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Is Johnson right about the polls just before he resigned last July – politicalbetting.com

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  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,217

    Nigelb said:

    Scott_xP said:

    According to The Times, Rishi Sunak is facing mounting pressure from allies of Boris Johnson to block the appointment of a senior civil servant as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

    The absolutely worst thing Rishi could do is block the appointment.

    He can't, anyway.
    At most he can advise a longer delay. And an excessive delay would be contested.
    Good morning

    Yes - the BBC said the same just now

    I understand the cabinet office have seized her phone and are securing documents, as she has been present at many cabinet meetings

    There is no doubt the Johnson supporters, including the mail with their over the top front page, are going to use this to undermine the case against him no matter how much the appointment is defended

    Not sure the timing of this was politically sensible, as it would have made sense to do this after the privileges committee report
    They'd squeal even more then.
    If they don't trust her report, it ought to be a relatively simple matter to verify the facts.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 49,411
    kle4 said:

    TimS said:

    IanB2 said:

    I don't think there's anything to worry about regarding the Gray appointment in terms of ethics or the rules, but politically it's a bit of a gaffe by Starmer if he didn't consider how it could be seen (or alternatively a very cunning way of reminding us all about Partygate by getting it back into the news....)

    And the Tories are hypocritical on this anyway. They have regularly plucked people from public sector roles straight into government - particularly from the BBC - and put people with Tory links straight into prominent public sector roles.
    I’m not sure the first is an issue?

    Re any senior civil servant effectively joining the senior management of the opposition - isn’t the issue that she has been privy to confidential information that the government has a right to expect to be kept confidential?
    By that logic no senior civil servant would ever be allowed to join or work for a political party after they retire or decide to leave the service.

    People are going nuts over this story, and at the worst end its clearly out of excitement for a way to defend saint Boris.

    But whilst the suddeness of the appointment doesn't look great and that's why it was a poor move at this time, a lot of people are just severely overreacting to the principle of it.

    People are allowed to work for parties even if they were high up in the civil service. If it had been 5 years from now no one but obsessives would care. Its just distractingly close to an event she was in the news for.
    This comes back to the general point about Civil Servants, “Purdah”, and taking jobs elsewhere.

    There have been some cases, over the years, which were unpleasant. Civil servant X selected private firm Y for contract. Contract turns into a long running disaster for government, money spinner for Y. Civil Servant then gets big job at Y.

    There have also been reverse cases.

    So the idea came up of blocking civil servants from going to some jobs for a period of time.

    The counter argument, which has some validity, is that ex civil servants have valuable knowledge on how to work with government - without that knowledge, doing contracts is a lot harder.

    Like many things, it is impossible to produce a simple set of rules that cover all cases. Humans, eh?
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,580

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Boris tells Sunak and Hunt to slash corporation tax to Irish levels and reverse the 6% corporation tax rise they plan.

    He also comes out in opposition to British Museum Chairman George Osborne's plans to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/03/02/boris-johnson-calls-corporation-tax-cut-irish-levels-fresh-challenge/

    Stating that the Elgin Marbles belong in London is a bit like saying the Crown Jewels belong in Athens!

    The British Museum = Biggest Stolen Goods Warehouse in the World!
    I think that's Boris's point. If the BM (or any museum for that matter) obliges itself to 'give everything back', it's not a museum, it's a room.
    Indeed, loan exhibits abroad but if every major museum only displayed objects from the country it was located in there wouldn't be a lot of exhibits left in them
    The Parthenon still exists, so the Marbles belong there.
    All the places that all the exhibits in all the museums in the world came from still exist.
    Not in the respect Sunil is talking about. The Elgin Marbles are literally fixtures ripped off the walls of an ancient building that is still there.

    In most cases, the item is either by its nature moveable, or the context in which it was displayed either gone or massively changed.

    It's objectively ludicrous - even if one attaches no blame to Elgin personally and thinks it all legal etc - that the Marbles are in Bloomsbury rather than an ancient building which they were literally part of and which (I'll repeat) is still effing there.
    There's another side to this that I find interesting, and that's the soft power of artefacts.

    A few years back, my son was fascinated by terracotta warriors and Easter Island heads. He was a bit too young to take him up to the Liverpool terracotta warrior exhibition in 2018, but last year we went to a tiny (but brilliant) 'fake' Terracotta Warrior exhibition in Dorchester, of all places, which he loved. (There's a fake Tutankhamun exhibition just up the road as well).

    This isn't relevant to the marbles, but I wonder if having exhibits around the world actually helps the original country? Does have an Easter Island head in the BM create more knowledge and interest about/in Easter Island? Do all the exhibits of Ancient Egypt in local museums, of dusty mummies and strange inscriptions, actually create generations of people who are interested in Egypt and its history, and therefore more likely to travel there?

    Would the world be richer if every ancient artefact was in its original place, or poorer? (Leaving aside issues if where an 'original' place is)?

    This is not an argument for musuems keeping foreign artefacts: the same sort of effect may be achieved by travelling exhibitions. But I reckon there's a massive soft power in it - especially for small places like Easter Island.
    That's a good point but I guess there is an important distinction between lending out artefacts of one's own volition and having them plundered by some Victoria cad and not returned.
    People are also inclined to lend you their stuff when you have a gun to their head, in some cases.
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 17,001

    The first polls following the Windsor unknotting have been published. Both show improved votes for the Conservatives. PeoplePolling have C on 24% (+4%) and Techne have C on 29% (+2%).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election

    Which is the other 5D chess aspect here.

    Rishi wanted to be basking in the warm glow of his genuine achievement. That story has been rather overtaken by events.

    (I suspect the timing is driven more by government-in-waiting aspects than political optics. Let's say six months gardening leave is reasonable, that takes us to September and we really are in the GE run-up.)
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,662

    boulay said:

    Foxy said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Love today's Daily Heil front page. The evil Starmer forced Number 10 aides to bring suitcases of wine into Downing Street so that they could have another kareoke party. Who knew?

    Supposedly the attack line on Starmer has been Keith! The donkey man so boring that you'd fall asleep if you spoke to him. Now suddenly he is Blofeld, a man with huge power and agents everywhere, dastardly pulling the strings and setting up conspiracies.

    Keith Donkey brought down Corbyn with a manufactured conspiracy, now apparently he also brought down Johnson with an entirely different conspiracy which reached into the heart of the government machine during lock down. Imagine what he will do to the EU and Biden etc when he is elected PM? Blackmailing the UN for £100,000,000,000,000,000 or else he will fire the Crust-o-Matic Doomsday Earthquake machine he's had Ben Houchen build on Teesside.

    @mikeysmith
    Your occasional reminder that Sue Gray only did the Partygate inquiry because Simon Case had to pull out because he'd been accused of having one of the bloody parties in his office.

    She was appointed to the probe by - that's right folks - Boris Johnson.
    And she didn't investigate many incidents, such as the ABBA party. So ideal for when a whitewash is needed.

    She didn't investigate ABBA because she was too busy doing the hypnosis sessions on Ben Houchen. Big Ben thinks he is removing money and control from local councils and handing both it and public money to his friends in an every week in Private Eye corruption probe scandal. But no - Keith Donkey has had him brainwashed and he is building the Death Machine at Teesworks which PM Starmer will use to blackmail the UN.

    It sounds incredible. But it more convincing than the Daily Mail front page!
    I have absolutely no issue with Sue Gray going to work for Labour, have no issue with her investigations as everyone can see there were parties and it’s disingenuous for any Tory to claim that Boris was hard done by.

    My problem is that Labour should probably have not announced this until after the Standards committee had rogered Boris as I fear that Boris and his outriders will use this to muddy the waters and allow another stab in the back story to build when it was starting to look that he was fading into the background and that Standards would be the stake in his heart.

    If it helps Boris then Labour have made an error in timing if not the actual act.
    I think there are two things here -

    - Nothing illegal, no standards broken, not dubious. In fact completely inside all laws, rules, guidelines.
    - Bad optics
    There's a couple of other, minor side issues here.

    *) Labour are potentially making themselves a hostage to fortune. If there were contacts between Labour and Gray during the inquiry, it could be insinuated that a deal had been done.

    *) It sends a message: get the 'right' result in an inquiry, and the side might hire you (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). I'm unconvinced that's a good thing, especially after the Shami Chakrabarti scandal.

    Which leads to a question; if Gray had cleared Johnson, would she still have been hired by Labour?

    IMV Labour were perfectly right in offering the job; I'm unsure Gray was wise to accept it.
    Did Gray get the "right" result? IIRC her report was a bit of a damp squib - she refused to even look at some of the allegations, presented a load of uncontested facts about the partying and basically said that what happened wasn't great. To put it another way, which parts of her report do Tories now think were factually inaccurate or suggestive of anti-Tory bias?
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 49,411
    kle4 said:

    kle4 said:

    HYUFD said:

    Most UK voters and most 2019 Conservative voters think Starmer will keep the State the same size. Most 2019 Labour voters though think Starmer will grow the State. They can't both be right?

    https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1631253054845509633?t=GFaU_6UG4fXK-BrYoKwIEA&s=19

    I don't think the public really grasp the question. Grow it how, in what area, all parts or just overall so some bits still stay the same?
    Spending more money on the courts, for example, would be growing the public sector to the advantage of all of us. Except possibly those likely to be convicted!
    Probably even them - speedier justice, even if they'd rather not face justice.
    Magistrates are cheap, though the Labour Party is hard wired to dislike them.

    The idea of replacing them with judges comes up from time to time. This would require a fuckton of judges. Which would mean a massive number of 6 figure jobs for lawyers…
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 121,974
    edited March 2023

    The first polls following the Windsor unknotting have been published. Both show improved votes for the Conservatives. PeoplePolling have C on 24% (+4%) and Techne have C on 29% (+2%).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election

    Well those new polls at least get the Tories up to about 100 to 150 seats rather than the 50 PP were forecasting in their last poll
  • Nigelb said:

    Scott_xP said:

    According to The Times, Rishi Sunak is facing mounting pressure from allies of Boris Johnson to block the appointment of a senior civil servant as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

    The absolutely worst thing Rishi could do is block the appointment.

    He can't, anyway.
    At most he can advise a longer delay. And an excessive delay would be contested.
    Good morning

    Yes - the BBC said the same just now

    I understand the cabinet office have seized her phone and are securing documents, as she has been present at many cabinet meetings

    There is no doubt the Johnson supporters, including the mail with their over the top front page, are going to use this to undermine the case against him no matter how much the appointment is defended

    Not sure the timing of this was politically sensible, as it would have made sense to do this after the privileges committee report
    I'm not sure that Labour will be too upset if Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Right now he is a bigger threat to Sunak than to Starmer. And if the Tories want us all to talk about Partygate again, that sounds great, be my guest!
    To be honest I expected a response along those lines, but Johnson is over and Sunak will take the party into GE 24

    This move will muddy the water and if Starmer had a good political antenna he would have done this after the privileges report

  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,580
    Nigelb said:

    boulay said:

    Foxy said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Love today's Daily Heil front page. The evil Starmer forced Number 10 aides to bring suitcases of wine into Downing Street so that they could have another kareoke party. Who knew?

    Supposedly the attack line on Starmer has been Keith! The donkey man so boring that you'd fall asleep if you spoke to him. Now suddenly he is Blofeld, a man with huge power and agents everywhere, dastardly pulling the strings and setting up conspiracies.

    Keith Donkey brought down Corbyn with a manufactured conspiracy, now apparently he also brought down Johnson with an entirely different conspiracy which reached into the heart of the government machine during lock down. Imagine what he will do to the EU and Biden etc when he is elected PM? Blackmailing the UN for £100,000,000,000,000,000 or else he will fire the Crust-o-Matic Doomsday Earthquake machine he's had Ben Houchen build on Teesside.

    @mikeysmith
    Your occasional reminder that Sue Gray only did the Partygate inquiry because Simon Case had to pull out because he'd been accused of having one of the bloody parties in his office.

    She was appointed to the probe by - that's right folks - Boris Johnson.
    And she didn't investigate many incidents, such as the ABBA party. So ideal for when a whitewash is needed.

    She didn't investigate ABBA because she was too busy doing the hypnosis sessions on Ben Houchen. Big Ben thinks he is removing money and control from local councils and handing both it and public money to his friends in an every week in Private Eye corruption probe scandal. But no - Keith Donkey has had him brainwashed and he is building the Death Machine at Teesworks which PM Starmer will use to blackmail the UN.

    It sounds incredible. But it more convincing than the Daily Mail front page!
    I have absolutely no issue with Sue Gray going to work for Labour, have no issue with her investigations as everyone can see there were parties and it’s disingenuous for any Tory to claim that Boris was hard done by.

    My problem is that Labour should probably have not announced this until after the Standards committee had rogered Boris as I fear that Boris and his outriders will use this to muddy the waters and allow another stab in the back story to build when it was starting to look that he was fading into the background and that Standards would be the stake in his heart.

    If it helps Boris then Labour have made an error in timing if not the actual act.
    I think there are two things here -

    - Nothing illegal, no standards broken, not dubious. In fact completely inside all laws, rules, guidelines.
    - Bad optics
    There's a couple of other, minor side issues here.

    *) Labour are potentially making themselves a hostage to fortune. If there were contacts between Labour and Gray during the inquiry, it could be insinuated that a deal had been done.

    *) It sends a message: get the 'right' result in an inquiry, and the side might hire you (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). I'm unconvinced that's a good thing, especially after the Shami Chakrabarti scandal.

    Which leads to a question; if Gray had cleared Johnson, would she still have been hired by Labour?

    IMV Labour were perfectly right in offering the job; I'm unsure Gray was wise to accept it.
    I think such contacts quite unlikely.
    And why shouldn't she accept the role ?

    The idea that Labour influenced the enquiry is so utterly risible that only a complete fool like Dorries might actually believe it.
    So about 1/3 of the parliamentary party and probably a higher proportion of the membership.

    If even 'sensible' MPs or government ministers start playing along - "I'm sure it's fine but I understand the concerns, it raises questions" - then we can probably regard that as a sign they think the party's support will tank if Boris is punished, and they see this as a way out.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 49,411
    kle4 said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Boris tells Sunak and Hunt to slash corporation tax to Irish levels and reverse the 6% corporation tax rise they plan.

