Sitting Priti or Priti Vacant?Paddy Power are offering 3/1 on Priti Patel not being in the cabinet on the 1st of March 2021 and 1/5 that she is.https://t.co/9d6VqOH5YmMe, I'm taking the 3/1 and I explain here why.https://t.co/n8jtDSRndX pic.twitter.com/o4OW9o7mFM
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Interesting that there’s a suggestion Raab might get it (although God forbid given how useless he is). Would he keep the deputy PM role?
Might have been useful in the current negotiations. He holds all the cards...
https://twitter.com/CraftBeerNSport/status/1333052875048693760
Edit - tweet deleted
https://twitter.com/_jamesbfc/status/1333054414257590273
https://twitter.com/Alan_Dawson1971/status/1333054462823444480
Current Betfair prices:-
Biden 1.04
Democrats 1.04
Biden PV 1.03
Biden PV 49-51.9% 1.05
Trump PV 46-48.9% 1.05
Trump ECV 210-239 1.08
Biden ECV 300-329 1.08
Biden ECV Hcap -48.5 1.06
Biden ECV Hcap -63.5 1.07
Trump ECV Hcap +81.5 1.02
AZ Dem 1.05
GA Dem 1.05
MI Dem 1.05
NV Dem 1.05
PA Dem 1.06
WI Dem 1.06
Trump to leave before end of term NO 1.11
Trump exit date 2021 1.09
How the actual fuck has he not merely survived but walked away?
He is dislikeable enough, for sure. I was never convinced that "Howard Kirk voted Conservative in 1979" as the TV adaption would have it. Much more likely, Prof Howard Kirk would have ended up his shagging career as a left-wing Master of an Oxbridge College and a talking head on Radio 4.
For Johnson's canvassing style, we would surely find it hard to beat Bertie Wooster in "Much Obliged, Jeeves", who I recollect used the immortal line
"Do you want to see our foreign policy humped up?"
Wooster's canvassing patter, "steady hand on the helm of the Great Ship of State" is pure Boris Johnson. But Bertie was essentially unambitious, so maybe it is Lord Sidcup?
Certainly, Boris seems to have escaped from the pages of a PG Wodehouse novel. It would be very nice to return him there.
Your response misses the point:
1. If leading Labour politicians in Leeds and Nottingham want it, leaving aside the others in Yorkshire and the E Midlands who don't it's because they're being given the option of HS2 or nothing. That's the crazy way that our centralised country works. If they were asked to decide what they would prefer to invest the same sum in, instead, they won't choose HS2.
2. It doesn't matter if the Conservatives eventually cancel HS2 East, which they probably will. All the better. Labour is on the right side of the argument from the start, while the Tories are playing catch up. Starmer gets a head start in trying to redefine Labour as the party of responsible, not wasteful public investment. If the Tories do cancel it, Labour's argument will also shift to a focus on why the Tories are not planning to invest the cash in something else.
Top work by the guys in the medical car.
Thankfully we now have the fastest cars ever built, that can have a driver walk away from an accident like that.
I was one of those who was sceptical about the Halo, but today it undoubtedly saved Romain Grosjean’s life.
Hang them, flog them, then hang them again plays well with Johnson's new/old electorate. And May is coming faster than you think.
https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/stewart-halo-criticism-1960s-safety-backlash-939179/939179/
Jason Roy fails yet again. Not looking too good for him.
1. She is a Brexiteer so gives him cover when a deal is made
2. She is a hanger and flogger so gives cover to Boris's latest crackdown on crime
3. Her very presence protects Boris from racism charges
Where do the rumours come from? Does Michael Gove fancy a new job?
The point is it should be up to regional leaders to set their own infrastructure investment priorities for the communities they represent. They will define "profit" in the widest sense, in terms of addressing the costs that arise of doing nothing, and I think that major social housing programmes would be high up their priorities given a choice.
I think the History Man would have joined the SDP before going full Thatcherite in the mid 80s. By now he would be a Brexiteer and anti-vaxxer.
Edit: Above all, Bertie has zero ambition - much to the frustration of certain of his more designing lady friends. And Mike works hard at his cricket IIRC - but that is a different ambition, towards excellence for its own sake, of the kind one sees in a sumo wrestler or Japanese archer.
Bertie is an idiot, but he means well. Johnson isn't an idiot, but neither does he mean well.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/04/straight-out-wodehouse-could-boris-johnson-be-roderick-spode-disguised-bertie
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/mar/30/boris.livingstone
"I first met whatshisname, aka Boris Johnson, when I spoke at the Oxford Union as Daily Telegraph editor while he was its president. I remember feeling cross, that the evening seemed a benefit match for the presidential ego. No, let us be frank: I realised that this callow white lump in formal evening dress was a lot better at playing an audience than I was. A while later, Boris joined the Telegraph. Following a spell as a leader writer, he became our EU correspondent. Over the next few years, he developed the persona which has become famous today, a façade resembling that of PG Wodehouse's Gussie Finknottle, allied to wit, charm, brilliance and startling flashes of instability."
It might be more important than the Georgia run-offs.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/most-important-relationship-d-c-biden-mcconnell-have-history-n1248830
The problem will only come IF Reform gets and real traction in the New Year and is able to field full slates of candidates across places like Kent and Surrey. In 2013, UKIP won 147 Councillors but lost them all in 2017.
