The locals could be brutal - voters want something different.
And perhaps the only way to cure them of that is if they get it.
In the next GE it won't be the performance of a few local councils which matter.
No, 'get it' nationally, I meant. A Reform government. That'll wise people up. Bit like Trump2 although not as damaging because I don't think Farage is monster material.
“We are all afraid,” Murkowski said, taking a long pause. “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.” https://x.com/sahilkapur/status/1912853012193624250
What at this point is the balance between justified fear, and cowardice ?
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
A man so daft that he plotted himself out of a leadership race.
That was his backers tbf. They tried to engineer his preferred opponent for the run off and succeeded in engineering the man himself out of the run off. You couldn't make it up. Literally couldn't make it up. If you submitted that in a script for a political drama you'd get it returned with a cover note saying "rejected on grounds of credulity".
While I share your general amusement, the pedant in me bridles at the phrase 'couldn't make it up', especially when paired with the word 'literally' - I'm fairly sure you could make it up. People make stuff up all the time, much of it less believable than that. Look at Star Wars, for example.
No but that's literally what I'm saying. You *could* make it up, yes, but not if you wanted it accepted as a serious proposition by the commissioning editor. So to all intents and purposes you couldn't.
Oh come on! This is exactly the sort of thing which happened in The Thick of It.
I'm not disputing how ridiculous the situation was. I'm pedantically disputing the use of the phrase 'you couldn't make it up'. People make up implausible stuff all the time, and much of it gets commissioned for telly. (Look at Death in Paradise. 50% of the time that finishes and you look at the wife and both shake your heads and say 'no...'. Still watch the next one though. I like light-hearted crime drama where the main puzzle is 'how'. And I have some sympathy for the writers still trying to come up with plots 100-odd episodes in).
'You couldn't make it up' is just a phrase I can rarely let go without a quibble. (See also describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island', the use of the word 'stunning' to mean 'nice', and the misuse of the word 'literally'.)
I don't trying to fall out about it. This is just pb pedantry.
But TTOI was a comedy. Of course you could make it up as a joke. The Cleverly thing works fine as deliberate farce or even as a piece of whimsy. What I'm saying is you couldn't make it up and be taken seriously. That's what the phrase means in my book.
All right, House of Cards? To Play the King? Both of those contained plots more far fetched.
Your problem with the Clevershambles is that it is a) improbable and b) funny. Drama has a problem with things that are funny, preferring tense looks all the time. And that is why drama is almost never fulfilling - because the real world isn't like that. Funny things happen all the time. Just because something's funny doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
We're at cross purposes. When I say "serious drama" I mean the likes of Kavanaugh QC or Smiley's People. Straightforward story telling with no attempt to be kooky or satirical. That genre. There's no place there for the sort of nonsense that happened with James Cleverly (or tbf his backers). If you tried to put something like that in you'd be told to go and have a rethink. Meaning you'd have failed to make it up.
The fault here is with most drama's utter aversion to anything amusing happening.
But House of Cards was a proper drama. And it's a plausible plotline for one of that series. After all, the Chief Whip ended up as PM.
Where we appear to be is that you could make it up, but if you did, and presented it to the humourless commissioners of TV drama, they wouldn't like it as a plotline because in their world nothing is allowed to be in the least bit amusing.
I'm going to go and make an omelette now. Mushroom, onion, pancetta, potato and cheese. Maybe a bit of chorizo if there's any in the fridge.
Very nice.
There is humour in Kavanagh and Smiley's People. It's in the dialogue. What there isn't is farcical events.
Though Badenoch has a higher favourable and net rating than Reeves.
Reeves' tax rises for business owners and farmers and winter fuel allowance cuts for pensioners have dug in a negative image of her, much like VAT on fuel changes did for Lamont
Go on Kemi! Under 20%! You can do it! One more heave!
FON consistently puts Reform higher than other polls and just short of a majority, if Kemi's Tories went any lower then Farage would almost certainly be heading for a majority of MPs with them
Sir Keir just needs to keep reforming and slowly showing progress.
Writing him off is very silly but it won’t stop the same few from commenting that Reform are going to win a landslide. Of course they also said Johnson would be PM for a decade so their history is average shall we say.
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
Hopefully Tory MPs won’t mess around with the voting this time as that cost Cleverly last year . I just don’t see how Badenoch lasts until the next election .
She lasts until the GE as otherwise Jenrick almost certainly replaces her as leader. He has enough Tory MPs to get to the runoff and would easily now win a members vote against Stride or Cleverly, he has more MPs than Davis did in 2003 for instance who did not have enough to stop Howard replacing IDS by coronation.
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
The locals could be brutal - voters want something different.
And perhaps the only way to cure them of that is if they get it.
In the next GE it won't be the performance of a few local councils which matter.
No, 'get it' nationally, I meant. A Reform government. That'll wise people up. Bit like Trump2 although not as damaging because I don't think Farage is monster material.
You may be overestimating how much of a downgrade is possible.
The locals could be brutal - voters want something different.
And perhaps the only way to cure them of that is if they get it.
Yeah, so of that fails then where do they go ?
Back to,the other parties who have failed repeatedly ? Why. Pointless to do that.
The "next big thing" will be what we've seen in Germany and Greece with BSW and Course of Freedom respectively. It will be termed by the indolent on here as a "left wing version of Reform" but there will be similarities. It will be nationalist, anti-immigrant and certainly anti-any return to the EU. It will be socially conservative but strongly anti-austerity arguing fort much higher taxes for the wealthy and more public spending in poorer areas an on education and health.
And as a centrist dad, the more fragments the populists split into, the better under FPTP.
And it's possible that Reform will cohere better for longer than previous Farage vehicles, but it would require things to be different this time.
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
It is Reform they need to squeeze and Jenrick is best for that, Labour are already down to about 25% and even Kemi has picked up some 2024 Labour voters just leaked more to Reform
Chat GPT is thinking about a blister pack Lee Anderson.
Hmmm. I gave it Roderick Spode & Eulalie, plus 'symbols associated with Lee Anderson'.
It missed the shorts.
Love the Barnsley chop.
On which note, lamb is even more expensive in France than it is in Britain.
The economics of a sheep are not great. Expensive for the consumer and unprofitable for the farmer. The wool is largely worthless. You sell one ewe for meat and you get 2 shoulders (farm shop price maybe 30-40 each), 2 legs cut off before the shank (60-70 each), 2 rear shanks (7-8 each?), neck for about 20, best end / rack another 30-40, rump 20, breast 15, then a few bits to sell for merguez and offal. There’s not the charcuterie options with lamb that there are with pork.
That’s around £350 for a whole animal, yet all those cuts sound relatively expensive don’t they?
Contrast with a cow or pig, both of which have much greater weight of flesh, are less suicidal when in the fields, and are more nose to tail in usage.
Go on Kemi! Under 20%! You can do it! One more heave!
Some stats and ratios:
LLG 46, RefCon 48: quite similar to other polls
LabCon 42, SPLORG 58: way higher SPLORG than other pollsters
Con:Ref 0.71. Quite close to the 0.67 crossover
The collapse of the combined Lab/Con score is remarkable at 42. In the GE of 2017 it was 82, with both over 40. In GE 2024 it was 57. This combined with there being no sense of revival in either camp is a huge slow burning story.
And at this very moment, with USA politics providing the biggest story and challenge since WWII, big western European political parties should never be out of sight and mind, fizzing with top comment, alive with ideas and reshaping perspectives on both past and future, full of great thoughts with embyonic statesmen trying to outsmart and replace the established set, great speeches outlining future directions, the public hanging on every word from parliament.
Instead we have the hot news being a legal spat between two schools of feminist thought about toilets and the felling of an oak tree. Strange times.
“We are all afraid,” Murkowski said, taking a long pause. “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.” https://x.com/sahilkapur/status/1912853012193624250
What at this point is the balance between justified fear, and cowardice ?
It's cowardice which enabled what has happened.
What's he saying?
I think we've just had a vindication of those who were arguing for having pronouns in emails - Murkowski is a she.
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
A man so daft that he plotted himself out of a leadership race.
That was his backers tbf. They tried to engineer his preferred opponent for the run off and succeeded in engineering the man himself out of the run off. You couldn't make it up. Literally couldn't make it up. If you submitted that in a script for a political drama you'd get it returned with a cover note saying "rejected on grounds of credulity".
While I share your general amusement, the pedant in me bridles at the phrase 'couldn't make it up', especially when paired with the word 'literally' - I'm fairly sure you could make it up. People make stuff up all the time, much of it less believable than that. Look at Star Wars, for example.
No but that's literally what I'm saying. You *could* make it up, yes, but not if you wanted it accepted as a serious proposition by the commissioning editor. So to all intents and purposes you couldn't.
Oh come on! This is exactly the sort of thing which happened in The Thick of It.
I'm not disputing how ridiculous the situation was. I'm pedantically disputing the use of the phrase 'you couldn't make it up'. People make up implausible stuff all the time, and much of it gets commissioned for telly. (Look at Death in Paradise. 50% of the time that finishes and you look at the wife and both shake your heads and say 'no...'. Still watch the next one though. I like light-hearted crime drama where the main puzzle is 'how'. And I have some sympathy for the writers still trying to come up with plots 100-odd episodes in).
'You couldn't make it up' is just a phrase I can rarely let go without a quibble. (See also describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island', the use of the word 'stunning' to mean 'nice', and the misuse of the word 'literally'.)
I don't trying to fall out about it. This is just pb pedantry.
But TTOI was a comedy. Of course you could make it up as a joke. The Cleverly thing works fine as deliberate farce or even as a piece of whimsy. What I'm saying is you couldn't make it up and be taken seriously. That's what the phrase means in my book.
All right, House of Cards? To Play the King? Both of those contained plots more far fetched.
Your problem with the Clevershambles is that it is a) improbable and b) funny. Drama has a problem with things that are funny, preferring tense looks all the time. And that is why drama is almost never fulfilling - because the real world isn't like that. Funny things happen all the time. Just because something's funny doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
We're at cross purposes. When I say "serious drama" I mean the likes of Kavanaugh QC or Smiley's People. Straightforward story telling with no attempt to be kooky or satirical. That genre. There's no place there for the sort of nonsense that happened with James Cleverly (or tbf his backers). If you tried to put something like that in you'd be told to go and have a rethink. Meaning you'd have failed to make it up.
The fault here is with most drama's utter aversion to anything amusing happening.
But House of Cards was a proper drama. And it's a plausible plotline for one of that series. After all, the Chief Whip ended up as PM.
Where we appear to be is that you could make it up, but if you did, and presented it to the humourless commissioners of TV drama, they wouldn't like it as a plotline because in their world nothing is allowed to be in the least bit amusing.
I'm going to go and make an omelette now. Mushroom, onion, pancetta, potato and cheese. Maybe a bit of chorizo if there's any in the fridge.
Very nice.
There is humour in Kavanagh and Smiley's People. It's in the dialogue. What there isn't is farcical events.
The bit about the Degas is glorious in Smiley's People, not least because it's played so straight.
But are you suggesting that successfully kidnapping the head of the KGB is not a farcical event?
Go on Kemi! Under 20%! You can do it! One more heave!
Some stats and ratios:
LLG 46, RefCon 48: quite similar to other polls
LabCon 42, SPLORG 58: way higher SPLORG than other pollsters
Con:Ref 0.71. Quite close to the 0.67 crossover
The collapse of the combined Lab/Con score is remarkable at 42. In the GE of 2017 it was 82, with both over 40. In GE 2024 it was 57. This combined with there being no sense of revival in either camp is a huge slow burning story.