    He also comes out in opposition to British Museum Chairman George Osborne's plans to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/03/02/boris-johnson-calls-corporation-tax-cut-irish-levels-fresh-challenge/

    Stating that the Elgin Marbles belong in London is a bit like saying the Crown Jewels belong in Athens!

    The British Museum = Biggest Stolen Goods Warehouse in the World!
    I think that's Boris's point. If the BM (or any museum for that matter) obliges itself to 'give everything back', it's not a museum, it's a room.
    Indeed, loan exhibits abroad but if every major museum only displayed objects from the country it was located in there wouldn't be a lot of exhibits left in them
    The Parthenon still exists, so the Marbles belong there.
    All the places that all the exhibits in all the museums in the world came from still exist.
    Not in the respect Sunil is talking about. The Elgin Marbles are literally fixtures ripped off the walls of an ancient building that is still there.

    In most cases, the item is either by its nature moveable, or the context in which it was displayed either gone or massively changed.

    It's objectively ludicrous - even if one attaches no blame to Elgin personally and thinks it all legal etc - that the Marbles are in Bloomsbury rather than an ancient building which they were literally part of and which (I'll repeat) is still effing there.
    There's another side to this that I find interesting, and that's the soft power of artefacts.

    A few years back, my son was fascinated by terracotta warriors and Easter Island heads. He was a bit too young to take him up to the Liverpool terracotta warrior exhibition in 2018, but last year we went to a tiny (but brilliant) 'fake' Terracotta Warrior exhibition in Dorchester, of all places, which he loved. (There's a fake Tutankhamun exhibition just up the road as well).

    This isn't relevant to the marbles, but I wonder if having exhibits around the world actually helps the original country? Does have an Easter Island head in the BM create more knowledge and interest about/in Easter Island? Do all the exhibits of Ancient Egypt in local museums, of dusty mummies and strange inscriptions, actually create generations of people who are interested in Egypt and its history, and therefore more likely to travel there?

    Would the world be richer if every ancient artefact was in its original place, or poorer? (Leaving aside issues if where an 'original' place is)?

    This is not an argument for musuems keeping foreign artefacts: the same sort of effect may be achieved by travelling exhibitions. But I reckon there's a massive soft power in it - especially for small places like Easter Island.
    That's a good point but I guess there is an important distinction between lending out artefacts of one's own volition and having them plundered by some Victoria cad and not returned.
    People are also inclined to lend you their stuff when you have a gun to their head, in some cases.
    You can more with a broadside of 68lbrs and a kind word, than you can with just a kind word.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,580

    boulay said:

    Foxy said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Love today's Daily Heil front page. The evil Starmer forced Number 10 aides to bring suitcases of wine into Downing Street so that they could have another kareoke party. Who knew?

    Supposedly the attack line on Starmer has been Keith! The donkey man so boring that you'd fall asleep if you spoke to him. Now suddenly he is Blofeld, a man with huge power and agents everywhere, dastardly pulling the strings and setting up conspiracies.

    Keith Donkey brought down Corbyn with a manufactured conspiracy, now apparently he also brought down Johnson with an entirely different conspiracy which reached into the heart of the government machine during lock down. Imagine what he will do to the EU and Biden etc when he is elected PM? Blackmailing the UN for £100,000,000,000,000,000 or else he will fire the Crust-o-Matic Doomsday Earthquake machine he's had Ben Houchen build on Teesside.

    @mikeysmith
    Your occasional reminder that Sue Gray only did the Partygate inquiry because Simon Case had to pull out because he'd been accused of having one of the bloody parties in his office.

    She was appointed to the probe by - that's right folks - Boris Johnson.
    And she didn't investigate many incidents, such as the ABBA party. So ideal for when a whitewash is needed.

    She didn't investigate ABBA because she was too busy doing the hypnosis sessions on Ben Houchen. Big Ben thinks he is removing money and control from local councils and handing both it and public money to his friends in an every week in Private Eye corruption probe scandal. But no - Keith Donkey has had him brainwashed and he is building the Death Machine at Teesworks which PM Starmer will use to blackmail the UN.

    It sounds incredible. But it more convincing than the Daily Mail front page!
    I have absolutely no issue with Sue Gray going to work for Labour, have no issue with her investigations as everyone can see there were parties and it’s disingenuous for any Tory to claim that Boris was hard done by.

    My problem is that Labour should probably have not announced this until after the Standards committee had rogered Boris as I fear that Boris and his outriders will use this to muddy the waters and allow another stab in the back story to build when it was starting to look that he was fading into the background and that Standards would be the stake in his heart.

    If it helps Boris then Labour have made an error in timing if not the actual act.
    I think there are two things here -

    - Nothing illegal, no standards broken, not dubious. In fact completely inside all laws, rules, guidelines.
    - Bad optics
    There's a couple of other, minor side issues here.

    *) Labour are potentially making themselves a hostage to fortune. If there were contacts between Labour and Gray during the inquiry, it could be insinuated that a deal had been done.

    *) It sends a message: get the 'right' result in an inquiry, and the side might hire you (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). I'm unconvinced that's a good thing, especially after the Shami Chakrabarti scandal.

    Which leads to a question; if Gray had cleared Johnson, would she still have been hired by Labour?

    IMV Labour were perfectly right in offering the job; I'm unsure Gray was wise to accept it.
    Did Gray get the "right" result? IIRC her report was a bit of a damp squib - she refused to even look at some of the allegations, presented a load of uncontested facts about the partying and basically said that what happened wasn't great. To put it another way, which parts of her report do Tories now think were factually inaccurate or suggestive of anti-Tory bias?
    People were a tad disappointed as I recall. Let's rerun it if that's what the tories want. Surely they're not saying it was all ok after all? I'm sure PM Boris expressed regret for what went on.
  • SouthamObserverSouthamObserver Posts: 39,582

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Boris tells Sunak and Hunt to slash corporation tax to Irish levels and reverse the 6% corporation tax rise they plan.

    He also comes out in opposition to British Museum Chairman George Osborne's plans to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/03/02/boris-johnson-calls-corporation-tax-cut-irish-levels-fresh-challenge/

    Stating that the Elgin Marbles belong in London is a bit like saying the Crown Jewels belong in Athens!

    The British Museum = Biggest Stolen Goods Warehouse in the World!
    I think that's Boris's point. If the BM (or any museum for that matter) obliges itself to 'give everything back', it's not a museum, it's a room.
    Indeed, loan exhibits abroad but if every major museum only displayed objects from the country it was located in there wouldn't be a lot of exhibits left in them
    The Parthenon still exists, so the Marbles belong there.
    All the places that all the exhibits in all the museums in the world came from still exist.
    Not in the respect Sunil is talking about. The Elgin Marbles are literally fixtures ripped off the walls of an ancient building that is still there.

    In most cases, the item is either by its nature moveable, or the context in which it was displayed either gone or massively changed.

    It's objectively ludicrous - even if one attaches no blame to Elgin personally and thinks it all legal etc - that the Marbles are in Bloomsbury rather than an ancient building which they were literally part of and which (I'll repeat) is still effing there.
    There's another side to this that I find interesting, and that's the soft power of artefacts.

    A few years back, my son was fascinated by terracotta warriors and Easter Island heads. He was a bit too young to take him up to the Liverpool terracotta warrior exhibition in 2018, but last year we went to a tiny (but brilliant) 'fake' Terracotta Warrior exhibition in Dorchester, of all places, which he loved. (There's a fake Tutankhamun exhibition just up the road as well).

    This isn't relevant to the marbles, but I wonder if having exhibits around the world actually helps the original country? Does have an Easter Island head in the BM create more knowledge and interest about/in Easter Island? Do all the exhibits of Ancient Egypt in local museums, of dusty mummies and strange inscriptions, actually create generations of people who are interested in Egypt and its history, and therefore more likely to travel there?

    Would the world be richer if every ancient artefact was in its original place, or poorer? (Leaving aside issues if where an 'original' place is)?

    This is not an argument for musuems keeping foreign artefacts: the same sort of effect may be achieved by travelling exhibitions. But I reckon there's a massive soft power in it - especially for small places like Easter Island.

    A fun fact about the terracotta warriors is that most are still buried. When the first ones were unearthed they were all painted but exposure to light quickly made the colours fade away. They are now waiting for the appropriate preservation technology to be developed before digging out any more.

  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 27,995

    Nigelb said:

    Scott_xP said:

    According to The Times, Rishi Sunak is facing mounting pressure from allies of Boris Johnson to block the appointment of a senior civil servant as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

    The absolutely worst thing Rishi could do is block the appointment.

    He can't, anyway.
    At most he can advise a longer delay. And an excessive delay would be contested.
    Good morning

    Yes - the BBC said the same just now

    I understand the cabinet office have seized her phone and are securing documents, as she has been present at many cabinet meetings

    There is no doubt the Johnson supporters, including the mail with their over the top front page, are going to use this to undermine the case against him no matter how much the appointment is defended

    Not sure the timing of this was politically sensible, as it would have made sense to do this after the privileges committee report
    I'm not sure that Labour will be too upset if Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Right now he is a bigger threat to Sunak than to Starmer. And if the Tories want us all to talk about Partygate again, that sounds great, be my guest!
    To be honest I expected a response along those lines, but Johnson is over and Sunak will take the party into GE 24

    This move will muddy the water and if Starmer had a good political antenna he would have done this after the privileges report

    No, raining on Sunak's parade is just the right thing to do this week. The timing was probably a complete accidental however.
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,652

    boulay said:

    Foxy said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Love today's Daily Heil front page. The evil Starmer forced Number 10 aides to bring suitcases of wine into Downing Street so that they could have another kareoke party. Who knew?

    Supposedly the attack line on Starmer has been Keith! The donkey man so boring that you'd fall asleep if you spoke to him. Now suddenly he is Blofeld, a man with huge power and agents everywhere, dastardly pulling the strings and setting up conspiracies.

    Keith Donkey brought down Corbyn with a manufactured conspiracy, now apparently he also brought down Johnson with an entirely different conspiracy which reached into the heart of the government machine during lock down. Imagine what he will do to the EU and Biden etc when he is elected PM? Blackmailing the UN for £100,000,000,000,000,000 or else he will fire the Crust-o-Matic Doomsday Earthquake machine he's had Ben Houchen build on Teesside.

    @mikeysmith
    Your occasional reminder that Sue Gray only did the Partygate inquiry because Simon Case had to pull out because he'd been accused of having one of the bloody parties in his office.

    She was appointed to the probe by - that's right folks - Boris Johnson.
    And she didn't investigate many incidents, such as the ABBA party. So ideal for when a whitewash is needed.

    She didn't investigate ABBA because she was too busy doing the hypnosis sessions on Ben Houchen. Big Ben thinks he is removing money and control from local councils and handing both it and public money to his friends in an every week in Private Eye corruption probe scandal. But no - Keith Donkey has had him brainwashed and he is building the Death Machine at Teesworks which PM Starmer will use to blackmail the UN.

    It sounds incredible. But it more convincing than the Daily Mail front page!
    I have absolutely no issue with Sue Gray going to work for Labour, have no issue with her investigations as everyone can see there were parties and it’s disingenuous for any Tory to claim that Boris was hard done by.

    My problem is that Labour should probably have not announced this until after the Standards committee had rogered Boris as I fear that Boris and his outriders will use this to muddy the waters and allow another stab in the back story to build when it was starting to look that he was fading into the background and that Standards would be the stake in his heart.

    If it helps Boris then Labour have made an error in timing if not the actual act.
    I think there are two things here -

    - Nothing illegal, no standards broken, not dubious. In fact completely inside all laws, rules, guidelines.
    - Bad optics
    There's a couple of other, minor side issues here.

    *) Labour are potentially making themselves a hostage to fortune. If there were contacts between Labour and Gray during the inquiry, it could be insinuated that a deal had been done.

    *) It sends a message: get the 'right' result in an inquiry, and the side might hire you (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). I'm unconvinced that's a good thing, especially after the Shami Chakrabarti scandal.

    Which leads to a question; if Gray had cleared Johnson, would she still have been hired by Labour?

    IMV Labour were perfectly right in offering the job; I'm unsure Gray was wise to accept it.
    Did Gray get the "right" result? IIRC her report was a bit of a damp squib - she refused to even look at some of the allegations, presented a load of uncontested facts about the partying and basically said that what happened wasn't great. To put it another way, which parts of her report do Tories now think were factually inaccurate or suggestive of anti-Tory bias?
    Yes, wasn't Sue Gray's most damning revelation that Boris nibbled on a slice of birthday cake? For the other stuff - the raucous disco sex party in the Downing Street basement - she concluded that Boris was wholesomely and blamelessly somewhere else at the time.
  • Cost of living, energy prices…

    No let’s talk about a job given to somebody I’ve never heard of
  • O/T

    re the recent US Government comments saying its increasingly likely Covid came from a lab leak, seems to me this a fairly blatant hint to the Chinese that, supply weapons to the Russians and we are going to be telling the world you are responsible for the leak and have been lying out of your ass.
  • boulay said:

    Foxy said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Love today's Daily Heil front page. The evil Starmer forced Number 10 aides to bring suitcases of wine into Downing Street so that they could have another kareoke party. Who knew?

    Supposedly the attack line on Starmer has been Keith! The donkey man so boring that you'd fall asleep if you spoke to him. Now suddenly he is Blofeld, a man with huge power and agents everywhere, dastardly pulling the strings and setting up conspiracies.

    Keith Donkey brought down Corbyn with a manufactured conspiracy, now apparently he also brought down Johnson with an entirely different conspiracy which reached into the heart of the government machine during lock down. Imagine what he will do to the EU and Biden etc when he is elected PM? Blackmailing the UN for £100,000,000,000,000,000 or else he will fire the Crust-o-Matic Doomsday Earthquake machine he's had Ben Houchen build on Teesside.

    @mikeysmith
    Your occasional reminder that Sue Gray only did the Partygate inquiry because Simon Case had to pull out because he'd been accused of having one of the bloody parties in his office.

