UK General Discussion:The Rt. Hon Alex Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Populist Hero

[Zinneke]

I don't know why but I burst out laughing at this :

https://twitter.com/NatashaC/status/1409478342026444800

Its such a Johnsonian moment in British politics.

[Zinneke]

Can we expect a England beats Germany boost for Boris?

Well it take attention away from the Hancock affair that was threatening to become the latest national obsession.

[Zinneke]

Bugger.

Feeling a bit happier now?

I'm always going to want England to lose. That's sort of the whole point of the Home Nations in sports. And if it helps, Wales in both football and rugby annoy me more!

But I'm livid at the goodwill, international goodwill, that a lot of people had for the England squad this time with all the crap directed at the players being squandered in those last few games and after the final by the fans yet again.

I remember a couple years ago I was  reading about how England clubs were being banned from the Europe club tournaments (what became UEFA Champions League) in for a few years in the late 80’s due to hooliganism. I remember saying to myself... huh? They can’t be that bad. But some of the videos and social media posts I’ve seen after yesterday’s final are sickening. I get theyre heartbroken and frustrated that England will never win the Euro or WC but.. that’s heartbreak and frustration does not justify the total vile, disgusting, appalling way in which those fans have presented themselves

As I and others have explained, England fans are not the worst actually, just the...most aesthetically in-your-face?

Anyway, surely the real political scandal out of the scenes will be how so many were allowed to gather in the Wembley area with very light policing and stewards totally out of their depth for the biggest sporting event in 55 years, during the tail end of a pandemic too. The Mayor, PM and relevant authorities totally misjudged the capacity of opportunistic, drunk, coked up guys to try their luck storming Wembley. When even a minor Europa League game is on here I can't get off the stadium metro stops without a football ticket (not that I would ever want to get off in Anderlecht) and there are several perimeters of control.

[Zinneke]

Is Cummings talking sense in this thread about the British media sphere's approach to the pandemic?

https://twitter.com/Dominic2306/status/1422496357466640396

[Zinneke]

The only thing Cummings has a point on re the government’s pandemic response is the failure to shut the borders in March 2020. That was the only point at which an Antipodean solution to the pandemic was a possibility (although given that Britain is neither Australia nor New Zealand that was always a possibility only). Since then the only way of keeping deaths at an absolute minimum would have been to keep the country in a permanent state of March style lockdown, which would have been fairly unsaleable politically back in the Summer of 2020 when no-one had any concrete idea as to the timescale of vaccine development. Cummings’ is bullsh**tting (not surprising but hey ho) if he thinks that his approach (of instituting lockdowns a couple of weeks sooner than the government eventually did) would have made a significant dent in the death toll.

I think his main criticism in that thread is that the right-wing gammons and Guardian caricatures like Calladwhatshername were so obsessed with their favourite "FREEDOM VS GOVERNMENT" or "Real lockdown was never tried" hobby horse that they turned Covid into a "Culture War" issue and the result was that science, reason and any kind of realistic, data-based policy was hindered.

But yeah keep frothing at the mouth with your Telegraph subscription. Saving Britain everyday.

How long before he gets an account here?

I’d expect him to get an account on voteuk first if he joined a political forum but thinking about that made me laugh.

Actually Vote Uk, albeit an outlier, is still a case in point. I was stunned reading it how opposed they were to the mere act of wearing a face mask. Obviously mostly driven by the "libertarian thatcherite" (read : crypto-authoritarian neo-fascist) but even some left-wingers were getting into intellectual debate about the utility of the face mask as an act of oppression.

I remember the days when anti-government people were campaigning for the right to cover their faces in demos.

[Zinneke]

I mean, the only paper I read on a regular basis is the Guardian so as usual you’re missing the point. Frankly, expecting ‘science, reason and any kind of realistic data-based (lol) policy’ to inform decision making in this situation (as in any other) was always a fantasy. Of course someone like Cummings, having spent x-number of years huddled up in a County Durham bunker imbibing Otto Von Bismarck through his eyeballs, might actually con himself into believing that, but someone like you with a bit of common sense shouldn’t.

Even if it were the case it doesn't mean the media should turn every single Covid measure into a culture war.

[Zinneke]

Pass the pipe when you are done!

[Zinneke]

https://twitter.com/search?q=neil%20oliver&src=typed_query

Strangely Neil Oliver's view of parents having complete supremacy over their children is similar to the views of some "left-wing" American posters.

[Zinneke]

Raab went from top choice in the Cabinet amongst Conservative Home readers to 4th from bottom. Beautiful seeing that peepsqueak psychopath get bludgeoned by his own.

[Zinneke]

Looks like there’s no reshuffle and it was, to quote Peter Mannion, a way of getting MPs to behave and eat their truffles.

I know this a tangent but Peter Mannion is a better character than Malcolm Tucker. There I said it.

[Zinneke]

It is a trend and a highly worrying one.

One thing has to be said though - it has next to nothing to do with rudeness or "disrespect" on social media and pushing ending anonymity there as a "solution" verges on actual dishonesty.

Social media has played a massive part in radicalisation. I agree that anonymity shouldn't be waived but Facebook and Twitter should ban people more readily and crack down on the bots.

