A reminder that Nadine Dorries previously also appeared on “I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here” while a sitting MP. And then failed to disclose her £82,000 fee received to Parliament. She also had the whip briefly suspended but later became part of Boris Johnson’s government as the Minister for Writing “Mrs Nadine Johnson” Over and Over In Her Diary While Staring Dreamily At The Prime Minister.
(I kid - she was the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, four subjects which she knew absolutely nothing about.)
As much as the press loved to focus on the smoochyface aspects of that scandal, I remain far more peeved that he also gave the woman he was playing tonsil hockey with a £25,000 a year NHS consultancy job on the taxpayer’s dime.
Only if you presume that anything horrendous he says will be challenged. It won’t. He’ll get a clear platform to blame asylum seekers for deserving whatever firebombs thrown at them.
Well, feel free to present a cite if this is in fact the case (and you could well be right).
Personally it seems to me the BBC attracts a lot of criticism from both the right (for being too left-leaning) and the left (for being too right-leaning), which suggests to me they are doing a reasonable job of being balanced. But I haven’t attempted to quantify this, so it could be just what they want me to think. Unless (as with any news source) you accept what they present uncritically, it kind of doesn’t matter.
Where in gods name did you get the idea that Johnson was socially liberal? People just put really weird templates onto that man without any basis of reality.
He pretty much led a government of hand picked trolls, backed by whatever grotesques he could get waiting in the wing (Fabricant). His job was troll daily, why else would obvious idiot Jacob Rees Mogg/The Viceroy of India be in any government position? They picked fights over imaginary outrages such as Jerusalem at the Prom. There was absolutely no sign of that man being socially liberal at all.
It isn’t confusing, it is plainly misdirectional. They actively seek out the self-haters, it is the original trick, Thatcher was by definition a woman (though I’d use the term “hag” personally), she had absolutely no love for womenkind. The same holds True for Patel, Braverman and the likes of Sunak, Kwarteng and Javid are not filling their ranks with their own kind. The likes of Dorries is less there for being a woman, more for being absolutely batshit crazy, which suits, well, see above.
During this period a company who he was a part owner of (along with his brother in law, his sister and his mum) got awarded a large NHS contract. He was also part of the large NHS giveaway, with the likes of his next door neighbour, and local pub landlord getting awarded NHS contracts during the pandemic. Ie: provably corrupt, and not only would have resigned, but probably have went to jail under any normal government.
This has been the goto position of people over the years, but its long since been invalid. I can see your point a long time ago, but any form of reality seems to enrage the tories now.
Brexit has been barely mentioned at all, when it’s clear and obvious the problem. Huge queues at dover go uncovered (yet are on other other channels news). Kuenssberg, who was chief political editor at the BBC, turned down a job with Johnson’s administration but still remains friends. Plenty of photographs of her laughing at Johnson’s quips, but here’s a BBC trust decision on biasing an interview against Corbyn, but Cummings has briefing her on his jaunt to Barnard Castle. She leaked Postal votes results the day before the election, against electoral law (but got off with it because they claimed she didn’t mean it).
I remember watching an episode of Countryfile (farmers, a typically VERY Tory lot) covering Beet farming, which got absolutely screwed over by Brexit (removal of tariffs meant Jamaican sugar beet undercut their industry and they couldn’t sell their overpriced sugar beet to the EU anymore either), and it just didn’t get mentioned. I suspect it got discussed but never made it past the editor.
The starting point wasn’t Brexit. It was Scottish Independence, which a lot of people didn’t realise in England, when the interviews went on it was “someone who was anti scottish independence” and “someone who was slightly less anti scottish independence”. Threatening to presenters who were pro-Scottish independence was a bit of a giveaway though. It’s hard to go off and start building the cite lists there, there’s too many cases of anti-SNP/Indy in the last few months, never mind going back eight years.
I guess you really need an overview from a unbiased newspaper like The washington post
“But Marr and others said that fair and balanced reporting about what some consider secession isn’t in the BBC’s job description.”
Cameron and Johnson were socially Liberal as opposed to socially Conservative. Bibles did not get thumped, they had Cabinets with a fair number of women and from minority backgrounds… They were in favour of same sex marriage and I am sure they were unconcerned about sexuality. Johnson, probably too unconcerned about some of his political friends whose uncontrolled sexuality regularly intruded on their colleagues. Johnson protected a sex pest, which was his undoing. Cameron, I believe, had a disabled child who tragically died. I am assuming that must have had an influence on the policy of improving the status of social work as a profession.
