Is Johnson now toast? Given the letters of no-confidence, loud booing at St Paul’s and even constant audience criticism during Any Questions on safe Tory territory – Isle of Wight, will Conservatives put him to a leadership poll this evening. I think and hope the country is tired of him now.
Blimey O’Reilly, is some justice on’t horizon? Now sack overpromoted narcissist!
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He was booed at a jubilee event, which is known for attracting Maoists so that doesn’t count.
Maoists? Is there such a thing as a royalist Maoist?
No there isn’t….it’s almost as if I was joking.
People sometimes forget that I have absolutely no sense of humour. If in doubt, I take things literally.
Like a kleptomaniac
No, you are confusing the use of the verb ‘take’ which I am using as a synonym for ‘understand’ with the more conventional use expressing appropriation. This would be an easy mistake to make, were it not for the absence of a comma between the words ‘things’ and ‘literally’.
I would say I am ‘like Mr Logic’, as I think I have adequately demonstrated.
Aah … my error.
Dang nabbit. I’ll never get the hang of this joke-telling malarkey…
That dull thudding sound you hear is Moose’s head on his desk.
That’s not my head.
I haven’t posted for ages, but that was so ****ing funny it made my day.
I hope it was a satisfying thud for all concerned.
Dwight, you’re wight!, er, right!
On a FB fan page for Chris Morris, i had to point out to someone who was clearly not quite there, that Chris Morris often uses irony, as do his fans. There should be a test before you can use social media and the Internet. Record collections will be inspected, too.
In my experience, Chris Morris fans are not known for their sense of humour.
Sounds like I’d be a fan.
Supporters said to wait until the Sue Gray report, and he clung on when it was highly critical. They said to wait until the results of the council elections, and he clung on despite the results being at the higher of end of the predictions for Conservative losses. I almost hope that he clings on after squeaking through a confidence vote because I want his stench to cling to his party until the next General Election.
I want him to he humiliated at the ballot box. If he goes this way he will go to his grave believing that his adoring public were deprived of him by a few bitter malcontents.
I want him to be Portilloed. And, while we’re at it, Portalooed.
Exactly this. People will be going on about him for years if he doesn’t get voted out, saying to bring him back.
He needs to lose at the ballot box, and then he’s gone forever
Bit like the remain vote in Brexit…
I am conflicted.
Much as I want him gone, I can’t see anyone in the likely replacements I’d want instead. At the moment he’s doing a fine job of reminding the voting public what a shower of shit he and his cronies are.
I’m not in the PCP, and I’d like to my opportunity to put two fingers up to him and his team at the next GE. Will there be an “anybody but him” box on the form?
Twitter says something big is about to be revealed and it’s under the hashtag #deathgate.
My guess is that there was some fiddling with numbers of official COVID deaths reported but I honestly don’t think that would be big enough a scandal, given who we are talking about.
Something about Johnson not being as close to death’s door as was portrayed at the time, because it got him some much needed sympathy and time out when he’d completely fucked up the early response to COVID?
It seems that Boris lied about how sick he was when he had COVID. It’s just another lie. It won’t be the final nail in his coffin or anything like that.
As long as he’s humbled and lessons are learned and the underlying structure of the department is changed, that’s fine. We are ready to move on to the next lie.
I’m humbled, lessons are learned, staff are changed. Now fuck off and let me carry on exactly as I was doing before, plebs.
Someone, print off some cards so I don’t even have to so this again. Or better still, just reuse this video clip after the next cock up, due next week.
Exactly
I’ve had to think long and hard about this, opinions are easy to come by but reason is more difficult. Therefore I have come to this conclusion, he should curl up into the lump of festering shyte that he is and die, same goes for his cronies.
I agree. I think we’re beyond looking at whether the political timing of his downfall is optimal. He really needs to go.
The big question is can the disaffected Tories rustle up the necessary 180 votes needed to call on him to resign? If they don’t, it’s supposed to take a year before they can try again.
Even supposing they do get the 180 votes, will Boris break the habit of a lifetime by doing the decent thing and resigning?
