Even if Comrade Jez splits the left vote, it's going to be hard for the Conservatives to take advantage.
In 2021, Shaun Bailey got 35% in the first round. That was at peak Vaccine Hero Boris, and Bailey was a better candidate than Hall. (Who has already managed to pose for a stupid photo on the front page of the Standard and caused the Conservatives to complain to London's newspaper, which is never a wise thing to do.)
We're not far off a scenario where the vote to the left of the Conservatives could be split into three equal portions and still come out ahead of Hall.
Not sure that is right. Bailey was 4.7% behind. Corbyn will win a lot more than 5% if he stands, I would guess 15-20% most likely. That feels like enough to allow the Tories to win if they get around 30% to me. Sounds plausible.
I don’t think the Tories will get 30% in the mayoral when they’re on less than that nationally.
Uxbridge (a 6.7% swing to Labour by the way) has gone to everyone’s heads.
The economy is bad and people feel like there is no solution and one party has been in power a long time. Nationally that is a disaster for the Tories. In London, some blame the Tories (fairly) others blame the Mayor (unfairly), so less so.
Khan is a bit shit. He is taking all of the blame for ULEZ, yet the decision to impose it was made by Shapps Green. So he should have been banging that particular drum hard. Instead he's taking the blame.
Not sure that works. He can't champion ULEZ at the same time as say, not my fault, blame the Tories for it.
His mistakes are around implementation, leaving it fiscally regressive, and a lack of listening, persuasion and compromise, three characteristics that are sorely missing from contemporary UK politics across the board.
No to both. The mistakes lay with the muppet running Labour's Uxbridge campaign who decided not to counter Tories telling voters they'd all have to pay, when in fact most vehicles are exempt. Years ago John Prescott complained about this idea, then presumably due to Mandelson and/or Campbell, that you must never refute your opponent's charges because that is letting the Tories "set the agenda". Well, great unless it means losing an election.
I think there is a lot of electoral denial on here from normally astute posters.
That 90% are not impacted is pretty irrelevant to the electoral damage. These are low turnout elections decided by not that much. The first round gap between Khan and Bailey was 120,000 votes. If 700,000 vehicles are starting to get hit by charges, that will be a big problem. Now of course the Tories are so bad nationally it may not matter but it is dismissed far too casually.
700,000 vehicles! Where on earth are you getting that from.
Read the Rawnsley piece above. The Tories told people with Tesla's they would have to pay the ULEZ charge. And Tories in Uxbridge always tell the truth, so it must be fact.
The ULEZ extension will have been in place for at least a year before the next election, so reality will disabuse them of that notion looking before they cast a General Election vote.
I don't think it will. People aren't stupid.
The ULEZ has been introduced as a revenue-raising measure. When all the cars are compliant, and it isn't raising any revenue, they will tighten the rules.
Once all cars are electric and have zero tailpipe emissions they aren't likely to take down all the cameras and give up on the revenue. They'll want to use the existing infrastructure to introduce a road-pricing scheme for all cars.
Road pricing is inherently a good idea. Capacity is scarce, and we should be looking at the best way to maximize throughput - which is almost certainly through charging.
So driving becomes a luxury item only for the very rich?
Hopefully driving becomes an activity that pays for the expenses it imposes.
Not necessarily my preferred route, though.
>Once all cars are electric and have zero tailpipe emissions they aren't likely to take down all the cameras and give up on the revenue.
Yes, however congestion will remain an issue and private motor vehicles will remain the most space-inefficient form of urban transport.
It can be tweaked by multi-occupancy rules and similar - but that is increasing complexity.
Personally, I'd follow Paris and improve all modes of traffic flow in Inner / Central London by removing 100k-200k of on-street parking spaces. , and using the 500 acres of space freed up for pavements, bus lanes, traffic lanes, mobility tracks and many other things.
ULEZ is something I fully support, but....over the next few years, most sane people who regularly have to go through the zone or actually live in the zone will get a ULEZ compliant car. What will London do next to generate the revenue that it loses? As far as I can see, it makes about 200 million quid a year, which is a lot of money to replace .
Two things: 1) the primary driver to expand ULEZ was to fund the hole in TfL as directed by Grant Shapps. With TfL's farebox recovering after COVID there is less of a hole to fill 2) ULEZ will bring more cars into its grip. And before anyone starts to wail and gnash, we are all used to this. Remember EURO 3/4/5/6 compliance law. Same thing. People replace cars as they age for cost and reliability reasons, this is no different
Grant Shapps must be wondering why he's getting so much political luck at the moment. A policy he introduced helps the Tories to win a by-election they were expected to lose.
Even if Comrade Jez splits the left vote, it's going to be hard for the Conservatives to take advantage.
In 2021, Shaun Bailey got 35% in the first round. That was at peak Vaccine Hero Boris, and Bailey was a better candidate than Hall. (Who has already managed to pose for a stupid photo on the front page of the Standard and caused the Conservatives to complain to London's newspaper, which is never a wise thing to do.)
We're not far off a scenario where the vote to the left of the Conservatives could be split into three equal portions and still come out ahead of Hall.
Not sure that is right. Bailey was 4.7% behind. Corbyn will win a lot more than 5% if he stands, I would guess 15-20% most likely. That feels like enough to allow the Tories to win if they get around 30% to me. Sounds plausible.
I don’t think the Tories will get 30% in the mayoral when they’re on less than that nationally.
Uxbridge (a 6.7% swing to Labour by the way) has gone to everyone’s heads.
The economy is bad and people feel like there is no solution and one party has been in power a long time. Nationally that is a disaster for the Tories. In London, some blame the Tories (fairly) others blame the Mayor (unfairly), so less so.
Khan is a bit shit. He is taking all of the blame for ULEZ, yet the decision to impose it was made by Shapps Green. So he should have been banging that particular drum hard. Instead he's taking the blame.
Not sure that works. He can't champion ULEZ at the same time as say, not my fault, blame the Tories for it.
His mistakes are around implementation, leaving it fiscally regressive, and a lack of listening, persuasion and compromise, three characteristics that are sorely missing from contemporary UK politics across the board.
No to both. The mistakes lay with the muppet running Labour's Uxbridge campaign who decided not to counter Tories telling voters they'd all have to pay, when in fact most vehicles are exempt. Years ago John Prescott complained about this idea, then presumably due to Mandelson and/or Campbell, that you must never refute your opponent's charges because that is letting the Tories "set the agenda". Well, great unless it means losing an election.
I think there is a lot of electoral denial on here from normally astute posters.
That 90% are not impacted is pretty irrelevant to the electoral damage. These are low turnout elections decided by not that much. The first round gap between Khan and Bailey was 120,000 votes. If 700,000 vehicles are starting to get hit by charges, that will be a big problem. Now of course the Tories are so bad nationally it may not matter but it is dismissed far too casually.
700,000 vehicles! Where on earth are you getting that from.
Read the Rawnsley piece above. The Tories told people with Tesla's they would have to pay the ULEZ charge. And Tories in Uxbridge always tell the truth, so it must be fact.
The ULEZ extension will have been in place for at least a year before the next election, so reality will disabuse them of that notion looking before they cast a General Election vote.
I don't think it will. People aren't stupid.
The ULEZ has been introduced as a revenue-raising measure. When all the cars are compliant, and it isn't raising any revenue, they will tighten the rules.
Once all cars are electric and have zero tailpipe emissions they aren't likely to take down all the cameras and give up on the revenue. They'll want to use the existing infrastructure to introduce a road-pricing scheme for all cars.
Road pricing is inherently a good idea. Capacity is scarce, and we should be looking at the best way to maximize throughput - which is almost certainly through charging.
So driving becomes a luxury item only for the very rich?
The issue is that transport is mostly a necessity for the economy to function. Even leisure travel - assuming the person travelling spends money at the destination. Very few journeys are pure travelling-for-the-heck-of-it .
Therefore the government needs to make journeys as inexpensive as possible, to allow the economy to function economically. Yet transport has costs. A large question therefore comes on how much of those costs needs to go onto the person/people travelling (including freight...), and how much onto general taxation, to be paid by everyone.
A classic example is parking in small towns: they want people to come in to use their shops, but make it unattractive by charging for parking. Yet the charge gives the council a handy revenue stream - even if it goes towards killing local shops.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
There is a lesson in there somewhere but if it is anything other than "Fuck you" from the government, I'm damned if I can find it.
You presumably made a profit and they made a loss. But they will have paid tens of millions of VAT, Employers NI, rates, duties, licence fees, etc etc as well as being an unpaid tax collector of many millions more through PAYE, VAT and employees NI.
This is not a new problem but it is a growing one. Profits are so easily manipulated for large companies that they are perhaps not the correct answer as to how they contribute to the society in which they extract their gains. Its tricky though, especially when we want these large companies to invest a lot more into our economy rather than somewhere else.
They dumped debt on the company to take out a dividend.
I also pay NI, VAT (both as a business and personally), council tax, and income tax.
My point is that big companies manipulate the system to avoid paying tax that fools like me and my business don't or can't. That system is not frankly fair and that sense of government and big business saying "fuck you" to ordinary voters who try to do the right thing is, if left unchecked, deeply corrosive of our society.
I agree with this, of course, but the only body with the power to sort taxation is parliament, led of course by the treasury. Just as quite middling sorts plan things to limit IHT, income tax, and so on - with effects that are quite significant, given that IHT is 40% - so larger cheeses will do the same. It is not ASDA or Morrisons who make tax law.
(With IHT the headline relief is £325k, from memory. For lots of people - perhaps most of the middle class - this can be turned into £1million without breaking sweat; more complicated but not impossible things can make it much higher).
Even if Comrade Jez splits the left vote, it's going to be hard for the Conservatives to take advantage.
In 2021, Shaun Bailey got 35% in the first round. That was at peak Vaccine Hero Boris, and Bailey was a better candidate than Hall. (Who has already managed to pose for a stupid photo on the front page of the Standard and caused the Conservatives to complain to London's newspaper, which is never a wise thing to do.)
We're not far off a scenario where the vote to the left of the Conservatives could be split into three equal portions and still come out ahead of Hall.