Economically, of course, they were Conservative. Small government, low taxes. One Nation Conservatives.
The current crop of Conservatives seem more radical and seem to be scraping the barrel, looking for a populist angle to energise the right. They seem very out of step with the prevailing culture. They are lost without some flag waving cause like Brexit and ill equipped to take the centre ground.
And privately calling her a “hag” to yourself is your prerogative. But please refrain from referring to her (or any other female) by this sexist term on this board. Thanks.
The current BBC chairman donated £400k to the Tories, and the current director general was the deputy chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative party in the 1990s, and stood as a Tory councillor. Accusations of BBC bias toward the left/Labour are utterly hilarious.
One (as yet not publicly discussed, AFAIK) problem for Labour, if they form the next government, will be how drastically to clear out the Tory placemen and -women in nominally independent quangos and organisations like the BBC, the NHS and assorted regulatory agencies without creating a tit-for-tat “spoils” system.
You speak as if this selection of Conservatives appeared from nowhere, rather than filling the spare slots with ERG members, ex UKIPs loons, and deselecting anyone based around the reality of Brexit, rational thinking and any sort of slightly moderate thinking,
Selections and deselections by one Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. I am utterly baffled how you seem to shrug him off as any sort of liberal.
Just because he’s been managed in recent times due to be Prime Minister, so his racist, sexist and homophobic rants are kept out out public view, doesn’t mean it didn’t fuel the anti-woke narratives in the last year, immigrants on boats “invading” and a government pretty much hand chosen by him to enrage the gammons with “others”.
Cameron was a One Nation Liberal Conservative. Johnson is not. Perhaps he was, once upon a time in his early Mayorship, but there has been no indication of this in the last eight years. Once freed of the yoke of the people of London, he spoke freely. And drove his party gladly to the far right.
I do wonder why people seem to give Johnson the “benefit of the doubt” so much. The 200K dead never seems to be due to any of his choices. The billions of covid money gone nothing to do with him. He wasn’t firing Patel when she was shipping asylum applicants to Rwanda to live there no matter if they were successful or not.
The weird need for some people to say “He’s doing his best” and never to complete the sentence with “and it’s fucking awful” just makes me wonder why they need to apologise for a lazy hateful useless person who wanted to run the UK. It’s not as if he became PM by mistake, or as part of a drunken bet.
Johnson was certainly had a liberal attitude to his own conduct. Nor do I think he cared much about the standards of the people he gathered around him. A libertarian or in his case a libertine. It led to his downfall when his cabinet colleagues finally lost patience with his incompetence. He was a poor leader but nonetheless a vote winner who secured the Conservatives a large majority and his success was unusual. Johnson was a political maverick without much of a plan.
I was simply distinguishing him politically from other wings of his party, especially the radical Thatcherite wannabes like Truss.
It is important to understand how such people get into power and how they operate.
Alternatively you can just throw up your arms in indignation, lamenting the voting public as fools for tolerating any politician so transparently riven with obvious faults and failings.
That leads nowhere and it ignores the fact that UK voters, as is the trend in other countries, has a problem with the political class. So they vote for mavericks who are sure to stir things up.
We now have Sunak as PM. What to make of him? He seems quite the opposite of Johnson. Will he last two years? Will he be able to lead the Conservatives into the next election? The party seems barely functional, riven with factions. He needs the support of some of those factions if he is to survive. That means giving jobs to some oddballs.
The country has moved on now and I think the voters concern is now squarely with the economy. That is a serious numbers game and no amount of flannel is going to make those monthly bills go away. All that Brexit nonsense had gone and we are right back down to earth.
“The political class” isn’t some alien species. Ultimately they succeed because they say things that appeal to people.
The last few years have confirmed to me that in modern liberal democracies people get the leaders they deserve.
There is plenty of evidence in the United States at least that people will continue to vote against their own interests if something else appeals to their emotions.
Although that does invite the obvious response: if the EU is still to blame for all our woes, you’re saying the Brexit project of “taking back control” has been a complete bust?