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Going, Not Going, Going, maybe, Gone, but for how long?

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The yellow bellied, yellow headed lying buffoon has fecked off back to the Caribbean because he couldn’t get enough deluded Tory Cnuts to back him.

Hopefully he will be swallowed by a really big shark whilst blobbing about in the Bermuda Triangle if that bit of water is in the Caribbean if not any water will do.

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  1. A vile, shameless charlatan. I cobbled a few thoughts on the empty husk of the Conservative Parliamentary Party yesterday afternoon, when he was still a real and present danger.

    I’ve been struck by a few things during the recent Conservative Party chaos in the UK. One was Sir Charles Walker MP (Con.) giving a boiling-point TV interview exposing the ‘talentless people’ in Truss’ failed cabinet. Other Conservatives have said it’s time they went away for a period in opposition, to figure out what it is they stand for. A TV reporter described the Conservative MPs pushing and shoving in the voting lobby last week as ‘rats fighting in a sack’. An academic interviewed on Radio 4 thought it extraordinary that Kwasi Kwarteng’s PhD thesis is nowhere available to access online, as is the norm with theses carried out in the digital era.

    I have no tribalist views about politics in either NI or the UK nationally – I just loathe corruption, incompetence and entitlement, from wherever it derives. Whatever remains of the Conservative Party after the election that must come within two years needs to pass a great deal of time away from government to find some humility, compassion and something to offer the public. Then again, if it simply falls apart or divides into factions of futility, who will weep?

      • Ha! By the time I ring around, get a band together, find someone who can actually sing in a pleasing manner and persuade the BBC to revive TOTP for a regional non-entity and his political commentary, the news will have moved on so fast the the Con Party will have utterly imploded and the whole thing will be quite literally a waste of everyone’s time!

  2. Is anyone surprised to see the grifters and lobby fodder emerge in a display of olympic formation synchronised arse covering ? Those who sat on their hands and then brayed and yapped approval at a Chancellor presenting a budget which had the lifespan of a drying coat of paint and have now all decided that this clusterfuck is all behind us and that they’re the people to deliver grown up and responsible politics ? Those who would structurally choose rob the unborn to pay the wealthy ?

    Constitutionally they can distort a selection process in any way they want. That is a systematic fault. The weasels and toadies in the, thankfully – diminishing as we move forward – press will sell the outcome as yet another peek into the sunlit uplands. Any claim to represent the country at large which doesn’t acknowledge the need to increase public expenditure, to fulfill the as-yet undefined mantra of levelling up, or to plug covid-driven gaps is illegitimate, and it goes without saying, goes nowhere near the aspirations of the non-Tory voting majority in the country.
    In a side-issue, check out the FT Brexit video, which ties in neatly with the growing input from nervous money gurus.

    The country deserves better !

  4. Sorry, back again..Just listening to last night’s Week in Westminster, where a warning was btoadcast, that, owing to speed of movement any incoming set up would not be as “well-planned and organised,” as that under Truss..
    Ye Gods ! Batten down the hatches Mrs Nog, I’m off to fill the bunker with cans of beans..

    • You have to register, so here it is. Well worth a paste.

      After withdrawing from the Conservative leadership contest, Boris Johnson claimed there was a “very good chance” he would have won but insisted he was acting in the “national interest” because strong government required a united party.

      His disciples at the Daily Mail took up the refrain. “For the good of the party and the country, Mr Johnson has set his dream aside,” the paper declared. “This is a gesture of wisdom, honour and statesmanship. His time will come again.”

      Johnson acting in the national interest rather than his own? What manifest nonsense! It is crystal clear why he withdrew.

      He cut short his Caribbean holiday and flew home last week expecting to be rapturously embraced by a party filled with remorse over his departure in July. He offered “deals” to Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt to clear his route to a spectacular Churchillian comeback. To try and build momentum, he and his aides claimed much more support within the parliamentary party than they seemed to actually have. They sent wavering Tory MPs dubious polling numbers to curry their support. Johnson even promised to keep his old nemesis, Jeremy Hunt, as Chancellor.

      The ruses didn’t work. By the time he released his statement last night, Johnson had secured the backing of fewer than 60 named MPs, though he claimed to have surpassed the threshold of 100 required to stay in the race. The man who led his party to a “stonking victory” in the 2019 general election (albeit against the risible Jeremy Corbyn) had retained the support of scarcely one in six of his MPs. Even those that pass for “big beasts” in today’s drastically diminished Tory party – the likes of Suella Braverman, David Frost, Steve Baker and Kemi Badenoch – had deserted him, as had his apologist friend the former Telegraph editor Charles Moore, leaving a pathetic rump of diehard sycophants such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nadine Dorries and Chris Heaton-Harris in his corner.

      No, Johnson did not withdraw for the good of the country. He withdrew because he faced a crushing defeat and public humiliation.

      As for the scores of Conservative MPs who deserted him for Sunak, it would be nice to think that they really did act in the national interest, and of some perhaps that’s true. But the rest would have seen what Johnson, blinded by his immense ego, could not.

