I don’t mind the idea of a PM without “experience” whatever that means, if they have a good head on their shoulders and strong integrity. It becomes even more important that they make great picks for the key ministries and if they have a good head, they would know that too. So picking the “inexperienced” candidate as PM might well lead to far better government all round.
Cathy Newman asks Keir Starmer to tell her one interesting thing about himself. Without skipping a beat he replies: “I did violin lessons with fat boy slim back in the day.” @Channel4News
Riveting....I wouldn't say I have lived a SeanT crazed style lifestyle but can give you 10s of better anecdotes than that.
Throw a question like that at me and I'd freeze, no matter how interesting I am (spoiler alert, less interesting than SeanT). I'd have to fall back on a joke like winning a boring man competition, which is pretty interesting.
But SKS will (or at least should) have war gamed this as clearly he has been asked previously about being boring. Its like when MPs can't answer the old how much is a pint of milk / litre of petrol. You know its coming at some point, so you better have an answer.
Starmer's answer is great. Doing violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim is a great anecdote.
Patrick O'Flynn @oflynnsocial · 1h Wow amazing result for @KemiBadenoch - Kemi has done this in two days. Penny has been planning her campaign for two years. If this doesn't tell Tory MPs who is the most compelling candidate in the field then nothing will.
Is planning really a notable strength among 21st-century Tories in general, and members of BJ administration in particular?
Sounds more like a handicap!
To be fair to Boris, Covid has rather dominated his PMship. Any plans *any* PM had would have gone out of the window in spring 2020.
In some ways that is the mark of a PM: not how well they can plan, but the way they react when the plans go tits-up due to unforeseeable circumstances (not that I'm saying Boris did well with that).
Having read up a bit and watched some footage of her (thanks to @williamglenn) I'm impressed enough with Badenoch to think she needs to make progress. Speaks human, interesting back story, isn't utterly psychotic / self-serving.
I've watched some vids - she is good. Bloody good. But PM in a time of economic crisis and prelude to War?
Nope. May be brilliant. But it is too much of a risk.
Although betting wise I am keeping an eye.
Why we need a good leader is so we don't get a war.
Completely OT but even though I am not generally a big fan of George Monbiot, I am absolutely loving the way he is tearing a new one into Vodaphone for the way they have handled his parents.
Basically Mother died, father has dementia, Vodaphone refusing to cancel the account because the father cannot answer complex questions such as when the account was opened and what his wife's number was (he has dementia!), refusing to deal with Monbiot at all in spite of him submitting evidence and trying to work within their system and then setting debt collectors on the father when they cancelled the DD.
Monbiot is steaming and is not letting them back down now they have seen the bad publicity growing. Hopefully this will cost them a lot of customers.
Elder abuse. Sounds potentially criminal in this instance - is it?
It's incompetence more than malice.
A lot of these companies set up very stringent ID&V systems and limits on what password holders can do.
When the customer dies it becomes a nightmare.
That said a lot of companies now have specialist departments to deal with this, and power of attorney sections as well as transfer of ownership.
Vodafone's behaviour was typical about fifteen years ago, now it is an outlier.
O2, Sky, EE/BT, plenty of banks, all have human beings who can see the bigger picture.
The other complicating factor with tech companies is that you are dealing with high value items and it becomes slightly awkward when say 1 month into a 24 month contract the customer and a month ago they took out over 3 grands worth of hardware and not even paid their first bill.
Badenoch “confessed to hacking into the website of a Labour MP in 2008”
I’m impressed. It would be interesting to have the first PM who has actually got a fucking clue about how these newfangled computer thingys work.
One of the things that amuses me is the misuse of the word 'hack'. As an old-timer, 'hack' implies skill. It does not mean getting unauthorised access to systems - it means an elegant shortcut in code, e.g. making something more efficient by using undocumented features in the assembler (which will break with the next processor version...)
Using the modern usage; if she gained access to the website using a default password, it is a level 0 hack and totally unnoteworthy. If she used a script written by a script-kiddie, it is a level 10 hack. If she read about a zero-day exploit on the web and created her own code, a level 100 hack. And if she *found* a zero-day exploit and wrote code to exploit it, a level 1000 hack.
I bet whoever website she hacked was stoopid and used default or easily-guessed passwords.
Back in the day a lot of hacking was simply making use of service consoles for systems that were wide open. Skill level close to nil, just a little knowledge was required. You could access all kinds of important stuff, much more important than some MP's website, the sort of stuff we nowadays worry about being the target for a first-strike cyber attack as a precursor to war.
The Tory membership want a coup. They are largely favouring those drawn from outside government rather than those at its upper echelons. They have decided the Boris gang need to be excised.
This is a radical and novel idea because it requires parachuting someone with limited government experience into the leadership, something no party has ever really tried before whilst in government. It could do them the world of good, but it could also be seen as irresponsible.
Not in the UK, but one D Trump.....
Out of interest, who was the last PM to either have never previously served in the Cabinet or as LoTo? Has there been one (well aside from Walpole, obviously)?
The Tory membership want a coup. They are largely favouring those drawn from outside government rather than those at its upper echelons. They have decided the Boris gang need to be excised.
This is a radical and novel idea because it requires parachuting someone with limited government experience into the leadership, something no party has ever really tried before whilst in government. It could do them the world of good, but it could also be seen as irresponsible.
Not in the UK, but one D Trump.....
Out of interest, who was the last PM to either have never previously served in the Cabinet or as LoTo? Has there been one (well aside from Walpole, obviously)?
Not sure I can think of one. Balfour is the closest I think (might even be the right answer) - someone cleverer than me will be able to tell me if that’s right.
Balfour was First Lord of the Treasury, Leader of the House and a former chief Secretary of Ireland.
The answer was in fact mentioned upthread - Henry Addington, whose only previous post in politics was as Speaker.
I hope the Badenoch team have 7 names committed in private to tip her over the line. I suspect she has not had long enough to make too many enemies but there will be moves to stop her getting nominated
Id imagine a few non committals will go for her on the back of that survey to ensure she is in the race if she doesnt get a surge generally
Completely OT but even though I am not generally a big fan of George Monbiot, I am absolutely loving the way he is tearing a new one into Vodaphone for the way they have handled his parents.
Basically Mother died, father has dementia, Vodaphone refusing to cancel the account because the father cannot answer complex questions such as when the account was opened and what his wife's number was (he has dementia!), refusing to deal with Monbiot at all in spite of him submitting evidence and trying to work within their system and then setting debt collectors on the father when they cancelled the DD.
Monbiot is steaming and is not letting them back down now they have seen the bad publicity growing. Hopefully this will cost them a lot of customers.
Did Monbiot set up Lasting Power of Attorney for his father?
Presumably not, as with LPA, Monbiot would have the authority to take control of his father's affairs & deal with Vodafone.
If he did not set it up, then it is Monbiot's fault.
The rules are well known ... I had to obey them when my mother had dementia.
His father did not just get dementia overnight -- Monbiot had time to set up LPA.
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 38m Replying to @oflynnsocial and @MRothermere Patrick, you are an eloquent advocate of the right wing cause. But you are also a seasoned Westminster observer. You cannot seriously believe Kemi Badenoch should be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in six weeks time. Come on mate. Get real.
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 38m Replying to @oflynnsocial and @MRothermere Patrick, you are an eloquent advocate of the right wing cause. But you are also a seasoned Westminster observer. You cannot seriously believe Kemi Badenoch should be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in six weeks time. Come on mate. Get real.
Badenoch “confessed to hacking into the website of a Labour MP in 2008”
I’m impressed. It would be interesting to have the first PM who has actually got a fucking clue about how these newfangled computer thingys work.