And at this very moment, with USA politics providing the biggest story and challenge since WWII, big western European political parties should never be out of sight and mind, fizzing with top comment, alive with ideas and reshaping perspectives on both past and future, full of great thoughts with embyonic statesmen trying to outsmart and replace the established set, great speeches outlining future directions, the public hanging on every word from parliament.
Instead we have the hot news being a legal spat between two schools of feminist thought about toilets and the felling of an oak tree. Strange times.
At the moment the dominant political question is how to respond to Trump’s USA and all that implies for Europe-China relations, the threat of Russia and global economic prospects. I’m not surprised it’s crowding out everything else.
Macron, Meloni, UVDL, Zelenskyy, Tusk get that. So does Carney.
Labour gets it but is hopelessly torn between ideological clarity and diplomatic pragmatism, the Lib Dems get it and sense the opportunity, I think Reform probably get it, in the sense that they have to decide which bed they want to make, but I’m not sure the Tories do.
Munitions plants in NATO countries continue exploding - today the Northrop Grumman plant in Utah, producing rocket engines for Pentagon and control units for Patriot missiles.
The locals could be brutal - voters want something different.
And perhaps the only way to cure them of that is if they get it.
In the next GE it won't be the performance of a few local councils which matter.
No, 'get it' nationally, I meant. A Reform government. That'll wise people up. Bit like Trump2 although not as damaging because I don't think Farage is monster material.
You may be overestimating how much of a downgrade is possible.
I don't think I am. Just look at the sort of units Reform are attracting as members and candidates. They're barely better than their voters. Worse in some cases.
Go on Kemi! Under 20%! You can do it! One more heave!
Some stats and ratios:
LLG 46, RefCon 48: quite similar to other polls
LabCon 42, SPLORG 58: way higher SPLORG than other pollsters
Con:Ref 0.71. Quite close to the 0.67 crossover
The collapse of the combined Lab/Con score is remarkable at 42. In the GE of 2017 it was 82, with both over 40. In GE 2024 it was 57. This combined with there being no sense of revival in either camp is a huge slow burning story.
And at this very moment, with USA politics providing the biggest story and challenge since WWII, big western European political parties should never be out of sight and mind, fizzing with top comment, alive with ideas and reshaping perspectives on both past and future, full of great thoughts with embyonic statesmen trying to outsmart and replace the established set, great speeches outlining future directions, the public hanging on every word from parliament.
Instead we have the hot news being a legal spat between two schools of feminist thought about toilets and the felling of an oak tree. Strange times.
At the moment the dominant political question is how to respond to Trump’s USA and all that implies for Europe-China relations, the threat of Russia and global economic prospects. I’m not surprised it’s crowding out everything else.
Macron, Meloni, UVDL, Zelenskyy, Tusk get that. So does Carney.
Labour gets it but is hopelessly torn between ideological clarity and diplomatic pragmatism, the Lib Dems get it and sense the opportunity, I think Reform probably get it, in the sense that they have to decide which bed they want to make, but I’m not sure the Tories do.
The dominant political issue being Trump is only if you love him or hate him, most voters are more concerned by tax rises and immigration and WFA and spending cuts. We have always had the lowest level Trump tariffs anyway
“We are all afraid,” Murkowski said, taking a long pause. “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.” https://x.com/sahilkapur/status/1912853012193624250
What at this point is the balance between justified fear, and cowardice ?
It's cowardice which enabled what has happened.
What's he saying?
He is a reporter reporting. She, Republican senator, is saying that Republcans could do the right thing but are genuinely afraid of what would happen to them - presumably in terms of public violence, the actions of random nutters etc. Is it out of the question that she means that if this carries on in current trajectory that traitors might get a one way trip to El Salvador?
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
A man so daft that he plotted himself out of a leadership race.
That was his backers tbf. They tried to engineer his preferred opponent for the run off and succeeded in engineering the man himself out of the run off. You couldn't make it up. Literally couldn't make it up. If you submitted that in a script for a political drama you'd get it returned with a cover note saying "rejected on grounds of credulity".
While I share your general amusement, the pedant in me bridles at the phrase 'couldn't make it up', especially when paired with the word 'literally' - I'm fairly sure you could make it up. People make stuff up all the time, much of it less believable than that. Look at Star Wars, for example.
No but that's literally what I'm saying. You *could* make it up, yes, but not if you wanted it accepted as a serious proposition by the commissioning editor. So to all intents and purposes you couldn't.
Oh come on! This is exactly the sort of thing which happened in The Thick of It.
I'm not disputing how ridiculous the situation was. I'm pedantically disputing the use of the phrase 'you couldn't make it up'. People make up implausible stuff all the time, and much of it gets commissioned for telly. (Look at Death in Paradise. 50% of the time that finishes and you look at the wife and both shake your heads and say 'no...'. Still watch the next one though. I like light-hearted crime drama where the main puzzle is 'how'. And I have some sympathy for the writers still trying to come up with plots 100-odd episodes in).
'You couldn't make it up' is just a phrase I can rarely let go without a quibble. (See also describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island', the use of the word 'stunning' to mean 'nice', and the misuse of the word 'literally'.)
I don't trying to fall out about it. This is just pb pedantry.
But TTOI was a comedy. Of course you could make it up as a joke. The Cleverly thing works fine as deliberate farce or even as a piece of whimsy. What I'm saying is you couldn't make it up and be taken seriously. That's what the phrase means in my book.
All right, House of Cards? To Play the King? Both of those contained plots more far fetched.
Your problem with the Clevershambles is that it is a) improbable and b) funny. Drama has a problem with things that are funny, preferring tense looks all the time. And that is why drama is almost never fulfilling - because the real world isn't like that. Funny things happen all the time. Just because something's funny doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
We're at cross purposes. When I say "serious drama" I mean the likes of Kavanaugh QC or Smiley's People. Straightforward story telling with no attempt to be kooky or satirical. That genre. There's no place there for the sort of nonsense that happened with James Cleverly (or tbf his backers). If you tried to put something like that in you'd be told to go and have a rethink. Meaning you'd have failed to make it up.
It’s Kavanagh QC.
Not to be confused with Kavana, the rock icon from the late nineties.
I get the impression that Trump is going to do brilliant trade deals, that in reality are no different to what existed before, so as to get out of the mess he has created, and sell it to the MAGA as evidence that he is the king of deal making.
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
A man so daft that he plotted himself out of a leadership race.
That was his backers tbf. They tried to engineer his preferred opponent for the run off and succeeded in engineering the man himself out of the run off. You couldn't make it up. Literally couldn't make it up. If you submitted that in a script for a political drama you'd get it returned with a cover note saying "rejected on grounds of credulity".
While I share your general amusement, the pedant in me bridles at the phrase 'couldn't make it up', especially when paired with the word 'literally' - I'm fairly sure you could make it up. People make stuff up all the time, much of it less believable than that. Look at Star Wars, for example.
No but that's literally what I'm saying. You *could* make it up, yes, but not if you wanted it accepted as a serious proposition by the commissioning editor. So to all intents and purposes you couldn't.
Oh come on! This is exactly the sort of thing which happened in The Thick of It.
I'm not disputing how ridiculous the situation was. I'm pedantically disputing the use of the phrase 'you couldn't make it up'. People make up implausible stuff all the time, and much of it gets commissioned for telly. (Look at Death in Paradise. 50% of the time that finishes and you look at the wife and both shake your heads and say 'no...'. Still watch the next one though. I like light-hearted crime drama where the main puzzle is 'how'. And I have some sympathy for the writers still trying to come up with plots 100-odd episodes in).
'You couldn't make it up' is just a phrase I can rarely let go without a quibble. (See also describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island', the use of the word 'stunning' to mean 'nice', and the misuse of the word 'literally'.)
I don't trying to fall out about it. This is just pb pedantry.
But TTOI was a comedy. Of course you could make it up as a joke. The Cleverly thing works fine as deliberate farce or even as a piece of whimsy. What I'm saying is you couldn't make it up and be taken seriously. That's what the phrase means in my book.
All right, House of Cards? To Play the King? Both of those contained plots more far fetched.
Your problem with the Clevershambles is that it is a) improbable and b) funny. Drama has a problem with things that are funny, preferring tense looks all the time. And that is why drama is almost never fulfilling - because the real world isn't like that. Funny things happen all the time. Just because something's funny doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
We're at cross purposes. When I say "serious drama" I mean the likes of Kavanaugh QC or Smiley's People. Straightforward story telling with no attempt to be kooky or satirical. That genre. There's no place there for the sort of nonsense that happened with James Cleverly (or tbf his backers). If you tried to put something like that in you'd be told to go and have a rethink. Meaning you'd have failed to make it up.
The fault here is with most drama's utter aversion to anything amusing happening.
But House of Cards was a proper drama. And it's a plausible plotline for one of that series. After all, the Chief Whip ended up as PM.
Where we appear to be is that you could make it up, but if you did, and presented it to the humourless commissioners of TV drama, they wouldn't like it as a plotline because in their world nothing is allowed to be in the least bit amusing.
I'm going to go and make an omelette now. Mushroom, onion, pancetta, potato and cheese. Maybe a bit of chorizo if there's any in the fridge.
Very nice.
There is humour in Kavanagh and Smiley's People. It's in the dialogue. What there isn't is farcical events.
Though you could argue that having a literal insane person being the sane, balanced narrator of a part of Smilley’s People…
“We are all afraid,” Murkowski said, taking a long pause. “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.” https://x.com/sahilkapur/status/1912853012193624250
What at this point is the balance between justified fear, and cowardice ?
John Rentoul is surely correct here, in today’s ‘View from Westminster’
Wes He Should
Wes Streeting, one of the few cabinet ministers who is actually delivering what the people want, has an interesting interview in The Spectator.
He says he will not go on a chicken run from his Ilford North seat, in which case he is likely to lose it – a pro-Palestinian independent came within 500 votes of winning last year, and Labour is unlikely to gain votes next time.
This is brave of him, but he should go to a safe seat because he is good. He has only just started the huge task of turning the NHS round, which will take more than one parliament, but he is doing all the right things – namely, bringing in Alan Milburn, Paul Corrigan, Michael Barber and Liz Lloyd (all the people who turned the NHS round last time).
He should abandon Ilford because his country needs him.
I get the impression that Trump is going to do brilliant trade deals, that in reality are no different to what existed before, to get out of the mess he has created, and sells it to the MAGA as evidence that he is the king of the deal making.
A bit like Truss.
He’s fucked the market and some supply chains too, for a long time. His legacy is going to be appalling. He will be truly reviled. His polling numbers on the economy and tariffs are cratering.
Chat GPT is thinking about a blister pack Lee Anderson.
Hmmm. I gave it Roderick Spode & Eulalie, plus 'symbols associated with Lee Anderson'.
It missed the shorts.
Love the Barnsley chop.
On which note, lamb is even more expensive in France than it is in Britain.
The economics of a sheep are not great. Expensive for the consumer and unprofitable for the farmer. The wool is largely worthless. You sell one ewe for meat and you get 2 shoulders (farm shop price maybe 30-40 each), 2 legs cut off before the shank (60-70 each), 2 rear shanks (7-8 each?), neck for about 20, best end / rack another 30-40, rump 20, breast 15, then a few bits to sell for merguez and offal. There’s not the charcuterie options with lamb that there are with pork.