    She was appointed to the probe by - that's right folks - Boris Johnson.
    And she didn't investigate many incidents, such as the ABBA party. So ideal for when a whitewash is needed.

    She didn't investigate ABBA because she was too busy doing the hypnosis sessions on Ben Houchen. Big Ben thinks he is removing money and control from local councils and handing both it and public money to his friends in an every week in Private Eye corruption probe scandal. But no - Keith Donkey has had him brainwashed and he is building the Death Machine at Teesworks which PM Starmer will use to blackmail the UN.

    It sounds incredible. But it more convincing than the Daily Mail front page!
    I have absolutely no issue with Sue Gray going to work for Labour, have no issue with her investigations as everyone can see there were parties and it’s disingenuous for any Tory to claim that Boris was hard done by.

    My problem is that Labour should probably have not announced this until after the Standards committee had rogered Boris as I fear that Boris and his outriders will use this to muddy the waters and allow another stab in the back story to build when it was starting to look that he was fading into the background and that Standards would be the stake in his heart.

    If it helps Boris then Labour have made an error in timing if not the actual act.
    I think there are two things here -

    - Nothing illegal, no standards broken, not dubious. In fact completely inside all laws, rules, guidelines.
    - Bad optics
    There's a couple of other, minor side issues here.

    *) Labour are potentially making themselves a hostage to fortune. If there were contacts between Labour and Gray during the inquiry, it could be insinuated that a deal had been done.

    *) It sends a message: get the 'right' result in an inquiry, and the side might hire you (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). I'm unconvinced that's a good thing, especially after the Shami Chakrabarti scandal.

    Which leads to a question; if Gray had cleared Johnson, would she still have been hired by Labour?

    IMV Labour were perfectly right in offering the job; I'm unsure Gray was wise to accept it.
    Did Gray get the "right" result? IIRC her report was a bit of a damp squib - she refused to even look at some of the allegations, presented a load of uncontested facts about the partying and basically said that what happened wasn't great. To put it another way, which parts of her report do Tories now think were factually inaccurate or suggestive of anti-Tory bias?
    Yes, wasn't Sue Gray's most damning revelation that Boris nibbled on a slice of birthday cake? For the other stuff - the raucous disco sex party in the Downing Street basement - she concluded that Boris was wholesomely and blamelessly somewhere else at the time.
    I distinctly recall Tories here being broadly supportive of it at the time. How strange
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 17,001
    kle4 said:

    Nigelb said:

    boulay said:

    Foxy said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Love today's Daily Heil front page. The evil Starmer forced Number 10 aides to bring suitcases of wine into Downing Street so that they could have another kareoke party. Who knew?

    Supposedly the attack line on Starmer has been Keith! The donkey man so boring that you'd fall asleep if you spoke to him. Now suddenly he is Blofeld, a man with huge power and agents everywhere, dastardly pulling the strings and setting up conspiracies.

    Keith Donkey brought down Corbyn with a manufactured conspiracy, now apparently he also brought down Johnson with an entirely different conspiracy which reached into the heart of the government machine during lock down. Imagine what he will do to the EU and Biden etc when he is elected PM? Blackmailing the UN for £100,000,000,000,000,000 or else he will fire the Crust-o-Matic Doomsday Earthquake machine he's had Ben Houchen build on Teesside.

    @mikeysmith
    Your occasional reminder that Sue Gray only did the Partygate inquiry because Simon Case had to pull out because he'd been accused of having one of the bloody parties in his office.

    She was appointed to the probe by - that's right folks - Boris Johnson.
    And she didn't investigate many incidents, such as the ABBA party. So ideal for when a whitewash is needed.

    She didn't investigate ABBA because she was too busy doing the hypnosis sessions on Ben Houchen. Big Ben thinks he is removing money and control from local councils and handing both it and public money to his friends in an every week in Private Eye corruption probe scandal. But no - Keith Donkey has had him brainwashed and he is building the Death Machine at Teesworks which PM Starmer will use to blackmail the UN.

    It sounds incredible. But it more convincing than the Daily Mail front page!
    I have absolutely no issue with Sue Gray going to work for Labour, have no issue with her investigations as everyone can see there were parties and it’s disingenuous for any Tory to claim that Boris was hard done by.

    My problem is that Labour should probably have not announced this until after the Standards committee had rogered Boris as I fear that Boris and his outriders will use this to muddy the waters and allow another stab in the back story to build when it was starting to look that he was fading into the background and that Standards would be the stake in his heart.

    If it helps Boris then Labour have made an error in timing if not the actual act.
    I think there are two things here -

    - Nothing illegal, no standards broken, not dubious. In fact completely inside all laws, rules, guidelines.
    - Bad optics
    There's a couple of other, minor side issues here.

    *) Labour are potentially making themselves a hostage to fortune. If there were contacts between Labour and Gray during the inquiry, it could be insinuated that a deal had been done.

    *) It sends a message: get the 'right' result in an inquiry, and the side might hire you (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). I'm unconvinced that's a good thing, especially after the Shami Chakrabarti scandal.

    Which leads to a question; if Gray had cleared Johnson, would she still have been hired by Labour?

    IMV Labour were perfectly right in offering the job; I'm unsure Gray was wise to accept it.
    I think such contacts quite unlikely.
    And why shouldn't she accept the role ?

    The idea that Labour influenced the enquiry is so utterly risible that only a complete fool like Dorries might actually believe it.
    So about 1/3 of the parliamentary party and probably a higher proportion of the membership.

    If even 'sensible' MPs or government ministers start playing along - "I'm sure it's fine but I understand the concerns, it raises questions" - then we can probably regard that as a sign they think the party's support will tank if Boris is punished, and they see this as a way out.
    The Conservatives are in trouble either way. The current support base will be seriously dischuffed if Boris is Betrayed, but the swing voters will be furious if he gets away with it.

    Not so much Big Dog as an albatross.
  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,748
    edited March 2023

    let’s talk about a job given to somebody I’ve never heard of

    I distinctly recall Tories here being broadly supportive of it at the time. How strange

    These two comments are completely contradictory.
  • Nigelb said:

    Scott_xP said:

    According to The Times, Rishi Sunak is facing mounting pressure from allies of Boris Johnson to block the appointment of a senior civil servant as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

    The absolutely worst thing Rishi could do is block the appointment.

    He can't, anyway.
    At most he can advise a longer delay. And an excessive delay would be contested.
    Good morning

    Yes - the BBC said the same just now

    I understand the cabinet office have seized her phone and are securing documents, as she has been present at many cabinet meetings

    There is no doubt the Johnson supporters, including the mail with their over the top front page, are going to use this to undermine the case against him no matter how much the appointment is defended

    Not sure the timing of this was politically sensible, as it would have made sense to do this after the privileges committee report
    I'm not sure that Labour will be too upset if Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Right now he is a bigger threat to Sunak than to Starmer. And if the Tories want us all to talk about Partygate again, that sounds great, be my guest!
    To be honest I expected a response along those lines, but Johnson is over and Sunak will take the party into GE 24

    This move will muddy the water and if Starmer had a good political antenna he would have done this after the privileges report

    No, raining on Sunak's parade is just the right thing to do this week. The timing was probably a complete accidental however.
    Looks as if you are concerned about Sunak

    This is a bubble story and Sunak's visit to France next week, the budget a few days later, the 10.1% increase in pensions, benefits, and minimum wage, with the possible resolution of the nurses dispute and continuing fuel support are far more likely to be noticed by the voters
  • First, I remind her that the Prime Minister came here yesterday and apologised. He said that with hindsight it was not what should have happened or what he would have wanted to happen. It is being investigated by Sue Gray, a civil servant of the highest integrity and of the greatest reputation.

    Jacob Rees-Mogg
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,662

    Nigelb said:

    Scott_xP said:

    According to The Times, Rishi Sunak is facing mounting pressure from allies of Boris Johnson to block the appointment of a senior civil servant as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

    The absolutely worst thing Rishi could do is block the appointment.

    He can't, anyway.
    At most he can advise a longer delay. And an excessive delay would be contested.
    Good morning

    Yes - the BBC said the same just now

    I understand the cabinet office have seized her phone and are securing documents, as she has been present at many cabinet meetings

    There is no doubt the Johnson supporters, including the mail with their over the top front page, are going to use this to undermine the case against him no matter how much the appointment is defended

    Not sure the timing of this was politically sensible, as it would have made sense to do this after the privileges committee report
    I'm not sure that Labour will be too upset if Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Right now he is a bigger threat to Sunak than to Starmer. And if the Tories want us all to talk about Partygate again, that sounds great, be my guest!
    To be honest I expected a response along those lines, but Johnson is over and Sunak will take the party into GE 24

    This move will muddy the water and if Starmer had a good political antenna he would have done this after the privileges report

    I would like Johnson to disappear from public life - as I have said on here repeatedly I think he is a congenital liar and lacks the moral character to have any political role. It's up to others on here to reflect on how they have helped to further his career. But he is the Tory party's problem now. If they can't flush the turd that is a sign of their disunity and the PM's lack of authority within his party. It's not Labour's job to help them dispatch Johnson. Labour have hired a highly competent public-spirited ex official to help them to prepare for government. If it causes the Tories some additional discomfort, great. They deserve it.
  • Nigelb said:

    Scott_xP said:

    According to The Times, Rishi Sunak is facing mounting pressure from allies of Boris Johnson to block the appointment of a senior civil servant as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

    The absolutely worst thing Rishi could do is block the appointment.

    He can't, anyway.
    At most he can advise a longer delay. And an excessive delay would be contested.
    Good morning

    Yes - the BBC said the same just now

    I understand the cabinet office have seized her phone and are securing documents, as she has been present at many cabinet meetings

    There is no doubt the Johnson supporters, including the mail with their over the top front page, are going to use this to undermine the case against him no matter how much the appointment is defended

    Not sure the timing of this was politically sensible, as it would have made sense to do this after the privileges committee report
    I'm not sure that Labour will be too upset if Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Right now he is a bigger threat to Sunak than to Starmer. And if the Tories want us all to talk about Partygate again, that sounds great, be my guest!
    To be honest I expected a response along those lines, but Johnson is over and Sunak will take the party into GE 24

    This move will muddy the water and if Starmer had a good political antenna he would have done this after the privileges report

    No, raining on Sunak's parade is just the right thing to do this week. The timing was probably a complete accidental however.
    Looks as if you are concerned about Sunak

    This is a bubble story and Sunak's visit to France next week, the budget a few days later, the 10.1% increase in pensions, benefits, and minimum wage, with the possible resolution of the nurses dispute and continuing fuel support are far more likely to be noticed by the voters
    You finally made a sensible post consolations congratulations
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,165
    edited March 2023

    Looks like Sir Keir has played a blinder with Sue Gray. Until now this week was all about Rishi, getting Brexit done and a return to mature and consensual politics. Sir Keir has ensured that we're now back talking about Boris and his lockdown antics. Moreover, by shifting the the perspective in this way, Sir Keir has ensured that, once again, the Tory Party is perceived as nothing more than Boris's instrument. A masterstroke really.

    This is a very silly, Westminster bubble reading of events. From the profiles I've read, Grey is a very influential figure - apparently even cabinet appointments in the Cameron/Osborne era needed her say so. I have read that she now wants the Cabinet Secretary role - the effective boss of the UK, and this is a step in that direction. For Starmer's part, her appointment is like a rite of passage toward governing, which we're seeing more and more of with Labour these days. The political implications, such as they are, must have been considered, and deemed to be not significant enough to bother with. Of course, it would be delicious if Labour lost the next election and these assumptions all proved premature, but as long as Rishi survives, the prospect looks unlikely.
  • Typical narcissistic response from the Johnsonites. It's not all about them. Life isn't all about them. Nor is it all a game of us and them.

    Plenty of civil servants have served as Chief of Staff to a PM / LotO. Dan Rosenfield did so to Johnson himself.

    https://twitter.com/davidherdson/status/1631591795757809664

    Tories oddly silent about Dan Rosenfield?
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,580

    kle4 said:

    Nigelb said:

    boulay said:

    Foxy said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Love today's Daily Heil front page. The evil Starmer forced Number 10 aides to bring suitcases of wine into Downing Street so that they could have another kareoke party. Who knew?

    Supposedly the attack line on Starmer has been Keith! The donkey man so boring that you'd fall asleep if you spoke to him. Now suddenly he is Blofeld, a man with huge power and agents everywhere, dastardly pulling the strings and setting up conspiracies.

    Keith Donkey brought down Corbyn with a manufactured conspiracy, now apparently he also brought down Johnson with an entirely different conspiracy which reached into the heart of the government machine during lock down. Imagine what he will do to the EU and Biden etc when he is elected PM? Blackmailing the UN for £100,000,000,000,000,000 or else he will fire the Crust-o-Matic Doomsday Earthquake machine he's had Ben Houchen build on Teesside.

    @mikeysmith
    Your occasional reminder that Sue Gray only did the Partygate inquiry because Simon Case had to pull out because he'd been accused of having one of the bloody parties in his office.

    She was appointed to the probe by - that's right folks - Boris Johnson.
    And she didn't investigate many incidents, such as the ABBA party. So ideal for when a whitewash is needed.

    She didn't investigate ABBA because she was too busy doing the hypnosis sessions on Ben Houchen. Big Ben thinks he is removing money and control from local councils and handing both it and public money to his friends in an every week in Private Eye corruption probe scandal. But no - Keith Donkey has had him brainwashed and he is building the Death Machine at Teesworks which PM Starmer will use to blackmail the UN.

    It sounds incredible. But it more convincing than the Daily Mail front page!
    I have absolutely no issue with Sue Gray going to work for Labour, have no issue with her investigations as everyone can see there were parties and it’s disingenuous for any Tory to claim that Boris was hard done by.

    My problem is that Labour should probably have not announced this until after the Standards committee had rogered Boris as I fear that Boris and his outriders will use this to muddy the waters and allow another stab in the back story to build when it was starting to look that he was fading into the background and that Standards would be the stake in his heart.

    If it helps Boris then Labour have made an error in timing if not the actual act.
    I think there are two things here -

    - Nothing illegal, no standards broken, not dubious. In fact completely inside all laws, rules, guidelines.
    - Bad optics
    There's a couple of other, minor side issues here.