One of the things that amuses me is the misuse of the word 'hack'. As an old-timer, 'hack' implies skill. It does not mean getting unauthorised access to systems - it means an elegant shortcut in code, e.g. making something more efficient by using undocumented features in the assembler (which will break with the next processor version...)
Using the modern usage; if she gained access to the website using a default password, it is a level 0 hack and totally unnoteworthy. If she used a script written by a script-kiddie, it is a level 10 hack. If she read about a zero-day exploit on the web and created her own code, a level 100 hack. And if she *found* a zero-day exploit and wrote code to exploit it, a level 1000 hack.
I bet whoever website she hacked was stoopid and used default or easily-guessed passwords.
Back in the day a lot of hacking was simply making use of service consoles for systems that were wide open. Skill level close to nil, just a little knowledge was required. You could access all kinds of important stuff, much more important than some MP's website, the sort of stuff we nowadays worry about being the target for a first-strike cyber attack as a precursor to war.
Wasn't there a version of Unix in the 1970s that accepted a NULL password? I.e. you could just press in the password field and get it accepted, even if there was a password?
I don't know much about these things but googling it the first article that comes up from the NS says "The act she’s describing appears, on the face of it, to be a fairly serious violation of the Computer Misuse Act, and a potential offence that can carry a jail term."
I'm not trying to make a mountain out of a molehill but to me, at any rate, it speaks to the character of the individual involved. Would I try to hack into an opponent's website? No.
There are those who dismissed Johnson's antics as pranks and wheezes and look how that ended up.
To keep in in perspective though, if that's her own "prank" then it shouldn't disqualify her from high office.
Cathy Newman asks Keir Starmer to tell her one interesting thing about himself. Without skipping a beat he replies: “I did violin lessons with fat boy slim back in the day.” @Channel4News
Riveting....I wouldn't say I have lived a SeanT crazed style lifestyle but can give you 10s of better anecdotes than that.
Throw a question like that at me and I'd freeze, no matter how interesting I am (spoiler alert, less interesting than SeanT). I'd have to fall back on a joke like winning a boring man competition, which is pretty interesting.
But SKS will (or at least should) have war gamed this as clearly he has been asked previously about being boring. Its like when MPs can't answer the old how much is a pint of milk / litre of petrol. You know its coming at some point, so you better have an answer.
Starmer's answer is great. Doing violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim is a great anecdote.
It isn't really a "great" anecdote. But it's sufficient to qualify as an interesting thing about himself as per the terms of the question, thus avoiding ridicule, without being so interesting that it invites criticism.
This is the cornfield test. Asked in an interview what the naughtiest thing she's ever done was, Theresa May was ridiculed for saying it was running through a field of wheat. That was clearly nowhere near naughty enough to satisfy people. Equally, if she'd said she'd shot a man in Tesco just to watch him die, that would have been deemed too naughty. The gap between those two things on the naughtiness scale is reasonably large, and she should really have hit something between the two.
Starmer's anecdote is perfectly adequate. A sincere attempt to answer the question that isn't too crazy. (Spot the person bunking off exam marking by posting here.)
But given that "perfectly adequate, sincere, not too crazy" is going to be his whole pitch in 2024/5, that's to be expected.
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 38m Replying to @oflynnsocial and @MRothermere Patrick, you are an eloquent advocate of the right wing cause. But you are also a seasoned Westminster observer. You cannot seriously believe Kemi Badenoch should be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in six weeks time. Come on mate. Get real.
The same Dan Hodges thinks Tugendhat is a serious candidate
Cathy Newman asks Keir Starmer to tell her one interesting thing about himself. Without skipping a beat he replies: “I did violin lessons with fat boy slim back in the day.” @Channel4News
Riveting....I wouldn't say I have lived a SeanT crazed style lifestyle but can give you 10s of better anecdotes than that.
Throw a question like that at me and I'd freeze, no matter how interesting I am (spoiler alert, less interesting than SeanT). I'd have to fall back on a joke like winning a boring man competition, which is pretty interesting.
But SKS will (or at least should) have war gamed this as clearly he has been asked previously about being boring. Its like when MPs can't answer the old how much is a pint of milk / litre of petrol. You know its coming at some point, so you better have an answer.
Starmer's answer is great. Doing violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim is a great anecdote.
Pretty low bar for anecdotal greatness there. dueted or formed a quartet with, possibly...
Its a "I went to school with / I dated somebody who became a B/C-tier famous person" statement....Given the positions in public life he has held, that is super low in the interest rankings.
Tony Blair was a master at answering those type of questions.
Its not really dropping a WOW is it. Did you know? Have you heard? That Starmer guy had violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim! No fucking way! Yes! Sir Keir Starmer AND Quentin Cook. Together. At Grammar School. Amazeballs
It just isn't meant to "drop a wow".
It's meant to avoid two pitfalls.
One is saying something so boring that it invites negative comment... "did you hear that tit Starmer saying the most interesting thing about himself was that he'd once being on a walking tour of Belgium? Boring w*nker".
The other is that it's so surprising that it invites negative comment... "did you hear that tit Starmer saying he'd once snorted coke off a Thai ladyboy with the late Denis Healy? Weirdo".
I don't know much about these things but googling it the first article that comes up from the NS says "The act she’s describing appears, on the face of it, to be a fairly serious violation of the Computer Misuse Act, and a potential offence that can carry a jail term."
I'm not trying to make a mountain out of a molehill but to me, at any rate, it speaks to the character of the individual involved. Would I try to hack into an opponent's website? No.
There are those who dismissed Johnson's antics as pranks and wheezes and look how that ended up.
To keep in in perspective though, if that's her own "prank" then it shouldn't disqualify her from high office.
When May admitted that she had, with malice aforethought, run across someone else's field of grain, I'm afraid that was the opening of Pandora's box.
Completely OT but even though I am not generally a big fan of George Monbiot, I am absolutely loving the way he is tearing a new one into Vodaphone for the way they have handled his parents.
Basically Mother died, father has dementia, Vodaphone refusing to cancel the account because the father cannot answer complex questions such as when the account was opened and what his wife's number was (he has dementia!), refusing to deal with Monbiot at all in spite of him submitting evidence and trying to work within their system and then setting debt collectors on the father when they cancelled the DD.
Monbiot is steaming and is not letting them back down now they have seen the bad publicity growing. Hopefully this will cost them a lot of customers.
Did Monbiot set up Lasting Power of Attorney for his father?
Presumably not, as with LPA, Monbiot would have the authority to take control of his father's affairs & deal with Vodafone.
If he did not set it up, then it is Monbiot's fault.
The rules are well known ... I had to obey them when my mother had dementia.
His father did not just get dementia overnight -- Monbiot had time to set up LPA.
Hmm.
(1) Don't underestimate how difficult some old folks can be, even if compos mentis. Sometimes they flatly refuse to be sensible. If dad did not want to play ball re setting up a LPA, then Monbiot could do nothing about a LPA till the need arose - by when it would by definition be too late except for the more rigorous procedure, and phone firms etc would be playing up anyway.
(2) The firms don't always play ball even with LPAs, especially if stuck a decade or two back - I had to physically retrieve the primary document with 3-D seals (Scottish equivalent< to be more precise) from the family lawyer in the big city and bring it into the bank to enable Mrs C to deal with my father's bank account, and he was still alive and compos mentis!!
I don't know much about these things but googling it the first article that comes up from the NS says "The act she’s describing appears, on the face of it, to be a fairly serious violation of the Computer Misuse Act, and a potential offence that can carry a jail term."
