The ‘Big Dog’ is trying to be re-crowned, God help us …
She’s gone, or will be once her successor has been ‘crowned’ by next week. Who will that be? In the mother-and-father of all comebacks it could be Johnson. The rumours started yesterday as soon as the first dust had settled, and now it’s the theme of the print editions’ front pages. However, the dear old Star didn’t disappoint us. They are jubilant because their Tesco iceberg lettuce survived Truss in No 10. Have a look at their front page – it’s at the bottom of the usual compilation (link)
Firstly, the ‘good’ news: Hunt and Wallace are not going to compete for the No 10 spot. Or so they said yesterday. Also, Gove is alleged not to plan to run. With the news of ‘Big Dog will be back Back’, who knows what the rest will decide. There’s one small but dark cloud on the BJ horizon: the HoC Privileges Committee still has to decide about Johnson’s peculations. Given that Labour desperately wants a GE now it is easy to see that they’ll do their utmost to stir the proverbial brown stuff, especially since the Tories really cannot afford to have to run yet another coronation should yon brown stuff forces a re-crowned BJ to resign yet again.
The commentariat in the MSM are naturally having a field day, and so do their ‘sources’ in the Tory Party. It’s all so very tedious. We’re again treated to the theme of ‘bitter rivalry’, with gossip that Ms Mordaunt ‘doesn’t want to play second fiddle to Sunak’ in the DT (link, paywalled) while The Times carefully slips off their fence, just a little bit, writing that the ‘bitter rivalry between Johnson and Sunak’ would make ‘P4P’ the ‘unity choice’ (link, paywalled).
Let’s have a quick look at how the latest PM selection, this coronation, will proceed. After all, La Truss said she’d be out by the end of next week when her replacement will have been found. Since she’d had a long talk with Sir Graham Brady yesterday, I’m sure she knew by the time of her resignation speech how Brady and the 1922 Committee would proceed. Here’s how:
Nominations opened yesterday and will close at 2pm on Monday. Any hopeful will need to have the support of at least 100 MPs. Given that there are 357 Tory MPs, this means there’ll be no more than three candidates left. Next:
“If three leadership hopefuls make the cut, a ballot of Tory MPs will take place at 3.30pm to eliminate one, with the result announced at 6pm. Either way an indicative vote between the final two will be held at 6.30pm and the result of that will be declared at 9pm. At that point the loser might choose to drop out and allow a coronation, in which case the remaining candidate would immediately become Prime Minister. But if they refused to do so, the contest would immediately proceed to an online ballot of party members for the rest of the week.That would close at 11am next Friday, with Conservative officials saying the final result of the contest would be announced “later that day”.” (paywalled link)
So the untrustworthy Tory membership peasants – they’re old and ignorant anyway – will get a chance to vote again should their overlords, those mighty (and mightily stupid) MPs not be capable of crowning or re-crowning a PM all by themselves. It’s futile to speculate today who will emerge. Given the stupidity of said MPs who are now desperate to find a way to cling to their seats at the next GE, they might indeed go for their imagined ‘best chance of survival’ and plump for Johnson because ‘he’s a vote winner’. It remains to be seen if the electorate will be ‘charmed’ again by BJ. Hilarity in times of dire news is enjoyable and distracting, but won’t solve the problems battering our country.
Looking into my own, cynically coloured crystal ball I predict that the candidate will win who’ll commit to leaving Wallace – allegedly the one candidate Labour fears most even though he won’t stand (paywalled link) – and Hunt in place. Remember the outcry by yon MP on Wednesday, about how job-grabbing has made the Tories into the shambolic party they are? In today’s DT, Andrew Mitchell MP also warns:
“Tory Party won’t survive with tribal gangs who back a leader just to get a Cabinet job – We are in the last chance saloon but there is still time to unite country and party if we elect someone who can control the economic crisis” (paywalled link)
We can expect acres of pixels in the MSM’s weekend editions, full of gossip by ‘sources’, trying to justify why one candidate is better and more unifying than another. There will be scant ‘news’ about decisions the Truss caretaker government will have to take. Will the candidates talk about budgets? The presentation of that Autumn Budget is only ten days away. Will the crowned or re-crowned candidate make promises to the current office holders about leaving them in their jobs? We’ll have to wait and see.
