Focusing on the important issues!
Yes, indeed. But her next appearance in the headlines was at least health-related:
She has since been moved to the environment department, where she is distinguishing herself again:
Looks like another appointment to please the right wing of the Conservative party.
Maria Caulfield is attracting the ire of feminists with a stance on restricting abortion. That seems pretty counter cultural. The leadership of the Conservatives have been pretty socially Liberal, One Nation Conservativism - Cameron and Johnson.
However, there seems to be some whose approach to politics seems to be to engage in ‘culture wars’. Patel, Truss, then Braverman with her tirade against ‘Guardian reading tofu eating wokerati’.
The Conservatives are a confusing party. On the one hand they have a progressive policy of promoting women and minorities to senior positions within the party. On the other hand the politicians who have benefitted from this seem to promote policies designed to please the most socially conservative section of the party. The blue rinse and golf club Conservative party members whose values are not very representative of the broader electorate. They are unlikely to carry the public with them. Now that Brexit has been done, this sort of yahoo politics is redundant. Did they not get the memo?
This is a sure fire way not to get elected at the next election.
So … keep it up?
Brexit will never be done, and they like it that way so they can continue to blame the EU
for all the problems / fuck-ups etc.
The Conservatives of late do seem to revel in deliberately appointing ministers bent on working against the public interest in their particular briefs.
Not that amazing - when they interviewed 29 people who survived attempting suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, all 29 said that they regretted their suicide attempt on the way down.
The British jumped off a political cliff, and their country is still tumbling down and being dashed against the rocks. Is it any surprise that many wish they could go back?
To be fair (just for the sheer mental exercise of it, as a greater writer than me once wrote), this is not a new thing in politics - Yes, Minister referenced this sort of thing at least twice in the early 1980s. One example:
“Does he like television?”
“Hasn’t even got a set.”
“Then we’ll make him a governor of the BBC”
[Admittedly this was not a government ministry appointment]
Another example was the chain-smoking Minister for Sport (already an irony) being promoted to Health Secretary (because the previous incumbent had been packed off to the Treasury, to avoid embarrassment over the PM squashing his proposed anti-smoking legislation).
As an aside, it’s particularly amusing to me that most of the proposed anti-smoking legislation that got huge laughs as being outrageous in that episode was basically enacted about 20 years later (a complete ban on advertising except at point of sale, warnings on packets saying “dying of cancer can seriously damage your health”, no smoking in the workplace).
Pah, that study is completely biased - they didn’t ask anyone who succeeded in their attempt.
I’m mostly joking, but there is some truth in there - surviving may make people feel their life now has meaning that was previously lacking, they may regret the fact they are left with injuries, etc. Of course this doesn’t change the original point (that it’s not surprising a majority now support the idea of reversing Brexit, given how things have turned out). Unfortunately, human nature is such that it’s often only possible to truly learn from a mistake after it has been made.
It is certainly a challenge to ask people who successfully killed themselves if they’re happy with that choice. Or at least to get a coherent answer from them.
To be fair, all 29 said they regretted their decision on the way down, so before they knew they would survive.
Whether this is objectively true or due to flawed human memory, we may never know.
Good point, I missed that in my ‘analysis’ - thank you. It’s almost like the people who did the study thought about it more than I did 
.
In other news that may make people wish for the sweet release of death, Matt Hancock announced this morning that he will be appearing on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. Less than an hour later, the Tory party announced that he had lost the whip. (I.e. has been kicked out the party).
He said that as he was in no danger of being in government any time soon (Sunak isn’t a fan) this was a great way of getting the Tory message out to the 12m strong audience.
The whips said his job was to be in Parliament, not eating kangaroo genitals for attention (I paraphrase).
Someone asked, what about Johnson and his 5 week holiday then, should he be kicked out for not doing the work? The whips said that these matters were dealt with on a case by case basis. This is code for “Nobody likes Matt Hancock”.
can you give us a bit of background? Who is Matt Hancock and why does nobody like him?
A fair question!
He was Health Secretary during the pandemic (in post from 2018 to June 2021). That’s a tough gig in all fairness but he did not cover himself in glory. Pandemic preparedness was not what it should have been, but the main criticism is his handling of the testing regime (set a target of 100,000 tests a day, couldn’t meet it, diverted resources away from the “trace” element of test and trace to try, ended up lying about what was being achieved and playing silly buggers with stats to try to make the numbers work) and his handling of the issue of returning infected elderly covid patients to care homes.
He ceased to be Health Secretary when he was caught on CCTV* breaking - and how! - the social distancing rules with one of his advisers, in his office. He has now left his wife and kids for her, in IIRC a fairly graceless manner.
Basically, he has a reputation as an incompetent slimeball, but without the alleged charm and charisma of, say, Boris Johnson to help him get away with it.
*This is a scandal in itself. How the fuck is CCTV footage from a Minister’s office making its way to the front page of a newspaper?
Thanks for the info. That is a very low bar to hurdle.
Some reaction here:
To drag this back to the topic: this is good for RIshi Sunak. Hancock is going to publish his diaries of the pandemic and is due to appear at the PArliamentary Inquiry into handling of the pandemic. He was expected to be critical of SUnak’s “economy first” approach to lockdowns etc.
This tawdry publicity move taints Hancock and makes it easier for Sunak to dismiss his criticism.
I think we know the answer. Put an incompetent slimeball in a position of power, and he will step on people. People who just happen to have a thumbdrive handy, and access to a CCTV drive…
The CCTV feed from inside a Ministers office should not be accessible to disgruntled junior staff though. It’s incredibly sensitive - I mean, what we’ve seen from it is obviously blackmail material in the wrong hands - and there are or ought to be a range of safeguards to stop this sort of thing happening. It may be serial incompetence but given the viciousness of the feuding between senior Tories over lockdowns, it’s not totally mad to see this a dirty tricks operation between internal factions.
Prime Ministers have two jobs. One is to deal with the internal factions within the party - maintaining support by bribing faction leaders with ministerial jobs and seat around the cabinet table and undermining the less loyal by letting word of their various screw ups and indiscretions out to friendly journalists. This requires finely tuned political antennae and lots of spies who monitor the fortunes of ministers as they try to manage their departments.
The other is to govern the country and implement the political program they sold the electorate in the General Election. That and deal with various external events that arise from time to time on the international stage.
Sunak has appointed ministers and should soon release an economic plan agreed with the Chancellor. We wait with baited breath to see how much pain it will involve. There have been some clues to manage expectations. There will be tax rises and public spending cuts. They will be mindful of malking these realistic and costed to not spook the markets as Truss did so disastrously. The radical ‘Think tank’ of economic advisors Truss relied upon is now out of favour. Sunak and Hunt will have had their own team working a plan for quite a while.
Meanwhile the public and newshounds need to be entertained the right of the party will want some red meat to devour. That is the job of the Home Office and the immigration issues are guaranteed to generate plenty of drama.
It will be interesting to see if Braverman self destructs. She seems to hold her nerve, but I can see public opinion turning against her policy of making life difficult for boat people. She will make the case that they are all fit young men simply looking to do illegal work and the press will find photos of innocent young children staring through fences of some squalid detention camp. She will accept no responsibility and blame the French and EU for the crisis. We have been here before.