I'm not trying to make a mountain out of a molehill but to me, at any rate, it speaks to the character of the individual involved. Would I try to hack into an opponent's website? No.
There are those who dismissed Johnson's antics as pranks and wheezes and look how that ended up.
To keep in in perspective though, if that's her own "prank" then it shouldn't disqualify her from high office.
"Harman accepted Badenoch's apology, but the matter was reported to Action Fraud, the UK's cyber crime reporting centre.[34][35]"
I think the tories fear the cultural power of the left. They saw Boris as pathetic in the face of BLM, the trashing of the Centophah, statue toppling etc. Badenoch offers the possibility of the reinvention and modernisation of the party, a credible alternative to the vision offered by the left. They think that, with Badenoch at the helm, they cannot be just be smeared and dismissed as the party of white male privelege.
I think there are many activists on the Right and Left who think in such terms, and I'm sympathetic to those concerns myself, but I also think most of the electorate are more concerned about how they are going to pay their energy bills and why NHS waiting lists are so long.
If the Tories try to make the next election about "woke" issues when people are worried to death about how they are gong to make ends meet then I suspect the opposition will wipe the floor with them and rightly so.
So what 'one interesting thing' about oneself would PBers use in a conversation with a stranger? Something a politician might use.
Mine would be: "I spent a year walking the coast of the mainland UK".
Yes, that's the best I can say for myself...
Mine might be, 'I get these weird homicidal feelings when stupid smug c***s ask pointless personal questions.'
When That Sort Of Class try That Sort Of Question on me, I tend to go with "I'd love to tell you, but I've signed the Official Secrets Act" or "I could tell you, but I've paid my debt to society now, so turn to page 9..."
Actually, I'm not totally correct about Addington. There is one subsequent Prime Minister who technically was not a member of the cabinet and never had been at the time of his appointment.
However, as he had been a de facto member of the cabinet for 14 years, and arguably the number two in the government on many occasions, it's a very technical distinction.
That person was also mentioned earlier today - Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, who was Commander in Chief of the Army before becoming Prime Minister.
Completely OT but even though I am not generally a big fan of George Monbiot, I am absolutely loving the way he is tearing a new one into Vodaphone for the way they have handled his parents.
Basically Mother died, father has dementia, Vodaphone refusing to cancel the account because the father cannot answer complex questions such as when the account was opened and what his wife's number was (he has dementia!), refusing to deal with Monbiot at all in spite of him submitting evidence and trying to work within their system and then setting debt collectors on the father when they cancelled the DD.
Monbiot is steaming and is not letting them back down now they have seen the bad publicity growing. Hopefully this will cost them a lot of customers.
Elder abuse. Sounds potentially criminal in this instance - is it?
It's incompetence more than malice.
A lot of these companies set up very stringent ID&V systems and limits on what password holders can do.
When the customer dies it becomes a nightmare.
That said a lot of companies now have specialist departments to deal with this, and power of attorney sections as well as transfer of ownership.
Vodafone's behaviour was typical about fifteen years ago, now it is an outlier.
O2, Sky, EE/BT, plenty of banks, all have human beings who can see the bigger picture.
The other complicating factor with tech companies is that you are dealing with high value items and it becomes slightly awkward when say 1 month into a 24 month contract the customer and a month ago they took out over 3 grands worth of hardware and not even paid their first bill.
Thanks for details.
Think that at certain point, behind the times morphs into willful misconduct. Esp. when it's emerging profit center.
Badenoch “confessed to hacking into the website of a Labour MP in 2008”
I’m impressed. It would be interesting to have the first PM who has actually got a fucking clue about how these newfangled computer thingys work.
One of the things that amuses me is the misuse of the word 'hack'. As an old-timer, 'hack' implies skill. It does not mean getting unauthorised access to systems - it means an elegant shortcut in code, e.g. making something more efficient by using undocumented features in the assembler (which will break with the next processor version...)
Using the modern usage; if she gained access to the website using a default password, it is a level 0 hack and totally unnoteworthy. If she used a script written by a script-kiddie, it is a level 10 hack. If she read about a zero-day exploit on the web and created her own code, a level 100 hack. And if she *found* a zero-day exploit and wrote code to exploit it, a level 1000 hack.
I bet whoever website she hacked was stoopid and used default or easily-guessed passwords.
Back in the day a lot of hacking was simply making use of service consoles for systems that were wide open. Skill level close to nil, just a little knowledge was required. You could access all kinds of important stuff, much more important than some MP's website, the sort of stuff we nowadays worry about being the target for a first-strike cyber attack as a precursor to war.
Wasn't there a version of Unix in the 1970s that accepted a NULL password? I.e. you could just press in the password field and get it accepted, even if there was a password?
It wasn't even an issue with bad security or bugs. There were loads of systems with no security, other than obscurity. Even where systems has passwords there were lots of lists of interesting phone numbers to dial-up, and known working accounts. As well as a huge amount of similar details for telnet.
The desire for speed is understandable, but they're picking a prime minister and it gives little time for the media to properly scrutinise a large roster of candidates, many of whom have never had much exposure to scrutiny
Cathy Newman asks Keir Starmer to tell her one interesting thing about himself. Without skipping a beat he replies: “I did violin lessons with fat boy slim back in the day.” @Channel4News
Riveting....I wouldn't say I have lived a SeanT crazed style lifestyle but can give you 10s of better anecdotes than that.
Throw a question like that at me and I'd freeze, no matter how interesting I am (spoiler alert, less interesting than SeanT). I'd have to fall back on a joke like winning a boring man competition, which is pretty interesting.
But SKS will (or at least should) have war gamed this as clearly he has been asked previously about being boring. Its like when MPs can't answer the old how much is a pint of milk / litre of petrol. You know its coming at some point, so you better have an answer.
Starmer's answer is great. Doing violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim is a great anecdote.
Pretty low bar for anecdotal greatness there. dueted or formed a quartet with, possibly...
Its a "I went to school with / I dated somebody who became a B/C-tier famous person" statement....Given the positions in public life he has held, that is super low in the interest rankings.
Tony Blair was a master at answering those type of questions.
Its not really dropping a WOW is it. Did you know? Have you heard? That Starmer guy had violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim! No fucking way! Yes! Sir Keir Starmer AND Quentin Cook. Together. At Grammar School. Amazeballs
It just isn't meant to "drop a wow".
It's meant to avoid two pitfalls.
One is saying something so boring that it invites negative comment... "did you hear that tit Starmer saying the most interesting thing about himself was that he'd once being on a walking tour of Belgium? Boring w*nker".
The other is that it's so surprising that it invites negative comment... "did you hear that tit Starmer saying he'd once snorted coke off a Thai ladyboy with the late Denis Healy? Weirdo".
It sucessfully shows there is nothing interesting about him - 'fat boy slim was in my class'. Adding 'back in the day' is, as i believe ths kids say, totes cringe
Cathy Newman asks Keir Starmer to tell her one interesting thing about himself. Without skipping a beat he replies: “I did violin lessons with fat boy slim back in the day.” @Channel4News
Riveting....I wouldn't say I have lived a SeanT crazed style lifestyle but can give you 10s of better anecdotes than that.
Throw a question like that at me and I'd freeze, no matter how interesting I am (spoiler alert, less interesting than SeanT). I'd have to fall back on a joke like winning a boring man competition, which is pretty interesting.
But SKS will (or at least should) have war gamed this as clearly he has been asked previously about being boring. Its like when MPs can't answer the old how much is a pint of milk / litre of petrol. You know its coming at some point, so you better have an answer.
Starmer's answer is great. Doing violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim is a great anecdote.
