wanton dwarf
Member
Note the word "Assumption" because it was well within your abilities to find out the truth before you posted.
The "Presumption" is that you know the truth but want to avoid the context of your question is suspect.
Boris Is Toast
- Thread starter ski
- Start date
Note the word "Assumption" because it was well within your abilities to find out the truth before you posted.
The "Presumption" is that you know the truth but want to avoid the context of your question is suspect.
Danllan
Member
- Location
- Sir Gar / Carms
The TFF threads are the font of all wisdom in re renewables... thanks for the tip.
I'm pretty happy with presumption, you give us a lot to work from.
wanton dwarf
Member
The TFF threads are the font of all wisdom in re renewables... thanks for the tip.
Of course you're statement isn't true again.
However what TFF DOES do is give practical experience from like minded people - those that are honest and share their thoughts.
A source of information, problems and experiences we can all learn from.
IF you want to learn that is and do not assume.
- Location
- Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
- Location
- S E Glos
Van Tam resigns, and the High Court says Johnson & Hancock's dodgy PPE contracts were unlawful.
Did I miss something ?
Greythundercloudys
Member
What a surprise, number 19 has a covid out break, not see boris again for a week now. What a stroke of luck.
Highly convenient, but also shows how rules can be bent to suit. PM not making public appearance due to close member of family having covid, yet the official rules now say that if you are fully vaccinated you do not need to isolate, but should take daily lateral flow tests. Now we know the PM is vaccinated as we saw the photos.
Obviously couldn't find a walk in fridge to hide from the press this time so needed another excuse
- Location
- Westish Suffolk
Any chance that the reduction today in isolation requirements is an olive branch to the plebs?
- Location
- Lincolnshire.
Er I think you will find the law doesn’t apply to the current government. Don’t believe me? Just ask Commissioner Cressida Dick, she’ll put you straight.
- Location
- Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
- Location
- Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Interview when he was still Mayor
- Location
- S E Glos
More parties around the D of E's funeral - I can just see the memes.....
- Location
- Montgomeryshire
- Location
- Northumberland
Seemed a genuine bloke
I do hope there are not pictures about to emerge of Van Tam in the garden at No 10 swigging a can of lager
Has the wee one let you out yet ? ha ha HA
Hindsight
Member
- Location
- Lincolnshire
Tory right will decide when Johnson’s time is up
The prime minister was chosen to get Britain out of the EU but Brexiteers want someone ideologically sounder to continue the project
Matthew ParrisFriday January 14 2022, 5.00pm, The Times
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Sue Gray this, Sue Gray that. “Sue Gray: a profile”. “Sue Gray is expected to …”, Sue Gray will/Sue Gray won’t, Sue Gray might…
What the blazes is going on with our representative democracy? Since the last general election, the decision about who leads our nation is primarily in the hands of the parliamentary Conservative Party: a constitutional fact of which I’m sure Sue Gray heartily wishes we could all be reminded. She’s a civil servant. She cannot sack the prime minister. It’s questionable whether she can even recommend he should be sacked. If she stops short (as she probably will) of declaring him unfit for office, he can do his rumpled “sorry” look, mumble that his knuckles have been well and truly rapped, that “lessons have been learnt”, and suggest we all move on.
How, anyway, did this idea arise: that it falls to a civil servant to dismiss, if she wishes, a serving prime minister? The baffling public and media fixation on what is essentially an internal Whitehall investigation can be traced to three causes.
I’ve suggested the first. Not only does it postpone everything and supply an excuse for making no comment but also it places centre-stage a report that’s unlikely, in the end, to cook Boris Johnson’s goose. The idea of Gray donning the equivalent of a hanging judge’s black cap and condemning a PM’s political career to death sits uncomfortably with the theory of democratic government. She’ll be aware of that, even though it’s just possible that Downing Street has reckoned without her fiercely prosecuting intellect.
Second, the fixation on her investigation arises from a moral vacuum on Johnson’s part. He could conduct an investigation into himself; it need take no more than a few minutes; but, a stranger to any notion of probity, he won’t do this.