Not sure that is right. Bailey was 4.7% behind. Corbyn will win a lot more than 5% if he stands, I would guess 15-20% most likely. That feels like enough to allow the Tories to win if they get around 30% to me. Sounds plausible.
I don’t think the Tories will get 30% in the mayoral when they’re on less than that nationally.
Uxbridge (a 6.7% swing to Labour by the way) has gone to everyone’s heads.
The economy is bad and people feel like there is no solution and one party has been in power a long time. Nationally that is a disaster for the Tories. In London, some blame the Tories (fairly) others blame the Mayor (unfairly), so less so.
Khan is a bit shit. He is taking all of the blame for ULEZ, yet the decision to impose it was made by Shapps Green. So he should have been banging that particular drum hard. Instead he's taking the blame.
Not sure that works. He can't champion ULEZ at the same time as say, not my fault, blame the Tories for it.
His mistakes are around implementation, leaving it fiscally regressive, and a lack of listening, persuasion and compromise, three characteristics that are sorely missing from contemporary UK politics across the board.
No to both. The mistakes lay with the muppet running Labour's Uxbridge campaign who decided not to counter Tories telling voters they'd all have to pay, when in fact most vehicles are exempt. Years ago John Prescott complained about this idea, then presumably due to Mandelson and/or Campbell, that you must never refute your opponent's charges because that is letting the Tories "set the agenda". Well, great unless it means losing an election.
I think there is a lot of electoral denial on here from normally astute posters.
That 90% are not impacted is pretty irrelevant to the electoral damage. These are low turnout elections decided by not that much. The first round gap between Khan and Bailey was 120,000 votes. If 700,000 vehicles are starting to get hit by charges, that will be a big problem. Now of course the Tories are so bad nationally it may not matter but it is dismissed far too casually.
700,000 vehicles! Where on earth are you getting that from.
Read the Rawnsley piece above. The Tories told people with Tesla's they would have to pay the ULEZ charge. And Tories in Uxbridge always tell the truth, so it must be fact.
The ULEZ extension will have been in place for at least a year before the next election, so reality will disabuse them of that notion looking before they cast a General Election vote.
I don't think it will. People aren't stupid.
The ULEZ has been introduced as a revenue-raising measure. When all the cars are compliant, and it isn't raising any revenue, they will tighten the rules.
Once all cars are electric and have zero tailpipe emissions they aren't likely to take down all the cameras and give up on the revenue. They'll want to use the existing infrastructure to introduce a road-pricing scheme for all cars.
Road pricing is inherently a good idea. Capacity is scarce, and we should be looking at the best way to maximize throughput - which is almost certainly through charging.
So driving becomes a luxury item only for the very rich?
The issue is that transport is mostly a necessity for the economy to function. Even leisure travel - assuming the person travelling spends money at the destination. Very few journeys are pure travelling-for-the-heck-of-it .
Therefore the government needs to make journeys as inexpensive as possible, to allow the economy to function economically. Yet transport has costs. A large question therefore comes on how much of those costs needs to go onto the person/people travelling (including freight...), and how much onto general taxation, to be paid by everyone.
A classic example is parking in small towns: they want people to come in to use their shops, but make it unattractive by charging for parking. Yet the charge gives the council a handy revenue stream - even if it goes towards killing local shops.
The Elizabeth Line is quite expensive if you use it for more than a couple of days and venture outside the central area.
Even if Comrade Jez splits the left vote, it's going to be hard for the Conservatives to take advantage.
In 2021, Shaun Bailey got 35% in the first round. That was at peak Vaccine Hero Boris, and Bailey was a better candidate than Hall. (Who has already managed to pose for a stupid photo on the front page of the Standard and caused the Conservatives to complain to London's newspaper, which is never a wise thing to do.)
We're not far off a scenario where the vote to the left of the Conservatives could be split into three equal portions and still come out ahead of Hall.
Not sure that is right. Bailey was 4.7% behind. Corbyn will win a lot more than 5% if he stands, I would guess 15-20% most likely. That feels like enough to allow the Tories to win if they get around 30% to me. Sounds plausible.
I don’t think the Tories will get 30% in the mayoral when they’re on less than that nationally.
Uxbridge (a 6.7% swing to Labour by the way) has gone to everyone’s heads.
The economy is bad and people feel like there is no solution and one party has been in power a long time. Nationally that is a disaster for the Tories. In London, some blame the Tories (fairly) others blame the Mayor (unfairly), so less so.
Khan is a bit shit. He is taking all of the blame for ULEZ, yet the decision to impose it was made by Shapps Green. So he should have been banging that particular drum hard. Instead he's taking the blame.
Not sure that works. He can't champion ULEZ at the same time as say, not my fault, blame the Tories for it.
His mistakes are around implementation, leaving it fiscally regressive, and a lack of listening, persuasion and compromise, three characteristics that are sorely missing from contemporary UK politics across the board.
No to both. The mistakes lay with the muppet running Labour's Uxbridge campaign who decided not to counter Tories telling voters they'd all have to pay, when in fact most vehicles are exempt. Years ago John Prescott complained about this idea, then presumably due to Mandelson and/or Campbell, that you must never refute your opponent's charges because that is letting the Tories "set the agenda". Well, great unless it means losing an election.
I think there is a lot of electoral denial on here from normally astute posters.
That 90% are not impacted is pretty irrelevant to the electoral damage. These are low turnout elections decided by not that much. The first round gap between Khan and Bailey was 120,000 votes. If 700,000 vehicles are starting to get hit by charges, that will be a big problem. Now of course the Tories are so bad nationally it may not matter but it is dismissed far too casually.
700,000 vehicles! Where on earth are you getting that from.
Read the Rawnsley piece above. The Tories told people with Tesla's they would have to pay the ULEZ charge. And Tories in Uxbridge always tell the truth, so it must be fact.
The ULEZ extension will have been in place for at least a year before the next election, so reality will disabuse them of that notion looking before they cast a General Election vote.
I don't think it will. People aren't stupid.
The ULEZ has been introduced as a revenue-raising measure. When all the cars are compliant, and it isn't raising any revenue, they will tighten the rules.
Once all cars are electric and have zero tailpipe emissions they aren't likely to take down all the cameras and give up on the revenue. They'll want to use the existing infrastructure to introduce a road-pricing scheme for all cars.
Road pricing is inherently a good idea. Capacity is scarce, and we should be looking at the best way to maximize throughput - which is almost certainly through charging.
So driving becomes a luxury item only for the very rich?
The issue is that transport is mostly a necessity for the economy to function. Even leisure travel - assuming the person travelling spends money at the destination. Very few journeys are pure travelling-for-the-heck-of-it .
Therefore the government needs to make journeys as inexpensive as possible, to allow the economy to function economically. Yet transport has costs. A large question therefore comes on how much of those costs needs to go onto the person/people travelling (including freight...), and how much onto general taxation, to be paid by everyone.
A classic example is parking in small towns: they want people to come in to use their shops, but make it unattractive by charging for parking. Yet the charge gives the council a handy revenue stream - even if it goes towards killing local shops.
That mechanism's true in the short term. In the medium term, businesses move in response to these policies. For example, if your business is distributing windows a few dozen miles around the hinterland of the town, it doesn't really "need" to be in the city centre, and most councils would rather get your vans and trucks off the roads. (People move too. But at different speeds, and lots of people will spend decades in the same place come what may.)
Even if Comrade Jez splits the left vote, it's going to be hard for the Conservatives to take advantage.
In 2021, Shaun Bailey got 35% in the first round. That was at peak Vaccine Hero Boris, and Bailey was a better candidate than Hall. (Who has already managed to pose for a stupid photo on the front page of the Standard and caused the Conservatives to complain to London's newspaper, which is never a wise thing to do.)
We're not far off a scenario where the vote to the left of the Conservatives could be split into three equal portions and still come out ahead of Hall.
Not sure that is right. Bailey was 4.7% behind. Corbyn will win a lot more than 5% if he stands, I would guess 15-20% most likely. That feels like enough to allow the Tories to win if they get around 30% to me. Sounds plausible.
I don’t think the Tories will get 30% in the mayoral when they’re on less than that nationally.
Uxbridge (a 6.7% swing to Labour by the way) has gone to everyone’s heads.
The economy is bad and people feel like there is no solution and one party has been in power a long time. Nationally that is a disaster for the Tories. In London, some blame the Tories (fairly) others blame the Mayor (unfairly), so less so.
Khan is a bit shit. He is taking all of the blame for ULEZ, yet the decision to impose it was made by Shapps Green. So he should have been banging that particular drum hard. Instead he's taking the blame.
Not sure that works. He can't champion ULEZ at the same time as say, not my fault, blame the Tories for it.
His mistakes are around implementation, leaving it fiscally regressive, and a lack of listening, persuasion and compromise, three characteristics that are sorely missing from contemporary UK politics across the board.
No to both. The mistakes lay with the muppet running Labour's Uxbridge campaign who decided not to counter Tories telling voters they'd all have to pay, when in fact most vehicles are exempt. Years ago John Prescott complained about this idea, then presumably due to Mandelson and/or Campbell, that you must never refute your opponent's charges because that is letting the Tories "set the agenda". Well, great unless it means losing an election.
I think there is a lot of electoral denial on here from normally astute posters.
That 90% are not impacted is pretty irrelevant to the electoral damage. These are low turnout elections decided by not that much. The first round gap between Khan and Bailey was 120,000 votes. If 700,000 vehicles are starting to get hit by charges, that will be a big problem. Now of course the Tories are so bad nationally it may not matter but it is dismissed far too casually.
700,000 vehicles! Where on earth are you getting that from.
Read the Rawnsley piece above. The Tories told people with Tesla's they would have to pay the ULEZ charge. And Tories in Uxbridge always tell the truth, so it must be fact.
The ULEZ extension will have been in place for at least a year before the next election, so reality will disabuse them of that notion looking before they cast a General Election vote.
I don't think it will. People aren't stupid.
The ULEZ has been introduced as a revenue-raising measure. When all the cars are compliant, and it isn't raising any revenue, they will tighten the rules.
Once all cars are electric and have zero tailpipe emissions they aren't likely to take down all the cameras and give up on the revenue. They'll want to use the existing infrastructure to introduce a road-pricing scheme for all cars.