If he’s still there come the next election, the “most successful political party in the history of politics” won’t just find themselves as the first government to lose an election from such a strong majority. They’ll likely be on the end of a Lib/Lab alliance who’ll shove through PR and remove any chance of Bojo et al ever winning an outright majority again.
I wish I could feel more confident about Starmer doing the right thing in this regard. More than half the country are screaming for it, but…Labour…
I think if they get 50% of votes plus 1 he has to go, not his choice. There may be a number less than that that could trigger a resignation
He will not resign ever, though.
@Moose-the-Mooche
Agreed
PMs are supposed to head for the glass of brandy and the revolver in the study when they’ve been caught lying to the House.
Didn’t see him going then and given his vow to fight on, can’t see him simply rolling over and doing the decent thing now.
He’ll still have the brandy though. It all feeds into his Churchill fantasy.
Both Thatcher and May ‘won’ their VOC, May with 63%, but they were mortally wounded and realised – or were told – that their time was up. The difference is that for all their faults, they had honour and integrity. Johnson has neither.
Thatcher had men in grey suits to tell her the game was up. BoJo has a dim and sycophantic cabinet and a load of coke-snorting spads. There are no grownups in that room.
This. Sadly.
The excellent Frank Cottrell-Boyce on the Twits describes the cronies as ‘ That weird coterie of idle ideologues and bewildered inadequates.’ Sounds about right.
With the AW now seemingly every bit as vitriolically anti-Johnson as it was anti-Corbyn in 2019 I wonder is he simply not what was expected, or did everyone back then vote in the hope that a Swinson or Lucas government might be elected? I appreciate that many here believe Corbyn would have been far worse, and that’s fair enough, but if people weren’t prepared to vote against Johnson in a realistic way I’d say you have confirmation of the old adage that every country gets the government it deserves.
Vote Judith Chalmers!
Vote Dame Joanna Lumley!
For all that the board in general may have been anti Corbyn I think it was more anti Conservative/Johnson and probably voted accordingly
At the last election something around 50% of the electorate voted for something other than Tory. Despite the so called landslide, the Tory vote was 42%. So I don’t think the UK got what it deserved, it got what the first past the post system makes possible.
And it’s a fair bet many who voted Conservative didn’t neccessarily want him as PM (see also Corbyn and Labour voters). Andrea Jenkyns tweeted earlier that Johnson should be left to ‘ to get on with the job he was democratically elected to do’. Well, no. The standard procedure is that the party with the largest number of seats, whether by itself or in coalition, makes its leader PM. That’s a long way from the presidential style endorsement of the individual Jenkyns suggests.
And people voted knowing full well what that FPTP system meant.
I’m not sure what that means. Despite never once voting Tory in 41 years I’ve endured 28 years of them in power. I’m only allowed the one vote and for the vast majority of my life I’ve cast it knowing full well I would end up being represented by someone I didn’t vote for and whose policies I didn’t support. What alternative have I missed?
Yes, your vote was wasted.
Safe Seats are the Rotten Boroughs of our times.
If every vote counted, the turnout would be higher. In NZ there is MMP – where there’s a Party vote and a Candidate vote.
There are still safe seats for either side but the Party vote means that seats are allocated based on the popular vote too.
It also allows the PM and others in high office to not necessarily be local constituent MPs. It looks good if you are, though.
“What alternative have I missed?”
@fortuneight,
The alternative to your conscience/ideological vote is surely the purely pragmatic vote? Id est, given Britain’s FPTP system, the “least worst” out of Lab and Con. (Speaking for myself personally, I’d have voted for whichever one offered a second referendum on Brexit.)
@Gary – the only ideology I subscribe to is not voting Tory. Otherwise every vote I’ve cast has been pragmatic, or tactical as it’s often described. At the last election I held my nose and voted Labour despite their shambolic campaign because they were the only party in my constituency likely to get more than 20% of the vote. Most of the time I’ve pondered whether to vote for the person who will come second, or the one who will come third.
