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Sunak remains favourite to succeed Truss as PM – politicalbetting.com
Sunak remains favourite to succeed Truss as PM – politicalbetting.com
I find this one hard to call as, judging by the betting, so do punters. Sunak has been favourite for so long but would he fail again in a leadership contest?
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Evening all
A gorgeous autumn afternoon backing losers at Windsor may not be Colorado but it's a world away from the machinations of Westminster.
I wonder the extent to which Conservative MPs now have buyers' remorse. Would a PM Mordaunt be in the same position as the current incumbent? It seems implausible - she came out swinging for her Prime Minister today and that display of "loyalty" won't go unnoticed.
Hunt did what we needed to do over the weekend and this morning (in concert with other factors) to stabilise and steady the markets but economically we seem in a different place from three weeks ago. As I said last evening, the Magic Money tree has been cut up and the stump burned - Prudence is back in the Presidential Suite and it seem the "compassionate Conservative" (a phrase I first heard used by George W Bush) is now in favour.
Whether the electorate will consider it compassionate or self-serving is another matter and the tone of Hunt's ominous warnings suggest prudence will dictate compassion is in short supply. This may not just be the reckoning for Kwarteng's absurdity but for the whole Covid response and post-Covid response.
Truss's behaviour today has been extraordinary - I cannot imagine any other Prime Minister who wouldn't have tried to come out swinging but to use Mordaunt as a human shield suggests a diminution in extremis. After just six weeks, her meteoric descent will likely end more in the manner of Chicxulub but whether the Conservative Party itself can survive the impact is the longer-term question.
Not laying Hunt at the moment.
StillWaters said:
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From 1936 : Vote Hogg to save your bacon
SSI - Believe the year was 1938, and the slogan referred to Hogg's support for the Munich Agreement just "negotiated" by Neville Chamberlain
from Hogg's wiki page:
In 1938, Hogg was chosen as a candidate for Parliament in the Oxford by-election. This election took place shortly after the Munich Agreement and the Labour candidate Patrick Gordon Walker was persuaded to step down to allow a unified challenge to the Conservatives; A. D. Lindsay, the Master of Balliol College fought as an 'Independent Progressive' candidate. Hogg narrowly defeated Lindsay, who was said to be horrified by the popular slogan of "Hitler wants Hogg".
Hogg voted against Neville Chamberlain in the Norway Debate of May 1940, and supported Winston Churchill. . . .
https://twitter.com/dizzy_thinks/status/1582084551270338561
Investors are neither legally nor morally obligated to bankroll the government.
What does Farage suggest? Laws that require people to buy British government bonds?
For that reason I think Penny is the best fit for them. Has the best chance of giving them a 200-240 seat result IMHO.
Another, who backed Truss for the leadership, said: “It would be mad if she doesn’t go.”
https://www.ft.com/content/5c4827ab-9882-4cbb-a2ba-049dc5f363bb
In my view the hack doesn't work, the Tories have to choose which way they want to go and deal with the consequences.
The PM needs to communicate and speak well. It is hard to see past Mordaunt.
Sunak gets FS.
https://twitter.com/michael66880048/status/1582050778360950784/photo/1
I wasn't that impressed with Mordaunt but she won loyalty points and may yet emerge from this debacle with her status enhanced within the Conservative Party.
As for Hunt, he demolished his predecessor's proposals and has offered almost nothing - he's not making hostages to fortune admittedly but he will have to stand at the Despatch Box and say which taxes are going up and where the £40 billion (or whatever) of spending cuts are going to fall and I suspect the leaves of his new-found popularity will begin to be eaten away by the caterpillars of reality.
But, back in the real world, what is actually left of the Truss premiership, apart from the woman herself?
She wasn’t elected for her empathy, or her communication skills. It was to boldly cut taxes and usher in a new era of growth. That’s all gone.
The grown ups in the Tory party need to take back control and come up with a clear strategy for steering themselves — and us — through the hard months ahead.
It seems possible that there is a silencing operation going on.
I think that something must be up.
The first great tragedy here is that the party wasted the Summer, when they had the opportunity to work out what they felt about Boris and the future. The second is that the rapid collapse of Truss means that they now have roughly zero time to work out the answers to the questions they ducked last time.
But when I say managerial there will be some control over direction whoever leads - but hands will be tied somewhat and it will probably be a matter of what the emphasis is. It is going to have to be someone who believes in sound money (and can sell themselves that way) and who can sell a vision.
No.
So she IS going to go before the GE. The only question is when. The obvious answer to that question is 'now'.
Firstly, What does Penny believe in?
Penny had so much wind in her sails going into the leadership contest, but she sank very early on once the whistle started the hustings, not just because she lacks charisma and presentation skills, but because she was a policy vacuum whilst those around her came for a proper fight over the soul of the party. Can you recall her launch event, in the debates what were her positions on issues defining and dividing the Conservative Party today, the main points of her sales pitch?
Truss won, because she at least had a platform, and the (party) electorate like it. Planning laws and other structural rigidities keep Britain poorer than it should be, our merchant banks made us great once and the City can again, our advantage lies in professional services, ease of doing business and a capital city on which all the world converges.
For example, does Penny Mourdant believe in levelling up, or does she see it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions, can ever be levelled?
Secondly, todays smug and irritating performance from Penny Mourdant, made up from just party political bullshit and spin, will wear thin very quickly if that’s her usual modus operandi from the very top of a governing party. From her Willy Speech, her bizarre Speech in the US, through the leadership contest to today, Penny has never shown Primeministerial vision or gravitas.