Road pricing is inherently a good idea. Capacity is scarce, and we should be looking at the best way to maximize throughput - which is almost certainly through charging.
A good idea might be to charge £5 for using a motorway. Wouldn't be enough to put anyone off from using them but would raise a lot of money. And you don't need to construct expensive toll plazas anymore.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Bravo sir. This tone-deaf, economically and culturally illiterate idiocy is typical of todays "Fuck Business" Tory Party.
Three basic errors:
1) Weaponising Stupidity and Ignorance will only get you so far. No matter how hard you spin it, no matter how often your media goons shill for you, reality always catches up. 2) Climate Change is undeniable, unavoidable, very literally a hot topic. Hard to shill even to people who started ignorant and have been made stupid that "green crap" can be ignored when they get roasted alive on holiday and then flooded when they return home. 3) "Green Crap" should be hugely profitable. Biden has turbocharged the US economy with it. The UK is uniquely positioned geographically to be both world-leading and globally exporting of "green crap" technologies.
This is why the Tories really do need to be crushed next year. They are a pastiche of the knuckle-dragging morons in Don't Look Up who insisted not only was the asteroid not a concern, but actually didn't exist actually.
Your commentary, and those of your green fellow travellers, might have more value if it contained some factual material rather than just turgid invective.
Your first 'point' is simply 'I disagree with you'. You have zero evidence that Fishing isn't sincere in his beliefs, rather than trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes, and asserting that he is is typical ugly belligerence from you.
Nobody is denying that the climate changes - it has done so since the planet begun. People do question the extent to which human behaviour is responsible, and if it is, what the best way forward should then be. By the way, what evidence have you that increased flooding is due to climatic change, as opposed to houses on flood plains, the clampdown on dredging etc.? Shit all would be my guess.
'Green crap' is not profitable; our present renewable energy ecosystem depends on bill-payers' subsidies to survive. Your point about America though, is accidentally interesting - how exactly is the UK to lead the 'green industrial revolution', when apparently what is needed to do that is a vast amount of public money, which other countries (who presumably would like it if they are the leaders) have more of than we do?
I can't say I've ever been tempted by your oeuvre, but apparently you come over as quite a nice person on your Youtube videos. It would be nice if you didn't use PB as some sort of cleanse - we're not a scratching post.
£150m for ULEZ infrastructure. Greater London population around 9.5m. £15 per Londoner for better air quality?
Am I missing something here? That sounds like fantastic value for money.
God Tories are such gigantic whoppers.
Sure for the vast majority ULEZ is a positive change. But its a small non vote changing positive.
For a small but significant minority it is a financial headache during a cost of living crisis. For them it is a vote changer.
Generally speaking, I suppose that the test of an effective politician is the ability to get things that are beneficial for the people as a whole done in the face of opposition from those who lose out.
Something that’s much easier to do when the losers are in the top 10% by income, rather than the skilled working class and lower-middle-class JAMs who can’t afford to replace their old car at the moment.
I don't believe this claim.
Car ownership in London is low and skews heavily towards the wealthy. The 'poorer vehicle owner' claim imo is mainly them being used as a human shield, as anti-LTN campaigns use a minority of people with disabilities, ignoring the majority.
Bart did this yesterday when he assumed that 10% of vehicles being non-compliant means that 10% of the population were under attack, and that was in some way outrageous.
In reality, nearly half of London households do not even own a motor vehicle, and that is a third even in the Outer Boroughs. From the latest not very recent figures I have seen (old TFL technical briefing note - welcome more recent numbers) around 40% of cars in London are owned by about 15% of households.
The numbers who will actually drive non-compliant cars in London will be tiny.
I wonder how the skilled working classes will react when they realise they are being sold a pup?
One problem with LTNs as often implemented is they effectively bar cabs, so there is an effect on the car-less and disabled. They can make life harder for the emergency services too.
You can still access an LTN with a vehicle - they don't bar cabs or any sort of vehicle at all.
There is no evidence whatsoever that they delay the emergency services. Indeed, congestion is the main reason why there are delayed in cities, and the whole point of LTNs is reduce traffic, both within the LTN and more generally. See https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/incident-response-times-fire-facts
Anyone who has ever played a city simulator knows that reducing the number and proximity of junctions is key for reducing congestion. This is actually a problem with the design of the Queensferry Crossing - the junction for S.Queensferry is too close to the junctions for the M8 etc.
You may be right but I have heard both cab drivers and delivery drivers complaining about LTNs, and have read about thieves on mopeds using them to escape police. Maybe there are just one or two poorly designed LTNs though.
Back in 2020, they abolished the LTN trial areas in Redbridge (ie. Ilford North and Ilford South) after only c. 6 weeks.
Though how many miles were saved by letting buses turn right by the station instead of driving halfway to Manor Park on the one-way system?
Even if Comrade Jez splits the left vote, it's going to be hard for the Conservatives to take advantage.
In 2021, Shaun Bailey got 35% in the first round. That was at peak Vaccine Hero Boris, and Bailey was a better candidate than Hall. (Who has already managed to pose for a stupid photo on the front page of the Standard and caused the Conservatives to complain to London's newspaper, which is never a wise thing to do.)
We're not far off a scenario where the vote to the left of the Conservatives could be split into three equal portions and still come out ahead of Hall.
Not sure that is right. Bailey was 4.7% behind. Corbyn will win a lot more than 5% if he stands, I would guess 15-20% most likely. That feels like enough to allow the Tories to win if they get around 30% to me. Sounds plausible.
I don’t think the Tories will get 30% in the mayoral when they’re on less than that nationally.
Uxbridge (a 6.7% swing to Labour by the way) has gone to everyone’s heads.
The economy is bad and people feel like there is no solution and one party has been in power a long time. Nationally that is a disaster for the Tories. In London, some blame the Tories (fairly) others blame the Mayor (unfairly), so less so.
Khan is a bit shit. He is taking all of the blame for ULEZ, yet the decision to impose it was made by Shapps Green. So he should have been banging that particular drum hard. Instead he's taking the blame.
Not sure that works. He can't champion ULEZ at the same time as say, not my fault, blame the Tories for it.
His mistakes are around implementation, leaving it fiscally regressive, and a lack of listening, persuasion and compromise, three characteristics that are sorely missing from contemporary UK politics across the board.
No to both. The mistakes lay with the muppet running Labour's Uxbridge campaign who decided not to counter Tories telling voters they'd all have to pay, when in fact most vehicles are exempt. Years ago John Prescott complained about this idea, then presumably due to Mandelson and/or Campbell, that you must never refute your opponent's charges because that is letting the Tories "set the agenda". Well, great unless it means losing an election.
I think there is a lot of electoral denial on here from normally astute posters.
That 90% are not impacted is pretty irrelevant to the electoral damage. These are low turnout elections decided by not that much. The first round gap between Khan and Bailey was 120,000 votes. If 700,000 vehicles are starting to get hit by charges, that will be a big problem. Now of course the Tories are so bad nationally it may not matter but it is dismissed far too casually.
700,000 vehicles! Where on earth are you getting that from.
Read the Rawnsley piece above. The Tories told people with Tesla's they would have to pay the ULEZ charge. And Tories in Uxbridge always tell the truth, so it must be fact.
The ULEZ extension will have been in place for at least a year before the next election, so reality will disabuse them of that notion looking before they cast a General Election vote.
I don't think it will. People aren't stupid.
The ULEZ has been introduced as a revenue-raising measure. When all the cars are compliant, and it isn't raising any revenue, they will tighten the rules.
Once all cars are electric and have zero tailpipe emissions they aren't likely to take down all the cameras and give up on the revenue. They'll want to use the existing infrastructure to introduce a road-pricing scheme for all cars.
Road pricing is inherently a good idea. Capacity is scarce, and we should be looking at the best way to maximize throughput - which is almost certainly through charging.
So driving becomes a luxury item only for the very rich?
Maybe more like trains. A single journey from Carlisle to London can cost between under £20 to about £250.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
ULEZ is something I fully support, but....over the next few years, most sane people who regularly have to go through the zone or actually live in the zone will get a ULEZ compliant car. What will London do next to generate the revenue that it loses? As far as I can see, it makes about 200 million quid a year, which is a lot of money to replace .
Two things: 1) the primary driver to expand ULEZ was to fund the hole in TfL as directed by Grant Shapps. With TfL's farebox recovering after COVID there is less of a hole to fill 2) ULEZ will bring more cars into its grip. And before anyone starts to wail and gnash, we are all used to this. Remember EURO 3/4/5/6 compliance law. Same thing. People replace cars as they age for cost and reliability reasons, this is no different
Grant Shapps must be wondering why he's getting so much political luck at the moment. A policy he introduced helps the Tories to win a by-election they were expected to lose.
Grant Shapps would reach higher rank were it not for his appearance. He is a better administrator than many of his colleagues but unfortunately looks about 12. There again, being part of Boris's leadership bid team might not have helped.
Even if Comrade Jez splits the left vote, it's going to be hard for the Conservatives to take advantage.
In 2021, Shaun Bailey got 35% in the first round. That was at peak Vaccine Hero Boris, and Bailey was a better candidate than Hall. (Who has already managed to pose for a stupid photo on the front page of the Standard and caused the Conservatives to complain to London's newspaper, which is never a wise thing to do.)
We're not far off a scenario where the vote to the left of the Conservatives could be split into three equal portions and still come out ahead of Hall.
Not sure that is right. Bailey was 4.7% behind. Corbyn will win a lot more than 5% if he stands, I would guess 15-20% most likely. That feels like enough to allow the Tories to win if they get around 30% to me. Sounds plausible.
I don’t think the Tories will get 30% in the mayoral when they’re on less than that nationally.
Uxbridge (a 6.7% swing to Labour by the way) has gone to everyone’s heads.
The economy is bad and people feel like there is no solution and one party has been in power a long time. Nationally that is a disaster for the Tories. In London, some blame the Tories (fairly) others blame the Mayor (unfairly), so less so.
Khan is a bit shit. He is taking all of the blame for ULEZ, yet the decision to impose it was made by Shapps Green. So he should have been banging that particular drum hard. Instead he's taking the blame.
Not sure that works. He can't champion ULEZ at the same time as say, not my fault, blame the Tories for it.
