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The leadership betting remains stable in spite of developments – politicalbetting.com
The leadership betting remains stable in spite of developments – politicalbetting.com
The above betting chart shows just how stable the betting has become with Truss barely moving off a 90% chance since the start of the month.
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Done my bit for your 250-1 shot. Sadly, going to be a losing bet because ...God knows why. Truss is an order of magnitude poorer on every metric.
The 1922 set the rules and the timetable - is there an argument for something shorter?
The 2015 LD leadership election lasted from May 8th to July 16th so just over two months. Johnson resigned on 7th July and the result will be September 5th so comparable.
If you have membership involvement and hustings and rallies for party groups it all takes time - it's called democracy. There's an argument for disenfranchising the membership if you want a quick result but as we're likely to see here, the choice of the MPs doesn't always reflect the choice of the Party membership.
Boris Johnson, for all his many faults, managed to last three years and won a general election before accumulating sufficient political damage to see him defenestrated.
For what it's worth, I expect I'll vote Sunak, but I don't think Truss will be a poor PM - albeit given the exceptionally difficult period we're facing, it might be easy to argue after the fact that she was. However, I do agree that her current difficulties indicate she is likely to prove a poor campaigner, and I am expecting Starmer to be PM following the next GE.
For a dark, moody, sexy, witty, stirring period drama, try BECOMING ELIZABETH
It's about the children of the recently dead Henry VIII - Edward, Mary, Elizabeth - and how they jostle for power and/or try to save themselves. It's really good, and smart
Is there any modern precedent for a Prime Minister to be installed without a General Election and to be ousted without having contested a General Election as Prime Minister? I can't think of one since 1918 - might have been one earlier of course.
1.11 Liz Truss 90%
9.6 Rishi Sunak 10%
Next Conservative leader
1.11 Liz Truss 90%
9.6 Rishi Sunak 10%
Have you seen Thirteen Lives? Very good imo, despite some dodgy (well awful) British regional accent attempts.
Aside from being a cracking good tale, it's a telling reminder of the enormous soft power influence that Britain still wields (despite Tory attempts to trash it).
Compare May and Brown's coronations and how that turned out for them at the next general election
May resigned too... Thatcher resigned too... you can see where this is going.
But, thinking of music, this is a fine example of raw masculine genius:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccyHT1sFmsg
No me neither. One can only assume that she believes in fantasy economics.
This won't end well. For the nation.
It is like an advert for stoical, laconic Britishness. And Ron Howard is still an excellent storyteller
SPOILER COMING:
Mind you, he had good material. What a remarkable story! I had no idea they anesthetised the Thai boys
Also- what we've seen of Truss is that she is pretty poor- big ideas are proposed and withdrawn because the public misunderstood them, foolish stuff is said into still-live microphones. It hasn't affected the state of the race, because the relevant electorate Just Don't Want Rishi.
They should find a way to truncate it. Move on
Much as I deeply disagree with PB Tories on most topics I totally respect that they represent the small and ever-diminishing 'sane wing' of the Tory party.
I've been feeling pessimistic recently and I think China will invade/blockade Taiwan and then the world gets a little bit more screwed up.
Johnson was an excellent campaigner - he had shown that in the London Mayoral election. I doubted he needed much preparation for the GE campaign - it's also much easier to campaign when you have a clear poll lead and your opponents are in disarray.
That Corp tax rise has to go. That NI rise has to go.
I don't want someone that Roger thinks of like Tony Blair as a Tory leader....
https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1557452163844022275
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
1) Boris won a GE and by a huge margin compared to past Conservative performance for many years.
2) Boris had huge charisma.
3) Boris was still performing respectably in opinion polls compared to typical mid term performance.
Truss doesn't have 1) or 2). And it's entirely possible she won't have 3) either.
Two years is a long time. If she performs badly, is miles behind in the polls and shows no signs of any improvement then she stands every chance of being booted out next summer.
https://twitter.com/bealejonathan/status/1557469165627260933
And two of his three immediate predecessors suffered the same fate.
Since Salisbury retired in 1902 leaders of the Conservative Party have usually not ended well, no matter who or what they were.
After being deported from Turkey after serving sentence.
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
She might not be sure
It is possible that she may be in luck though. Both German and US inflation figures were better this month. A turn or just a pause? Time will tell.
I see too that Germany has announced €10billion in tax cuts to help families. Higher personal allowances, increased children's allowances and raising of thresholds to curb fiscal drag. Lizzy take note.
IIRC he is the only Prime Minister to resign when leading in the polls.
Online location is kind of my thing (I'm keynoting a conference next week if anyone fancies a few days in Florence...). w3w has seen a vast amount of, IMO justified, scepticism from people in the field. I won't bore you with all the details because I would rather be drinking my cider, but the crux of it all is that it's a copyrighted algorithm, therefore w3w are within their rights to charge for use of it. Going all-in on w3w, then finding that they decide to start charging for use of it a few years down the road - probably not end-users, but major clients such as courier companies - is not a good thing.
If you look at their published accounts (as plenty of people have done) they are verging on the delusional. Turnover is £458,000. Annual loss: £16m. I believe that's technically known as "burning money".
Ultimately the £16m comes from the VCs who've invested in w3w (as did the £14m the year before, and the year before that, and...). VCs do not invest without some idea of their exit strategy. w3w is evidently not going to be profitable in its own right any time soon. The only exit that makes any sense is a sale to someone with deep pockets. There are only a small number of companies who I can see being interested - Google, Facebook, and perhaps most likely, Amazon. Mmm, a copyrighted location system controlled by Amazon. What could possibly go wrong.
Anyway, booze.
Those who are in a position to consider removing a prime minister don't think to themselves "We can't do it before the next election because there's no precedent for that, given that they were installed without fighting one, and even less so given that they took office on the same day of the week as Andrew Bonar Law."
Incidentally the sturgeon moon is nearly to the full, and mighty impressive it is too. Must be near its perigee to be that large.
Something is very afoot.
https://what3words.com/lacking.imagination.dude
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
Talking of which, does ADH (lost, but somehow forgiven and allowed to be a fairly reasonable Foreign Secretary afterwards) have the best "I was Conservative leader and survived" story to tell?
https://what3words.com/tiresome.daylong.enthusiasm
All this stuff about apps is all in hindsight, if anyone actually used a feature phone at the time you’ll know it had nothing. The UI was terrible and a ringtone cost like £5.
Was the first iPhone perfect, no. And the 3G was a big improvement. But it was not a pile of wank.
I was one of the earliest Gmail testers. It was also not a pile of wank.
Creativity isn’t just writing trash airport fiction, however lucrative that can be.
See, tho, it is fun. This is one reason people are embracing it, and I don't think techie types quite understand that
But the spiral of "they can't get any more bonkers, can they?" feels like it has further it could go.
But that was the first time I've ever used it and the old fashioned vague description would probably have worked just as well. I'm not entirely sure what vital niche it fills. It's an admirably creative solution to a problem I personally have never had.
But I suppose lots of things fall into that category. Things don't have to be useful to me personally in order to be useful.
Three words is a genius way of describing every single 3 sq m place on earth. Three words!!
https://what3words.com/lakes.flames.riots
https://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-62492374