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Why I’m laying Liz for Leader – politicalbetting.com
Why I’m laying Liz for Leader – politicalbetting.com
Wishing everyone in the UK and around the world a merry Christmas ?? ? pic.twitter.com/xPmsm2t7JH
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Edit: nope. Second, possibly like Liz?
Shaun Lintern
@ShaunLintern
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14m
"It is predicted that the London Ambulance Service (LAS), Emergency Departments (EDs) and the General and Acute (G&A) bed base are likely to become overwhelmed due to rising Covid demand in the next 2-3 weeks" - NHS London warning today reported by HSJ
Shaun Lintern
@ShaunLintern
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3m
As previously reported by
@thesundaytimes
NHS England internally has been warning of a peak by the first two weeks of January...there is little doubt about the wave...only its size. But are hospitals, ambulances and community services ready?
I am considering laying a bit off my Truss bet from a year ago at 30/1
Where as the opposition are we would do something, don't know what, whatever SAGE says, but which of their options, well something, just not nothing.
Throw the lot of them out.
In some respects it represents a massive victory for the Foreign Office as they now have EU policy back under their wing.
That's the sort of thing that is impossible to predict and impossible to sanely deal with.
Far be it from me to disagree with @Richard_Nabavi (though it's never stopped me before) but the reason the Conservative Party was prepared to forgive Boris Johnson past sins was he was a present and future winner (in 2019).
As soon as the ComRes poll of the Conservative leadership contenders came out in mid June 2019 showing Johnson alone of the runners BOTH able to drag votes away from BXP AND deliver a Conservative majority at a future election, nothing else mattered.
Johnson delivered on the primary raison d'etre of the current Conservative Party - the retention of its position as the governing party of the UK. If he is the only option able to perpetuate that in 2024, he will be the leader. If another emerges who has a better prospect of keeping the party in Government, Johnson will be cast aside without a thought as of course was Margaret Thatcher whose electoral record far surpasses that of Boris.
Finally today this has been resisted. Possibly accidentally, but still.
When what you're proposing is damaging and pointless - don't do it.
The problem is that right now people think the most optomistic scenario from SAGE is for a peak of 3000 admissions a day, as that is their lowest model. Except other models suggest this is NOT the lowest possible. The narrative is running that if we do nothing, we will definitely see a minimum of 3000 admissions a day. It’s dishonest.
I’m not blaming the scientists entirely here, I want to know what instructions they are getting.
However her past could come back to haunt her and she could get stuck on the NIP.
She also needs some polls showing her with net favourables at least matching Starmer's as Sunak has as the Tories will want a more popular leader if Boris goes
You could always assess the situation yourself and make your own decisions, Mr Urquhart?
That would be the attention-seekers of the media and some Twitter commentators. Who grab stuff, skim it for an attention-grabbing takeaway line, and plaster it everywhere they can.
David Cameron, of course, had almost no administrative success whatsoever before he became leader. He was an opposition spokesman who spoke reasonably well.
Theresa May presided over the home office for an age and managed to avoid either success or serious blame.
Boris...
How much time does Lizzie T have before the job blows up in her face?
What people say and what they actually do are two different things.
I am either incredibly unlucky or these marches are very common. It’s a real problem for any defence system based on boosters.
Engaging with them is hard but treating them with contempt as or the Saj is not productive either.
Perhaps Hunt will come through the middle.
@ Cyclefree
Is there anyone in government with any understanding of the supply chain? Anyone at all??
Daughter has to place her orders for the week by midnight tonight.
She is operating on the assumption that she might just make it to Xmas. And will close thereafter. If she is allowed to open on NY people will just have to drink what is left. She is not buying any fresh stock and risk losing it.
We went through all this nonsense last year and nothing has been learnt. Fullers is closing many of its pubs in London because they simply cannot operate like this.
The government's behaviour is pitiful. The one certainty I have is that our health and the health of our businesses are not even in the Top 10 considerations affecting what the government is doing. It's all about what is good for individual Tory politicians.
I intend paying absolutely no regard to what the government says. Just do what I think right for my family. The government can go fuck itself.
That's very much my attitude now, Cyclefree.
Throughout the pandemic I've been a good citizen, doing very as the Government bid and cutting it a good deal of slack because of the manifest difficulty of the task it has faced. No more. I've have seen at first hand why a wishy-washy policy gives us the worst of all possible worlds and have decided to simply ignore its instructions.
This is not to say I will behave irresponsibly. I will use my own common sense and judgement and avoid putting others at risk unnecessarily. But I will decide. The Government has lost all credibility with me. It looks increasingly as if it is being driven by political expedience.
If the Conservatives don't want to acknowledge that Johnson was a massive mistake and the 2019 win came at a huge medium-term price, she's a handy comfort blanket.
Conversely, she goes into that job with political capital to spend. If she can eke out a resolution that Brexit purists hate (because they will) but the more pragmatic of their number dislike but concede is just about agreeable, she could still walk away with minor scratches and even the odd begrudging “Well, at least she got it sorted.” We all know she isn’t backwards about coming forwards too - spin it as another deal done by mighty dealmaker Liz, pepper it with a lot of emojis, and she might just get away with it.
I see her weaknesses as being less to do with this actually, and more the fact that, although a darling of the Tory Party, she’s a bit of an unknown beyond political circles. Most people only really know her because she once gave a mortifyingly wooden speech about cheese and pork markets. What is her proposal to take to the electorate? What is her vision? How does she appeal to the man on the street?
Of all of the senior Tories I admit I rather like her. But she also has a slightly startled, confused aura about her, which can make her come off as lightweight. She could have that trained out of her (you can see she has worked on this somewhat from her early Cameroon days, the product perhaps of some Thatcher-esque coaching?) but there’s still work to be done there.
