Another interesting point to remember is Sunak’s rise to power.
He was appointed Chancellor by Johnson when Sajid Javid resigned. Javid resigned because Johnson was trying to lay down the law about who JAvid could hire as Special Political Advisor. It was a huge power play - Ministers, esp in major offices like Chancellor, have always chosen their own staff. But here was Johnson making it a decision for the Prime Minister. Javid saw he couldn’t have any credibility if he let that happen, so he resigned in protest.
Sunak was promoted into Chancellor role and the initial consensus - certainly shared by Johnson but widely held - was that he was a good pick as he was a no-mark with little experience who would be easy for Number 10 to push around. Funny how things work out, isn’t it?
Yeah. A state-run energy company. If it undercut the existing companies that would create a huge legal problem. (The state is not supposed to compete directly with private enterprise).
We used to have a state-run energy company. (Is anyone old enough to remember Electricity and Gas Boards?) They were an unmitigated disaster.
I am thankful that they were not daft enough to encourage Boris though.
Yeah. Plus, “the baleful influence of the Treasury” was one of Cumming’s bugbears and he definitely wanted control over spending shifted from 11 to 10 Downing St. (The SPAD thing was almost certainly his wizard wheeze. It has all the hallmarks of being superficially clever but if you look back once the dust has settled, not achieving anything like what he wanted and often the opposite).
I think Rishi was the best option. I don’t think voters are going to care about him being part of an out-of-touch elite…that’s absolutely the norm here.
From a conservative strategy point of view, the best he can do is virtually nothing for the next six months. The country needs to see that the Tories can be stable again after all this drama and humiliation.
They are still almost certain to get trounced in the next election, but it’s their best bet.
I don’t think this is a choice anymore. It wasn’t a choice six months ago, and I suspect that is really what has been happening popularity wise since.
Our energy bills have doubled. And looks as if they will double again. Plus with inflation, our wages have dropped ten percent. Everyone needs a payrise and a lot of people who probably never voted are now heading towards debt, repossesson and bankrupcy.
To put in context, without action, it was predicted that 80% of all UK Pubs will be out of business by christmas. Them being the first to see the massive difference between their energy bills and actual income, which will have dropped because of energy bills. This may have been delayed by whatever action Truss and co got past the actual mini budget. I couldn’t keep track there.
Unless I speculated at the time that it was a deliberate tory voting strategy: #homelesspeoplecantvote
Please can you expand on this, for this child of the 80s (i.e. I’m too young to remember the problems)? Because although I’m generally in favour of the capitalist free market, it seems to me that just doesn’t work for some things - the railway being the prime example. And utilities (and certainly utility infrastructure) seem like another. Private utility companies just seem like a way to siphon money from (mostly, relatively poor) bill payers to (mostly, relatively wealthy) shareholders.
So are the Tories going to lose any support from their nativist base for selling out to wokeism and making a person of a non-traditional hue as its head?
Sunak represents a breed of politician which has emerged recently who could be called Vulcans: clever, young and fairly moderate. You also have Macron in France and Mayor Pete in the US . I don’t think they necessarily make the best leaders and each would benefit from a decade more of experience but certainly their countries could do a lot worse. Obama was similar too though he also had more of a gift for high oratory.
Could you (or anyone) tell this ignorant Yank what policies Labour could put in place that would make things better? Everything sounds so dire, and it seems (from a distance) that there’s not much to build on. (Or should I ask that in a different thread?)
They not only had a monopoly on the supply of power, but also the supply of appliances. The main complaints concerned their somnolent attitude to service. Everything took an interminable amount of time. You could spend half a day just trying to get someone on the phone and when you did, they would usually fail to resolve the problem.
For appliances, one had to go to their shop where there were a number of samples. When you placed an order, you often had to wait months for delivery.
Nope. Full Brexit faithful. Might be young, but not on the moderate end of the scale by any definition at all. I’m not completely sure he is clever. He is rich. Or rather his wife is very rich, it’s not clear how rich he was before he married her. He’s part of the financial faithful, ie: thatcherite mutal fund managers that the Tories pick their “talent” from. Parachuted into one of the safest seats in the country, so in effect he was chosen to be one of the future, I think because of some extreme right wing policy ideas that the thatcherite think tanks can use to make out they’ve thought about something.
The clever thing seemed to be a thing the faithful press pushed around during Brexit when they had some unknown quantity to stick in a role. Dominic Raab for instance was touted as such, and was seen to be thick as mince. David Frost too. David Davis seems to be the cleverest of these, but he wasn’t very clever at all, so the bar isn’t set high.
Let’s face it, if you’re a Brexiteer you’re not clever…
The truth is that Sunak is something of an unknown quantity. He is one of the youngest, and perhaps the actual youngest, Prime Minister of modern times. He is also inexperienced; he has become PM just seven years after entering Parliament, which I think is a record for modern Prime Ministers, and just four years after being appointed to a junior government position (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Government, a position in which he attracted no notice whatsoever). While his rise thereafter was rapid (Chief Secretary to the Treasury, July 2019; Chancellor of the Exchequer, February 2020) it left very little trace — he was in fact appointed Chancellor largely because he was seen as a nonentity without a following who would be easy for Downing Street (the Prime Minister’s office) to control.
As Chancellor he served in extraordinary times. He became insanely popular for handing out prodigious amounts of public money during the pandemic. Not all of that expenditure turned out to have been well-judged or well-managed, but in the circumstances people will cut him some slack for that. Either way, the times in which he served were so extraordinary as to make it difficult to make judgments about his qualities and characteristics in office, or about how he compares with other great officers of state.
All of which means that he comes to Downing Street with vaguer impressions of him, more shallowly formed, than most of his predecessors, which suggests that public perceptions of him as Prime Minister might be quite volatile. The parliamentary party is in a febrile state and, if Sunak’s popularity does take a dive, I could see them getting quite panicky.