A small detail that has particularly annoyed me is that the parties the Prime Minister celebrated were declared as BYOB, which stands for Bring Your Own Booze. How cheap can you get? Does the PM not have a budget for representation he can tap into? Could he not have asked a rich friend to finance this carousing instead of the stupid wallpaper*? And if you can bring liquids in bottles bigger than 100 ml into Nr. 10, does that mean the security there is more relaxed than at your local airport?
* Is he going to take the wallpaper off the walls in Nr. 10 to plaster the walls in his new home with it? Will his girlfriend like it there half as much as she liked it in Nr. 10?
I remember when c-span used to run the "questions " when Blair was in office it was a combo of serious questions and debate and sometimes it was just Blair humorously taking the piss from the opposition and even occasionally his own party who provided one of my favorite lines …
he was wanting to do something and was talking about it and a junior member stood up and said “with all due respect to the prime minister may I ask him in the style of our American cousins “what was he smoking earlier in the evening ?” because that idea sounds like what a university kid would consider after a couple rolled cigarettes” everyone was rolling over with laughter and Blair responded “hmmm seems like well have to work on that one” Next question"
The “one rule for us, one for the plebs” ideals of the Tories has been a steady drip, even before the Partygate thing exploded in the past month. Before that it was the Owen Patterson scandal, the general principles of which had been bubbling for a long time before boiling over. The parties are a different situation, but it all plays into this notion that the Tories in power can do whatever they want with no repercussions, and they figured that Boris could just deliberately mess his hair up, stand in front of a TV camera, say “wiffle waffle harumph harumph haminahaminahamina” (seriously, watch clips of him on YouTube being interviewed and you’ll know I’m not exaggerating) and they’d skate by.
Sadly, anyone waiting in the wings to replace BoJo is just as morally bereft and intellectually vacuous as he is. Too bad that the Labour leader is kind of a personality dead zone.
Just that it’s happened multiple times in the U.S. Including the governor of our most populous state, and the Speaker of the House, who is 2nd in line to the presidency. None of them faced any actual consequences.
If it winds up differently in the UK, all the better, but it’s up to you guys.
Sure, there’s one off incidents everywhere - but this wasn’t. This was multiple offences, all in No 10 - like Biden have about ten parties in the White House. One event could be forgiven, two even, but we’ve been getting revelations of new events every few days for weeks.There’s a limit to how much can be brushed off.
Quoting because this is indeed the way things are meant to be done but: says who?
There is no rule here. There is no referee with the power to say a) you lied to Parliament and b) you now have to stop being PM.
If a PM were to stand up in the Commons and say, “I lied to you, I’m glad I did, I’d do it again and I have no intention of resigning” there is absolutely nothing that will require him to do so.
It might make his party sufficiently unhappy about their future electoral prospects under an admitted liar that they depose him as Leader of their party, but it might not. They might decide they like that swaggering, Trumpian attitude and back him to the hilt.
An enormous amount of the checks and balances in British political life come down to “But only a cad and bounder with no sense of honour would do such a thing” which is fine when you elect decent chaps but what happens if you do in fact elect a cad and bounder with no sense of honour? They can get away with a lot, is what happens.
(We first saw this, incidentally, in Labour: Corbyn lost, and lost heavily, a vote of no confidence by his MPs. Everyone said “Well, he’ll have to resign now” but he just… didn’t. And when people checked the rule book, there was nothing in it saying that he would cease to be leader if he lost the confidence of the parliamentary party. It was just assumed that no-one would try to carry on under such circumstances. But carry on he did.)
Boris is quite capable of a) simply denying that he lied to the House even if plain evidence proves he did or b) refusing to resign even if he admits it. And he can get away with it as long as he can persuade his MPs that they don’t want to rock the boat.
That’s true of any form of regulation: enforcement depends on the quality and integrity of the enforcers, whether judiciary, police, Mr Speaker or the Committee on Privileges, and ultimately the voters in a general election, as well as the ruling party’s MPs. (In the “flagrant defiance” scenario outlined above, I’d imagine Palace officials would be doing whatever they could to get the issue resolved to avoid letting the monarch get involved).
Yes, but in Parliament in principle there are no enforcers. There is no one whose job it is to remove a lying PM from power. Police and judiciary don’t come into it because lying to Parliament isn’t a crime or a tort. It’s just bad form. The Speaker can find that the PM to be a liar but he can’t stop him from being PM. The system is that a PM found to have lied to Parliament would simply remove themselves, on the grounds that they would essentially be ashamed not to. It’s a system that simply doesn’t allow for someone who’s willing not to do the done thing.
If the PM lies, and his party like the lies, and enough voters either like the lies or believe them, then the UK is stuck with a lying PM.
It’d be less of an issue with some sort of proportional representation system rather than the FPTP system we have now, but of course there’d just be other problems then.
That’s the case, to a large degree, in the US, too. A lot of the rules are unwritten, so there turned out to be no recourse when someone violated them.
Hahaha, this may be the most hilarious example of false equivalence I’ve yet seen on the board. You’ve stretched “it’s” so far in your first sentence it’s become completely transparent.
Yes, and in some ways that’s fine, in a caveat emptor sort of fashion.
But we - and by we I mean serious political commentators, almost all politicians etc.* - act as if there are checks and balances and enforcers. So the system is more vulnerable to bad actors than either an open “Whatever you get away with is fine” system, or one with enforced standards/rules because it doesn’t protect itself against the shameless.
E.g. Starmer went to some lengths at yesterday’s PMQs to get Johnson to say that lying to Parliament would be a breach of the Ministerial Code (and so it would). Because Starmer thinks that this admission will trap Johnson. It’ll make life tricky for him but it’s not like confessing to a crime in court. Johnson is quite capable of blustering some nonsense about “pettifogging lawyer’s tricks” and just clinging on come what may.
There is some small comfort that at least Boris Johnson was elected by getting the most votes. I don’t know if he hit 50%, but he was actually picked by the population.
I was stunned he was even up for it. Back when Cameron resigned, I was relieved when Theresa May got it instead of him, though she was hardly that impressive.