And it all the years I’ve done it, its made not one iota of difference, because I’ve not been in any seat with even a sniff of a chance of changing hands. I’ve extended my democratic right to piss in the wind, roughly every 4 years to the point where I wonder why I bother.
I know some people will have only voted for one party their whole life; they bear out your points above. But until Labour / Lib Dem / Green get over themselves and figure out a meaningful election pact, tactical voting still just delivers the people you didn’t vote for.
Thanks for your interesting and considered reply, F’8. I couldn’t agree more with you and others here about the dire need for electoral reform.
In my constituency, the incumbent Tory candidate held his seat by a margin of about 600 votes over the Lib Dem candidate.
The third placed Labour candidate, meanwhile, took 12,500 votes. Some 7,000 shy of the Lib Dems.
It was well known in the area that Labour were insisting on campaigning right up until polling day, and that in doing so they were handing the seat to the Tories. It was repeatedly pointed out to them on the doorstep.
The pragmatic vote indeed.
Exacts. There definitely should have been a pact. But without one and with the undemocratic FPTP system instead, I think anyone who was fervently opposed to Brexit, who saw it as an unmitigated and irreversible disaster, might have done better not voting Libs at least for that election.
If only the humble voter could be made to understand the clear electoral logic of voting for a candidate they don’t like, who they don’t believe can win, whose party is tracking a distant third in their constituency and who is in possession of a less aggressive anti-Brexit policy position than the Lib Dems, so that said candidate can prevent Brexit.
You’re being sarcastic, but I agree: “if only”.
Of course the Libs were never going to win on a national level and govern the country and be in a position to stop Brexit. Jo Swinson couldn’t even convince her own constituency of her leadership qualities.
We could yet again have the old “how influential was the press?” discussion, but what’s the point?
(Rather coincidentally, I see Corbyn’s trending on Twitter at the mo).
The voters were presented with three awful candidates, the sole selling point of each of whom was “vote for me so that these other mugs don’t get in”.
Hence this entire discussion.
Never again, please.
I feel free to discuss anything with whoever, as I hope everyone does here. I’ve never once asked your opinion or remotely encouraged you to join in, yet you always seem unable to resist. If you don’t wish to in the future that’s perfectly fine by me.
I was referring to the election.
Ok, sorry for the misunderstanding.
😘
People were vitriolically anti Corbyn at least in part because they could see he was an enormous act of folly who would inevitably hand long term power to the Tories. In fact, If you want to go back to the threads from the time he won the leadership election you’ll find many many people issuing that warning.
Regrettably, those concerns were ignored, so that a faction of the Labour Party could go chase its dreams, call each other “comrade” and dust off their Che Guevara t-shirts.
It’s a bit rich to insist on putting up the shittest, most implausible candidate in the history of the party because why not, and then when he inevitably crashes and burns – as repeatedly warned – tut that this is really the fault of the foolish electorate. Rich, but extremely on-brand.
The British public should never have been asked to choose between Johnson and Corbyn. If you’re looking for people to learn lessons I would start with those who insisted on that state of affairs. Because they’re dramatically more responsible than those who refused to hold their nose and vote for Corbyn.
My attitude remains. Whatever people thought of Johnson, and knowing how the FPTP system works, they rightly or wrongly, for better or worse, preferred him to the alternative and they got what they chose (or they failed to make a realistic choice). The reasons for that preference are irrelevant, the outcome was pretty predictable. They should all stop moaning and watch something good on telly instead.
PS. I could well be wrong and can’t check right now as I’m supposed to be busy, but didn’t the “shittiest, most implausable candidate in the history of the party” attract more people to join the party than any previous leader and win a much higher share of the vote than under Miliband in the previous election? Don’t quote me on anything.
He did do those things, and still managed to lose elections to the Tories who had been in power for seven and nine years – the second one being Labour’s worst defeat ever, I seem to recall
Them darn Brits sure do love their Brexits.
