If you think the Tories are having a bad time spare a thought for the IDF. They're saying they've run out of Palestinians to shoot so they're turning on their own men.
Yes, it’s hilarious that a few young men have been killed by accident. As were British men, French men, Americans, pretty much everyone in war killed by their own side. I won’t ever know if my great uncle was shot down and killed by his own side in North Africa, frankly it doesn’t matter as it was all shit, but it’s an absolute blinder of a card to play for “my side v your side”. How Saddam’s supporters laughed at the UK/US blue on blue deaths.
This isn't a war.
It's a Genocide
“Hey guys, I’ve got a great idea, let’s go and kill loads of our neighbours in a really really horrific way. What could go wrong?”
Cue, everything going wrong.
“ oh that’s not fair”
You fucking idiot.
Proportionate response is acceptable a Genocide and bombing of civilians infrastructure is not.
I believe you are the aforesaid fucking idiot if you think 35000 civilians are Hamas
No, I’m just an admittedly horrible person who thinks that if you punch me in the face I will punch you many times, smash your wind pipe and smash your bollocks so you never reproduce. Everyone knows Israel are terrible like I am and yet they started the fight. What did they think the response would be?
No you are responding to my punching you in the face by shooting my whole extended family and carpet bombing the whole population of Chesterfield whilst turning off water and stopping food from entering Derbyshire just in case you missed anyone. You will especially target women and children because that is how bad Genocide supporters are. You caught me by surprise I expected to be punished but couldn't have forseen you were a genocidal maniac.
BTW you know you are one of the last few brainwashed don't you. Only 10% are in your category 58% and rising in mine (and that was a month ago will have risen further still now
I’m looking forward to being the 1/10 who didn’t want to support lunatics who hate Jews, gays, people who don’t follow an ideology. The funniest thing is that under the regime of those you support you would probably be a second class citizen at best or up against a wall at worst. You are supposedly a left wing, supporting everyone, minorities, the works but you support a regime that fucking hates all you stand for. Freedom for women, minorities, sexuality. You cannot see that the world you want is made worse by these fuckers and until everyone learns that they are not acting in your best interests they will be there terrifying you into electing them. As a left winger stand up and demand Hamas and all their ilk fuck off. Otherwise you are just a useful idiot.
How many of these dead women and children are "these fucker" or are all Muslims categorised by you in that manner. Islamophbia I think is the name for that.
It’s not remotely “islamaphobia” - Islam is a fine religion but as flawed as Christianity or any other religion. Hamas isn’t about Islam in its Koranic sense - it’s about control and a bunch of small dicked men who cannot handle women being free, men loving men, and power and money. Get me a secular gov in Gaza and I will die in a ditch against Israel suppressing it but you absolutely know that Hamas hate everything you stand for.
Seriously, imagine if Hamas take over Sheffield and your wife, daughter, have to obey bullshit ancient religious nonsense. Imagine you cannot go down the pub if you feel like it. You and I are weirdly probably aligned on freedoms and yet you support people who want to smash others freedoms.
And yet, if I lived in Sheffield under such conditions and the rest of Yorkshire were to invade, drive me out of my home, flatten most of the buildings in the city, and kill thousands in the process... I imagine that I might be tempted to swallow my hatred for the bigoted city council for a while and stand with them against the invaders.
At that point, it becomes a matter of simple patriotism doesn't it? I'd like to think that it wouldn't affect me, but realistically it probably would.
And that's the risk for Israel - even if they manage to eradicate the Hamas organisation entirely, what use is it if they've turned everyone else in Gaza against them?
If you lived in Sheffield in such conditions you would look at the people you hate in Leeds, with jobs, kebabs on a Friday night, parties, laughter, happiness, normal lives and say “ I want that, I really don’t want the party scene closed down, I want to have girls, drink, fun, freedom, and I’m feeling a bit gay thIs weekend and I want to enjoy that and not be hanged from a crane if possible.” And then someone turns up at your home and says, you cannot enjoy that life, you just pick up rocks and throw them at Israeli soldiers.
Just flood Gaza with booze, drugs, prostitutes. Make them know that this life is more fun that a mythical land of virgins.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Status? For some people being ridiculously wealthy is enough, and you're right you can have more influence that way too sometimes.
But being the youngest UK PM in two centuries ensures being remembered, even if in coming in when he did he was dealt a bad hand and then played it even more poorly to make things even worse.
Doubtless there will be as many comments on here about Sunak's enunciation failure as there were about Starmer's stumble at PMQ's yesterday.
LOL!
Would be even funnier if there had been an enunciation failure from Sunak!
I think the point is that it's an incredibly trivial matter – he slipped up on a word. People do it all the time; you do it; I do it. We all do. I present for a living. It doesn't matter as long as you KBO.
I think the fact that Sir Keir gets flustered and mangles his words under pressure is not trivial, if you consider the public's opinion of a politician as important. The likes of Brown, Miliband and May all faltered in part due to their awkward personalities and manner of speech
Most politicians mangle their words if they are on the front lines, listen to some of early Thatcher as leader phase. She was nothing like the Prime Minister she became.
Like Thatcher, Starmer is an eminent barrister who rose to the very top job for a barrister in England & Wales.
If he was frequently getting flustered and mangled he wouldn't have won so many cases and helped so many terrorists win their cases (copyright The Sun.)
I am one of life's gobby bastards, even I occasionally mangle a word in front of an audience.
I don't particularly like Starmer but the accusation being made about Starmer's tongue slip today is the exclusive narrative of Isam. What I find remarkable is Johnson fanboi Isam never noticed any of Johnson's excruciatingly embarrassing public relations fiascos. I will start with Peppa Pig. I wonder how many more stops PBets can recall before we reach Mornington Crescent?
Doubtless there will be as many comments on here about Sunak's enunciation failure as there were about Starmer's stumble at PMQ's yesterday.
LOL!
Would be even funnier if there had been an enunciation failure from Sunak!
I think the point is that it's an incredibly trivial matter – he slipped up on a word. People do it all the time; you do it; I do it. We all do. I present for a living. It doesn't matter as long as you KBO.
I think the fact that Sir Keir gets flustered and mangles his words under pressure is not trivial, if you consider the public's opinion of a politician as important. The likes of Brown, Miliband and May all faltered in part due to their awkward personalities and manner of speech
Most politicians mangle their words if they are on the front lines, listen to some of early Thatcher as leader phase. She was nothing like the Prime Minister she became.
Like Thatcher, Starmer is an eminent barrister who rose to the very top job for a barrister in England & Wales.
If he was frequently getting flustered and mangled he wouldn't have won so many cases and helped so many terrorists win their cases (copyright The Sun.)
I am one of life's gobby bastards, even I occasionally mangle a word in front of an audience.
I don't particularly like Starmer but the accusation being made about Starmer's tongue slip today is the exclusive narrative of Isam. What I find remarkable is Johnson fanboi Isam never noticed any of Johnson's excruciatingly embarrassing public relations fiascos. I will start with Peppa Pig. I wonder how many more stops PBets can recall before we reach Mornington Crescent?
Why don’t you just leave me alone you fucking oddball???
I noticed megasaur suggesting December on the previous thread and I've had a sneaking suspicion the same way myself for a whle now.
To be precise, I'm thinking the 12 of December. Again.
Rationale: Sunak doesn't want to pull the trigger on ending the Tory Government any sooner than he has to, which gives him the impulse to run as long as he can.
Accepting the fact that a campaign over Christmas would indeed be desperate, and look desperate, and piss people off still further, it's about as late as he realistically can go.
He can kind of justify (or at least pretend to justify) going that late on the grounds that the last one was December 12th, after all, so it's the five year point, and we all accepted a 12th December election last time.
Yes, it'll make things harder for activists, but that's more a Labour and Lib Dem problem than a Tory one, because they don't exactly have many activists left, so fewer activists all round makes for a more air-war/Royal Mail delivery campaign, which they'll be able to handle, and partly mitigate their activist disadvantage.
Moon Rabbit was certain in was going to be May! She explained how logically it could be no other date.
Don't tell me I've spent my life savings on a pup!
She is now (or was) certain it will be in July and cannot possibly be any other month. I dare say her serial certainty will continue all bloody year.
It won’t be July 4th now, it’s already too late to call it with close down next week.
I think Sunak likes being Prime Minister, and it eats him up he’s getting chucked out. Even if experts point to the optimum day in 2024 he will lose less seats and help the party by choosing that, I still think he’ll hang on till the end based on self interest. I wouldn’t even rule out January.
Really? It seems to me that he hates it, and that he's deeply uncomfortable with the constraints of the role. Sure, I can understand that he doesn't want to fail - he's never really failed at anything before, and he doesn't want his most consequential role in life to be his first failure. But that doesn't mean the he's enjoying himself.
Once he loses, and once he's safely ensconced on the board of a few Californian startups that are trying to eat London's fintech lunch, I hope that he'll finally be able to relax a bit and work out where he went wrong. I think he's smart enough to do that, and hope that he'll be able to accept that he wasn't cut out for politics and that his talents are better used elsewhere.
And I'm sure that he'll be much, much happier as a result.
Really good to see the Labour front bench strike a constructive tone on the sex education guidance today, a million miles away from the overwrought & ill-informed debate on here.
Doubtless there will be as many comments on here about Sunak's enunciation failure as there were about Starmer's stumble at PMQ's yesterday.
LOL!
Would be even funnier if there had been an enunciation failure from Sunak!
I think the point is that it's an incredibly trivial matter – he slipped up on a word. People do it all the time; you do it; I do it. We all do. I present for a living. It doesn't matter as long as you KBO.
I think the fact that Sir Keir gets flustered and mangles his words under pressure is not trivial, if you consider the public's opinion of a politician as important. The likes of Brown, Miliband and May all faltered in part due to their awkward personalities and manner of speech
Most politicians mangle their words if they are on the front lines, listen to some of early Thatcher as leader phase. She was nothing like the Prime Minister she became.
Like Thatcher, Starmer is an eminent barrister who rose to the very top job for a barrister in England & Wales.
