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Bad news for Liz Truss fans, all three of them – politicalbetting.com
Bad news for Liz Truss fans, all three of them – politicalbetting.com
Liz Truss became prime minister one year ago. Do you think she did well or badly as prime minister?All BritonsWell: 7%Badly: 81%Con votersWell: 11%Badly: 80%https://t.co/8B236fmz1V pic.twitter.com/1ycxtD49nb
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I’ve got
1) Liz Truss
2) ????
Will Starmer even try, I wonder.
That would be Luckyguy (and possibly EPG). Possibly also Keir Starmer and his fan club, which we assured by our resident Jezist consists of four donkeys in a field somewhere near Surrey.
After that we're struggling.
It would have been a darn sight less difficult with those provisos in place.
Why is Berlin suddenly so popular.
We've the prospect of another 15 months of this.
PS the votes of 81,326 Tory members really isn't a democratic mandate to change the country.
Catalogue: https://www.bonhams.com/auction/27998/lot/306P/1943-vickers-supermarine-spitfire-mark-ix-single-seat-fighter-chassis-no-mh415/
Livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0UqLicdV0A
Before you pick holes in that, yes a know the argument is full of holes. I don't support it... just saying that's the argument.
Cabinet ministers, however, privately believe that it is time for Sunak to cast aside his natural caution and return to the more bullish approach he took at the end of the Tory leadership contest against Liz Truss.
The contest he lost to Liz Truss
Before she was beaten by a lettuce.
It's about being prepared to take on the challenge. She didn't do that, not even the 'what if people question this basic point?' stage. She hadn't prepared her MPs for it either, not even testing the waters to see how much she could carry them with her.
She might not have succeeded either way, and I'm still a little surprised they didn't tough it out which probably wouldn't have been much worse in the long run, but she did not fail because she challenged the consensus and that is hard.
It is hard, but she failed because she had no plan beyond saying 'X is a problem, also let's have some tax cuts, which will help in a way I am unable to explain'. Just a bit more time and prep and there wouldn't have been such a freak out. It rewrites things to put it all down to the inherent problem of tackling consensus.
Let's also never forget that despite her pivot economically she ran as the continuity candidate who did not think Boris should have quit, with her claims we needed to massively change things causing a bit of dissonance.
I'm not even saying it couldn't have worked, but it was her job to sell it, and she couldn't even survive 2 months, if she couldn't manage beyond that that itself is proof she couldn't have achieved her aims.
The point is, the UK voted Johnson in in 2019 with his manifesto. Liz Truss’s legislative agenda was pretty radically different to that. Not really very democratic.
So the "mandate" point is moot.
There was a fair bit of foreboding about the flakiness of Truss and Trussonomics before she got the job... Did anyone think she would do quite as badly as she did?
Some even quesiton what's the point of being a party member if you don't get a vote for leader, despite how recent an innovation it is, and how membership is well down on what it used to be. Admittedly the Corbyn vote did see a surge in membership, but the Tories have not seen that since the system was implemented.
To frame it was 'she failed because its hard to challenge the consensus' takes away her agency and makes it seem an inevitability that she went so soon and failed.
How truffle ruined absolutely everything
If I shut my eyes, I can remember a time when I’d order a plain pasta pomodoro and mac and cheese came just as it was. My chips were sprinkled only with a dash of flaky sea salt. A much simpler time.
A time before truffle.
Then, truffle took over, sending the London food scene into a state of mushroom-induced delirium. Now, seemingly every morsel on every menu is swimming in a thick pungent oil or is scattered with shavings of the crusty, nobbly little creatures. My TikTok For You Page is an explosion of sweaty cheese wheels and twirling forkfuls of truffley pastas. ‘You’ve got to try this new spot in Soho,’ an influencer’s voice proclaims. ‘We had the truffle fries, the truffle pasta and this incredible truffle cocktail with a truffle emulsion.’
https://www.timeout.com/london/food-restaurant-truffle-takeover?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-gb
Add a few more PBers, close family members and some of the more politically active among the anti-Woke BD/SM community, and she's cracked double digits (numerically speaking).
They probably should have stuck with her to be honest. The reputational hit of 3 PMs in 2 months has been so devastating, with no countering narrative of positive recovery since to make up for it.
I know it's illogical in the sense that the type of change being offered by centre-left opposition parties is very different to that Truss was offering.