His mistakes are around implementation, leaving it fiscally regressive, and a lack of listening, persuasion and compromise, three characteristics that are sorely missing from contemporary UK politics across the board.
No to both. The mistakes lay with the muppet running Labour's Uxbridge campaign who decided not to counter Tories telling voters they'd all have to pay, when in fact most vehicles are exempt. Years ago John Prescott complained about this idea, then presumably due to Mandelson and/or Campbell, that you must never refute your opponent's charges because that is letting the Tories "set the agenda". Well, great unless it means losing an election.
I think there is a lot of electoral denial on here from normally astute posters.
That 90% are not impacted is pretty irrelevant to the electoral damage. These are low turnout elections decided by not that much. The first round gap between Khan and Bailey was 120,000 votes. If 700,000 vehicles are starting to get hit by charges, that will be a big problem. Now of course the Tories are so bad nationally it may not matter but it is dismissed far too casually.
700,000 vehicles! Where on earth are you getting that from.
Read the Rawnsley piece above. The Tories told people with Tesla's they would have to pay the ULEZ charge. And Tories in Uxbridge always tell the truth, so it must be fact.
The ULEZ extension will have been in place for at least a year before the next election, so reality will disabuse them of that notion looking before they cast a General Election vote.
I don't think it will. People aren't stupid.
The ULEZ has been introduced as a revenue-raising measure. When all the cars are compliant, and it isn't raising any revenue, they will tighten the rules.
Once all cars are electric and have zero tailpipe emissions they aren't likely to take down all the cameras and give up on the revenue. They'll want to use the existing infrastructure to introduce a road-pricing scheme for all cars.
Road pricing is inherently a good idea. Capacity is scarce, and we should be looking at the best way to maximize throughput - which is almost certainly through charging.
So driving becomes a luxury item only for the very rich?
Did I read a completely different sentence? How does only allowing the very rich to drive maximize throughput?
£150m for ULEZ infrastructure. Greater London population around 9.5m. £15 per Londoner for better air quality?
Am I missing something here? That sounds like fantastic value for money.
God Tories are such gigantic whoppers.
Sure for the vast majority ULEZ is a positive change. But its a small non vote changing positive.
For a small but significant minority it is a financial headache during a cost of living crisis. For them it is a vote changer.
Generally speaking, I suppose that the test of an effective politician is the ability to get things that are beneficial for the people as a whole done in the face of opposition from those who lose out.
Something that’s much easier to do when the losers are in the top 10% by income, rather than the skilled working class and lower-middle-class JAMs who can’t afford to replace their old car at the moment.
I don't believe this claim.
Car ownership in London is low and skews heavily towards the wealthy. The 'poorer vehicle owner' claim imo is mainly them being used as a human shield, as anti-LTN campaigns use a minority of people with disabilities, ignoring the majority.
Bart did this yesterday when he assumed that 10% of vehicles being non-compliant means that 10% of the population were under attack, and that was in some way outrageous.
In reality, nearly half of London households do not even own a motor vehicle, and that is a third even in the Outer Boroughs. From the latest not very recent figures I have seen (old TFL technical briefing note - welcome more recent numbers) around 40% of cars in London are owned by about 15% of households.
The numbers who will actually drive non-compliant cars in London will be tiny.
I wonder how the skilled working classes will react when they realise they are being sold a pup?
One problem with LTNs as often implemented is they effectively bar cabs, so there is an effect on the car-less and disabled. They can make life harder for the emergency services too.
You can still access an LTN with a vehicle - they don't bar cabs or any sort of vehicle at all.
There is no evidence whatsoever that they delay the emergency services. Indeed, congestion is the main reason why there are delayed in cities, and the whole point of LTNs is reduce traffic, both within the LTN and more generally. See https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/incident-response-times-fire-facts
Anyone who has ever played a city simulator knows that reducing the number and proximity of junctions is key for reducing congestion. This is actually a problem with the design of the Queensferry Crossing - the junction for S.Queensferry is too close to the junctions for the M8 etc.
You may be right but I have heard both cab drivers and delivery drivers complaining about LTNs, and have read about thieves on mopeds using them to escape police. Maybe there are just one or two poorly designed LTNs though.
Back in 2020, they abolished the LTN trial areas in Redbridge (ie. Ilford North and Ilford South) after only c. 6 weeks.
Though how many miles were saved by letting buses turn right by the station instead of driving halfway to Manor Park on the one-way system?
Back of an envelope: if allowing buses to cut out the Ilford one-way system saved a quarter of a mile on a dozen routes, that must be at least a hundred bus-miles saved per day, as well as cutting congestion and pollution.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Bravo sir. This tone-deaf, economically and culturally illiterate idiocy is typical of todays "Fuck Business" Tory Party.
Three basic errors:
1) Weaponising Stupidity and Ignorance will only get you so far. No matter how hard you spin it, no matter how often your media goons shill for you, reality always catches up. 2) Climate Change is undeniable, unavoidable, very literally a hot topic. Hard to shill even to people who started ignorant and have been made stupid that "green crap" can be ignored when they get roasted alive on holiday and then flooded when they return home. 3) "Green Crap" should be hugely profitable. Biden has turbocharged the US economy with it. The UK is uniquely positioned geographically to be both world-leading and globally exporting of "green crap" technologies.
This is why the Tories really do need to be crushed next year. They are a pastiche of the knuckle-dragging morons in Don't Look Up who insisted not only was the asteroid not a concern, but actually didn't exist actually.
Your commentary, and those of your green fellow travellers, might have more value if it contained some factual material rather than just turgid invective.
Your first 'point' is simply 'I disagree with you'. You have zero evidence that Fishing isn't sincere in his beliefs, rather than trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes, and asserting that he is is typical ugly belligerence from you.
Nobody is denying that the climate changes - it has done so since the planet begun. People do question the extent to which human behaviour is responsible, and if it is, what the best way forward should then be. By the way, what evidence have you that increased flooding is due to climatic change, as opposed to houses on flood plains, the clampdown on dredging etc.? Shit all would be my guess.
'Green crap' is not profitable; our present renewable energy ecosystem depends on bill-payers' subsidies to survive. Your point about America though, is accidentally interesting - how exactly is the UK to lead the 'green industrial revolution', when apparently what is needed to do that is a vast amount of public money, which other countries (who presumably would like it if they are the leaders) have more of than we do?
I can't say I've ever been tempted by your oeuvre, but apparently you come over as quite a nice person on your Youtube videos. It would be nice if you didn't use PB as some sort of cleanse - we're not a scratching post.
This government is corrupt and incompetent and deserves to lose.
@RochdalePioneers makes it sound as if he's campaigning against existential evil. No argument can ever be sufficiently exaggerated.
ULEZ is something I fully support, but....over the next few years, most sane people who regularly have to go through the zone or actually live in the zone will get a ULEZ compliant car. What will London do next to generate the revenue that it loses? As far as I can see, it makes about 200 million quid a year, which is a lot of money to replace .
Two things: 1) the primary driver to expand ULEZ was to fund the hole in TfL as directed by Grant Shapps. With TfL's farebox recovering after COVID there is less of a hole to fill 2) ULEZ will bring more cars into its grip. And before anyone starts to wail and gnash, we are all used to this. Remember EURO 3/4/5/6 compliance law. Same thing. People replace cars as they age for cost and reliability reasons, this is no different
Grant Shapps must be wondering why he's getting so much political luck at the moment. A policy he introduced helps the Tories to win a by-election they were expected to lose.
Grant Shapps would reach higher rank were it not for his appearance. He is a better administrator than many of his colleagues but unfortunately looks about 12. There again, being part of Boris's leadership bid team might not have helped.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
Yeah, Brexit's complicated but it had damn all to do with Boris getting dumped, and Partygate was only peripheral. You should tell Ukrainians that Boris was a compulsive and reflexive liar and in the end his ministerial colleagues got pissed off with defending the indefensible on Radio 4. Boris had to go when none of his hand-picked Brexit-supporting colleagues could stomach working (and lying) for the World King. Brexit, Partygate and Wallpapergate were so much froth, as even were Pincher and Paterson.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that they love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Perhaps say nothing about how you were once Putin's biggest admirer, then....
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
Off topic, a little piece of interesting social commentary here, which touches if passingly on a few topical social and political issues, as well as being the counter-reaction to viewcode’s pointed-but not-without-truth post above:
Leaving aside the fact that I had to get the twelve foot ladder out to read it - Unherd has a paywall now? You have to pay to read it??? - rarely have I read an article so designed to make me get the trebuchet and burning pitch out from the cache. God, can't these people just get proper jobs?
The author Louis Elton describes themself as "a theological anthropologist, strategy consultant and conceptual artist". There was a time when the cretinous overprivileged children of the idle rich had the decency to become restaurant critics and hide in the pages of the Sunday supplements where they could do no real harm. Now they're theological bloody anthropologists. Have they no shame?
What's wrong? He got it written and published, and paid for (presumably), which is, on sound empirical grounds, no different from, say, Mr Johnson or (soon to be?) Lady Dorries.
Though it does begin ...
'It is a drab Wednesday in April and I am sat naked in a transparent plastic shed. Tucked away in a forest near the sleepy town of Uckfield, a woman starts to hit me in the face with some birch twigs, while another incants tales of Sussex’s dragons. “Beware the dragons of St Leonard’s Forest,” she wails. “They’re not like the winged dragons of Wales. These ones are like serpents, slithering and squirting a deadly and smelly slime that torments the people of Horsham.”'
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
A political friend of mine blames it all on Carrie. Not in a misogynist way more a “don’t marry the mistress” way
Reckons he began to lose his judgment when he shacked up with her
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
He certainly couldn't.
Can I remind you of Neil and Stephen Kinnock's socially distanced outside birthday cake? The press wanted Steve Kinnock to be charged, sacked, imprisoned. It was wild. And this was at a time Boris was partying like it was 1999.
And what about Starmer and Beergate, the press and Tories on here wanted his nuts too? Some on here still do.
I think it fair to say Sunak was "ambushed by a cake". But Johnson? He was living it large whilst the Queen mourned on her own, but Boris will be Boris. One rule for him another for HMQ.