Now that Truss has thrown in the towel she cannot ask for a vote of confidence and trigger a GE. Labour and the LibDems are predictably demanding a GE be held now. The Tories however, be they ever so suicidal, be they ever so keen to dance the ‘Death Hoky-Coky’ by plumping for the ‘Big Dog’ again, know that their only chance to avoid a total wipe-out at the next GE is to plod on, in the hope that ‘events’ will turn things around for them.
You’ll have noticed that there’s one factor left out in all this political to-and-fro, including the Labour demands for a GE: us plebs. We’re after all untrustworthy and cannot be expected to vote as we ought to. Our concerns about inflation, about energy prices, about the coming winter and how to survive it, about illegal immigrants for whose comfort we’re paying through the nose, about Net Zero and green crappery: these are of no interest.
Westminster is set to play their beloved games of gossip, backstabbing, blood on floors and securing the best Whitehall ‘sources’. That’s all that matters to them. We, the electorate, the taxpayers, do not. I do wish the times we’re forced to live in were just a little bit less ‘interesting’.
But, surely now is the time for proportional representation since there are a number of new small Parties. If either of the Biggies can be persuaded…
We’re living under a government of occupation now, which would never allow anything to happen that got in the way of their project. They need for the time being to keep the illusion of democracy going, but will essentially ensure that nothing interferes with their project.
I don’t know either about the idea that has been mooted on this site from time to time, of the smaller parties joining forces. They would have to be very careful that one of the parties did not go “rogue” and bring all of them down together. I’ve got my doubts about one or two of them.
On the whole I agree with you Viv. Except for one point.
The fact is that Bojo was elected by us voters.
Of course he was elected solely because he promised to ‘Get Brexit Done’. We did not vote for the green crappery, the WEF, illegal immigrants etc.
Any way, I see no hope for the future at the moment.
You are absolutely right Pauline and I will never vote for these clowns ever again.
With the polls showing a Conservative wipe out at a GE, people are, like the doomed workers in the Twin Towers, clearly caught between staying put and getting hideously burned or jumping to certain death under Labour.
And we have reached the crazy point where Boris might be returned, not for the country’s sake, but in the hope of saving the Conservative Party. Dan Wootten said it was necessary ‘to save Britain from the globalist elites.” No! Boris is one of them; his dad is a eugenicist on record as wanting global population reduction, and laughing about it, and his wife and her buddies are brainless green zealots pushing net zero with net zero knowledge of any science or facts whatsoever.
I suppose the only ray, a very small ray, to emerge from all this, not that it helps, is the revelation to a much wider public of the complete dearth of democracy, respect for democracy and the offices of state, and the shadowy globalist control, about all of which ‘conspiracy theorists’ have long warned.
Final point. Ken Livingstone would be happy with Sunak – that says it all.
Let’s hope to god its Penny Mordaunt and neither of Boris or Dishy, the acceptable face of the treasury.
t g s . Well it’s all guesswork at the moment who will stand. But if Mordaunt stands, most unlikely to win and if she did would be out for incompetence in no time flat.
Current betting
Ritchie Soona 5/6 Boris Johnson 7/4
Penny Mordaunt 11/2 David Frost 100/1
Looks like God is not listening (sorry, couldn’t resist).
You mean the Penny Mordaunt who is pally with that nice benign Bill Gates?
Boris or Sunak? One rejected by MPs or one rejected by members. Two unity candidates to run the asylum. Genius.
Agreed Matt up North. I see no hope for us.
While all this goes on, the biosecurity state and digital cage is being built around us. If we’re not very careful indeed, one day soon we’ll wake up to find our bank accounts frozen, then chaos for a while probably , then “salvation” in the form of the Digitalised Pound aka Britcoin aka CBDC.