Lol
Which is more ancedotable: taking violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim, or billiards lessons from Minnesota Fats?
A 42 year old with sod all experience at the higher levels and utterly untested under serious fire is possibly going to be fingering the nuclear button in six weeks or so time.
This country is having a nervous breakdown.
The Tory party certainly is. The rest of us don't get a say.
She is obsessed with the culture wars. Would be dreadful.
She just doesn't accept the premises of the other side.
No it's not that, she enflames it for no good reason.
Penny Morduant is the most sensible on this by a country mile.
No she isn't. She has lied about her position.
I don't mind Ms Mordaunt having different views on self-ID to mine but I do mind very much that she lies about them. She is now claiming, wrongly, that she was the one who fought to remove the gender neutral language in the Maternity Bill so that the word "woman" was used. This is a lie. She was the one who introduced the gender neutral language. It was the Lords who threw the gender neutral language out and she was forced to accept it.
...
This is what she actually tweeted:
"It was me that changed maternity legislation that was drafted in gender neutral language ( by another) to use female terms"
Carefully worded, no doubt (as any lawyer will surely appreciate) but what she wrote is not strictly a lie, and it's some distance short of "claiming, wrongly, that she was the one who fought to remove the gender neutral language in the Maternity Bill"
Exactly. I agree (as a Penny supporter) with the leaker's version (albeit a malicious leak) more than Penny's. But she hasn't lied. The legislation was no doubt drafted (with gender neutral langauge) by another, and it was no doubt Mordaunt who eventually re-worded it, (after the House of Lords insisted).
No - that's not correct. When Minister for Equalities she was signed up to the Stonewall agenda. That agenda is quite openly to remove the word "woman" from legislation and official documents, as various FoI requests have revealed. It is also to remove the sex based exemptions from the Equality Act and abolish the crime of rape by deception. If she had wanted the word "woman" in the legislation she could have insisted on it. She was challenged on it at the time by others but held firm.
She was forced to make the change. She did not do it voluntarily. She is now misrepresenting the position, doubtless because she realises that it may be a problem.
It seems to me to be an unforced error. Why not tell the truth? This has been easily picked up by opponents. It is the sort of mistake that Boris has been making. If she can't get her story straight on this.....
My view is that both her and Kemi and Tugendhat are too inexperienced to be PM though they all have something to commend them, if only because they are relatively fresh faced. Though Mordaunt is not that fresh faced: a bit two faced if anything.
None of them make the heart sing. But then Britain has become a giant Rotten Borough. We the great unwashed don't count and must wait to see what 200,000 Tory members inflict on us. Yay!
Cathy Newman asks Keir Starmer to tell her one interesting thing about himself. Without skipping a beat he replies: “I did violin lessons with fat boy slim back in the day.” @Channel4News
Riveting....I wouldn't say I have lived a SeanT crazed style lifestyle but can give you 10s of better anecdotes than that.
Throw a question like that at me and I'd freeze, no matter how interesting I am (spoiler alert, less interesting than SeanT). I'd have to fall back on a joke like winning a boring man competition, which is pretty interesting.
But SKS will (or at least should) have war gamed this as clearly he has been asked previously about being boring. Its like when MPs can't answer the old how much is a pint of milk / litre of petrol. You know its coming at some point, so you better have an answer.
Starmer's answer is great. Doing violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim is a great anecdote.
Lol
Which is more ancedotable: taking violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim, or billiards lessons from Minnesota Fats?
Violin lessons. If you take billiards lessons from Fats, no matter how much you rail against it it all goes to pot in the end.
Apparently the new Northern Ireland Sec once asked if he needed a passport to visit Derry.
Isn't that essentially the line used against every incoming NI Secretary? It does feel rather like the Mandelson "mushy peas" line - often repeated, but with little or no factual basis.
Completely OT but even though I am not generally a big fan of George Monbiot, I am absolutely loving the way he is tearing a new one into Vodaphone for the way they have handled his parents.
Basically Mother died, father has dementia, Vodaphone refusing to cancel the account because the father cannot answer complex questions such as when the account was opened and what his wife's number was (he has dementia!), refusing to deal with Monbiot at all in spite of him submitting evidence and trying to work within their system and then setting debt collectors on the father when they cancelled the DD.
Monbiot is steaming and is not letting them back down now they have seen the bad publicity growing. Hopefully this will cost them a lot of customers.
Did Monbiot set up Lasting Power of Attorney for his father?
Presumably not, as with LPA, Monbiot would have the authority to take control of his father's affairs & deal with Vodafone.
If he did not set it up, then it is Monbiot's fault.
The rules are well known ... I had to obey them when my mother had dementia.
His father did not just get dementia overnight -- Monbiot had time to set up LPA.
Hmm.
(1) Don't underestimate how difficult some old folks can be, even if compos mentis. Sometimes they flatly refuse to be sensible. If dad did not want to play ball re setting up a LPA, then Monbiot could do nothing about a LPA till the need arose - by when it would by definition be too late except for the more rigorous procedure, and phone firms etc would be playing up anyway.
(2) The firms don't always play ball even with LPAs, especially if stuck a decade or two back - I had to physically retrieve the primary document with 3-D seals (Scottish equivalent< to be more precise) from the family lawyer in the big city and bring it into the bank to enable Mrs C to deal with my father's bank account, and he was still alive and compos mentis!!
I hesitate to comment in detail on Monbiot's case, as I don't know the full facts.
If Monbiot has an LPA, then I think Vodafone are clearly in the wrong.
And if Monbiot does not have an LPA, he should not be "tearing Vodafone a new one".
I agree it needs trust between family members for an elderly person to sign an LPA.
I don't know much about these things but googling it the first article that comes up from the NS says "The act she’s describing appears, on the face of it, to be a fairly serious violation of the Computer Misuse Act, and a potential offence that can carry a jail term."
I'm not trying to make a mountain out of a molehill but to me, at any rate, it speaks to the character of the individual involved. Would I try to hack into an opponent's website? No.
There are those who dismissed Johnson's antics as pranks and wheezes and look how that ended up.
To keep in in perspective though, if that's her own "prank" then it shouldn't disqualify her from high office.
When May admitted that she had, with malice aforethought, run across someone else's field of grain, I'm afraid that was the opening of Pandora's box.
On the hacking thing - IIRC she tried an obvious password and it worked.
Many years back I was a member of members club on Portman Square. The place was full of A listers. In casual conversation with a several of them, I demonstrated the vulnerability of their voicemail - this was before the big “phone hacking” scandal hit. All it was, was a stupid default pin. Technically, since I didn’t ask their specific permission to access their voicemail, before I showed them how unprotected it was….
Actually, I'm not totally correct about Addington. There is one subsequent Prime Minister who technically was not a member of the cabinet and never had been at the time of his appointment.
However, as he had been a de facto member of the cabinet for 14 years, and arguably the number two in the government on many occasions, it's a very technical distinction.
That person was also mentioned earlier today - Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, who was Commander in Chief of the Army before becoming Prime Minister.
Was Master General of the Ordnance not considered a Cabinet post? Chief Secretary for Ireland seems to have been too.
The desire for speed is understandable, but they're picking a prime minister and it gives little time for the media to properly scrutinise a large roster of candidates, many of whom have never had much exposure to scrutiny
Whilst I agree media scrutiny would be good for them, his tone suggests he thinks it is a requirement for political parties to submit their internal leadership candidates to the media for scrutiny, that it is an oversight of the process that it is speedy.
It isn't.
It's a good reason they should not make their leader, who will be PM, someone with very little experience, but the party could decide by picking names out of a hat.