It is important because it defines the man in the moment, and this reflected on those he associated with, particularly his party.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
The other puzzle for me is his lack of any real idea of what to do with a very comfortable majority. Awful as COVID and Ukraine are both could have been exploited to fulfil his grand plan - but he just didn't have one. Like him or loathe him that's what is so tragic about the last 4 years .
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
A political friend of mine blames it all on Carrie. Not in a misogynist way more a “don’t marry the mistress” way
Reckons he began to lose his judgment when he shacked up with her
It’s a theory. She is quite ditzy
It's the other way around - it's the sensible ex-wife he lost, who despite everything agreed to marry him that previous kept him from going off the rails.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
The other puzzle for me is his lack of any real idea of what to do with a very comfortable majority. Awful as COVID and Ukraine are both could have been exploited to fulfil his grand plan - but he just didn't have one. Like him or loathe him that's what is so tragic about the last 4 years .
Yes I tend to agree. “Levelling up” turned out to be a slogan with no real philosophy or policy
And yet he was great on Ukraine. And vaccines. It’s a damn shame
He should never have fallen out with Dom Cummings. Who is genuinely clever, sharp and has great ideas (albeit sometimes mad)
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
A political friend of mine blames it all on Carrie. Not in a misogynist way more a “don’t marry the mistress” way
Reckons he began to lose his judgment when he shacked up with her
It’s a theory. She is quite ditzy
It's the other way around - it's the sensible ex-wife he lost, who despite everything agreed to marry him that previous kept him from going off the rails.
That’s part of my friend’s theory. The long suffering Marina Warner kept him kinda grounded
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
The other puzzle for me is his lack of any real idea of what to do with a very comfortable majority. Awful as COVID and Ukraine are both could have been exploited to fulfil his grand plan - but he just didn't have one. Like him or loathe him that's what is so tragic about the last 4 years .
Sunak appears to be even worse. There’s 18 months until the election, but still few ideas of what might be achieved between now and then.
Worst of all, he deposed someone who did have ideas, even if you disagreed with them.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
The other puzzle for me is his lack of any real idea of what to do with a very comfortable majority. Awful as COVID and Ukraine are both could have been exploited to fulfil his grand plan - but he just didn't have one. Like him or loathe him that's what is so tragic about the last 4 years .
JohnO can confirm this back in June 2019 he and I had a conversation where I relayed a conversation from somebody who knew Boris Johnson very well.
Their view, Boris Johnson is fundamentally too lazy to be Prime Minister, he wanted the trappings and prestige of power but didn't want to do any of the hard work of being Prime Minister.
Compare and contrast his missing several COBRA meetings in Jan-March 2020 to do with Covid with Mrs Thatcher's approach to dealing with the burgeoning HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
She read every briefing paper, questioning the Health Officers and Scientific advisers to get more info.
You can tell which approach went well and which didn't.
A premiership cannot exist in a vacuum, his hollowing out of the party allowed that vacuum to exist.
The cabinet overruled Mrs Thatcher, Boris Johnson's government didn't have the balls until the very end.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
A political friend of mine blames it all on Carrie. Not in a misogynist way more a “don’t marry the mistress” way
Reckons he began to lose his judgment when he shacked up with her
It’s a theory. She is quite ditzy
It's the other way around - it's the sensible ex-wife he lost, who despite everything agreed to marry him that previous kept him from going off the rails.
That’s part of my friend’s theory. The long suffering Marina Warner kept him kinda grounded
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
A political friend of mine blames it all on Carrie. Not in a misogynist way more a “don’t marry the mistress” way
Reckons he began to lose his judgment when he shacked up with her
It’s a theory. She is quite ditzy
It's the other way around - it's the sensible ex-wife he lost, who despite everything agreed to marry him that previous kept him from going off the rails.
For the party thing, I think the fact he had been seriously ill with Covid (*) in 2020 might have had more than a little bearing on his decision making. But to counter that, his problem started not with the party revelation, but with his unforced defence of Owen Paterson and then others. And that is a trait he has had throughout his career: defending 'friends' to the point of utter stupidity.
If he had resigned, or stepped down for six months once he came out from hospital, he might still be PM to this day. Or, given his character flaws, perhaps not.
(*) Despite what some utter ****s now claim, which makes them worse than him.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
The other puzzle for me is his lack of any real idea of what to do with a very comfortable majority. Awful as COVID and Ukraine are both could have been exploited to fulfil his grand plan - but he just didn't have one. Like him or loathe him that's what is so tragic about the last 4 years .
Sunak appears to be even worse. There’s 18 months until the election, but still few ideas of what might be achieved between now and then.
Worst of all, he deposed someone who did have ideas, even if you disagreed with them.
Whatever else happened, nobody except Johnson deposed Johnson.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
The other puzzle for me is his lack of any real idea of what to do with a very comfortable majority. Awful as COVID and Ukraine are both could have been exploited to fulfil his grand plan - but he just didn't have one. Like him or loathe him that's what is so tragic about the last 4 years .
Yes, ironically both Covid (in the early days when he caught it, and then at vaccine time) and Ukraine gave Boris, and the Tories, quite a boost in the opinion polling. But then he blew it because he's an undisciplined twat.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Disappointing that people in Ukraine have such poor judgement on this. Ok Russian invasion bla bla but you'd have hoped they would have the nous and the bandwidth to follow the ins and outs of domestic British politics.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
The other puzzle for me is his lack of any real idea of what to do with a very comfortable majority. Awful as COVID and Ukraine are both could have been exploited to fulfil his grand plan - but he just didn't have one. Like him or loathe him that's what is so tragic about the last 4 years .
Sunak appears to be even worse. There’s 18 months until the election, but still few ideas of what might be achieved between now and then.
Worst of all, he deposed someone who did have ideas, even if you disagreed with them.
That is bollocks.
Boris Johnson was deposed because he lied about putting a known sexual predator into a position of a authority then made ministers repeat that lie.
Once the lie became public that's when Boris Johnson was deposed.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
The other puzzle for me is his lack of any real idea of what to do with a very comfortable majority. Awful as COVID and Ukraine are both could have been exploited to fulfil his grand plan - but he just didn't have one. Like him or loathe him that's what is so tragic about the last 4 years .
Sunak appears to be even worse. There’s 18 months until the election, but still few ideas of what might be achieved between now and then.
Worst of all, he deposed someone who did have ideas, even if you disagreed with them.
That is bollocks.
Boris Johnson was deposed because he lied about putting a known sexual predator into a position of a authority then made ministers repeat that lie.
Once the lie became public that's when Boris Johnson was deposed.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
The other puzzle for me is his lack of any real idea of what to do with a very comfortable majority. Awful as COVID and Ukraine are both could have been exploited to fulfil his grand plan - but he just didn't have one. Like him or loathe him that's what is so tragic about the last 4 years .
Yes, ironically both Covid (in the early days when he caught it, and then at vaccine time) and Ukraine gave Boris, and the Tories, quite a boost in the opinion polling. But then he blew it because he's an undisciplined twat.
Oi! As a bit of an undisciplined twat myself I strenuously object to that characterisation.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
A political friend of mine blames it all on Carrie. Not in a misogynist way more a “don’t marry the mistress” way
Reckons he began to lose his judgment when he shacked up with her
It’s a theory. She is quite ditzy
It's the other way around - it's the sensible ex-wife he lost, who despite everything agreed to marry him that previous kept him from going off the rails.
That’s part of my friend’s theory. The long suffering Marina Warner kept him kinda grounded
Marina Wheeler?
Indeed. I’m thinking of the lady writer who is actually the lady writer in “lady writer” by Dire Straits
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Disappointing that people in Ukraine have such poor judgement on this. Ok Russian invasion bla bla but you'd have hoped they would have the nous and the bandwidth to follow the ins and outs of domestic British politics.
Or maybe they don’t give a crap about British domestic politics, but do know who led the world in responding to the Ukranians in their hour of need.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
The other puzzle for me is his lack of any real idea of what to do with a very comfortable majority. Awful as COVID and Ukraine are both could have been exploited to fulfil his grand plan - but he just didn't have one. Like him or loathe him that's what is so tragic about the last 4 years .
Sunak appears to be even worse. There’s 18 months until the election, but still few ideas of what might be achieved between now and then.
Worst of all, he deposed someone who did have ideas, even if you disagreed with them.
That is bollocks.
Boris Johnson was deposed because he lied about putting a known sexual predator into a position of a authority then made ministers repeat that lie.
Once the lie became public that's when Boris Johnson was deposed.
I wasn’t talking about Boris Johnson.
Liz Truss deposed herself by shitting the bed.
She sacked her Chancellor after the first whiff of trouble.
Her Chief Whip and Deputy Chief Whip resigned when she decided a vote in the House wasn't a confidence vote after all without telling the whips.
Ministers from the government benches were telling Tory MPs as were the whips that it was a confidence vote.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
The other puzzle for me is his lack of any real idea of what to do with a very comfortable majority. Awful as COVID and Ukraine are both could have been exploited to fulfil his grand plan - but he just didn't have one. Like him or loathe him that's what is so tragic about the last 4 years .
Sunak appears to be even worse. There’s 18 months until the election, but still few ideas of what might be achieved between now and then.
Worst of all, he deposed someone who did have ideas, even if you disagreed with them.
That is bollocks.
Boris Johnson was deposed because he lied about putting a known sexual predator into a position of a authority then made ministers repeat that lie.
Once the lie became public that's when Boris Johnson was deposed.
I wasn’t talking about Boris Johnson.
That was also bollocks. Sunak didn’t ‘depose’ Truss (I’ll gloss over your suggestion that she had anything which might be described as a set of coherent ideas); she lost the confidence of the her party, and would have been gone even if Sunak had never existed.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
A political friend of mine blames it all on Carrie. Not in a misogynist way more a “don’t marry the mistress” way
Reckons he began to lose his judgment when he shacked up with her
It’s a theory. She is quite ditzy
It's the other way around - it's the sensible ex-wife he lost, who despite everything agreed to marry him that previous kept him from going off the rails.
For the party thing, I think the fact he had been seriously ill with Covid (*) in 2020 might have had more than a little bearing on his decision making. But to counter that, his problem started not with the party revelation, but with his unforced defence of Owen Paterson and then others. And that is a trait he has had throughout his career: defending 'friends' to the point of utter stupidity.
