Simply awful Yougov poll for Sunak, worse even than the Comhome survey. Not only is he trounced by Mordaunt or Truss in the membership vote he even loses to Tugendhadt or Badenoch. He looks like another Portillo or David Miliband at this point not another Cameron or Blair.
Unless a major change he needs somehow to get Hunt into the last 2
Hunt won't be in the race for much longer.
Will there even be a race for much longer?
The way Sky are speaking, you'd expect Penny to be PM by the end of the week, by acclamation.
Question is whether Sunak would want to go through the members ballot if all the evidence is telling him he would lose it? Maybe the first ever incidence of the front runner conceding?!
The other time you know you are getting old is when some youngster says I love such and such new song, its a cover of some old song by x....and you have to tell them that was itself a cover of....
So true. That does work on us too though, I spent two decades thinking Always On My Mind was by the Pet Shop Boys.
A year or so ago I heard a 1990 cover of Strawberry Fields that gave me flashbacks to being a snotty teenager and absolutely insisting to my parents that it was *so very much better* than the boring old original, urgh!, eye-roll, eye-roll.
I remember that cover. Candyflip. It's excellent. Takes the already druggy original and makes it even dreamier and trippier, but with a better beat. Nothing wrong with that
Not to my taste, it sounds too close to the original for me.
I like covers that take a song and change its vibe.
There was a show on a few years ago, Stalker, that did this to good effect taking mostly upbeat 80s songs and using really creepy covers of them. Its amusing how many 80s pop songs you can do that to, take away the distinctive poppy 80s musical style, emphasise the words instead and you end up still with a good song but skin-crawling good instead of upbeat. Here's an example, a cover of Love is a Battlefield https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEG8dJVbuP8&list=PL3Wavy4uSV2g4LqE4Y4y2S5trDi_fBzlI&index=11
I am rather a fan of Nouvelle Vague, who specialise in Jazz style cover versions of punk and new wave hits. This is them doing Depeche Mode:
They even do a great cover of The Dead Kennedys hit Too Drunk to F***.
The 'Too Drunk..' cover is a thing of joy. Especially the singer giggling.
I'm a big fan of this sort of thing. One of my current favourites is Boss Hoss: cowboy versions of popular tunes. Here's their version of 'Hey Ya'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQVWXAlEUB8
4 Women 2 of White and Non White 4 Men 2 Non White 2 white
Go find another leadership contest in UK that is as diverse. He is a person who deserves to be spoken of in language that is defamatory. And to have a fox stuffed up his Kimino
Inch by inch the UK seems to be moving away from the more turbulent waters it was in a few weeks ago. Boris being booted has helped but there's also some sense in recent days that the Bank has finally woken up and will push bigger rate rises to combat inflation. Loads of chatter from all over the city around it too so hopefully it's true.
There's going to be a few more tough months IMO but then we'll start to see base effects kick in because energy costs had already begun to surge in late 2021 and all we'll be left with is the effect of weaker sterling (still substantial tbf) by the start of next year.
The next PM needs to get a handle on costs and get moving with huge supply side reform. Kemi gets it, the sticking plaster rebates are addressing the symptoms of inflation rather than the cause (not enough investment in electricity generation) and we need to get moving with solving our deep economic to unlock future growth and the nation's potential rather than just giving away minor one off rebates.
The Tories would do well to get Kemi in the final two so she gets a national platform to speak about her ideas.
My father is 87 and as kids we were always taught to take people as they come - race, sex, or sexuality. Even “trans”, and yes even when I was a kid there were one or two around.
He was born in Birkenhead and grew up in working class Gosport and left school at 14 or 15.
As far as I can tell I was very lucky, if one is to believe received opinion pretty much everyone back then was steeped in bigotry.
