A bullying minister, who broke the rules designed to ensure that civil servants are not harangued and bullied by jumped up here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians. Expected by an unwritten code of honour to resign when found guilty.
But lo! From Number 10 here is a personal Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card, signed “Love, your chum Boris”.
How much more of this Leave campaign pay-back will the British Public tolerate? Everyone bar the nutters seems to hate her guts so why is he prepared to carry on with this mockery of due process? Does she know where (some of) the bodies are buried, or what?
I don’t know what this horrible woman has on him but he is a one issue Prime Minister who never wanted to be lumbered with a real crisis and actually having to organise some very unglamorous things with quick efficiency and effectiveness. He really doesn’t give a shit who he offends. The Dominic Cummings stuff earlier in this year could only have been handled in that way to wind people up, there can be no other reason for it.
With even many in his own parliamentary party having had enough, I think and sincerely hope that Johnson’s days could soon be numbered.
Classic non-apology as well: I’m sorry if people were upset
Johnson’s in thrall to the Trump playbook – just ignore all the checks and balances that used to prevent behaviour like this, such as honour, dignity and respect for the office you hold, the people who elected you, and the judicial process. Once you’ve survived a couple of storms like this and Barnard Castle they just become noise and you’ve got away with it
Standards that take decades to establish but days to destroy. Aren’t standards – or at least playing up to them – the very essence of the British way? This Brexit government seems to delight in its bonfire of protocols, but what remains when there are no standards left? A country without morals, principles, or decency.
Fully agree. It’s horrible, isn’t it? I think it’s so much worse in the USA though. It’s just depressing, the death of the gentleman politician.
This. And the thing that frightens me is that Trump was way too close to staying in power, despite all that he’d done and said, every affront to decency.
Cummings famously viewed every such controversy as being of concern only to the Westminster Bubble, and that real people i.e. red wall voters, don’t care about them. Cummings, Trump, Johnson, all work to the arrogant principle that you can get away with almost anything in politics nowadays, if you lie, lie and lie again. The most alarming thing is that the voters prove them right.
I once worked with a lady who was a bully. She was one of those “I speak my mind and if you don’t like it. Tough” characters. Vile woman. I ended up managing her and it was impossible. I’d present anonymous feedback to her and she’d fight it. People would complain to me “off the record” about her but were scared of taking it further. In the end we managed to move her to a job where she worked solo. I regret not dealing with her and being stronger but it was exhausting and incredibly stressful. She was clever and vindictive and knew how to just stay ahead of rules. I hope Boris Johnson will regret not getting rid of Pritti Patel when the opportunity presented itself. I guarantee she is making people’s lives a misery every day. These energy vampires, these drains, are exhausting. Big mistake but as you say one that he’ll probably get away with again and will impact others more than him.
Ian Duncan Smith likes her. Which speaks volumes.
Can you imagine how horrible someone from her background has to be for people like IDS to like her?
There’s a very interesting story about Saint Rishi in the current Private Eye: not so much “No more Mr Nice Guy” as “Never fucken was one”.
He’s obviously giving (gave) her one…pictures, videos the whole shebang in her safe.
D’you know, I think you may be right: the body language between them smacks of tupping and the two backed beast.
I reckon it’s the other way round… she’s definitely a closet dominatrix.
Closet … possibly a fridge.
That was the best bit of the new Spitting Image
The thing is though that even if she does know where the bodies are buried, it’s almost as if the great British public expect that there are bodies with Boris and don’t seem to care.
It continues to amaze me that Boris (and the rest of the shambles of a government) do stuff that you think “how would anyone ever vote for them again in the future ?” – yet come the next election with a few big slogans, a few well targeted tax cuts and guess what……
I suspect the average Conservative voter thinks…I’m doing pretty well and have increased my portfolio, bank account, houses owned etc and so let’s crack on with these great chaps/chapesses.
No actual thought about anyone else and the actual state of this country. As long as I have it all in my back yard (gated obviously to keep the proles as far away as possibly) then all is ok!
The thing is, I can almost understand/forgive/tolerate/accept [what’s the least supportive way I can put this] it from those kind of people, it’s the ones who don’t have a pot to piss in, yet vote Tory, that I don’t understand.
You may well be right.
The folks who are the opposite view of what you describe aren’t going to be here though.