In terms of vote shares, in 2017, in England, the Conservatives on 46.5%, Labour 20% and the LDs 18%.
Taylor has a 'new labour' aura written all over him however the programme last week on gambling 25/11/20 was excellent with interviews with Rebecca Cassidy and Emma Casey both of whom had interesting insights into gambling and anybody who bets on politics is recommended to listen to the programme on BBC sounds.
Perhaps the public needs to start discussing with itself when we need to reopen properly and give up on the scientists and the ministers and their all over the place lock/unlock strategy?
If the severely medically vulnerable, care home residents and the 80+ years olds have been vaccinated, then perhaps we agree that society reopens on that date and we end this before we have nothing left to reopen.
Easter seems about right, but it might be February if the new minister for needles comes good.
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
What is the evidence for Laurie Taylor?
From my viewing post, virtually every Arts & Humanities Professor in Oxbridge in the 1990s was behaving like Howard Kirk.
'The History Man' is a decade or so earlier, but I'd say there was no serious shortage of role models
https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-blows-past-deadline-certify-general-election-results-lawmakers-push-reforms
I know I'm the only PBer interested in this election, but I'll keep mentioning it when vaguely relevant.
Seems pretty clear - if the upward advance of hospitalisation hadn't stopped, we would have reached and passed the first peak quite rapidly.
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/pennsylvania-2020-election-biden-trump-20201129.html
Has anyone found any evidence? eg A tape or a direct quote somewhere.
Why that was, was comprehensively answered when they restaged the lifeboat loadings using the replica lifeboats and davits made for the movie.
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else.
2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses
3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less.
4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
It was a decision none of us wanted to take. But it was a decision none of us could avoid. When ministers met just one month ago to consider whether to introduce a second national lockdown we were presented with a Devil’s dilemma.
We were being asked to impose restrictions on individual liberty which went against every instinct we have had all our adult lives. We would be asking friends and families to avoid each other’s company. We would be closing shops, bars and restaurants, and not just denying people the social contact which defines us as human beings but also suppressing the animal spirit which keeps our economy going. We would be asking millions who had already given up so much to sacrifice even more.
So why did those of us gathered round the cabinet table that Friday afternoon decide that we would, indeed, choose to make November 2020 such a difficult month? For the same reason that Emmanuel Macron in France, Sebastian Kurz in Austria, Micheál Martin in Ireland, Mark Rutte in the Netherlands, Angela Merkel in Germany, Stefan Löfven in Sweden and so many other democratic leaders chose to restrict their people’s freedoms. And for the same reason that the eight political parties in power in devolved administrations have taken similar steps to the UK government. Because the alternative would have been indefensible.
We had to act, as they did, because if we did not our health service would have been overwhelmed.
That Friday morning I was in Surrey, looking forward to a trip later to an award-winning business in my constituency, the Hogs Back Brewery. But a cloud already hung over my day. I knew that the data coming in from the frontline of the fight against the virus was ominous. So I was not surprised, although I was certainly chilled, by the summons to an action meeting to consider the difficult steps that might now be required. Of course, I’d change my diary: was the meeting tomorrow, or Sunday? No — please get back to London as soon as possible.
More to follow
That afternoon we were confronted with what would happen to our hospitals if the spread of the virus continued at the rate it was growing. Unless we acted, the NHS would be broken.
Infections were doubling fast. The number of days taken to see that increase was open to question. But the trend was not. Infection numbers were growing in areas which had previously seen low prevalence. And as the numbers infected increased so, with iron logic, did the numbers in our hospitals. We could not know exactly when, or how late, we could leave it and still have time to pull the handbrake to avoid disaster, but sooner or later our NHS hospitals would be full.
Not just administratively at full stretch. But physically overwhelmed. Every bed, every ward occupied. All the capacity built in the Nightingales and requisitioned from the private sector too. The NHS could, and would, cancel the operations of patients waiting for hip replacements and other routine procedures to free up more beds. But that wouldn’t be enough. The numbers infected with Covid-19 and requiring a bed would displace all but emergency cases. And then even those. With every NHS bed full, the capacity of the health service to treat new emergency cases — people who had suffered serious accidents, heart attacks, strokes — would go.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lockdown-was-the-only-way-to-stop-the-nhs-being-broken-xq7b2ctpj
1.04 Biden to win the presidency.
“Following a month of skyrocketing Covid-19 cases, the US has reached its highest number yet of hospitalizations due to the virus. The US surpassed 80,000 daily hospitalizations on November 19 and set new records steadily for 17 days straight until Friday, according to the COVID Tracking Project. Then on Saturday, the number reached 91,635”
https://www.chronicle-tribune.com/lifestyles/health/26-states-set-records-for-coronavirus-hospitalizations-thanksgiving-week/video_fb4e26ac-4e37-5411-bdd7-56a1514c510a.html
Let's see where the USA is on 10 December when the Thanksgiving cases start getting hospitalised, and then ask whether there is any reason to think that couldn't happen here.
I also find from Wiki that:
'P. G. Wodehouse said of Flashman, "If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."'
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/feb/04/northern-powerhouse-rail-backers-say-hs2-vital-success