Besides, absent a coronation the final two candidates will get plenty of scrutiny. Narrowing down the list is the party's job, why have the media scrutinise a whole bunch of candidates who are not going to be put to the members vote?
I don't know much about these things but googling it the first article that comes up from the NS says "The act she’s describing appears, on the face of it, to be a fairly serious violation of the Computer Misuse Act, and a potential offence that can carry a jail term."
I'm not trying to make a mountain out of a molehill but to me, at any rate, it speaks to the character of the individual involved. Would I try to hack into an opponent's website? No.
There are those who dismissed Johnson's antics as pranks and wheezes and look how that ended up.
To keep in in perspective though, if that's her own "prank" then it shouldn't disqualify her from high office.
When May admitted that she had, with malice aforethought, run across someone else's field of grain, I'm afraid that was the opening of Pandora's box.
On the hacking thing - IIRC she tried an obvious password and it worked.
Many years back I was a member of members club on Portman Square. The place was full of A listers. In casual conversation with a several of them, I demonstrated the vulnerability of their voicemail - this was before the big “phone hacking” scandal hit. All it was, was a stupid default pin. Technically, since I didn’t ask their specific permission to access their voicemail, before I showed them how unprotected it was….
That was one thing lost in the whole phone hacking stuff....what was repeatedly called phone hacking, wasn't really hacking at all...while the Indy ran a number of very good articles detailing some genuinely hacking that went on at a similar time.
Cathy Newman asks Keir Starmer to tell her one interesting thing about himself. Without skipping a beat he replies: “I did violin lessons with fat boy slim back in the day.” @Channel4News
Riveting....I wouldn't say I have lived a SeanT crazed style lifestyle but can give you 10s of better anecdotes than that.
Throw a question like that at me and I'd freeze, no matter how interesting I am (spoiler alert, less interesting than SeanT). I'd have to fall back on a joke like winning a boring man competition, which is pretty interesting.
But SKS will (or at least should) have war gamed this as clearly he has been asked previously about being boring. Its like when MPs can't answer the old how much is a pint of milk / litre of petrol. You know its coming at some point, so you better have an answer.
Starmer's answer is great. Doing violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim is a great anecdote.
Pretty low bar for anecdotal greatness there. dueted or formed a quartet with, possibly...
Its a "I went to school with / I dated somebody who became a B/C-tier famous person" statement....Given the positions in public life he has held, that is super low in the interest rankings.
Tony Blair was a master at answering those type of questions.
Its not really dropping a WOW is it. Did you know? Have you heard? That Starmer guy had violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim! No fucking way! Yes! Sir Keir Starmer AND Quentin Cook. Together. At Grammar School. Amazeballs
It just isn't meant to "drop a wow".
It's meant to avoid two pitfalls.
One is saying something so boring that it invites negative comment... "did you hear that tit Starmer saying the most interesting thing about himself was that he'd once being on a walking tour of Belgium? Boring w*nker".
The other is that it's so surprising that it invites negative comment... "did you hear that tit Starmer saying he'd once snorted coke off a Thai ladyboy with the late Denis Healy? Weirdo".
It sucessfully shows there is nothing interesting about him - 'fat boy slim was in my class'. Adding 'back in the day' is, as i believe ths kids say, totes cringe
It really doesn't.
As I've explained, with that sort of "gotcha" question, you're just trying to avoid ridicule by giving an answer that opens you out to criticism from less political types. Nobody is going to be saying at the pub tonight either "I heard a really interesting thing about Starmer earlier..." or "I heard Starmer saying the most stupid thing earlier..."
As has been said, it's an adequate answer and, with gotcha questions, that's the best type of answer.
Completely OT but even though I am not generally a big fan of George Monbiot, I am absolutely loving the way he is tearing a new one into Vodaphone for the way they have handled his parents.
Basically Mother died, father has dementia, Vodaphone refusing to cancel the account because the father cannot answer complex questions such as when the account was opened and what his wife's number was (he has dementia!), refusing to deal with Monbiot at all in spite of him submitting evidence and trying to work within their system and then setting debt collectors on the father when they cancelled the DD.
Monbiot is steaming and is not letting them back down now they have seen the bad publicity growing. Hopefully this will cost them a lot of customers.
Did Monbiot set up Lasting Power of Attorney for his father?
Presumably not, as with LPA, Monbiot would have the authority to take control of his father's affairs & deal with Vodafone.
If he did not set it up, then it is Monbiot's fault.
The rules are well known ... I had to obey them when my mother had dementia.
His father did not just get dementia overnight -- Monbiot had time to set up LPA.
Hmm.
(1) Don't underestimate how difficult some old folks can be, even if compos mentis. Sometimes they flatly refuse to be sensible. If dad did not want to play ball re setting up a LPA, then Monbiot could do nothing about a LPA till the need arose - by when it would by definition be too late except for the more rigorous procedure, and phone firms etc would be playing up anyway.
(2) The firms don't always play ball even with LPAs, especially if stuck a decade or two back - I had to physically retrieve the primary document with 3-D seals (Scottish equivalent< to be more precise) from the family lawyer in the big city and bring it into the bank to enable Mrs C to deal with my father's bank account, and he was still alive and compos mentis!!
I hesitate to comment in detail on Monbiot's case, as I don't know the full facts.
If Monbiot has an LPA, then I think Vodafone are clearly in the wrong.
And if Monbiot does not have an LPA, he should not be "tearing Vodafone a new one".
I agree it needs trust between family members for an elderly person to sign an LPA.
But why should his father's LPA be needed to deal with a deceased mother's account?
Completely OT but even though I am not generally a big fan of George Monbiot, I am absolutely loving the way he is tearing a new one into Vodaphone for the way they have handled his parents.
Basically Mother died, father has dementia, Vodaphone refusing to cancel the account because the father cannot answer complex questions such as when the account was opened and what his wife's number was (he has dementia!), refusing to deal with Monbiot at all in spite of him submitting evidence and trying to work within their system and then setting debt collectors on the father when they cancelled the DD.
Monbiot is steaming and is not letting them back down now they have seen the bad publicity growing. Hopefully this will cost them a lot of customers.
Did Monbiot set up Lasting Power of Attorney for his father?
Presumably not, as with LPA, Monbiot would have the authority to take control of his father's affairs & deal with Vodafone.
If he did not set it up, then it is Monbiot's fault.
The rules are well known ... I had to obey them when my mother had dementia.
His father did not just get dementia overnight -- Monbiot had time to set up LPA.
Hmm.
(1) Don't underestimate how difficult some old folks can be, even if compos mentis. Sometimes they flatly refuse to be sensible. If dad did not want to play ball re setting up a LPA, then Monbiot could do nothing about a LPA till the need arose - by when it would by definition be too late except for the more rigorous procedure, and phone firms etc would be playing up anyway.
(2) The firms don't always play ball even with LPAs, especially if stuck a decade or two back - I had to physically retrieve the primary document with 3-D seals (Scottish equivalent< to be more precise) from the family lawyer in the big city and bring it into the bank to enable Mrs C to deal with my father's bank account, and he was still alive and compos mentis!!
I hesitate to comment in detail on Monbiot's case, as I don't know the full facts.
If Monbiot has an LPA, then I think Vodafone are clearly in the wrong.
And if Monbiot does not have an LPA, he should not be "tearing Vodafone a new one".
I agree it needs trust between family members for an elderly person to sign an LPA.
But why should his father's LPA be needed to deal with a deceased mother's account?
Who is the executor?
If it is his father, due to an out of date will, that could get complicated.