If he was frequently getting flustered and mangled he wouldn't have won so many cases and helped so many terrorists win their cases (copyright The Sun.)
I am one of life's gobby bastards, even I occasionally mangle a word in front of an audience.
I don't particularly like Starmer but the accusation being made about Starmer's tongue slip today is the exclusive narrative of Isam. What I find remarkable is Johnson fanboi Isam never noticed any of Johnson's excruciatingly embarrassing public relations fiascos. I will start with Peppa Pig. I wonder how many more stops PBets can recall before we reach Mornington Crescent?
Johnson does quips and columns well but he can’t do speeches. Butchers every other line. It’s a massive shame he never came up against Starmer in an election. SKS would destroy him and we would t have this king over the water shite.
Doubtless there will be as many comments on here about Sunak's enunciation failure as there were about Starmer's stumble at PMQ's yesterday.
LOL!
Would be even funnier if there had been an enunciation failure from Sunak!
I think the point is that it's an incredibly trivial matter – he slipped up on a word. People do it all the time; you do it; I do it. We all do. I present for a living. It doesn't matter as long as you KBO.
I think the fact that Sir Keir gets flustered and mangles his words under pressure is not trivial, if you consider the public's opinion of a politician as important. The likes of Brown, Miliband and May all faltered in part due to their awkward personalities and manner of speech
I think the story here is your attempt to boost it to a matter of importance. The public either haven’t noticed or don’t give a shit…
Oh, sorry, forgot, pointing out your obsession in this matter is effectively censorship. My bad.
This attack line isn't going to work for Sunak (his painfully prepared "Steam bro" response to the "tech brother" stumble was pure cringe), but it's one of the few things that CCHQ have to go on - so we'll see much more of the Sleepy Keith stuff, I'm sure of it.
SKS might be well advised to get out in front of it - own the age gap between him and Starmer (Reagan style!), make a virtue of being serious-minded, and perhaps even playing up the occasional stumble to humanise him a little.
He could fart into his hands and throw it into the faces of most people on here and they'd find a way to say it was fair enough
Depends on the smell. Roasty? Sulphurous? Pooey? Weirdly unscented?
The privileged trump of the lawyer, smelling, miraculously, of faux earnestness with warning notes of caulked wine, lingering and, ultimately, foul.
Isn't it corked? Can't imagine wine having caulk in it. Or is it? Have I just made a faux pas?
I noticed megasaur suggesting December on the previous thread and I've had a sneaking suspicion the same way myself for a whle now.
To be precise, I'm thinking the 12 of December. Again.
Rationale: Sunak doesn't want to pull the trigger on ending the Tory Government any sooner than he has to, which gives him the impulse to run as long as he can.
Accepting the fact that a campaign over Christmas would indeed be desperate, and look desperate, and piss people off still further, it's about as late as he realistically can go.
He can kind of justify (or at least pretend to justify) going that late on the grounds that the last one was December 12th, after all, so it's the five year point, and we all accepted a 12th December election last time.
Yes, it'll make things harder for activists, but that's more a Labour and Lib Dem problem than a Tory one, because they don't exactly have many activists left, so fewer activists all round makes for a more air-war/Royal Mail delivery campaign, which they'll be able to handle, and partly mitigate their activist disadvantage.
Moon Rabbit was certain in was going to be May! She explained how logically it could be no other date.
Don't tell me I've spent my life savings on a pup!
She is now (or was) certain it will be in July and cannot possibly be any other month. I dare say her serial certainty will continue all bloody year.
It won’t be July 4th now, it’s already too late to call it with close down next week.
I think Sunak likes being Prime Minister, and it eats him up he’s getting chucked out. Even if experts point to the optimum day in 2024 he will lose less seats and help the party by choosing that, I still think he’ll hang on till the end based on self interest. I wouldn’t even rule out January.
Really? It seems to me that he hates it, and that he's deeply uncomfortable with the constraints of the role. Sure, I can understand that he doesn't want to fail - he's never really failed at anything before, and he doesn't want his most consequential role in life to be his first failure. But that doesn't mean the he's enjoying himself.
Once he loses, and once he's safely ensconced on the board of a few Californian startups that are trying to eat London's fintech lunch, I hope that he'll finally be able to relax a bit and work out where he went wrong. I think he's smart enough to do that, and hope that he'll be able to accept that he wasn't cut out for politics and that his talents are better used elsewhere.
And I'm sure that he'll be much, much happier as a result.
I'm not sure he can figure out what went wrong. Failure though his premiership will have been he rose through the ranks of politics super fast and became Prime Minister in difficult circumstances, so in his mind he can pin any faults on that alone. As he'll still be rich and thus powerful he won't face the kind of difficult circumstances that might cause a reflection.
Doubtless there will be as many comments on here about Sunak's enunciation failure as there were about Starmer's stumble at PMQ's yesterday.
LOL!
Would be even funnier if there had been an enunciation failure from Sunak!
I think the point is that it's an incredibly trivial matter – he slipped up on a word. People do it all the time; you do it; I do it. We all do. I present for a living. It doesn't matter as long as you KBO.
I think the fact that Sir Keir gets flustered and mangles his words under pressure is not trivial, if you consider the public's opinion of a politician as important. The likes of Brown, Miliband and May all faltered in part due to their awkward personalities and manner of speech
Most politicians mangle their words if they are on the front lines, listen to some of early Thatcher as leader phase. She was nothing like the Prime Minister she became.
Like Thatcher, Starmer is an eminent barrister who rose to the very top job for a barrister in England & Wales.
If he was frequently getting flustered and mangled he wouldn't have won so many cases and helped so many terrorists win their cases (copyright The Sun.)
I am one of life's gobby bastards, even I occasionally mangle a word in front of an audience.
I don't particularly like Starmer but the accusation being made about Starmer's tongue slip today is the exclusive narrative of Isam. What I find remarkable is Johnson fanboi Isam never noticed any of Johnson's excruciatingly embarrassing public relations fiascos. I will start with Peppa Pig. I wonder how many more stops PBets can recall before we reach Mornington Crescent?
Why don’t you just leave me alone you fucking oddball???
Doubtless there will be as many comments on here about Sunak's enunciation failure as there were about Starmer's stumble at PMQ's yesterday.
LOL!
Would be even funnier if there had been an enunciation failure from Sunak!
I think the point is that it's an incredibly trivial matter – he slipped up on a word. People do it all the time; you do it; I do it. We all do. I present for a living. It doesn't matter as long as you KBO.
I think the fact that Sir Keir gets flustered and mangles his words under pressure is not trivial, if you consider the public's opinion of a politician as important. The likes of Brown, Miliband and May all faltered in part due to their awkward personalities and manner of speech
I think the story here is your attempt to boost it to a matter of importance. The public either haven’t noticed or don’t give a shit…
Oh, sorry, forgot, pointing out your obsession in this matter is effectively censorship. My bad.
This attack line isn't going to work for Sunak (his painfully prepared "Steam bro" response to the "tech brother" stumble was pure cringe), but it's one of the few things that CCHQ have to go on - so we'll see much more of the Sleepy Keith stuff, I'm sure of it.
SKS might be well advised to get out in front of it - own the age gap between him and Starmer (Reagan style!), make a virtue of being serious-minded, and perhaps even playing up the occasional stumble to humanise him a little.
He could fart into his hands and throw it into the faces of most people on here and they'd find a way to say it was fair enough
Depends on the smell. Roasty? Sulphurous? Pooey? Weirdly unscented?
The privileged trump of the lawyer, smelling, miraculously, of faux earnestness with warning notes of caulked wine, lingering and, ultimately, foul.
Isn't it corked? Can't imagine wine having caulk in it. Or is it?Have I just made a faux pas?
Doubtless there will be as many comments on here about Sunak's enunciation failure as there were about Starmer's stumble at PMQ's yesterday.
LOL!
Would be even funnier if there had been an enunciation failure from Sunak!
I think the point is that it's an incredibly trivial matter – he slipped up on a word. People do it all the time; you do it; I do it. We all do. I present for a living. It doesn't matter as long as you KBO.
I think the fact that Sir Keir gets flustered and mangles his words under pressure is not trivial, if you consider the public's opinion of a politician as important. The likes of Brown, Miliband and May all faltered in part due to their awkward personalities and manner of speech
Most politicians mangle their words if they are on the front lines, listen to some of early Thatcher as leader phase. She was nothing like the Prime Minister she became.
Like Thatcher, Starmer is an eminent barrister who rose to the very top job for a barrister in England & Wales.
If he was frequently getting flustered and mangled he wouldn't have won so many cases and helped so many terrorists win their cases (copyright The Sun.)
I am one of life's gobby bastards, even I occasionally mangle a word in front of an audience.
I don't particularly like Starmer but the accusation being made about Starmer's tongue slip today is the exclusive narrative of Isam. What I find remarkable is Johnson fanboi Isam never noticed any of Johnson's excruciatingly embarrassing public relations fiascos. I will start with Peppa Pig. I wonder how many more stops PBets can recall before we reach Mornington Crescent?
Why don’t you just leave me alone you fucking oddball???
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Maybe he just continually makes epically bad decisions?
It’s really quite weird, in the way where you realise you haven’t done all in life you could do, so when he was in his first year at school in the spring term he would have been taught Winchester Football. It was a grim compulsory thing on a Wednesday afternoon and unfortunately he was in the other half of school so I didn’t get to mold him into being a fine man like myself. I can see him though, tiny little scared chap being brutalised weekly and knowing that maths and hard work was the future rather than being a boozy complicated person on PB. He’s everyone from school I thought would be - lawyer/city not army, politics. I would just love to know what made him decide, I’m going for this. There are so many people I knew who would have been better PMs, more charismatic than him but equally intelligent. Alex Chalk, the soon to be lost Simon Boas who should have been PM.
Really? It seems to me that he hates it, and that he's deeply uncomfortable with the constraints of the role. Sure, I can understand that he doesn't want to fail - he's never really failed at anything before, and he doesn't want his most consequential role in life to be his first failure. But that doesn't mean the he's enjoying himself.
