Conservative party/opposition watch

[automaticearth2]

BBC presenter shows her glee at Boris withdrawing from the race:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/ ... er-johnson

She's now been taken off air (wonder if she still gets paid?) You'd think someone working on an 'impartial' national broadcaster funded by taxpayer money would keep these kind of thought to themselves....

[Stumuz2]

Impartial my ar*e!

[Mark]

Impartial my ar*e!

Boris is history - you really need to let go now....
Go for a long walk, do something constructive, go plant a tree...

[Stumuz2]

Impartial my ar*e!

Boris is history - you really need to let go now....
Go for a long walk, do something constructive, go plant a tree...

Boris........Biased BBC?

Ok explain your logic.

[UndercoverElephant]

Sunak rules out early election. I will make a prediction that this will ultimately turn out to be a major strategic mistake. The opposition will use it to skewer him on a daily basis, and the negative consequences will just keep piling up. He will try to ignore it and make it go away, and will be precisely as successful as Blair was at making misleading parliament about the Iraq war go away. He will be remembered as Rishi "the man with no mandate" Sunak, and the tories will be annihilated when the election eventually happens.

[Catweazle]

Given the choice of being annihilated now or in two years what will Rishi choose? I reckon two years of Tory nest-feathering is guaranteed.

[automaticearth2]

I'm wondering if Sunak is going to try and be a slightly less of a 'grey suit' than Starmer. He's also going to try and point out that he was a true brexiteer whereas Starmer appeared to sit on the fence etc. Against all this, he's seen as slippery so can imagine he has an uphill struggle on this front. It will be interesting to what he's cabinet ends up looking like...

[UndercoverElephant]

He has just tried to set off in two opposed directions at the same time. We face a profound economic crisis and must start paying off a historically humungous debt....but he is going to deliver a land of milk and honey where the NHS and other public services start working again and every day is filled with hope. This isn't going to work once the details start appearing.

[Potemkin Villager]

It's all just politics innit?

[UndercoverElephant]

It's all just politics innit?

Yes, but the details matter. His biggest challenge is resisting calls for a swift election, and he's committed himself to a specific defence: he will honour Johnson's manifesto from 2019. That is a very good argument, but sets him up for disaster because everybody knows it is completely impossible for him to honour that manifesto, which was pre-covid, pre-ukraine-war and pre-minibudget. He has just opened his premiership by promising the impossible, and the opposition will use this very effectively against him. Specifically: Johnson had no mandate for austerity, so he must either avoid austerity or his argument for refusing an election collapses. I do not believe he can sustain this politically for 2 years.

[Potemkin Villager]

Yes it does rather seem to be continuation of the usual banging of heads on the wall, digging of ever deeper flooding holes,
painting the party in a corner and making promises that are impossible to even come close to approaching. yet alone actually achieving.
I would say things will unravel further rather quickly in the absence of party or national unity and the backstabbing is probably well under way. Whatever way it is dressed up, Operation Austerity will precipitate mass push back unless it is demonstrated to be equitable which it will not be.

Still he looks and sounds competent (and actually seems to like people) which is a big improvement on his predecessor

[UndercoverElephant]

It has become much clearer what is going on tonight, I think. Sunak has decided to run a super-slick professional operation - he's the anti-Truss and anti-Johnson at the same time. He genuinely hasn't decided on the details. He's reshuffled to get the various factions all talking, and selected the only over-arching strategy available to avoid immediate demands for a general election, which is to continue honouring Johnson's manifesto...somehow. And he is then going to get the government to attempt to actually agree a plan of what they are going to do, which will require delaying the next major announcement well beyond hallloween.

Nothing wrong with any of that in itself. Probably what I'd do if I somehow found myself in his situation. It is going to be absolutely fascinating to find out what happens next. When Sunak said that exceptionally hard decisions had to be made, he meant his own cabinet is going to have to make them. That cabinet are united in their terror of facing the coming election without having got their collective act together, but they are going to find it exceptionally difficult to agree on these decisions.

He's a slick operator, but at this point he's fighting against logic itself. He cannot win.

EDIT: Of course he can win. He knows the tories will lose the election. He's got two years to show what a great job he can do in unbelievably formidable circumstances, and come out of it keeping his own seat and either continuing as tory leader in opposition or doing whatever else he fancies. I wonder how long he can keep this show on the road.

[PS_RalphW]

He is almost certainly going to get a popularity bounce just by not being utterly corrupt or incompetent. He will never be accepted by the more racist elements in society, and being fabulously wealthy will make it harder for him to impose austerity on the rest of us.

The question is, how long can he keep the rabid hordes of Tory mps that currently occupy the house from tearing each others throats out?
I think I have just repeated ehat you said, but using more accurate language

[Mark]

Conservative MPs question Suella Braverman's return to cabinet:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63410737

Sunak's judgement already under scrutiny....
This looks like a poor decision which will come back to bite him...

[RevdTess]

Still not clear to me what the order of events was with Braverman's resignation/sacking. At the time it just seemed like an excuse to resign without accusations of 'disloyalty', and maybe she even sent the emails deliberately to have a convenient 'minor' fault to own up to, but then we heard Braverman and Truss had a massive row the previous night over immigration, and you're left wondering if this stuff all conveniently came out because Truss wanted an excuse to fire her. Either way it still looks terrible to put someone back in a job in which they made a resigning-level mistake only a week earlier. Do people really think resigning just instantly resets everything? It's like Johnson thinking he can just come back with all forgiven. Why?!

The lack of integrity with many MPs in parliament is just appalling. I realise these days most voters care far more about issues than about an MP's integrity, but for me I've gone the other way. I'd much rather have an MP that had virtues of integrity, sincerity, humility, compassion etc, even if they held different views to me on political issues. Sadly, the wrong sort of MPs always seem to rise to the top. Let's hope Sunak is different. But after Braverman being reappointed, maybe not