour - not so much.
One day they will decide to be an actual Opposition Party. But not yet.
Please clarify - how is an 87-seat gain not doing well? I’m seeing several councils flipped Con to Lab, none flipped the other way (one did flip Lab->LibDem), as well as absolute seat gain.
This is largely my take, mind you, but I’ve seen very little actual excitement in voting for Labour because Labour is an attractive alternative. Most of it has been strategic voting based on which not-Tory party is most likely to succeed (which, in my area and many others, was Labour).
In my corner of London, nothing has changed. All the councillor seats were held by Labour and the result has been that they are all still held by Labour.
It is a Labour Party closed shop, dominated by an electorate that tends towards tribal voting and there is a low turnout (34%).
I often wish I lived in a place where my vote felt as if it actually had some bearing on the outcome. One party councils are not healthy for local democracy. It reduces to what internal wrangles are taking place within the party and most of that will take place in the Labour club rather than in public. It is a rotten borough.
Curiously mirrored by UK national politics, where what is good for the Conservative party seems to preside over the national interest.
The political parties are in very poor shape. It is rather absurd that we look to these local elections for protest votes that may convince the Conservatives to oust Boris from his throne.
There’s an enjoyable opinion piece in the NY Times today about Johnson and the Tories in general (paywalled, sorry). Here are some choice bits:
Lots of people predicted that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s administration would be a bin fire, but I don’t think anyone expected it to be quite so surreal.
The voters, at least, have noticed, and they have punished him. In Thursday’s local elections Mr. Johnson and his Conservative Party lost more than 400 seats and control of a number of councils, including at least two flagship councils in London. The party expected this and leaked ahead of the election that it would lose an absurd 800 seats. It hoped to make those results look like victory, with the dishonesty we have come to expect.
Now that the disappointing election results are in, will M.P.s wait for the final Gray report to decide whether or not to schedule a vote of no confidence in Mr. Johnson? That they have not already is partly because there is, as yet, no obvious successor. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor of the Exchequer, was until recently considered the most likely candidate because he is tidy, while Mr. Johnson often resembles a kitchen mop.
To call this an administration in decline is to grossly undersell the depths to which it has sunk. Mr. Johnson and our other representatives are ambushed by cake, by porn, by booze, but above all by themselves. There is no leadership, no direction and no plan.
The whole thing is pretty brutal.
To be fair, Boris is very popular in Ukraine.
He has hit upon a foreign policy that is pretty simple: fulsome support for Ukraine in defending itself from the Russian invasion. This is backed up by arms and money. Prime Ministers are very fond of raising their international profile in this way when they have frustrations at home.
Johnson is, however, somewhat undermined by a key element of his Brexit policy delivered by his Home Secretary Pritti Patel:to be tough on refugees, asylum seekers and to tightly control immigration with a strict rules and procedures. This has put many bureaucratic obstacles in the way of Ukrainian refugees trying to reach the UK in stark contrast to the generosity of EU countries.
Cold War warrior mode was a pretty successful policy for Thatcher in the 1980s and this playbook has been re-opened. That relied on a close relationship with Reagan. Sadly Johnson is regarded as a British Trump-lite by the current Biden administration.
Right after the elections, Radio Four seemed to be concentrating on a fact that some very key councils in Central London had gone Labour (incl. Westminster), but it seemed to be largely the symbolism of a couple of key shifts rather than a considered analysis of the whole results.
The Conservative party will be looking for any indication that the Northern ‘Red Wall’ seats previously held by Labour may be in danger at the next General Election.
I don’t think they expected much in London given that it did not vote Brexit and the large immigrant population will be affected by Patels Immigration Bill.
Good to know the President is getting something right overseas other than his Ukraine policy.
And (but?) are facing moans from their local parties in their seemingly safe rural seats, particularly in the south and west that they risk losing there to the LibDem resurgence.
And “down from London” demographic shifts may account for the fact that Labour have taken Worthing on the South coast: Worthing - formerly “God’s waiting room” and the kind of place that you would never expect to vote anything but Tory.
I thought that was Eastbourne?
In the end the Tories kept control of my council but with a full third of their previous seats gone, which is a big deal. In addition to Labour and Independent gains, the Lib Dems even managed to pick up a bunch of seats (up from zero).
Ultimately, of course, Boris will shrug it off and stay in office until forced out with a crowbar. Anyone expecting him to leave out of a sense of decency or duty to party really hasn’t been paying attention.
Agreed. The numbers within his own party have to be unavoidable. Or the Slithy Gove sticks the knife in again as in 2016.
We have a couple of by-elections coming up, both resulting from the resignation of a Conservative MP.
Tiverton and Honiton (24,000 majority) is the seat of Niel Parish, who was caught watching porn on his smartphone in Parliament
and
Wakefield is the seat of Imran Ahmad Khan (3,358 majority), who was convicted of sexually assaulting a underage boy.
Wakefield is a northern red wall seat that could easily go back to Labour
Tiverton and Honiton is true blue Tory, and the voters would have to be mightily upset for the Conservatives to lose.
Plenty to give the Conservatives Party leadership some anxiety that the voters might protest about the sleazy MPs.