Once he loses, and once he's safely ensconced on the board of a few Californian startups that are trying to eat London's fintech lunch, I hope that he'll finally be able to relax a bit and work out where he went wrong. I think he's smart enough to do that, and hope that he'll be able to accept that he wasn't cut out for politics and that his talents are better used elsewhere.
And I'm sure that he'll be much, much happier as a result.
I don't think he hates it, but I don't think he will work out where he went wrong.
His entire attitude appears to be "why aren't you more impressed by my brilliance?"
He doesn't understand ordinary life, so will never understand why ordinary people don't worship him.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
On the election date, the various daft scenarios have now been put away. November looks more plausible, though in practice running a campaign concurrently with the US one has its own challenges especially for a Tory party whose more desperate MPs may start parroting whatever batshit things Trump says.
I still think we slide past that and head towards 12th December.
Doubtless there will be as many comments on here about Sunak's enunciation failure as there were about Starmer's stumble at PMQ's yesterday.
LOL!
Would be even funnier if there had been an enunciation failure from Sunak!
I think the point is that it's an incredibly trivial matter – he slipped up on a word. People do it all the time; you do it; I do it. We all do. I present for a living. It doesn't matter as long as you KBO.
I think the fact that Sir Keir gets flustered and mangles his words under pressure is not trivial, if you consider the public's opinion of a politician as important. The likes of Brown, Miliband and May all faltered in part due to their awkward personalities and manner of speech
Most politicians mangle their words if they are on the front lines, listen to some of early Thatcher as leader phase. She was nothing like the Prime Minister she became.
Like Thatcher, Starmer is an eminent barrister who rose to the very top job for a barrister in England & Wales.
If he was frequently getting flustered and mangled he wouldn't have won so many cases and helped so many terrorists win their cases (copyright The Sun.)
I am one of life's gobby bastards, even I occasionally mangle a word in front of an audience.
I don't particularly like Starmer but the accusation being made about Starmer's tongue slip today is the exclusive narrative of Isam. What I find remarkable is Johnson fanboi Isam never noticed any of Johnson's excruciatingly embarrassing public relations fiascos. I will start with Peppa Pig. I wonder how many more stops PBets can recall before we reach Mornington Crescent?
Why don’t you just leave me alone you fucking oddball???
Please feel free to flag me again. Apologies.
So weird
I wasn't insulting you, I was explaining why I feel Johnson is a worse public speaker than Starmer. I don't understand why you are crying hurt, unless you are actually Boris Johnson.
Boris was elected PM despite years of gaffes, bad behaviour, slip ups and what have you. The reason he got away with them was probably correlated to his Personality Ratings, which were the highest of any PM I believe. It's probably why his highly intelligent ex wife took him back numerous times when he was caught cheating - some people just get away with things others dont. I don't like it, but that's life.
Sir Keir has among the lowest Personality ratings of any LotO, and so the public are less likely to think "Ah that's just part of Sir Kei's charm" when he messes up - just like they didn't when Ed, Gordo and TMay froze.
Sunak's ratings are bad too mind you, so that might let Sir Keir off the hook. Personally I think Sunak comes over quite well, even if he does sound just like Will from The Inbetweeners
Doubtless there will be as many comments on here about Sunak's enunciation failure as there were about Starmer's stumble at PMQ's yesterday.
LOL!
Would be even funnier if there had been an enunciation failure from Sunak!
I think the point is that it's an incredibly trivial matter – he slipped up on a word. People do it all the time; you do it; I do it. We all do. I present for a living. It doesn't matter as long as you KBO.
I think the fact that Sir Keir gets flustered and mangles his words under pressure is not trivial, if you consider the public's opinion of a politician as important. The likes of Brown, Miliband and May all faltered in part due to their awkward personalities and manner of speech
Most politicians mangle their words if they are on the front lines, listen to some of early Thatcher as leader phase. She was nothing like the Prime Minister she became.
Like Thatcher, Starmer is an eminent barrister who rose to the very top job for a barrister in England & Wales.
If he was frequently getting flustered and mangled he wouldn't have won so many cases and helped so many terrorists win their cases (copyright The Sun.)
I am one of life's gobby bastards, even I occasionally mangle a word in front of an audience.
I don't particularly like Starmer but the accusation being made about Starmer's tongue slip today is the exclusive narrative of Isam. What I find remarkable is Johnson fanboi Isam never noticed any of Johnson's excruciatingly embarrassing public relations fiascos. I will start with Peppa Pig. I wonder how many more stops PBets can recall before we reach Mornington Crescent?
Why don’t you just leave me alone you fucking oddball???
Please feel free to flag me again. Apologies.
So weird
I wasn't insulting you, I was explaining why I feel Johnson is a worse public speaker than Starmer. I don't understand why you are crying hurt, unless you are actually Boris Johnson.
It's so tedious having you on my case every time I post on here you nutter
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
He is so un-wykehamical though. He’s not intellectually curious, cynical, nuts. Without doxing there are a few of us on here and there are wildly differing views, bonkers in some cases, and I love that we are so different but Rishi is the most, worst, example because he’s intelligent in a maths way but not in an argument way.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
On the election date, the various daft scenarios have now been put away. November looks more plausible, though in practice running a campaign concurrently with the US one has its own challenges especially for a Tory party whose more desperate MPs may start parroting whatever batshit things Trump says.
I still think we slide past that and head towards 12th December.
I remain steadfast in my view that Sunak wants at least 2 years, so it has to be late October or later. Going into January is even more electorally suicidal than holding on now is, so I think it's possible but unlikely. So that means very late October, November, or pre-Christmas December.
From a perspective on how to justify a date, December has the advantage of having a full five year parliament as the pretext, and it's not as though turnout was appreciably worse, in fact it was still higher than any GE since 1997, other than 2017. Add in the US Presidential election and saying there should be some gap from that and you are looking at late November anyway, in which case might as well go the full five.
(I'm sure there will be many legal challenges still going on in December whoever wins the US election, and State house shenanigans and possibly some violence if Trump loses, but from the UK perspective it will be 'done')
Boris was elected PM despite years of gaffes, bad behaviour, slip ups and what have you. The reason he got away with them was probably correlated to his Personality Ratings, which were the highest of any PM I believe. It's probably why his highly intelligent ex wife took him back numerous times when he was caught cheating - some people just get away with things others dont. I don't like it, but that's life.
Sir Keir has among the lowest Personality ratings of any LotO, and so the public are less likely to think "Ah that's just part of Sir Kei's charm" when he messes up - just like they didn't when Ed, Gordo and TMay froze.
Sunak's ratings are bad too mind you, so that might let Sir Keir off the hook. Personally I think Sunak comes over quite well, even if he does sound just like Will from The Inbetweeners
Attlee was nowhere near as charismatic as Churchill but won. And did a very good job as PM. With a decent electoral system he’d have won in 1951, too.
On the election date, the various daft scenarios have now been put away. November looks more plausible, though in practice running a campaign concurrently with the US one has its own challenges especially for a Tory party whose more desperate MPs may start parroting whatever batshit things Trump says.
I still think we slide past that and head towards 12th December.
It does look like any realistic chance of it being Q3 has gone and it won't be Jan 2025. So Q4. I think Oct (?)
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Your Sunak defences on the basis (it would appear) of the bonds of the old school tie is one of PB's charming oddities.
Some of your points do verge on the fantastical though. Sunak worked for Goldman Sachs. I'm sure he did well. But his own investment company began when he'd already married the Infosys billions, managing his father in law's money.
There are some business leaders, mainly American ones, who are more influential in the world than a UK PM, but not that many. Do you see strong evidence that Sunak was on his way to becoming a Zuckerberg or a Buffet? It's a new one on me.
I don't know Sunak's motivation for entering politics, but I do know that several of his decisions once there happen to have benefitted the family business. Infosys are an important company, as are many of Sunak's stocks like Moderna, but not like Google - so ubiquitous as to be unavoidable.
Personally am keeping ‘em crossed for July, but that’s a hope not a prediction. I don’t know when it will be, but my actual prediction is that the longer he waits the more the public will see him as either frit or a ditherer.
He wants the wedge issue of immigration to be hot so he won't go until he's 100% he can get flights off before or during the campaign. As soon as practicable after that seems likely.
Now, I'm not in the UK. But are there really millions of potential Conservative voters who are desperate to return to the fold just so long as a couple of flights have left for Rwanda?
My gut - and I realize I'm in California - is that voters have now reached that stage where they want a change. Sunak isn't right wing enough to stop defections to Reform. And he isn't centrist enough to avoid losing votes to the LibDems and Labour. He's also screwed by the fact that the Left is likely to vote highly tactically, while the Right will very definitely not.
There's no bogeyman, either. Who - other than @bigjohnowls and @isam - is going to march to the polling station and vote Conservative out of fear of Starmer? (And with Johnson gone, I think bjo will be going green.)
And I don't see an easy way out. There's no popular MP in the wings who can galvanize support and bring the disparate factions together.
It's time for the Conservative Party to accept that the electorate is going to give them a drubbing.
And, if it's any consolation, the problems with the UK economy will still be there in five years time. So you never know, the Conservatives may get another chance sooner rather than later.
I have decided to cast my first ever vote for the Conservatives in this General Election.
The UK has not had a proper Conservative government for too long, and needs one. That certainly won’t be delivered by Labour.
And in today's least shocking news...
I’m not a Tory shrill. I’m standing up for the Conservatism the country needs. It hasn’t been getting it is the point.
Whatever economic policy Boris pursued, it certainly wasn’t Conservative - high debt, high spend, high wage, high inflation, high borrowing. Our country has gone too libertarian, even the Conservative Party, and that is bad for everyone, especially children today. It’s to properly protect children we need more Conservatism. Since the eighties and nineties, public policy has not been used enough to strengthen families, communities, and the nation: the associations that make individuals happy, safe and free. Given the unique threats of our age we need more Conservatism not less. Ironically, just as the country needs more Conservatism, it’s going to vote Labour, and continuation of the direction of last 27 years currently wrong, only turned up to maximum wrongness.
Labour economic policy is the same as Truss, they share the same unstable chaotic economy from a dash for growth growth growth.