I think there has always been a wide range of views and the so-called "culture wars" have been going on for a long time. In my own family my two sets of grandparents were almost caricature versions of the two sides to the postwar debate (they all grew up in the 1920s, my grandfathers both served in the war). On my father's side, my grandfather was a communist when he was at Oxford, my grandmother came from a Welsh nonconformist background; they were active in the Labour Party and CND; they lived in the US for a bit and got involved in the Civil Rights movement. They had gay friends I think. My dad's best friend at school in the early 1950s was black. They were extremely unbigoted, early proponents of wokeness I suppose. On my mother's side, her parents grew up poor in Devonport but were both pretty gifted - my grandmother a very talented pianist, my grandfather an engineer. Neither went to university. My grandfather lived in Bermuda for a bit as a teenager where I think he picked up some fairly prejudiced views. He was pretty openly racist as well as being extremely right wing in general. I think my grandmother's views weren't so different although she was better at hiding them (my grandfather was quite often drunk). My grandfather allegedly told his neighbour that my wife was "as black as the ace of spades" after meeting her for the first time. On the other hand they were quite nice to her once they got to know her. They were certainly extremely prejudiced but I think that reflected the narrowness of their upbringing and a certain amount of bitterness that they had been held back by their working class origins, as they undoubtedly had been. Long and short, my family has been arguing about these "culture war" issues for decades, there is nothing new under the sun.
On the list of NHS disruptions, this has to down somewhere below whether they’ve got enough toilet roll for the week I suspect.
You suspect wrong.
Can you actually explain why, or are you simply going to loftily assert that this is a massive issue for the NHS & leave the rest of us to take you at your word?
The latter, I'm afraid. As it is confidential and quite sensitive, you'll have to take my word for it, and, if you have any sense, you will.
Do you expect it to become public knowledge in due course?
There is also the slight curiosity of Starmer going for Sunak at PMQs today.
What was the purpose of that? Was it to try and nix his chances on the basis that they are concerned about him? Or was it because Labour assume he is going to win and they are getting the attack lines in early?
To me the latter seems most likely but if that’s right it strikes me as a misreading of the situation. It may however had the unintended consequence of putting some Tory MPs off?
Or, because they want him to win, so they're trying to help him by engendering some tribal loyalty for him amongst Tory MPs and members.
Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQVWXAlEUB8
There's going to be a few more tough months IMO but then we'll start to see base effects kick in because energy costs had already begun to surge in late 2021 and all we'll be left with is the effect of weaker sterling (still substantial tbf) by the start of next year.
The next PM needs to get a handle on costs and get moving with huge supply side reform. Kemi gets it, the sticking plaster rebates are addressing the symptoms of inflation rather than the cause (not enough investment in electricity generation) and we need to get moving with solving our deep economic to unlock future growth and the nation's potential rather than just giving away minor one off rebates.
The Tories would do well to get Kemi in the final two so she gets a national platform to speak about her ideas.
On my father's side, my grandfather was a communist when he was at Oxford, my grandmother came from a Welsh nonconformist background; they were active in the Labour Party and CND; they lived in the US for a bit and got involved in the Civil Rights movement. They had gay friends I think. My dad's best friend at school in the early 1950s was black. They were extremely unbigoted, early proponents of wokeness I suppose.
On my mother's side, her parents grew up poor in Devonport but were both pretty gifted - my grandmother a very talented pianist, my grandfather an engineer. Neither went to university. My grandfather lived in Bermuda for a bit as a teenager where I think he picked up some fairly prejudiced views. He was pretty openly racist as well as being extremely right wing in general. I think my grandmother's views weren't so different although she was better at hiding them (my grandfather was quite often drunk). My grandfather allegedly told his neighbour that my wife was "as black as the ace of spades" after meeting her for the first time. On the other hand they were quite nice to her once they got to know her.
They were certainly extremely prejudiced but I think that reflected the narrowness of their upbringing and a certain amount of bitterness that they had been held back by their working class origins, as they undoubtedly had been.
Long and short, my family has been arguing about these "culture war" issues for decades, there is nothing new under the sun.