She has six years in one of the great offices of state - it's about as good as you're going to get. There seems to be some sort of collective breakdown going on in leftist circles about the Tories having a second female PM before Labour have managed to have one.
That means she hasn't been sacked, not that she's any good. Brown had a decade at the Treasury. I really don't rate her. Not PM material. Also, talking of our former PM, her smile has a touch of the Gordon Browns about it.
If Labour get themselves a decent centrist leader (they won't) then they deny the Tories a majority at the very least in 2020.
My guess is we'll have to have vote reform at some point because none of the parties will be strong enough anymore, which is because people have rejected political parties in general and they're all heading back into their core shells.
Either that or huge Tory majorities forever. Pass the cheese board.
Can anyone prove themselves PM material beforehand? Cameron looked a smarmy bastard when he was elected leader in 2005, but it's ironic that he's going to leave the job when he's actually become very good at it. She's done well to last at the Home Office as long as she has, so presumably she's been doing something right. Jimmy's right though - it's the best of a bad lot.
Failed to grow a penis.Originally Posted by GS
I think the Tories with a strong 'pro-Britain' message could do well in the northern areas that voted Brexit, if they attack them and campaign there with a clear campaign message and any sense of conviction. There's real scope for proper realignment, if they don't BOTTLE it.
Or just not shit enough to justify being sacked. I'm sure we could have parachuted Priti "let's be clear about this" Patel in to beat up on immigrants in a conference speech.
Cameron looked a smarmy bastard when he left. He is a smarmy bastard. He always looked PM material though. I remember having the conversation with my old man at the time. Read any of the main books covering the New Labour period and you'll know how worried they got that Cameron was the one who'd do for them. Because he was them.
Cameron benefited from going up against a genuine nutter in Brown and a complete waste of space in Miliband. He'd have been taken apart by Blair.
I'm pretty sure polls consistently had the Tories ahead in Blair's final months. He was done.
The best chance Labour had was when Brown first took charge and looked like a super hero with his response to floods, foot and mouth disease and terrorist attacks. Then Osborne was Osborne and murdered him (on inheritance tax?) at the Tory Conference.
Brown didn't recover from failing to call an election. He looked like a bottler, and it made it easy to attack him for having 'no legitimacy' because everybody knew he was always going to be handed the leadership. I remember at the time that there was a 'Brown bounce', and everybody thought he was great on the grounds that he wasn't Tony Blair.
Then the penny dropped that he was, in fact, a nutter. The GFC finished him.
I'm failing to foresee a situation in which we're not fucked if Leadsom wins. Either the economy tanks, the Toriescare blamed and we end up with some mental Corbyn/Eagle led coalition. Or it goes okay and Leadsom is PM.
I'm going to be a traitor and apply for an Irish passport anyway so I can retain my freedom of movement. I might have to upgrade that to emigration to some quiet coastal village on the south west of Ireland so I can just hide from it all.
Leaving the EU clearly carries real short-term risk. There's a chance the whole thing could spiral if the political classes don't get a firm fucking grip on things, and I don't see how Leadsom can do this. That the executive have not made the necessary contingency planning for a leave vote is a genuinely appalling way to govern.
I was thinking of getting an Irish passport years ago, but by doing so I'm required to recognise that the Free State claims some jurisdiction over the north.
I don't think they give a fuck about your recognition, mate. Lie.
May will be fine, and probably what people (and THE MARKETS) want at the moment. I've been on this for years as well. What a roll.
Dingle is lovely.
Stop shitting yourselves though.
Just seen that Leadsom march.
And her introduction at that press conference thing. "I can't hear you! I said ARE YOU READY FOR ANDREA!?"
Murdoch and Co were fully behind Michael Gove, because Murdoch loves journalists and especially journalists who used to work for him. Now that 'Gover' (fuck off) is out, the Sun are fully on board the Theresa May train:
I suspect there will be a fairly concerted pro-May media campaign, because most sensible people can see what would happen if Leadsom won. Presumably the members, being significantly less paranoid and fragile than your average Labour member, will do what's best for the country. Hopefully.
What's so bad about Leadsom? I don't really know much about her.
It's difficult to know where to start:
- She appears to have 'exaggerated' her CV quite significantly, making grandiose claims about her role and job title which simply aren't correct;
- She has no experience at cabinet level, and has only been a relatively junior minister in a non-department since becoming an MP in 2010; and
- She's given some quite unimpressive speeches as part of her candidacy thus far in closed meetings to Tories (this appears not to have been a tactical leak by any rival campaign - she was just shit).
Her entire candidature hinges on her support of Brexit, but even there she said it would be a 'disaster' not three years ago. She also ran a blog (for fuck sake) for several years, which is now being dug through by every journalist going to find things to undermine her.