I’m right on this. It’s the electorate who will get it wrong when the election comes.
Doubtless there will be as many comments on here about Sunak's enunciation failure as there were about Starmer's stumble at PMQ's yesterday.
LOL!
Would be even funnier if there had been an enunciation failure from Sunak!
I think the point is that it's an incredibly trivial matter – he slipped up on a word. People do it all the time; you do it; I do it. We all do. I present for a living. It doesn't matter as long as you KBO.
I think the fact that Sir Keir gets flustered and mangles his words under pressure is not trivial, if you consider the public's opinion of a politician as important. The likes of Brown, Miliband and May all faltered in part due to their awkward personalities and manner of speech
Most politicians mangle their words if they are on the front lines, listen to some of early Thatcher as leader phase. She was nothing like the Prime Minister she became.
Like Thatcher, Starmer is an eminent barrister who rose to the very top job for a barrister in England & Wales.
If he was frequently getting flustered and mangled he wouldn't have won so many cases and helped so many terrorists win their cases (copyright The Sun.)
I am one of life's gobby bastards, even I occasionally mangle a word in front of an audience.
I don't particularly like Starmer but the accusation being made about Starmer's tongue slip today is the exclusive narrative of Isam. What I find remarkable is Johnson fanboi Isam never noticed any of Johnson's excruciatingly embarrassing public relations fiascos. I will start with Peppa Pig. I wonder how many more stops PBets can recall before we reach Mornington Crescent?
Why don’t you just leave me alone you fucking oddball???
Please feel free to flag me again. Apologies.
So weird
I wasn't insulting you, I was explaining why I feel Johnson is a worse public speaker than Starmer. I don't understand why you are crying hurt, unless you are actually Boris Johnson.
It's so tedious having you on my case every time I post on here you nutter
Personally am keeping ‘em crossed for July, but that’s a hope not a prediction. I don’t know when it will be, but my actual prediction is that the longer he waits the more the public will see him as either frit or a ditherer.
He wants the wedge issue of immigration to be hot so he won't go until he's 100% he can get flights off before or during the campaign. As soon as practicable after that seems likely.
Now, I'm not in the UK. But are there really millions of potential Conservative voters who are desperate to return to the fold just so long as a couple of flights have left for Rwanda?
My gut - and I realize I'm in California - is that voters have now reached that stage where they want a change. Sunak isn't right wing enough to stop defections to Reform. And he isn't centrist enough to avoid losing votes to the LibDems and Labour. He's also screwed by the fact that the Left is likely to vote highly tactically, while the Right will very definitely not.
There's no bogeyman, either. Who - other than @bigjohnowls and @isam - is going to march to the polling station and vote Conservative out of fear of Starmer? (And with Johnson gone, I think bjo will be going green.)
And I don't see an easy way out. There's no popular MP in the wings who can galvanize support and bring the disparate factions together.
It's time for the Conservative Party to accept that the electorate is going to give them a drubbing.
And, if it's any consolation, the problems with the UK economy will still be there in five years time. So you never know, the Conservatives may get another chance sooner rather than later.
I have decided to cast my first ever vote for the Conservatives in this General Election.
The UK has not had a proper Conservative government for too long, and needs one. That certainly won’t be delivered by Labour.
Chortle.
It’s the wrong time for Truss “go for growth” economics we will get with Labour, yet it’s by dining out on the so called chaos of the Truss Premiership that’s going to put Labour in.
Boris was elected PM despite years of gaffes, bad behaviour, slip ups and what have you. The reason he got away with them was probably correlated to his Personality Ratings, which were the highest of any PM I believe. It's probably why his highly intelligent ex wife took him back numerous times when he was caught cheating - some people just get away with things others dont. I don't like it, but that's life.
Sir Keir has among the lowest Personality ratings of any LotO, and so the public are less likely to think "Ah that's just part of Sir Kei's charm" when he messes up - just like they didn't when Ed, Gordo and TMay froze.
Sunak's ratings are bad too mind you, so that might let Sir Keir off the hook. Personally I think Sunak comes over quite well, even if he does sound just like Will from The Inbetweeners
Starmer’s ratings are far better than Johnson’s. Johnson pissed on his own chips. Starmer is by some margin the most popular politician in the country - even if his net rating is negative.Against a competent LOTO Johnson would be leading the Tories into oblivion. Sunak will at least keep them in the top 2.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Westminster is super bright but also London, cool to a point, go home down the road at weekends. Winchester is a bit let’s get 600 guys on the spectrum and see what happens and for shits and gigs let’s get someone who will be PM. We were better off producing Chancellors of the Exchequer and Archbishops etc. and general weirdos, background people. Westminster and Eton are very driven, Winchester not so.
Boris was elected PM despite years of gaffes, bad behaviour, slip ups and what have you. The reason he got away with them was probably correlated to his Personality Ratings, which were the highest of any PM I believe. It's probably why his highly intelligent ex wife took him back numerous times when he was caught cheating - some people just get away with things others dont. I don't like it, but that's life.
Sir Keir has among the lowest Personality ratings of any LotO, and so the public are less likely to think "Ah that's just part of Sir Kei's charm" when he messes up - just like they didn't when Ed, Gordo and TMay froze.
Sunak's ratings are bad too mind you, so that might let Sir Keir off the hook. Personally I think Sunak comes over quite well, even if he does sound just like Will from The Inbetweeners
Attlee was nowhere near as charismatic as Churchill but won. And did a very good job as PM. With a decent electoral system he’d have won in 1951, too.
Without the King going on hols, he probably could have held on for a bit longer and survived the post-Korea shocks!
Barristers having to treat Lesley Sewell of the PO as though she is a child, such is her fragility and uselessness.
Lesley Sewell former Chief Information Officer of the PO, that is.
Being a senior IT person does not prepare you for this. I am surprised, given it is televised and has been the subject of such scrutiny in recent months, more people have not reacted as she did.
Maybe but she was the head of IT. Not just some IT bod stuck in the back in a black t-shirt. You would expect her to be all over her department and what was going on. Which should in turn have provided cover and competence for the questions being asked.
Although I suppose the whole inquiry has been characterised by PO heads of this and that who knew nothing that was happening in their departments.
Giving evidence is horribly stressful. Giving evidence on live TV even more so. Competent honest people are not necessarily great witnesses or public speakers, and incompetent liars are often the best bullshitters. As recent electoral history shows.
Bullshitters work best when you encounter them in short bursts or repetitive scenarios, which is why politics is a good breeding ground.
They don't work well when pinned down and forced to confront their own words and actions, and where smooth nonsense will be exposed by rigorous questioning.
So id say they actually do badly at inquiries if, and here's the major caveat, the inquiry is itself being competently managed.
A question is how much systematic issues and errors should be placed on the head of specific individuals - and this is probably at the heart of this awful mess. Most people want to do a good job. Lots of people want to do a good job with minimal effort. If doing a good job involves fighting an internal culture in an organisation, then it is far from easy. In fact, fighting it can lose you your job and/or friends. And for some people most importantly of all, prestige.
Another issue is that what you say about bullshitters is also true of people who *tried* to do the right thing. Can you look back at a decision you made in business a decade or more ago and defend it robustly? Especially if you now know it was the wrong decision?
I wouldn't want to give evidence in this environment. I fear, like many inquiries, it's findings will not get to the important facts, and instead excoriate people. In some cases, unjustly.
It's pretty clear from the enquiry evidence that a large number of witnesses had little or no interest in "doing a good job", and the ongoing miscarriages of justice were a matter to be covered up, which they did.
It's also obvious that from today's evidence there's not much that shows Sewell being actively culpable.
Also not much evidence showing Sewell did much of anything actually useful? For the non-pittance (I presume) she got over-paid.
Yes, she’s hardly admirable. But in contrast with a number of witnesses, she’s unlikely to have been a criminal.
I noticed megasaur suggesting December on the previous thread and I've had a sneaking suspicion the same way myself for a whle now.
To be precise, I'm thinking the 12 of December. Again.
Rationale: Sunak doesn't want to pull the trigger on ending the Tory Government any sooner than he has to, which gives him the impulse to run as long as he can.
Accepting the fact that a campaign over Christmas would indeed be desperate, and look desperate, and piss people off still further, it's about as late as he realistically can go.
He can kind of justify (or at least pretend to justify) going that late on the grounds that the last one was December 12th, after all, so it's the five year point, and we all accepted a 12th December election last time.
Yes, it'll make things harder for activists, but that's more a Labour and Lib Dem problem than a Tory one, because they don't exactly have many activists left, so fewer activists all round makes for a more air-war/Royal Mail delivery campaign, which they'll be able to handle, and partly mitigate their activist disadvantage.
Moon Rabbit was certain in was going to be May! She explained how logically it could be no other date.
Don't tell me I've spent my life savings on a pup!
She is now (or was) certain it will be in July and cannot possibly be any other month. I dare say her serial certainty will continue all bloody year.
It won’t be July 4th now, it’s already too late to call it with close down next week.
I think Sunak likes being Prime Minister, and it eats him up he’s getting chucked out. Even if experts point to the optimum day in 2024 he will lose less seats and help the party by choosing that, I still think he’ll hang on till the end based on self interest. I wouldn’t even rule out January.
"It won’t be July 4th now . . ." Are you certain?
Key to semi-successful pseudo-prognostication, is to make "Delphic" utterances.
As in, "Rishi Sunak will call the GE before the Great Pumpkin arises anew". Or "withers anon" take your pick!
I think I understand you. You mean like this. 🙂
Don’t go through that gate. I’m telling you just don’t go through that gate. Go through that gate and you are the naughtiest sheep ever.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Your Sunak defences on the basis (it would appear) of the bonds of the old school tie is one of PB's charming oddities.
Some of your points do verge on the fantastical though. Sunak worked for Goldman Sachs. I'm sure he did well. But his own investment company began when he'd already married the Infosys billions, managing his father in law's money.
There are some business leaders, mainly American ones, who are more influential in the world than a UK PM, but not that many. Do you see strong evidence that Sunak was on his way to becoming a Zuckerberg or a Buffet? It's a new one on me.