If he had resigned, or stepped down for six months once he came out from hospital, he might still be PM to this day. Or, given his character flaws, perhaps not.
(*) Despite what some utter ****s now claim, which makes them worse than him.
The nature of his demise was eminently predictable - indeed I pretty much did so myself on PN not long after he became leader. I don't see any contribution from his having had covid; it was all already written in the stars
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Disappointing that people in Ukraine have such poor judgement on this. Ok Russian invasion bla bla but you'd have hoped they would have the nous and the bandwidth to follow the ins and outs of domestic British politics.
I liked a comment from an American on British politics. Because the stakes are so low and yet the drama so high.
We did basically get "levelling up" - real pay growth for workers in scarce manual-type roles. It turns out everyone else hates it, and that includes a lot of Tory voters.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Disappointing that people in Ukraine have such poor judgement on this. Ok Russian invasion bla bla but you'd have hoped they would have the nous and the bandwidth to follow the ins and outs of domestic British politics.
Maybe at times the view from outside is more revealing than that on the ground. Why on earth should anyone in Ukraine be concerned with the ins and outs of UK domestic politics?
Where does he go? It’s either Real or a leading English Prem club. I agree this rules out Spurs
If he wants a real challenge and a global stage he’ll go for the EPL
Maybe he goes for millions a week in the Saudi League?
He’s already a squillionaire. He doesn’t need the money. Who wants to play in insane heat in a literal desert? With no booze and fun? Only someone over 30 with their best days behind them
He’s more likely to follow Messi to MLS than go to Saudi. But I think he’ll go to Spain or England
Where does he go? It’s either Real or a leading English Prem club. I agree this rules out Spurs
If he wants a real challenge and a global stage he’ll go for the EPL
Maybe he goes for millions a week in the Saudi League?
He’s already a squillionaire. He doesn’t need the money. Who wants to play in insane heat in a literal desert? With no booze and fun? Only someone over 30 with their best days behind them
He’s more likely to follow Messi to MLS than go to Saudi. But I think he’ll go to Spain or England
I wasn't been serious. Outside of winning the WC, Champions League football is the pinnacle and I imagine he wants to leave PSG because they aren't close to quality of the likes of Man City or Real Madrid. PSG haven't won a European trophy since winning the mighty intertoto cup in 2001, while the domestic French league isn't really much more than a feeder league for the likes of the EPL these days.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Disappointing that people in Ukraine have such poor judgement on this. Ok Russian invasion bla bla but you'd have hoped they would have the nous and the bandwidth to follow the ins and outs of domestic British politics.
Maybe at times the view from outside is more revealing than that on the ground. Why on earth should anyone in Ukraine be concerned with the ins and outs of UK domestic politics?
Cricket must look absolutely ridiculous to those looking in. Taking teams off before 90 overs are bowled in good weather, not starting early on the good days when you always lose time later, and of course they must have a full lunch."
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Disappointing that people in Ukraine have such poor judgement on this. Ok Russian invasion bla bla but you'd have hoped they would have the nous and the bandwidth to follow the ins and outs of domestic British politics.
Or maybe they don’t give a crap about British domestic politics, but do know who led the world in responding to the Ukranians in their hour of need.
Oh cmon. Let's leave the Boris mythologising to Jacob and Nadine. But otherwise, yes, that's my exact point. The Ukrainains are obviously and understandably not the place to go for a rounded assessment of Boris Johnson and why he's no longer PM of the United Kingdom.
Cricket must look absolutely ridiculous to those looking in. Taking teams off before 90 overs are bowled in good weather, not starting early on the good days when you always lose time later, and of course they must have a full lunch."
Had a few quid (sadly only a few) on Hamilton to win earlier this week, at 24 on Betfair. Decided to lay half of it pre-race, just in case it all goes pear shaped at the first corner.
My similar punt on Norris for pole came tantalisingly close. Should have done it the other way round.
Cricket must look absolutely ridiculous to those looking in. Taking teams off before 90 overs are bowled in good weather, not starting early on the good days when you always lose time later, and of course they must have a full lunch."
I think about golf. They are very flexible when it comes to potential weather issues, be it changing start times, extra days etc.
Yep. If they were expecting nothing but heavy rain on Saturday and Sunday, they’d have started early and finished late on Thursday and Friday, and would be prepared to come back on Monday if they had to.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Disappointing that people in Ukraine have such poor judgement on this. Ok Russian invasion bla bla but you'd have hoped they would have the nous and the bandwidth to follow the ins and outs of domestic British politics.
Maybe at times the view from outside is more revealing than that on the ground. Why on earth should anyone in Ukraine be concerned with the ins and outs of UK domestic politics?
I fear you've taken kinabalu's comment more seriously than he intended. I think he was joking.
Cricket must look absolutely ridiculous to those looking in. Taking teams off before 90 overs are bowled in good weather, not starting early on the good days when you always lose time later, and of course they must have a full lunch."
Even if Comrade Jez splits the left vote, it's going to be hard for the Conservatives to take advantage.
In 2021, Shaun Bailey got 35% in the first round. That was at peak Vaccine Hero Boris, and Bailey was a better candidate than Hall. (Who has already managed to pose for a stupid photo on the front page of the Standard and caused the Conservatives to complain to London's newspaper, which is never a wise thing to do.)
We're not far off a scenario where the vote to the left of the Conservatives could be split into three equal portions and still come out ahead of Hall.
Not sure that is right. Bailey was 4.7% behind. Corbyn will win a lot more than 5% if he stands, I would guess 15-20% most likely. That feels like enough to allow the Tories to win if they get around 30% to me. Sounds plausible.
I don’t think the Tories will get 30% in the mayoral when they’re on less than that nationally.
Uxbridge (a 6.7% swing to Labour by the way) has gone to everyone’s heads.
The economy is bad and people feel like there is no solution and one party has been in power a long time. Nationally that is a disaster for the Tories. In London, some blame the Tories (fairly) others blame the Mayor (unfairly), so less so.
Khan is a bit shit. He is taking all of the blame for ULEZ, yet the decision to impose it was made by Shapps Green. So he should have been banging that particular drum hard. Instead he's taking the blame.
Not sure that works. He can't champion ULEZ at the same time as say, not my fault, blame the Tories for it.
His mistakes are around implementation, leaving it fiscally regressive, and a lack of listening, persuasion and compromise, three characteristics that are sorely missing from contemporary UK politics across the board.
No to both. The mistakes lay with the muppet running Labour's Uxbridge campaign who decided not to counter Tories telling voters they'd all have to pay, when in fact most vehicles are exempt. Years ago John Prescott complained about this idea, then presumably due to Mandelson and/or Campbell, that you must never refute your opponent's charges because that is letting the Tories "set the agenda". Well, great unless it means losing an election.
I think there is a lot of electoral denial on here from normally astute posters.
That 90% are not impacted is pretty irrelevant to the electoral damage. These are low turnout elections decided by not that much. The first round gap between Khan and Bailey was 120,000 votes. If 700,000 vehicles are starting to get hit by charges, that will be a big problem. Now of course the Tories are so bad nationally it may not matter but it is dismissed far too casually.
700,000 vehicles! Where on earth are you getting that from.
Read the Rawnsley piece above. The Tories told people with Tesla's they would have to pay the ULEZ charge. And Tories in Uxbridge always tell the truth, so it must be fact.
The ULEZ extension will have been in place for at least a year before the next election, so reality will disabuse them of that notion looking before they cast a General Election vote.
I don't think it will. People aren't stupid.
The ULEZ has been introduced as a revenue-raising measure. When all the cars are compliant, and it isn't raising any revenue, they will tighten the rules.
Once all cars are electric and have zero tailpipe emissions they aren't likely to take down all the cameras and give up on the revenue. They'll want to use the existing infrastructure to introduce a road-pricing scheme for all cars.
Road pricing is inherently a good idea. Capacity is scarce, and we should be looking at the best way to maximize throughput - which is almost certainly through charging.
So driving becomes a luxury item only for the very rich?
The issue is that transport is mostly a necessity for the economy to function. Even leisure travel - assuming the person travelling spends money at the destination. Very few journeys are pure travelling-for-the-heck-of-it .
Therefore the government needs to make journeys as inexpensive as possible, to allow the economy to function economically. Yet transport has costs. A large question therefore comes on how much of those costs needs to go onto the person/people travelling (including freight...), and how much onto general taxation, to be paid by everyone.
A classic example is parking in small towns: they want people to come in to use their shops, but make it unattractive by charging for parking. Yet the charge gives the council a handy revenue stream - even if it goes towards killing local shops.
A favourite was Abingdon. The retiree councillors of a LibDem/Green type got rid of as much car related stuff they could in the city centre.
Then the shopping centre died.
A park and ride scheme was repeatedly turned down on the grounds that it was spending money on cars….
So everyone drives to Oxford. To the park and ride there.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Disappointing that people in Ukraine have such poor judgement on this. Ok Russian invasion bla bla but you'd have hoped they would have the nous and the bandwidth to follow the ins and outs of domestic British politics.
Maybe at times the view from outside is more revealing than that on the ground. Why on earth should anyone in Ukraine be concerned with the ins and outs of UK domestic politics?
It’s a scaling issue. They have had politicians who stole on the Putin scale, and tried to sell the whole country to a foreign power (Russia). People who were implicated in providing information to the Russian invaders. Real, full on treason.
On that scale, an intern wheeling a fridge into No 10 is the size of an ant.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Disappointing that people in Ukraine have such poor judgement on this. Ok Russian invasion bla bla but you'd have hoped they would have the nous and the bandwidth to follow the ins and outs of domestic British politics.
Maybe at times the view from outside is more revealing than that on the ground. Why on earth should anyone in Ukraine be concerned with the ins and outs of UK domestic politics?
Wildfires spreading across the Greek island of Rhodes are leaving thousands of tourists in limbo, wondering where they will spend the night
Meanwhile, holiday companies are cancelling flights to the island. Jet2 has cancelled flights to Rhodes all next week, while TUI stopped flights there until Wednesday
EasyJet has cancelled package holidays but is still running flights to the island - as are British Airways, Ryanair, and others
BA customers who are currently in Rhodes on a flight-only booking can change their flight to come back earlier than planned, free of charge, the airline says.