That’s around £350 for a whole animal, yet all those cuts sound relatively expensive don’t they?
Contrast with a cow or pig, both of which have much greater weight of flesh, are less suicidal when in the fields, and are more nose to tail in usage.
One of the problems for French lamb is that it is now extremely difficult to source the young lambs from Scotland since Brexit- so too many lambs in UK and not enough in France.
John Rentoul is surely correct here, in today’s ‘View from Westminster’
Wes He Should
Wes Streeting, one of the few cabinet ministers who is actually delivering what the people want, has an interesting interview in The Spectator.
He says he will not go on a chicken run from his Ilford North seat, in which case he is likely to lose it – a pro-Palestinian independent came within 500 votes of winning last year, and Labour is unlikely to gain votes next time.
This is brave of him, but he should go to a safe seat because he is good. He has only just started the huge task of turning the NHS round, which will take more than one parliament, but he is doing all the right things – namely, bringing in Alan Milburn, Paul Corrigan, Michael Barber and Liz Lloyd (all the people who turned the NHS round last time).
He should abandon Ilford because his country needs him.
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
Except of course Sir Edward has a 1st from Oxford and is an exceptionally determined and shrewd politician.
Jaw-dropping footage revealed by @markwhiteTV today showing what GB News believes to be Sudanese migrants showing off their 4* hotels.
This is a mockery. There are homeless British citizens sleeping rough on the street and economic migrants fleeing France are a priority for our government.
Keir Starmer promised he would end the migrant hotels, yet another failure.
These videos are nothing but an advertisement for others to come to the UK, of which we believe, there are thousands more queueing up.
If we allowed asylum seekers to work, which that moron May stopped, we wouldn't need to host them in hotels, 4* or otherwise.
Truly one of the worst policy decisions of my lifetime.
Was that May? In any case, allowing asylum seekers to work is an obvious loophole in the work permit system that shouldn't be reopened. We need to remove the right to claim asylum on demand.
David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, will today unveil plans to strip thousands of asylum seekers of the right to work while their claim to stay in Britain is being assessed.
Sudan is a brutal war zone. I am not surprised that Sudanese people are seeking asylum elsewhere, including in the country of the empire that occupied them for decades.
It is remarkable that Trump does not seem to be having an effect on Farage and Reform
Maybe it is more we have an unpopular government, a conservative party struggling with their past, and a Lib Dem leader who seems to think politics is all about acting daft in and on water
Certainly the 1st May is looking like successes for Reform and to top it all a likely win in Helsby and Runcorn
You recognise the current malaise of our moribund system, realise Reform are the only current option to start a bridge to meaningful change yet will still end up putting a cross by the local Tory..🧐 It's like Groundhog day..🤔
Go on Kemi! Under 20%! You can do it! One more heave!
Some stats and ratios:
LLG 46, RefCon 48: quite similar to other polls
LabCon 42, SPLORG 58: way higher SPLORG than other pollsters
Con:Ref 0.71. Quite close to the 0.67 crossover
The collapse of the combined Lab/Con score is remarkable at 42. In the GE of 2017 it was 82, with both over 40. In GE 2024 it was 57. This combined with there being no sense of revival in either camp is a huge slow burning story.
And at this very moment, with USA politics providing the biggest story and challenge since WWII, big western European political parties should never be out of sight and mind, fizzing with top comment, alive with ideas and reshaping perspectives on both past and future, full of great thoughts with embyonic statesmen trying to outsmart and replace the established set, great speeches outlining future directions, the public hanging on every word from parliament.
Instead we have the hot news being a legal spat between two schools of feminist thought about toilets and the felling of an oak tree. Strange times.
At the moment the dominant political question is how to respond to Trump’s USA and all that implies for Europe-China relations, the threat of Russia and global economic prospects. I’m not surprised it’s crowding out everything else.
Macron, Meloni, UVDL, Zelenskyy, Tusk get that. So does Carney.
Labour gets it but is hopelessly torn between ideological clarity and diplomatic pragmatism, the Lib Dems get it and sense the opportunity, I think Reform probably get it, in the sense that they have to decide which bed they want to make, but I’m not sure the Tories do.
The dominant political issue being Trump is only if you love him or hate him, most voters are more concerned by tax rises and immigration and WFA and spending cuts. We have always had the lowest level Trump tariffs anyway
Tariffs are a sideshow but the peace of the European continent very much isn’t.
We have an actively pro-Russian president in the White House. He is sending the world economy down the toilet. I think most people have noticed and care.
Chat GPT is thinking about a blister pack Lee Anderson.
Hmmm. I gave it Roderick Spode & Eulalie, plus 'symbols associated with Lee Anderson'.
It missed the shorts.
Love the Barnsley chop.
On which note, lamb is even more expensive in France than it is in Britain.
The economics of a sheep are not great. Expensive for the consumer and unprofitable for the farmer. The wool is largely worthless. You sell one ewe for meat and you get 2 shoulders (farm shop price maybe 30-40 each), 2 legs cut off before the shank (60-70 each), 2 rear shanks (7-8 each?), neck for about 20, best end / rack another 30-40, rump 20, breast 15, then a few bits to sell for merguez and offal. There’s not the charcuterie options with lamb that there are with pork.
That’s around £350 for a whole animal, yet all those cuts sound relatively expensive don’t they?
Contrast with a cow or pig, both of which have much greater weight of flesh, are less suicidal when in the fields, and are more nose to tail in usage.
One of the problems for French lamb is that it is now extremely difficult to source the young lambs from Scotland since Brexit- so too many lambs in UK and not enough in France.
They used to buy lambs from scotland live to grow on and slaughter later? Otherwise I'm not sure what you're getting at...
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
Except of course Sir Edward has a 1st from Oxford and is an exceptionally determined and shrewd politician.
The Hammer of the Sub Postmasters, I’m sure they appreciate his determination
I still think by this time next year and certainly by 2029 things will look very different.
Maybe better, maybe worse. But I stand by what I’ve said many times, Labour will be re-elected.
And with that, fin.
I think so too. And it's not an exotic opinion. They're the betting favourites.
Indeed they are, though not by much. And, oddly, at the same time, the front two in the betting for next PM are Farage and Badenoch. 9/2 Badenoch doesn't look enticing to me.
The top 6 for next PM (Hills) are really bizarre: Farage Badenoch Streeting Jenrick Cooper Boris.
Chat GPT is thinking about a blister pack Lee Anderson.
Hmmm. I gave it Roderick Spode & Eulalie, plus 'symbols associated with Lee Anderson'.
It missed the shorts.
Love the Barnsley chop.
On which note, lamb is even more expensive in France than it is in Britain.
The economics of a sheep are not great. Expensive for the consumer and unprofitable for the farmer. The wool is largely worthless. You sell one ewe for meat and you get 2 shoulders (farm shop price maybe 30-40 each), 2 legs cut off before the shank (60-70 each), 2 rear shanks (7-8 each?), neck for about 20, best end / rack another 30-40, rump 20, breast 15, then a few bits to sell for merguez and offal. There’s not the charcuterie options with lamb that there are with pork.
That’s around £350 for a whole animal, yet all those cuts sound relatively expensive don’t they?
Contrast with a cow or pig, both of which have much greater weight of flesh, are less suicidal when in the fields, and are more nose to tail in usage.
One of the problems for French lamb is that it is now extremely difficult to source the young lambs from Scotland since Brexit- so too many lambs in UK and not enough in France.
They used to buy lambs from scotland live to grow on and slaughter later? Otherwise I'm not sure what you're getting at...
"Well, Clarice. Have the lambs stopped screaming?"
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
Except of course Sir Edward has a 1st from Oxford and is an exceptionally determined and shrewd politician.
Yes, a fun centrist dad, but amongst the most popular party leader in net terms too, with a party that is second only to the Greens in terms of public perception.
It took a decade to get back from 2015 to the strongest position for a third party in modern British history, and Davey deserves a fair bit of the credit.
I still think by this time next year and certainly by 2029 things will look very different.
Maybe better, maybe worse. But I stand by what I’ve said many times, Labour will be re-elected.
And with that, fin.
I think so too. And it's not an exotic opinion. They're the betting favourites.
Indeed they are, though not by much. And, oddly, at the same time, the front two in the betting for next PM are Farage and Badenoch. 9/2 Badenoch doesn't look enticing to me.
The top 6 for next PM (Hills) are really bizarre: Farage Badenoch Streeting Jenrick Cooper Boris.
Yes. It's due to 2 big Lab uncertainties. Will SKS run again? Who will replace him if he doesn't?
Sorry, 3. And who will (eventually) replace him if he does run again and wins?
Chat GPT is thinking about a blister pack Lee Anderson.
Hmmm. I gave it Roderick Spode & Eulalie, plus 'symbols associated with Lee Anderson'.
It missed the shorts.
Love the Barnsley chop.
On which note, lamb is even more expensive in France than it is in Britain.
The economics of a sheep are not great. Expensive for the consumer and unprofitable for the farmer. The wool is largely worthless. You sell one ewe for meat and you get 2 shoulders (farm shop price maybe 30-40 each), 2 legs cut off before the shank (60-70 each), 2 rear shanks (7-8 each?), neck for about 20, best end / rack another 30-40, rump 20, breast 15, then a few bits to sell for merguez and offal. There’s not the charcuterie options with lamb that there are with pork.
That’s around £350 for a whole animal, yet all those cuts sound relatively expensive don’t they?
Contrast with a cow or pig, both of which have much greater weight of flesh, are less suicidal when in the fields, and are more nose to tail in usage.
One of the problems for French lamb is that it is now extremely difficult to source the young lambs from Scotland since Brexit- so too many lambs in UK and not enough in France.
They used to buy lambs from scotland live to grow on and slaughter later? Otherwise I'm not sure what you're getting at...
Looks like we supply about 2/3 of all french sheepmeat imports post-brexit.
I can't find the pre-brexit figures. But given Ireland and Spain and frozen suppliers like New Zealand, it's hard to imagine it was much higher.
Jaw-dropping footage revealed by @markwhiteTV today showing what GB News believes to be Sudanese migrants showing off their 4* hotels.
This is a mockery. There are homeless British citizens sleeping rough on the street and economic migrants fleeing France are a priority for our government.
Keir Starmer promised he would end the migrant hotels, yet another failure.
These videos are nothing but an advertisement for others to come to the UK, of which we believe, there are thousands more queueing up.
If we allowed asylum seekers to work, which that moron May stopped, we wouldn't need to host them in hotels, 4* or otherwise.
Truly one of the worst policy decisions of my lifetime.
Was that May? In any case, allowing asylum seekers to work is an obvious loophole in the work permit system that shouldn't be reopened. We need to remove the right to claim asylum on demand.
David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, will today unveil plans to strip thousands of asylum seekers of the right to work while their claim to stay in Britain is being assessed.
Sudan is a brutal war zone. I am not surprised that Sudanese people are seeking asylum elsewhere, including in the country of the empire that occupied them for decades.
Presumably as a democrat you believe the people of that country have a right to decide whether to accept asylum seekers or not?
I still think by this time next year and certainly by 2029 things will look very different.
Maybe better, maybe worse. But I stand by what I’ve said many times, Labour will be re-elected.
And with that, fin.
I think so too. And it's not an exotic opinion. They're the betting favourites.
