The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel - The Tory leadership elections

I assume Mark Harper's scraping up the 8 nominations is related to his previous job as Chief Whip.

I'm surprised that only Esther McVey went off the cliff on the following question:

2. “The UK should set a zero carbon target for 2050.” Do you agree and if so why?

If you want to guarantee failure, get politicians to set a target.

Preserving our natural environment is vital for the legacy we leave future generations and we must take action to combat climate change.

Our approach must combine the urgent need for action with protecting the livelihoods of working people. Reducing carbon emissions should be a continuous, dynamic process where we recognise the importance of technology and business in helping us achieve this. They don’t need targets – they just need government to stop slapping taxes on them.

We should recognise that it’s often working people in traditional industries who are expected to pay the price. Climate change affects us all, but this is a hard message to land with someone who has lost their job. It is also true that many of the measures proposed by more wealthy environmental activists would result in rising costs for working families.

cbf to check the number but xps to AF - check this lad’s Wikipedia page for multiple lols

This is a slightly difficult question for someone who spent quite a number of years working in Iraq and Afghanistan

Can't the whole country just vote one of them off every week for the next couple of months instead of allowing 100,000 weirdos to do it for us?

missed this

The former equalities minister Maria Miller introduces Raab, saying one day she might convince him he’s a feminist after all. Gets a laugh. I don’t find it that funny.

— Beth Rigby (@BethRigby) June 10, 2019

Matt DC OTM except the final two die together.

raab is an MRA

Raab has a lot of skeletons just waiting to tumble out wrt women (as does Johnson, obvs).

rory stewart’s book on afghanistan is not bad. he wipes his arse with a hand full of gravel at one point

well that explains the haunted look i guess

I can remember people joking on here about hitler and billy bremner etc.. on the labour leadership election before it looked like Corbyn was more than a placeholder. this most amazing tory 10 shortlist is more toxic than the stale farts of death in the fuhrerbunker and bremner's coffin combined, and then thinking about the freakazoids that get the last vote on this contest .. lol i just give up.

Tory leadership campaign pic.twitter.com/XsYJE2LB93

— ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) (@neka) June 9, 2019

proving to be the most prescient UK tv program ever!

Hot take - the most likely candidates don't actually intend to follow through on the promises they're currently making, they just understand the value of pitching to their party before pitching to the country. Unlike, say, Liz Kendall or Yvette Cooper who tried to do the opposite.

what could possibly go wrong

Matt is right that Johnson's tax proposal isn't really a proposal, it's a statement of which wing of Toryism he's aligning himself with. the on the nose-ness of it, plus the current media strategy - don't engage with the media - feels like he's trying to create the same procession that led May to the leadership. I don't see any way he ends up unopposed but he might well hoover up a bunch of the other candidates and shorten the ballot process.

i also think he's reasonably explicitly demonstrating to the faithful that he wants to go full Trump/Bannon and it's just crazy enough to work as long as he can get to the final 2. i don't think any of the potential opponents are seriously going to try to attack him from the left.

But then after already pissing off vast swathes of the electorate he should be trying to win over for the sake of 40 odd thousand head-bangers, he has to do a damaging policy u-turn in a GE cos he didn't really mean it. It doesn't seem a good strategy to me.

obv he isn't thinking that far ahead - but he should be. and they have to let him out of that box at some point as well.

His approach is working so far, but then the great British media allows Boris to get away with shit no other politician would dream of even attempting to get away with. I only hope the infidelities, abortions, illegitimate children, coke, sexual harrassments, racism is going to be flung in his face when he does stick his head above the parapet but I wouldn't bet on it and, a la Trump, I'm not sure anyone really cares.

he has to do a damaging policy u-turn in a GE cos he didn't really mean it

He may calculate he can pivot without much damage, he may even be right. There might not really be that much calculation to it

But also if your trade is in identity and persona then policy isn't even all that relevant, so what if you u-turn

He’s *possibly* toast at the next GE because Labour people in his constituency have been running an unseat Boris campaign for two years.

some of the noise from his camp has been about how he is still the one nation liberal tory who was mayor ...blah blah .. and the only way they can project this nonsense by keeping him out of sight. That is the Boris they'd pitch to the electorate imo .. and maybe Trump style stuff wouldn't be by design and maybe they'd calculate he could get away with some of it .. but going full Trump/Boris would be a complete fail imo. When people say he's popular with members, don't forget that is such a small number these days they daren't even disclose it out of embarrassment and good lot of them are probably dead!

Would be so sweet if Johnson pulled a Balfour and lost his seat while PM

Hot take - the most likely candidates don't actually intend to follow through on the promises they're currently making, they just understand the value of pitching to their party before pitching to the country.

It is probably true that they either already know "renegotiate the backstop or No Deal" is nuts and doesn't make sense, or will find that out just like May did, and similar may apply regarding tax plans etc; but I'm not enjoying watching the press gamble the entire country on this without asking any questions more relevant than "what posters did you have on your wall when you were 14" while we helpless onlookers try to uncover traces of the line between "pretending to be recklessly dictatorial and cronyist for votes" and "actually being recklessly dictatorial and cronyist", and I imagine it's not winning us a great deal of goodwill on the EU side, or indeed Scotland.

(Or from any other non-Westminster-and-maybe-DUP govt/institution except Trump, and if anyone thinks his momentary blurtings of apparent goodwill are worth a thing, well...)