There’s a whole generation, including my two teenagers, who will be able to vote at the next election. They are not taken in at all by Trump/Brexit/Boris/Free School Meals/Test & Trace/Algorithm Exam Grades/etc.
My father was a left-wing firebrand and put me off politics for decades, so I don’t discuss it unless they bring it up, which they often do when we have the Radio 4 news on.
I think there’s going to be a groundswell of young voters in 2024 who give this shower a good hard kick up the arse. I hope so, anyway…
Who do you think they’ll vote for? I really wish the Greens could organise themselves and give everything a good shake up. Maybe the generation you mention are the ones to go with their hearts..
Yes, I forgot ‘environment’ in my list above. I’m really not sure who, I make it clear that is their decision to make. I don’t want to be a bully like my father was.
I lean towards Libs but I think Starmer is more likely to give Boris a run for his money.
Sadly, South Cambridgeshire has been a safe Tory seat since inception in 1983.
Nice idea, except the constituency which voted for her, Witham, has a perfect mix of well-off farmers and rural dwellers – your traditional Telegraph-reading Tories, post-war exiles from East London – Sun-reading cockney Tories, and McMansion TOWIE Mail readers. It’s one of the safest seats in the country.
What does she have on Boris? It’s not what she has, it’s what she is – they are birds of a feather – thick, ambitious, narcissistic, vain bullies, just appealing to the baser instincts of different stratas of British society – neither with a shred of empathy.
Boris is many things but he is not thick.
What he lacks is self awareness and he has a godlike ego clearly instilled by his upbringing.
Priti Patel is fully self aware and goes out to push the boundaries, that is how she has got away with this and we are here.
Maybe not as thick as Patel, but I think a lifetime of Bullingdon-style self-indulgence has coarsened the expensive elite education he got, which, coupled with his manifest laziness leaves him relying on his newspaper columnist sensationalism and cheap debating club tactics to boast, prevaricate, lie and smear. I don’t think he’s intelligent at all. Intelligence is about having foresight, understanding, mastery of a subject. Johnson is all surface and bluster. His aides were reputedly told to keep briefing memos to less than 2 pages.
John Crace puts his finger on BJ’s central characteristic, which is neediness. Previous generations of Tories – Thatcher, Joseph, Tebbit, Heseltine, even Major to an extent had a toughness which meant that they were prepared to be unpopular if it was necessary. Johnson is not ready to be personally unpopular, as he will be – and, unlike his hero Trump, even his supporters don’t believe he is God’s anointed, and won’t get tooled up to “defend” him. I think he will end up being hated perhaps more than any PM we have had, and watching his fat ego implode in front of our eyes is going to provide us with some much-needed entertainment.
Smirk your way out of that, shithead.
I agree.
Intelligence and educated are clearly different things.
As someone pointed out when Mogg made his Caractacus quote in the House this’d week, if he’s so bright how come everything he knows seems to have been learnt at school and nothing since.
And how come he can’t get a suit that fits properly?
Stands. Applauds.
I used to work in the MoD in the 80s and Heseltine required every briefing on one side of A4. This wasn’t laziness – the idea was that it made those composing the brief be concise, but it did rather fall apart if the matter was complex. Hey, we just left stuff out…it was his problem.
Leaving stuff out, or slightly changing the presentation of the original message…
“This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor of the company with very powerful effects.”
He’s not thick but he’s intellectually and physically lazy. Doesn’t bother with detail or thinking much about anything but his position. Never does anything he can’t get someone else to do instead.
This, I think.
There is no evidence of a mind at work in the slightest. No original thought at all.
One of my lady friends, normally left-leaning, yesterday wrote on her FB that she supports Priti for her strength of character in a very male-dominated workplace.
Either I don’t know her as well as I thought I did, or she was sticking one up to International Men’s Day.
Already on Twitter it’s a case of Tory MPs and the like, tweeting what a wonderful woman Patel is, hard-working, volunteers at soup-kitchens, misunderstood. The Kryptonite of the ‘Woke’ left. The BAME success story who went from Home Ec to Home Sec….
It smacks of the the support Cummings received in the summer, and there’s more than a suggestion it’s co-ordinated.