The prospect of Penny as PM won’t frighten the opposition one bit. But more importantly, can she steer the Tory party out of its factional infighting and unite them around an ethos?
Imo the answer is a clear and rather obvious no.
Madness piled on madness. And Tories say "nothing to see here" as the poll deficit tunnels its way through the earth towards Java.
Farage should be ashamed. I'm not one of those who thinks everything he says is nonsense but he must know what he's saying is absurd. Debt to GDP is high, debt interest is quite high and you can't show plans that have debt to GDP % falling in the medium term. There's no mystery here.
They will know their expectation of advancement will be zero under any other leader - I imagine the public dismissal of Jacob Rees-Mogg will probably be a 5% Labour to Conservative swing on its own.
It's rock versus hard place though. One option is to leave Truss in charge, let her become the symbol for everything that goes wrong and then, scapegoat-like, she is sent into the wilderness in the hope the rest of the party will be absolved of the sins and can continue.
Politics doesn't work like that, though. Dodging the bullet won't work - one day the electorate will want the opportunity to send the Conservatives publicly and comprehensively into Opposition and it's something the Tories will just have to accept rather than try to squirm and avoid.
Changing Prime Ministers again looks bad on so many levels - of course, Rome went through four Emperors in 68 AD and still went on to conquer large parts of Europe but that's probably not the best analogy. To lose a Prime Minister through ill-health (Eden, MacMillan) is one thing, for one to retire (Wilson) is one thing but to defenestrate yet another Prime Minister after Thatcher, May and Johnson just looks sloppy.
I was nearer to Perth when Hunt gave his statement and got nearly all of it.
He was good , I thought. After the pantomime of the last couple of weeks it was nice to hear an adult again. Reeves wasn’t great. It was almost as if she was befuddled by the number of points she wanted to make and she ended up somewhat scatter gun and incoherent.
If the markets remain calm tomorrow it might be a good day to move Truss on and put together a real team.
Tory MPs also elimated Hunt in the first round of the contest, a strong candidate for the job. Hence, I think that the MPs should take a substantial part of the blame. It is said that plane crashes rarely happen due to a single cause, but due to a combination of several factors. The same thing has happened here. The candidates, the MPs, the party membership, the outgoing PM, and the current political situation (Brexit, COVID, Ukraine, 12 years in power) all contributed to this disaster.
Her performance today was rockstar stuff. Note perfect on the stickiest wicket since the Somme, hush ma big metaphor. Only attack line is the "hiding under a desk" line, and that's from people who have just read the quote and don't realise she was rebutting someone else's suggestion.
Nobody con or lab is doing beliefy stuff for the foreseeable few years after the object lesson thoughtfully provided by Kwaz n Liz in where beliefiness gets you. Boring administrative competence is the order of the day.
https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1582098068354519040?s=20&t=pAaHO2IC7bBRXlBMb8-fcQ
The trouble with Labour is it doesn't matter how good Starmer is, who I personally like quite a lot, the party is full of people who fundamentally had no problem putting Corbyn in charge. That is as unpalatable to me as it would be voting for a hypothetical good GOP candidate knowing that everyone around him was wearing a stupid red cap a year or so earlier.
The country realising its up a cul de sac and lost, and the governing party tearing itself in multiple directions over which ethos gets the country out of this mess?
The job spec for the next prime minister is
sane.
Interesting to see if Hunt sacks him before Truss is out
Whereas in reality, the Conservatives are full of people who fundamentally had no problem putting Truss in charge.
I'm not objective - I don't pretend to be. I'm not a supporter of the Conservative Party. However, when they do something right, it's only right to note that. As the Government, they should be held to account and to proper scrutiny. The last 6 weeks have been wasted in terms of moving the country forward.
Hunt will be painfully aware of the gap in the finances and if he wants to be the only adult in the room, fine. Nobody in the Conservative Party thanked Ken Clarke for giving Labour a good economic start in 1997 - nobody will thank Jeremy Hunt if the heavy lifting in terms of restoring the public finances is accomplished before Starmer and Reeves take over.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1582044513274822656.html
for all the reasons I listed, Penny won’t really frighten opposition all that much.
But you are missing the point Mark - as I posted in the last thread and in the post above, the definition here isn’t what frightens Labour going into the next election, but what ethos unites the Conservative Party and steers it in the right direction. That’s the more important measurement for the replacement of Truss. It wasn’t just craziness that drove the Truss government to attack and trash the Tory governments since 2010, including that of Boris, it was a search for answers to the UKs underlying problems, search for realistic and achievable policies, not just vacuous slogans like “levelling up”.
A push for growth isn’t such a bad idea right now, is it?
Lots of chatter around in Tory circles speculating about the degree to which Sunakites with City links may have deliberately stoked the market run against Truss/Kwarteng.
https://twitter.com/oflynnsocial/status/1582095411107414016?s=20&t=pAaHO2IC7bBRXlBMb8-fcQ
Politically that won't be much fun. But less fun will be blackouts when people are trying to cook tea for their kids.
Funny old world.
Penny can do human, and as third place behind the defeated Sunak and discredited Truss is in a strong position, and she has ambition.
Corbyn was clearly a reluctant leader, and in many ways the Labour offer was much more conservative than his personal views. John McDonnell was clearly the brains of the operation, and was much more pragmatic - if anything desperate to be seen as unlikely to rock the boat too much.
Trump was an absolute megalomaniac - and nearly everyone who worked closely with him, has at some point suggested he was a dangerous, unpredictable lunatic.
The vast majority of Con supporters want nothing to do with such trash but they are out there - just like Lab has the Corbynites