Tuesday 6 September 2022

Truss victorious as expected

No surprises yesterday. Truss won, but not as convincingly as she might have hoped, with a little over 57% of the vote on a turnout of 82%. She didn’t even get a majority of the 170,000 membership. It was the lowest vote share for any Tory leader since they started using the system. It is more or less guaranteed that she will make a worse prime minister than Johnson and I never thought I’d be saying that. The awful truth is that she and Sunak were the best that Tory MPs could find. The result was announced in The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster, among a world-record gathering of people who don’t know what they’re doing.

It goes without saying that Johnson was the worst PM in history - up until now.

A short video clip by Otto English says it all about him:

When Johnson came to office, things were not that bad, ever since we have had one disaster after another. Brexit had reached a sort of impasse in 2019 with nobody sure about what it actually meant. 

Now we do.

It means lower trade, higher costs, fewer jobs, more red tape, longer queues, chronic labour shortages and a stalling economy. We also have an utterly incompetent government hand-picked by the Etonian idiot, rising inflation, lower productivity, energy prices through the roof and a cost of living crisis.

Just one of the more bizarre things about Brexit is that last year the UK issued a record number of visas. There were 277,069 work-related visas granted in the year ending March 2022 (including dependants), a 129 per cent increase on the year before yet we still have employers unable to recruit enough staff. How does that even work?

I suppose labour shortages will soon be the least of our worries as small businesses close their doors and make employees redundant, unable to afford massive increases in their energy bills.  Someone said Truss’ in-tray contains everything except Armageddon - and even that isn’t ruled out in my opinion.

This is how Truss will overtake Johnson in the league of awful prime ministers.  The present situation would tax a brilliant political and organisational genius surrounded by the brightest and the best minds in the country but I am afraid Truss and her team are as far from that as it is possible to imagine.

I read that twelve letters from her own MPs are going in to Sir Graham Brady from Tory MPs next week expressing no confidence in Truss and this is before she has seen the Queen. Again, this is no surprise. The Tory party's much vaunted ability to 'come together' after a bruising leadership election is going to be tested to destruction over the next two years.  It is at least three seething hate-filled factions now.

Truss blanked Sunak completely when her name was announced as the winner. There was no attempt to commiserate with him or reconcile his supporters with her’s. It does not augur well for unity in the hopelessly divided party. 

Her policy of 'going for growth in place of tax rises is something every government has been trying to achieve since the 1950s and have mostly failed.  Chancellor Anthony Barber plunged us into a vicious inflationary spiral when he tried the same thing before the 1974 elections which took years to eradicate and was extremely costly.

The acceptance speech Truss gave yesterday was wooden, shallow, banal and awkward, about as inspiring as a threadbare sock.

She started the election process by coming bottom in the first televised debate and was lucky to do that. Out of five candidates she was thought to have finished last with just 6 per cent of viewers in a snap poll afterwards thinking she was the best candidate, although she herself declared she had won it.  It takes real delusion to get to the top of the Tory party these days.  Her performance never got above woeful.

In most organisations there is normally a process where the most able rise naturally by osmosis to the top. In the Conservative party that has been reversed, as Johnson demonstrated and now Truss. Anyone remotely capable is forced to the bottom and out of the back door.

You can judge how bad things are going to get when you read that Therese Coffey is said to be in line to become deputy PM and Suella Braverman will take Priti Patel’s place at the Home Office. Patel quit yesterday before she was pushed. The Home Office has become totally dysfunctional under her and will only go downhill under Braverman.

If Johnson is remembered for anything apart from Brexit, it will be for elevating to cabinet the worst bunch of inept, lame brained, second rate political has-beens this country has ever seen.


Trump

The stuff I posted recently about Trump was about the really deep trouble he’s in over the classified documents that he has admitted taking when he left The White House in January 2021. But as we know this isn’t the only problem Trump’s got.

Tomi T Ahonen has been posting on Twitter about six ‘paths’ that could take the former POTUS to jail. The FBI raid and the top secret papers are just one. But the 6 January riots are another. This is a thread on that path:

He claims among a lot of other things that the Department of Justice have ‘flipped’ Trump's old chief of staff Mark Meadows after the Mar-a-Lago raid on 8 August and  White House attorneys Pat Cipolloni and Eric Herschmann are also now 'cooperating' with the FBI.

Ahonen also says there are eleven Republican congressmen who are going to wind up behind bars:

"The DOJ is now playing each GOP Congressman against each other, the fastest to flip gets best deal - which will be at least a decade in prison, and only 2 of 11 at best get ANY kind of deal. The rest go to prison for Life Without Parole."

Think about that, the reward for giving evidence against Trump and your own colleagues is ten years!

Also, the FBI have been secretly recording Trump’s lawyer Rudi Giuliani’s phone calls since 2019 and have a mass of information about the plot to overthrow the US government. The wire tap was authorised by Attorney General William Barr, who Trump himself appointed. Barr apparently 'forgot' to tell Trump that Giulani's phone was bugged!

Do read the thread, it's absolutely fascinating. Trump IS going to jail, but as Ahonen says, just like the mafia, it's always the boss who gets in the dock last.

The American's can still teach us a thing or two about pursuing enemies of the state.

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