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Third, there’s another vacuum, this one created by Johnson’s parliamentary colleagues. They stare at their shoes and murmur that Britain must await Gray’s verdict. Why? They chose, and they can dispose. As I say, they can remove him tomorrow. In recent memory, four past Tory prime ministers have faced what was essentially a confidence vote by Commons colleagues. By what yardstick of incompetence does this latest PM escape challenge? As new reports of “workplace” knees-ups emerge, for 360 elected Conservative MPs to abdicate responsibility in favour of a single civil servant is looking more and more cowardly.
So he may survive: may live, at least, to fight another day. Gray’s verdict could well leave him enough wriggle-room to cling on. For a bit. Don’t for a moment, though, imagine that this would be the end of the matter. He has been shot. He is winged. He will never fly again but will stagger from one shenanigan to the next.
My guess is that the real arbiters of Johnson’s fate are the ideological right wing among his Commons colleagues. They’re close to concluding — but have not quite yet concluded — that his usefulness to them has passed. Johnson was chosen to get Brexit done. But parliamentary crusaders for leaving the European Union have never really accepted him as one of their own. They know his identification with their cause was opportunistic, a route to Downing Street. He has since delivered Brexit to them but is it (they ask) the right Brexit?
The Brexiteers and former members of the ERG (the so-called European Research Group) are not quite the same as the Tory right, but there’s huge overlap. Many are small-state Conservatives: believers in bonfires of regulation, a curbing of the welfare state, reduced employment protection, lower taxes and greater freedoms to sink or swim. Many are profoundly sceptical about carbon net-zero, green taxes and what they see as the climate-change brigade. Foremost among the reasons they wanted Brexit was that this would give Britain the freedom to depart the European regulatory orbit.
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David (Lord) Frost’s resignation as Johnson’s Brexit minister is a highly significant telltale of the way the wind is blowing among this group. Liz Truss has been wooing them assiduously and it’s rumoured that should she become prime minister Frost wants to serve as her foreign secretary. I suspect Jacob Rees-Mogg would develop an ambition to be her chancellor.
You can surely picture the sort of Tory government these politicians dream of; I think it would be lunacy but, for all that this columnist has been railing against Johnson for nearly a decade, I would not associate him (or his wife) with this particular lunacy. Even if he really believed in “Britain unchained”, he lacks the focus or determination to deliver it to his party’s right wing. They need a juggernaut, not a shopping trolley.
Brexit to this group is a process not an outcome. Looking at potential replacements for this prime minister they are weighing up the options but have not, I believe, reached any consensus yet. Johnson has carried Britain over the threshold for them. That was stage one. Stage two will be to start taking advantage of what they see as the political and economic opportunities this opens up. They don’t trust Johnson with stage two, and they’re right. They haven’t quite made up their minds about Rishi Sunak: his fiscal conservatism may appeal but is he daredevil enough to embrace the dream of an Atlantic Singapore and lose the support of more centrist colleagues?
They would not see Jeremy Hunt as a natural ally. Truss, however (witness her preposterous recent speeches) knows she’s under active inspection as a possible spear-carrier. Could she be The One? Watch her for some dangerous posturing over the Northern Ireland protocol (now in her remit) and the possible invocation of Article 16, a sort of mini-declaration of war with Brussels.
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The Tory right probably lack the numbers to vote Truss into first place in any MPs’ leadership ballot that would follow Johnson’s losing a confidence vote; but if they can form a solid block around a single candidate they might be able to lift her into second place. That shortlist of two would be put to the whole national membership. Estimates of opinion among the membership are hard to make, and she doesn’t look like the front-runner yet, but she’d prove an eye-catching candidate. An ambush threatens.
The moderates/centre/centre-left (choose your appellation) are probably still a majority among the party’s MPs, but my impression is that they don’t talk to each other much, or identify properly as a group — witness my loose and ungainly term for them. It is in the party’s interests, but more importantly the nation’s, that they get their act together.
Johnson will stumble again. Dreadful local government election results loom in the spring. The right may be swift to move. The centre needs to hold.
Boris Johnson
Conservative Party
UK politics
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