Until she was on the ITV debate, most people hadn't heard of her. The speed of the leadership contest means she's accelerated to the front on the basis of a) supporting Brexit and b) not being Michael Gove, and she thus hasn't had the necessary level of 'due diligence' undertaken on her record. That's happening now, and the more she's exposed to public scrutiny the more it's becoming clear that she's just not ready for Prime Minister. It would be a different issue if you were voting for a leader of the opposition, who could bat their way into the game for a few years, but you're asking someone with no experience and questionable personal credentials to lead the most complex set of negotiations this country has undertaken since decolonisation.
She's not up to it, in short. She also doesn't have the support of the vast majority of MPs, so if the membership elect her purely on the basis she campaigned for Brexit, the Tories are looking at a Corbyn-esque scenario with someone who a) is not supported by the parliamentary party and b) just isn't very good.
I think that newspaper that has photoshopped Theresa May's face on Thatchers body was created specifically to make me feel a bit ill.
Boydy will probably post it in the shameful lustage thread.
You're joking, GS? The Tory membership is mental. They elected Cameron because they got fed up of losing so went for Blair lite just to get back into power and then change at a later date. This is change time. May might just be horrific enough for them. But if not....
Choosing May is like choosing to eat shit with sugar on top. Theresa fucking May is the normal one in this. Jesus Christ.
The membership are mental, but there's no entryism and presumably there's a certain degree of pragmatism ingrained in a membership which was willing to elect Cameron over Davis - the latter of whom probably shared the politics of most members.
This is where we are, unfortunately. It's May or anarchy.
AT LEAST I USED THE THREAD PROPERLY.
Caps, damnit.
I thought this a few days ago, then I started finding stuff out about her.
There's a devastating column about her in Private Eye this week.
It's not just Private Eye. The media as a whole are going for her.
OK, periodically we'll be exposing the hypocrisy of various political parties who slag off UKIP for a wide variety of things.
What would you think if UKIP offered a discount on membership, but only if you were British born? Uproar right...
OK let's see our friends The Greens, and their totally non-discriminatory membership offer.
https://my.greenparty.org.uk/civicrm...?reset=1&id=63
We have a politics thread, put this stuff in there.
Edit: Merged
They were already offering International Membership, they've just made it cheaper for advertising purposes and it seems to have worked as nutters are spreading it to places like these.
@Lewis - you'll like this. Crabb for PM indeed.
I'm face palming, but really this sort of story is great as it exposes Leadsom as the chancer she is. Just drop out and let May win, you fucking chancer.
That Chinny post is great. Fighting hypocrisy by imagining a response to a hypothetical situation.
I'd almost want her to win so I can start the "As a mother..." drinking game.
Add 'genuine' into your drinking game. She begins a lot of her sentences with "genuinely", which suggests that a lot of what she says isn't genuine.
She's a fucking nutter. It wasn't even a leading question, apparently - she fucking offered it off her own bat. The fucking mentalist.
It's the religious weirdos you need to watch. 'Set your watch', as Christopher Hitchens used to say.
Not you, GS, mate. Obviously.
Theresa will win, the Tory party membership is the backbone of England, it always gets it right.
The ultra-vile Arron Banks is clearly ploughing his moolah into Leadsom, he needs stopping.
I'm not a nutter, thankfully.
Give it a few years.
You don't see me standing around with a placard or marching*, do you?
* Absent an orange sash and hearty renditions of pro-Union songs.
It's alright - the Twitter outrage crowd have moved into fifth gear over this, so we'll presumably be fine.
If we lived in a reasonable world she'd be pulling out of the race tomorrow morning, but I'm not sure we do. You can't possibly have someone as Prime Minister who displays that sort of judgement at the, well, not even the first hurdle. The 0th hurdle.
I would agree, actually. The question isn't about Theresa May, but the answer is. Either it's callous, or it's stupid. Neither is on, really. She's accused the Times of fabricating the quote, they've produced the transcript. It's dishonest as well as stupid, so I think there would be genuine grounds for her pulling out of the race on account of this. Not that she will, but the Tory MPs who voted for her because they were squeamish about Gove's knifing of Boris need to take a long, hard fucking look at themselves.
Neat summary of it, for anyone who cares:
Bless 'er. Her lovely nan act did its job during the referendum, softening Boris Johnson and Margot Honecker, but she is well out of her depth and ought not to have been encouraged.
That's evident, but there are clear questions which the Tory MPs who voted for her need to answer. How in the fuck did they allow her to get on the ballot? There's a danger this woman might become Prime Minister at a supreme moment of national crisis.
It would ruin the moral grandstanding the Tories have over Labour, for a start. Nobody wants that, least of all Labour.
I just liked the idea of her going up to Merkel with pictures of her kids.
"Those are my national interests, Angela."
Twitter is going a bit overboard about all of this. Is it that much different from female politicians generally claiming that being women gives them some sort of compassionate and temperamental advantage in running things?
This Leadsom stuff is some proper post-facts political world nonsense and going by the replies to that tweet they're buying it as well.
I work in HIV where MSM means 'Men who have sex with men' which is very confusing when reading tweets like
You what?
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