When your primary evidence of someone not being an electoral liability is an election they lost against a candidate who essentially didn’t turn up, that probably tells you all you need to know.
Not sure what you’re on about, Bing. Who didn’t turn up to what? I wasn’t looking for any evidence of anything. (I’m kinda beginning to wonder if it’s me or Corbyn you’re a little bit obsessed with. Rather hoping it’s me.)
🙄
🧖♀️
It’s easy to forget that Corbyn was actually quite popular for a while…remember him at Glastonbury? He attracted a large following amongst young people who had never engaged with politics before; he was different. Johnson was somewhat similar in that he engaged well with a cohort outside of those usually interested in politics. Corbyn was undone by not being very good at actually leading a party, ignoring talented people who he disagreed with, and exacerbating divisions….sound familiar? Coincidentally (?) both were elected by party members (and I believe Johnson was the first for the Tories under this system), which sounds harmless enough, but party memberships, almost by definition, tend to be dominated by the more zealous politically and will generally pick the more extreme candidate – the Tory membership is also quite small in number. Labour learned the lesson by not allowing a plethora of similar candidates onto the paper, which is what had let Corbyn in.
I never see the main stage acts at Glastonbury, I’m always wandering off to discover something new. Especially when their only song is a cover version.
He should have played the Left Field, surely?
I don’t know if this happened in other local Conservative Associations, but I’m reliably informed that, post-Brexit, my local CA was infiltrated by former Brexit Party members who effectively took it over and were actively trying to oust my local Remainer Tory MP. His Brexit Party opponent in the previous election became Association chairman and then he was expelled by Central Office for dissent. That’s when he decided he was not going to stand in 2019 and was leaving politics.
Today’s news is awful. There is no way there will be 180 mp’s who will vote against him.
Would have been better to wait for the two by-election results with a massive Tory loss then we may have seen the requisite 180 mp’s or more.
Now we have to wait a further year for another opportunity to do what the Tories do best ie. stick the boot in.
I kind of agree with @Gatz that we should now wait until the GE and see the party get slaughtered but we have to live with this shite for much longer
My suspicion is that the vote has been pulled forward ahead of the by elections in the expectation that he’ll get the support he needs now but probably not if the Tories lose these seats (as current polling suggests they will).
Winning a confidence vote now buys him 12 months, in theory, although May also won one and was still gone within 6 months.
Interesting – this suggests Johnson loyalists sent in letters to the 1922 Committee in the same way as they voted for Hunt in the penultimate round of the Tory election leadership campaign. Sounds plausible.
On the assumption that it wasn’t a question of “if” there would be a challenge, just “when”, then a vote before the by elections plays better for Johnson, and no doubt the whips were able to get the requisite number of letters in. It also makes sense given there are no declared leadership challengers as yet; one of the major factors in Johnson’s favour is the lack of willingness of anyone else to take the job on.
Whilst we’re likely to see relatively few MPs coming out to defend him other than those wholly reliant on his patronage – Mogg, Patel, Dorries – being openly unsupportive is tricky when it’s not clear who might be intending to take a tilt at the title. Run of the mill MPs rarely have any real influence or power once the cabinet posts are dolled out, but for a short window they have all the bargaining power, and will have to trade what they think they can get from Johnson’s camp against any risk he poses to them retaining their seat. Those with the biggest majorities have the most to gain in theory.
Playing the “devils overcoat” here can I just say we shouldn’t “throw out the BoBo with the bathwater”? Better the devil you know than spoil the broth is my watchword! When all is said and done it was his so-called “unpopular policies” that not only won us a World Cup but restored the Maniarchy!!! And “pardon my French” or am I not wrong when I say his girlfriend is a bit shaggable? I mean, you would, you know! Partygate? Tartygate more like!!! Howsabout a bit of cash n’ Carrie then, Miss Naughtyknickers!!! PHWOAAAARRRRRRR!!!!!!!
Things went downhill when Dilyn went electric.
Bojo’s g/f?
Assume you mean Nadine Dorries.