    *) Labour are potentially making themselves a hostage to fortune. If there were contacts between Labour and Gray during the inquiry, it could be insinuated that a deal had been done.

    *) It sends a message: get the 'right' result in an inquiry, and the side might hire you (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). I'm unconvinced that's a good thing, especially after the Shami Chakrabarti scandal.

    Which leads to a question; if Gray had cleared Johnson, would she still have been hired by Labour?

    IMV Labour were perfectly right in offering the job; I'm unsure Gray was wise to accept it.
    I think such contacts quite unlikely.
    And why shouldn't she accept the role ?

    The idea that Labour influenced the enquiry is so utterly risible that only a complete fool like Dorries might actually believe it.
    So about 1/3 of the parliamentary party and probably a higher proportion of the membership.

    If even 'sensible' MPs or government ministers start playing along - "I'm sure it's fine but I understand the concerns, it raises questions" - then we can probably regard that as a sign they think the party's support will tank if Boris is punished, and they see this as a way out.
    The Conservatives are in trouble either way. The current support base will be seriously dischuffed if Boris is Betrayed, but the swing voters will be furious if he gets away with it.

    Not so much Big Dog as an albatross.
    Yes, Keir is fortunate his albatross problem took care of itself by planting himself firmly on the tiny minority side of major issues. No such luck for Rishi, Boris is not going anywhere and really not that out of step with the main party, he's just got the morals of a corrupt praying mantis.
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,494
    HYUFD said:

    The first polls following the Windsor unknotting have been published. Both show improved votes for the Conservatives. PeoplePolling have C on 24% (+4%) and Techne have C on 29% (+2%).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election

    Well those new polls at least get the Tories up to about 100 to 150 seats rather than the 50 PP were forecasting in their last poll
    Broken sleazy Reform (and "others") on the slide.

    Mike's suggestion that polls might show the lead down to single figures seems to have been overreach - still around 20%. The NI deal has given Sunak a useful personal boost and his party a small nudge, which is probably in the midrange of what PBers predicted.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,580

    First, I remind her that the Prime Minister came here yesterday and apologised. He said that with hindsight it was not what should have happened or what he would have wanted to happen. It is being investigated by Sue Gray, a civil servant of the highest integrity and of the greatest reputation.

    Jacob Rees-Mogg

    Haha. I don't even need to guess what he is saying now, without acknowledging that.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,165
    kle4 said:

    kle4 said:

    Nigelb said:

    boulay said:

    Foxy said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Love today's Daily Heil front page. The evil Starmer forced Number 10 aides to bring suitcases of wine into Downing Street so that they could have another kareoke party. Who knew?

    Supposedly the attack line on Starmer has been Keith! The donkey man so boring that you'd fall asleep if you spoke to him. Now suddenly he is Blofeld, a man with huge power and agents everywhere, dastardly pulling the strings and setting up conspiracies.

    Keith Donkey brought down Corbyn with a manufactured conspiracy, now apparently he also brought down Johnson with an entirely different conspiracy which reached into the heart of the government machine during lock down. Imagine what he will do to the EU and Biden etc when he is elected PM? Blackmailing the UN for £100,000,000,000,000,000 or else he will fire the Crust-o-Matic Doomsday Earthquake machine he's had Ben Houchen build on Teesside.

    @mikeysmith
    Your occasional reminder that Sue Gray only did the Partygate inquiry because Simon Case had to pull out because he'd been accused of having one of the bloody parties in his office.

    She was appointed to the probe by - that's right folks - Boris Johnson.
    And she didn't investigate many incidents, such as the ABBA party. So ideal for when a whitewash is needed.

    She didn't investigate ABBA because she was too busy doing the hypnosis sessions on Ben Houchen. Big Ben thinks he is removing money and control from local councils and handing both it and public money to his friends in an every week in Private Eye corruption probe scandal. But no - Keith Donkey has had him brainwashed and he is building the Death Machine at Teesworks which PM Starmer will use to blackmail the UN.

    It sounds incredible. But it more convincing than the Daily Mail front page!
    I have absolutely no issue with Sue Gray going to work for Labour, have no issue with her investigations as everyone can see there were parties and it’s disingenuous for any Tory to claim that Boris was hard done by.

    My problem is that Labour should probably have not announced this until after the Standards committee had rogered Boris as I fear that Boris and his outriders will use this to muddy the waters and allow another stab in the back story to build when it was starting to look that he was fading into the background and that Standards would be the stake in his heart.

    If it helps Boris then Labour have made an error in timing if not the actual act.
    I think there are two things here -

    - Nothing illegal, no standards broken, not dubious. In fact completely inside all laws, rules, guidelines.
    - Bad optics
    There's a couple of other, minor side issues here.

    *) Labour are potentially making themselves a hostage to fortune. If there were contacts between Labour and Gray during the inquiry, it could be insinuated that a deal had been done.

    *) It sends a message: get the 'right' result in an inquiry, and the side might hire you (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). I'm unconvinced that's a good thing, especially after the Shami Chakrabarti scandal.

    Which leads to a question; if Gray had cleared Johnson, would she still have been hired by Labour?

    IMV Labour were perfectly right in offering the job; I'm unsure Gray was wise to accept it.
    I think such contacts quite unlikely.
    And why shouldn't she accept the role ?

    The idea that Labour influenced the enquiry is so utterly risible that only a complete fool like Dorries might actually believe it.
    So about 1/3 of the parliamentary party and probably a higher proportion of the membership.

    If even 'sensible' MPs or government ministers start playing along - "I'm sure it's fine but I understand the concerns, it raises questions" - then we can probably regard that as a sign they think the party's support will tank if Boris is punished, and they see this as a way out.
    The Conservatives are in trouble either way. The current support base will be seriously dischuffed if Boris is Betrayed, but the swing voters will be furious if he gets away with it.

    Not so much Big Dog as an albatross.
    Yes, Keir is fortunate his albatross problem took care of itself by planting himself firmly on the tiny minority side of major issues. No such luck for Rishi, Boris is not going anywhere and really not that out of step with the main party, he's just got the morals of a corrupt praying mantis.
    Preying for forgiveness?
  • Nigelb said:

    Scott_xP said:

    According to The Times, Rishi Sunak is facing mounting pressure from allies of Boris Johnson to block the appointment of a senior civil servant as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

    The absolutely worst thing Rishi could do is block the appointment.

    He can't, anyway.
    At most he can advise a longer delay. And an excessive delay would be contested.
    Good morning

    Yes - the BBC said the same just now

    I understand the cabinet office have seized her phone and are securing documents, as she has been present at many cabinet meetings

    There is no doubt the Johnson supporters, including the mail with their over the top front page, are going to use this to undermine the case against him no matter how much the appointment is defended

    Not sure the timing of this was politically sensible, as it would have made sense to do this after the privileges committee report
    I'm not sure that Labour will be too upset if Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Right now he is a bigger threat to Sunak than to Starmer. And if the Tories want us all to talk about Partygate again, that sounds great, be my guest!
    To be honest I expected a response along those lines, but Johnson is over and Sunak will take the party into GE 24

    This move will muddy the water and if Starmer had a good political antenna he would have done this after the privileges report

    I would like Johnson to disappear from public life - as I have said on here repeatedly I think he is a congenital liar and lacks the moral character to have any political role. It's up to others on here to reflect on how they have helped to further his career. But he is the Tory party's problem now. If they can't flush the turd that is a sign of their disunity and the PM's lack of authority within his party. It's not Labour's job to help them dispatch Johnson. Labour have hired a highly competent public-spirited ex official to help them to prepare for government. If it causes the Tories some additional discomfort, great. They deserve it.
    I don't know if you were aware but Johnson was addressing a conference yesterday when he said to the audience

    'Put up your hand for Brexit'

    He and the host did but nobody else followed

    That is so funny !!!!!
  • rkrkrk said:

    Obvious point - but there is no way Starmer hired this woman just to make life difficult for the Tories.

    Chief of staff is probably in his top 5 of most important decisions, he will want someone excellent to do the job with deep govt experience. Remember he has never even been a minister.

    It seems to me that he hired her for competence and the fact she’s very experienced? Is there really any more to it than that?

    He is taking the job seriously, that can only be a good thing.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,580
    edited March 2023

    Nigelb said:

    Scott_xP said:

    According to The Times, Rishi Sunak is facing mounting pressure from allies of Boris Johnson to block the appointment of a senior civil servant as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

    The absolutely worst thing Rishi could do is block the appointment.

    He can't, anyway.
    At most he can advise a longer delay. And an excessive delay would be contested.
    Good morning

    Yes - the BBC said the same just now

    I understand the cabinet office have seized her phone and are securing documents, as she has been present at many cabinet meetings

    There is no doubt the Johnson supporters, including the mail with their over the top front page, are going to use this to undermine the case against him no matter how much the appointment is defended

    Not sure the timing of this was politically sensible, as it would have made sense to do this after the privileges committee report
    I'm not sure that Labour will be too upset if Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Right now he is a bigger threat to Sunak than to Starmer. And if the Tories want us all to talk about Partygate again, that sounds great, be my guest!
    To be honest I expected a response along those lines, but Johnson is over and Sunak will take the party into GE 24

    This move will muddy the water and if Starmer had a good political antenna he would have done this after the privileges report

    No, raining on Sunak's parade is just the right thing to do this week. The timing was probably a complete accidental however.
    Looks as if you are concerned about Sunak

    This is a bubble story and Sunak's visit to France next week, the budget a few days later, the 10.1% increase in pensions, benefits, and minimum wage, with the possible resolution of the nurses dispute and continuing fuel support are far more likely to be noticed by the voters
    It's not really about whether its noticed by voters IMO. They're screwed by events and the economy anyway, despite a good week on NI.

    It's how Tory MPs react. And that will depend on how Tory Members react. Scare stories of deselections were circulating just last week for those insufficiently loyal to Boris. Inboxes will be filling up with what an outrage it is and our lad were stitched up.
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 8,302
    The only depressing thing about Starmer's appointment is the reprisal of people who struggle to type Gray instead of Grey.

    Otherwise, Starmer obviously thinks Gray is a top appointment, he's probably right, and he won't give a flying fuck about the whinging as there's absolutely nothing wrong with what he's done.
  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,748

    HYUFD said:

    The first polls following the Windsor unknotting have been published. Both show improved votes for the Conservatives. PeoplePolling have C on 24% (+4%) and Techne have C on 29% (+2%).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election

    Well those new polls at least get the Tories up to about 100 to 150 seats rather than the 50 PP were forecasting in their last poll
    Broken sleazy Reform (and "others") on the slide.

    Mike's suggestion that polls might show the lead down to single figures seems to have been overreach - still around 20%. The NI deal has given Sunak a useful personal boost and his party a small nudge, which is probably in the midrange of what PBers predicted.
    Too early to say. We've only had two polls since, and neither is from a firm with a pre-2019 track record.
  • numbertwelvenumbertwelve Posts: 6,678

    Typical narcissistic response from the Johnsonites. It's not all about them. Life isn't all about them. Nor is it all a game of us and them.

    Plenty of civil servants have served as Chief of Staff to a PM / LotO. Dan Rosenfield did so to Johnson himself.

    https://twitter.com/davidherdson/status/1631591795757809664

    Tories oddly silent about Dan Rosenfield?

    I think the bleating from the Johnson camp is ridiculous. I do think it was an odd appointment that wasn’t the best tactical move by Starmer, but I don’t think it’s going to cause much if any damage to him.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,114
    kle4 said:

    TimS said:

    IanB2 said:

    I don't think there's anything to worry about regarding the Gray appointment in terms of ethics or the rules, but politically it's a bit of a gaffe by Starmer if he didn't consider how it could be seen (or alternatively a very cunning way of reminding us all about Partygate by getting it back into the news....)

    And the Tories are hypocritical on this anyway. They have regularly plucked people from public sector roles straight into government - particularly from the BBC - and put people with Tory links straight into prominent public sector roles.
    I’m not sure the first is an issue?

    Re any senior civil servant effectively joining the senior management of the opposition - isn’t the issue that she has been privy to confidential information that the government has a right to expect to be kept confidential?
    By that logic no senior civil servant would ever be allowed to join or work for a political party after they retire or decide to leave the service.

    People are going nuts over this story, and at the worst end its clearly out of excitement for a way to defend saint Boris.

    But whilst the suddeness of the appointment doesn't look great and that's why it was a poor move at this time, a lot of people are just severely overreacting to the principle of it.

    People are allowed to work for parties even if they were high up in the civil service. If it had been 5 years from now no one but obsessives would care. Its just distractingly close to an event she was in the news for.
    I think its a good appointment by Starmer, just at the wrong time. I think Gray did a decent job with the poisoned chalice she was given, and I also see no barrier to people from the civil service joining parties. I do think that the timing is off on this occassion.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,169

    kle4 said:

    TimS said:

    IanB2 said:

    I don't think there's anything to worry about regarding the Gray appointment in terms of ethics or the rules, but politically it's a bit of a gaffe by Starmer if he didn't consider how it could be seen (or alternatively a very cunning way of reminding us all about Partygate by getting it back into the news....)

    And the Tories are hypocritical on this anyway. They have regularly plucked people from public sector roles straight into government - particularly from the BBC - and put people with Tory links straight into prominent public sector roles.
    I’m not sure the first is an issue?

    Re any senior civil servant effectively joining the senior management of the opposition - isn’t the issue that she has been privy to confidential information that the government has a right to expect to be kept confidential?
    By that logic no senior civil servant would ever be allowed to join or work for a political party after they retire or decide to leave the service.

    People are going nuts over this story, and at the worst end its clearly out of excitement for a way to defend saint Boris.

    But whilst the suddeness of the appointment doesn't look great and that's why it was a poor move at this time, a lot of people are just severely overreacting to the principle of it.

    People are allowed to work for parties even if they were high up in the civil service. If it had been 5 years from now no one but obsessives would care. Its just distractingly close to an event she was in the news for.
    This comes back to the general point about Civil Servants, “Purdah”, and taking jobs elsewhere.

