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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Why I’m expecting Boris to fail in his bid to be Theresa May’s successor
Picture: ConHome next Tory leader polling from December 2015
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A deliberate mistake by @TheScreamingEagles?
The man has no shame.
The YouGov poll that showed a half percent Lab to Con swing if Boris replaced Mrs May was presented by many Boris Johnson fans as a sign that only their man can win the Tories the next election.
Weren't polls with 'alternative to Mrs Thatcher' options showing double digit (or high single digit) leads for the alternatives before she got into serious trouble?
At best these polls show Boris is no worse than a PM who is widely regarded as not great.....(at best)....
Boris would be a bloody awful leader. We must hope Mr. Eagles' prophetic powers exceed his historical comprehension.
He would galvanise the opposition, for sure.
For what it's worth, I still think that Gasly/Sainz are rightly favourites but the two outsiders that might be considered value are Raikkonen (29) and Alonso.
More importantly, he did not spend tens of millions of London taxpayers' money on it, unlike the Garden Bridge. Damnation to everyone involved in that project.
PS: Water Cannons WTF
He’s not worth the emotional investment
The biggest problem however is that while he was chasing all these dream projects he was utterly uninterested in the bread and butter of running London, and took any attempts to hold him to account simply as opportunities to joke around. Everything is just a game to him, and every political decision simply another move to be judged solely against his personal self interest at the time.
And on the other hand, there was, and is, a need for more airport capacity in the SE. The concept of an estuary airport has been a longstanding one, and to properly evaluate it you would need to spend some money - as people did on all the other options as well, e.g. Gatwick and the two Heathrow schemes.
Where the Garden Bridge differs is that there was no need, as was shown when Boris and others couldn't give a reason for its existence.
It's worth pointing out that this trait of 'voting for X to stop Y' isn't confined to the Tories. Foot won in 1980 largely because he wasn't Healey. A case could be made that one reason Ed won is because he wasn't his brother.
I said in 2016 that if Boris stood he wouldn't win. I was right and his stock has fallen a long way since. I think he would even struggle to get nominated if Gove, Fox or Rees-Mogg stood (I'm not expecting JRM to, I think the others will - Fox is a sort of thick version of Ken Clarke when it comes to leadership contests).
A more interesting question is whether he decides in light of that to flounce off and make millions from TV and writing and after dinner speaking, a la Portillo. He's clearly not in Parliament because he enjoys it or out of a sense of public
ityservice (as tbf the likes of Mogg and Corbyn are). If he realises his dream is not coming true, he might walk. The value bet for Boris is probably on a by-election in Uxbridge in 2019.Edit - the autocorrect typo was absolutely awesome, but made a nonsense of my comment. Clearly he's interested in 'publicity' services from Parliament!
No punches pulled here:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/aug/05/antisemitism-labour-jeremy-corbyn-crisis-wont-go-away
mind blowingly cretinoussame leadership election system as Labour, he would be favourite, especially if only a proposer and seconded were required.They don't, so he isn't.
What I don’t see is how it gets resolved - even if Corbyn was to resign or be no-confidenced by the PLP as he was in 2016, he’d be re-elected by the members who couldn’t care less about antisemitism. He’d need to fail to get the nominations from the MPs, does anyone think we are close to that stage yet?
Set against the header:
1. The Conservative Party - members and MPs - are united in one thing: May cannot lead them into the next election.
2. So someone else has to. But who, if not Boris? Nobody else has Boris's name recognition. Noody has the ability to draw in the politically unengaged like he can.
3. He can pull of the not insubstantial trick of appearing to be an anti-politician, aloof from politics whilst still being part of it.
4. He won the Brexit vote, something that would have been lost if fronted by Farage.
5. And what other politician can do this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhxilSeFqMI
6. Or this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWIUp19bBoA
Either way we’re better off without him.
Kubica would likely have been taken on elsewhere if that were a credible move. The Red Bull seat, even as second fiddle, is a very attractive one, so pretty much whoever gets offered it (potentially excepting Raikkonen if he gets a multi-year offer from Ferrari) will go for it.