I don't know Sunak's motivation for entering politics, but I do know that several of his decisions once there happen to have benefitted the family business. Infosys are an important company, as are many of Sunak's stocks like Moderna, but not like Google - so ubiquitous as to be unavoidable.
Absolutely true, despite him being bloody useless I keep hearing myself going full Bingo Little “but we were at the same school Bertie.”
Personally am keeping ‘em crossed for July, but that’s a hope not a prediction. I don’t know when it will be, but my actual prediction is that the longer he waits the more the public will see him as either frit or a ditherer.
He wants the wedge issue of immigration to be hot so he won't go until he's 100% he can get flights off before or during the campaign. As soon as practicable after that seems likely.
Now, I'm not in the UK. But are there really millions of potential Conservative voters who are desperate to return to the fold just so long as a couple of flights have left for Rwanda?
My gut - and I realize I'm in California - is that voters have now reached that stage where they want a change. Sunak isn't right wing enough to stop defections to Reform. And he isn't centrist enough to avoid losing votes to the LibDems and Labour. He's also screwed by the fact that the Left is likely to vote highly tactically, while the Right will very definitely not.
There's no bogeyman, either. Who - other than @bigjohnowls and @isam - is going to march to the polling station and vote Conservative out of fear of Starmer? (And with Johnson gone, I think bjo will be going green.)
And I don't see an easy way out. There's no popular MP in the wings who can galvanize support and bring the disparate factions together.
It's time for the Conservative Party to accept that the electorate is going to give them a drubbing.
And, if it's any consolation, the problems with the UK economy will still be there in five years time. So you never know, the Conservatives may get another chance sooner rather than later.
I have decided to cast my first ever vote for the Conservatives in this General Election.
The UK has not had a proper Conservative government for too long, and needs one. That certainly won’t be delivered by Labour.
Lol, MoonRabbit has come out, utterly predictably as a proud PBTory. The only surprise is that it took so long.
Personally am keeping ‘em crossed for July, but that’s a hope not a prediction. I don’t know when it will be, but my actual prediction is that the longer he waits the more the public will see him as either frit or a ditherer.
He wants the wedge issue of immigration to be hot so he won't go until he's 100% he can get flights off before or during the campaign. As soon as practicable after that seems likely.
Now, I'm not in the UK. But are there really millions of potential Conservative voters who are desperate to return to the fold just so long as a couple of flights have left for Rwanda?
My gut - and I realize I'm in California - is that voters have now reached that stage where they want a change. Sunak isn't right wing enough to stop defections to Reform. And he isn't centrist enough to avoid losing votes to the LibDems and Labour. He's also screwed by the fact that the Left is likely to vote highly tactically, while the Right will very definitely not.
There's no bogeyman, either. Who - other than @bigjohnowls and @isam - is going to march to the polling station and vote Conservative out of fear of Starmer? (And with Johnson gone, I think bjo will be going green.)
And I don't see an easy way out. There's no popular MP in the wings who can galvanize support and bring the disparate factions together.
It's time for the Conservative Party to accept that the electorate is going to give them a drubbing.
And, if it's any consolation, the problems with the UK economy will still be there in five years time. So you never know, the Conservatives may get another chance sooner rather than later.
I have decided to cast my first ever vote for the Conservatives in this General Election.
The UK has not had a proper Conservative government for too long, and needs one. That certainly won’t be delivered by Labour.
Lol, MoonRabbit has come out, utterly predictably as a proud PBTory. The only surprise is that it took so long.
This news has shocked me even more than finding out Barry Manilow is gay.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Westminster is super bright but also London, cool to a point, go home down the road at weekends. Winchester is a bit let’s get 600 guys on the spectrum and see what happens and for shits and gigs let’s get someone who will be PM. We were better off producing Chancellors of the Exchequer and Archbishops etc. and general weirdos, background people. Westminster and Eton are very driven, Winchester not so.
Have you read much Agatha Christie? The philosophy of Miss Marple was that everyone fitted into a 'type', so if the brassy shop assistant in St Mary Mead had been stealing for her nail polish habit, it was likely that the brassy wife of the murdered millionaire was doing the same. The village parallel. It's an incredibly unfashionable philosophy these days, meaning in today's climate you can't really adapt Miss Marple well for TV any more. But there may be something in it.
Your old boy theory - that the culture of a public school will predict the choices made thereafter, is like that. It's quite eccentric.
Boris was elected PM despite years of gaffes, bad behaviour, slip ups and what have you. The reason he got away with them was probably correlated to his Personality Ratings, which were the highest of any PM I believe. It's probably why his highly intelligent ex wife took him back numerous times when he was caught cheating - some people just get away with things others dont. I don't like it, but that's life.
Sir Keir has among the lowest Personality ratings of any LotO, and so the public are less likely to think "Ah that's just part of Sir Kei's charm" when he messes up - just like they didn't when Ed, Gordo and TMay froze.
Sunak's ratings are bad too mind you, so that might let Sir Keir off the hook. Personally I think Sunak comes over quite well, even if he does sound just like Will from The Inbetweeners
Attlee was nowhere near as charismatic as Churchill but won. And did a very good job as PM. With a decent electoral system he’d have won in 1951, too.
Without the King going on hols, he probably could have held on for a bit longer and survived the post-Korea shocks!
That's the first time I've heard 'dying' called 'going on hols.'
Barristers having to treat Lesley Sewell of the PO as though she is a child, such is her fragility and uselessness.
Lesley Sewell former Chief Information Officer of the PO, that is.
Being a senior IT person does not prepare you for this. I am surprised, given it is televised and has been the subject of such scrutiny in recent months, more people have not reacted as she did.
Maybe but she was the head of IT. Not just some IT bod stuck in the back in a black t-shirt. You would expect her to be all over her department and what was going on. Which should in turn have provided cover and competence for the questions being asked.
Although I suppose the whole inquiry has been characterised by PO heads of this and that who knew nothing that was happening in their departments.
Giving evidence is horribly stressful. Giving evidence on live TV even more so. Competent honest people are not necessarily great witnesses or public speakers, and incompetent liars are often the best bullshitters. As recent electoral history shows.
Bullshitters work best when you encounter them in short bursts or repetitive scenarios, which is why politics is a good breeding ground.
They don't work well when pinned down and forced to confront their own words and actions, and where smooth nonsense will be exposed by rigorous questioning.
So id say they actually do badly at inquiries if, and here's the major caveat, the inquiry is itself being competently managed.
A question is how much systematic issues and errors should be placed on the head of specific individuals - and this is probably at the heart of this awful mess. Most people want to do a good job. Lots of people want to do a good job with minimal effort. If doing a good job involves fighting an internal culture in an organisation, then it is far from easy. In fact, fighting it can lose you your job and/or friends. And for some people most importantly of all, prestige.
Another issue is that what you say about bullshitters is also true of people who *tried* to do the right thing. Can you look back at a decision you made in business a decade or more ago and defend it robustly? Especially if you now know it was the wrong decision?
I wouldn't want to give evidence in this environment. I fear, like many inquiries, it's findings will not get to the important facts, and instead excoriate people. In some cases, unjustly.
It's pretty clear from the enquiry evidence that a large number of witnesses had little or no interest in "doing a good job", and the ongoing miscarriages of justice were a matter to be covered up, which they did.
It's also obvious that from today's evidence there's not much that shows Sewell being actively culpable.
Also not much evidence showing Sewell did much of anything actually useful? For the non-pittance (I presume) she got over-paid.
Yes, she’s hardly admirable. But in contrast with a number of witnesses, she’s unlikely to have been a criminal.
"Which one were you at the inquiry?" "The non-criminal one" "You're hired"
Doubtless there will be as many comments on here about Sunak's enunciation failure as there were about Starmer's stumble at PMQ's yesterday.
LOL!
Would be even funnier if there had been an enunciation failure from Sunak!
I think the point is that it's an incredibly trivial matter – he slipped up on a word. People do it all the time; you do it; I do it. We all do. I present for a living. It doesn't matter as long as you KBO.
I think the fact that Sir Keir gets flustered and mangles his words under pressure is not trivial, if you consider the public's opinion of a politician as important. The likes of Brown, Miliband and May all faltered in part due to their awkward personalities and manner of speech
Most politicians mangle their words if they are on the front lines, listen to some of early Thatcher as leader phase. She was nothing like the Prime Minister she became.
Like Thatcher, Starmer is an eminent barrister who rose to the very top job for a barrister in England & Wales.
If he was frequently getting flustered and mangled he wouldn't have won so many cases and helped so many terrorists win their cases (copyright The Sun.)
I am one of life's gobby bastards, even I occasionally mangle a word in front of an audience.
I don't particularly like Starmer but the accusation being made about Starmer's tongue slip today is the exclusive narrative of Isam. What I find remarkable is Johnson fanboi Isam never noticed any of Johnson's excruciatingly embarrassing public relations fiascos. I will start with Peppa Pig. I wonder how many more stops PBets can recall before we reach Mornington Crescent?
Why don’t you just leave me alone you fucking oddball???
Please feel free to flag me again. Apologies.
So weird
I wasn't insulting you, I was explaining why I feel Johnson is a worse public speaker than Starmer. I don't understand why you are crying hurt, unless you are actually Boris Johnson.
It's so tedious having you on my case every time I post on here you nutter
Boris was elected PM despite years of gaffes, bad behaviour, slip ups and what have you. The reason he got away with them was probably correlated to his Personality Ratings, which were the highest of any PM I believe. It's probably why his highly intelligent ex wife took him back numerous times when he was caught cheating - some people just get away with things others dont. I don't like it, but that's life.
Sir Keir has among the lowest Personality ratings of any LotO, and so the public are less likely to think "Ah that's just part of Sir Kei's charm" when he messes up - just like they didn't when Ed, Gordo and TMay froze.
Sunak's ratings are bad too mind you, so that might let Sir Keir off the hook. Personally I think Sunak comes over quite well, even if he does sound just like Will from The Inbetweeners
Starmer’s ratings are far better than Johnson’s. Johnson pissed on his own chips. Starmer is by some margin the most popular politician in the country - even if his net rating is negative.Against a competent LOTO Johnson would be leading the Tories into oblivion. Sunak will at least keep them in the top 2.
