sufi

lala
i was chatting earlier to someone who'd just come from work at the cabinet office, scenes were described,
they reckon blojo would trigger a GE before he quits &/or royal assent will be revoked ... juicy
 

wild greens

Well-known member
Probably in here somewhere but only just read this scurrilous thread about Boris' Russian odyssey(s). Pretty interesting really

 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Gove getting sacked is hilarious. They're down to the last few loyalists, desperately trying to scrape together enough semi-sentient lifeforms to fill a cabinet as more ministers resign every hour, the situation's looking increasingly untenable, also Gove, you're fired you useless piece of shit.
 

woops

is not like other people
I love the idea of US Question Time, but I think we've become too polarized and tribal for it to be of any use. It would be a joke, just be obnoxious one-sided statements from both sides, probably descending into schoolyard name calling (and, if we were lucky, the occasional fistfights).
Like the presidential debates
 
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Leo

Well-known member
The NY Times reports the top contenders as Truss, Zahawi, Hunt (the bookmakers' favorite), and Sunak.
 

Leo

Well-known member

Jeremy Hunt, the former foreign secretary whom Mr. Johnson defeated in the last party leadership contest, is also seen as a potential party leader and is the bookmakers’ favorite for the top job. After losing the 2019 leadership contest, he moved to the party’s backbenches but has continued to be an influential member.

Mr. Hunt has chaired the Health and Social Care Select Committee since January 2020. Throughout the pandemic, he has been a vocal critic of the government’s approach to Covid-19. Mr. Hunt initially opposed Brexit in a pivotal 2016 referendum but in the years since has come out in support of it. His public gaffes have hurt him in the past, including when he accidentally described his Chinese wife as Japanese.
 

Leo

Well-known member
Can you imagine the plotting, scheming, and alliance building that going on behind the scenes right now? Like Big Brother-PM Edition.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah... absolute Game of Thrones/House of Cards/I Claudius etc scheming. I wish we were party to it. We'll have to wait for the various self-aggrandising memoirs in a decade or two... if we still care.

Anyway, a small part of me is enjoying the Tories being stuck with the horrible bastard they were happy to foist on us. And pretending to be surprised that he is putting his own survival above anything else. Now he's properly dug in I'm thinking that he will do anything to cling on - including smash his own party and bring about a constitutional crisis. The exact qualities of ruthless selfishness that they prized when working for them are suddenly not so welcome...

His argument that he has a mandate from the people falls apart under the slightest examination - yes the Tories won a huge majority, and possibly much of that was down to him. But that majority was won on 43 percent of the vote so if he is gonna insist that the vote was due to him, then surely he has to also own up to the fact that he actually attracted only a minority of the votes cast. But hardly a surprise that he interprets things in the most sneakily favourable way for him.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I'm beginning to realise that Johnson is completely deluded - as with many of the most relentless liars I've known or known of, I think that part of the reason they are able to lie so easily and with absolutely no feeling of guilt is due to the fact that first they lie to themselves. Once they themselves totally believe that the lie is god's honest truth then they can simply repeat that "truth" as easily and innocently as a normal person repeats a fact they have been given.

As we know the Tory Party got forty-three percent of the vote in the last GE, but due to the foibles of the electoral system, they got a huge majority of 80 seats. The last few days have revealed to me that Johnson has twisted that in his stupid fat head so that he thinks that that large majority of seats in parliament was due to an equally huge majority of votes in the country and that those votes were won not by the party but entirely by him.

In other words, although the 365 seats in parliament actually mean simply that 43% of the country chose the Tory party, I believe that the vicious twat now barricaded in Downing Street has managed to truly convince himself that instead it means that 56% of the electorate voted specifically to make him the absolute ruler of the country and so whatever the pygmies and short-sighted fools surrounding him think, the country loves him and thus he has every right to ignore their pathetic squeaking about his lies, corruption and so on.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
How many resignations do we need before he can't fill cabinet? It must be close now
I don't think he can fill it now. I mean, technically there are enough people who haven't either resigned or said that they have no confidence in him (in fact only a few of the cabinet have actually resigned but some of them like Patel and Suleman or whatever her name is have said they want Johnson to leave but feel they can't resign and leave their department fucked), but that doesn't mean that they will take a cabinet job if offered it. Anyone who does so will surely be blowing their chances of any future career in the party, they would be the lamest of lame ducks in a lame duck regime with no chance to get to grips with their portfolio never mind actually putting their stamp on it. You would have to think that the only people who would consider such a role would be people who in normal circumstances would have no chance of getting near a position of importance. It would be laughable if he picked some random backbencher with no ambition and no idea of what such a job entailed. It really feels as though the government can no longer function right now. Or as someone put it on twitter earlier, UK politics can be described as in a situation where the Titanic refused to accept that the iceberg had won.

think it is quite nice that he's going to go down looking like an absolute wanker

Yep. I mean he always looked like an absolute wanker, but now he looks like a desperate and childish wanker who is trying desperately to stop his lip wobbling as he lashes out by firing Gove and claiming that the country still loves him. The fucking prick. It's great to see him suffering like this.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I think they told him that if there was another VONC then he could only expect to get 65 votes or so. But he said that if there is a VONC then he will fight it. I'm really starting to think that he might call at GE that way he would be hoping that there would be enough people who hate Labour enough to keep him in power, although if he did that then the parliamentary party would surely hate him even more for gambling with their political lives to save his skin. I dunno if they could stop him from doing that - though if there was an election and the Tories won, what would stop them from having a VONC straight after that and getting rid of him? Can he really insist on leading a load of people who don't want him to be their leader?
 
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