    There have been some cases, over the years, which were unpleasant. Civil servant X selected private firm Y for contract. Contract turns into a long running disaster for government, money spinner for Y. Civil Servant then gets big job at Y.

    There have also been reverse cases.

    So the idea came up of blocking civil servants from going to some jobs for a period of time.

    The counter argument, which has some validity, is that ex civil servants have valuable knowledge on how to work with government - without that knowledge, doing contracts is a lot harder.

    Like many things, it is impossible to produce a simple set of rules that cover all cases. Humans, eh?
    Yep, it’s difficult to write rules on these things, that are sufficiently broad yet don’t restrict the rights of people to earn a living. No matter what the detail, there will always be the occasional edge case that doesn’t feel right.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,217
    Not great for any Ukrainian forces still in Bakhmut.
    This could be very bad. This is the O0506 highway, the road between Chasiv Yar and Bakhmut and the only paved road left in and out of Bakhmut. (Pic looks north with village of Khromove to the right.) There are still dirt roads for the military. But supplies and aid are disrupted.
    https://mobile.twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1631589987337510913
  • Blair had Jonathan Powell. Cameron had Ed Llewellyn
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,114

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Boris tells Sunak and Hunt to slash corporation tax to Irish levels and reverse the 6% corporation tax rise they plan.

    He also comes out in opposition to British Museum Chairman George Osborne's plans to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/03/02/boris-johnson-calls-corporation-tax-cut-irish-levels-fresh-challenge/

    Stating that the Elgin Marbles belong in London is a bit like saying the Crown Jewels belong in Athens!

    The British Museum = Biggest Stolen Goods Warehouse in the World!
    I think that's Boris's point. If the BM (or any museum for that matter) obliges itself to 'give everything back', it's not a museum, it's a room.
    Indeed, loan exhibits abroad but if every major museum only displayed objects from the country it was located in there wouldn't be a lot of exhibits left in them
    The Parthenon still exists, so the Marbles belong there.
    All the places that all the exhibits in all the museums in the world came from still exist.
    Not in the respect Sunil is talking about. The Elgin Marbles are literally fixtures ripped off the walls of an ancient building that is still there.

    In most cases, the item is either by its nature moveable, or the context in which it was displayed either gone or massively changed.

    It's objectively ludicrous - even if one attaches no blame to Elgin personally and thinks it all legal etc - that the Marbles are in Bloomsbury rather than an ancient building which they were literally part of and which (I'll repeat) is still effing there.
    There's another side to this that I find interesting, and that's the soft power of artefacts.

    A few years back, my son was fascinated by terracotta warriors and Easter Island heads. He was a bit too young to take him up to the Liverpool terracotta warrior exhibition in 2018, but last year we went to a tiny (but brilliant) 'fake' Terracotta Warrior exhibition in Dorchester, of all places, which he loved. (There's a fake Tutankhamun exhibition just up the road as well).

    This isn't relevant to the marbles, but I wonder if having exhibits around the world actually helps the original country? Does have an Easter Island head in the BM create more knowledge and interest about/in Easter Island? Do all the exhibits of Ancient Egypt in local museums, of dusty mummies and strange inscriptions, actually create generations of people who are interested in Egypt and its history, and therefore more likely to travel there?

    Would the world be richer if every ancient artefact was in its original place, or poorer? (Leaving aside issues if where an 'original' place is)?

    This is not an argument for musuems keeping foreign artefacts: the same sort of effect may be achieved by travelling exhibitions. But I reckon there's a massive soft power in it - especially for small places like Easter Island.

    A fun fact about the terracotta warriors is that most are still buried. When the first ones were unearthed they were all painted but exposure to light quickly made the colours fade away. They are now waiting for the appropriate preservation technology to be developed before digging out any more.

    IIRC most ancient statues in Rome, Greece etc were painted. The white marble we associate with the classics era is totally false.

    Or have I got that wrong?
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,139

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Boris tells Sunak and Hunt to slash corporation tax to Irish levels and reverse the 6% corporation tax rise they plan.

    He also comes out in opposition to British Museum Chairman George Osborne's plans to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/03/02/boris-johnson-calls-corporation-tax-cut-irish-levels-fresh-challenge/

    Stating that the Elgin Marbles belong in London is a bit like saying the Crown Jewels belong in Athens!

    The British Museum = Biggest Stolen Goods Warehouse in the World!
    I think that's Boris's point. If the BM (or any museum for that matter) obliges itself to 'give everything back', it's not a museum, it's a room.
    Indeed, loan exhibits abroad but if every major museum only displayed objects from the country it was located in there wouldn't be a lot of exhibits left in them
    The Parthenon still exists, so the Marbles belong there.
    All the places that all the exhibits in all the museums in the world came from still exist.
    Not in the respect Sunil is talking about. The Elgin Marbles are literally fixtures ripped off the walls of an ancient building that is still there.

    In most cases, the item is either by its nature moveable, or the context in which it was displayed either gone or massively changed.

    It's objectively ludicrous - even if one attaches no blame to Elgin personally and thinks it all legal etc - that the Marbles are in Bloomsbury rather than an ancient building which they were literally part of and which (I'll repeat) is still effing there.
    There's another side to this that I find interesting, and that's the soft power of artefacts.

    A few years back, my son was fascinated by terracotta warriors and Easter Island heads. He was a bit too young to take him up to the Liverpool terracotta warrior exhibition in 2018, but last year we went to a tiny (but brilliant) 'fake' Terracotta Warrior exhibition in Dorchester, of all places, which he loved. (There's a fake Tutankhamun exhibition just up the road as well).

    This isn't relevant to the marbles, but I wonder if having exhibits around the world actually helps the original country? Does have an Easter Island head in the BM create more knowledge and interest about/in Easter Island? Do all the exhibits of Ancient Egypt in local museums, of dusty mummies and strange inscriptions, actually create generations of people who are interested in Egypt and its history, and therefore more likely to travel there?

    Would the world be richer if every ancient artefact was in its original place, or poorer? (Leaving aside issues if where an 'original' place is)?

    This is not an argument for musuems keeping foreign artefacts: the same sort of effect may be achieved by travelling exhibitions. But I reckon there's a massive soft power in it - especially for small places like Easter Island.

    A fun fact about the terracotta warriors is that most are still buried. When the first ones were unearthed they were all painted but exposure to light quickly made the colours fade away. They are now waiting for the appropriate preservation technology to be developed before digging out any more.
    Actually, I think it's a bit more complex than that. From what I've seen (and I've watched many, many hours of documentaries with him...) they're still digging out statues from a pit at a time, but at a slow cadence.

    The thing they're not tackling is the mausoleum's tomb. And that thing's truly gargantuan. It was written that it had a recreation of a city in it, with rivers of mercury. Which was widely disbelieved, until some analysis of soil from the site showed high levels of mercury...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_the_First_Qin_Emperor
  • Driver said:

    HYUFD said:

    The first polls following the Windsor unknotting have been published. Both show improved votes for the Conservatives. PeoplePolling have C on 24% (+4%) and Techne have C on 29% (+2%).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election

    Well those new polls at least get the Tories up to about 100 to 150 seats rather than the 50 PP were forecasting in their last poll
    Broken sleazy Reform (and "others") on the slide.

    Mike's suggestion that polls might show the lead down to single figures seems to have been overreach - still around 20%. The NI deal has given Sunak a useful personal boost and his party a small nudge, which is probably in the midrange of what PBers predicted.
    Too early to say. We've only had two polls since, and neither is from a firm with a pre-2019 track record.
    Taking polls at face value is unwise, the more important result is the trend and especially post WF and the spring budget and other events
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,580

    Typical narcissistic response from the Johnsonites. It's not all about them. Life isn't all about them. Nor is it all a game of us and them.

    Plenty of civil servants have served as Chief of Staff to a PM / LotO. Dan Rosenfield did so to Johnson himself.

    https://twitter.com/davidherdson/status/1631591795757809664

    Tories oddly silent about Dan Rosenfield?

    I think the bleating from the Johnson camp is ridiculous. I do think it was an odd appointment that wasn’t the best tactical move by Starmer, but I don’t think it’s going to cause much if any damage to him.
    Trying to push that the principle of appointment is wrong doesn't work since there are myriad examples of civil servants working for Tories too.

    Trying to push this particular example is wrong doesn't really work because if its claimed her work was dodgy it contradicts themselves at the time and means it needs redoing, not ignoring.

    I responded first post after the news broke on here and felt it was unwise on her part to move across so soon, but that's small beer stuff. Despite joking people aren't stupid, and arguing the innocence of Boris on this basis is not going to fly.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,139

    boulay said:

    Foxy said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Love today's Daily Heil front page. The evil Starmer forced Number 10 aides to bring suitcases of wine into Downing Street so that they could have another kareoke party. Who knew?

    Supposedly the attack line on Starmer has been Keith! The donkey man so boring that you'd fall asleep if you spoke to him. Now suddenly he is Blofeld, a man with huge power and agents everywhere, dastardly pulling the strings and setting up conspiracies.

    Keith Donkey brought down Corbyn with a manufactured conspiracy, now apparently he also brought down Johnson with an entirely different conspiracy which reached into the heart of the government machine during lock down. Imagine what he will do to the EU and Biden etc when he is elected PM? Blackmailing the UN for £100,000,000,000,000,000 or else he will fire the Crust-o-Matic Doomsday Earthquake machine he's had Ben Houchen build on Teesside.

    @mikeysmith
    Your occasional reminder that Sue Gray only did the Partygate inquiry because Simon Case had to pull out because he'd been accused of having one of the bloody parties in his office.

    She was appointed to the probe by - that's right folks - Boris Johnson.
    And she didn't investigate many incidents, such as the ABBA party. So ideal for when a whitewash is needed.

    She didn't investigate ABBA because she was too busy doing the hypnosis sessions on Ben Houchen. Big Ben thinks he is removing money and control from local councils and handing both it and public money to his friends in an every week in Private Eye corruption probe scandal. But no - Keith Donkey has had him brainwashed and he is building the Death Machine at Teesworks which PM Starmer will use to blackmail the UN.

    It sounds incredible. But it more convincing than the Daily Mail front page!
    I have absolutely no issue with Sue Gray going to work for Labour, have no issue with her investigations as everyone can see there were parties and it’s disingenuous for any Tory to claim that Boris was hard done by.

    My problem is that Labour should probably have not announced this until after the Standards committee had rogered Boris as I fear that Boris and his outriders will use this to muddy the waters and allow another stab in the back story to build when it was starting to look that he was fading into the background and that Standards would be the stake in his heart.

    If it helps Boris then Labour have made an error in timing if not the actual act.
    I think there are two things here -

    - Nothing illegal, no standards broken, not dubious. In fact completely inside all laws, rules, guidelines.
    - Bad optics
    There's a couple of other, minor side issues here.

    *) Labour are potentially making themselves a hostage to fortune. If there were contacts between Labour and Gray during the inquiry, it could be insinuated that a deal had been done.

    *) It sends a message: get the 'right' result in an inquiry, and the side might hire you (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). I'm unconvinced that's a good thing, especially after the Shami Chakrabarti scandal.

    Which leads to a question; if Gray had cleared Johnson, would she still have been hired by Labour?

    IMV Labour were perfectly right in offering the job; I'm unsure Gray was wise to accept it.
    Did Gray get the "right" result? IIRC her report was a bit of a damp squib - she refused to even look at some of the allegations, presented a load of uncontested facts about the partying and basically said that what happened wasn't great. To put it another way, which parts of her report do Tories now think were factually inaccurate or suggestive of anti-Tory bias?
    I don't know. But if you're going to say that sort of thing, did Beergate get the 'right' result? ;)
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,114

    rkrkrk said:

    Obvious point - but there is no way Starmer hired this woman just to make life difficult for the Tories.

    Chief of staff is probably in his top 5 of most important decisions, he will want someone excellent to do the job with deep govt experience. Remember he has never even been a minister.

    It seems to me that he hired her for competence and the fact she’s very experienced? Is there really any more to it than that?

    He is taking the job seriously, that can only be a good thing.
    Yes - far better to hire someone with experience and a long track record in the civil service if you intend to actually get things done.*

    *Not sure he's proved that bit yet.

  • Weird that I don’t remember JRM complaining about a right-wing stitch up when David Frost stopped being a civil servant advising the government and became a Tory minister in the Lords instead. But maybe that’s different.

    https://twitter.com/jonsopel/status/1631355770229911552
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,580

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Boris tells Sunak and Hunt to slash corporation tax to Irish levels and reverse the 6% corporation tax rise they plan.

    He also comes out in opposition to British Museum Chairman George Osborne's plans to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/03/02/boris-johnson-calls-corporation-tax-cut-irish-levels-fresh-challenge/

    Stating that the Elgin Marbles belong in London is a bit like saying the Crown Jewels belong in Athens!

    The British Museum = Biggest Stolen Goods Warehouse in the World!
    I think that's Boris's point. If the BM (or any museum for that matter) obliges itself to 'give everything back', it's not a museum, it's a room.
    Indeed, loan exhibits abroad but if every major museum only displayed objects from the country it was located in there wouldn't be a lot of exhibits left in them
    The Parthenon still exists, so the Marbles belong there.
    All the places that all the exhibits in all the museums in the world came from still exist.
    Not in the respect Sunil is talking about. The Elgin Marbles are literally fixtures ripped off the walls of an ancient building that is still there.

    In most cases, the item is either by its nature moveable, or the context in which it was displayed either gone or massively changed.

    It's objectively ludicrous - even if one attaches no blame to Elgin personally and thinks it all legal etc - that the Marbles are in Bloomsbury rather than an ancient building which they were literally part of and which (I'll repeat) is still effing there.
    There's another side to this that I find interesting, and that's the soft power of artefacts.

    A few years back, my son was fascinated by terracotta warriors and Easter Island heads. He was a bit too young to take him up to the Liverpool terracotta warrior exhibition in 2018, but last year we went to a tiny (but brilliant) 'fake' Terracotta Warrior exhibition in Dorchester, of all places, which he loved. (There's a fake Tutankhamun exhibition just up the road as well).