      They saw that the public had grown heartily sick of his lies, cronyism and debauchery, of his disregard for the law and prime ministerial ethics, of the endless stream of scandals that he generated, of his protection of venal loyalists, of his vacuous rhetoric and broken promises, of his indolence and incompetence, of his demonisation of those who stood in his way and the evident contempt with which this self-styled “champion of the people” actually treated the electorate. And that was before inflation began to surge, standards of living to plummet and public services to collapse.

      The Tories suffered a string of crushing by-election defeats. Their poll ratings plunged. Johnson’s own approval rating reached -48. Loathed by most of the country, his MPs realised that he had long ago ceased to be a “winner” and had become an electoral liability whose return would have destroyed any chance of them retaining their seats.

      Johnson appears not to understand any of that. He showed no contrition, no remorse, in his graceless resignation speech on 7 July, preferring to blame Westminster’s “herd instinct”. His statement last night was even more delusional. Referring to his “massive election victory less than three years ago”, he claimed he still has “much to offer” and would be “well placed to deliver a Conservative victory in 2024”.

      Happily, the man who proved the most destructive, divisive and dishonest prime minister in modern British history will not get that chance. His unambiguous rejection by his party, not once but twice, shows that the “greased piglet” has finally been cornered, the conman has been rumbled, the snake-oil salesman has been run out of town.

      It is a disgrace that yet another prime minister should be imposed on the country without any electoral mandate whatsoever – not even the paltry 81,326 votes of Tory party members that Liz Truss garnered. But for all Sunak’s flaws – not least the fact he stayed loyal to Johnson for far too long – he does promise to lead the Conservative Party away from the lunacy that has engulfed it these past six years.

      He is not malign like Johnson, or absurd like Truss. He is a Brexiteer, but not a rabid one. He is a free marketeer, but not a fanatical libertarian. He will hopefully seek to unite our fractured country, not divide it through yet more culture wars. He is more pragmatist than ideologue, a realist not fantasist. Above all, he understands the need for Britain to live within its means.

      Tory MPs knew all that when they backed Sunak in such large numbers over the weekend. In short, a party now trailing Labour by 30 points or more and facing the very real possibility of electoral oblivion appears finally to have learned its lesson. “Cakeism” has run its course. Johnsonian populism is, mercifully, dead.

      • Now *that’s* the kind of unequivocal monstering that I’ve been wanting to see.

        For this Afterworder’s money, it’s note-perfect and word-perfect.

        As things stand, I’ll struggle to fit it all on a t-shirt but I’m prepared to make the necessary sacrifices… More wine, garçon…and more pies!

      • I dunno. I hope this is right but I wonder if it’s just Johnson: The Wilderness Years. Churchill was out of favour for a decade, so Johnson has time on his side. Like Arnie or an unflushable turd, he’ll be back.

        I do wonder if some people would read all that, see the four words ‘the risible Jeremy Corbyn’ and declare the NS a right wing propaganda rag…

        • Somehow I doubt it. If the polls are correct, and Labour win the next GE in 2 years, then there will be a further 5 years of that government. Johnson is too lazy to put in the hard yards as leader of the opposition.

          • If Starmer (or whoever) wins for Labour in ’24-’25 and then goes a full term as PM, after 5 years in opposition, the Tories will have been deserted by the arriviste hard-right headbangers and Johnson, Truss etc. will be just a bad memory. A cautionary tale they tell in the Conservative Associations.
            Johnson will have moved permanently to the USA, where a good living can still be made by his kind. Truss will write some books and keep her head down.

  7. Loved that NS piece but …

    On Thursday I will do my stint for my local community (I’m a people person, and I mean than most sincerely, folks) and opposite the road I will see one, two, three, four, five… twenty… thirty… forty (mainly) men pick up their Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Daily F***wit and take it home where “the wife” will read it “for the recipes” and at the next election, or, heh!, referendum, if you have faith that they wouldn’t both (because, rest assured, she will do whatever “he” does) dive headlong back to Fat Boy J. and the Abba crew and/or their ilk, you have far more faith than I do.

  11. I was quite afraid Johnson might actually get on the ticket – the morons in the Tory party membership would have voted him back in! There is also anecdotally still quite a lot of support for him in the country, but just imagine the chaos if he had made it. On reflection, part of me wishes this had happened bcause it really would have been the end of the Tories for the foreseeable, but the damage to people’s lives less fortunate than me would have been ghastly.

    Sunak already seems to be making fundamental errors – bringing back Braverman a week after she resigned is terrible politics, and already has some Tories calling him out for it. Surely she has to go (again!) or he ties himself in knots defending her – either way he looks weak.

    As an aside – my granddaughter is two weeks old….already on her second PM, second Chancellor, and third Home Sec.

  13. Hmmm – that routine, minor, draft document sent by Suella Braverman was a lot more sensitive than she made out at the time. It was done to undermine the Truss plan to relax immigration visa controls so that we can get particularly talented people coming to the UK. Braverman’s resignation was worded in such a way that she did something minor on purpose to get a second yellow card.

    I think Keir Starmer might be wise to pull up a chair and just watch them destroy each other.

  14. Extraordinary piece about Truss’s colossally inept first few weeks as Trade Sec in today’s Sunday Times. Well worth taking out the free trial to read

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