Here we go again:
One down, eh?
j
“Sir” Gavin is and always has been an odious creep. I’ve often wondered what dirt he must have on whom from his days as chief whip. There can surely be no other explanation for his continued presence in government.
We might be about to find out. Popcorn, anyone?
One of the paths to power in a political party is to be responsible for encouraging MPs to support the administration’s political program by voting appropriately. Sometime you get MPs who are difficult, want to take a stand on principle, that sort of thing. So the Whips office imposes various methods of persuasion. Careers advancement in the form of a cabinet job as a minister of junior minister will encourage the careerists. But others, the leaders of rebellious factions within the party may need further persuasion. Whips are reputed to have ‘black books’ that record the indiscretions of MPs and threaten to make them public and ruin their reputation if they do not support the government on crucial votes.
A period in the Whips office usually sets a career up to a later ministerial career. They tend to keep their black books as an insurance policy.
If we get to hear the contents of this black book, I am sure shock waves will ripple through the party and it will be the undoing of many a career.
This is the ‘House of Cards’. Or maybe this character was like the uncouth psycho, Tucker, in ‘In the Loop’.
Sunak has to deal with kind of stuff to keep his support within the party. With a party like the Conservatives, so fractured and full of factional infighting. He will be spending more of his time fire fighting and trying to suppress scandals that doing other stuff….like governing and managing the economy.
Nitpick/genuine question: do you mean Malcolm Tucker in “The Thick of It”?
ETA: sorry, should have checked first. The character appears in both “In the Loop” and “The Thick of It”, the former being a film spin-off from the latter TV series.
Careful. We don’t want to turn this thread into a f*****g omnishambles.
Rishi Sunak says he didn’t know about the alleged bullying by Gavin Williamson
The prime minister said Sir Gavin had been right to resign, adding his behaviour had been “unacceptable”.
Mr Sunak said he had not known of “specific concerns” about his conduct in two previous ministerial roles.
And… I believe him. I’m sure there must have been stories circulating - but could you imagine sitting down with Sunak in a House Of Commons bar and having a good old gossip?
j
ETA: for US dopers
is a Malcolm Tuckerism. Made me laugh.
Whenever politicians are accused of failing to live up to their responsibilities they often claim ignorance of what was going on.
‘The President did not know! Wasn’t that Nixon’s defence when the Watergate scandal broke.
Sunak is lying. How did he get to the position of Prime Minister without knowing exactly what the Chief Whip was up to? He had spies everywhere keeping him informed about the party gossip.
More political shenanigans :
B**** Johnson has stipulated that any sitting tory MPs he’s “elevated” to the Lords
in his resignation honours list* should not take their new seats until the next
election (~2 years away) because that would necessitate a by-election in their
constituency which they would probably lose given the current status of the opinion polls.
* eg Nadine “Mad Nad” Dorries
bastards
Also I wouldn’t have labeled him as an “uncouth psycho,” really. Just a really hard-ass political functionary who has in some cases stunning skill in political manoeuvring but also has very little in the way of ethical boundaries.
He mostly terrorises his own side because it’s full of incompetent idiots barely able to function as human beings and he has to take absolute control over them to move his party forward in any way.
In the end, his willingness to use dirty tricks ends his reign of terror. But until then he is always a marvelous whirlwind of foul-mouthed ranting and cutthroat measures. I heard an interview with Peter Capaldi in which he said people stop him on the street and demand that he swear at them.
I used to have an app on my phone that would periodically send me a voice mail message from Malcolm Tucker, each one getting progressively angrier, fouler-mouthed, and using more and more violent imagery. It was delightful.
This is one of my favorite Malcolm Tucker moments:
At least he is not a Tory. (The show never explicitly used party labels but it was very clear that Tucker wore the red rose. Among other things, the party was dominated by Scottish enforcers. And several of the jokes about their own party leader were clearly Gordon Brown jokes. Also, after they lost power, the winning “coalition” was made up of aristocratic twits and “the Inbetweeners.”)
In the movie it’s kind of worse because the whole thing results in an actual war. But, of course, Blair did sign on to a real war, it was “based on a true story.”
Tucker is almost certainly based on Alastair Campbell, and there is a story (possibly apocryphal) that Blair and Brown and company found the show so close to reality that they searched their offices for bugs in the belief that the writers must have been listening in.
God only knows what we’d hear if we bugged No 10 these days.
Nothing so eloquent, I imagine. Mostly Lord Froofraws barely managing to produce an intelligible syllable, Sir Rodericks periodically exploding in racist tirades, and a bunch of teen-aged philosophers citing Ayn Rand at each other and putting everyone else to sleep. Every once in a while, the group of them getting together and trying to sell their souls as hard as they can while picking the servants’ pockets.
Did someone already post this? Malcolm Tucker versus Liz Truss
Here’s a q I had and rather than start a thread on it I figured id ask here …
If tony Blair hadn’t been taken in by the Iraq mess would of he lasted longer?
Blair served as PM for just over ten years, which makes him one of the longest-serving PMs since the UK became a democracy, and the longest-serving of all Labour PMs. The Iraq War undoubtedly plays a part in the story of the decline of his popularity, but I think there’s a natural life-cycle for premierships.
It’s an untestable historical what-if, but all PMs who remain in office who remain in office for seven or eight years continuously start to become unpopular over something, and there are always ambitious and often competent rivals in the party who want their turn before it’s too late. Even without the Iraq War, I’d be surprised if Blair had lasted much longer than in fact he did.
One of our provincial premiers here in Canada had the knapsack theory of parliamentary leadership.
Every First Minister starts out with an empty knapsack. Over time, no matter how competent the First Minister is, things will go wrong. For each thing that goes wrong, the First Minister starts to collect stones in the knapsack: sometimes small ones, some middling, and sometimes really big ones.
And at some point, the First Minister can’t carry that knapsack any more, and either resigns to let a new First Minister take over, or gets defeated at the polls, because the load in the knapsack is insurmountable.
There was, of course, the story about a pact between Blair and Brown that Blair would, at some point, step down so Gordon Brown could take over as PM. Brown would look after the economy to finance their political program of reforming public services. Notably Health and Education.
Gordon Brown was Chancellor during Blair premiership and he kept tight control of the purse strings. Less money for Blairs foreign interventions. Few Chancellors have had that much power since then. In fact recent Conservative PMs have kept Chancellors on a very short dog lead.
< golf clap >
As noted he probably wouldn’t have had a significantly longer tenure (and if he had, he would have run into the 2008 financial crisis that Brown got hit with), but he would have emerged with a much less tarnished reputation. His support for the Iraq War and open lying about the need for it in the run-up to the war absolutely destroyed the support from his base to a huge degree, and even now the leftist base use the phrase “war criminal” to describe him.
The worst of it is, I don’t think he was deliberately lying. He allowed himself to jump to a deluded conclusion on limited evidence. The problem wasn’t so much insincerity (and his infuriating sanctimoniousness about it), as superficiality of judgement. As Robin Cook put it at the time - “I asked”: and Blair didn’t ask hard enough.
If Blair genuinely believed the “45-minutes” claim, my opinion of him would sink even lower.
Which brings us back to Sunak and sincerity - whether Sunak is doing what he’s doing because he genuinely believes he’s taking the best course of action for the country or he’s knows it’s unworkable but he’s doing it because the majority of the party want it or he’s just doing it for personal gain, the end result will be the same and it ain’t likely to be good.