We’re living under a government of occupation; I agree with an observation I read today (by someone or other), that it feels like Germany in the 1930’s . Evil all around us and impending doom.
Spot on, and there is much more going on insidiously, like carbon content being added to products (touted as help for consumer choice) as a fore-runner to being able, with those CBDCs, to forbid their purchase if you have exceeded some arbitrary allowance for the week.
Well that didn’t take long. The ‘ink’ is barely dry.
https://summit.news/2022/10/21/australian-bank-begins-linking-customer-transactions-to-carbon-footprint/
Yes mary. One or two things that have happened to me lately have alerted me to the fact that our banks are basically after grabbing our money away from us.
I received an Update of Terms and Conditions small print from my bank this week. It quietly stated that it now has extra powers to stop dodgy looking payments. For my own good, to stop money laundering and fraud of course.
Johnson would bring the green stuff with him.
I am becoming increasingly concerned for the sanity of ( Mainly ) socialist ( mainly ) women who speak or more often scream and drown out other speakers ,in a display of bad manners… But even worse is the content., It consists first,of irrational slogans seamlessly following one another by a string of further slogans with no connectivity or even reality.
I give you a recent example. “Unfunded tax cuts, Fantasy economics, Benefitting the rich not the poor, Treasury Knows what its doing, Trickle down doesn’t work. etc., proven,.. Tax cutting doesn’t work.
” … I know, foolish is it not. But it is working for the cretinous loud left, who cannot spare the time to work things out, and the foolish Tory who ditto.
t g s. Unfortunately you are right that Johnson would bring back the same old same old.
I quite like James Forsyth’s description: “Britain is suffering from box-set politics. Each series is more dramatic (and less plausible) than the last. The plot twists go from the unlikely to the unbelievable. The narrative arc is ever more compressed. Characters come and go with alarming speed. And the most unlikely of comebacks is mooted.”
Unfortunately, it’s a series fewer and fewer people want to watch. Series 1 in December 2019 was a chart topper, but like most series the script writers quickly run out of ideas and think a new script writer will help. It rarely does as the case of Carrie Johnson shows.
I’ve only now had time to see what, if anything, John Redwood has to say. He’s kept well out of the ongoing shenanigans, writing about the economy.
Today he’s unusually scathing in the most polite way – worth a read:
https://johnredwoodsdiary.com/2022/10/21/another-leadership-election/
Viv. Scathing indeed but not sufficiently outraged to distance himself from that he finds unacceptable by crossing the floor and becoming and becoming an Independent
Jake I have not read it yet but I would rather he became either the PM, or better still the Cof E.
As an Idependent (or member of one of the small parties, if he got elected he would have no power at all.
John Redwood has no power now except as a facilitator of the Not-The-Tory Party to keep the credulous centre Right on side. That is his role and always has been since his failed leadership bid. McVey, Baker, Davies, Davis, Patel and others play the same game. If they don’t rock the boat too much they will be well rewarded and they can focus on their secondary income streams.
I’m inclined to agree.
Interesting… Watching the Farage outside broadcast last night from Deal in Kent. (GB News) He had several shows of hands.
The biggest concerns were immigration and fisheries.
Plus nobody wanted Boris back.
There was general hostility to the Torys for their incompetence, narcissism and self interest.
Plus rage that there was no-one else to vote for and calls for Farage to return to politics.
You forgot to mention, unintentionally I am sure, yes they were quiet over Boris, but there was a huge uniform groan at the mention of Sunak.
That is interesting Phil O’S. Add my groan to the others re Sunak.
During the programme, whilst talking economic boat migrants a smug journalist said:
‘you cannot stop people from coming here. It is possible to swim the channel’.
Nige had a wonderful, wonderful reply:
‘Do you know more people have walked on the moon than have swum, unaided, across the channel?’.
Biscotte……….and that leftie so called journalist who sounded thick as two short planks, has probably blown his chances of progressing up the ladder from the newspaper produces in his tiny bedroom at home. The bloke was utter numpty, and Farage sussed him out straight away.