    This isn't relevant to the marbles, but I wonder if having exhibits around the world actually helps the original country? Does have an Easter Island head in the BM create more knowledge and interest about/in Easter Island? Do all the exhibits of Ancient Egypt in local museums, of dusty mummies and strange inscriptions, actually create generations of people who are interested in Egypt and its history, and therefore more likely to travel there?

    Would the world be richer if every ancient artefact was in its original place, or poorer? (Leaving aside issues if where an 'original' place is)?

    This is not an argument for musuems keeping foreign artefacts: the same sort of effect may be achieved by travelling exhibitions. But I reckon there's a massive soft power in it - especially for small places like Easter Island.

    A fun fact about the terracotta warriors is that most are still buried. When the first ones were unearthed they were all painted but exposure to light quickly made the colours fade away. They are now waiting for the appropriate preservation technology to be developed before digging out any more.
    Actually, I think it's a bit more complex than that. From what I've seen (and I've watched many, many hours of documentaries with him...) they're still digging out statues from a pit at a time, but at a slow cadence.

    The thing they're not tackling is the mausoleum's tomb. And that thing's truly gargantuan. It was written that it had a recreation of a city in it, with rivers of mercury. Which was widely disbelieved, until some analysis of soil from the site showed high levels of mercury...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_the_First_Qin_Emperor
    Pretty remarkable. Feels like there should be a lot more very careful work on that whole site than is the case.

    Unrelatedly, When I was there they hadn't even touched up the English language signs to be entirely correct, which felt like a tiny easy detail to get right on such a major attraction.
  • boulay said:

    Foxy said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Love today's Daily Heil front page. The evil Starmer forced Number 10 aides to bring suitcases of wine into Downing Street so that they could have another kareoke party. Who knew?

    Supposedly the attack line on Starmer has been Keith! The donkey man so boring that you'd fall asleep if you spoke to him. Now suddenly he is Blofeld, a man with huge power and agents everywhere, dastardly pulling the strings and setting up conspiracies.

    Keith Donkey brought down Corbyn with a manufactured conspiracy, now apparently he also brought down Johnson with an entirely different conspiracy which reached into the heart of the government machine during lock down. Imagine what he will do to the EU and Biden etc when he is elected PM? Blackmailing the UN for £100,000,000,000,000,000 or else he will fire the Crust-o-Matic Doomsday Earthquake machine he's had Ben Houchen build on Teesside.

    @mikeysmith
    Your occasional reminder that Sue Gray only did the Partygate inquiry because Simon Case had to pull out because he'd been accused of having one of the bloody parties in his office.

    She was appointed to the probe by - that's right folks - Boris Johnson.
    And she didn't investigate many incidents, such as the ABBA party. So ideal for when a whitewash is needed.

    She didn't investigate ABBA because she was too busy doing the hypnosis sessions on Ben Houchen. Big Ben thinks he is removing money and control from local councils and handing both it and public money to his friends in an every week in Private Eye corruption probe scandal. But no - Keith Donkey has had him brainwashed and he is building the Death Machine at Teesworks which PM Starmer will use to blackmail the UN.

    It sounds incredible. But it more convincing than the Daily Mail front page!
    I have absolutely no issue with Sue Gray going to work for Labour, have no issue with her investigations as everyone can see there were parties and it’s disingenuous for any Tory to claim that Boris was hard done by.

    My problem is that Labour should probably have not announced this until after the Standards committee had rogered Boris as I fear that Boris and his outriders will use this to muddy the waters and allow another stab in the back story to build when it was starting to look that he was fading into the background and that Standards would be the stake in his heart.

    If it helps Boris then Labour have made an error in timing if not the actual act.
    I think there are two things here -

    - Nothing illegal, no standards broken, not dubious. In fact completely inside all laws, rules, guidelines.
    - Bad optics
    There's a couple of other, minor side issues here.

    *) Labour are potentially making themselves a hostage to fortune. If there were contacts between Labour and Gray during the inquiry, it could be insinuated that a deal had been done.

    *) It sends a message: get the 'right' result in an inquiry, and the side might hire you (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). I'm unconvinced that's a good thing, especially after the Shami Chakrabarti scandal.

    Which leads to a question; if Gray had cleared Johnson, would she still have been hired by Labour?

    IMV Labour were perfectly right in offering the job; I'm unsure Gray was wise to accept it.
    Did Gray get the "right" result? IIRC her report was a bit of a damp squib - she refused to even look at some of the allegations, presented a load of uncontested facts about the partying and basically said that what happened wasn't great. To put it another way, which parts of her report do Tories now think were factually inaccurate or suggestive of anti-Tory bias?
    I don't know. But if you're going to say that sort of thing, did Beergate get the 'right' result? ;)
    That was the wrong result because Labour wasn’t found guilty. That was a stitch up from the Tories and the Mail. They managed to get the Police to open an investigation. Corrupt.
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 61,662
    Mr. B, impossible. Morris dancing is already the zenith of cool.
  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,748
    kle4 said:

    Typical narcissistic response from the Johnsonites. It's not all about them. Life isn't all about them. Nor is it all a game of us and them.

    Plenty of civil servants have served as Chief of Staff to a PM / LotO. Dan Rosenfield did so to Johnson himself.

    https://twitter.com/davidherdson/status/1631591795757809664

    Tories oddly silent about Dan Rosenfield?

    I think the bleating from the Johnson camp is ridiculous. I do think it was an odd appointment that wasn’t the best tactical move by Starmer, but I don’t think it’s going to cause much if any damage to him.
    Trying to push that the principle of appointment is wrong doesn't work since there are myriad examples of civil servants working for Tories too.

    Trying to push this particular example is wrong doesn't really work because if its claimed her work was dodgy it contradicts themselves at the time and means it needs redoing, not ignoring.

    I responded first post after the news broke on here and felt it was unwise on her part to move across so soon, but that's small beer stuff. Despite joking people aren't stupid, and arguing the innocence of Boris on this basis is not going to fly.
    It's not an immediate risk, but it does raise the possibility of a future attack if he does something dubious in office and people bring up "remember when he rewarded Sue Gray with a job for bringing down a Prime Minister?"

    Lots of people believe in "no smoke without fire", unfortunately, so a politician only gets so many chances to do things that are perfectly legitimate but seem slightly off. Maybe she's good enough at her new job that she's worth using one of those lives.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,139
    kle4 said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Boris tells Sunak and Hunt to slash corporation tax to Irish levels and reverse the 6% corporation tax rise they plan.

    He also comes out in opposition to British Museum Chairman George Osborne's plans to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/03/02/boris-johnson-calls-corporation-tax-cut-irish-levels-fresh-challenge/

    Stating that the Elgin Marbles belong in London is a bit like saying the Crown Jewels belong in Athens!

    The British Museum = Biggest Stolen Goods Warehouse in the World!
    I think that's Boris's point. If the BM (or any museum for that matter) obliges itself to 'give everything back', it's not a museum, it's a room.
    Indeed, loan exhibits abroad but if every major museum only displayed objects from the country it was located in there wouldn't be a lot of exhibits left in them
    The Parthenon still exists, so the Marbles belong there.
    All the places that all the exhibits in all the museums in the world came from still exist.
    Not in the respect Sunil is talking about. The Elgin Marbles are literally fixtures ripped off the walls of an ancient building that is still there.

    In most cases, the item is either by its nature moveable, or the context in which it was displayed either gone or massively changed.

    It's objectively ludicrous - even if one attaches no blame to Elgin personally and thinks it all legal etc - that the Marbles are in Bloomsbury rather than an ancient building which they were literally part of and which (I'll repeat) is still effing there.
    There's another side to this that I find interesting, and that's the soft power of artefacts.

    A few years back, my son was fascinated by terracotta warriors and Easter Island heads. He was a bit too young to take him up to the Liverpool terracotta warrior exhibition in 2018, but last year we went to a tiny (but brilliant) 'fake' Terracotta Warrior exhibition in Dorchester, of all places, which he loved. (There's a fake Tutankhamun exhibition just up the road as well).

    This isn't relevant to the marbles, but I wonder if having exhibits around the world actually helps the original country? Does have an Easter Island head in the BM create more knowledge and interest about/in Easter Island? Do all the exhibits of Ancient Egypt in local museums, of dusty mummies and strange inscriptions, actually create generations of people who are interested in Egypt and its history, and therefore more likely to travel there?

    Would the world be richer if every ancient artefact was in its original place, or poorer? (Leaving aside issues if where an 'original' place is)?

    This is not an argument for musuems keeping foreign artefacts: the same sort of effect may be achieved by travelling exhibitions. But I reckon there's a massive soft power in it - especially for small places like Easter Island.

    A fun fact about the terracotta warriors is that most are still buried. When the first ones were unearthed they were all painted but exposure to light quickly made the colours fade away. They are now waiting for the appropriate preservation technology to be developed before digging out any more.
    Actually, I think it's a bit more complex than that. From what I've seen (and I've watched many, many hours of documentaries with him...) they're still digging out statues from a pit at a time, but at a slow cadence.

    The thing they're not tackling is the mausoleum's tomb. And that thing's truly gargantuan. It was written that it had a recreation of a city in it, with rivers of mercury. Which was widely disbelieved, until some analysis of soil from the site showed high levels of mercury...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_the_First_Qin_Emperor
    Pretty remarkable. Feels like there should be a lot more very careful work on that whole site than is the case.

    Unrelatedly, When I was there they hadn't even touched up the English language signs to be entirely correct, which felt like a tiny easy detail to get right on such a major attraction.
    I do ponder an interesting fact about the terracotta warriors: they were discovered in 1974, whilst the cultural revolution was still ongoing, but waning. Given that a few years earlier China had considered destroying the Great Wall of China - and indeed, hundreds of kilometres of it were destroyed.

    If the terracotta warriors had been found a decade earlier, they might well have just destroyed the entire site.

    (As an aside, apart from the touristy parts, the Great Wall is apparently not well cared for. Then again, neither was Hadrian's Wall before 200 years ago. But we didn't see Hadrian's Wall as a symbol of our kingdom back then.)
  • Nigelb said:

    Scott_xP said:

    According to The Times, Rishi Sunak is facing mounting pressure from allies of Boris Johnson to block the appointment of a senior civil servant as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

    The absolutely worst thing Rishi could do is block the appointment.

    He can't, anyway.
    At most he can advise a longer delay. And an excessive delay would be contested.
    Good morning

    Yes - the BBC said the same just now

    I understand the cabinet office have seized her phone and are securing documents, as she has been present at many cabinet meetings

    There is no doubt the Johnson supporters, including the mail with their over the top front page, are going to use this to undermine the case against him no matter how much the appointment is defended

    Not sure the timing of this was politically sensible, as it would have made sense to do this after the privileges committee report
    I'm not sure that Labour will be too upset if Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Right now he is a bigger threat to Sunak than to Starmer. And if the Tories want us all to talk about Partygate again, that sounds great, be my guest!
    To be honest I expected a response along those lines, but Johnson is over and Sunak will take the party into GE 24

    This move will muddy the water and if Starmer had a good political antenna he would have done this after the privileges report

    I would like Johnson to disappear from public life - as I have said on here repeatedly I think he is a congenital liar and lacks the moral character to have any political role. It's up to others on here to reflect on how they have helped to further his career. But he is the Tory party's problem now. If they can't flush the turd that is a sign of their disunity and the PM's lack of authority within his party. It's not Labour's job to help them dispatch Johnson. Labour have hired a highly competent public-spirited ex official to help them to prepare for government. If it causes the Tories some additional discomfort, great. They deserve it.
    I don't know if you were aware but Johnson was addressing a conference yesterday when he said to the audience

    'Put up your hand for Brexit'

    He and the host did but nobody else followed

    That is so funny !!!!!
    Yes I saw that - he asked the audience to raise their hands if they thought Brexit was a good idea. Only a handful did.

    It's not funny, it's tragic.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,139

    boulay said:

    Foxy said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Love today's Daily Heil front page. The evil Starmer forced Number 10 aides to bring suitcases of wine into Downing Street so that they could have another kareoke party. Who knew?

    Supposedly the attack line on Starmer has been Keith! The donkey man so boring that you'd fall asleep if you spoke to him. Now suddenly he is Blofeld, a man with huge power and agents everywhere, dastardly pulling the strings and setting up conspiracies.

    Keith Donkey brought down Corbyn with a manufactured conspiracy, now apparently he also brought down Johnson with an entirely different conspiracy which reached into the heart of the government machine during lock down. Imagine what he will do to the EU and Biden etc when he is elected PM? Blackmailing the UN for £100,000,000,000,000,000 or else he will fire the Crust-o-Matic Doomsday Earthquake machine he's had Ben Houchen build on Teesside.

    @mikeysmith
    Your occasional reminder that Sue Gray only did the Partygate inquiry because Simon Case had to pull out because he'd been accused of having one of the bloody parties in his office.

    She was appointed to the probe by - that's right folks - Boris Johnson.
    And she didn't investigate many incidents, such as the ABBA party. So ideal for when a whitewash is needed.

    She didn't investigate ABBA because she was too busy doing the hypnosis sessions on Ben Houchen. Big Ben thinks he is removing money and control from local councils and handing both it and public money to his friends in an every week in Private Eye corruption probe scandal. But no - Keith Donkey has had him brainwashed and he is building the Death Machine at Teesworks which PM Starmer will use to blackmail the UN.

    It sounds incredible. But it more convincing than the Daily Mail front page!
    I have absolutely no issue with Sue Gray going to work for Labour, have no issue with her investigations as everyone can see there were parties and it’s disingenuous for any Tory to claim that Boris was hard done by.

    My problem is that Labour should probably have not announced this until after the Standards committee had rogered Boris as I fear that Boris and his outriders will use this to muddy the waters and allow another stab in the back story to build when it was starting to look that he was fading into the background and that Standards would be the stake in his heart.

    If it helps Boris then Labour have made an error in timing if not the actual act.
    I think there are two things here -

    - Nothing illegal, no standards broken, not dubious. In fact completely inside all laws, rules, guidelines.
    - Bad optics
    There's a couple of other, minor side issues here.

    *) Labour are potentially making themselves a hostage to fortune. If there were contacts between Labour and Gray during the inquiry, it could be insinuated that a deal had been done.