What I dont understand about Priti Patel is that she is from an Immigrant family yet is blatantly racist. Vile woman and she should have been gone when the allegations first surfaced. Boris Johnson obviously wants to be surrounded by like minded idiots who will bow to his every whim. They are all wankers.
Racism isn’t just confined to white people.
@Tiggerlion not saying it is. However I would think that she would be of a mind to give the same chance to other immigrant families that her family had. That is the part that doesn’t chime with me
If you want to hear “robust” opinions on immigration, ask an immigrant or better still the children of immigrants (cf the delightful Lord Yaxley-Lennon). The idea that “they” all have solidarity with each other is a dangerous myth.
I understand her parents were expelled from Amin’s Uganda. Indians in Africa could often be quite well to do and middle class (Gandhi was a lawyer in South Africa, for example). That’s very different from, to take a community I used to know quite well, the Kashmiri Pakistanis in Bradford who came from rural, often illiterate stock. People’s background isn’t just race, it’s also class, which I think plays a big role in how Patel sees herself.
Let us also not forget that her own family would have been denied entry to this country under the very regulations she has put into place.
It’s quite a challenge to come up with the appropriate vernacular to really describe what a vile individual she is.
Utterly shit at her job as well, it must be said.
A certain proportion of East African Asians, the ones who owned a lot of the country’s businesses, were just as much exploiters of the Africans as the colonial whites had been. Some of them treated their workers appallingly. Idi Amin’s expulsion of them all was very popular with the rest of the population at the time.
Not sure about your last statement there … oh hang on. As you were.
Grant Shapps get’s a pass though because he’s Mick Jones cousin
(another re-enforcement of it’s not what you know, but who you know (or are related to)_
I didn’t have Boris down as a fan of The Clash!
Foreigner maybe.
Or Don Revie’s Leeds United.
I’m guessing that London Calling is his second favourite album after Goats Head Soup.
Daddy was a bank robber?
Dunno about that, but with the Johnson family haircut, he’d be rank bobber, they all would.
This isn’t about her, it’s about Johnson. He made himself v unpopular with the Tories at Westminster and Tory HQ by allowing Cummings and Cain to take (back) control and enjoying their beligerence in doing so. Nut Nut Gate has left him needing to buy back the affections of those he’s ignored for the last year. Backing this odious woman (a friend of a friend who woked for her in the Dept of Pensions said she was the most vile individual she’d ever come across, and she’d encountered a few in her time) will be Johnson just trying to reassure the lickspittles sat around the Cabinet table that what’s good for him will trickle down to them too. Anywhere else she’d be out on her arse. Again.
She now has in her possession the set of Polaroids and a dossier that Cummings was holding in May.
Expect this set to be passed between Ministers when any wrong doing is suggested
Johnson has as much will-power as a balloon on a stick, and that’s why he’s doing nothing. But people are usually terrified of bullies, even when they have the ability to sack them.
I think my experience is pretty typical. There was a manager where I worked, who was the classic bully, using it to cover up her own incompetence. Prone to slamming down phones, walking out of meetings and shouting at her staff. Her behaviour was known across the organisation at all levels. Instead of discipling her boss ,let’s call him John, unbelievably promoted her to get her out of her own department, and then made her manager of me and somebody else. Within 30 seconds, literally, of our first meeting she was yelling at me, and making stuff up about how John thought I was useless. I raised this him and HR, but on and on it went, with her harassing me and shouting whenever we met, with them dithering around. I did the thing you’re advised to do of noting everything and putting it in emails. It also helped that there were witnesses, who were very keen on providing evidence on my side. When nothing was being done, and she was in fact getting worse, I wrote to HR and asked them to clarify the grievance procedure, including at which point I could go to an employment tribunal. There was then mysteriously a reorganisation and she was made redundant, with what was probably a six-figure payoff. I left shortly afterwards.
What struck me was when she had gone, was that the head of HR said he was glad someone had finally done something – he knew that she had reduced people to tears, but he didn’t seem to regard it as his job to do anything. Some people said that he and John were nice guys, and didn’t like confrontation, that’s why they had let it go on so long. Like Johnson, who probably also thinks he’s nice, or at least wants to be liked, a couple of cowards really.
By the way, anyone remember the “reset” of the government, with a new era being ushered in with Cummings leaving? Carrie Symonds and Allegra Stratton bringing in a new empathetic style. Was that only last week?