It's pretty kooky, but you do get a few people with that kind of view. I distinctly remember a voter at the last London mayoral elections proudly proclaiming on the doorstep that he wanted change so would be voting for the Lib Dem GLA candidate, and Laurence Fox for Mayor. Takes all sorts.
Sunak is boring too, but like Truss he has the party that wants to be revolutionaries to mollify. Starmer's revolutionary base are too tuckered out by defeat to pressure him to take performative action, so if we're lucky he'll do something substantive.
Mr “she’ll surprise on the upside” Leon
Anyone using the phrase "food scene" should also be taken out and shot.
Not that I have anything against the author.
As it turned out, she failed due to recklessly cracking on and trying to do what she had foolishly promised in the face of all reason and sense. You do almost have to admire it in a sick way.
"Xóchitl Gálvez is a Mexican original. She’s a radiant, broad-faced Indigenous woman who grew up in extreme poverty, studied math over the protests of her abusive, alcoholic father, and battled her way to building a prosperous tech company and becoming a senator. Now she is rocking Mexican politics.
Gálvez is the leading opposition candidate running to succeed President Andrés Manuel López Obrador."
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/20/mexico-presidential-elections-galvez-interview/
Oh, and among other things she has dressed up as a T. Rex to criticize 'López Obrador’s proposed election-law changes that she claimed bring back the “Jurassic era.”'
Running against her is Lopez Obrador's pick, former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum. But there's more.: There may be a third significant candidate, former foreign minster Marcelo Eberard:
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/07/mexico-presidential-elections-sheinbaum-spoiler/
(The drug cartels would -- probably -- prefer Sheinbaum.)
Macaroni cheese is a British main course, based on some dish from medieval Italy that Italians don’t eat any more, which was trendy in the 60s and 70s and incredibly conservative now.
Mac and cheese is a side dish for oversize Americans for whom a giant pizza doesn’t provide enough calories on its own.
That gives Starmer and Reeves space to be quite spicy, if they want to. We won't know until after the event, because it will sound boring anyway. But something like Reeve's plan to list government borrowing against assets built as a result could help in lots of ways whilst sounding dull and responsible.
But I don’t agree with those that say it just needed more planning. The truth is that all our governments work within ever narrower parameters and can actually change less and less.
It needs extraordinary leadership to change this. And I don’t see a hint of this in our current politics.
https://www.visitberlin.de/en/event/babylon-berlin-concert
https://www.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/en/about/news/archaeopteryx-named-fossil-year
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
But these two bits from the column may tell you more about her: She says that at 17 she fought off a rapist with a soldering iron -- and hasn't been afraid of anyone since. And recently, according to an advisor, she told a group: “I have the ovaries to confront him. I hope you have the balls to follow me."
AMLO (as Lopez Obrador is often called) is a left-wing populist -- with a chilling indifference to the damage the drug lords have done to Mexico.
(For the record: One of the -- perhaps the best -- best things the US could do for our southern neighbors is stop buying illegal drugs from their criminals.)
That's why she crashed and burned. The sooner the Tories stop thinking that Thatcherism is the answer the quicker they might actually start the hard work of thinking about the solutions to today's problems.
((Sensible answer is opposite of U.K., so December is the start of summer, at least in the meteological sense. Bearing in mind the sheer size of Oz, English style seasons are not appropriate for all locations.)
Bloody cyclists, eh.
Seems a weird tautology. Surely the whole point of a bomb hoax is it's a fake?
Top is St Andrew's. Of the top 16 no fewer than 5 are Scottish. This seems worth noting as the Scottish population is less than 10% of the UK. can any of this be true?
The all time UK record for September is ~35.5C - in Northern Ireland in 1906
Close
Incidentally, there are parallels in warfare. Every army goes into battle trained and ready to fight the last war, and if it's not won quickly there is a period about 6-24 months in when each side realises that oops they don't know how to do this, and have to come up with something else fast. You can see the Ukrainians and Russians adapting in real time.
But that's warfare. There's no immediately pressing need for the Conservatives to evolve, so they wont. If they are defeated in 24 they will, but until then no.
Ukraine 1
For that alone the Tories should be wiped of the political map, let alone all the rest of the long charge sheet against them
And though her lack of preparation and skill became readily apparent quickly, I'll also concede she's not spent too much time since wallowing in what would be understandable bitterness.
Given just 7% of voters thought her premiership was a success she will probably be our last for the foreseeable future