that doesn't work for me.
Was it Paul Whitehouse exceedingly drunk? Or Stanley Unwin?
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that doesn't work for me.
Was it Paul Whitehouse exceedingly drunk? Or Stanley Unwin?
Andy_Ross
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Yes, I put it in youtube tags and it isn't on there lol
Here's a link that works
https://twitter.com/TheFastShow1/status/1488264588000854017
Here's a link that works
https://twitter.com/TheFastShow1/status/1488264588000854017
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Well it looks like Sue Gray did her job and Tory MPs have just enough of a fig leaf to keep Boris Johnson in post. The British public have short enough memories that this will all be forgotten when they're distracted by the successes of Brexit, the next big Covid news or the extra bank holiday in June to mark the queen's 70th jubilee. 
Mojo
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Perhaps Central Office told her to do a bit of ducking and weaving, and she didn’t realise it was a metaphor.
Makes about as much sense as her normal stuff
Had she just been to a work event?
Or a neurological issue
Andy_Ross
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Julian Smith (Tory MP for Skipton and Ripon, former Chief Whip and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland) tweeted
@JulianSmithUK
The smear made against Keir Starmer relating to Jimmy Saville yesterday is wrong & cannot be defended. It should be withdrawn. False and baseless personal slurs are dangerous, corrode trust & can't just be accepted as part of the cut & thrust of parliamentary debate.
@JulianSmithUK
The smear made against Keir Starmer relating to Jimmy Saville yesterday is wrong & cannot be defended. It should be withdrawn. False and baseless personal slurs are dangerous, corrode trust & can't just be accepted as part of the cut & thrust of parliamentary debate.
Andy_Ross
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remember, the rules are: Lies are ok. Truthfully pointing out lies is not allowed
Existing protocol is unfit to deal with liars, it was drawn up in the days when telling a lie in Parliament was thought to be dishonorable.
The current speaker is very weak and is effectively shielding Johnson.
Dominic Raab tells Radio 4 Today that Boris slur against Starmer was ‘normal cut and thrust’ of Parliamentary debate.
Existing protocol is unfit to deal with liars, it was drawn up in the days when telling a lie in Parliament was thought to be dishonorable.
The current speaker is very weak and is effectively shielding Johnson.
Dominic Raab tells Radio 4 Today that Boris slur against Starmer was ‘normal cut and thrust’ of Parliamentary debate.
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Has it actually impacted his approval with the public though? Obviously political actors that want to remove him talk as if they are outraged on behalf of the public, but is that born out in polling?The British public have short enough memories that this will all be forgotten when they're distracted by the successes of Brexit, the next big Covid news or the extra bank holiday in June to mark the queen's 70th jubilee.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/boris-johnson-approval-rating
Partygate broke in late November. I'm not sure I see much of a falling off a cliff in support. It's more like there has been a downward trend since April/May last year
73% seem to think he's doing a bad job up from 60-odd percent before "Partygate" happened. That's pretty damning IMO.
Realistically, given that around 10% of people seem to be perpetually undecided, I'm not sure how much lower it can go - there are always Tory loyalists.
That said, the British public seem to have pretty malleable opinions and we've got some extra bank holidays coming up, Covid will likely go into abeyance over the summer, foreign holidays will be back on the cards and I'm sure that there'll be some EU nonsense to drum up support for Boris "the best PM since Churchill" Johnson.
You cannot be dishonourable when you have no honour.
Andy_Ross
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That's just it, when those in the system have no honour it all falls down.
That's the kind of thinking that means you chose Cromwell over Charles II.
Do you have a graph that shows some kind of a bump when partygate broke? I see a downwards trend since April/May. Some demographics maybe show a bump there, but I don't find it very convincing. The fact that you can find a drop between October and December when he'd been declining since May doesn't tell you anything of significance happened in November.
He seems to have bottomed out at 46% support amongst Conservatives. Again, that's really off a decline that started in May.
My take, for what little it's worth is that all the lockdowns etc is him playing against type. Opening everything up comes more naturally to him and I'd expect it to help.That said, the British public seem to have pretty malleable opinions and we've got some extra bank holidays coming up, Covid will likely go into abeyance over the summer, foreign holidays will be back on the cards and I'm sure that there'll be some EU nonsense to drum up support for Boris "the best PM since Churchill" Johnson.
Unfortunately both the UK and US political systems have been founded on the assumption that people will tend to follow the rules and when they don't that there will be consequences. The problem is that this is mainly governed by precedent instead of there being specific rules - and punishments for breaking.
The likes of Boris Johnson (and Donald Trump) have discovered that so long as you don't believe yourself to be governed by the "rules" you can simply ignore them safe in the knowledge that there isn't the political will among your cowed political allies to enforce them.
Personally I'd rather live in a republic than even a constitutional monarchy and think that the amount of power and influence that the gentry have is obscene in a country that considers itself (or at least should consider itself) a modern democracy. The likes of Boris Johnson benefit from this residual feudal mentality in the UK IMO.
I was thinking last night, that it would be nice if we could sue Eton College out of existance for the damage they seem to have done to this country. Dreaming is free.
Have they? I'm not sure that this is true at all. I would say that the US system is more founded on the realisation that everything is political, even the law, hence their views on impeachment following the trial of Warren Hastings.
It's not a discovery. This has been known for hundreds of years. It has just been convenient to present it as otherwise.
The difference with Boris and Trump is they make far less of a pretence about it. There probably are leaders who would feel honour bound not to break the rules, Theresa May would perhaps be an example, but do such people make good Prime Ministers? I think many people would take Johnson over May any day of the week. I think that if one insists on politicians complying with middle class morality, then middle class morality gets baked into the political assumptions. You end up being governed by dry moral prudes like May and Starmer, or PR men like Blair.
I would say they benefit from the working class being repelled by middle class morality. Maybe living in a republic like the US would be better where politics isn't dominated by the rich.
BP (Before Pandemic) I was often driving through Eton in the morning and I always wondered how many future PMs, ministers, high court judges and the likes I was driving past. It is when you think about it absolutely disgusting that simply going to that one school assures "success" in later life for most of them.
The greatest achievement of Thatcherism was to convince the working class that they were middle class.
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