And anyone flying to Rhodes with BA over the next week can change their flight to a later date, also free of charge.
As for the BA flight tomorrow - the airline says it will use a larger plane than normal so that it can pick up as many people as possible in Rhodes who want to return to the UK.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
The other puzzle for me is his lack of any real idea of what to do with a very comfortable majority. Awful as COVID and Ukraine are both could have been exploited to fulfil his grand plan - but he just didn't have one. Like him or loathe him that's what is so tragic about the last 4 years .
Sunak appears to be even worse. There’s 18 months until the election, but still few ideas of what might be achieved between now and then.
Worst of all, he deposed someone who did have ideas, even if you disagreed with them.
That is bollocks.
Boris Johnson was deposed because he lied about putting a known sexual predator into a position of a authority then made ministers repeat that lie.
Once the lie became public that's when Boris Johnson was deposed.
I wasn’t talking about Boris Johnson.
That was also bollocks. Sunak didn’t ‘depose’ Truss (I’ll gloss over your suggestion that she had anything which might be described as a set of coherent ideas); she lost the confidence of the her party, and would have been gone even if Sunak had never existed.
Truss's detailed policy plans were later released on Conhome. They, and Truss in her policy statements, were very consistent and clear. You may have disagreed with them, but that's a different matter.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
The what if is "What if Boris had fessed up and apologised?" Was there a point (maybe summer 2021) where he had enough political capital to do that and survive and thrive?
Yes, I think he could have done that, and people would have moved on.
And that's the key but of the morality tale.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
The other puzzle for me is his lack of any real idea of what to do with a very comfortable majority. Awful as COVID and Ukraine are both could have been exploited to fulfil his grand plan - but he just didn't have one. Like him or loathe him that's what is so tragic about the last 4 years .
JohnO can confirm this back in June 2019 he and I had a conversation where I relayed a conversation from somebody who knew Boris Johnson very well.
Their view, Boris Johnson is fundamentally too lazy to be Prime Minister, he wanted the trappings and prestige of power but didn't want to do any of the hard work of being Prime Minister.
Compare and contrast his missing several COBRA meetings in Jan-March 2020 to do with Covid with Mrs Thatcher's approach to dealing with the burgeoning HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
She read every briefing paper, questioning the Health Officers and Scientific advisers to get more info.
You can tell which approach went well and which didn't.
A premiership cannot exist in a vacuum, his hollowing out of the party allowed that vacuum to exist.
The cabinet overruled Mrs Thatcher, Boris Johnson's government didn't have the balls until the very end.
Also contrast Mrs T on the ozone hole vs the current lot on climate change.
Had a few quid (sadly only a few) on Hamilton to win earlier this week, at 24 on Betfair. Decided to lay half of it pre-race, just in case it all goes pear shaped at the first corner.
My similar punt on Norris for pole came tantalisingly close. Should have done it the other way round.
Well that excitement didn't last long. Off for a walk.
It is an interesting critique, and it is pretty shocking that a person such as this can gain such a high profile and, it is alleged, be put forward for a knighthood? I have often been criticised on this forum for calling Farage a modern day fascist. What does someone really need to do to convince people on here that they have fascist tendencies?
Wildfires spreading across the Greek island of Rhodes are leaving thousands of tourists in limbo, wondering where they will spend the night
Meanwhile, holiday companies are cancelling flights to the island. Jet2 has cancelled flights to Rhodes all next week, while TUI stopped flights there until Wednesday
EasyJet has cancelled package holidays but is still running flights to the island - as are British Airways, Ryanair, and others
BA customers who are currently in Rhodes on a flight-only booking can change their flight to come back earlier than planned, free of charge, the airline says.
And anyone flying to Rhodes with BA over the next week can change their flight to a later date, also free of charge.
As for the BA flight tomorrow - the airline says it will use a larger plane than normal so that it can pick up as many people as possible in Rhodes who want to return to the UK.
Throughout that region and most of the med yes it does happen each year and it is down to chance mainly the type of areas affected. There may be also an issue as to how ell the authorities have planned for fire risks. I live on the edge of Europe's only desert in Almeria - we had some bad fires here back in 2009 but very little of significance since. Each year now a lot of preventive measures are taken and they have rapid responses whenever and however a fire starts. Incidentally there are both the naturally occurring ones and often the larger number set by humans ignoring the rules or just being feckless.
I'm sure the Greek authorities are thrilled that the entire region now faces boycoots and cancellations while the 10 day forecast is for entirely normal summer temperatures.
The washing out at Stodge Towers, the covers on at Old Trafford. The certainties of an English summer?
Also among the certainties arguments on a Sunday at Tesco as shoppers with small trollies try to use the self checkout tills and street theatre on the corner as two drivers discuss the finer points of the ULEZ (that seems improbable given the gestures and language on offer).
As for ULEZ, it's about means and ends - most people wouldn't argue with an end that everyone deserves to breathe cleaner air. The problem is the means - ULEZ is not without merit but the problem, apart from the desperate desire of the Conservatives to find a stick with which to beat Labour, is it looks less like an altruistic measure to improve the quality of London's air than a cash-raising exercise to help Khan and City Hall.
While recognising the need for stick, there needs to be a lot of carrot - selling ULEZ in Inner London where most people have good access to public transport and where the necessity for a car is debatable is one thing (96% of vehicles were compliant) but selling it in Outer London is a different proposition. Yes, the majority of cars will be compliant but we know diesel ownership is greater and small business (the eponymous white van man) tends often to older particulate pumping diesels.
There needs to be a base assumption that no one should be financially worse off if they exchange a non-compliant for a compliant vehicle - if they stick with their non-complient vehicle, they'll know what to expect.
The other aspect is traffic from Outer to Inner London - we already have a congestion charge in place. For many, the journet from Outer to Inner London starts with a drive to a tube or train station and parking up before commuting in to the centre of town - ULEZ is irrelevant currently.
Taking the ULEZ to Outer London means £12.50 to get to the tube or train station and it also impacts on those in the next ring of the doughnut - car owners in Surrey, Essex and elsewhere who drive into Outer London towns - they suddenly become liable for this charge.
Why should anyone from Reigate or Harlow fund the London Mayoralty? That doesn't mean nothing can or should be done - the ends are still important. Taking some of the heat out of the issue would be a good step but it's a bone with which the Susan Halls and Lee Andersons can run. Perhaps they don't think or believe air quality is an issue - I've certainly never heard Susan Hall, in a pause among her rantings, advocate any kind of alternative solution.
Thank God common sense seems to be breaking slowly through on Net Zero, ULEZ and other green crap anyway. I can see this being the big popular revolt of the 2020s, like leaving the EU was for the 2010s.
Half of Europe is on fire and the other half is flooded according to the news, so maybe green crap is not quite dea.d.
Tells you everything about how crap the news is and sfs about weather and climate
Are you saying that the whole of Rhodes catches fire every year and reporting it is just a passing fad? Are you not amazed by the photograph here, in peacetime Europe?
'Holidaymaker Emma Marsh said: 'We are currently in Rhodes - we landed today only to be told that our hotel has burnt down. No one from the airline informed us before we flew.";
LOL, but I imagine the tour operators won't refund until the actual hotel booked has caught fire, so you just board the plane and hope a different part of Rhodes is where the problem is. I have made a rule, no advance bookings in the med June July August, but I don't have term dates to stick to
I simply don't travel in the school holidays and don't go to the Med in midsummer as it is already too bloody hot. I had a pleasant time in the Baltics and Finland in June and I am next going away in September
I fear the north Norwegian riviera still has some heavy lifting to do, however…
This season has really pinpointed the dilemma we have for holidays in a warming Europe. There are very few short haul places now where you aren’t at a 50% risk of being in unpleasantly hot conditions, but can still be confident of good sunny warm weather.
Northern Europe is still too unreliable. Southern Europe is a furnace more often than not. Central Europe now alternates between furnace and wet.
North West Spain and Northern Portugal, Coastal Charente, and the high alpine regions of the Med and Spain are just about all that’s left.
I can recommend Ukraine? Specifically, Lviv, where it is warm bright and sunny, with a 3% chance of missiles, and a light, pleasant, probably-not-radioactive breeze
We sit outside and drink our кава, contentedly
I'm looking forward to the photos of empty bottles of wine (one glass) from the front line in Bakhmut.
Cut me some slack. I just got here
I’ve already had some hairy moments - eg when the passport people found the Russian visa in my heavily stamped passport (I clean forgot my visit to St Petersburg and the Russian Arctic in 2019, or I would have used my other passport)
Then we arrived at 2am during curfew. I have press accreditation from the Ukrainian MOD (they love flints here) which means I can break curfew - and go into combat zones! - but still a bit hairy
It’s also true that love the Brits. The weary guy taking me to my 3am hotel room asked me dutifully “where are you from” and I told him and he turned and his eyes lit up and he said “Great Britain! Your country has really helped us!”
I got a bit of a patriotic tingle. He was genuine. Apparently they love us and the Poles first, and the Americans are third and everyone else is Meh or Putin
Ha, I knew it!
Have fun, stay safe, and yes the Ukranians are lovely people who really don’t deserve what’s happening to them - and who really love the Brits!
They also specifically admire Boris. It’s not imaginary. They can’t work out why we dumped him for a few parties
Anyway. I am out for coffee and strudel. Woke up late. No bombs. Expect photos of wheatbeer
Well done on going there and nice posts. Loved the weather forecast one, although rather black humour.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
Of course. But the party thing DOES look mad from outside. So he had a beer during lockdown. You sacked your prime minister for THAT?
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
Boris did not just have a party, he royally F***ed over the country and he and his band of grifters scammed us out of billions. Nothing is too good for him but as ever these scumbags buy £4M houses cash and just laugh at us.
Comments
Personally, I'd follow Paris and improve all modes of traffic flow in Inner / Central London by removing 100k-200k of on-street parking spaces.
500 acres is approx. 500 miles of traffic lane.