The trick is to call Article 16 over something utterly trivial. The Northern Ireland widgets disclosure form for example. NIWD form must go! It's causing the Union to collapse. The EU doesn't care about NIWD so it's not going to collapse the TCA over it. There's a bit of haggling and widgets disclosure gets rolled into the import declaration. Agreement is signed. PM-in-waiting Truss presents her best profile amongst massive Union flags in the photo op.
She has done three things that matter to Brexiteers:
1. Triggered Article 16
2. Demonstrated EU threats are toothless.
3. Got the EU to cave
And because Brexit is entirely performative, that's all she needs to do. Then she wins the CP leadership race.
NEW: Matt Hancock is in the cheese and wine photo from the Downing Street garden, Telegraph can reveal.
Winston Churchill
Reginald McKenna
Bonar Law (1921)
Robert Cecil
Lord Salisbury
Peter Thorneycroft
Frank Soskice
Lord Carrington
Ian Gilmour
Michael Heseltine
Nigel Lawson
Geoffrey Howe
John Redwood
Frank Field
James Purnell
And that's without even thinking too much. Ostensibly all these people resigned for one reason, but in reality it was a multiplicity of reasons or a different reason from the one given - for example Purnell said it was to forestall a Tory general election victory but in fact he was just frustrated with the direction of the government and the way it was being mismanaged.
I'm sending it around my friends. Brilliant.
That is not the point. The point Fraser Nelson winkled out of Medley is that SAGE don't model the stuff where actually this is going to be ok, because there is no point.
There's not a chance in hell that Geoffrey Howe resigned for other than the stated reasons for example.
And after today - Boris isn't long for PM.
Conflict of Loyalty. One of the best political memoirs I've ever read. Worth a read if you've never come across it.
Anyway, my Covid booster yesterday has left me rather tired and I have an early start tomorrow. So have a great evening.
That leadership bid looking less likely tonight then.
TimT explained the parameters of the decision-making process in conditions of high uncertainty and with credible possibilities of a Never Event, and it follows exactly that process.
So it could either be that process, with the criteria of a Never Event as laid down over a decade ago in the last Labour Government, or its a cabal of evil scientists or a secret civil servant with a fetish for lockdowns who’s not been sprung yet.
I hate lockdowns. I personally incline to the view that there will not be a need for them. But I agree that the probabilities involved are still unclear, and that they should ensure that they have the options on the table, together with what they would or would not do, as well as the costs for them, all clearly laid out.
And, of course, as Paul Mainwood drily observed a few days ago: if we do want to adjust for a variable severity, we can simply do the less-than-arcane procedure of “multiply by a constant” against the outcomes.
The EU frankly have a long list of more important things to worry about as do we. Taking the abrasiveness of Frost out of the equation it is just possible that a deal will be easier than currently thought, just like those trade deals proved to be.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59680707
about the serious failings in social and housing care of Brighton and Hove Council remarkably fails to mention which party runs it.
I wonder if the heartless Tories would have been treated in the same way?
There's another area I know of where this occurs. In engineering, you often have to consider what happens if something fails. Say you have a widget in a substation that, if it fails, will blow out power to a city block, and will damage the substation so much that it will require three days to be repaired. The good scenarios are that it will never fail, and everything will be hunky-dory. You do not know whether it will fail, or when - but it might. And the cost of failure is rather large.
You therefore have to make a decision: do you redesign the widget to make it less likely to fail (difficult, if you are finding it hard to quantify how often it may fail), or do you put in a layer of redundancy (e.g. fire suppression, or a backup system) so that, if it does fail, it does not damage the substation and can be easily and quickly replaced?
You consider the worst-case reasonable scenarios, because they are the ones that hurt. Now, the cost of adding that layer of redundancy might be judged as greater than the cost of a rare failure - but at least you can make that judgement.
(This then leads onto things like the swiss-cheese model of accident causations, where layers of redundancy fail in turn, but that's irrelevant for this.)
Ed Balls is the best example - apparently clever on economic stuff, and yet when tested seems like Diane Abbot.
Jim Pickard
@PickardJE
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2h
Breaking:
Unite the Union general secretary Sharon Graham has commissioned QC-led inquiry into the Birmingham hotel & conference centre built under previous leadership
Graham says recent expert valuation has estimated its value as "considerably lower than the costs incurred"
That said, if Omicron doesn't end the pandemic through being too transmissible to stop, then expect complaints about refusers to grow louder and more strident. If the idea takes hold that they are the major obstacle to a return to normality - and especially if we have any further variant waves in which hospital ICUs are full of the unvaccinated - then moves to attempt to force them into submission may become very popular, very quickly.
It does seem with Omicron, if one gets it, everybody close to them is highly likely to get it.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/12/20/risk-not-spending-christmas-elderly-parents/
"We are going to [my parents' in] Yorkshire, this year, because it’s time to embrace life, not death; to acknowledge that in an uncertain world, there will always be risk, and doubt, and danger; that hiding away from your loved ones, as another year breathes its last and terrified experts warn of yet another surge, is no life at all, only death postponed."
But shit-show as it is Boris did get Brexit done.
Mrs Balls owns the trousers though.
"Dr Robert Malone, inventor of MRNA and DNA vaccines, tell people NOT to vaccinate their children with the Covid-19 vaccine for at least 5 years, until the research and testing has been done:"
Followed by a link to a TikTok video.
Facebook have added a 'Covid vaccines work' banner underneath the post.
From my (limited) knowledge, there's a fair bit wrong in it.