But we knew that anyway. It was always going to come to the fore eventually. I was told by an MP involved in the mass resignations of 2016 that the reason for it wasn't the sacking of Benn or the bombing of Syria but that Corbyn was completely unable to function as a leader. He was hopelessly. The examples he gave were hilarious and tragic.
The great irony is that the only thing no friend or foe could accuse him of -racism-is the thing that ultimately revealed his greatest failing
An object lesson to our politicians in how to do something socially useful with god given idiocy.
Also he is definitely amusing, has things to say and can write an engaging, erudite and rhetorically persuasive piece for the press. He would be the Heineken candidate.
At one point they have the disguised assassin pause mid-mission to bleed a radiator.
1) Of course polls can change, Boris has led polls before, then trailed again and is now back leading them again. The whole reason for that is precisely that there will not be No Deal but the Chequers Deal instead, the Chequers Deal was the signal May is ready to cave to the EU for a withdrawal agreement and transition deal which is why Boris is leading again as most Leavers are furious at that and he opposes the Chequers Deal
2) Boris did not stand last time as he was not suited to negotiate with the EU and MPs had decided May was best for that, next time though the MPs will not be choosing someone to negotiate with the EU on a Brexit deal but to beat Corbyn and Boris is easily the best choice for that
3) The poll in question which had the Tories at 38% under Boris compared to 35% under Mogg and a terrible 30% for Gove and 29% for Javid and Hunt was brilliant for Boris as it showed only he of the alternative leaders to May would do any better than her against Corbyn given May trailed Corbyn by 1% while Boris tied Corbyn. Hence if the Tories are not going to replace May with Boris they may as well keep May as all other alternative leaders would be worse. Javid and Hunt are now Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary respectively too so the lack of name recognition argument for them cannot last much longer
4) Tory MPs especially in marginal seats will at the end of the day want a leader who can save their seats and beat Corbyn, as long as Boris looks best able to do that in the polls he remains the likely next Tory leader
5) Major only won as the 'Stop Heseltine' candidate as polling showed the Tories would beat Kinnock under his leadership as Heseltine would. No alternative Tory leader polled does as well against Corbyn as Boris.
Hague and IDS only won as the 'Stop Clarke' candidates of Eurosceptics, Boris already is the candidate of Eurosceptics.
6) Boris is tough enough to survive a brutal campaign e.g. if he twice beat Ken Livingstone to win the London Mayoralty and beat off everything the hard Left threw at him he will easily survive a Tory leadership contest especially when at the end of the day he has charisma which like Bill Clinton, Trump or Berlusconi helps them brush off any backstory issues
Nonetheless I think the points you raise, especially 1 and 2, do show that acting as though he will inevitably do so and be an inevitable success if he does, is misplaced and overly optimistic.
I am far from convinced he woukd suffer a lot from no deal - he would probably get backed by no dealers and like Trump shrugs off reports of what he has said before - but just because some polling is in his favour does not mean the others have no shot. Any of them has one chance to reinvent themselves.
Yes, he has a good shot. But he does have big negatives too.
'Oh dear oh dear.'
'Oh dear oh dear oh dear.'
Many happy childhood memories of watching Barry making a complete fool of himself while Paul made a worse one.
Anyway, I must be off. RIP Barry Chuckle.
As I say I think he has a good shot, but I cannot understand the approach which treats his ability to help save tory seats as a certainty and that is key, since that is usually what is relied upon to explain why his many flaws are irrelevant to the MPS, since they won't risk their own seats.
It may be that he did not stand because Gove decided he was unfit to negotiate with the EU, but to imply as you did that he made the decision of his own volition is to play fast and loose with the facts.
I know you want the Conservatives to win the next election, but even if Boris was the man to do that - and he isn't - these kind of claims don't help your case.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trumps-escalating-war-on-the-truth-is-on-purpose
Only three members of Nixon’s enemies list are still alive. (Ron Dellums, a former member of Congress particularly loathed by Nixon for his anti-war protests and militant civil-rights activism, died on Monday.) I called one of them, Morton Halperin, to ask what he thought of the proliferating Trump-Nixon comparisons. Halperin, who oversaw the writing of the Pentagon Papers and then served on Nixon’s National Security Council staff before breaking with him over the invasion of Cambodia, sued when he found out that Nixon had secretly taped him and others in the White House. Over the years, he has been one of Nixon’s proudest and most persistent enemies. So I was surprised when Halperin insisted, strongly, that Nixon wasn’t nearly as damaging to the institution of the Presidency as Trump has been. “He’s far worse than Nixon,” Halperin told me, “certainly as a threat to the country.”
