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

[Mic09]

5 minutes ago, hippo said:

The spin doctors have some good reference material though - the man who stands up to the EU (heard that before?) the man who stands up to the house of lords, - I d say he can have balls

I think the jury is out. I give it a couple more weeks and he begs for an extension.

[hippo]

2 minutes ago, Mic09 said:

I think the jury is out. I give it a couple more weeks and he begs for an extension.

Boris knows his target audience - and has struck a chord with them - be surprised if he doesn't romp the GE

[ml1dch]

9 minutes ago, hippo said:

The spin doctors have some good reference material though - the man who stands up to the EU (heard that before?) the man who stands up to the house of lords, - I d say he can have balls

Didn't he give in to the House of Lords the second he realised he couldn't stop what they wanted to do?

[hippo]

Just now, ml1dch said:

Didn't he give in to the House of Lords the second he realised he couldn't stop what they wanted to do?

Well -Ive not read that anywhere (Speaks volumes)

[HanoiVillan]

Behold, ladies and gentlemen, as the Right Honourable Member for Riyadh Central admits working with a foreign government to undermine the will of Parliament:

 

[NurembergVillan]

19 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Behold, ladies and gentlemen, as the Right Honourable Member for Riyadh Central admits working with a foreign government to undermine the will of Parliament:

 

Again. He's pulled this stunt before.

Absolute rocket polisher.

[HanoiVillan]

17 minutes ago, NurembergVillan said:

Again. He's pulled this stunt before.

Absolute rocket polisher.

In a party that's absolutely full of them, he might actually be The Worst.

Depressingly he suffered no actual consequences last time for running his own, parallel foreign policy, so I don't suppose there will be any consequences this time either. 

[bickster]

Does Elmer Fudd resign every month?

[bickster]

53 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

In a party that's absolutely full of them, he might actually be The Worst.

Depressingly he suffered no actual consequences last time for running his own, parallel foreign policy, so I don't suppose there will be any consequences this time either. 

The hands down thickest MP in any parliament ever

[tonyh29]

51 minutes ago, bickster said:

The hands down thickest MP in any parliament ever

 

[bickster]

Oh she's not the sharpest tool in the box that's for sure @tonyh29 but Kawczynski is in a league of his own

[Dr_Pangloss]

11 hours ago, hippo said:

Boris knows his target audience - and has struck a chord with them - be surprised if he doesn't romp the GE

He will hoover up the vast majority of UKIPers and Brexit party supporters for sure. But I'd imagine he will lose a share of those who are still pro-remain or who simply despise Johnson and his right wing front bench. I'd imagine a good amount of 'conservatives with a small c' (this a little bit right of centre but not as far from the centre as the current government) will be turned off by him and his cronies. 

I'm also expecting a more energised electorate, with younger people voting at higher rates and the data shows these segments are far less likely to vote Tory, so all of Johnson's gains will IMO be offset, but not sure by how much. I think the Lib Dems will end up doing very well. It's just a pity that Labour have been in such a shambolic state.

Edited September 8, 2019 by Dr_Pangloss

[snowychap]

 

Ha ha.

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

13 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

admits working with a foreign government to undermine the will of Parliament:

How times change,  30 years ago this would have been secret meetings, envelopes,  nods and some winks etc.

These day's,  no one gives a ****,  they are living day to day at the moment.  Governments like the UK are supposed to be diplomatically quiet and by definition plan for the long term in all aspects of government but just put it on Twitter instead.  Shouldn't they be working instead of posting anyway or is there nothing to do.

words removed playing at adult jobs.

[bickster]

1 hour ago, snowychap said:

 

Ha ha.

It would be amusing

[NurembergVillan]

 

[wazzap24]

17 hours ago, hippo said:

Boris knows his target audience - and has struck a chord with them - be surprised if he doesn't romp the GE

Absolutely no chance on McGrath’s green earth does he ‘romp’ it. 

Even with Cummings ‘masterminding’ the campaign, there just aren’t enough nutters for this to happen.

Would theTories win? Probably, but it would be either a tiny majority or another hung parliament. 

At this point a GE is just going to cause more chaos/uncertainty imo, because there isn’t a credible party for normal people to vote for. 

 

[mjmooney]

Here's a scenario (not a prediction, btw): 

Boris gets away with ignoring Parliament. We crash out with no deal. The economy tanks. The election produces another hung Parliament. The broad left finally gets its act together enough to form a coalition government, with Corbyn as PM. They immediately open negotiations with the EU to arrange a trading deal. Corbyn is assassinated. A state of emergency is declared. 

Take it from there. 

