November will be incredibly stressful in the UK and US.
Conventionally, UK, US, AUS, CAN, NZ don’t hold elections that clash with each other. My best guess is Rishi will bite the bullet and have it in May, otherwise December/Jan. I don’t think it’ll be November.
I’m not aware of any such convention.
Several times, Canada has had federal elections overlapping with US presidential elections: 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, 2004, and 2008. (The 1980 election was during the primary season in the US, but the rest were all in the fall.)
Of course, our elections don’t take up so much time …
Understatement of the decade, there.
Is a high turnout election likely to help or hurt the Tories? You know, making the difference between a slaughter and a complete rout?
Conventional thinking says it should help them as it would mean they’ve somehow managed to get the Tory faithful out to vote. However, even the Tory faithful don’t seem that keen on the current government. Which explains the lift we’re seeing for the Faragists - I think I read earlier that the Reform party’s share of the vote in one of yesterday’s by elections, at 13%, was more than the swing to Labour needed to overturn the Tories’ previous majority in that seat.
OB
One Yank’s sorta-informed opinion. And worth the tuppence ye paid for it. 
Sounds like Little England is to the right of Rishi, but wants competence along with their hate and populist ignorance.
The City wants the usual: no taxes, no fuss, no surprises.
I predict an attempt to engineer a happy surprise and a snap election on the bounce. To little real result.
The actual next election will not be the rout some lefty folks are hoping for. Labour will form the next government and deservedly so. But they won’t be omnipotent.
Hey, for this Yank’s wish, as long as Tories aren’t even leading the opposition, it’ll all be fine.
I’m not so sure of this. In recent times the likes of the Daily Mail has found that it has been going too far for it’s centrist readership. The path to the right has been walked now, and there’s no gold down there, just a country where there’s potholes and graffiti everywhere and a lot of incompetents in government talking crap on the news.
There’s always going to be shaven apes who will be there, I’ve seen Shrewsbury English Defence League on the main street of Wolverhampton. That’s no master race there. I can see the mistake been seen to have been made, and that’s now the problem the tories have. The noose was given.
You are far closer to it than I am.
So when the Tories tack back to their traditional center of low taxes, business friendliness, and mild(er) forms of White-tinged social conservatism, does that pull in enough centrists and tired-of-the-shenanigans voters to offset the immediate loss of the knuckle-draggers to Farage and his ilk?
The “good” news about UK politics is you don’t have a hard duopoly of parties; there’s always a way for the discontented to express their unhappiness, even if that doesn’t result in many (any?) seats in Parliament. The bad news is that also means it’s easy for formerly reliable voters to stomp off in a huff and vote minor party just to vent their spleen.
Unlikely, given the omnishambles the Tories have created over the years. Sheer incompetence isn’t that easily overlooked.
70 years ago, the Tories could always ride high over any of the 1945 Labour government’s achievements just by bringing out devaluation and - groundnuts.
I’d never heard of this groundnut scheme before, but I just watched Gosford Park for the umpteenth time last night, and this reminded me of Tom Hollander’s character’s scheme to get rich by providing the Sudanese army with shoes.
ETA: I googled and found that the Sudanese shoe scheme was completely improvised by Hollander.
The problem is that the Tories have left it far too late to do this. They have been chasing the right-wing loon vote agressively for years now, and purging their own party of anyone centrist, anyone competent, and anyone with a brain, a backbone and a moral conseience. If they now tack to the centre, it will be deeply unconvincing. A party that has embraced a post-truth, post factual culture will find it hard to convince anyone of their sincerity, so they’ll lose the right-wing loon vote while not really getting much of the centrist vote. To recover the centrist vote it’s not enough to pose as centrists; they will actually need to look convincingly like centrist, and it will take a (political) generation of rebuilding as a centrist party before that would be credible.
They’ve been a consistently appalling government for the past seven or eight years; that’s not something they can turn around in the space of a few months. A political generation is roughtly about seven years; I think Labour are safe for two terms of government.
There are precious few centrists left with any influence in the Tory party, since the Brexit fracturing and Boris’s purge.
And another Tory may be about to bite the dust (how long, o Lord, how long):
Mr Benton was caught breaching Commons rules by offering to lobby ministers and table parliamentary questions on behalf of gambling investors.
MPs don’t do this regularly?
From an earlier article:
A report by the Commons Standards Committee said he had given the message he was “corrupt and ‘for sale’” in a meeting with undercover reporters posing as gambling industry investors.
As with the Eddie Murphy movie, the issue is saying the quiet part out loud.
It’s 100% OK to be utterly corruptly for sale. It’s not OK to advertise that fact on billboards along the motorways. Benton broke the latter rule, not the former.
No, it’s not OK to be corruptly for sale. There are all sorts of rules about acting for special interests, and if there’s money involved it has to be registered and declared.
Yeah, but they’ve weakened parliamentary regulatory powers so much that you’ve got to be blatant about it now. He was.
It is so widespread that they’d censure 90% of the tory party, especially after they chucked out all the ones with morals and replaced them with the likes of mines, a twice bankrupt ex-military who’s only job
is to vote yes with the party, and that’s likely the last chance he’ll make money in the next 20 years.