QUASI-AV????
The system of voting is called the Exhaustive Ballot. It differs massively from AV in that you only get one vote per round, with AV you can rank the candidates in order of preference from the outset!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustive_ballot
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-45073385
Boris has charisma, Brown did not
https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/964163240380063747
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etIqln7vT4w
However after May's relatively poor performance v Corbyn in 2017 Tory MPs will be looking for someone to beat Corbyn above all now if and when May goes and to sell post Brexit UK
The other issue that is forgotten is that we have now had three PMs in a row who basically had no political vision and just promoted their benefits as administrators. Boris, if he stands, will have a positive vision to sell of an independent and confident nation. What vision are Javid and Hunt etc going to sell? They have no discernible set of principles or vision. Their campaigns will purely be built on the fact that the are OK at their jobs and not terribly unpopular. But as the polls don’t show that they will be more successful at beating Labour than Boris, it is not a useful pitch for Tory MPs.
Tory MPs will vote for whoever is most popular with the voters. That will probably be Boris. If he stands and doesn’t implode again the chances he does not make the final two are low. I think the public will rally to a vision in the next contest and MPs will follow the public.
The real question is whether he tries to get rid of May before she sells out to the EU. If he goes for her early and gets a contest he is far more likely to win than if he waits until mid 2019. Personally, I think there will be a contest this year and that May will lose, or resign.
Your argument seems to come down to how we the country should be lucky to be led by this charismatic stallion of a man, when he deigns to take up the role at his pleasure, even though he said he wasn't up to it during an even more crucial part. It's not the same as some others not standing, since unlike then Boris was widely expected to.
Most contributors here don't want Boris to be next Tory leader and most comments are explanations of why they feel that way. The comments are irrelevant to the probability that in fact he will be elected leader.
HYUFD explains downthread explains why at least a third of Tory MPs will vote for him. Summary: he's the best chance they've got.
At 6/1 against on Betfair, his odds are too long. I certainly wouldn't be laying him at those odds. Those who do are following their heart not their head.
Also the same question about Chuka Umunna, who decided not to stand for the Lab leadership a week after he’d announced he was standing in 2015. (He’s since got married).
A contest between a Remainer and a Leaver only has one likely winner because of the predilections of the membership, so I think that the next PM will probably be a committed Leaver of the second rank: not widely known to the public, and from outside of the Cabinet. One or two names spring to mind. But we shall see.
Majority of Germans want to bring back military service
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article180588522/Umfrage-Mehrheit-der-Deutschen-fuer-Wiedereinfuehrung-der-Wehrpflicht.html
that should cheer the neighbours up
I doubt Boris or Umunna should worry, indeed I would not be surprised if they are our next two PMs
I won't respect those MPs calling for May to come when they come back from the summer - they knew the score, many were on record saying her deal was not only bad, but unacceptable, and anything she might get from the EU will by definition be worse as the EU will have demanded further concessions. Therefore there is no reason, if they cannot support it, to not have provoked a challenge already, and if someone like Boris later says he could have gotten a better deal I will call him what he is, a liar and a coward, since he hasn't attempted to remove May so that he can try. Ok he might not succeed, but if she is wasting her time on a crap deal, do something about it. And quitting the Cabinet wasn't doing something about it, since that only affects his positioning for a leadership contest in future, it was about saving his own arse.
All the evidence is Boris is best to do that and if he does not lead the Tories at the next general election the likelihood of a Corbyn premiership is increased
Chequers is not going to be approved by the EU. People are skipping the bit about how May can deal with that and still stay in office. On what basis will she be able to back down when she has said this is the limit? She will go, or be kicked out. Everyone said no leavers would stand up to her over Chequers and that did not exactly go as planned.