Indeed they are, though not by much. And, oddly, at the same time, the front two in the betting for next PM are Farage and Badenoch. 9/2 Badenoch doesn't look enticing to me.
The top 6 for next PM (Hills) are really bizarre: Farage Badenoch Streeting Jenrick Cooper Boris.
Yes. It's due to 2 big Lab uncertainties. Will SKS run again? Who will replace him if he doesn't?
Sorry, 3. And who will (eventually) replace him if he does run again and wins?
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
Except of course Sir Edward has a 1st from Oxford and is an exceptionally determined and shrewd politician.
LDs 'Winning here'. The LDs only like him as leader because they don't have the foggiest as to anything much. Completely clueless.
I think it's fair to say that such is the state of the nation and those that live in it generally. Disappointing though it is as an observation.
Jaw-dropping footage revealed by @markwhiteTV today showing what GB News believes to be Sudanese migrants showing off their 4* hotels.
This is a mockery. There are homeless British citizens sleeping rough on the street and economic migrants fleeing France are a priority for our government.
Keir Starmer promised he would end the migrant hotels, yet another failure.
These videos are nothing but an advertisement for others to come to the UK, of which we believe, there are thousands more queueing up.
If we allowed asylum seekers to work, which that moron May stopped, we wouldn't need to host them in hotels, 4* or otherwise.
Truly one of the worst policy decisions of my lifetime.
Was that May? In any case, allowing asylum seekers to work is an obvious loophole in the work permit system that shouldn't be reopened. We need to remove the right to claim asylum on demand.
David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, will today unveil plans to strip thousands of asylum seekers of the right to work while their claim to stay in Britain is being assessed.
Sudan is a brutal war zone. I am not surprised that Sudanese people are seeking asylum elsewhere, including in the country of the empire that occupied them for decades.
How many Britons alive today are responsible for that imperial occupation?
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
Except of course Sir Edward has a 1st from Oxford and is an exceptionally determined and shrewd politician.
Yes, a fun centrist dad, but amongst the most popular party leader in net terms too, with a party that is second only to the Greens in terms of public perception.
It took a decade to get back from 2015 to the strongest position for a third party in modern British history, and Davey deserves a fair bit of the credit.
Another (former) Liberal Democrat deserves rather more.
Though for all Truss set Starmer and Davey up, they still had to not miss the open goal.
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
Except of course Sir Edward has a 1st from Oxford and is an exceptionally determined and shrewd politician.
Yes, a fun centrist dad, but amongst the most popular party leader in net terms too, with a party that is second only to the Greens in terms of public perception.
It took a decade to get back from 2015 to the strongest position for a third party in modern British history, and Davey deserves a fair bit of the credit.
“We are all afraid,” Murkowski said, taking a long pause. “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.” https://x.com/sahilkapur/status/1912853012193624250
What at this point is the balance between justified fear, and cowardice ?
It's cowardice which enabled what has happened.
What's he saying?
He is a reporter reporting. She, Republican senator, is saying that Republcans could do the right thing but are genuinely afraid of what would happen to them - presumably in terms of public violence, the actions of random nutters etc. Is it out of the question that she means that if this carries on in current trajectory that traitors might get a one way trip to El Salvador?
Murkowski is a serial 'reasonable Republican' but when push comes to shove does Trump's bidding.
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
A man so daft that he plotted himself out of a leadership race.
That was his backers tbf. They tried to engineer his preferred opponent for the run off and succeeded in engineering the man himself out of the run off. You couldn't make it up. Literally couldn't make it up. If you submitted that in a script for a political drama you'd get it returned with a cover note saying "rejected on grounds of credulity".
While I share your general amusement, the pedant in me bridles at the phrase 'couldn't make it up', especially when paired with the word 'literally' - I'm fairly sure you could make it up. People make stuff up all the time, much of it less believable than that. Look at Star Wars, for example.
No but that's literally what I'm saying. You *could* make it up, yes, but not if you wanted it accepted as a serious proposition by the commissioning editor. So to all intents and purposes you couldn't.
Oh come on! This is exactly the sort of thing which happened in The Thick of It.
I'm not disputing how ridiculous the situation was. I'm pedantically disputing the use of the phrase 'you couldn't make it up'. People make up implausible stuff all the time, and much of it gets commissioned for telly. (Look at Death in Paradise. 50% of the time that finishes and you look at the wife and both shake your heads and say 'no...'. Still watch the next one though. I like light-hearted crime drama where the main puzzle is 'how'. And I have some sympathy for the writers still trying to come up with plots 100-odd episodes in).
'You couldn't make it up' is just a phrase I can rarely let go without a quibble. (See also describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island', the use of the word 'stunning' to mean 'nice', and the misuse of the word 'literally'.)
I don't trying to fall out about it. This is just pb pedantry.
But TTOI was a comedy. Of course you could make it up as a joke. The Cleverly thing works fine as deliberate farce or even as a piece of whimsy. What I'm saying is you couldn't make it up and be taken seriously. That's what the phrase means in my book.
All right, House of Cards? To Play the King? Both of those contained plots more far fetched.
Your problem with the Clevershambles is that it is a) improbable and b) funny. Drama has a problem with things that are funny, preferring tense looks all the time. And that is why drama is almost never fulfilling - because the real world isn't like that. Funny things happen all the time. Just because something's funny doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
We're at cross purposes. When I say "serious drama" I mean the likes of Kavanaugh QC or Smiley's People. Straightforward story telling with no attempt to be kooky or satirical. That genre. There's no place there for the sort of nonsense that happened with James Cleverly (or tbf his backers). If you tried to put something like that in you'd be told to go and have a rethink. Meaning you'd have failed to make it up.
It’s Kavanagh QC.
Not to be confused with Kavana, the rock icon from the late nineties.
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
Except of course Sir Edward has a 1st from Oxford and is an exceptionally determined and shrewd politician.
LDs 'Winning here'. The LDs only like him as leader because they don't have the foggiest as to anything much. Completely clueless.
I think it's fair to say that such is the state of the nation and those that live in it generally. Disappointing though it is as an observation.
Political debate seems long gone.
Interesting view in all the LDs who post here. We are all clueless are we? Even though between us we include successful business people, doctors, etc. Yet generalized comments like 'they don't have the foggiest as to anything and completely clueless applies does it?
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
Except of course Sir Edward has a 1st from Oxford and is an exceptionally determined and shrewd politician.
LDs 'Winning here'. The LDs only like him as leader because they don't have the foggiest as to anything much. Completely clueless.
I think it's fair to say that such is the state of the nation and those that live in it generally. Disappointing though it is as an observation.
Political debate seems long gone.
I am happy to say that’s not true in the slightest.
But the Lib Dems have always been the mildly bullied swot in the classroom, ignored by the jocks and kicked or growled at by the misanthropes.
Luckily they have a liberal dogwhistle, which can only be heard by those who can be arsed to listen or read. Which is a decent slice of middle England. But shush, let’s leave the ideologues to do their noisy thing.
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
A man so daft that he plotted himself out of a leadership race.
That was his backers tbf. They tried to engineer his preferred opponent for the run off and succeeded in engineering the man himself out of the run off. You couldn't make it up. Literally couldn't make it up. If you submitted that in a script for a political drama you'd get it returned with a cover note saying "rejected on grounds of credulity".
While I share your general amusement, the pedant in me bridles at the phrase 'couldn't make it up', especially when paired with the word 'literally' - I'm fairly sure you could make it up. People make stuff up all the time, much of it less believable than that. Look at Star Wars, for example.
No but that's literally what I'm saying. You *could* make it up, yes, but not if you wanted it accepted as a serious proposition by the commissioning editor. So to all intents and purposes you couldn't.
Oh come on! This is exactly the sort of thing which happened in The Thick of It.
I'm not disputing how ridiculous the situation was. I'm pedantically disputing the use of the phrase 'you couldn't make it up'. People make up implausible stuff all the time, and much of it gets commissioned for telly. (Look at Death in Paradise. 50% of the time that finishes and you look at the wife and both shake your heads and say 'no...'. Still watch the next one though. I like light-hearted crime drama where the main puzzle is 'how'. And I have some sympathy for the writers still trying to come up with plots 100-odd episodes in).
'You couldn't make it up' is just a phrase I can rarely let go without a quibble. (See also describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island', the use of the word 'stunning' to mean 'nice', and the misuse of the word 'literally'.)
I don't trying to fall out about it. This is just pb pedantry.
But TTOI was a comedy. Of course you could make it up as a joke. The Cleverly thing works fine as deliberate farce or even as a piece of whimsy. What I'm saying is you couldn't make it up and be taken seriously. That's what the phrase means in my book.
All right, House of Cards? To Play the King? Both of those contained plots more far fetched.
Your problem with the Clevershambles is that it is a) improbable and b) funny. Drama has a problem with things that are funny, preferring tense looks all the time. And that is why drama is almost never fulfilling - because the real world isn't like that. Funny things happen all the time. Just because something's funny doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
We're at cross purposes. When I say "serious drama" I mean the likes of Kavanaugh QC or Smiley's People. Straightforward story telling with no attempt to be kooky or satirical. That genre. There's no place there for the sort of nonsense that happened with James Cleverly (or tbf his backers). If you tried to put something like that in you'd be told to go and have a rethink. Meaning you'd have failed to make it up.
The fault here is with most drama's utter aversion to anything amusing happening.
But House of Cards was a proper drama. And it's a plausible plotline for one of that series. After all, the Chief Whip ended up as PM.
Where we appear to be is that you could make it up, but if you did, and presented it to the humourless commissioners of TV drama, they wouldn't like it as a plotline because in their world nothing is allowed to be in the least bit amusing.
I'm going to go and make an omelette now. Mushroom, onion, pancetta, potato and cheese. Maybe a bit of chorizo if there's any in the fridge.
Very nice.
There is humour in Kavanagh and Smiley's People. It's in the dialogue. What there isn't is farcical events.
The bit about the Degas is glorious in Smiley's People, not least because it's played so straight.
But are you suggesting that successfully kidnapping the head of the KGB is not a farcical event?
It is, but not in a James Cleverly Fourth Ballot sense. It has a certain gravitas.
I get the impression that Trump is going to do brilliant trade deals, that in reality are no different to what existed before, so as to get out of the mess he has created, and sell it to the MAGA as evidence that he is the king of deal making.
John Rentoul is surely correct here, in today’s ‘View from Westminster’
Wes He Should
Wes Streeting, one of the few cabinet ministers who is actually delivering what the people want, has an interesting interview in The Spectator.
He says he will not go on a chicken run from his Ilford North seat, in which case he is likely to lose it – a pro-Palestinian independent came within 500 votes of winning last year, and Labour is unlikely to gain votes next time.
This is brave of him, but he should go to a safe seat because he is good. He has only just started the huge task of turning the NHS round, which will take more than one parliament, but he is doing all the right things – namely, bringing in Alan Milburn, Paul Corrigan, Michael Barber and Liz Lloyd (all the people who turned the NHS round last time).
He should abandon Ilford because his country needs him.
If Streeting can improve the NHS enough for voters to notice, he won’t need to worry about his seat. Even in Ilford ( @Sunil_Prasannan could possibly confirm) the majority of voters will vote for a rejuvenated NHS over fairness for Gaza.
I get the impression that Trump is going to do brilliant trade deals, that in reality are no different to what existed before, so as to get out of the mess he has created, and sell it to the MAGA as evidence that he is the king of deal making.
Worse yet, it will work.
