love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

I just heard a clip of PMQs on the world service. Looks like one of the attack lines the Tories will use against Starmzy is to play on public distrust about the shiftiness of lawyers. Not a bad tactic in the circs.

Loses a little weight when thrown by a former journalist tbh.

The thing that both perfectly encapsulates this and gives me the crazy pills feeling is that they're proudly putting an unenforcable quarantine in place in mid fucking June, which will neither protect people nor please business.

SV you know i'm not agreeing with him, just looking at how this stuff will be played as tactics. It won't be wholly ineffective.

All the chorus of numpts who were saying ooh he's got him rattled, Corbyn couldn't do that. After the first few pmqs can stfu because he most certainly hasn't got Boris rattled anymore!

SV you know i'm not agreeing with him, just looking at how this stuff will be played as tactics. It won't be wholly ineffective.

No, of course - just that it might have landed better from May, for example.

maybe whoever takes over when Johnson carks it will have more moral no i can't do it straight-faced

Starmer is currently only one percentage point behind Johnson on the "who would make the best Prime Minister?" question. That's the thing they should feel rattled about because it tends to be a decent predictor of the next election. Labour had reasonable poll leads under Miliband and at times had a slight one under Corbyn but at no point did either leader come close to matching up with Cameron, May or Johnson on that question.

So yes they're going to start getting personal with him soon. So far Starmer's approach seems to be to try and keep at arm's length anything that might be used against him when the Tories shift back into culture war mode but "lawyer from London" isn't really something he can make go away. Question is how many people will care or be influenced by that.

If it’s true that elections are decided on what people think a party’s going to do next rather than what’s it’s done before, it won’t matter. Johnson being a sleazy journalist didn’t matter for the same reason - a lot of people arguably voted because he was going to GBD

I don't think people have ever really considered Johnson to be just a journalist, or at least not for a long time, his brand has been much bigger than that for 15 years or so at least.

i'm not much of a believer in tactics or optics as influencers of opinion but maybe the one area where it works is if voters trust you to *do* something, as anvil often points out ;-)

in that case Starmzy probably needs to avoid getting a rep for being all things to all people, tho again who's to say he'll ever get a shot at a general election?

Probably the single biggest reason behind the collapse in the government's ratings is that voters are losing faith in the government's ability to do anything and particularly to protect them in a crisis. It's one of the reasons why Rishi Sunak (spray the fucking money around quickly) is more popular than Matt Hancock (fail to have anything in place and working months after you said you would). Johnson is probably taking more of the hit from the latter than he is feeling the benefit of the former right now.

xp
very disappointing to have read that post as "who's to say Starmzy won't get shot" on my rain-wet phone, only to get home and see I'd misread it!

Look away now Calz:

'Starmer can chair a meeting. He can draft a minute. He can lead a team. He can hold a press conference. He can stay calm in an interview. Those skills look simple, but they’re not, and they’re vital.' @gsoh31 on the breadth of Sir Keir Starmer's potential https://t.co/nkxtholWy1

— British GQ (@BritishGQ) June 10, 2020

Generally worrying if the best you can say about a future PM is stuff that i can do too.

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/MisguidedWeightyHen-small.gif

fuck me i've got a shot at the leadership

British GQ, the home of progressive politics in the UK

"He can draft a minute" is genuinely incredible stuff.

he can hold a pen in his hand, pensively studying some legal documents on his desk while jerking off with the other hand.. he's a fucking miracle!

I can cook dinner and tea at the same time pal, so get fucked!

Lads GQ, bestowers of Politician Of The Year on Rory Stewart last year for his many many achievements, are not easily impressed.

Rory Stewart can make a cup of tea in Dari tbfttm

which is the most difficult language to master? Dari or the often arcane and oblique language of the barrister, sometimes known by laypersons as Wanker-ese.

Johnson doing the presser this afternoon, some more announcements incoming

it's PUB DEATH TIME

Meanwhile Neil Ferguson is fucking it up for them in ctte: "earlier lockdown would have prevented half of the deaths".

so that means they saved 30,000 people? yay!

Literally a week earlier would have prevented 50% of deaths. Fucking hell.

and now they can't play the man and dismiss this as coming from mr lockdown-breaker, either

the current line appears to be "if we hadn't acted it would have been even worse so fu"

look we could have seen 470,000 more deaths in the uk so stfu

Ferguson: "The policy has always been to protect care homes... the policy was always clear...the problem-this is not unique to this country-was that the policy simply failed to be enacted, at least until v recently."

Doesn't sound much like a "protective ring" as Hancock says...

— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) June 10, 2020

have seen more effective iterations of "protective ring" on 80's era Catholic altar-boys ... never mind.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52993734

the UK's coronavirus epidemic did not have one origin - but at least 1,356 origins. On each of those occasions somebody brought the infection into the UK from abroad and the virus began to spread as a result.

Good job we quarantined our little island before things really kicked off

European holiday season is going to be a real clusterfuck.

he's brushed his hair for this one

bubbles, eh

Anecdotally, people are reserving hotel rooms across Europe - and the UK - like it's going out of style.

DIDN’T HAPPEN 🚨 pic.twitter.com/irqLV9Dm8f

— The Trashies (@TheTrashiesUK) June 10, 2020

good work, wish i'd thought of that

schools "catchup" over summer

Breaking News: R Number between 0.7 and 0.9

(ie same as it's been for weeks)

although boris has just said "we've got it right down", to a mere 39,000 new cases a week.

Anecdotally, people are reserving hotel rooms across Europe - and the UK - like it's going out of style.

A bunch of hotel chains are offering flexible booking, which is going to come in handy when more countries put up big NO BRITS signs at the border.

Add Austria to that list

tbh I fear the Southern European countries will be sufficiently shook by the idea of tourism collapsing that they won't leave the brits out

Portugal have already said some come one come all.

.@BethRigby: "What do you now wish you had done differently?"@BorisJohnson: "We're going to have to look back at all of it and learn the lessons we can, but frankly I think a lot of these questions are still premature."

Follow live: https://t.co/4sGQDLLTHi pic.twitter.com/EsO3tghtQR

— SkyNews (@SkyNews) June 10, 2020

Fucking hell this is honestly even worse than it looks in print.

boris in full 🤷‍♂️ mode

What's with all the #ScumMedia replies to that tweet? Is that some coordinated right wing thing?