Yes, none of this matters because there's nothing I can do about it and we all need to sit through it and not scream ourselves too hoarse to make some kind of futile protestation afterwards that it wasn't actually our fault.

is such a small number these days they daren't even disclose it out of embarrassment and good lot of them are probably dead!

A third of them might be dead, a third of them are pensioners many of whom may not have actually paid any attention to politics since 1981, and a third of them are Brexit Party entryists swelling the ranks to vote for the looniest loon. Yay!

I think there's a good chance he or at least the party is toast at the next election btw but I can't see us getting a GE any time soon because they know that, and even the "never Boris"/"never No Deal" Tory MPs are probably "never willingly giving up a seat by voting no confidence" Tories long before they're never anything else.

CH has been keeping its own list of declared MP supporters: https://www.conservativehome.com/parliament/2019/06/leadership-election-candidate-support-numbers-hunt-27-johnson-19-raab-13-gove-12-javid-10.html

the winner of the leadership race gets potentially 3 years as PM before having to win a general election. they've got little reason to be appealing to anybody beyond their membership.

Maria Miller, who is backing Dominic Raab to be Tory leader, says allegations which led to him signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement were brought "vexatiously". Under the terms of the NDA, the other party can't dispute that claim. #r4today

— Kevin Schofield (@PolhomeEditor) June 11, 2019

The NDA refers to sexual harassment claims brought by a woman. The judge who granted it was Tom Tughendhat’s father Justice Michael T, who should have recused himself from ruling on his son’s friend’s case. #RevokeA50 #StopRaab

— Kate Makuen FRSA 🖖🏻 (@VesperUK) June 11, 2019

could this finally derail #tugmentum

SV to thread!

Mark Harper’s leadership launch material is certainly different pic.twitter.com/xJWmP9AXOp

— Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) June 11, 2019

(I said "I think there's a good chance <Boris> or the party is toast at the next election btw" earlier but even that strikes me as too optimistic now - but I have done enough howling at the moon and clutching my tinfoil hat on this thread already so I'll try to shut it with the "we're doomed" for a bit)

Interesting that not-so-keen-on-Brexit types Ed Vaizey and Oliver Letwin are listed as backing Gove. Then again I was already confused by the Cooper-Letwin Bill because iirc Letwin shares the hardcore Brexiteers' desire to see the NHS sold off. Maybe that's just a given for a Tory these days. I guess Gove, Vaizey and Letwin were all "Cameroons".

(my parents live in Letwin's constituency and their elderly neighbour waited 5 hours for an ambulance while lying on a cold stone floor with a possibly broken back - the neighbour's son drove down to the south coast from Up North quicker than the ambulance got there from 20 miles away - so they were going to write to Letwin, and I sort of felt that they should, but also sort of didn't want this saga to be recited as an example of how the NHS is failing and rip it apart already)

Nah I think your posts were very otm spacecadet and you should post in these threads more!

If anyone remembers, Letwin was the guy photoed dumping confidential papers in St James’s Park(!) so maybe it’s as well ye didn’t contact him
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/oliver-letwin-caught-throwing-away-85337

I think anyone coming in realistically knows they can't be an unelected pm for 3 years and face the prospect of remainers tanking every no-deal brexit/hard-brexit they try and get through parliament, as before. There simply has to be an election much sooner, unless they can compromise even more than May was willing to which would make a joke of all the tough talk. Or as McVey suggested just go full dictatorship and don't allow any more parliamentary votes!

Donald Tusk: “Please do not waste this time.” pic.twitter.com/6rqOXrHbI9

— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) June 11, 2019

dear god

more like a scrawny, tb-stricken fox with three legs and lead shot embedded in half its face

or a strigiform with acephaly issues idk

Simplified Brussels view on Tory race:

Johnson - generally regarded as the devil incarnate
Gove - very much on the pantheon of hated Brexiteers
Raab - negotiated a deal and then quit to vote against it

When you get down to Javid and Hancock I doubt many here have heard of them

— Jon Stone (@joncstone) June 11, 2019

What about Cunt?

That's on a previous tweet - basically Amber Rudd thinks he's a respected statesman but no one in Brussels respects him due to his first major intervention being to compare the EU to the USSR.

Wasn't it Hunt that made the Slovenia/Slovakia mixup "Soviet vassal state" booboo? And then said in his pitch video that he was the right man for the job because if people didn't get the details right the EU might not give us the best deal? Arf.

japanese/chinese mixup as well, but was about his wife tbf!

also keeps insisting his surname begins with an 'h' which is clearly untrue

For good or ill, Rory Stewart would absolutely annihilate Jeremy Corbyn in a general election.

— James O'Brien (@mrjamesob) June 11, 2019

only one of them has walked across afghanistan and speaks dari tbf

xp, lol, “for good or ill”

I see we’re back to this narrative

I’m well aware of his voting record. The support for austerity et al stinks. But Corbyn *couldn’t beat Theresa May* & Stewart’s at least a hundred times more impressive than her.

— James O'Brien (@mrjamesob) June 11, 2019

Only one of them has eaten cold Tesco own brand baked beans straight out of a tin.

Given that Rory Stewart is never going to be leader of the Conservative Party it's like one of those pointless, "Would a zombie beat a vampire?" pub conversations.