    *) It sends a message: get the 'right' result in an inquiry, and the side might hire you (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). I'm unconvinced that's a good thing, especially after the Shami Chakrabarti scandal.

    Which leads to a question; if Gray had cleared Johnson, would she still have been hired by Labour?

    IMV Labour were perfectly right in offering the job; I'm unsure Gray was wise to accept it.
    Did Gray get the "right" result? IIRC her report was a bit of a damp squib - she refused to even look at some of the allegations, presented a load of uncontested facts about the partying and basically said that what happened wasn't great. To put it another way, which parts of her report do Tories now think were factually inaccurate or suggestive of anti-Tory bias?
    I don't know. But if you're going to say that sort of thing, did Beergate get the 'right' result? ;)
    That was the wrong result because Labour wasn’t found guilty. That was a stitch up from the Tories and the Mail. They managed to get the Police to open an investigation. Corrupt.
    I know we won't agree on this, but it really wasn't.

    Remember, even Starmer couldn't say whether he had broken the rules or not, and he's a massively big-brained lawyer. That's not a sign of a stitch-up.

    Besides, Shami Chakrabati waves 'hi'. One of Labour's issue is that they have form with this.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 49,411

    Mr. B, impossible. Morris dancing is already the zenith of cool.

    I thought giant trebuchets crewed by intelligent mutant giant fish were the last word in cool?
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,580
    Driver said:

    kle4 said:

    Typical narcissistic response from the Johnsonites. It's not all about them. Life isn't all about them. Nor is it all a game of us and them.

    Plenty of civil servants have served as Chief of Staff to a PM / LotO. Dan Rosenfield did so to Johnson himself.

    https://twitter.com/davidherdson/status/1631591795757809664

    Tories oddly silent about Dan Rosenfield?

    I think the bleating from the Johnson camp is ridiculous. I do think it was an odd appointment that wasn’t the best tactical move by Starmer, but I don’t think it’s going to cause much if any damage to him.
    Trying to push that the principle of appointment is wrong doesn't work since there are myriad examples of civil servants working for Tories too.

    Trying to push this particular example is wrong doesn't really work because if its claimed her work was dodgy it contradicts themselves at the time and means it needs redoing, not ignoring.

    I responded first post after the news broke on here and felt it was unwise on her part to move across so soon, but that's small beer stuff. Despite joking people aren't stupid, and arguing the innocence of Boris on this basis is not going to fly.
    It's not an immediate risk, but it does raise the possibility of a future attack if he does something dubious in office and people bring up "remember when he rewarded Sue Gray with a job for bringing down a Prime Minister?"

    Lots of people believe in "no smoke without fire", unfortunately, so a politician only gets so many chances to do things that are perfectly legitimate but seem slightly off. Maybe she's good enough at her new job that she's worth using one of those lives.
    I think you get a reset when you become PM, so it's probably fine. In any case that's a problem for future Keir to worry about, and he's going to have bigger problems.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    Went to a posh Thai resto last night. Got a free tasting menu because I’m reviewing it for the Gazette

    But I have to be honest. I ate probably the worst ant of my life


  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,217
    .
    Driver said:

    kle4 said:

    Typical narcissistic response from the Johnsonites. It's not all about them. Life isn't all about them. Nor is it all a game of us and them.

    Plenty of civil servants have served as Chief of Staff to a PM / LotO. Dan Rosenfield did so to Johnson himself.

    https://twitter.com/davidherdson/status/1631591795757809664

    Tories oddly silent about Dan Rosenfield?

    I think the bleating from the Johnson camp is ridiculous. I do think it was an odd appointment that wasn’t the best tactical move by Starmer, but I don’t think it’s going to cause much if any damage to him.
    Trying to push that the principle of appointment is wrong doesn't work since there are myriad examples of civil servants working for Tories too.

    Trying to push this particular example is wrong doesn't really work because if its claimed her work was dodgy it contradicts themselves at the time and means it needs redoing, not ignoring.

    I responded first post after the news broke on here and felt it was unwise on her part to move across so soon, but that's small beer stuff. Despite joking people aren't stupid, and arguing the innocence of Boris on this basis is not going to fly.
    It's not an immediate risk, but it does raise the possibility of a future attack if he does something dubious in office and people bring up "remember when he rewarded Sue Gray with a job for bringing down a Prime Minister?"

    Lots of people believe in "no smoke without fire", unfortunately, so a politician only gets so many chances to do things that are perfectly legitimate but seem slightly off. Maybe she's good enough at her new job that she's worth using one of those lives.
    The far greater risk would be getting into government without enough people who understand how to get things done in office.
  • @Jossiasjessop it won't let me quote you for some reason.

    The evidence came from a person who just so happened to be walking past a private window, who happened to have a direct line to the Mail.

    The Police investigated Starmer twice and found he had no case to answer, twice. They did that because of pressure.

    Even despite being found innocent, people claimed he was still guilty. The whole thing was corrupt in my view. We do disagree, yes.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,217
    Sub $200 per kilo to orbit will change a lot if things. The US military gets interested:
    https://spacenews.com/the-future-of-starship-includes-national-security-missions/
  • boulayboulay Posts: 5,407
    Leon said:

    Went to a posh Thai resto last night. Got a free tasting menu because I’m reviewing it for the Gazette

    But I have to be honest. I ate probably the worst ant of my life


    That’s similar to a Newcastle delicacy but usually served with cured, lightly smoked ham.


    It’s called Ant and Speck.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,580
    I know it's easy, very easy, to make fun of or ignore Tom Harwood, since he is a bit ridiculous. But I have to confess despite the tone he takes I tend to agree with him when it comes to development matters.

    “I don’t think there’s a single form of energy production in this country that a politician, or across the board politicians, have supported. We live in a country now where every single politician, every single political party, from each direction, find reasons to say no. To stop development. To stop growth. To stop our own home-grown energy. Frankly, I don’t care if it’s shale gas, if it’s fracking, if it’s wind, if it’s solar, if it’s nuclear, if it’s oil, if it’s gas. I don’t care, just build it!”

    https://order-order.com/2023/03/03/watch-harwood-hits-out-at-politicians-power-generation-failure/
  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,748

    @Jossiasjessop it won't let me quote you for some reason.

    The evidence came from a person who just so happened to be walking past a private window, who happened to have a direct line to the Mail.

    The Police investigated Starmer twice and found he had no case to answer, twice. They did that because of pressure.

    Even despite being found innocent, people claimed he was still guilty. The whole thing was corrupt in my view. We do disagree, yes.

    You do remember that Sir Keir wanted to lock us down harder and for longer than the government did? In this case, holding him to a higher standard than "the letter of the law" is, if not entirely legitimate, totally understandable.
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,073

    boulay said:

    Foxy said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Love today's Daily Heil front page. The evil Starmer forced Number 10 aides to bring suitcases of wine into Downing Street so that they could have another kareoke party. Who knew?

    Supposedly the attack line on Starmer has been Keith! The donkey man so boring that you'd fall asleep if you spoke to him. Now suddenly he is Blofeld, a man with huge power and agents everywhere, dastardly pulling the strings and setting up conspiracies.

    Keith Donkey brought down Corbyn with a manufactured conspiracy, now apparently he also brought down Johnson with an entirely different conspiracy which reached into the heart of the government machine during lock down. Imagine what he will do to the EU and Biden etc when he is elected PM? Blackmailing the UN for £100,000,000,000,000,000 or else he will fire the Crust-o-Matic Doomsday Earthquake machine he's had Ben Houchen build on Teesside.

    @mikeysmith
    Your occasional reminder that Sue Gray only did the Partygate inquiry because Simon Case had to pull out because he'd been accused of having one of the bloody parties in his office.

    She was appointed to the probe by - that's right folks - Boris Johnson.
    And she didn't investigate many incidents, such as the ABBA party. So ideal for when a whitewash is needed.

    She didn't investigate ABBA because she was too busy doing the hypnosis sessions on Ben Houchen. Big Ben thinks he is removing money and control from local councils and handing both it and public money to his friends in an every week in Private Eye corruption probe scandal. But no - Keith Donkey has had him brainwashed and he is building the Death Machine at Teesworks which PM Starmer will use to blackmail the UN.

    It sounds incredible. But it more convincing than the Daily Mail front page!
    I have absolutely no issue with Sue Gray going to work for Labour, have no issue with her investigations as everyone can see there were parties and it’s disingenuous for any Tory to claim that Boris was hard done by.

    My problem is that Labour should probably have not announced this until after the Standards committee had rogered Boris as I fear that Boris and his outriders will use this to muddy the waters and allow another stab in the back story to build when it was starting to look that he was fading into the background and that Standards would be the stake in his heart.

    If it helps Boris then Labour have made an error in timing if not the actual act.
    I think there are two things here -

    - Nothing illegal, no standards broken, not dubious. In fact completely inside all laws, rules, guidelines.
    - Bad optics



    Someone formerly in a role where impartiality is key goes to a role where partiality is key.

    Correctness aside, Starmer knows exactly what he is doing. Tory reactions are in line with his expectation I suspect. And an old sore is reopened.
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 17,001

    Nigelb said:

    Scott_xP said:

    According to The Times, Rishi Sunak is facing mounting pressure from allies of Boris Johnson to block the appointment of a senior civil servant as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

    The absolutely worst thing Rishi could do is block the appointment.

    He can't, anyway.
    At most he can advise a longer delay. And an excessive delay would be contested.
    Good morning

    Yes - the BBC said the same just now

    I understand the cabinet office have seized her phone and are securing documents, as she has been present at many cabinet meetings

    There is no doubt the Johnson supporters, including the mail with their over the top front page, are going to use this to undermine the case against him no matter how much the appointment is defended

    Not sure the timing of this was politically sensible, as it would have made sense to do this after the privileges committee report
    I'm not sure that Labour will be too upset if Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Right now he is a bigger threat to Sunak than to Starmer. And if the Tories want us all to talk about Partygate again, that sounds great, be my guest!
    To be honest I expected a response along those lines, but Johnson is over and Sunak will take the party into GE 24

    This move will muddy the water and if Starmer had a good political antenna he would have done this after the privileges report

    I would like Johnson to disappear from public life - as I have said on here repeatedly I think he is a congenital liar and lacks the moral character to have any political role. It's up to others on here to reflect on how they have helped to further his career. But he is the Tory party's problem now. If they can't flush the turd that is a sign of their disunity and the PM's lack of authority within his party. It's not Labour's job to help them dispatch Johnson. Labour have hired a highly competent public-spirited ex official to help them to prepare for government. If it causes the Tories some additional discomfort, great. They deserve it.
    I don't know if you were aware but Johnson was addressing a conference yesterday when he said to the audience

    'Put up your hand for Brexit'

    He and the host did but nobody else followed

    That is so funny !!!!!
    Yes I saw that - he asked the audience to raise their hands if they thought Brexit was a good idea. Only a handful did.

    It's not funny, it's tragic.
    And the bigger tragedy? There are some people who want to make it as irreversible as possible.

    I can understand people backing Brexit when the dinnae ken. To seek to impose it on future generations when they ken the noo, that's another matter.
  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,748
    Nigelb said:

    .

    Driver said:

    kle4 said:

    Typical narcissistic response from the Johnsonites. It's not all about them. Life isn't all about them. Nor is it all a game of us and them.

    Plenty of civil servants have served as Chief of Staff to a PM / LotO. Dan Rosenfield did so to Johnson himself.

    https://twitter.com/davidherdson/status/1631591795757809664

    Tories oddly silent about Dan Rosenfield?

    I think the bleating from the Johnson camp is ridiculous. I do think it was an odd appointment that wasn’t the best tactical move by Starmer, but I don’t think it’s going to cause much if any damage to him.
    Trying to push that the principle of appointment is wrong doesn't work since there are myriad examples of civil servants working for Tories too.

    Trying to push this particular example is wrong doesn't really work because if its claimed her work was dodgy it contradicts themselves at the time and means it needs redoing, not ignoring.

    I responded first post after the news broke on here and felt it was unwise on her part to move across so soon, but that's small beer stuff. Despite joking people aren't stupid, and arguing the innocence of Boris on this basis is not going to fly.
    It's not an immediate risk, but it does raise the possibility of a future attack if he does something dubious in office and people bring up "remember when he rewarded Sue Gray with a job for bringing down a Prime Minister?"

    Lots of people believe in "no smoke without fire", unfortunately, so a politician only gets so many chances to do things that are perfectly legitimate but seem slightly off. Maybe she's good enough at her new job that she's worth using one of those lives.
    The far greater risk would be getting into government without enough people who understand how to get things done in office.
    Not a problem if you don't have any things that you want to get done.
  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,748

    Nigelb said:

    Scott_xP said:

    According to The Times, Rishi Sunak is facing mounting pressure from allies of Boris Johnson to block the appointment of a senior civil servant as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

    The absolutely worst thing Rishi could do is block the appointment.

    He can't, anyway.
    At most he can advise a longer delay. And an excessive delay would be contested.
    Good morning

    Yes - the BBC said the same just now

    I understand the cabinet office have seized her phone and are securing documents, as she has been present at many cabinet meetings

    There is no doubt the Johnson supporters, including the mail with their over the top front page, are going to use this to undermine the case against him no matter how much the appointment is defended

    Not sure the timing of this was politically sensible, as it would have made sense to do this after the privileges committee report
    I'm not sure that Labour will be too upset if Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Right now he is a bigger threat to Sunak than to Starmer. And if the Tories want us all to talk about Partygate again, that sounds great, be my guest!
    To be honest I expected a response along those lines, but Johnson is over and Sunak will take the party into GE 24

    This move will muddy the water and if Starmer had a good political antenna he would have done this after the privileges report

    I would like Johnson to disappear from public life - as I have said on here repeatedly I think he is a congenital liar and lacks the moral character to have any political role. It's up to others on here to reflect on how they have helped to further his career. But he is the Tory party's problem now. If they can't flush the turd that is a sign of their disunity and the PM's lack of authority within his party. It's not Labour's job to help them dispatch Johnson. Labour have hired a highly competent public-spirited ex official to help them to prepare for government. If it causes the Tories some additional discomfort, great. They deserve it.
    I don't know if you were aware but Johnson was addressing a conference yesterday when he said to the audience

    'Put up your hand for Brexit'

    He and the host did but nobody else followed

    That is so funny !!!!!
    Yes I saw that - he asked the audience to raise their hands if they thought Brexit was a good idea. Only a handful did.