Cathy Newman asks Keir Starmer to tell her one interesting thing about himself. Without skipping a beat he replies: “I did violin lessons with fat boy slim back in the day.” @Channel4News
Riveting....I wouldn't say I have lived a SeanT crazed style lifestyle but can give you 10s of better anecdotes than that.
Throw a question like that at me and I'd freeze, no matter how interesting I am (spoiler alert, less interesting than SeanT). I'd have to fall back on a joke like winning a boring man competition, which is pretty interesting.
But SKS will (or at least should) have war gamed this as clearly he has been asked previously about being boring. Its like when MPs can't answer the old how much is a pint of milk / litre of petrol. You know its coming at some point, so you better have an answer.
Starmer's answer is great. Doing violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim is a great anecdote.
Pretty low bar for anecdotal greatness there. dueted or formed a quartet with, possibly...
Its a "I went to school with / I dated somebody who became a B/C-tier famous person" statement....Given the positions in public life he has held, that is super low in the interest rankings.
Tony Blair was a master at answering those type of questions.
Its not really dropping a WOW is it. Did you know? Have you heard? That Starmer guy had violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim! No fucking way! Yes! Sir Keir Starmer AND Quentin Cook. Together. At Grammar School. Amazeballs
It just isn't meant to "drop a wow".
It's meant to avoid two pitfalls.
One is saying something so boring that it invites negative comment... "did you hear that tit Starmer saying the most interesting thing about himself was that he'd once being on a walking tour of Belgium? Boring w*nker".
The other is that it's so surprising that it invites negative comment... "did you hear that tit Starmer saying he'd once snorted coke off a Thai ladyboy with the late Denis Healy? Weirdo".
It sucessfully shows there is nothing interesting about him - 'fat boy slim was in my class'. Adding 'back in the day' is, as i believe ths kids say, totes cringe
It really doesn't.
As I've explained, with that sort of "gotcha" question, you're just trying to avoid ridicule by giving an answer that opens you out to criticism from less political types. Nobody is going to be saying at the pub tonight either "I heard a really interesting thing about Starmer earlier..." or "I heard Starmer saying the most stupid thing earlier..."
As has been said, it's an adequate answer and, with gotcha questions, that's the best type of answer.
But that's the problem with such anecdotes. Thousands of people will have had dinner with Princess Anne. Possibly tens of thousands. But it sounds impressive.
With my previous anecdote, walking the coast; less than a hundred have done it in one go without a break (*); about the same again have done it in sections. It requires ten to twelve months of hard work, planning and dedication. Many times more people have summited Everest in one year than have walked the coast. But it does not sound as impressive.
(*) I was #25 or so. And yes, I'm sad enough to keep a record of them all...
On the hacking thing - IIRC she tried an obvious password and it worked.
Many years back I was a member of members club on Portman Square. The place was full of A listers. In casual conversation with a several of them, I demonstrated the vulnerability of their voicemail - this was before the big “phone hacking” scandal hit. All it was, was a stupid default pin. Technically, since I didn’t ask their specific permission to access their voicemail, before I showed them how unprotected it was….
It always annoyed me that that was described as hacking, when it involved no skill at all, other than knowing the right phone number. But there was an MP IIRC who claim a text was intercepted, and that was a much bigger deal, as that would point to someone accessing an SMS gateway or lawful intercept capabilities, and I don't recall much ever coming of that.
Cathy Newman asks Keir Starmer to tell her one interesting thing about himself. Without skipping a beat he replies: “I did violin lessons with fat boy slim back in the day.” @Channel4News
Riveting....I wouldn't say I have lived a SeanT crazed style lifestyle but can give you 10s of better anecdotes than that.
Throw a question like that at me and I'd freeze, no matter how interesting I am (spoiler alert, less interesting than SeanT). I'd have to fall back on a joke like winning a boring man competition, which is pretty interesting.
But SKS will (or at least should) have war gamed this as clearly he has been asked previously about being boring. Its like when MPs can't answer the old how much is a pint of milk / litre of petrol. You know its coming at some point, so you better have an answer.
Starmer's answer is great. Doing violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim is a great anecdote.
It isn't really a "great" anecdote. But it's sufficient to qualify as an interesting thing about himself as per the terms of the question, thus avoiding ridicule, without being so interesting that it invites criticism.
This is the cornfield test. Asked in an interview what the naughtiest thing she's ever done was, Theresa May was ridiculed for saying it was running through a field of wheat. That was clearly nowhere near naughty enough to satisfy people. Equally, if she'd said she'd shot a man in Tesco just to watch him die, that would have been deemed too naughty. The gap between those two things on the naughtiness scale is reasonably large, and she should really have hit something between the two.
Completely OT but even though I am not generally a big fan of George Monbiot, I am absolutely loving the way he is tearing a new one into Vodaphone for the way they have handled his parents.
Basically Mother died, father has dementia, Vodaphone refusing to cancel the account because the father cannot answer complex questions such as when the account was opened and what his wife's number was (he has dementia!), refusing to deal with Monbiot at all in spite of him submitting evidence and trying to work within their system and then setting debt collectors on the father when they cancelled the DD.
Monbiot is steaming and is not letting them back down now they have seen the bad publicity growing. Hopefully this will cost them a lot of customers.
Did Monbiot set up Lasting Power of Attorney for his father?
Presumably not, as with LPA, Monbiot would have the authority to take control of his father's affairs & deal with Vodafone.
If he did not set it up, then it is Monbiot's fault.
The rules are well known ... I had to obey them when my mother had dementia.
His father did not just get dementia overnight -- Monbiot had time to set up LPA.
Hmm.
(1) Don't underestimate how difficult some old folks can be, even if compos mentis. Sometimes they flatly refuse to be sensible. If dad did not want to play ball re setting up a LPA, then Monbiot could do nothing about a LPA till the need arose - by when it would by definition be too late except for the more rigorous procedure, and phone firms etc would be playing up anyway.
(2) The firms don't always play ball even with LPAs, especially if stuck a decade or two back - I had to physically retrieve the primary document with 3-D seals (Scottish equivalent< to be more precise) from the family lawyer in the big city and bring it into the bank to enable Mrs C to deal with my father's bank account, and he was still alive and compos mentis!!
I hesitate to comment in detail on Monbiot's case, as I don't know the full facts.
If Monbiot has an LPA, then I think Vodafone are clearly in the wrong.
And if Monbiot does not have an LPA, he should not be "tearing Vodafone a new one".
I agree it needs trust between family members for an elderly person to sign an LPA.
But why should his father's LPA be needed to deal with a deceased mother's account?
Who is the executor?
If it is his father, due to an out of date will, that could get complicated.
Or if it was held by them jointly.
Clearly stated that it was the mother's phone account. And it's not as if Vodafone were being robbed of anything that didn't arise from the primary decease of the customer (i.e. no further need for their services).
On executry, that's a bit more complex - but there is no mention of that being an issue.
Just checked the ComRes data tables. Even with Labour +15 overall they are still 12 points down among the over-65s.
I don't know if there's any way for Labour to win back the votes of the oldsters, or for the Tories to lose them, but if it happened without a balancing move in another demographic it would make 1997 look like a close contest.
I don't know much about these things but googling it the first article that comes up from the NS says "The act she’s describing appears, on the face of it, to be a fairly serious violation of the Computer Misuse Act, and a potential offence that can carry a jail term."
I'm not trying to make a mountain out of a molehill but to me, at any rate, it speaks to the character of the individual involved. Would I try to hack into an opponent's website? No.
There are those who dismissed Johnson's antics as pranks and wheezes and look how that ended up.
To keep in in perspective though, if that's her own "prank" then it shouldn't disqualify her from high office.