In my last place the head of HR was a bully, disliked by all. She had a meeting with one of the cleaning staff and promised him a promotion, then when he came to collect on her promise, she denied ever making it. Fortunately he had recorded the whole conversation. She went ballistic, threatened him with all manner of sanction, including dismissal and legal proceedings. He wasn’t cowed and reported the whole thing to the MD. She ‘left by mutual agreement’ shortly after. The sky was blackened with the tossing of hats.
One quality you absolutely dont need as head of HR is being a bully.
She probably hasn’t got anything on him.
Johnson’s a bully, and he sees in her a kindred spirit.
That boy should have been set right a very long time ago.
Whatever I might have thought of Geoffrey Howe, John Major, Shirley Williams, Michael Foot, David Owen, Dennis Healey etc. in the past, regardless of which party they represented, I never thought they were thick. The polar opposite, in fact.
I think Priti Patel is as thick as shite.
How on earth, have we ended up with someone this thick in such high office?
I wouldn’t put her in charge of eating a rusk.
I don’t know how you can make a statement like that, calling her thick as shite. You don’t work with her, so how do you know how thick she is…actually, I do know someone who works in the Home Office, so I think his opinion is more valid…he says…she’s as thick as shite! I jest, you are quite correct!
He told me that for Amber Rudd they had to write memos as if they were writing them for a school child to understand, but for Patel they have to write them as if it’s for a primary school child to understand. I can’t remember whether it was Priti Thick or Priti Stupid they know her as, but it was something along those lines.
Priti Vacant ?
There’s no point in askin’!
👏👏 for Slug
hear, hear
Spot on
In answer to the question, nothing. They are both the same – unprincipled bullies. In a saner world, she would have been out the door following her demonising of the legal profession – particularly those who specialise in immigration law – following the attack on the legal firm. Neither her nor the pm chose to do the right & decent thing. Lawyers enacting the law are now ‘activists’ and do gooders. God help us, doing good is frowned upon by this shower of unprincipled scoundrels.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/25/priti-patel-kept-up-anti-lawyer-rhetoric-after-met-warning-on-terror
Nothing at all. He’s spineless and for all his bluster, can’t sack people.
Another question. What has Chris Grayling got on just about everyone?
Up
£100,000 per week for something he has no grasp of.
Whee is @fauxgeordie when we need him.
We know what he’d say though. The deal’s been done, the BBC and NHS will be gone in 3 years (this was about 10 years ago), snouts in the trough, jobs for the boys etc etc.
To be fair to FG, he wasn’t alone in genuinely believing that shouting BAD PEOPLE ARE BAD to his friends on social media several times a day for 10 years would make the bad people go away. You only have to look at Friday night Twitter to see that’s still many people’s idea of effective political engagement.
It’s easier to live with than killing them.
True. And hurling abuse at anyone who disagreed with him.
Priti Patel can’t resign, because resign has “g” in it, a letter of which she has no concept.
She can only resin.
Another up
Priti Patel is a “g’ist.
That smacks of ‘g’ism…oh
No jokes about wankin!
My God, what a load of fucking namby pampy wusses we have here! Just fucking do what you are fucking told and if you don’t like it, fuck off!
I paraphrase, obviously….
Note: this is not bullying behaviour because my boss says so. Anyway, apols if I have offended anyone….
My guess would be that our alleged Prime Minister needs her onside for a possible thin Brexit deal that will irk much of the party and ERG types.
My second guess is that they just no longer care about how all this appears, and that until we start objecting to being lied at and all the other shit they do, they know they can get away with it.
Despite her awfulness etc I do think that ideas and proposals should be written concisely and in language that a bright 14 year old can understand. As we learned from the footage in Yes Minister, you can hide some pretty shonky stuff if you bury it deep enough inside a Minister’s bulging red box.
arf and indeed rofl
Like Grayling, she has one quality that the PM du jour needs and likes: loyalty to the cause right now.
The thing I fail to understand is that Boris and Trump both apparently appeal to the conservative christian / religious elements of society, yet both are characters whose morals and behaviours are the polar opposite of the values the groups are supposed to hold dear.
btw – I in no way mean this as an attack / slight on anyones religious beliefs and am not implying that anyone who is supports either of these two grotesques……
Organised religion is the apex of virtue signalling. “Look at me, I’ve banked some piety, so I can earn interest on the hate.”