If you think the Tories are having a bad time spare a thought for the IDF. They're saying they've run out of Palestinians to shoot so they're turning on their own men.
Yes, it’s hilarious that a few young men have been killed by accident. As were British men, French men, Americans, pretty much everyone in war killed by their own side. I won’t ever know if my great uncle was shot down and killed by his own side in North Africa, frankly it doesn’t matter as it was all shit, but it’s an absolute blinder of a card to play for “my side v your side”. How Saddam’s supporters laughed at the UK/US blue on blue deaths.
This isn't a war.
It's a Genocide
“Hey guys, I’ve got a great idea, let’s go and kill loads of our neighbours in a really really horrific way. What could go wrong?”
Cue, everything going wrong.
“ oh that’s not fair”
You fucking idiot.
Proportionate response is acceptable a Genocide and bombing of civilians infrastructure is not.
I believe you are the aforesaid fucking idiot if you think 35000 civilians are Hamas
No, I’m just an admittedly horrible person who thinks that if you punch me in the face I will punch you many times, smash your wind pipe and smash your bollocks so you never reproduce. Everyone knows Israel are terrible like I am and yet they started the fight. What did they think the response would be?
No you are responding to my punching you in the face by shooting my whole extended family and carpet bombing the whole population of Chesterfield whilst turning off water and stopping food from entering Derbyshire just in case you missed anyone. You will especially target women and children because that is how bad Genocide supporters are. You caught me by surprise I expected to be punished but couldn't have forseen you were a genocidal maniac.
BTW you know you are one of the last few brainwashed don't you. Only 10% are in your category 58% and rising in mine (and that was a month ago will have risen further still now
I’m looking forward to being the 1/10 who didn’t want to support lunatics who hate Jews, gays, people who don’t follow an ideology. The funniest thing is that under the regime of those you support you would probably be a second class citizen at best or up against a wall at worst. You are supposedly a left wing, supporting everyone, minorities, the works but you support a regime that fucking hates all you stand for. Freedom for women, minorities, sexuality. You cannot see that the world you want is made worse by these fuckers and until everyone learns that they are not acting in your best interests they will be there terrifying you into electing them. As a left winger stand up and demand Hamas and all their ilk fuck off. Otherwise you are just a useful idiot.
How many of these dead women and children are "these fucker" or are all Muslims categorised by you in that manner. Islamophbia I think is the name for that.
It’s not remotely “islamaphobia” - Islam is a fine religion but as flawed as Christianity or any other religion. Hamas isn’t about Islam in its Koranic sense - it’s about control and a bunch of small dicked men who cannot handle women being free, men loving men, and power and money. Get me a secular gov in Gaza and I will die in a ditch against Israel suppressing it but you absolutely know that Hamas hate everything you stand for.
Seriously, imagine if Hamas take over Sheffield and your wife, daughter, have to obey bullshit ancient religious nonsense. Imagine you cannot go down the pub if you feel like it. You and I are weirdly probably aligned on freedoms and yet you support people who want to smash others freedoms.
And yet, if I lived in Sheffield under such conditions and the rest of Yorkshire were to invade, drive me out of my home, flatten most of the buildings in the city, and kill thousands in the process... I imagine that I might be tempted to swallow my hatred for the bigoted city council for a while and stand with them against the invaders.
At that point, it becomes a matter of simple patriotism doesn't it? I'd like to think that it wouldn't affect me, but realistically it probably would.
And that's the risk for Israel - even if they manage to eradicate the Hamas organisation entirely, what use is it if they've turned everyone else in Gaza against them?
If you lived in Sheffield in such conditions you would look at the people you hate in Leeds, with jobs, kebabs on a Friday night, parties, laughter, happiness, normal lives and say “ I want that, I really don’t want the party scene closed down, I want to have girls, drink, fun, freedom, and I’m feeling a bit gay thIs weekend and I want to enjoy that and not be hanged from a crane if possible.” And then someone turns up at your home and says, you cannot enjoy that life, you just pick up rocks and throw them at Israeli soldiers.
Just flood Gaza with booze, drugs, prostitutes. Make them know that this life is more fun that a mythical land of virgins.
Beirut is a lot more fun than Haifa! And the people are cleverer funnier and tri lingual. How much fun you have has more to do with money than any morality. Not being allowed to share a hotel room with someone who doesn't share your surname just makes them more inventive.
Boris was elected PM despite years of gaffes, bad behaviour, slip ups and what have you. The reason he got away with them was probably correlated to his Personality Ratings, which were the highest of any PM I believe. It's probably why his highly intelligent ex wife took him back numerous times when he was caught cheating - some people just get away with things others dont. I don't like it, but that's life.
Sir Keir has among the lowest Personality ratings of any LotO, and so the public are less likely to think "Ah that's just part of Sir Kei's charm" when he messes up - just like they didn't when Ed, Gordo and TMay froze.
Sunak's ratings are bad too mind you, so that might let Sir Keir off the hook. Personally I think Sunak comes over quite well, even if he does sound just like Will from The Inbetweeners
Starmer’s ratings are far better than Johnson’s. Johnson pissed on his own chips. Starmer is by some margin the most popular politician in the country - even if his net rating is negative.Against a competent LOTO Johnson would be leading the Tories into oblivion. Sunak will at least keep them in the top 2.
Sunak, on top of his own issues aggravating things, is dealing with the Boris-Truss fallout, and substantial internal rumblings or apathy from Boris fans who despise him and those who ousted Boris. Had Boris clung on he would have faced substantial disquiet and rebellion due to the problems he was causing, but would at least have his own core of support which Sunak is unable to rely on.
So I can believe the Tories might have been doing a bit better if Boris was still there purely on the basis the party would not have cut inside apart in quite so dramatic fashion, but I don't think they'd be doing meaningfully better.
Boris was elected PM despite years of gaffes, bad behaviour, slip ups and what have you. The reason he got away with them was probably correlated to his Personality Ratings, which were the highest of any PM I believe. It's probably why his highly intelligent ex wife took him back numerous times when he was caught cheating - some people just get away with things others dont. I don't like it, but that's life.
Sir Keir has among the lowest Personality ratings of any LotO, and so the public are less likely to think "Ah that's just part of Sir Kei's charm" when he messes up - just like they didn't when Ed, Gordo and TMay froze.
Sunak's ratings are bad too mind you, so that might let Sir Keir off the hook. Personally I think Sunak comes over quite well, even if he does sound just like Will from The Inbetweeners
Attlee was nowhere near as charismatic as Churchill but won. And did a very good job as PM. With a decent electoral system he’d have won in 1951, too.
Maybe, maybe not. If we had had PR in 1951 the Liberals would have held the balance of power and may well have backed Churchill, indeed Churchill offered Clement Davies their leader the post of Education Secretary but he turned it down at that time to keep the Liberals distinct as the Conservatives has a majority anyway
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Boris was elected PM despite years of gaffes, bad behaviour, slip ups and what have you. The reason he got away with them was probably correlated to his Personality Ratings, which were the highest of any PM I believe. It's probably why his highly intelligent ex wife took him back numerous times when he was caught cheating - some people just get away with things others dont. I don't like it, but that's life.
Sir Keir has among the lowest Personality ratings of any LotO, and so the public are less likely to think "Ah that's just part of Sir Kei's charm" when he messes up - just like they didn't when Ed, Gordo and TMay froze.
Sunak's ratings are bad too mind you, so that might let Sir Keir off the hook. Personally I think Sunak comes over quite well, even if he does sound just like Will from The Inbetweeners
Attlee was nowhere near as charismatic as Churchill but won. And did a very good job as PM. With a decent electoral system he’d have won in 1951, too.
Without the King going on hols, he probably could have held on for a bit longer and survived the post-Korea shocks!
That's the first time I've heard 'dying' called 'going on hols.'
I though he was due to go on a Commonwealth tour in 1952, hence wanting to have an election before he left?
If he genuinely thought he was likely to die before that, he certainly wasn't admitting it publicly at the time the election was called...
We’re obviously not going to have an East Anglian derby next season. Pity; sends BBC East TV into raptures.
As an Ipswich fan I’m looking forward to giving Norwich fans the kind of crap they’ve been giving us for years.
All three that came up lat time are returning to the depths of the Championship. Its the most likely fate of those promoted.
Generally, I think the teams coming up this season are a stronger proposition than last. I mean, it's unlikely they'll be challenging for European places, but there are other Premiership teams that lack deep squads or have financial woes.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
You know, thinking about maths, I think it would do Sunak an awful lot of good to appear on Countdown doing the maths bit. It's chummy and relatable yet showing he's the whizzkid that we need.
Boris was elected PM despite years of gaffes, bad behaviour, slip ups and what have you. The reason he got away with them was probably correlated to his Personality Ratings, which were the highest of any PM I believe. It's probably why his highly intelligent ex wife took him back numerous times when he was caught cheating - some people just get away with things others dont. I don't like it, but that's life.
Sir Keir has among the lowest Personality ratings of any LotO, and so the public are less likely to think "Ah that's just part of Sir Kei's charm" when he messes up - just like they didn't when Ed, Gordo and TMay froze.
Sunak's ratings are bad too mind you, so that might let Sir Keir off the hook. Personally I think Sunak comes over quite well, even if he does sound just like Will from The Inbetweeners
Starmer’s ratings are far better than Johnson’s. Johnson pissed on his own chips. Starmer is by some margin the most popular politician in the country - even if his net rating is negative.Against a competent LOTO Johnson would be leading the Tories into oblivion. Sunak will at least keep them in the top 2.
IPSOS Personality ratings, not leader ratings
I don’t think Johnson is included in leader ratings by many pollsters anymore. I’m happy to be corrected. If he were he would be below Davey. No PM has fucked his own brand as hard since Blair did. His star is long dimmed.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
Boris was elected PM despite years of gaffes, bad behaviour, slip ups and what have you. The reason he got away with them was probably correlated to his Personality Ratings, which were the highest of any PM I believe. It's probably why his highly intelligent ex wife took him back numerous times when he was caught cheating - some people just get away with things others dont. I don't like it, but that's life.
