This Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy

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Scottish Secretary Alister Jack confirms he'll be standing down at the next election (but seemingly declines the peerage offered by Johnson, so he can stay in parliament and cabinet until the 2024 election). Very marginal seat - Tory majority of 1.3k over the SNP in 2019. Will be an interesting one - was Labour 2005-2015, but has otherwise been an SNP-Tory marginal, which is very much the state of politics in the Borders right now.

The context here is the news (as reported in the Times) that the sitting MPs offered peerages will likely have to stand down in order to be elevated. So we could still see by-elections in the seats of Alok Sharma, Nigel Adams and Nadine Dorries.

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d Andrea Jenkyns (who opened the conference by operatically singing the national anthem - including the more... aggressive verses).

the one with "Rebellious Scots to crush!" or something else?

Thankfully she stopped before she got that far!

But she did include all the ones asking God to crush your enemies, before the conference became 48 hours attacking their own party, which had some… interesting implications.

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Damian Green's remarks about sewage* aren't terribly helpful all told.

Jonathan Ashworth's live reaction pretty much sums it up:

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Richard Bacon is standing down as MP for South Norfolk (majority of 21k) at the next election.

Skeptical of climate change, anti-terror laws, aiding any combat in the Middle East, and public scrutiny of his use of taxis, Bacon was an odd duck as a Tory MP. His most prominent moment seems to be his accidental role in the downfall of Charles Clarke as Home Secretary. His questions about the release of prisoners helped open the scandal that downed Clarke, who Bacon apparently liked and didn't want fired.

Earlier in the year, he was criticised for being "practically anonymous" locally, and recently lost a vote held by his local association, who seem to have threatened to open selections up if he stood again.

The last time anyone other than the Tories won South Norfolk was the 1945 election, so I guess we should get used to whichever Tory candidate replaces Bacon.

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Dominic Raab is retiring at the next election - leaving Esher and Walton open. Slim 2.7k Tory majority over the Lib Dems in 2019, after a concerted tactical vote campaign in 2019.

I’d be curious to see whether the tactical vote was anti-Tory, or anti-Raab. Local elections results this year put Lib Dems marginally ahead of the Tories, but behind the collective of Residents Associations that seem to dominate locally.

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Phillip Dunne (Ludlow, majority of 23k) also standing down. Seat was Lib Dem 2001-2005, and has been safely Conservative (with scattered opposition) ever since.

Edit: dates fixed

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Sunak’s Cabinet Office reporting Johnson’s apparent Chequers lawbreaking to the police, rather than covering for him, is producing some wild reaction from the backbenches:
https://twitter.com/CatNeilan/status/1661292796353847298

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Is this actually a significant group of MPs, or is it a small group of troublemakers who happen to have the ear of some sympathetic journalists?

I’d gamble it’s the latter right now. They’re briefing anonymously to keep their numbers obscured, and the tactic seems to be to bombard friendly journalists (see Christopher Hope) with quotes, rather than spread out amongst the different political editors etc.

As ever, the number of Johnson defenders is hard to gauge. Is it the 20-30 votes he got to oppose the Windsor Framework? Or are there the 100 votes Graham Brady says he got in nominations to be leader again last October? Presumably it’s much closer to the first than the second, which is unverified anyway.

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There's more:
https://twitter.com/benrileysmith/status/1661366579659960324

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Three Tory MPs announced their retirement at the next election during the mad weekend where Johnson, Dorries and Adams resigned:

Will Quince is the member for Colchester (Tory majority of 9.4k). His seat was Lib Dem until 2015, but seems to have developed into a Tory-Lab marginal, which has (with the exception of 2019), come down to a tight 5k majority for the Tories ever since they first one it. Quince is an odd duck - he's rolled from one ministerial post to another, resigning in the anti-Johnson wave of June 6th, only to accept a new appointment the next day. He was sent to the Health Department under Truss, and has stayed there under Sunak.

Royston Smith is the member for Southampton Itchen (Tory majority of 4.5k). Itchen is a seat with a large student population (I'd know, trust me) and covers a large part of the city. It came down to a mere 31 vote majority in 2017, so this one looks pretty dire for the Tories under current polling. Beesley could probably give you all a better run-down than I could. Smith himself is a pretty strident Leave advocate, and has made a number of clumsy comments to constituents and the media at large.

Bill Cash is the member for Stone (Tory majority of 19.9k). Ardent brexiteer, one of the original Maastricht rebels, and the oldest MP (83), I honestly expected him to be a 'lifer' at this point. More could be said about his role in the ERG's "star chamber" of lawyers, his meandering approach to speechcraft, and his prominence during the Brexit debates. But that's probably a job for someone else.

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It’s been a long three and a half years - definitely wouldn’t have called Jenrick outliving Johnson in government.

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Lucy Allan is standing down as MP for Telford (Conservative majority of 10.9k) at the next election. While she won a healthy majority at the last election, her previous two wins in 2017 and 2015 were uber-marginal, at 720 and 730 votes respectively. Was comfortably Labour during the Blair years, and stayed Labour by just over 900 votes in 2010.