There are excessive numbers of lovely young women on the streets. But then you realise, there are simply excessive numbers of WOMEN
The gender balance is about 70% women, 15% old men. 8% young men (one with crutches). 7% kids
The young men are all at the front, or they fled and dodged the draft
Therefore the government needs to make journeys as inexpensive as possible, to allow the economy to function economically. Yet transport has costs. A large question therefore comes on how much of those costs needs to go onto the person/people travelling (including freight...), and how much onto general taxation, to be paid by everyone.
A classic example is parking in small towns: they want people to come in to use their shops, but make it unattractive by charging for parking. Yet the charge gives the council a handy revenue stream - even if it goes towards killing local shops.
And they love Boris because they are only looking at what he did for them, which was great. Shame about the other crap he dumped on us.
(With IHT the headline relief is £325k, from memory. For lots of people - perhaps most of the middle class - this can be turned into £1million without breaking sweat; more complicated but not impossible things can make it much higher).
Your first 'point' is simply 'I disagree with you'. You have zero evidence that Fishing isn't sincere in his beliefs, rather than trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes, and asserting that he is is typical ugly belligerence from you.
Nobody is denying that the climate changes - it has done so since the planet begun. People do question the extent to which human behaviour is responsible, and if it is, what the best way forward should then be. By the way, what evidence have you that increased flooding is due to climatic change, as opposed to houses on flood plains, the clampdown on dredging etc.? Shit all would be my guess.
'Green crap' is not profitable; our present renewable energy ecosystem depends on bill-payers' subsidies to survive. Your point about America though, is accidentally interesting - how exactly is the UK to lead the 'green industrial revolution', when apparently what is needed to do that is a vast amount of public money, which other countries (who presumably would like it if they are the leaders) have more of than we do?
I can't say I've ever been tempted by your oeuvre, but apparently you come over as quite a nice person on your Youtube videos. It would be nice if you didn't use PB as some sort of cleanse - we're not a scratching post.
I can’t be arsed to go into the whole Brexit context. “Lots of people hate him because yada yada”
By sheer coincidence one of the people in my train compartment last night was a Belgian Canadian SPAD and politics geek from Ottawa who makes money from political betting. You can imagine the happy hours we spent chatting about ridiculous political minutiae
Then we drank wine and moved on to life love and happiness and he revealed he’s abandoned the political life in Ottawa for “something more meaningful” - he’s volunteering to reconstruct the towns around Kharkiv
Perhaps a lesson for us all
@RochdalePioneers makes it sound as if he's campaigning against existential evil. No argument can ever be sufficiently exaggerated.
AN Otherpolitician could have done that and it would probably have worked.
Boris couldn't, because he was Boris. Nothing in his life story gave him that ability. Which is both why he got to the top and why he couldn't stay there.
Reckons he began to lose his judgment when he shacked up with her
It’s a theory. She is quite ditzy
Can I remind you of Neil and Stephen Kinnock's socially distanced outside birthday cake? The press wanted Steve Kinnock to be charged, sacked, imprisoned. It was wild. And this was at a time Boris was partying like it was 1999.
And what about Starmer and Beergate, the press and Tories on here wanted his nuts too? Some on here still do.
I think it fair to say Sunak was "ambushed by a cake". But Johnson? He was living it large whilst the Queen mourned on her own, but Boris will be Boris. One rule for him another for HMQ.
It is important because it defines the man in the moment, and this reflected on those he associated with, particularly his party.
It wasn't trivial.
And yet he was great on Ukraine. And vaccines. It’s a damn shame
He should never have fallen out with Dom Cummings. Who is genuinely clever, sharp and has great ideas (albeit sometimes mad)
No he will win if he stands
Meanwhile
Sir Kid Starvers net approval plunges to -13 (-9)
✅ Approve 26% (-4)
❌ Disapprove 39% (+5)
This is SKS's lowest net approval with Opinium since September 2022 (before Liz Truss became PM).
Via @OpiniumResearch,19-21 Jul (+/- vs 5-7 Jul)
Worst of all, he deposed someone who did have ideas, even if you disagreed with them.
Their view, Boris Johnson is fundamentally too lazy to be Prime Minister, he wanted the trappings and prestige of power but didn't want to do any of the hard work of being Prime Minister.
Compare and contrast his missing several COBRA meetings in Jan-March 2020 to do with Covid with Mrs Thatcher's approach to dealing with the burgeoning HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
She read every briefing paper, questioning the Health Officers and Scientific advisers to get more info.
You can tell which approach went well and which didn't.
A premiership cannot exist in a vacuum, his hollowing out of the party allowed that vacuum to exist.
The cabinet overruled Mrs Thatcher, Boris Johnson's government didn't have the balls until the very end.
If he had resigned, or stepped down for six months once he came out from hospital, he might still be PM to this day. Or, given his character flaws, perhaps not.
(*) Despite what some utter ****s now claim, which makes them worse than him.
But then he blew it because he's an undisciplined twat.
Boris Johnson was deposed because he lied about putting a known sexual predator into a position of a authority then made ministers repeat that lie.
Once the lie became public that's when Boris Johnson was deposed.
Such a Tory t**t
FOOTBALL: Spanish newspaper Marca reports that Tottenham are interested in buying Kylian Mbappe
https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/1682880184511512576
She sacked her Chancellor after the first whiff of trouble.
Her Chief Whip and Deputy Chief Whip resigned when she decided a vote in the House wasn't a confidence vote after all without telling the whips.
Ministers from the government benches were telling Tory MPs as were the whips that it was a confidence vote.
Sunak didn’t ‘depose’ Truss (I’ll gloss over your suggestion that she had anything which might be described as a set of coherent ideas); she lost the confidence of the her party, and would have been gone even if Sunak had never existed.
Where does he go? It’s either Real or a leading English Prem club. I agree this rules out Spurs
If he wants a real challenge and a global stage he’ll go for the EPL
He’s more likely to follow Messi to MLS than go to Saudi. But I think he’ll go to Spain or England
https://www.gbnews.com/politics/tory-mp-sara-britcliffe-mother-death-alcoholic
Cricket must look absolutely ridiculous to those looking in. Taking teams off before 90 overs are bowled in good weather, not starting early on the good days when you always lose time later, and of course they must have a full lunch."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/cricket/64959411
Decided to lay half of it pre-race, just in case it all goes pear shaped at the first corner.
My similar punt on Norris for pole came tantalisingly close.
Should have done it the other way round.
Then the shopping centre died.
A park and ride scheme was repeatedly turned down on the grounds that it was spending money on cars….
So everyone drives to Oxford. To the park and ride there.
On that scale, an intern wheeling a fridge into No 10 is the size of an ant.
Am at Diamond League so off here for a few hours now
Corbyn could split the vote enough, but for these factors
1) Anti-Tory sentiment
2) The Tories don’t have a candidate big enough to overcome 1) This was something that Boris could do.
It is notably beautiful in places. Hauntingly so
And then you see all the young men with crutches, injuries and worse
Wildfires spreading across the Greek island of Rhodes are leaving thousands of tourists in limbo, wondering where they will spend the night
Meanwhile, holiday companies are cancelling flights to the island. Jet2 has cancelled flights to Rhodes all next week, while TUI stopped flights there until Wednesday
EasyJet has cancelled package holidays but is still running flights to the island - as are British Airways, Ryanair, and others
BA customers who are currently in Rhodes on a flight-only booking can change their flight to come back earlier than planned, free of charge, the airline says.
And anyone flying to Rhodes with BA over the next week can change their flight to a later date, also free of charge.
As for the BA flight tomorrow - the airline says it will use a larger plane than normal so that it can pick up as many people as possible in Rhodes who want to return to the UK.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-66282605
Nothing to see here, happens every year
NEW THREAD
Before and after Russian missile attack.
https://twitter.com/OstapYarysh/status/1682987868355002370
Off for a walk.
...by continuing to fly folk to Rhodes.
I'm sure the Greek authorities are thrilled that the entire region now faces boycoots and cancellations while the 10 day forecast is for entirely normal summer temperatures.
https://www.eltiempo.es/rodas.html
The washing out at Stodge Towers, the covers on at Old Trafford. The certainties of an English summer?
Also among the certainties arguments on a Sunday at Tesco as shoppers with small trollies try to use the self checkout tills and street theatre on the corner as two drivers discuss the finer points of the ULEZ (that seems improbable given the gestures and language on offer).
As for ULEZ, it's about means and ends - most people wouldn't argue with an end that everyone deserves to breathe cleaner air. The problem is the means - ULEZ is not without merit but the problem, apart from the desperate desire of the Conservatives to find a stick with which to beat Labour, is it looks less like an altruistic measure to improve the quality of London's air than a cash-raising exercise to help Khan and City Hall.
While recognising the need for stick, there needs to be a lot of carrot - selling ULEZ in Inner London where most people have good access to public transport and where the necessity for a car is debatable is one thing (96% of vehicles were compliant) but selling it in Outer London is a different proposition. Yes, the majority of cars will be compliant but we know diesel ownership is greater and small business (the eponymous white van man) tends often to older particulate pumping diesels.
There needs to be a base assumption that no one should be financially worse off if they exchange a non-compliant for a compliant vehicle - if they stick with their non-complient vehicle, they'll know what to expect.
The other aspect is traffic from Outer to Inner London - we already have a congestion charge in place. For many, the journet from Outer to Inner London starts with a drive to a tube or train station and parking up before commuting in to the centre of town - ULEZ is irrelevant currently.
Taking the ULEZ to Outer London means £12.50 to get to the tube or train station and it also impacts on those in the next ring of the doughnut - car owners in Surrey, Essex and elsewhere who drive into Outer London towns - they suddenly become liable for this charge.
Why should anyone from Reigate or Harlow fund the London Mayoralty? That doesn't mean nothing can or should be done - the ends are still important. Taking some of the heat out of the issue would be a good step but it's a bone with which the Susan Halls and Lee Andersons can run. Perhaps they don't think or believe air quality is an issue - I've certainly never heard Susan Hall, in a pause among her rantings, advocate any kind of alternative solution.
(Google has already become notably poorer, and it’s algorithms incentivised reams of content-junk).
Bizarre as it seems, there may have been a golden age of the internet, circa 2000-2016?, which is hastening to a final end.
https://twitter.com/theatlantic/status/1683027951753805826?s=46&t=L9g_woCIqbo1MTuBFCK0xg