Go steady, the Magisterium know where you live.
Yes, literally. The most appalling people would buy indulgences to reduce time in purgatory. All claptrap of course but the church got a taste of the dosh you got by being an unscrupulous bastard with a get out of jail (almost) free card. Still going on actually…
https://m.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/07/17/pope-twitter-purgatory_n_3609470.html
Trump certainly markets himself to American evangelicals by promising to give them what they want, but does Johnson appeal to UK Christians of any kind? The British electorate is wary of any kind of religiosity, and the only evidence I have seen of any interest on Johnson’s part is that his (presumptive) youngest child was baptised recently, though that may have been the mother’s wishes.
Most Christians who listen to the teachings of Jesus Christ and praise him and sing songs on a Sunday follow a very different path in their everyday lives and are quite happy. They never speak of this.
I don’t think of Christians in England as being very political one way or the other. Your average pew-warmer isn’t likely to be a Nazi or a Trot but could be anywhere in between.
I’m told it’s different in Northern Ireland.
When I was a teenager I got myself invited to a Young Conservatives meeting in Weybridge, hoping for a heated debate or two.
I am somewhat left of centre now but back then I was much more intense politically.
Do you know what happened? They were so disarmingly nice that I didn’t have it in me to kick up a fuss. And there was no political talk at all – we had a talk from a local businessman talking about the flavourings he produces for food manufacturers. It was really interesting. It was like being in a really benign Blue Peter world.
It made me think that for most conservative supporters, politics is a sideshow really.
The sole purpose of local parties is to raise funds and to rubber stamp head office decisions. The social aspect makes that tedious work tolerable.
When I was a teenage hot-head activist, the Young Liberals held the best discos. As a result, I probably ‘donated’ more cash to the Liberal Party than Labour!
“Young Liberals held the best discos” – hardly surprising as they were led by the Tom Moulton of British politics.
I was a Young Liberal for exactly the same reason. I worked on the door on both elections in 1974.
The thing that ‘she’s got on him’ is nothing. We all know where the bodies are, they’re all over the lawn of No. 10. Blackmail would require some sort of acknowledgement from the victim that they had something to hide, or be ashamed of. Johnson believes he can survive anything because he’s got funny hair, talks about Churchill and sovereignty a lot, and isn’t Jeremy Corbyn. And the really scary thing is, he’s right.
In Season 1 of The Crown, the Queen reads Churchill the riot act on standards, after she discovers Churchill has concocted a story about a bad cold to cover the fact he’s had two mini strokes. It all centres around a meeting/state visit with Eisenhower, but the government was complicit in a shameless deception. In a one to one with Churchill the Queen emphasises that good governance must depend on trust between the government and the monarch. Churchill is depicted as accepting and utterly contrite. I thought it was a scene that brought the behaviour of this current government into sharp relief.
I don’t think you have to assume she must “have something” on him. The one driver of recent Conservative regimes in Downing Street is to assume that if the people who are “against” you want you to do something – the Opposition, the left, Remainers, Guardian columnists, the twitterati, the civil service, _anyone_ who isn’t a “naturally inclined Tory voter” – then that’s the thing you absolutely must not do. Even if it would otherwise be good politics or a sensible choice, even if you might otherwise do it yourself in less febrile times, you set your face firmly and overtly against it because you do not ever concede an inch of ground to those outside the tent. Look at Marcus Rashford’s campaign to feed the children of low income families during the holidays: however bad it might look to refuse to do this, they couldn’t be seen to accept the advice of a black footballer from a working class background, especially given the factions that were supporting him (at least until even their own side became sufficiently unhappy at defending this policy because it made daily life uncomfortable for them). Defending Patel plays well with those inclined to the same instincts as her on people management (and immigration), and whose main bugbear is the kind of people calling for her to be sacked.
It’s the mainstream equivalent of “triggered, snowflakes? lol” and comes straight out of the Timothy/Cummings/Trump playbook, where everything you do is decided on the basis of the sort of people it will harm or upset. Because that’s great for whipping up support from the small but significant and extremely zealous minority of useful idiots who will stick with you.