    It's not funny, it's tragic.
    And the bigger tragedy? There are some people who want to make it as irreversible as possible.

    I can understand people backing Brexit when the dinnae ken. To seek to impose it on future generations when they ken the noo, that's another matter.
    In the sense of going back to the status we had before, it is already irreversible. In the sense of rejoining at all, it can't be irreversible.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,662
    Leon said:

    Went to a posh Thai resto last night. Got a free tasting menu because I’m reviewing it for the Gazette

    But I have to be honest. I ate probably the worst ant of my life


    Nice grub.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,598
    Leon said:

    Went to a posh Thai resto last night. Got a free tasting menu because I’m reviewing it for the Gazette

    But I have to be honest. I ate probably the worst ant of my life


    What was wrong with it? Not al dente or something?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,598

    Mr. B, impossible. Morris dancing is already the zenith of cool.

    Specially for you today:

    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/mar/03/morris-is-a-creature-of-its-own-a-dance-for-a-new-age-photo-essay
  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,748

    Leon said:

    Went to a posh Thai resto last night. Got a free tasting menu because I’m reviewing it for the Gazette

    But I have to be honest. I ate probably the worst ant of my life


    Nice grub.
    ...

  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Went to a posh Thai resto last night. Got a free tasting menu because I’m reviewing it for the Gazette

    But I have to be honest. I ate probably the worst ant of my life


    What was wrong with it? Not al dente or something?
    Too peppery

    Don’t get me wrong. I love a nice ant as much as the next man, but this was a bit too “anty”
  • Stocky said:



    boulay said:

    Foxy said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Love today's Daily Heil front page. The evil Starmer forced Number 10 aides to bring suitcases of wine into Downing Street so that they could have another kareoke party. Who knew?

    Supposedly the attack line on Starmer has been Keith! The donkey man so boring that you'd fall asleep if you spoke to him. Now suddenly he is Blofeld, a man with huge power and agents everywhere, dastardly pulling the strings and setting up conspiracies.

    Keith Donkey brought down Corbyn with a manufactured conspiracy, now apparently he also brought down Johnson with an entirely different conspiracy which reached into the heart of the government machine during lock down. Imagine what he will do to the EU and Biden etc when he is elected PM? Blackmailing the UN for £100,000,000,000,000,000 or else he will fire the Crust-o-Matic Doomsday Earthquake machine he's had Ben Houchen build on Teesside.

    @mikeysmith
    Your occasional reminder that Sue Gray only did the Partygate inquiry because Simon Case had to pull out because he'd been accused of having one of the bloody parties in his office.

    She was appointed to the probe by - that's right folks - Boris Johnson.
    And she didn't investigate many incidents, such as the ABBA party. So ideal for when a whitewash is needed.

    She didn't investigate ABBA because she was too busy doing the hypnosis sessions on Ben Houchen. Big Ben thinks he is removing money and control from local councils and handing both it and public money to his friends in an every week in Private Eye corruption probe scandal. But no - Keith Donkey has had him brainwashed and he is building the Death Machine at Teesworks which PM Starmer will use to blackmail the UN.

    It sounds incredible. But it more convincing than the Daily Mail front page!
    I have absolutely no issue with Sue Gray going to work for Labour, have no issue with her investigations as everyone can see there were parties and it’s disingenuous for any Tory to claim that Boris was hard done by.

    My problem is that Labour should probably have not announced this until after the Standards committee had rogered Boris as I fear that Boris and his outriders will use this to muddy the waters and allow another stab in the back story to build when it was starting to look that he was fading into the background and that Standards would be the stake in his heart.

    If it helps Boris then Labour have made an error in timing if not the actual act.
    I think there are two things here -

    - Nothing illegal, no standards broken, not dubious. In fact completely inside all laws, rules, guidelines.
    - Bad optics



    Someone formerly in a role where impartiality is key goes to a role where partiality is key.

    Correctness aside, Starmer knows exactly what he is doing. Tory reactions are in line with his expectation I suspect. And an old sore is reopened.
    Just like Dan Rosenfeld then
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    The duck beak was interestingly crunchy
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,598
    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Went to a posh Thai resto last night. Got a free tasting menu because I’m reviewing it for the Gazette

    But I have to be honest. I ate probably the worst ant of my life


    What was wrong with it? Not al dente or something?
    Too peppery

    Don’t get me wrong. I love a nice ant as much as the next man, but this was a bit too “anty”
    A formic dinner, then, so to speak.
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 22,625
    Leon said:

    Went to a posh Thai resto last night. Got a free tasting menu because I’m reviewing it for the Gazette

    But I have to be honest. I ate probably the worst ant of my life


    Hope the ant music was better
  • boulayboulay Posts: 5,407
    Leon said:

    The duck beak was interestingly crunchy

    Are you sure you weren’t eating prawn quackers?
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,169
    Not a bad start for England. Banglas 9/3.
  • Sandpit said:

    Not a bad start for England. Banglas 9/3.

    This is what happens when you bowl a beamer at Sam Curran.
  • JonathanJonathan Posts: 21,471
    So someone takes a forensic look at the workings of Boris’ number ten and decides to focus on developing an alternative. Consider me shocked.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,139

    @Jossiasjessop it won't let me quote you for some reason.

    The evidence came from a person who just so happened to be walking past a private window, who happened to have a direct line to the Mail.

    The Police investigated Starmer twice and found he had no case to answer, twice. They did that because of pressure.

    Even despite being found innocent, people claimed he was still guilty. The whole thing was corrupt in my view. We do disagree, yes.

    Where the evidence came from is essentially irrelevant: unless you're claiming the event didn't take place?

    As I said, Starmer himself couldn't say whether it had been legal or not. And epidemiologically it was a terrible thing to do - and Starmer consistently wanted us plebs locked down more strongly.
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 26,122
    NEW THREAD
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 17,001
    Driver said:

    Nigelb said:

    Scott_xP said:

    According to The Times, Rishi Sunak is facing mounting pressure from allies of Boris Johnson to block the appointment of a senior civil servant as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

    The absolutely worst thing Rishi could do is block the appointment.

    He can't, anyway.
    At most he can advise a longer delay. And an excessive delay would be contested.
    Good morning

    Yes - the BBC said the same just now

    I understand the cabinet office have seized her phone and are securing documents, as she has been present at many cabinet meetings

    There is no doubt the Johnson supporters, including the mail with their over the top front page, are going to use this to undermine the case against him no matter how much the appointment is defended

    Not sure the timing of this was politically sensible, as it would have made sense to do this after the privileges committee report
    I'm not sure that Labour will be too upset if Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Right now he is a bigger threat to Sunak than to Starmer. And if the Tories want us all to talk about Partygate again, that sounds great, be my guest!
    To be honest I expected a response along those lines, but Johnson is over and Sunak will take the party into GE 24

    This move will muddy the water and if Starmer had a good political antenna he would have done this after the privileges report

    I would like Johnson to disappear from public life - as I have said on here repeatedly I think he is a congenital liar and lacks the moral character to have any political role. It's up to others on here to reflect on how they have helped to further his career. But he is the Tory party's problem now. If they can't flush the turd that is a sign of their disunity and the PM's lack of authority within his party. It's not Labour's job to help them dispatch Johnson. Labour have hired a highly competent public-spirited ex official to help them to prepare for government. If it causes the Tories some additional discomfort, great. They deserve it.
    I don't know if you were aware but Johnson was addressing a conference yesterday when he said to the audience

    'Put up your hand for Brexit'

    He and the host did but nobody else followed

    That is so funny !!!!!
    Yes I saw that - he asked the audience to raise their hands if they thought Brexit was a good idea. Only a handful did.

    It's not funny, it's tragic.
    And the bigger tragedy? There are some people who want to make it as irreversible as possible.

    I can understand people backing Brexit when the dinnae ken. To seek to impose it on future generations when they ken the noo, that's another matter.
    In the sense of going back to the status we had before, it is already irreversible. In the sense of rejoining at all, it can't be irreversible.
    You are, of course, right. And that's something we're going to have to live with. But there have been people here over the last few days telling themselves that Windsor and CPTPP are going to make Brexit so secure that there's no point talking about any reversal any more. And for some, that the irrerversibility is a feature, not a bug.

    (And no, nothing is totally irreversible, but many things are so hard to reverse that it's not realistic to do so. Entropy, dear Driver. Entropy.)
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,675

    there have been people here over the last few days telling themselves that Windsor and CPTPP are going to make Brexit so secure that there's no point talking about any reversal any more.

    And it's interesting that one person NOT claiming that is BoZo...
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 61,662
    Mr. Malmesbury, enormo-haddock are splendid, it is true.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 59,872
    Boris and Truss are the biggest allies Labour have.

    Because of their egos they cannot STFU and damage the Conservative Party every time they open their gobs.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 59,872

    Leon said:

    Went to a posh Thai resto last night. Got a free tasting menu because I’m reviewing it for the Gazette

    But I have to be honest. I ate probably the worst ant of my life


    Hope the ant music was better
    Menus like that are a real bugbear for me.
  • ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 3,670

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Boris tells Sunak and Hunt to slash corporation tax to Irish levels and reverse the 6% corporation tax rise they plan.

    He also comes out in opposition to British Museum Chairman George Osborne's plans to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/03/02/boris-johnson-calls-corporation-tax-cut-irish-levels-fresh-challenge/

    Stating that the Elgin Marbles belong in London is a bit like saying the Crown Jewels belong in Athens!

    The British Museum = Biggest Stolen Goods Warehouse in the World!
    I think that's Boris's point. If the BM (or any museum for that matter) obliges itself to 'give everything back', it's not a museum, it's a room.
    Indeed, loan exhibits abroad but if every major museum only displayed objects from the country it was located in there wouldn't be a lot of exhibits left in them
    The Parthenon still exists, so the Marbles belong there.
    All the places that all the exhibits in all the museums in the world came from still exist.
    Not in the respect Sunil is talking about. The Elgin Marbles are literally fixtures ripped off the walls of an ancient building that is still there.

    In most cases, the item is either by its nature moveable, or the context in which it was displayed either gone or massively changed.

    It's objectively ludicrous - even if one attaches no blame to Elgin personally and thinks it all legal etc - that the Marbles are in Bloomsbury rather than an ancient building which they were literally part of and which (I'll repeat) is still effing there.
    There's another side to this that I find interesting, and that's the soft power of artefacts.

    A few years back, my son was fascinated by terracotta warriors and Easter Island heads. He was a bit too young to take him up to the Liverpool terracotta warrior exhibition in 2018, but last year we went to a tiny (but brilliant) 'fake' Terracotta Warrior exhibition in Dorchester, of all places, which he loved. (There's a fake Tutankhamun exhibition just up the road as well).

    This isn't relevant to the marbles, but I wonder if having exhibits around the world actually helps the original country? Does have an Easter Island head in the BM create more knowledge and interest about/in Easter Island? Do all the exhibits of Ancient Egypt in local museums, of dusty mummies and strange inscriptions, actually create generations of people who are interested in Egypt and its history, and therefore more likely to travel there?

    Would the world be richer if every ancient artefact was in its original place, or poorer? (Leaving aside issues if where an 'original' place is)?

    This is not an argument for musuems keeping foreign artefacts: the same sort of effect may be achieved by travelling exhibitions. But I reckon there's a massive soft power in it - especially for small places like Easter Island.

    A fun fact about the terracotta warriors is that most are still buried. When the first ones were unearthed they were all painted but exposure to light quickly made the colours fade away. They are now waiting for the appropriate preservation technology to be developed before digging out any more.

    IIRC most ancient statues in Rome, Greece etc were painted. The white marble we associate with the classics era is totally false.

    Or have I got that wrong?
    I've seen a few documentaries on that - and looks to be true (not sure if it was every statue mind). I've often wondered if all the trade that went on with India influenced in either direction or if it was just common across the ancient world. But when you look at Indian temples you have to wonder what Rome or Athens may have actually looked like!


  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,179

    I would like Johnson to disappear from public life - as I have said on here repeatedly I think he is a congenital liar and lacks the moral character to have any political role. It's up to others on here to reflect on how they have helped to further his career. But he is the Tory party's problem now. If they can't flush the turd that is a sign of their disunity and the PM's lack of authority within his party. It's not Labour's job to help them dispatch Johnson. Labour have hired a highly competent public-spirited ex official to help them to prepare for government. If it causes the Tories some additional discomfort, great. They deserve it.

    Is it not a fact that Keir Starmer lied about his policy commitments when he ran for the Labour leadership?
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 49,411
    Nigelb said:

    Sub $200 per kilo to orbit will change a lot if things. The US military gets interested:
    https://spacenews.com/the-future-of-starship-includes-national-security-missions/

    A *cost* of $1250/Kg is tearing up the launch industry already

    The space launch industry is divided into

    1) SpaceX doesn’t exist. Their prices are fake. See ESA
    2) Due to politics we can’t build a fully reusable launcher to compete so we aim to be the other option for US Government contracts. See ULA.
    3) Copy Falcon 9 - see some renders from Europe, China on the web
    4) Ignore - much of the micro launcher industry
    5) we have a plan to be even cheaper - see Stoke Space



  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,139

    Nigelb said:

    Sub $200 per kilo to orbit will change a lot if things. The US military gets interested:
    https://spacenews.com/the-future-of-starship-includes-national-security-missions/

    A *cost* of $1250/Kg is tearing up the launch industry already

    The space launch industry is divided into

    1) SpaceX doesn’t exist. Their prices are fake. See ESA
    2) Due to politics we can’t build a fully reusable launcher to compete so we aim to be the other option for US Government contracts. See ULA.
    3) Copy Falcon 9 - see some renders from Europe, China on the web
    4) Ignore - much of the micro launcher industry
    5) we have a plan to be even cheaper - see Stoke Space
    A bit late to this, but I think that's a very biased, and incorrect, view of things.

    But we should still get together to buy ULA. ;)
This discussion has been closed.