When May admitted that she had, with malice aforethought, run across someone else's field of grain, I'm afraid that was the opening of Pandora's box.
With hindsight, she should have claimed to have opened Pandora's box in someone else's field of grain, as that would've been a perfectly good answer.
Something that perhaps ought to be in the back of Tory MPs' (if not members') minds: it may be useful to have a leader with whom the Lib Dems could do business, given that the next parliament could well be hung, with the Conservatives the largest party. It's an interesting question though not one the party can openly debate, as to do so admits failure.
Any candidate who becomes Conservative leader will have needed to be very firm on Brexit to have got the vote of the membership, so any Tory/Lib Dem parliamentary alliance may need to declare some sort of truce (whatever the then status quo is, not one step forward or back), which for the vast majority of us, could well be a breath of fresh air. Whether that could last in any real sense is another question.
Who among these candidates is 'coalitionable'? Some - Hunt, Javid, Shapps and Truss - were actually in government and even in cabinet with Sir Ed Davey back when he was a commoner.
If Braverman or Patel were to become leader, presumably the Tories are 'uncoalitionable'. I don't know about the others.
But that's the problem with such anecdotes. Thousands of people will have had dinner with Princess Anne. Possibly tens of thousands. But it sounds impressive.
With my previous anecdote, walking the coast; less than a hundred have done it in one go without a break (*); about the same again have done it in sections. It requires ten to twelve months of hard work, planning and dedication. Many times more people have summited Everest in one year than have walked the coast. But it does not sound as impressive.
(*) I was #25 or so. And yes, I'm sad enough to keep a record of them all...
None of them make the heart sing. But then Britain has become a giant Rotten Borough. We the great unwashed don't count and must wait to see what 200,000 Tory members inflict on us. Yay!
I really don't get why people moan about this so much. It's not the case that we the great unwashed are getting a choice taken away from us, we never had a choice. Whoever leads the majority party will get to be PM, and they've switched many times - as we've seen, they don't even have to ask their own members about it.
If you have a system wherein whoever has the confidence of the House is PM, then this is the natural result of that. A party leader could conceivably lose their seat even as the party wins, and we wouldn't re run the election. There's plenty I'd like to reform about our electoral systems, though not as much as some, but plenty of people don't want to change the system but also object to some aspects of it, like this one. There are sudden situations like scandal or death you wouldn't even want to take the time to ask all the public who should be the new party leader, and since it is ok sometimes I don't feel the outrage on occasions like this.
It all seems very cliche, like people suddenly converting to PR support after their side does badly on the seats to votes ratio.
Completely OT but even though I am not generally a big fan of George Monbiot, I am absolutely loving the way he is tearing a new one into Vodaphone for the way they have handled his parents.
Basically Mother died, father has dementia, Vodaphone refusing to cancel the account because the father cannot answer complex questions such as when the account was opened and what his wife's number was (he has dementia!), refusing to deal with Monbiot at all in spite of him submitting evidence and trying to work within their system and then setting debt collectors on the father when they cancelled the DD.
Monbiot is steaming and is not letting them back down now they have seen the bad publicity growing. Hopefully this will cost them a lot of customers.
Did Monbiot set up Lasting Power of Attorney for his father?
Presumably not, as with LPA, Monbiot would have the authority to take control of his father's affairs & deal with Vodafone.
If he did not set it up, then it is Monbiot's fault.
The rules are well known ... I had to obey them when my mother had dementia.
His father did not just get dementia overnight -- Monbiot had time to set up LPA.
Hmm.
(1) Don't underestimate how difficult some old folks can be, even if compos mentis. Sometimes they flatly refuse to be sensible. If dad did not want to play ball re setting up a LPA, then Monbiot could do nothing about a LPA till the need arose - by when it would by definition be too late except for the more rigorous procedure, and phone firms etc would be playing up anyway.
(2) The firms don't always play ball even with LPAs, especially if stuck a decade or two back - I had to physically retrieve the primary document with 3-D seals (Scottish equivalent< to be more precise) from the family lawyer in the big city and bring it into the bank to enable Mrs C to deal with my father's bank account, and he was still alive and compos mentis!!
I hesitate to comment in detail on Monbiot's case, as I don't know the full facts.
If Monbiot has an LPA, then I think Vodafone are clearly in the wrong.
And if Monbiot does not have an LPA, he should not be "tearing Vodafone a new one".
I agree it needs trust between family members for an elderly person to sign an LPA.
But why should his father's LPA be needed to deal with a deceased mother's account?
I would guess the account was jointly held by his mother & father.
When his mother died, the account was then in his father's name only.
But that's the problem with such anecdotes. Thousands of people will have had dinner with Princess Anne. Possibly tens of thousands. But it sounds impressive.
With my previous anecdote, walking the coast; less than a hundred have done it in one go without a break (*); about the same again have done it in sections. It requires ten to twelve months of hard work, planning and dedication. Many times more people have summited Everest in one year than have walked the coast. But it does not sound as impressive.
(*) I was #25 or so. And yes, I'm sad enough to keep a record of them all...
It would be more impressive if you'd had dinner with Keir Starmer
On the 20 MPs nominating them threshold for Tory leadership candidates to get on the ballot paper, only Sunak and Mordaunt as of now meet the threshold.
Tugendhat is just 1 short, the other have a lot of supporters to sign up in the next 24 hours before nominations close
Just checked the ComRes data tables. Even with Labour +15 overall they are still 12 points down among the over-65s.
I don't know if there's any way for Labour to win back the votes of the oldsters, or for the Tories to lose them, but if it happened without a balancing move in another demographic it would make 1997 look like a close contest.
But that's the problem with such anecdotes. Thousands of people will have had dinner with Princess Anne. Possibly tens of thousands. But it sounds impressive.
With my previous anecdote, walking the coast; less than a hundred have done it in one go without a break (*); about the same again have done it in sections. It requires ten to twelve months of hard work, planning and dedication. Many times more people have summited Everest in one year than have walked the coast. But it does not sound as impressive.
(*) I was #25 or so. And yes, I'm sad enough to keep a record of them all...
It would be more impressive if you'd had dinner with Keir Starmer
I'm boring enough to spend a year walking.
I'm not boring enough to have dinner with the most grey and boring person alive...
Comments
In some ways that is the mark of a PM: not how well they can plan, but the way they react when the plans go tits-up due to unforeseeable circumstances (not that I'm saying Boris did well with that).
A lot of these companies set up very stringent ID&V systems and limits on what password holders can do.
When the customer dies it becomes a nightmare.
That said a lot of companies now have specialist departments to deal with this, and power of attorney sections as well as transfer of ownership.
Vodafone's behaviour was typical about fifteen years ago, now it is an outlier.
O2, Sky, EE/BT, plenty of banks, all have human beings who can see the bigger picture.
The other complicating factor with tech companies is that you are dealing with high value items and it becomes slightly awkward when say 1 month into a 24 month contract the customer and a month ago they took out over 3 grands worth of hardware and not even paid their first bill.
Norway 0
And still in the first half....
Mine would be: "I spent a year walking the coast of the mainland UK".
Yes, that's the best I can say for myself...
😡😡😡😡😡
The answer was in fact mentioned upthread - Henry Addington, whose only previous post in politics was as Speaker.
Presumably not, as with LPA, Monbiot would have the authority to take control of his father's affairs & deal with Vodafone.
If he did not set it up, then it is Monbiot's fault.
The rules are well known ... I had to obey them when my mother had dementia.
His father did not just get dementia overnight -- Monbiot had time to set up LPA.
True story BTW...
