The election isn’t for PM; it’s for leader of the Tory Party. To win you have to be (duh) a member of the Tory party, and Tory party rules explicitly require that you be a member of parliament. Farage is neither.
. . . exactly as predicted by the polls for many weeks now. So I think this is already factores into peoples’ assessments and preductions about the leadership contest.
This is exactly how elections in a multi-party system are supposed to work, when there is a major issue facing the public. The vote should break along the major issue, with parties which take a clear position getting more votes than indecisive parties.
Brexit is the most important issue facing the British people. The two main parties are hopelessly muddled, the Tories even more than Labour. Because they don’t give a clear answer to the crucial issue of the day, they lose support.
Brexit Party and Lib-Dems give clear answers to their position on Brexit, and pick up votes accordingly.
As I’ve commented before, I think the historical precedent is the break-up of the Old Tory party in the mid-19th century, on the protectionist issue of the Corn Laws. You can’t have a party composed of people who can’t agree on a fundamental issue like that. So Toryism came a cropper, with protectionists founding the Conservative party, and low-tariff Tories drifting off to the new Liberal Party.
Think of parliamentary votes during a time of great election uncertainty as a Sorting Hat.
I leave it to each Doper to decide which party is Slytherin and which is Gryffindor.
They are doing roughly as well as UKIP did in previous Euro elections.
It looks as though the existential question for the Tories is well and truly in the open, with plenty of noises from the likes of Phillip Hammond that votes of confidence would be withheld from any new leader that pushes for no deal - and it doesn’t take many to wipe out any chance of a majority. Could leave them without a replacement PM capable of demonstrating that they have the confidence of Parliament. In which case Mrs M might have to continue holding the fort…
Hammond would say that, though, wouldn’t he? He stands to lose his job as Chancellor when a new PM is elected. So he’s angling for a seat in the Lords.
Pretty sure the survival of his country might be somewhat higher on his motivations…
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It would be nice to see a bit of selfless statemanship in Westminster these days.
The country is not in danger. Not from Brexit or the Tories, anyway. The SNP and Labour are different matters entirely.
A bad Brexit and/or much more of the Tories as they are, and the country is in a great deal of danger.
I’m as much a non-fan of Boris Johnson as a “paying attention from afar” American can be, but this article is stupidity itself. Two out of the top three points against Boris are:
- He’s overweight.
- He’s referred to as Boris, not Johnson, unlike other great statesmen.
Seriously, those are presented as legit arguments. I’m not kidding, those are the arguments. It’s complete dreck. The third main argument is that you would not use the words “conscientious, incredibly hard-working and determined” to describe him. Which, OK, at least now you’re getting to something somewhat relevant to potential job performance, but is still presented in a weird, roundabout manner.
Boris Johnson is terrible, IMO. I hope actually intelligent opinion pieces are published that help further this narrative as opposed to this nonsense. Do people actually take this Laura Perrins person seriously over there? Is it parody and I just got whooshed?
And Johnson has been nobbled. He’s being taken to court over the £350 million a week claim. The charges are misconduct in a public office.
Do I understand this right? That a private party is prosecuting this charge?
Hoo boy! If that could be done in the US with that charge, every president since Clinton (and likely some before him) as well as certain other officials (Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney, for example) would have been constantly harrassed by these cases. Many, but by no means all, of them frivolous.
Yes, it’s fair to say that this is a new development. It specifically relates to statements made while campaigning, both for Leave in 2016 and for the Tories in the 2017 general election.
It is obviously a stunt, and the ruling that it is not seems odd. For example, the ruling states that the prosecution was politically motivated in 2016, but given that three years have passed, it’s not politically motivated now. It’s not clear when the judge thinks the political motivation faded away.
On the other hand, politicians have the power to do a lot of stuff and unlike, say, international banks, or the police, there appears to be no regulatory mechanism to ensure that their communications with the people affected by their decisions have to be accurate, or honest, or plausibly honest, or made in good faith, or have any relation with the truth whatsoever. Maybe there should be such a regulatory mechanism.
In this case, we do have an Office of National Statistics, which is the final word on whether claims of numerical fact are accurate or not. In the 2016 campaign, the ONS ruled that the “We send Europe £350m a week” claim was false. Boris et al. kept using it. Should there not be *some *mechanism to prevent or discourage politicians from repeating statistics that have been ruled false by the statutory body charged with making such rulings? Or can politicians say literally any old bullshit they like and caveat elector be the only safeguard? I guess we’ll find out when the court rules.
(I think the claim that Johnson has been nobbled is an interesting one. This prosecution has been underway since 2016, AIUI. That it has got to this newsworthy stage just as Johnson has started his leadership campaign is bad timing for him, but I’m not sure that it’s anything more than bad timing.)
Griffyndor – Brave but foolhardy and somehow successful due to a surprising amount of luck? Sounds like Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party to me.
Slytherin – Diabolical yet wildly unsuccessful? Definitely the Conservatives.
Hufflepuff – Well meaning, down-to-earth slackers? Not sure, but Jeremy Corbyn seems like a badger lover, so let’s go with Labour.
Ravenclaw – Too smart for their own good? Change UK.
It occurred to me that Boris Johnson might set the record for shortest UK Prime Ministership. First act of Parliament under his stewardship? A vote of no confidence that he loses.
I wouldn’t put it past him to take a leaf out of Farage’s book (in Farage’s case, re the Electoral Commission) and launch an indignation campaign against the law and/or the judges. Whether that would get any further in practical terms than Cameron/May’s much-touted “British Bill of Rights”, or whether we would then be going full tilt down the Polish/Hungarian road of wholesale political interference with the judiciary… who knows?
Not nobbled, but boosted among his supporters. Nobody who is already supporting him will change their mind over this. Quite the contrary - right-wingers are more likely to support him now.
Yes, he’ll definitely claim it’s an elitist Remainer case, and there’s a pretty good chance he’ll hint jovially that there are “powers” who don’t want to see the jolly old will of the good old British public implemented. Possibly not when he needs MPs votes, but when he’s going to shires to woo Tory party members, vastly more likely. Given the Tory party’s recent pisspoor record of defending the indpendence of the judiciary, it’s unlikely he’d meet much internal opposition if he wanted to stir up this particular turnip-ghost.
It tells you a lot about the quality of the Tories, doesn’t it?