His "base" is only maybe 25% of voters though. If his support fell to that they'd be hope.
describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island',
It's one of my biggest pet peeves. People are usually making a point about not being big enough to go alone or whatever, which would be fair enough perhaps, but the point can be made without suggesting we are a small island or have a small population, since neither is the case.
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
Except of course Sir Edward has a 1st from Oxford and is an exceptionally determined and shrewd politician.
LDs 'Winning here'. The LDs only like him as leader because they don't have the foggiest as to anything much. Completely clueless.
I think it's fair to say that such is the state of the nation and those that live in it generally. Disappointing though it is as an observation.
Political debate seems long gone.
I am happy to say that’s not true in the slightest.
But the Lib Dems have always been the mildly bullied swot in the classroom, ignored by the jocks and kicked or growled at by the misanthropes.
Luckily they have a liberal dogwhistle, which can only be heard by those who can be arsed to listen or read. Which is a decent slice of middle England. But shush, let’s leave the ideologues to do their noisy thing.
If it's not true in the slightest why can't I find a single good reason to vote LD even though my views are very much aligned with their place on the political map? It's just a wasteland of middle ground so far as I can see.
They're polling 15% when they should be polling 35%.
Can you really say that their dogwhistle is tuned correctly?
John Rentoul is surely correct here, in today’s ‘View from Westminster’
Wes He Should
Wes Streeting, one of the few cabinet ministers who is actually delivering what the people want, has an interesting interview in The Spectator.
He says he will not go on a chicken run from his Ilford North seat, in which case he is likely to lose it – a pro-Palestinian independent came within 500 votes of winning last year, and Labour is unlikely to gain votes next time.
This is brave of him, but he should go to a safe seat because he is good. He has only just started the huge task of turning the NHS round, which will take more than one parliament, but he is doing all the right things – namely, bringing in Alan Milburn, Paul Corrigan, Michael Barber and Liz Lloyd (all the people who turned the NHS round last time).
He should abandon Ilford because his country needs him.
If Streeting can improve the NHS enough for voters to notice, he won’t need to worry about his seat. Even in Ilford ( @Sunil_Prasannan could possibly confirm) the majority of voters will vote for a rejuvenated NHS over fairness for Gaza.
Not sure how Streeting is personally to blame for Gaza, but I'd probably vote for him again.
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
A man so daft that he plotted himself out of a leadership race.
That was his backers tbf. They tried to engineer his preferred opponent for the run off and succeeded in engineering the man himself out of the run off. You couldn't make it up. Literally couldn't make it up. If you submitted that in a script for a political drama you'd get it returned with a cover note saying "rejected on grounds of credulity".
While I share your general amusement, the pedant in me bridles at the phrase 'couldn't make it up', especially when paired with the word 'literally' - I'm fairly sure you could make it up. People make stuff up all the time, much of it less believable than that. Look at Star Wars, for example.
No but that's literally what I'm saying. You *could* make it up, yes, but not if you wanted it accepted as a serious proposition by the commissioning editor. So to all intents and purposes you couldn't.
Oh come on! This is exactly the sort of thing which happened in The Thick of It.
I'm not disputing how ridiculous the situation was. I'm pedantically disputing the use of the phrase 'you couldn't make it up'. People make up implausible stuff all the time, and much of it gets commissioned for telly. (Look at Death in Paradise. 50% of the time that finishes and you look at the wife and both shake your heads and say 'no...'. Still watch the next one though. I like light-hearted crime drama where the main puzzle is 'how'. And I have some sympathy for the writers still trying to come up with plots 100-odd episodes in).
'You couldn't make it up' is just a phrase I can rarely let go without a quibble. (See also describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island', the use of the word 'stunning' to mean 'nice', and the misuse of the word 'literally'.)
I don't trying to fall out about it. This is just pb pedantry.
But TTOI was a comedy. Of course you could make it up as a joke. The Cleverly thing works fine as deliberate farce or even as a piece of whimsy. What I'm saying is you couldn't make it up and be taken seriously. That's what the phrase means in my book.
All right, House of Cards? To Play the King? Both of those contained plots more far fetched.
Your problem with the Clevershambles is that it is a) improbable and b) funny. Drama has a problem with things that are funny, preferring tense looks all the time. And that is why drama is almost never fulfilling - because the real world isn't like that. Funny things happen all the time. Just because something's funny doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
We're at cross purposes. When I say "serious drama" I mean the likes of Kavanaugh QC or Smiley's People. Straightforward story telling with no attempt to be kooky or satirical. That genre. There's no place there for the sort of nonsense that happened with James Cleverly (or tbf his backers). If you tried to put something like that in you'd be told to go and have a rethink. Meaning you'd have failed to make it up.
It’s Kavanagh QC.
Not to be confused with Kavana, the rock icon from the late nineties.
That's the one. Thaw.
An absolute legend, and a decent bloke too.
The Sweeney is just brilliant. Ace TV and great characters and a London long gone.
Me and my mate, Baker, called each other Jack and George for many years.
I’d drive my Triumph Acclaim like it was the old Cortina off to a blag up west where they were tooled up with shooters.
I get the impression that Trump is going to do brilliant trade deals, that in reality are no different to what existed before, so as to get out of the mess he has created, and sell it to the MAGA as evidence that he is the king of deal making.
Worse yet, it will work.
His "base" is only maybe 25% of voters though. If his support fell to that they'd be hope.
I don't think it will fall that far though. The GOP and the voting public have shown very willing to go along with his base support, and despite the current disruption shaking it it will only take a little 'good' news for more of them to go 'Oh, I overreacted a bit, it's not so bad, and I don't want to support the libs'.
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
A man so daft that he plotted himself out of a leadership race.
That was his backers tbf. They tried to engineer his preferred opponent for the run off and succeeded in engineering the man himself out of the run off. You couldn't make it up. Literally couldn't make it up. If you submitted that in a script for a political drama you'd get it returned with a cover note saying "rejected on grounds of credulity".
While I share your general amusement, the pedant in me bridles at the phrase 'couldn't make it up', especially when paired with the word 'literally' - I'm fairly sure you could make it up. People make stuff up all the time, much of it less believable than that. Look at Star Wars, for example.
No but that's literally what I'm saying. You *could* make it up, yes, but not if you wanted it accepted as a serious proposition by the commissioning editor. So to all intents and purposes you couldn't.
Oh come on! This is exactly the sort of thing which happened in The Thick of It.
I'm not disputing how ridiculous the situation was. I'm pedantically disputing the use of the phrase 'you couldn't make it up'. People make up implausible stuff all the time, and much of it gets commissioned for telly. (Look at Death in Paradise. 50% of the time that finishes and you look at the wife and both shake your heads and say 'no...'. Still watch the next one though. I like light-hearted crime drama where the main puzzle is 'how'. And I have some sympathy for the writers still trying to come up with plots 100-odd episodes in).
'You couldn't make it up' is just a phrase I can rarely let go without a quibble. (See also describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island', the use of the word 'stunning' to mean 'nice', and the misuse of the word 'literally'.)
I don't trying to fall out about it. This is just pb pedantry.
But TTOI was a comedy. Of course you could make it up as a joke. The Cleverly thing works fine as deliberate farce or even as a piece of whimsy. What I'm saying is you couldn't make it up and be taken seriously. That's what the phrase means in my book.
All right, House of Cards? To Play the King? Both of those contained plots more far fetched.
Your problem with the Clevershambles is that it is a) improbable and b) funny. Drama has a problem with things that are funny, preferring tense looks all the time. And that is why drama is almost never fulfilling - because the real world isn't like that. Funny things happen all the time. Just because something's funny doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
We're at cross purposes. When I say "serious drama" I mean the likes of Kavanaugh QC or Smiley's People. Straightforward story telling with no attempt to be kooky or satirical. That genre. There's no place there for the sort of nonsense that happened with James Cleverly (or tbf his backers). If you tried to put something like that in you'd be told to go and have a rethink. Meaning you'd have failed to make it up.
It’s Kavanagh QC.
Not to be confused with Kavana, the rock icon from the late nineties.
That's the one. Thaw.
An absolute legend, and a decent bloke too.
The Sweeney is just brilliant. Ace TV and great characters and a London long gone.
Me and my mate, Baker, called each other Jack and George for many years.
My father loved The Sweeney, he also said it was a tribute to John Thaw that after a few episodes of Morse he didn't see him as Jack Regan.
John Rentoul is surely correct here, in today’s ‘View from Westminster’
Wes He Should
Wes Streeting, one of the few cabinet ministers who is actually delivering what the people want, has an interesting interview in The Spectator.
He says he will not go on a chicken run from his Ilford North seat, in which case he is likely to lose it – a pro-Palestinian independent came within 500 votes of winning last year, and Labour is unlikely to gain votes next time.
This is brave of him, but he should go to a safe seat because he is good. He has only just started the huge task of turning the NHS round, which will take more than one parliament, but he is doing all the right things – namely, bringing in Alan Milburn, Paul Corrigan, Michael Barber and Liz Lloyd (all the people who turned the NHS round last time).
He should abandon Ilford because his country needs him.
If Streeting can improve the NHS enough for voters to notice, he won’t need to worry about his seat. Even in Ilford ( @Sunil_Prasannan could possibly confirm) the majority of voters will vote for a rejuvenated NHS over fairness for Gaza.
The rise of the Gaza bro MPs seemed to take most people by surprise, there's a big question whether it is sustained next time or not. If it is, Streeting is at the least in for a tough fight. If it isn't, he's probably safe whatever he does.
I still think by this time next year and certainly by 2029 things will look very different.
Maybe better, maybe worse. But I stand by what I’ve said many times, Labour will be re-elected.
And with that, fin.
I think so too. And it's not an exotic opinion. They're the betting favourites.
Indeed they are, though not by much. And, oddly, at the same time, the front two in the betting for next PM are Farage and Badenoch. 9/2 Badenoch doesn't look enticing to me.
The top 6 for next PM (Hills) are really bizarre: Farage Badenoch Streeting Jenrick Cooper Boris.
Yes. It's due to 2 big Lab uncertainties. Will SKS run again? Who will replace him if he doesn't?
Sorry, 3. And who will (eventually) replace him if he does run again and wins?
Why wouldn't he?
Ratings. Energy. If either of those are too low he'd step aside.
Jaw-dropping footage revealed by @markwhiteTV today showing what GB News believes to be Sudanese migrants showing off their 4* hotels.
This is a mockery. There are homeless British citizens sleeping rough on the street and economic migrants fleeing France are a priority for our government.
Keir Starmer promised he would end the migrant hotels, yet another failure.
These videos are nothing but an advertisement for others to come to the UK, of which we believe, there are thousands more queueing up.
If we allowed asylum seekers to work, which that moron May stopped, we wouldn't need to host them in hotels, 4* or otherwise.
Truly one of the worst policy decisions of my lifetime.
Was that May? In any case, allowing asylum seekers to work is an obvious loophole in the work permit system that shouldn't be reopened. We need to remove the right to claim asylum on demand.
David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, will today unveil plans to strip thousands of asylum seekers of the right to work while their claim to stay in Britain is being assessed.
Sudan is a brutal war zone. I am not surprised that Sudanese people are seeking asylum elsewhere, including in the country of the empire that occupied them for decades.
Presumably as a democrat you believe the people of that country have a right to decide whether to accept asylum seekers or not?
You're not suggesting an "in/out" referendum on it, I hope?