(((Dan Hodges)))
@DPJHodges
·
38m
Replying to
@oflynnsocial
and
@MRothermere
Patrick, you are an eloquent advocate of the right wing cause. But you are also a seasoned Westminster observer. You cannot seriously believe Kemi Badenoch should be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in six weeks time. Come on mate. Get real.
Somebody end this madness now!
I'm not trying to make a mountain out of a molehill but to me, at any rate, it speaks to the character of the individual involved. Would I try to hack into an opponent's website? No.
There are those who dismissed Johnson's antics as pranks and wheezes and look how that ended up.
To keep in in perspective though, if that's her own "prank" then it shouldn't disqualify her from high office.
But given that "perfectly adequate, sincere, not too crazy" is going to be his whole pitch in 2024/5, that's to be expected.
https://twitter.com/dpjhodges/status/1546080634472484864
It's meant to avoid two pitfalls.
One is saying something so boring that it invites negative comment... "did you hear that tit Starmer saying the most interesting thing about himself was that he'd once being on a walking tour of Belgium? Boring w*nker".
The other is that it's so surprising that it invites negative comment... "did you hear that tit Starmer saying he'd once snorted coke off a Thai ladyboy with the late Denis Healy? Weirdo".
We will all be as rich as pirates
My mother really doesn't like me mentioning that.
Actually, reckon cat & S0'C got alone just fine, with zero hint of impropriety by either.
(1) Don't underestimate how difficult some old folks can be, even if compos mentis. Sometimes they flatly refuse to be sensible. If dad did not want to play ball re setting up a LPA, then Monbiot could do nothing about a LPA till the need arose - by when it would by definition be too late except for the more rigorous procedure, and phone firms etc would be playing up anyway.
(2) The firms don't always play ball even with LPAs, especially if stuck a decade or two back - I had to physically retrieve the primary document with 3-D seals (Scottish equivalent< to be more precise) from the family lawyer in the big city and bring it into the bank to enable Mrs C to deal with my father's bank account, and he was still alive and compos mentis!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemi_Badenoch
If the Tories try to make the next election about "woke" issues when people are worried to death about how they are gong to make ends meet then I suspect the opposition will wipe the floor with them and rightly so.
However, as he had been a de facto member of the cabinet for 14 years, and arguably the number two in the government on many occasions, it's a very technical distinction.
That person was also mentioned earlier today - Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, who was Commander in Chief of the Army before becoming Prime Minister.
Think that at certain point, behind the times morphs into willful misconduct. Esp. when it's emerging profit center.
Not in a race. I just walked back with him from the gallops, but he won the King's Stand Stakes at Ascot.
Rejoice. Rejoice. Rejoice.
The desire for speed is understandable, but they're picking a prime minister and it gives little time for the media to properly scrutinise a large roster of candidates, many of whom have never had much exposure to scrutiny
https://twitter.com/shippersunbound/status/1546581671373316097?s=21&t=nY6EwDINkQntetH0nL0krA
She was forced to make the change. She did not do it voluntarily. She is now misrepresenting the position, doubtless because she realises that it may be a problem.
It seems to me to be an unforced error. Why not tell the truth? This has been easily picked up by opponents. It is the sort of mistake that Boris has been making. If she can't get her story straight on this.....
My view is that both her and Kemi and Tugendhat are too inexperienced to be PM though they all have something to commend them, if only because they are relatively fresh faced. Though Mordaunt is not that fresh faced: a bit two faced if anything.
None of them make the heart sing. But then Britain has become a giant Rotten Borough. We the great unwashed don't count and must wait to see what 200,000 Tory members inflict on us. Yay!
If Monbiot has an LPA, then I think Vodafone are clearly in the wrong.
And if Monbiot does not have an LPA, he should not be "tearing Vodafone a new one".
I agree it needs trust between family members for an elderly person to sign an LPA.
We watched Beavis & Butthead Do America
Many years back I was a member of members club on Portman Square. The place was full of A listers. In casual conversation with a several of them, I demonstrated the vulnerability of their voicemail - this was before the big “phone hacking” scandal hit. All it was, was a stupid default pin. Technically, since I didn’t ask their specific permission to access their voicemail, before I showed them how unprotected it was….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derry_City_and_Strabane_District_Council
"I once stood for Parliament" or
"I once shook the hand of Jimmy Saville" ?
It isn't.
It's a good reason they should not make their leader, who will be PM, someone with very little experience, but the party could decide by picking names out of a hat.
Besides, absent a coronation the final two candidates will get plenty of scrutiny. Narrowing down the list is the party's job, why have the media scrutinise a whole bunch of candidates who are not going to be put to the members vote?
As I've explained, with that sort of "gotcha" question, you're just trying to avoid ridicule by giving an answer that opens you out to criticism from less political types. Nobody is going to be saying at the pub tonight either "I heard a really interesting thing about Starmer earlier..." or "I heard Starmer saying the most stupid thing earlier..."
As has been said, it's an adequate answer and, with gotcha questions, that's the best type of answer.
3.35 Penny Mordaunt
3.55 Rishi Sunak
8.2 Liz Truss
10 Tom Tugendhat
16.5 Kemi Badenoch
29 Jeremy Hunt
46 Sajid Javid
48 Priti Patel
50 Dominic Raab
50 Nadhim Zahawi
60 Suella Braverman
If it is his father, due to an out of date will, that could get complicated.
Or if it was held by them jointly.
But that's the problem with such anecdotes. Thousands of people will have had dinner with Princess Anne. Possibly tens of thousands. But it sounds impressive.
With my previous anecdote, walking the coast; less than a hundred have done it in one go without a break (*); about the same again have done it in sections. It requires ten to twelve months of hard work, planning and dedication. Many times more people have summited Everest in one year than have walked the coast. But it does not sound as impressive.
(*) I was #25 or so. And yes, I'm sad enough to keep a record of them all...
On executry, that's a bit more complex - but there is no mention of that being an issue.
I don't know if there's any way for Labour to win back the votes of the oldsters, or for the Tories to lose them, but if it happened without a balancing move in another demographic it would make 1997 look like a close contest.
Any candidate who becomes Conservative leader will have needed to be very firm on Brexit to have got the vote of the membership, so any Tory/Lib Dem parliamentary alliance may need to declare some sort of truce (whatever the then status quo is, not one step forward or back), which for the vast majority of us, could well be a breath of fresh air. Whether that could last in any real sense is another question.
Who among these candidates is 'coalitionable'? Some - Hunt, Javid, Shapps and Truss - were actually in government and even in cabinet with Sir Ed Davey back when he was a commoner.
If Braverman or Patel were to become leader, presumably the Tories are 'uncoalitionable'. I don't know about the others.
If you have a system wherein whoever has the confidence of the House is PM, then this is the natural result of that. A party leader could conceivably lose their seat even as the party wins, and we wouldn't re run the election. There's plenty I'd like to reform about our electoral systems, though not as much as some, but plenty of people don't want to change the system but also object to some aspects of it, like this one. There are sudden situations like scandal or death you wouldn't even want to take the time to ask all the public who should be the new party leader, and since it is ok sometimes I don't feel the outrage on occasions like this.
It all seems very cliche, like people suddenly converting to PR support after their side does badly on the seats to votes ratio.
When his mother died, the account was then in his father's name only.
Tugendhat is just 1 short, the other have a lot of supporters to sign up in the next 24 hours before nominations close
https://conservativehome.com/2022/07/11/next-tory-leader-whos-backing-whom-our-working-list/
Edit: I shagged his 17 year old daughter too, when I was 21.
Not sorry.
And what is happening to the JRM candidacy?
I'm not boring enough to have dinner with the most grey and boring person alive...