Don’t think you’ll be crushed in the rush of people wanting to perform the beast with two backs with Mad Nad, HP…
Poor Nad.
“Channel 4 is a waste of the license fee”
“Nobody was booing”
“There are some good tracks on that Van Morrison album”….
Run the country?
Couldn’t run a bath.
…. without something being inappropriately handled
When it is time for Dorries to be removed from her post, can I be the first to suggest the headline “Go, Nad!”
One of the better letters about Johnson’s unsuitability in this morning’s Times purported to come from “the owner of a small brewery in Berkshire”
Surely that’s @Twang you’re talking about?
I asked him to arrange a pissup, which, ironically enough, he failed to do.
Look, it is late over here. Has he gone yet?
Vote doesn’t open for another hour yet, and stays open for two. Go to bed, and check here in the morning.
Result at about 9pm BST apparently. So 4 hours to get some kip.
Word on the street is that if there’s anything over 120 votes against him he ought to be toast – but it won’t come to that, and even if it did, which it won’t, he’d stay in the toaster, all brown and toasty and enthusiastically buttering himself, while vigorously claiming not to be toast.
Word before the local elections was that the loss of 200-300 seats would be bad nbut survivable, but 500 a total disaster. In the event 490 or so losses were spun as some kind of triumph.
Did somebody say Toast?
Much as the idea of Johnson buttering himself conjures up all sorts of unpleasant images, I also think it’s completely in keeping with his utter shamelessness to remain resiliently in post, even if nearly half his parliamentary party (hate him and) want him gone. The hubris is piling up to such an extent, the mound of shite in the Augean stables is building up behind the thinnest of Dories Trusses, that it will be extraordinarily cathartic when he is finally hosed out of Downing Street. It would be poetic justice if done with one of the water cannons he bought when London Mayor, and the resulting shute shot him in an arc over the Thames where the Garden Bridge was meant to be, bouncing outside the waterfront of the Mayorality to end up splat on Boris Island – the only flight to ever take off or land there.
He’s not going anywhere- he’ll scrape home for sure
I’m glad as if he goes then we get probably Liz Truss
Johnson is a compulsive liar but I actually think he has some intelligence- Truss would likely get us all killed in a nuclear war
Best bet is keep Boris and then with a bit of luck we get to see him humiliated at the next election
Can’t be bothered with Fat Boy J. and the Abba fan club.
I feel like I imagine a Kindergarten teacher might at the end of a trying day.
Just doing the opposite he, or they, would do – a.k.a. listening to 60s albums made by people with “watermelon smiles.”
Are ABBA the new No-Hits-But-Actually-LoadsaHits-Clash?
Unfortunately I think he’ll be staying. I feel he’ll get over the 180.
He’ll cling on, like the dangleberry he is.
211 to 148, hardly a landslide
The greased piglet carries on….
Confidence in Boris Johnson: 211
No confidence in Johnson: 148
That means more than 40% of Tory MPs voted against Johnson.
Damaging but not fatal, and the Great Unflushable will carry on transferring his stench to his whole, thoroughly divided, party.
I think the expression is “in office, but no longer in power”
Rory Stewart:
Remove the “payroll” vote – and look at the free vote from backbenchers. Almost 75% of all Tory MPs not dependent on his patronage voted against him. This is the end for Boris Johnson. The only question is how long the agony is prolonged
He has lost the support of a larger proportion of the parliamentary party than Theresa May did when she faced a no-confidence vote in 2018. Within eight months of that result, May was out.
Quotes above, courtesy of the Guardian. I want him to suffer the indignity of a lame dog Prime Ministership, haunted by the fact that his backbenchers despise him, as does the majority of the country. He trashed the UK from 2016 on and he deserves every calumny coming his way.
Is he entirely well? He’s a bit glassy eyed and those sniffs don’t sound 100% healthy. What on earth can have caused these symptoms, and couldn’t he at least have waited until after his interviews?
Glassy eyed? He’s pissed, or hungover or both all the time these days. What will get him first, his party or his partying?
