The banker loving, baby-eating Tory party thread (regenerated)

[mjmooney]

Boris or Gove... what sort of shit would you like in your sandwich? 

[HanoiVillan]

 

[ml1dch]

2 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

I think this is too passive. MP's have their own opinions about who will be the most popular leader in the country for retaining their seat. They aren't relying on someone to tell them. Also, their constituency associations never find out who they've voted for, do they? I don't recall this being made public?

You're right that if Boris is the first preference of 40% of Tory MP's then he can't be beaten. But I guess I'm less confident than you are that that's true now. 

 

I'm not suggesting they will swayed by a person or persons telling them who to vote for. 

They'll be swayed by polls saying that 39% of the people who keep them in position want Boris, with Dominic Raab second on a third of that and noone else getting to double figures. 

They'll be forming their opinions based on modelling that says that Johnson is the only candidate that would make people more likely to vote Conservative, with everyone else leading to a decreased vote share.

Now those polls might be erroneous or might change, but it is what it forming their opinions at the moment if their constituency chairman phones them up and asks them for their thoughts.

Also - let's not forget, they're selecting from a pool of Conservative MPs. How confident are you that their consciences couldn't countenance Johnson, because they are desperate for the competence and moral fibre of McVeigh, Gove or Raab instead? It's not like they'd be choosing him over someone they really want, like Thatcher or Pinochet. 

Finally, the bold bit - he doesn't need to be the first choice of a third / 40% or so. He just needs to be not the last choice of that many when they get to the last few.

It might not happen, the frontrunner is famous for not getting the Tory leadership - but the above is why the odds suggest it will. 

[PompeyVillan]

Whatever happens I think the next appointment will signal the Conservatives evolution into being a genuine far right party. They've been on the cusp for a while, but they've not had a leader who epitomises that ideology. If Johnson and Raab are the party member's favourites then I do hope the more fair minded Conservative voters show their disdain at the polling stations. 

What is interesting to me though is that I think their support is being splintered between even more hardcore far right/borderline facist Brexit party and the more moderate Lib Dems.

I'm sure Thatcher said something about getting knocked down by traffic from both sides. 

[blandy]

18 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

Rory Stewart is the candidate of the security services, the Army and Prince Charles. Not that it'll do him the blindest bit of good, mind you, but he's the 'deep state' choice. 

I find this kind of thing troubling. Have no idea what the security services, the Army and Prince Charles think about him or the others, nor do I care. But as @snowychap implies, he's basically a sentient being with practical abilities and skills from "real life". Yes, he's a Tory, but tbh if there was a "deep state" preference, or for that matter a general public preference, they'd have got it right, for the reasons snowy says. He's not a mad throbber, he's planted in the real world and diplomatic and human skills and experience are what the Country would want in a PM, from whichever party.

I kind of resent the Corbynite conspiracy theory bollex all about "deep state" and such like. And on top of that he's got no chance - because he isn't a throbber. If there was a deep state running things, then he'd be a certainty, wouldn't he?

[OutByEaster?]

Never mind a deep state running things, there's barely a state running things. If Stewart wants to go some way towards addressing that issue then he'll be the most reasonable option - I doubt very much that he does though as the reduction of the influence of the state for the benefit of money is pretty much Tory101.

 

[a m ole]

The choice seems to comprise of 2 or 3 clearings in the woods who actually want no deal and 17 clearings in the woods repeating exactly what May has been spouting for years.

I think the funniest candidate has to be Raab, a man who resigned in opposition to the deal he helped negotiate to then vote for it the third time round.

Edited May 26, 2019 by a m ole

[snowychap]

 

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, blandy said:

I find this kind of thing troubling. Have no idea what the security services, the Army and Prince Charles think about him or the others, nor do I care. But as @snowychap implies, he's basically a sentient being with practical abilities and skills from "real life". Yes, he's a Tory, but tbh if there was a "deep state" preference, or for that matter a general public preference, they'd have got it right, for the reasons snowy says. He's not a mad throbber, he's planted in the real world and diplomatic and human skills and experience are what the Country would want in a PM, from whichever party.