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
A man so daft that he plotted himself out of a leadership race.
That was his backers tbf. They tried to engineer his preferred opponent for the run off and succeeded in engineering the man himself out of the run off. You couldn't make it up. Literally couldn't make it up. If you submitted that in a script for a political drama you'd get it returned with a cover note saying "rejected on grounds of credulity".
While I share your general amusement, the pedant in me bridles at the phrase 'couldn't make it up', especially when paired with the word 'literally' - I'm fairly sure you could make it up. People make stuff up all the time, much of it less believable than that. Look at Star Wars, for example.
No but that's literally what I'm saying. You *could* make it up, yes, but not if you wanted it accepted as a serious proposition by the commissioning editor. So to all intents and purposes you couldn't.
Oh come on! This is exactly the sort of thing which happened in The Thick of It.
I'm not disputing how ridiculous the situation was. I'm pedantically disputing the use of the phrase 'you couldn't make it up'. People make up implausible stuff all the time, and much of it gets commissioned for telly. (Look at Death in Paradise. 50% of the time that finishes and you look at the wife and both shake your heads and say 'no...'. Still watch the next one though. I like light-hearted crime drama where the main puzzle is 'how'. And I have some sympathy for the writers still trying to come up with plots 100-odd episodes in).
'You couldn't make it up' is just a phrase I can rarely let go without a quibble. (See also describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island', the use of the word 'stunning' to mean 'nice', and the misuse of the word 'literally'.)
I don't trying to fall out about it. This is just pb pedantry.
But TTOI was a comedy. Of course you could make it up as a joke. The Cleverly thing works fine as deliberate farce or even as a piece of whimsy. What I'm saying is you couldn't make it up and be taken seriously. That's what the phrase means in my book.
All right, House of Cards? To Play the King? Both of those contained plots more far fetched.
Your problem with the Clevershambles is that it is a) improbable and b) funny. Drama has a problem with things that are funny, preferring tense looks all the time. And that is why drama is almost never fulfilling - because the real world isn't like that. Funny things happen all the time. Just because something's funny doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
We're at cross purposes. When I say "serious drama" I mean the likes of Kavanaugh QC or Smiley's People. Straightforward story telling with no attempt to be kooky or satirical. That genre. There's no place there for the sort of nonsense that happened with James Cleverly (or tbf his backers). If you tried to put something like that in you'd be told to go and have a rethink. Meaning you'd have failed to make it up.
It’s Kavanagh QC.
Not to be confused with Kavana, the rock icon from the late nineties.
That's the one. Thaw.
An absolute legend, and a decent bloke too.
The Sweeney is just brilliant. Ace TV and great characters and a London long gone.
Me and my mate, Baker, called each other Jack and George for many years.
My father loved The Sweeney, he also said it was a tribute to John Thaw that after a few episodes of Morse he didn't see him as Jack Regan.
Rewatching Morse, having not seen it since childhood, Thaw is stunning. Never not completely convincing.
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
Except of course Sir Edward has a 1st from Oxford and is an exceptionally determined and shrewd politician.
LDs 'Winning here'. The LDs only like him as leader because they don't have the foggiest as to anything much. Completely clueless.
I think it's fair to say that such is the state of the nation and those that live in it generally. Disappointing though it is as an observation.
Political debate seems long gone.
I am happy to say that’s not true in the slightest.
But the Lib Dems have always been the mildly bullied swot in the classroom, ignored by the jocks and kicked or growled at by the misanthropes.
Luckily they have a liberal dogwhistle, which can only be heard by those who can be arsed to listen or read. Which is a decent slice of middle England. But shush, let’s leave the ideologues to do their noisy thing.
Ha ha, fabulous. It’s a fair point you make the Lib Dem’s have no ideals. After all they sold out the students on tuition fees merely to be Tory fluffers.
Have you got over having working class people from Essex who smoked and spoke about lager in your hotel in Mexico yet ? 😂
At one time people had secretaries to iron out any embarrassing mistakes like this, now they just do it themselves on social media.
Since not enough people pay for someone to ensure their communications are properly formatted and related matters you get some pathetic stuff sometimes, so it feels like an area where computers should really be very useful, just a more advanced kind of spellcheck.
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
A man so daft that he plotted himself out of a leadership race.
That was his backers tbf. They tried to engineer his preferred opponent for the run off and succeeded in engineering the man himself out of the run off. You couldn't make it up. Literally couldn't make it up. If you submitted that in a script for a political drama you'd get it returned with a cover note saying "rejected on grounds of credulity".
While I share your general amusement, the pedant in me bridles at the phrase 'couldn't make it up', especially when paired with the word 'literally' - I'm fairly sure you could make it up. People make stuff up all the time, much of it less believable than that. Look at Star Wars, for example.
No but that's literally what I'm saying. You *could* make it up, yes, but not if you wanted it accepted as a serious proposition by the commissioning editor. So to all intents and purposes you couldn't.
Oh come on! This is exactly the sort of thing which happened in The Thick of It.
I'm not disputing how ridiculous the situation was. I'm pedantically disputing the use of the phrase 'you couldn't make it up'. People make up implausible stuff all the time, and much of it gets commissioned for telly. (Look at Death in Paradise. 50% of the time that finishes and you look at the wife and both shake your heads and say 'no...'. Still watch the next one though. I like light-hearted crime drama where the main puzzle is 'how'. And I have some sympathy for the writers still trying to come up with plots 100-odd episodes in).
'You couldn't make it up' is just a phrase I can rarely let go without a quibble. (See also describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island', the use of the word 'stunning' to mean 'nice', and the misuse of the word 'literally'.)
I don't trying to fall out about it. This is just pb pedantry.
But TTOI was a comedy. Of course you could make it up as a joke. The Cleverly thing works fine as deliberate farce or even as a piece of whimsy. What I'm saying is you couldn't make it up and be taken seriously. That's what the phrase means in my book.
All right, House of Cards? To Play the King? Both of those contained plots more far fetched.
Your problem with the Clevershambles is that it is a) improbable and b) funny. Drama has a problem with things that are funny, preferring tense looks all the time. And that is why drama is almost never fulfilling - because the real world isn't like that. Funny things happen all the time. Just because something's funny doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
We're at cross purposes. When I say "serious drama" I mean the likes of Kavanaugh QC or Smiley's People. Straightforward story telling with no attempt to be kooky or satirical. That genre. There's no place there for the sort of nonsense that happened with James Cleverly (or tbf his backers). If you tried to put something like that in you'd be told to go and have a rethink. Meaning you'd have failed to make it up.
It’s Kavanagh QC.
Not to be confused with Kavana, the rock icon from the late nineties.
That's the one. Thaw.
An absolute legend, and a decent bloke too.
The Sweeney is just brilliant. Ace TV and great characters and a London long gone.
Me and my mate, Baker, called each other Jack and George for many years.
I’d drive my Triumph Acclaim like it was the old Cortina off to a blag up west where they were tooled up with shooters.
My second car was a Triumph Acclaim !
Very good they were, too, and quite nippy. The only real fault was that they lost grip coming out of damp junctions.
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
Except of course Sir Edward has a 1st from Oxford and is an exceptionally determined and shrewd politician.
LDs 'Winning here'. The LDs only like him as leader because they don't have the foggiest as to anything much. Completely clueless.
I think it's fair to say that such is the state of the nation and those that live in it generally. Disappointing though it is as an observation.
Political debate seems long gone.
I am happy to say that’s not true in the slightest.
But the Lib Dems have always been the mildly bullied swot in the classroom, ignored by the jocks and kicked or growled at by the misanthropes.
Luckily they have a liberal dogwhistle, which can only be heard by those who can be arsed to listen or read. Which is a decent slice of middle England. But shush, let’s leave the ideologues to do their noisy thing.
If it's not true in the slightest why can't I find a single good reason to vote LD even though my views are very much aligned with their place on the political map? It's just a wasteland of middle ground so far as I can see.
They're polling 15% when they should be polling 35%.
Can you really say that their dogwhistle is tuned correctly?
What do you want from the Lib Dems?
Most people decrying them as a voting option either say they need to embrace the vibe shift plus be less woke, or say they need to stop being yellow Tories and abiding by the failing neoliberal consensus.
The party is what it is: Liberal, with both a capital and a lower case L, localist and revolutionist even if that means postcode lotteries, pro-European, social democratic on tax and spend, green, generally fans of experts, and fiercely anti-Trump.
It’s not leading the polls because it isn’t one of the big 2, but it also doesn't offer simple solutions to complicated problems (it tried in 2019 by making everything about cancelling Brexit, and got mullered at the election).
It is not parroting the very fashionable, but unevidenced, notion that “the establishment” has failed and the only option is to blow everything up and start from year zero. And for that it limits its appeal.
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
A man so daft that he plotted himself out of a leadership race.
That was his backers tbf. They tried to engineer his preferred opponent for the run off and succeeded in engineering the man himself out of the run off. You couldn't make it up. Literally couldn't make it up. If you submitted that in a script for a political drama you'd get it returned with a cover note saying "rejected on grounds of credulity".
While I share your general amusement, the pedant in me bridles at the phrase 'couldn't make it up', especially when paired with the word 'literally' - I'm fairly sure you could make it up. People make stuff up all the time, much of it less believable than that. Look at Star Wars, for example.
No but that's literally what I'm saying. You *could* make it up, yes, but not if you wanted it accepted as a serious proposition by the commissioning editor. So to all intents and purposes you couldn't.
Oh come on! This is exactly the sort of thing which happened in The Thick of It.
I'm not disputing how ridiculous the situation was. I'm pedantically disputing the use of the phrase 'you couldn't make it up'. People make up implausible stuff all the time, and much of it gets commissioned for telly. (Look at Death in Paradise. 50% of the time that finishes and you look at the wife and both shake your heads and say 'no...'. Still watch the next one though. I like light-hearted crime drama where the main puzzle is 'how'. And I have some sympathy for the writers still trying to come up with plots 100-odd episodes in).
'You couldn't make it up' is just a phrase I can rarely let go without a quibble. (See also describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island', the use of the word 'stunning' to mean 'nice', and the misuse of the word 'literally'.)
I don't trying to fall out about it. This is just pb pedantry.
But TTOI was a comedy. Of course you could make it up as a joke. The Cleverly thing works fine as deliberate farce or even as a piece of whimsy. What I'm saying is you couldn't make it up and be taken seriously. That's what the phrase means in my book.
All right, House of Cards? To Play the King? Both of those contained plots more far fetched.
Your problem with the Clevershambles is that it is a) improbable and b) funny. Drama has a problem with things that are funny, preferring tense looks all the time. And that is why drama is almost never fulfilling - because the real world isn't like that. Funny things happen all the time. Just because something's funny doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
We're at cross purposes. When I say "serious drama" I mean the likes of Kavanaugh QC or Smiley's People. Straightforward story telling with no attempt to be kooky or satirical. That genre. There's no place there for the sort of nonsense that happened with James Cleverly (or tbf his backers). If you tried to put something like that in you'd be told to go and have a rethink. Meaning you'd have failed to make it up.
It’s Kavanagh QC.
Not to be confused with Kavana, the rock icon from the late nineties.
That's the one. Thaw.
An absolute legend, and a decent bloke too.
The Sweeney is just brilliant. Ace TV and great characters and a London long gone.
Me and my mate, Baker, called each other Jack and George for many years.
My father loved The Sweeney, he also said it was a tribute to John Thaw that after a few episodes of Morse he didn't see him as Jack Regan.