[mjmooney]

London Review of Books

Quote

Diary
James Wood

Even at a place like Eton, it didn’t seem likely that anyone in my year would actually become prime minister. At school, everyone is ‘ambitious’, everyone loudly stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things? I remembered him as quite handsome, with the Etonian’s uncanny ability to soften entitlement with charm. Mostly, he was defined by negatives: he wasn’t an intellectual or scholar, a rebel, a musician, a school journalist or writer, even a sportsman. He wasn’t obviously political. He belonged to a social crowd that didn’t intersect much with mine: Home Counties, landed gentry, a stockbroker father somehow involved – the customary expensive vagueness – ‘in finance’, a grand house I could only imagine and probably in those days envied. These boys all knew one another from somewhere else, fraternised masonically in the holidays, took one another’s sisters to parties in Sussex and to hunt balls in Gloucestershire, and dressed like their fathers, in clothes that looked inherited even when purchased just the other day at New & Lingwood.

My own background was different. In my last year at the school, I wrote an anti-Thatcher screed in the school magazine, and a journalist from the Sun ambushed me in the street. Where did I live, what did my parents do? I saw his frustration when I told him that my father was a lecturer at Durham University, my mother a schoolteacher. ‘That doesn’t sound very establishment … You don’t have a relative in Maggie Thatcher’s cabinet?’ It was 1984. He was after political disgrace, looking for a turncoat Hurd, a Pym, a Raison, a Jopling. What was a Wood? We had no family connections, to Eton or anywhere else much. The only reason I was at the school was my mother’s madly aspirant zeal, her Scottish petit-bourgeois tirelessness. My older brother and I were both effectively scholarship boys. He was the real thing, a King’s Scholar (three years ahead of Boris Johnson); in my case, when my parents demonstrated financial need, the school eventually helped out with a bursary.

I was lucky – my religious parents would have insisted on ‘blessed’ – and savoured that luck, grateful to be at such a school, though often keen to set fire to it. Of course I wasn’t lucky – in the sense of being fortunate – like the born Etonian, and in time, once I had worked out the codes of this strange world, that difference would become not excruciating but a source of strength. The born Etonian was at one with his heritage. The quickest way to ascertain a boy’s natural Etonianness was to find out if his father had gone there. Plenty had. Then I would start my plebeian social arithmetic. If his father went there, then thirty or so years earlier his grandparents had had the money to send his father there. So his grandfather was probably an old Etonian. Which meant that sixty or so years earlier his great-grandparents had had enough money … It was dizzying, climbing backwards along the branches of these golden family trees.

It was unimaginable to me, the quickly privileged descendant of schoolteachers and shopkeepers, that these Etonians had been privileged for so long that the precise origins of their fortune could no longer be located. What amazing security: to have always been well-off probably suggested that one would always be well-off. The future would look comfortingly like the past. Amusingly, David Cameron is often described as being ‘upper-middle-class’, but the originary arithmetic doesn’t lie. His father went to Eton, as did his grandfather. And on his mother’s perhaps fancier side, his grandfather went to Eton, and his great-grandfather also went there, and his great-great-grandfather, and actually his great-great-great-grandfather did, too … I think we can bump him out of the middle classes.

Getting the hang of this place entailed subterfuge, vigilance, mimicry – a stealthy adventure I often enjoyed. The accent obviously had to be improved, and any lingering Durham commonness rubbed out. My father would have to be promoted from senior lecturer to professor, and my mother’s job mystified out of existence. My parents’ shameful first names, Dennis and Sheila (furry dice hanging in a Ford Cortina), could obviously never be uttered. Thank God my brother was called Angus – a bit Scottish maybe, but weren’t there plenty of posh Scots? That my parents were teetotal Christians was also unutterable. I would need better clothes; how could I get cheap shoes that looked expensive?

This labour of inclusion, like some journey of immigration, was a matter of working out hints and barely visible laws, fitting in quietly without drawing attention to oneself. The task mainly involved studying networks. How did everything connect? Surely it did in some way? Certain areas of London, certain prep schools, London shops (Harrods, for some reason, was considered a bit ‘common’, while Harvey Nichols was not), certain sports, clothes, even brands of aftershave: they all signified. There were ‘distinguished’ surnames everywhere, and one had to catch up with a celebrity that everyone else had already divined: Fiennes, Bingham (Lord Lucan’s son), Vestey, Wellesley, Sainsbury. There were copious numbers of double-barrelled names: Fearnley-Whittingstall, Austen-Leigh, Scrase-Dickins, the delicious Money-Coutts. (Money Counts?) There was even a triple-barrelled name: Edward Packe-Drury-Lowe – inherently absurd because of the prospect of infinite fission: if triple, why not quadruple or quintuple? One of the boys in my house had the surname Christie. His father owned Glyndebourne. ‘Christie’ meant something to me, so I assumed he was related to the auctioneers. Glyndebourne meant nothing to me, but my parents explained what it was. So: these were ‘the Christies who owned Glyndebourne’, and perhaps only mildly related to the more famous Christies who auctioned things? Families had major and minor branches – and even the minor branches were major.