As we are amongst friends can I fess up that I find her rather attractive in a scary preying mantis kind of way. I feel better now.
Ooh ‘er…mates then bites head off, before devouring corpse?
Sounds about right. Irresistible.
There’s nothing more offputting than the supercilious smirk that is her default facial expression. Horrible.
You speak the truth @count-jim-moriarty
Not just me then. I thought I was just being weird and had drunk too much beer.
I feel better knowing I’m not alone.
She’s got a big arse as well.
I’m only saying that to make you feel better.
**@vulpes-vulpes regrets starting thread**
You are not alone …
Though actually it’s praying mantis @Twang although it preys on its victims it clasps its raptorial forelegs together as if praying before attacking its victims.
Which to be fair sums up patel perfectly, hypocrisy at its finest.
I think you might be overthinking this Hube.
Story of my life.
Mods – can we remove the last thread above please? I fear for their souls if this remains public knowledge.
Why am I convinced that if you were to replace the words, ‘Priti Patel’ with ‘Diane Abbott’, the same people defending Patel on Twitter, would be demanding Abbot’s dismissal from the shadow cabinet?
Why am I also convinced that the same people demanding Patel is sacked, would be defending Abbot, praising her character etc?
It isn’t really a question of, is she a bully or is she not a bully, it’s more a question of, does she belong to the party I work/vote for or not? These things always are these days.
Well one went to a grammar school in Harrow and then Cambridge and sent her son to a private school, and the other went to state school in Watford and then Keele – so obviously any suggestion that the former was promoted beyond her competence is overt racism, but of the latter it’s absolutely fair comment because she’s a tory.
Abbot wasn’t dismissed for being a bully, she was dismissed for having the wrong ideas.
And not being photogenic. For which she should, of course, be gassed.
Politics is show business for ugly people. I think BoJo has forgotten that principle, amongst many others. The sight of so many well-groomed, photogenic Tory ministers makes me queasy.
I have a picture of Michael Gove on my ceiling above my bed.
The reason it is there will remain a secret.
Good.
Can you reach from there?
Well I never knew that! I went to school in Watford before going to Keele… was she so useless that she got there through clearing as well?
I don’t have much time for Abbott myself, but to my knowledge she hasn’t suggested that boatloads of refugeees should either get turned away by our armed forces or forcibly deported to a volcano somewhere in the middle of the ocean. Neither has she attempted to characterise those demonstrating about the climate crisis as an organised criminal group, or stigmatise the travelling community by demonstrating that she doesn’t know the difference between Travellers and Romani, and neither has she been tasked with improving things after the Windrush revelations only to announce that a “hostile environment” is intended to persist for at least a further two years.
As you say, it isn’t about which party she represents – either her dad’s old stomping ground of UKIP, the Referendum Party (WTF?) or her new caring and compassionate home with the Tories. It’s actually about what she believes as an individual and how that manifests itself in her behaviour as a public fugure.
Ah, I should have clarified, I didn’t mean Diane Abbot specifically. I just used her as an example as she’s the Shadow HC. I could’ve said Angela Rayner, Lisa Nandy or any other Labour MP.
Diane Abbott is not the shadow HC. It’s Nick Thomas-Symonds.
(me neither)
He is a white man.
And Diane Abbott wasn’t sacked, she stood down from the front bench when Corbyn resigned.
In some cases that’s true. Most people don’t get it follow the minutiae of politics and go with a party or politician they think they can trust. Some cases do cut through and go beyond party lines like Cummings. Also true for Corbyn, who repelled quite a few Labour voters. I don’t know if this one will. If it turns out that there’s evidence that Johnson did try to nobble the enquiry, he could look again like a bumbler who has to climb down again, and also further annoy those MPs he has sent out to defend her ( cue Curb your enthusiasm theme).
We’re going to have to ask Twang that question….
Which question was that again?
Sorry – all the deductive reasoning has been driven out of my head by the image of Michael Gove stuck to the ceiling above Wheaty’s bed….
Only heard today that she was in the Referendum Party from 1995 to 1997, and therefore was materially responsible for siphoning votes away from the Tories (and nowhere else in those days) in
the ’97 election, leading to 13 years of the hellish Liebour junta. No wonder Ken Clarke isn’t keen…