Rewatching Morse, having not seen it since childhood, Thaw is stunning. Never not completely convincing.
Ditto in Kavanagh QC.
Although it'd be Kavanagh KC now if they repeated it. Doesn't sound as good, oddly. Not sure I'd watch that.
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
Except of course Sir Edward has a 1st from Oxford and is an exceptionally determined and shrewd politician.
LDs 'Winning here'. The LDs only like him as leader because they don't have the foggiest as to anything much. Completely clueless.
I think it's fair to say that such is the state of the nation and those that live in it generally. Disappointing though it is as an observation.
Political debate seems long gone.
I am happy to say that’s not true in the slightest.
But the Lib Dems have always been the mildly bullied swot in the classroom, ignored by the jocks and kicked or growled at by the misanthropes.
Luckily they have a liberal dogwhistle, which can only be heard by those who can be arsed to listen or read. Which is a decent slice of middle England. But shush, let’s leave the ideologues to do their noisy thing.
Ha ha, fabulous. It’s a fair point you make the Lib Dem’s have no ideals. After all they sold out the students on tuition fees merely to be Tory fluffers.
They made a political compromise which proved not to be worth it in the eyes of their supporters (although they'd lost significant numbers even before the details of compromises were known, so in part it was just a principle issue for many), it doesn't seem that big a deal to me. If it remains a red line for other people that's fine too.
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
A man so daft that he plotted himself out of a leadership race.
That was his backers tbf. They tried to engineer his preferred opponent for the run off and succeeded in engineering the man himself out of the run off. You couldn't make it up. Literally couldn't make it up. If you submitted that in a script for a political drama you'd get it returned with a cover note saying "rejected on grounds of credulity".
While I share your general amusement, the pedant in me bridles at the phrase 'couldn't make it up', especially when paired with the word 'literally' - I'm fairly sure you could make it up. People make stuff up all the time, much of it less believable than that. Look at Star Wars, for example.
No but that's literally what I'm saying. You *could* make it up, yes, but not if you wanted it accepted as a serious proposition by the commissioning editor. So to all intents and purposes you couldn't.
Oh come on! This is exactly the sort of thing which happened in The Thick of It.
I'm not disputing how ridiculous the situation was. I'm pedantically disputing the use of the phrase 'you couldn't make it up'. People make up implausible stuff all the time, and much of it gets commissioned for telly. (Look at Death in Paradise. 50% of the time that finishes and you look at the wife and both shake your heads and say 'no...'. Still watch the next one though. I like light-hearted crime drama where the main puzzle is 'how'. And I have some sympathy for the writers still trying to come up with plots 100-odd episodes in).
'You couldn't make it up' is just a phrase I can rarely let go without a quibble. (See also describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island', the use of the word 'stunning' to mean 'nice', and the misuse of the word 'literally'.)
I don't trying to fall out about it. This is just pb pedantry.
But TTOI was a comedy. Of course you could make it up as a joke. The Cleverly thing works fine as deliberate farce or even as a piece of whimsy. What I'm saying is you couldn't make it up and be taken seriously. That's what the phrase means in my book.
All right, House of Cards? To Play the King? Both of those contained plots more far fetched.
Your problem with the Clevershambles is that it is a) improbable and b) funny. Drama has a problem with things that are funny, preferring tense looks all the time. And that is why drama is almost never fulfilling - because the real world isn't like that. Funny things happen all the time. Just because something's funny doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
We're at cross purposes. When I say "serious drama" I mean the likes of Kavanaugh QC or Smiley's People. Straightforward story telling with no attempt to be kooky or satirical. That genre. There's no place there for the sort of nonsense that happened with James Cleverly (or tbf his backers). If you tried to put something like that in you'd be told to go and have a rethink. Meaning you'd have failed to make it up.
It’s Kavanagh QC.
Not to be confused with Kavana, the rock icon from the late nineties.
That's the one. Thaw.
An absolute legend, and a decent bloke too.
The Sweeney is just brilliant. Ace TV and great characters and a London long gone.
Me and my mate, Baker, called each other Jack and George for many years.
My father loved The Sweeney, he also said it was a tribute to John Thaw that after a few episodes of Morse he didn't see him as Jack Regan.
Whereas Dennis Waterman in Minder was George Carter if he had gone off the rails. Even down to,the boxing.
I often chat with Rodney Marshall on Twitter whose Dad, Roger, was a prolific TV writer and wrote Sweeney episodes. He adored John Thaw as an actor, was great to write for, and always put his heart and soul into it.
In an early Sweeney episode he had a scene with John Forgeham, a bit of a tough guy, and forgeham had to hit thaw in the scene as it was a blag.
Thaw started feeding him his lines which gave Forgeham the right hump, so he hit Thaw for real.
I get the impression that Trump is going to do brilliant trade deals, that in reality are no different to what existed before, so as to get out of the mess he has created, and sell it to the MAGA as evidence that he is the king of deal making.
Worse yet, it will work.
His "base" is only maybe 25% of voters though. If his support fell to that they'd be hope.
I don't think it will fall that far though. The GOP and the voting public have shown very willing to go along with his base support, and despite the current disruption shaking it it will only take a little 'good' news for more of them to go 'Oh, I overreacted a bit, it's not so bad, and I don't want to support the libs'.
Sense you're right but I choose to believe otherwise for mental health reasons.
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
Except of course Sir Edward has a 1st from Oxford and is an exceptionally determined and shrewd politician.
LDs 'Winning here'. The LDs only like him as leader because they don't have the foggiest as to anything much. Completely clueless.
I think it's fair to say that such is the state of the nation and those that live in it generally. Disappointing though it is as an observation.
Political debate seems long gone.
I am happy to say that’s not true in the slightest.
But the Lib Dems have always been the mildly bullied swot in the classroom, ignored by the jocks and kicked or growled at by the misanthropes.
Luckily they have a liberal dogwhistle, which can only be heard by those who can be arsed to listen or read. Which is a decent slice of middle England. But shush, let’s leave the ideologues to do their noisy thing.
If it's not true in the slightest why can't I find a single good reason to vote LD even though my views are very much aligned with their place on the political map? It's just a wasteland of middle ground so far as I can see.
They're polling 15% when they should be polling 35%.
Can you really say that their dogwhistle is tuned correctly?
'Should be polling 35%'
In what universe is that true for a party that is barely covered by the media and where there are four parties competing, plus the greens on not far shy of 10%?
I can't comment why you don't vote Lib Dems. And I'm no activist, and I don't stand behind every policy position, but if I had to choose one party to take the sensible, liberal position a given topic, it's the Lib Dems over Labour or the Conservatives.
And any liberal considering voting Reform is a liar or a moron.
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
A man so daft that he plotted himself out of a leadership race.
That was his backers tbf. They tried to engineer his preferred opponent for the run off and succeeded in engineering the man himself out of the run off. You couldn't make it up. Literally couldn't make it up. If you submitted that in a script for a political drama you'd get it returned with a cover note saying "rejected on grounds of credulity".
While I share your general amusement, the pedant in me bridles at the phrase 'couldn't make it up', especially when paired with the word 'literally' - I'm fairly sure you could make it up. People make stuff up all the time, much of it less believable than that. Look at Star Wars, for example.
No but that's literally what I'm saying. You *could* make it up, yes, but not if you wanted it accepted as a serious proposition by the commissioning editor. So to all intents and purposes you couldn't.
Oh come on! This is exactly the sort of thing which happened in The Thick of It.
I'm not disputing how ridiculous the situation was. I'm pedantically disputing the use of the phrase 'you couldn't make it up'. People make up implausible stuff all the time, and much of it gets commissioned for telly. (Look at Death in Paradise. 50% of the time that finishes and you look at the wife and both shake your heads and say 'no...'. Still watch the next one though. I like light-hearted crime drama where the main puzzle is 'how'. And I have some sympathy for the writers still trying to come up with plots 100-odd episodes in).
'You couldn't make it up' is just a phrase I can rarely let go without a quibble. (See also describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island', the use of the word 'stunning' to mean 'nice', and the misuse of the word 'literally'.)
I don't trying to fall out about it. This is just pb pedantry.
But TTOI was a comedy. Of course you could make it up as a joke. The Cleverly thing works fine as deliberate farce or even as a piece of whimsy. What I'm saying is you couldn't make it up and be taken seriously. That's what the phrase means in my book.
All right, House of Cards? To Play the King? Both of those contained plots more far fetched.
Your problem with the Clevershambles is that it is a) improbable and b) funny. Drama has a problem with things that are funny, preferring tense looks all the time. And that is why drama is almost never fulfilling - because the real world isn't like that. Funny things happen all the time. Just because something's funny doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
We're at cross purposes. When I say "serious drama" I mean the likes of Kavanaugh QC or Smiley's People. Straightforward story telling with no attempt to be kooky or satirical. That genre. There's no place there for the sort of nonsense that happened with James Cleverly (or tbf his backers). If you tried to put something like that in you'd be told to go and have a rethink. Meaning you'd have failed to make it up.
It’s Kavanagh QC.
Not to be confused with Kavana, the rock icon from the late nineties.
That's the one. Thaw.
An absolute legend, and a decent bloke too.
The Sweeney is just brilliant. Ace TV and great characters and a London long gone.
Me and my mate, Baker, called each other Jack and George for many years.
I’d drive my Triumph Acclaim like it was the old Cortina off to a blag up west where they were tooled up with shooters.
My second car was a Triumph Acclaim !
Very good they were, too, and quite nippy. The only real fault was that they lost grip coming out of damp junctions.
The only car I’ve ever had where the bonnet hinged at the front. Built in Swindon IIRC.
Loved mine. SOM168Y. It was red. Handled superbly.
In all seriousness, if I was the Lib Dems I would have jumped on the AI action figure trend. Perhaps drop the dodgy bar chart and post office logo, but appearing to not be stuck up your arse goes down well with the public.
They could have done a set of them with his different stunts.
Being a likable clown as opposed to dislikable one like Trump is a great USP. It gets my vote
Except of course Sir Edward has a 1st from Oxford and is an exceptionally determined and shrewd politician.
LDs 'Winning here'. The LDs only like him as leader because they don't have the foggiest as to anything much. Completely clueless.
I think it's fair to say that such is the state of the nation and those that live in it generally. Disappointing though it is as an observation.
Political debate seems long gone.
I am happy to say that’s not true in the slightest.
But the Lib Dems have always been the mildly bullied swot in the classroom, ignored by the jocks and kicked or growled at by the misanthropes.
Luckily they have a liberal dogwhistle, which can only be heard by those who can be arsed to listen or read. Which is a decent slice of middle England. But shush, let’s leave the ideologues to do their noisy thing.
If it's not true in the slightest why can't I find a single good reason to vote LD even though my views are very much aligned with their place on the political map? It's just a wasteland of middle ground so far as I can see.
They're polling 15% when they should be polling 35%.
Can you really say that their dogwhistle is tuned correctly?
Their dog whistle is one of those that can only be heard by dogs, but is outwith the range of human ears.
Jaw-dropping footage revealed by @markwhiteTV today showing what GB News believes to be Sudanese migrants showing off their 4* hotels.
This is a mockery. There are homeless British citizens sleeping rough on the street and economic migrants fleeing France are a priority for our government.
Keir Starmer promised he would end the migrant hotels, yet another failure.
These videos are nothing but an advertisement for others to come to the UK, of which we believe, there are thousands more queueing up.