Of course there were subgroups and cliques. The largest faultline, really, was intelligence. The boys whose fathers and grandfathers had been to Eton, who inherited the school like an old watch or a family farm, didn’t have to use their brains, even if they had them. Those who had arrived more precipitously at this grand place – via academic or music scholarships, pushy middle-class parents, raw social experiments of one kind or another – had to live on their wits. King’s Scholars, who had won their scholarships by competitive exam, were set apart, herded into their own house and sartorially marked off with short black gowns, giving their closed world the aspect of a curious social laboratory. I always felt a bit sorry for my brother when I caught sight of him running towards lessons, clutching his ‘K.S.’ gown to his sides like a bird holding in its wings, a clever animal in an alien habitat.

By and large, these scholars were middle-class or upper-middle-class, the children of academics, doctors, self-made businessmen. If they were posh, they were interestingly so, like the brilliant mathematician and future Fields medallist Timothy Gowers, whose father was a composer and whose great-great-grandfather had been a famous neurologist. Or they came from bohemian and eccentric families, like Boris Johnson, perhaps with a hint of social arrivisme. Johnson, by the way, looked pretty much the same at 15 as he does at 55, and was a familiar sight as he charged and flapped his way around the college lanes. The bigfoot stoop (he was known as ‘the Yeti’), the bumbling confidence, the skimmed-milk pallor, the berserk hair, the alarming air of imminent self-harm, which gave the impression that he had been freshly released from some protective institution: all was already in place.

Over the years, I’ve resisted writing about Eton, for the usual reasons but mainly because I dislike a retrospect that might sound like some nasty combination of complaint, boast and self-pity. All three modes are unwarranted, as far as I’m concerned. I have largely happy memories of the school and eventually flourished there much as my socially avaricious mum hoped I would. But complaint doesn’t have to be merely self-interested. In 1984 I couldn’t have predicted that politics in the early 21st century would be so contaminated by my schoolfellows. Cameron became prime minister in 2010, and British life began to resemble a set-up from a Johnny English comedy – soon the prime minister, the mayor of London and the archbishop of Canterbury were all old Etonians. (Simon can’t possibly be the double agent, Rowan Atkinson says in Johnny English Reborn, because ‘Simon went to Eton’ – a nice joke since Dominic West, the actor playing Simon, also went to Eton.) Suddenly we were back in the 1960s, when the Conservative Party, looking around for a successor to the old Etonian Harold Macmillan, chose between two other Etonians, Lord Hailsham and Alec Douglas-Home. How had this happened?

Much worse was to come. Cameron tossed the rotten bouquet of a referendum to the nation. Seemingly, it was done lightly – politics as one of his careless posh parties. On the eve of Brexit, here was Boris Johnson, flamboyantly convictionless, writing pro and anti pieces for the Daily Telegraph, essentially back at school again – a place he never left – as if winging an end of year exam or Classics prize. And lo, with his arched clown eyebrows, and clad in that ever so slightly vulgar double-breasted suit – surely an Ealing comedy idea of an English gent? – came Jacob Rees-Mogg. Him! Like Johnson, Rees-Mogg appeared unchanged from schooldays. He was four years below me, notorious as soon as he arrived, because he never seemed young. He wandered around the school gazing blandly at people through his windscreen spectacles and clutching a gigantic briefcase, in which, it was rumoured, resided his ‘stocks and shares’. He was one of those boys – already playing the markets at 13.

But I’m the one who feels 13 again. After years of living in the United States, I’ve become unused to seeing lots of Etonians gathered in one place. And there are so many of them, all involved in varying degrees of Brexit: Cameron, Johnson and Rees-Mogg; Zac Goldsmith and Jesse Norman; Alexander Nix, the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica; Nigel Oakes, the founder of its sinister parent company, SCL; Kwasi Kwarteng, the son of Ghanaian immigrants and a King’s Scholar at Eton, who went on to Cambridge and Harvard and eventually became under-secretary of state at the Department for Exiting the European Union. Even the ranks of decency are stocked by old Etonians: Oliver Letwin, Rory Stewart and Hugo Dixon, editor in chief of the useful anti-Brexit website InFacts. (I remember Dixon, a King’s Scholar: skinny, super-bright, otherworldly.)