Allan’s statement is very much calibrated to stress she’s not running *in Telford*, so sounds like she might be about to try the chicken run to somewhere safer.

Not much to say about Allan’s career. Brief staff bullying scandal, a lot of talk about her libertarian instincts (which informed her approach to COVID) and one time she posted an edited video of Starmer that implied he had chosen not to prosecute grooming gangs. 

Until/unless she’s selected somewhere else, she represents the 40th sitting Tory (with the whip) to retire at the next election.

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Eddie Hughes, incumbent MP for Walsall North, has been selected for Tamworth at the next election (he's one of those who's been searching for a safer seat).

Which begs the question - if the incumbent member for Tamworth, currently under investigation by the Standards Committee, where to be suspended and a by-election triggered, would the local association pick a new candidate?

And if the new Tory candidate won the by-election, would they then face-off against Hughes in a *third* selection process for 2024?

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And is Tamworth really so safe after the locals?

I mean, nowhere’s *truly* safe for the Tories in this environment, given even seats like North Shropshire can be lost.

But yeah, the locals showed some particularly dire results for the Tories in areas represented by scandal-hit MPs (see the results in Andrew Bridgen’s patch for another example). Tamworth fits nicely into that column. Would have been interested to see what that council would look like if the whole, rather than only part, had been up for election this year…

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Steve Brine is standing down at the next election.

His constituency of Winchester has a majority of only 985 vote over the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems, of course, won this after a very rare re-run in 1997 (with the LD majority jumping from *2 votes* to 20,000 between general election and by-election), and held it until 2010.

Brine himself was one of those who lost the whip in 2019, but reconciled with Johnson in time for the general election - then went on to be a prominent anti-Johnson rebel last summer. He’s currently in a bit of trouble over lobbying from the healthcare industry, which, given his chairmanship of the Health and Social Care committee, hasn’t been received well. I believe he’s still under investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

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A former TV producer, Daisy Goodwin, has accused one of the Conservative candidates for London Mayor of groping her in 10 Downing Street.

The alleged event happened back when Daniel Korski was a special advisor to David Cameron, and Goodwin had been invited to a meeting to discuss collaboration on a TV project. 

She’s written up an editorial in the Times naming him.

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Two more Conservative MPs are standing down in 2024.

Chris Clarkson is standing down as MP for Heywood and Middleton, citing boundary changes. He’s only got a majority of 663, so possible he’s been offered the chance to run elsewhere. Interesting seat - it’s the closest UKIP seem to have come to winning a by-election against Labour, back in 2014, but it was only in 2019 that Labour finally lost the constituency - after having held it since it’s creation in 1983.

Greg Knight is standing down as MP for East Yorkshire. Majority of 22k, so no fear of losing the seat here. Knight is 74, so presumably he’s just decided to call it a day? Slightly odd career in the Commons - everything seemed to revolve around cars: opposing low-emission zones, speedbumps, and park-and-ride schemes, changing the law to exclude vintage cars from MOTs, getting embroiled in the expense scandal for spending taxpayer cash to repair the driveway up to the garage he keeps his car collection in. Knight is also a member of MP4, a band made up of a cross-party group of MPs from Labour, the Tories, and the SNP.

That all pales in comparison, however, to his magnum opus, this campaign video:

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Daniel Korski has withdrawn from the race to be Tory candidate for Mayor of London.

Unclear if the party will appoint a new candidate to fill out what was supposed to be a three-man shortlist, or if it’ll be a head-to-head between the two remaining candidates.

Potential for some sniping here, given the frontrunner (MP Paul Scully) was left off the shortlist.

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Sunak contriving to avoid PMQs both this week and next. Not hard to read things into that.

Aye - I saw several journalists point out that he’s now on track to have the poorest PMQs attendance in modern times:

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I think the appropriate question would be what does Sir Falsetto have to offer in any role other than that of parliamentarian? He’ll have plenty of fodder for scheming and rat******* whilst in opposition so I’m sure that prospect suits him just fine.

I hear he sells a mean fireplace.

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It is a tad amusing just how desperate Seb Payne and Paul Mason are for a safe seat at this point. My modest proposal is that they should be offered their respective party nominations uncontested - but in Orkney and Shetland, and be forced to do retail politics, in Gaelic, in remote hamlets on the isles for the next year.

If nothing else, at least we could film it as a half-hour sitcom for Channel 4, so something useful comes out of all this. Working title: Electoral Payne

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You could create an entire quiz of misleading questions out of the chicken runs this year:

• Which Wallis caused trouble when they turned up in Windsor?
• Which MP caused chaos in the Conservative Party, thanks to their run in Tamworth?
• Who won the Battle of Waterloo(ville)?

And so on.

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Oh well, at least we won't get the excruciatingly cringey photo-ops with Sunak now.

He still gave it his best shot…


My favourite though, is still Ed Davey photoshopping an England shirt onto himself:

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https://twitter.com/BBCBreaking/status/1695482838253002828
I know self-awareness was never Dorries' strong suit. But I think irony may now finally be dead.