If we allowed asylum seekers to work, which that moron May stopped, we wouldn't need to host them in hotels, 4* or otherwise.
Truly one of the worst policy decisions of my lifetime.
Generally speaking, the political decisions of the period 2015-2024 seem to have uniformly bad. And those the Coalition period weren't often better.
I agree (with the exception of schools, where our position in the PISA rankings notably improved), but why are you stopping in 2024? It's not as if July 2024 marked some kind of dramatic improvement (or improvement of any kind) in governance.
Until we have a government that is prepared to risk short term unpopularity to make correct economic decisions, I'm afraid we'll continue our current depressing trajectory of stagnation punctuated by periods of decline.
Those are woeful ratings for Badenoch . They should have picked Cleverly who has much more cross over appeal .
Cummings' prediction was that they would go for Cleverly next.
A man so daft that he plotted himself out of a leadership race.
That was his backers tbf. They tried to engineer his preferred opponent for the run off and succeeded in engineering the man himself out of the run off. You couldn't make it up. Literally couldn't make it up. If you submitted that in a script for a political drama you'd get it returned with a cover note saying "rejected on grounds of credulity".
While I share your general amusement, the pedant in me bridles at the phrase 'couldn't make it up', especially when paired with the word 'literally' - I'm fairly sure you could make it up. People make stuff up all the time, much of it less believable than that. Look at Star Wars, for example.
No but that's literally what I'm saying. You *could* make it up, yes, but not if you wanted it accepted as a serious proposition by the commissioning editor. So to all intents and purposes you couldn't.
Oh come on! This is exactly the sort of thing which happened in The Thick of It.
I'm not disputing how ridiculous the situation was. I'm pedantically disputing the use of the phrase 'you couldn't make it up'. People make up implausible stuff all the time, and much of it gets commissioned for telly. (Look at Death in Paradise. 50% of the time that finishes and you look at the wife and both shake your heads and say 'no...'. Still watch the next one though. I like light-hearted crime drama where the main puzzle is 'how'. And I have some sympathy for the writers still trying to come up with plots 100-odd episodes in).
'You couldn't make it up' is just a phrase I can rarely let go without a quibble. (See also describing Great Britain - the 8th largest and, what, 3rd most populous island in the world - as a 'small island', the use of the word 'stunning' to mean 'nice', and the misuse of the word 'literally'.)
I don't trying to fall out about it. This is just pb pedantry.
But TTOI was a comedy. Of course you could make it up as a joke. The Cleverly thing works fine as deliberate farce or even as a piece of whimsy. What I'm saying is you couldn't make it up and be taken seriously. That's what the phrase means in my book.
All right, House of Cards? To Play the King? Both of those contained plots more far fetched.
Your problem with the Clevershambles is that it is a) improbable and b) funny. Drama has a problem with things that are funny, preferring tense looks all the time. And that is why drama is almost never fulfilling - because the real world isn't like that. Funny things happen all the time. Just because something's funny doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
We're at cross purposes. When I say "serious drama" I mean the likes of Kavanaugh QC or Smiley's People. Straightforward story telling with no attempt to be kooky or satirical. That genre. There's no place there for the sort of nonsense that happened with James Cleverly (or tbf his backers). If you tried to put something like that in you'd be told to go and have a rethink. Meaning you'd have failed to make it up.
It’s Kavanagh QC.
Not to be confused with Kavana, the rock icon from the late nineties.
That's the one. Thaw.
An absolute legend, and a decent bloke too.
The Sweeney is just brilliant. Ace TV and great characters and a London long gone.
Me and my mate, Baker, called each other Jack and George for many years.
I’d drive my Triumph Acclaim like it was the old Cortina off to a blag up west where they were tooled up with shooters.
Comments
It missed the shorts.
It missed the shorts.
There is humour in Kavanagh and Smiley's People. It's in the dialogue. What there isn't is farcical events.
Reeves' tax rises for business owners and farmers and winter fuel allowance cuts for pensioners have dug in a negative image of her, much like VAT on fuel changes did for Lamont
Sir Keir just needs to keep reforming and slowly showing progress.
Writing him off is very silly but it won’t stop the same few from commenting that Reform are going to win a landslide. Of course they also said Johnson would be PM for a decade so their history is average shall we say.
And it's possible that Reform will cohere better for longer than previous Farage vehicles, but it would require things to be different this time.
I still think by this time next year and certainly by 2029 things will look very different.
Maybe better, maybe worse. But I stand by what I’ve said many times, Labour will be re-elected.
And with that, fin.
On which note, lamb is even more expensive in France than it is in Britain.
The economics of a sheep are not great. Expensive for the consumer and unprofitable for the farmer. The wool is largely worthless. You sell one ewe for meat and you get 2 shoulders (farm shop price maybe 30-40 each), 2 legs cut off before the shank (60-70 each), 2 rear shanks (7-8 each?), neck for about 20, best end / rack another 30-40, rump 20, breast 15, then a few bits to sell for merguez and offal. There’s not the charcuterie options with lamb that there are with pork.
That’s around £350 for a whole animal, yet all those cuts sound relatively expensive don’t they?
Contrast with a cow or pig, both of which have much greater weight of flesh, are less suicidal when in the fields, and are more nose to tail in usage.
And at this very moment, with USA politics providing the biggest story and challenge since WWII, big western European political parties should never be out of sight and mind, fizzing with top comment, alive with ideas and reshaping perspectives on both past and future, full of great thoughts with embyonic statesmen trying to outsmart and replace the established set, great speeches outlining future directions, the public hanging on every word from parliament.
Instead we have the hot news being a legal spat between two schools of feminist thought about toilets and the felling of an oak tree. Strange times.
But are you suggesting that successfully kidnapping the head of the KGB is not a farcical event?
Macron, Meloni, UVDL, Zelenskyy, Tusk get that. So does Carney.
Labour gets it but is hopelessly torn between ideological clarity and diplomatic pragmatism, the Lib Dems get it and sense the opportunity, I think Reform probably get it, in the sense that they have to decide which bed they want to make, but I’m not sure the Tories do.
Spain, Czech Republic, UK, Germany, Czech, Bulgaria, Slovakia..now the US.
https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/1912835067698692542
So it won’t be legally binding but is designed to let Trump go on US media saying he’s the greatest deal maker of all time !
Not to be confused with Kavana, the rock icon from the late nineties.
Wes He Should
Wes Streeting, one of the few cabinet ministers who is actually delivering what the people want, has an interesting interview in The Spectator.
He says he will not go on a chicken run from his Ilford North seat, in which case he is likely to lose it – a pro-Palestinian independent came within 500 votes of winning last year, and Labour is unlikely to gain votes next time.
This is brave of him, but he should go to a safe seat because he is good. He has only just started the huge task of turning the NHS round, which will take more than one parliament, but he is doing all the right things – namely, bringing in Alan Milburn, Paul Corrigan, Michael Barber and Liz Lloyd (all the people who turned the NHS round last time).
He should abandon Ilford because his country needs him.
He’s fucked the market and some supply chains too, for a long time. His legacy is going to be appalling. He will be truly reviled. His polling numbers on the economy and tariffs are cratering.
Broken, sleazy Tories and Greens on the slide!
Sunny P.
We have an actively pro-Russian president in the White House. He is sending the world economy down the toilet. I think most people have noticed and care.
2 lots of potential contempt proceeedings for Trump.
One of them is from Judge Boasberg, with the process already started.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HRmolBoM_k
The top 6 for next PM (Hills) are really bizarre:
Farage
Badenoch
Streeting
Jenrick
Cooper
Boris.
It took a decade to get back from 2015 to the strongest position for a third party in modern British history, and Davey deserves a fair bit of the credit.
Sorry, 3. And who will (eventually) replace him if he does run again and wins?
Looks like we supply about 2/3 of all french sheepmeat imports post-brexit.
I can't find the pre-brexit figures. But given Ireland and Spain and frozen suppliers like New Zealand, it's hard to imagine it was much higher.
I think it's fair to say that such is the state of the nation and those that live in it generally. Disappointing though it is as an observation.
Political debate seems long gone.
Cons were very short, 1.3 or something iirc.
Though for all Truss set Starmer and Davey up, they still had to not miss the open goal.
Honestly?
Rupert Lowe to sue Nigel Farage for libel amid Reform bullying row
Great Yarmouth MP brings legal action against party leader, Zia Yusuf and Lee Anderson over alleged ‘smear campaign’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/04/17/ruport-lowe-sues-nigel-farage-libel-reform-uk-bullying-row/
But the Lib Dems have always been the mildly bullied swot in the classroom, ignored by the jocks and kicked or growled at by the misanthropes.
Luckily they have a liberal dogwhistle, which can only be heard by those who can be arsed to listen or read. Which is a decent slice of middle England. But shush, let’s leave the ideologues to do their noisy thing.
It amounts to "Ooops. Sorry".
Follow-through required.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8g6lj8343o
They're polling 15% when they should be polling 35%.
Can you really say that their dogwhistle is tuned correctly?
The Sweeney is just brilliant. Ace TV and great characters and a London long gone.
Me and my mate, Baker, called each other Jack and George for many years.
I’d drive my Triumph Acclaim like it was the old Cortina off to a blag up west where they were tooled up with shooters.
It also led to me chanting at Jamie Vardy 'Your wife's a grass.'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0788r0xxmjo
We've seen the folly of that.
Have you got over having working class people from Essex who smoked and spoke about lager in your hotel in Mexico yet ? 😂
Very good they were, too, and quite nippy. The only real fault was that they lost grip coming out of damp junctions.
Most people decrying them as a voting option either say they need to embrace the vibe shift plus be less woke, or say they need to stop being yellow Tories and abiding by the failing neoliberal consensus.
The party is what it is: Liberal, with both a capital and a lower case L, localist and revolutionist even if that means postcode lotteries, pro-European, social democratic on tax and spend, green, generally fans of experts, and fiercely anti-Trump.
It’s not leading the polls because it isn’t one of the big 2, but it also doesn't offer simple solutions to complicated problems (it tried in 2019 by making everything about cancelling Brexit, and got mullered at the election).
It is not parroting the very fashionable, but unevidenced, notion that “the establishment” has failed and the only option is to blow everything up and start from year zero. And for that it limits its appeal.
Although it'd be Kavanagh KC now if they repeated it. Doesn't sound as good, oddly. Not sure I'd watch that.
I often chat with Rodney Marshall on Twitter whose Dad, Roger, was a prolific TV writer and wrote Sweeney episodes. He adored John Thaw as an actor, was great to write for, and always put his heart and soul into it.
In an early Sweeney episode he had a scene with John Forgeham, a bit of a tough guy, and forgeham had to hit thaw in the scene as it was a blag.
Thaw started feeding him his lines which gave Forgeham the right hump, so he hit Thaw for real.
In what universe is that true for a party that is barely covered by the media and where there are four parties competing, plus the greens on not far shy of 10%?
I can't comment why you don't vote Lib Dems. And I'm no activist, and I don't stand behind every policy position, but if I had to choose one party to take the sensible, liberal position a given topic, it's the Lib Dems over Labour or the Conservatives.
And any liberal considering voting Reform is a liar or a moron.
Loved mine. SOM168Y. It was red. Handled superbly.
Until we have a government that is prepared to risk short term unpopularity to make correct economic decisions, I'm afraid we'll continue our current depressing trajectory of stagnation punctuated by periods of decline.