[Zinneke]

In other news, it seems Johnson has basically the alt-right reading of Rome's decline and fall.

And he doesn't have the excuse of ignorance given he is a Classics degree holder. Zemmour was using the same talking point (only agreeing that it was Genghis Khan that caused the migration push).

I blame the advent of pop-historians like Niall Ferguson who taught a significant amount of conservatives about how to be revisionist without looking like a crank.

[Zinneke]

Politicians right now are all feining shock at this government's corruption - and they're not wrong because it is a real problem.  But as someone who works with local government every day and in an industry adjacent to *construction* no less - the UK is not the nation of upstanding hard workers we like to think it is.  It's corrupt from the bottom to the top and frankly the rot is what helps the wheels go round.  Not fun for those of us in the industry however that try not to be corrupt.

The evangelical says that but the evangelical will still put a cross next to his godless, hooker-hiring, shyster Tory MP because its better to "own the left" and "be a winner" than it is to have a satanic Labour government.

Its why the evangelical will burn in hell.

[Zinneke]

We still have Tory old boys scuttling around Brussels as "foreign policy" experts in between pints, affirming that Europe couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery in terms of these kind of operations...well look how your party have turned the UK'S organisational prowess into a laughing stock.

[Zinneke]

More than that, vaccines were explicitly advocated as our "passport to freedom".

In every Western country...and it has severely affected the credibility of institutions just when they are at their most vulnerable.

[Zinneke]

You only have to see how Theresa May earns 200k per speech to realise all you need is a short stint as PM in order to be bribed attract the services of big bankers or corporations. Wasn't there rumours Johnson was so jealous of May's income he was ready to resign even before COVID hit and just hit the money trail?

[Zinneke]

All this talk or Sunak and Patel being Tory leaders, do you think the white Tories and the Queen would want a nonwhite British premier?

We Tories are far too busy oppressing the poor and cooking up evil plans to sell the NHS to worry about American imports like race.

Says the guy who has Cromwell next to Thatcher in his sig.

Guess that's not race though, just casual anti-Irish/anti-Catholic bigotry?

[Zinneke]

An interesting thing to note is that Boris is the first Tory leader in a long time to have no Praetorian Guard in Parliament that is willing to back him to the hilt. Even Major and May had their arch-loyalists. This is probably in part due to the fact he spent eight years out of Westminster when he was Mayor. Whilst Boris does have his allies (Burns, Dorries, Malthouse, Patel, Shapps) they are mostly in government positions and not on the backbenches (where he needs them) and the fact that he does not belong to any party faction is another strength that is now working against him because he can only rely on personal connections rather than factional allies like Thatcher or Major could.

https://twitter.com/SnoozeInBrief/status/1480969616222523392

https://twitter.com/zinovievletter/status/1481211456595152900

[Zinneke]

I wish Peter Mannion would be a real person in the midst of all this, sent out to defend the Johnson government on the radio...

[Zinneke]

A minor detail: we have our first Minister from the 2019 intake. Andrew Griffith is the unpaid Parliamentary Under Secretary for Policy at the Cabinet Office, to support Steve Barclay and free up room for him.

Generally what determines if a new MP becomes a minister or becomes Lobby Fodder? What's the actual selection process ?

If the operative word is process, he was appointed by Boris Johnson and that was Johnson's prerogative to do so (technically the monarch appoints ministers). If that was not the intended question, I concur with what Conservatopia and MaxQue said. Griffith was also the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Boris Johnson personally. Previous holders of that role include Gavin Williamson who was Parliamentary Private Secretary to David Cameron, and got a lot of good and did a lot of bad as a result.

A huge amount of politics anywhere is about networking. Were you the son or daughter of a politician, did you work for a politician in their office or on their campaigns, etc.
It shouldn't be too surprising that the guy whose house serves as HQ for BoJo's leadership campaign becomes the first minister among his intake, serving BoJo in his cabinet.

It shouldn't be a surprise. But at the same time if I could put down the Western political class's decline to one factor it would be the slow and gradual re-aristocratization of the whole thing.  With University as a (shoddy) veil for "Meritocracy".

[Zinneke]

As an aside, Boris Johnson really is the very last person who should be blasé about abusing parliamentary privilege. There are all sorts of unpleasant rumours about him and his personal life and actions over the years floating around that the wider public has never heard a whiff of.

Yes I thought this- I know of at least one that is common enough that many newspapers openly hint at it and there are no doubt countless more. Once you take the stance he has done all it takes is one opposition MP who is retiring and the current benchmark set by Johnson is that everything is fair game.

Do tell.

It almost certainly involves shagging.

[Zinneke]

https://twitter.com/StewartMcDonald/status/1511734253826060298

[Zinneke]

Hasn’t the good reason he has kept Patel the fact that she is the only Cabinet member who is remotely loyal?

[Zinneke]

It's still a mystery how his team never covered such a routine base when insulating him from potential attacks.

[Zinneke]

A Labour-LibDem government is more attractive than one dependent on the SNP, this is the opposite of a scare campaign lol.

The Telegraph's goal is to scare Con-LibDem swing voters surely?