Monday 18 July 2022

The second leadership debate -as bad as the first

The second leadership debate last night was I'm afraid, just as bad as the first. Liz Truss improved a bit but not enough to claw back the position as far as I could see. Her’s is now a lost cause I think. If it isn’t, then God help us, in fact we may need God’s help whoever wins. This is apparently the best the Conservative party can offer. What a absolutely pathetic bunch.  This is what happens when a man of low intellect purges the cabinet of real talent and promotes a bunch of non-entities.

Sunak seems to assume he’s already won, never a good tactic since he is terribly unpopular with the Tory party membership. He seems to have a permanent rictus smile and a mouthful of back lit teeth. There is something totally fake about him.

Before the debate his team tweeted what I can only describe as a visual suicide note. It is a celebration of his support for Brexit - perhaps the most serious foreign policy mistake since Suez - in the style of a 1950s public service announcement. It is really quite bizarre and shows that Rishi thinks he's appealing to a lot of seventy year old nostalgics in the Tory party.

I have downloaded it for future reference as a key piece of evidence that the former chancellor and now leadership contender, is clinically insane.  One day soon he will regret making that video.

It portrays him as going against Cameron to support Vote Leave. A bit like Captain Smith claiming credit for steering the Titanic on it's more northerly course despite warnings of an icefield.

Sunak had a barrage of coverage in the Sunday Morning papers about his claims to be able to get rid of all unnecessary EU red tape - the oppressive regulations which are slowing us down - "in the first 100 days," which makes him the craziest of the five if you ask me.

In the Express, we had this:

Bear in mind they have been hunting high and low for six years (6 years!) for these crippling rules and we still don't even know what substantive ones they are! Next year we are forecast to have the slowest growth in the G7 which includes Germany, France and Italy, apparently suffering from all those stifling regulations dragging them down! It’s just not a rational train of thought and does nothing to inspire confidence in him.

He is linking himself to a disastrous and damaging policy which the public are slowly turning against.

Penny Mordaunt wants to get Brexit ‘re-done’ despite later claiming in the debate that Johnson had already got Brexit done! 

You begin to think we have never actually stepped off the Brexit merry-go-round. It is as Danny (Lord) Finkelstein said last week, as if "Real Brexit is, like real socialism, a sort of abstract, undefined idea, always a little over the horizon, always waiting for someone bold enough, a true believer to guide us to the promised land. All the actual problems with Brexit, as with socialism, are because we haven’t tried the real thing."


Brexit will keep having to be 're-done' because there is now way of ever doing it properly.

Borsi Johnson was enjoying himself at a farewell party at Chequers at the weekend while sending Kit Malthouse to chair an emergency COBRA meeting in Downing Street to discuss the national response to the dangerous heat wave.  He is finishing as he began, not giving a s**t about anyone except himself.

I also think he isn't going to get away Scot free as his shadowy connections to Alexander Lebedev and details of the secret that took place in Italy in April 2018 are slowly emerging. 

The latest account from Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian claims that at Yevgeny's parties, the women were all packed off with the men remaining. This comes from Rachel Johnson, when Cadwalladr was serendipitously booked on a same flight as Johnson's sister in adjacent seats. 

"What happens at these parties," Cadwalladr asked Rachel. “You tell me,” she said. What do you mean? “You’ll have to ask one of the men,” she said. “The women are sent home at midnight.” She had been to one hosted by Evgeny at his London home, Stud House. “I was packed off in a cab while all the men were still there.”

One doesn't need a particularly fertile imagination to guess what goes off.  If the Russians don't have 'kompromat' on Johnson I would be amazed.

He has a lot of serious national security questions to answer.

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