I kind of resent the Corbynite conspiracy theory bollex all about "deep state" and such like. And on top of that he's got no chance - because he isn't a throbber. If there was a deep state running things, then he'd be a certainty, wouldn't he?

The 'deep state' doesn't run the Tory party leadership contest. I'm not positing a conspiracy. Things are, basically, as they appear. 

However, it does appear to be true that a lot of people in the UK's more permanent power structures like Stewart, and want him to do well. That's not a crime, but it is an observation. The pertinent point here is that there was a time when being close to the royals and the armed forces would have counted for a lot in a Tory leadership contest; very clearly, we are not in those times any more. 

[HanoiVillan]

(the whole thread is fascinating by the way)

[peterms]

4 hours ago, blandy said:

I find this kind of thing troubling. Have no idea what the security services, the Army and Prince Charles think about him or the others, nor do I care. 

Was in two minds about commenting, since you don't care, but for anyone who does, the Tatler describes his connections to all of the above.

Quote

He has the looks of a misshapen Mick Jagger and a memory as mighty as a telephone directory. Not yet in his mid-40s, he has already been a bestselling author, Harvard lecturer, senior diplomat, charity boss, MP and (it is rumoured, though officially denied) an MI6 officer. He is also a friend of the Prince of Wales and was holiday-tutor to Princes William and Harry when they were schoolboys...

...To understand this romantic, Edwardian, elaborately polite figure, it may help to know something of his father, Brian - soldier and spy chief. Son of a Calcutta jute merchant of Scots lineage, Brian fought in the Second World War with the Black Watch, blowing up German tanks and shooting snipers out of trees. A linguist, he ran British intelligence in North Vietnam in the early Seventies while officially working as consul-general in Hanoi. On formal retirement from the service, he lived in Malaya and China, helping an electronics company.

All this young Rory watched and imbibed. He saw that life need not be a dreary office routine, limited to the English suburbs. A fellow could, if confident of his strengths, step outside the mundane and find adventures redolent of an earlier age...

After Oxford (where he attended just one meeting of the Bullingdon Club), he joined the Army briefly (the Black Watch, naturally) before entering the Diplomatic Service.

 

[bickster]

Is the Tatler some sort of covert who's who for the deep state?

[peterms]

20 minutes ago, bickster said:

Is the Tatler some sort of covert who's who for the deep state?

Possibly overt would be a more accurate term.  At least for the parts of the deep state in the upper parts of the social spectrum.  I don't imagine it concerns itself too much with the worker bees.

[blandy]

49 minutes ago, peterms said:

Was in two minds about commenting, since you don't care, but for anyone who does, the Tatler describes his connections to all of the above.

I’m pretty confident that neither you nor I really credit the Tatler with any kind of insight whatsoever. “ Sots lineage.. father...Prince of Wales...Oxford...” 

[blandy]

4 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

there was a time when being close to the royals and the armed forces would have counted for a lot in a Tory leadership contest; very clearly, we are not in those times any more. 

Agreed.

lets move on, eh? as a nation. As people, as parties.  If only...

[OutByEaster?]

Both of the major parties suffering tonight as expected. Labour will lose a lot of seats and the Conservative party will be decimated, quite probably falling below the Green party in the most shocking result in their history - a leaderless shambles that has lost the trust of their heartland and their traditional voters, a husk of a party without ideas, unity or a way out of their current malaise.

Or, as they say on the BBC - a disastrous night for Labour.

[HanoiVillan]

Just to say, the source I've read on this Rory Stewart stuff is this New Yorker piece: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/15/paths-of-glory-ian-parker

On the Prince of Wales:

'In 1992, not long after Stewart had started reading history at Balliol College, Oxford, he was approached by Prince Charles. The two had met when the Prince visited Eton a year or two earlier. The Prince was looking for a summer tutor for his sons, William and Harry, then ten and eight. (Charles and Princess Diana had recently separated, and the scandal was at its peak.) Stewart was invited for a weekend at Highgrove, the Prince’s house in Gloucestershire. When we spoke, Stewart was a little reluctant to talk about the Prince, but confirmed a story I had heard about his first night at Highgrove. He somehow locked himself in a bathroom, then realized it was also a safe room—reinforced and wired in case of attack. There was midnight conversation between him and the Prince, who stood on the other side of the thick door in his dressing gown. “Don’t be so ridiculous—you turn the key in the lock,” the Prince said. Stewart snapped the key in two, and a royal security detail broke through the door with axes. On a later visit, the Prince teased Stewart for wearing a tweed jacket that looked brand new.