I feel 13 again because the old questions reassert themselves. How did these people get here? What connects them? I thought I had learned something about networks, and now I realise I know rather little. What do these people have in common? Is it enough to reply, ‘Well, Eton of course,’ and be done with it? In Heroic Failure, Fintan O’Toole diagnoses in the Brexit worldview a combination of Thatcherite lust for economic deregulation and postwar nostalgia for lost imperial might. To summarise this worldview: we were ‘great’ when we had an empire. We won the Second World War and yet the loser, Germany, got all the benefits: moral authority, economic power and eventually effective sovereignty. Only by tearing ourselves away from the overweening and expansionist EU and ‘going it alone’ can we rediscover the fighting spirit that won the war in the first place. Brexit will be our second Reformation. Make Britain Great Again. All set to the Dad’s Army tune: ‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Juncker?’

Binding together these two impulses, conservative economic purism and imperial nostalgia, is the conviction that for decades – the Thatcher period aside – Britain has merely been managing its decline, and is increasingly content to do so. The phrase appears in Jacob Rees-Mogg’s galumphing book The Victorians: Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain, which reads like a collection of recycled Eton essays originally done in detention as punishment. Unlike contemporary politicians, none of these titans, Rees-Mogg tells us, was ‘managing the decline of Britain’. They were imbued with a ferocious work ethic, and ‘a practical patriotism’. They had the good sense to believe that it was ‘reasonable to export’ British civilisation ‘to other countries to remove such hardships as exist there’. Thatcher, he thinks, was a titanic Victorian of that sort. Since her departure, ‘the forces of stagnation, trepidation and hesitation have returned.’

Back in 2012, a bunch of proto-Brexiteers – Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss – slapdashed a manifesto together called Britannia Unchained, the gist of which is that the British have become squalid, lazy gits, getting fat and studying useless subjects like psychology and desiring only to be footballers or pop stars. If we emulated serious, dynamic countries like India, China and Israel, where the best young people go into technology or the sciences, we might kickstart the dodgy old British Leyland engine that is our current economic motor. These MPs share Rees-Mogg’s interpretation of recent history. Under Thatcher there was dynamism, but since the financial crisis ‘a spirit of decline has returned.’ In 1950 we were richer than France or West Germany. No more. And note the post-imperial retrospect: ‘Britain once ruled the empire on which the sun never set. Now it can barely keep England and Scotland together.’

The ‘decline’ theme is continued in Boris Johnson’s jaunty, florid book about Churchill, who, as Johnson sees it, became increasingly irrelevant during the Second World War, after America entered it, and especially afterwards – when Britain started decommissioning its imperial holdings. This chapter is entitled ‘The Giant of the Shrunken Island’. Churchill here performs as an early, greater version of Thatcher, a politician who by raw willpower could buoy Britain’s waning self-confidence: ‘By sheer force of personality he asserted his right to equality in the conference chamber … As long as Churchill had to be given honour and respect, the same could be said for Britain and the empire; or so he imagined.’

What did Cameron, Johnson and Rees-Mogg learn at Eton? Many things, as befits a complex institution that has produced Keynes and Huxley and Orwell. But two powerful memories seem pertinent at present. Near the end of our time at school, we were addressed by the headmaster (this is my memory, but it may have been some other senior member of staff). It was, I guess, an informal version of a commencement address, a send-off with valedictory ethics. The headmaster, a thoughtful Scot, instructed us in how we should comport ourselves in the world. The Etonian, he said, is one who can go into any room, mingle with any social group, be at ease and put others at their ease. (Not a bad model for the aspirant politicians in the room.) The Etonian is marked by his air of ‘effortless superiority’. The phrase was already commonplace at the school, appealed to and sometimes mocked. The headmaster, as I recall, invoked it in a cautionary spirit. He meant: you have been told that this is your strength, but don’t let it become your weakness. ‘Effortless superiority’ was the ethos, the ideal you aspired to – charmed confidence balanced by strategic noblesse oblige. If you aren’t forever performing your superiority but are elegantly obscuring it, you don’t alienate those many people who are suspicious of your privilege. We were told to be wary of misusing our superiority, but we were not told we didn’t have it. The instruction, even when well intentioned, depended on this modification – and so its perpetuation was guaranteed.

These are the people whom (for example) the northern working classes are supporting. I despair. 

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

51 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

A state of emergency is declared & Corbyn is assassinated.

FTFY.  Small timeline problem.