Christ. He’s like Cameron. An Airfix Prime Minster. Pull the cord for sound bites and booster gestures.
Not a principle or original empathetic thought in the same postcode.
He’s toast.
His party have just turned him over to do the other side.
Ewwww
There were no abstentions. Which means he that cannot be named* whilst Plod investigate accusations of rape was allowed to vote, I presume by proxy. I can’t think of any other situation where someone accused of something so serious would be allowed to participate in something so important. I’ve seen people suspended from work for eating damaged packs of crisps etc.
* took me 10 minutes to find via Google
Theresa May restored the whip to Andrew Griffith and Charlie Elphick before her confidence vote.
There’s not much abstention with that lot, is there?
‘Innocent until proven Tory’ might seem like it ought to be the law, but it’s not.
Nothing to do with being guilty or otherwise.
The people of [insert constituency name here] have as much right to be involved in that decision as anyone else with a Tory MP.
We’re all witches involved in a hunt, apparently.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-61716762
The country’s national broadcaster being forever on the case of the man who ostensibly runs its government, whatever next!
If there’s one thing you can rely on, it’s thousands of people in Conservative associations being told what to do by the BBC and the Labour party.
I shook my head when you voted for Brexit
And again when this buffoon became Prime Minister
And when I woke to see he survived a no confidence vote by a reasonable margin I felt like I was a nodding dog on a car dashboard on a bumpy road.
His margin was worse than the ones for may, major and thatcher. All were damaged by it, two by elections to come too.
211 to 148 is far from being a reasonable margin, JW.
He is fucked
He got less than 60% support in a poll in which he was the only candidate and the only voters were his colleagues from his own party. Hardly a ringing endorsement.
Let’s also not forgot that something like a third of that 60% were “salaried” MPs, many of whose ministerial posts will vanish when Johnson does
Better make that two thirds – fully 140 Tory MPs have “payroll” posts in govt. ministries
Though it was of course a secret ballot.
If you rely on the patronage of the PM for your post in the Department Of Widgets or whatever, it doesn’t matter if the confidence vote is secret or not.
If the PM is ousted in a confidence vote, you could be replaced in that post by someone under the patronage of his successor.
Only the continuation of the status quo offers you protection.
Difficult what with Rossi being the only surviving member.
Break the Rules Again and Again?
Bring back Coghlan!
What about Roy Lynne?
Though the streams are swollen
I had to undertake some extensive research to get that joke. But it was worth it. My compliments.
Ever the contrarian, I’m actually interested to see if anyone is still defending him and what he has done with his time in office. Anyone intelligent and non-partisan I mean. Are there any articles anyone has seen which make a serious attempt to argue his case? Genuine question. I like to actively seek an opposing view to make sure I’m not just stuck in an echo chamber, and something out there must explain his bulletproof-ness.
Zalensky’s a fan.
He would hardly say otherwise. The last thing he needs right now is to antagonise allies.
Though I think his vocal support for Johnson, while probably genuine in its gratitude, is also a dig at Macron, Scholz and Draghi for not helping enough.
He respects a fellow comedian.
A “concrete leader”. Well, there you go.
Alec Guinness voice: “Police are looking for some concrete men”
I don’t care if the conservative pulls itself to bits, it always feels as if it’s the party first and what will keep them in power rather than what is best for the country.
I know they will say they need a stable government and party to do the best for the country but they’ve had twelve years.
Sod ’em
Determined to make the upcoming by-elections a bit more even, the normally solid Lisa Nandy has now gone on TV to say that Labour apparently approves of the upcoming rail strikes.
Please, one nutso topic at a time 😉
On the anniversary of Rik Mayall’s death
It’s a blockbuster of an idea!
Sorry to not treat this story with the the grativas it deserves but….
Bwahahahahahahahaha!
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/02/boris-johnson-faces-investigation-into-claims-over-40-new-hospitals
Nurse, the screens!
Seems that Mr Johnson’s premiership has suffered another relapse!
Prolapse more like.
Does anybody have the Netflix rights to this shit?
Netflix?