Stewart tutored the young princes for two weeks in the summer of 1993, in Scotland: an hour a day, teaching English to both, and math to Harry. “I spent a lot of time with the Prince of Wales,” Stewart said. “That’s really where my friendship with him began.” One wonders if Stewart was summoned, at a difficult time, as much for the Prince’s sake as for his children’s. (“He’s remarkable at handling the Prince of Wales,” a well-placed observer recently said. “The Prince of Wales suspends all of his critical faculties when it comes to Rory.”) Jonathan Dimbleby, the British television journalist, was then making a documentary about the Prince. The film shows a glimpse of Stewart, playing soccer with Prince Harry and others, on a sloping lawn by a loch. Stewart—not fully adult, with a long neck and a big head—can be seen forcefully tackling a boy half his size.'

He subsequently ran an arts programme for the PoW in Afghanistan for three years, called the Turquoise Mountain Foundation. 

On the intelligence services:

'During the Second World War, Brian Stewart fought in the Black Watch, the Scottish infantry regiment. After the war, he worked in the Civil Service in colonial Malaya; he later wrote a book titled “Smashing Terrorism in the Malayan Emergency.” In the late fifties, he had various diplomatic postings in Asia, including Burma and China; in the late sixties, he was the British consul-general in Hanoi. Rory was born in 1973, in Hong Kong, not long after his father had finished a four-year stint, in London, as secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which liaises between ministers and intelligence agencies. That title, in particular, suggests something that is not in the public record, but that his son acknowledged: his father was involved in British overseas intelligence for twenty years, and reached a high rank. Brian Stewart, confirming this, noted that in the seventies he was in the running to become the director of the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6.

[. . .]

Last fall, Craig Murray, a former British diplomat who became an antiwar activist, made a striking charge in a blog post: he claimed that Stewart had been an officer of MI6, and was still active in MI6, when, starting in 2005, he worked in Afghanistan, running the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, the charity that Prince Charles helped found. Stewart told me, “There’s no way I can prove it, but the reality is I was really busy in Kabul, and anyone working with me would realize that I wouldn’t have had the time to do anything. And what would I have been doing anyway? Why is running an arts school the best cover?” (And it’s hard to believe that British intelligence would put Prince Charles in the position of being a spy’s sponsor.) Stewart also denied that there was any espionage element in his walk, a few years earlier.

This seemed credible. But was he in MI6, at the start of his career, in Indonesia and Montenegro? Someone in London who is in a position to know told me that Stewart certainly was. His mother, when asked, smiled, and said, “I wouldn’t begin to know.” Stewart muttered that he was not, but he didn’t contest the idea with the vigor of his Afghan denial. As a storyteller and a newly minted politician, he must find it frustrating if he is under a legal and moral obligation to mislead. “It’s an unfair question,” he said crossly, although he later suggested phrases that I might use—such as his career “giving the appearance of” such a path. He added that people should have “the very, very clear understanding that I stopped working in embassies and for the government proper in 2000.” From then on, “I was no longer part of the system.”'

Anyway, happy to leave it there, just wanted to provide the source. 

Edited May 26, 2019 by HanoiVillan

[peterms]

24 minutes ago, blandy said:

I’m pretty confident that neither you nor I really credit the Tatler with any kind of insight whatsoever. “ Sots lineage.. father...Prince of Wales...Oxford...” 

I can't claim much knowledge of the Tatler, but I thought their thing was detailed knowledge of the upper classes and their networks.  Political insight, not so much.

[HanoiVillan]

 

[peterms]

7 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

 

Good thread.  People are really letting their admiration and respect for Dom shine through.