Sir Keir has among the lowest Personality ratings of any LotO, and so the public are less likely to think "Ah that's just part of Sir Kei's charm" when he messes up - just like they didn't when Ed, Gordo and TMay froze.
Sunak's ratings are bad too mind you, so that might let Sir Keir off the hook. Personally I think Sunak comes over quite well, even if he does sound just like Will from The Inbetweeners
Attlee was nowhere near as charismatic as Churchill but won. And did a very good job as PM. With a decent electoral system he’d have won in 1951, too.
Maybe, maybe not. If we had had PR in 1951 the Liberals would have held the balance of power and may well have backed Churchill, indeed Churchill offered Clement Davies their leader the post of Education Secretary but he turned it down at that time to keep the Liberals distinct as the Conservatives has a majority anyway
The ‘Conservative’ Party in Parliament at the time was a mix of Conservatives, National Liberals and Ulster Unionists. One or two of the Liberal seats were the result of local deals between them and the Conservatives.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Interesting - perhaps I was reading more into the city vs town aspect!
I do think there's something to Luckyguy's Miss Marple theory. If told that someone went to a fancy school in NI, I can probably guess which one it is with maybe about an 80% certainty, so I'm entirely happy to believe that the effect is amplified when it comes to the top English public schools...
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
Boris was elected PM despite years of gaffes, bad behaviour, slip ups and what have you. The reason he got away with them was probably correlated to his Personality Ratings, which were the highest of any PM I believe. It's probably why his highly intelligent ex wife took him back numerous times when he was caught cheating - some people just get away with things others dont. I don't like it, but that's life.
Sir Keir has among the lowest Personality ratings of any LotO, and so the public are less likely to think "Ah that's just part of Sir Kei's charm" when he messes up - just like they didn't when Ed, Gordo and TMay froze.
Sunak's ratings are bad too mind you, so that might let Sir Keir off the hook. Personally I think Sunak comes over quite well, even if he does sound just like Will from The Inbetweeners
Starmer’s ratings are far better than Johnson’s. Johnson pissed on his own chips. Starmer is by some margin the most popular politician in the country - even if his net rating is negative.Against a competent LOTO Johnson would be leading the Tories into oblivion. Sunak will at least keep them in the top 2.
IPSOS Personality ratings, not leader ratings
I don’t think Johnson is included in leader ratings by many pollsters anymore. I’m happy to be corrected. If he were he would be below Davey. No PM has fucked his own brand as hard since Blair did. His star is long dimmed.
Blair’s legacy will always be tarnished beyond measure by Iraq. Maybe one day we’ll know why he went with it.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
Don’t Toye with him. (Didn’t realise you were back but happy you are).
Personally am keeping ‘em crossed for July, but that’s a hope not a prediction. I don’t know when it will be, but my actual prediction is that the longer he waits the more the public will see him as either frit or a ditherer.
He wants the wedge issue of immigration to be hot so he won't go until he's 100% he can get flights off before or during the campaign. As soon as practicable after that seems likely.
Now, I'm not in the UK. But are there really millions of potential Conservative voters who are desperate to return to the fold just so long as a couple of flights have left for Rwanda?
My gut - and I realize I'm in California - is that voters have now reached that stage where they want a change. Sunak isn't right wing enough to stop defections to Reform. And he isn't centrist enough to avoid losing votes to the LibDems and Labour. He's also screwed by the fact that the Left is likely to vote highly tactically, while the Right will very definitely not.
There's no bogeyman, either. Who - other than @bigjohnowls and @isam - is going to march to the polling station and vote Conservative out of fear of Starmer? (And with Johnson gone, I think bjo will be going green.)
And I don't see an easy way out. There's no popular MP in the wings who can galvanize support and bring the disparate factions together.
It's time for the Conservative Party to accept that the electorate is going to give them a drubbing.
And, if it's any consolation, the problems with the UK economy will still be there in five years time. So you never know, the Conservatives may get another chance sooner rather than later.
I have decided to cast my first ever vote for the Conservatives in this General Election.
The UK has not had a proper Conservative government for too long, and needs one. That certainly won’t be delivered by Labour.
Lol, MoonRabbit has come out, utterly predictably as a proud PBTory. The only surprise is that it took so long.
This news has shocked me even more than finding out Barry Manilow is gay.
I’m not a Tory shrill, I never have been a proud PB Tory on PB. I’m standing up for the Conservatism the country needs. It hasn’t been getting it is the point.
Democracy in UK has become an oligarchy, the liberal left in control of culture and the liberal right in control of the economy. This is New Labour, this is Cameroonism, this is everything post Brexit but with tingly bells on its toes ringing in our years. Both Labour and the Conservatives now share a liberal contractual view of society, in place of mutual loyalties binding human beings into families, groups and nations, they each now agree on the individual and the state, the individual and the market. Neither Labour or Conservatives speak for the families and neighbourhoods we are born into, nor about our cultural and religious inheritances - in fact when they do the populist libertarians press and media go bananas, as it’s seen as old fashioned. Both main parties now overlook the most basic bonds that hold individuals together in a society, and it’s really bad for children, so it’s time to stand up for Conservatism and bring it back, not attend its wake.
I’m right on this. It’s the electorate who will get it wrong when the election comes.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
Personally am keeping ‘em crossed for July, but that’s a hope not a prediction. I don’t know when it will be, but my actual prediction is that the longer he waits the more the public will see him as either frit or a ditherer.
He wants the wedge issue of immigration to be hot so he won't go until he's 100% he can get flights off before or during the campaign. As soon as practicable after that seems likely.
Now, I'm not in the UK. But are there really millions of potential Conservative voters who are desperate to return to the fold just so long as a couple of flights have left for Rwanda?
My gut - and I realize I'm in California - is that voters have now reached that stage where they want a change. Sunak isn't right wing enough to stop defections to Reform. And he isn't centrist enough to avoid losing votes to the LibDems and Labour. He's also screwed by the fact that the Left is likely to vote highly tactically, while the Right will very definitely not.
There's no bogeyman, either. Who - other than @bigjohnowls and @isam - is going to march to the polling station and vote Conservative out of fear of Starmer? (And with Johnson gone, I think bjo will be going green.)
And I don't see an easy way out. There's no popular MP in the wings who can galvanize support and bring the disparate factions together.
It's time for the Conservative Party to accept that the electorate is going to give them a drubbing.
And, if it's any consolation, the problems with the UK economy will still be there in five years time. So you never know, the Conservatives may get another chance sooner rather than later.
I have decided to cast my first ever vote for the Conservatives in this General Election.
The UK has not had a proper Conservative government for too long, and needs one. That certainly won’t be delivered by Labour.
Lol, MoonRabbit has come out, utterly predictably as a proud PBTory. The only surprise is that it took so long.
'When a finger points to the moon only the foolish look at the finger'
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
My personal view, and it is just my view, is that Westminster is significantly nerdier than Winchester (or indeed any of the major English public boarding schools).
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with some girls schools and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
Two things: (1) notice how many of the top schools are girls schools; (2) where the heck is Manchester Grammar School? When I was at Cambridge, the place was full of MGS kids.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
My personal view, and it is just my view, is that Westminster is significantly nerdier than Winchester (or indeed any of the major English public boarding schools).
It isn't certainly not in terms of Maths and Science
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
Didn’t he go to a grammar school?
No, Tonbridge (my sister went to a grammar in Tunbridge Wells though)
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
These league tables are completely gamed: "Little Johnny isn't going to get an A or A*, so we're not going to enter him into the exams under the school's umbrella. But here's the weblink so you can register him yourself, so he still gets his 'C'"
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
My personal view, and it is just my view, is that Westminster is significantly nerdier than Winchester (or indeed any of the major English public boarding schools).
It isn't certainly not in terms of Maths and Science
The top A Level maths set at Westminster will all be going to Cambridge. How much nerdier would you like them to be?
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
St Paul's - like Westminster - was a school designed for the lower ranks. It was where wealthy merchants sent their kids.
But I find it strange that anyone would really suggest the two of them do not draw almost entirely from the same pool of applicants these days.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
And of course you can still be PM, King or Archbishop of Canterbury, or MD of Boots or win the odd Oscar
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
These league tables are completely gamed: "Little Johnny isn't going to get an A or A*, so we're not going to enter him into the exams under the school's umbrella. But here's the weblink so you can register him yourself, so he still gets his 'C'"
We had some students that did Maths GCSE a year early (I was in the set just below). I think I remember my teachers mentioning that because they didn't do any other GCSEs in the year it negatively impacted the league tables because they only had 1 GCSE grade A*-C in that year !
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
My personal view, and it is just my view, is that Westminster is significantly nerdier than Winchester (or indeed any of the major English public boarding schools).
It isn't certainly not in terms of Maths and Science
And yet we looked down on those number geeks and laughed at them in Ancient Greek because they didn’t understand. Megasaur used to send the chaps on a Pempe ton moron proteron.
Personally am keeping ‘em crossed for July, but that’s a hope not a prediction. I don’t know when it will be, but my actual prediction is that the longer he waits the more the public will see him as either frit or a ditherer.
He wants the wedge issue of immigration to be hot so he won't go until he's 100% he can get flights off before or during the campaign. As soon as practicable after that seems likely.
Now, I'm not in the UK. But are there really millions of potential Conservative voters who are desperate to return to the fold just so long as a couple of flights have left for Rwanda?
My gut - and I realize I'm in California - is that voters have now reached that stage where they want a change. Sunak isn't right wing enough to stop defections to Reform. And he isn't centrist enough to avoid losing votes to the LibDems and Labour. He's also screwed by the fact that the Left is likely to vote highly tactically, while the Right will very definitely not.
There's no bogeyman, either. Who - other than @bigjohnowls and @isam - is going to march to the polling station and vote Conservative out of fear of Starmer? (And with Johnson gone, I think bjo will be going green.)
