It appears that the turd is now planning to give “honours” to half of his family.
His policy is obviously based on “what would Trump do ?”
Wanker
Boris remaining caretaker for two months will turn out to have made no difference as Liz Truss appears to be equally incompetent.
Maybe she’ll have an “incoming honours list” where she has a month of parties and giving titles to her family members.
Well, Liz Truss will be sworn is as the new Prime Minister tomorrow.
She has perhaps the most daunting in-box of any new Prime Minister since Churchill. Energy prices pushing the cost of living beyond the means of maybe millions, soaring inflation, Russia, the Brexit trade barrier in Northern Ireland, Tory infighting where there’s already talk of a vote of no confidence, Scottish independence, the NHS in a state of near-total crisis, the pound in free-fall, and the prediction of one of the deepest recessions in the G20.
She campaigned to stay in the EU and has since says she was wrong to do so. Because obviously it’s been such an amazing success? Or maybe she meant it was wrong for her career.
That sounds daunting indeed and I would not choose to be in her shoes. I hope she is up to the task.
To discuss that very topic, I have started a new thread about Truss.
Johnson has now just resigned as a member of parliament.
He has received the report about the lock down parties and says “They have still not produced a shred of evidence” …so I will resign.
Good riddence.
Of course, he now creates a bye-election, as does Nadine Dorries. She’s no loss either, but are they hoping the bye-elections will knock another couple of nails into the coffin for Sunak’s reputation?
There has been some speculation that Mad Nad (as even her friends call her) has resigned in order to vacate her super-safe Conservative seat for Boris to stand in, as a weird political rebirth. Tragically, that’s credible.
j
Technically, they’ve not resigned, but taken offices of profit under the Crown, which results in their automatic expulsion from the Commons. MPs can’t resign in Britain.
It did suddenly occur to me that he might be thinking he’s doing a De Gaulle-style flounce to Brightwell-les-deux-églises, but the Dorries option sounds horribly plausible in its self-delusion. But if Sunak has the nous, surely he could get BJ off the Tories’ approved candidates list if there’s enough found against him?
Delivering his announcement late on Friday evening, Mr Johnson said the draft report he had seen was “riddled with inaccuracies and reeks of prejudice”, adding it was clear the committee was “determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of Parliament”. “They have still not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons,” he said, insisting “I did not lie”. He also accused its chairwoman, Labour’s Harriet Harman, of “egregious bias”, saying he was “bewildered and appalled” at how he was being forced out.
Why would the chairwoman be Labour–as Tories control Parliament?
Custom and practice. It isn’t a case of the majority party having a clean sweep of committee chairs - after all, they already have charge of the ministries the committees supervise.
The Tories have a majority on this committee, but Harriet Harman is a (very) senior MP, and the “Mother of the House”, and was apparently elected unanimously by the committee.
Because Parliamentary Select Committee Chairs are divided amongst the parties on the basis of how many seats each party holds, so, as a random example, if there are 10 select committees, and Party A holds 60% of seats, they get six chairs, etc. The Chairs are then voted on by the whole house.
There are differences between committees. The Public Accounts Committee (which has oversight of value for money and efficiency/effectiveness of govt spending) is always chaired by a senior backbencher from the opposition party. The committee in Johnson’s case (Privileges) isn’t one that scrutinises the performance of any government department, but deals with MPs’ misbehaviour, so its members are assumed to be acting as a “conscience vote” rather than on party lines.
One for the “just goes to show how wrong you can be” file.
Here’s a gift link to the NY Times article about the report. It is damning, and makes clear why Johnson resigned to try to spin his way ahead of it.
Boris Johnson deliberately misled British lawmakers over lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street during the coronavirus pandemic, a powerful committee concluded on Thursday, releasing publicly the findings that prompted Mr. Johnson’s angry resignation from Parliament last week.
The 108-page document, produced by the House of Commons privileges committee, offered a damning verdict on Mr. Johnson’s honesty and integrity, concluding that his conduct in misleading lawmakers who questioned him, including about his publicly documented violations of lockdown policy, was deliberate and that he had committed “a serious contempt” of the House.
From this side of the pond, it is extremely satisfying to see a politician who is well known for being a lying huckster actually receive consequences for his lies, because of course that never seems to happen over here. It’s also clear now why Boris reacted so furiously, because this is going to be his legacy now (hopefully, at least).
It will be interesting to see how many Tories vote to ratify the report.
On Monday, members of Parliament will be asked to vote on whether to endorse the report. That could serve as a referendum on Mr. Johnson’s career, either revealing persistent divisions within the Conservative Party, if some Tories reject the findings, or ratifying Mr. Johnson’s fall from grace, if many endorse them.
Penny Mordaunt, the Conservative who serves as leader of the House of Commons, said it would be a free vote, meaning that the government will not pressure members to vote one way or the other. She also noted that the committee’s membership had been set up with the unanimous support of the House.
That sound you hear is Mordaunt throwing Boris under the bus. How many more will do the same?
“A damning verdict on Mr. Johnson’s honesty and integrity” is like “A damning review of Gilbert Gottfried’s career as an opera singer”. It doesn’t say anything people shouldn’t already be fully aware of.
…not in public, anyway.
And he’s done it again: ex-ministers are supposed to get clearance from an advisory committee before taking up another job (in case they use privileged information from their ministerial post for personal gain) - but BJ didn’t tell them he’d got a gig with a newspaper column until barely half an hour before the newspaper announced it.
Once more - rules are for little people, not the “king of the world”.