And I don't see an easy way out. There's no popular MP in the wings who can galvanize support and bring the disparate factions together.
It's time for the Conservative Party to accept that the electorate is going to give them a drubbing.
And, if it's any consolation, the problems with the UK economy will still be there in five years time. So you never know, the Conservatives may get another chance sooner rather than later.
I have decided to cast my first ever vote for the Conservatives in this General Election.
The UK has not had a proper Conservative government for too long, and needs one. That certainly won’t be delivered by Labour.
Lol, MoonRabbit has come out, utterly predictably as a proud PBTory. The only surprise is that it took so long.
'When a finger points to the moon only the foolish look at the finger'
True, a finger is not a moon. But it is a way to find the moon.
Havn’t you felt any disenchantment with the progressive politics of the last three decades? Things do not always get better. Human life is dependent upon forces greater than our own selves. There will never be an end to human pain and suffering, but it can be made less. Politics is about hope and great achievements, but it is also about failure and tragedy.
So what I propose is needed is not more of the same as the last three decades, as just about everyone on PB and in UK is blindly walking into. But what matters most to people is their family, relationships, friendships, work as a source of creative value, a cultural inheritance that gives meaning to life, and for some faith. What holds a society together is reciprocity - do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, the same thing that made ancient tribes work. Go back to remembering about protecting nature and human value from the commodification of capitalism and the transactional culture of the market. The liberalism of the last thirty years has not been progressive, it’s taken us back to the cave man age of cannibalism. To turn the dial back in the right direction needs Conservative hands on the lever.
Labour might win this one, but the future is Conservatism, lots of it.
Personally am keeping ‘em crossed for July, but that’s a hope not a prediction. I don’t know when it will be, but my actual prediction is that the longer he waits the more the public will see him as either frit or a ditherer.
He wants the wedge issue of immigration to be hot so he won't go until he's 100% he can get flights off before or during the campaign. As soon as practicable after that seems likely.
Now, I'm not in the UK. But are there really millions of potential Conservative voters who are desperate to return to the fold just so long as a couple of flights have left for Rwanda?
My gut - and I realize I'm in California - is that voters have now reached that stage where they want a change. Sunak isn't right wing enough to stop defections to Reform. And he isn't centrist enough to avoid losing votes to the LibDems and Labour. He's also screwed by the fact that the Left is likely to vote highly tactically, while the Right will very definitely not.
There's no bogeyman, either. Who - other than @bigjohnowls and @isam - is going to march to the polling station and vote Conservative out of fear of Starmer? (And with Johnson gone, I think bjo will be going green.)
And I don't see an easy way out. There's no popular MP in the wings who can galvanize support and bring the disparate factions together.
It's time for the Conservative Party to accept that the electorate is going to give them a drubbing.
And, if it's any consolation, the problems with the UK economy will still be there in five years time. So you never know, the Conservatives may get another chance sooner rather than later.
I have decided to cast my first ever vote for the Conservatives in this General Election.
The UK has not had a proper Conservative government for too long, and needs one. That certainly won’t be delivered by Labour.
And you think it will by reelecting the current shower ?
Comments
Just flood Gaza with booze, drugs, prostitutes. Make them know that this life is more fun that a mythical land of virgins.
@Samfr
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49m
I've never seen a politician with less ability to project empathy than Sunak. It's mesmeric. Even May was better.
https://twitter.com/Samfr
But being the youngest UK PM in two centuries ensures being remembered, even if in coming in when he did he was dealt a bad hand and then played it even more poorly to make things even worse.
https://x.com/RobinFlavell/status/1791190749448446401
I think he came across quite well on the clips I’ve seen of Loose Women today. Much better than Theresa May used to.
Once he loses, and once he's safely ensconced on the board of a few Californian startups that are trying to eat London's fintech lunch, I hope that he'll finally be able to relax a bit and work out where he went wrong. I think he's smart enough to do that, and hope that he'll be able to accept that he wasn't cut out for politics and that his talents are better used elsewhere.
And I'm sure that he'll be much, much happier as a result.
https://x.com/soniasodha/status/1791186271454589224
Here too.....
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/an-optimists-guide-to-dying/
Sorry but Simon’s articles on his upcoming death, google them, are fantastic.
His entire attitude appears to be "why aren't you more impressed by my brilliance?"
He doesn't understand ordinary life, so will never understand why ordinary people don't worship him.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
I still think we slide past that and head towards 12th December.
Sir Keir has among the lowest Personality ratings of any LotO, and so the public are less likely to think "Ah that's just part of Sir Kei's charm" when he messes up - just like they didn't when Ed, Gordo and TMay froze.
Sunak's ratings are bad too mind you, so that might let Sir Keir off the hook. Personally I think Sunak comes over quite well, even if he does sound just like Will from The Inbetweeners
Pity; sends BBC East TV into raptures.
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
From a perspective on how to justify a date, December has the advantage of having a full five year parliament as the pretext, and it's not as though turnout was appreciably worse, in fact it was still higher than any GE since 1997, other than 2017. Add in the US Presidential election and saying there should be some gap from that and you are looking at late November anyway, in which case might as well go the full five.
(I'm sure there will be many legal challenges still going on in December whoever wins the US election, and State house shenanigans and possibly some violence if Trump loses, but from the UK perspective it will be 'done')
And did a very good job as PM. With a decent electoral system he’d have won in 1951, too.
Some of your points do verge on the fantastical though. Sunak worked for Goldman Sachs. I'm sure he did well. But his own investment company began when he'd already married the Infosys billions, managing his father in law's money.
There are some business leaders, mainly American ones, who are more influential in the world than a UK PM, but not that many. Do you see strong evidence that Sunak was on his way to becoming a Zuckerberg or a Buffet? It's a new one on me.
I don't know Sunak's motivation for entering politics, but I do know that several of his decisions once there happen to have benefitted the family business. Infosys are an important company, as are many of Sunak's stocks like Moderna, but not like Google - so ubiquitous as to be unavoidable.
Whatever economic policy Boris pursued, it certainly wasn’t Conservative - high debt, high spend, high wage, high inflation, high borrowing. Our country has gone too libertarian, even the Conservative Party, and that is bad for everyone, especially children today. It’s to properly protect children we need more Conservatism. Since the eighties and nineties, public policy has not been used enough to strengthen families, communities, and the nation: the associations that make individuals happy, safe and free. Given the unique threats of our age we need more Conservatism not less. Ironically, just as the country needs more Conservatism, it’s going to vote Labour, and continuation of the direction of last 27 years currently wrong, only turned up to maximum wrongness.
Labour economic policy is the same as Truss, they share the same unstable chaotic economy from a dash for growth growth growth.
I’m right on this. It’s the electorate who will get it wrong when the election comes.
It’s all a bit braindead.
But in contrast with a number of witnesses, she’s unlikely to have been a criminal.
Don’t go through that gate. I’m telling you just don’t go through that gate. Go through that gate and you are the naughtiest sheep ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGBrEKNO1BI
Will Biden's Chinese EV tariffs work?
Will tariffs give the US auto industry time to catch up to Chinese EVs? Or will the US become the Galapagos of the car world?
https://www.high-capacity.com/p/will-bidens-chinese-ev-tariffs-work
Your old boy theory - that the culture of a public school will predict the choices made thereafter, is like that. It's quite eccentric.
"The non-criminal one"
"You're hired"
'Cheer up Norwich fans, it's not an embarrassing result when you can count all the goals your opponents scored on the fingers of one hand.'
So I can believe the Tories might have been doing a bit better if Boris was still there purely on the basis the party would not have cut inside apart in quite so dramatic fashion, but I don't think they'd be doing meaningfully better.
25 years ago, for sure. Even 5 years ago. Now... Not so sure? Think a months supply of little blue pills will be needed...
If he genuinely thought he was likely to die before that, he certainly wasn't admitting it publicly at the time the election was called...
Hope they've had a lovely day.
I do think there's something to Luckyguy's Miss Marple theory. If told that someone went to a fancy school in NI, I can probably guess which one it is with maybe about an 80% certainty, so I'm entirely happy to believe that the effect is amplified when it comes to the top English public schools...
Democracy in UK has become an oligarchy, the liberal left in control of culture and the liberal right in control of the economy. This is New Labour, this is Cameroonism, this is everything post Brexit but with tingly bells on its toes ringing in our years. Both Labour and the Conservatives now share a liberal contractual view of society, in place of mutual loyalties binding human beings into families, groups and nations, they each now agree on the individual and the state, the individual and the market. Neither Labour or Conservatives speak for the families and neighbourhoods we are born into, nor about our cultural and religious inheritances - in fact when they do the populist libertarians press and media go bananas, as it’s seen as old fashioned. Both main parties now overlook the most basic bonds that hold individuals together in a society, and it’s really bad for children, so it’s time to stand up for Conservatism and bring it back, not attend its wake.
I’m right on this. It’s the electorate who will get it wrong when the election comes.
https://www.best-schools.co.uk/uk-school-league-tables/list-of-league-tables/top-100-schools-by-gcse
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
But I find it strange that anyone would really suggest the two of them do not draw almost entirely from the same pool of applicants these days.
Havn’t you felt any disenchantment with the progressive politics of the last three decades? Things do not always get better. Human life is dependent upon forces greater than our own selves. There will never be an end to human pain and suffering, but it can be made less. Politics is about hope and great achievements, but it is also about failure and tragedy.
So what I propose is needed is not more of the same as the last three decades, as just about everyone on PB and in UK is blindly walking into. But what matters most to people is their family, relationships, friendships, work as a source of creative value, a cultural inheritance that gives meaning to life, and for some faith. What holds a society together is reciprocity - do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, the same thing that made ancient tribes work. Go back to remembering about protecting nature and human value from the commodification of capitalism and the transactional culture of the market. The liberalism of the last thirty years has not been progressive, it’s taken us back to the cave man age of cannibalism. To turn the dial back in the right direction needs Conservative hands on the lever.
Labour might win this one, but the future is Conservatism, lots of it.
You must be smoking some of your sheep droppings.
Use your cross wisely. Crucify a politician.
Middle England is stirring.