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

💥Surge of anger about this from Jeremy Hunt. One Tory MP who was backing him now threatening to spoil their ballot. “Any doubt about whether he was just Theresa in trousers now removed”. Memories of the issue in 2017 GE still raw for some....💥 https://t.co/QNsJkhfhff

— Sam Coates Sky (@SamCoatesSky) July 3, 2019

Foreign onlooker q: when does BoJo vs Hunt actually get decided

monday 22nd july

Conspiracy theory: the Countryside Alliance policy he announced yesterday is to game the Google algorithm to bury any announcements about Liam Fox supporting Jeremy Hunt.

It really is a huge, huge deal to a large proportion of the only people who matter, though, iirc. Banning fox hunting is their Vatican II.

doesn't play well w the other people who matter (voters) though iirc

xp lol

xxp the hint that they would look at bringing it back in 2017 was electorally toxic though

citation: second word cloud on this post
https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-findings/what-was-it-all-about-the-2017-election-campaign-in-voters-own-words/
(An issue that voters specifically cited as changing the way they thought about the parties)
Labour made hay out of that and the ivory trading policy.

maybe he should offer to bring back death penalty as a twofer with fox hunting ban repeal as well and ratchet up the empty threats against China, he sure sounds very commanding and tough in Beijing and not all like some weak sap playing to the gallery and has all their attention.

Another Tory MP texts:

“How the f**k is fox hunting a priority right now!?!? By the weekend Hunt will have announced an urgent vote on other highly pressing issues like moving the chart show back to Sunday afternoons.”

— Alex Wickham (@alexwickham) July 3, 2019

what are these "serious consequences" he's threatening against China? lol thermonuclear war ... biscuit tariffs?

It reads like a very desperate move from Hunt who doesn't otherwise strike me as caring much about fox hunting at all.

Hunt's priority is winning the leadership election. He's probably counting on the broader electorate having other things to worry about by the time the next General comes around.

It's a totemic issue for the grassroots and likely to also be aimed to convey the message that he'll come through on the things May promised and was too weak to deliver.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XZc0KI-srXM/hqdefault.jpg

(xxxp) That doesn't sound like something a Tory MP would say, anonymously or not.

I feel like you could work out who that person was if you were so minded - likely to be younger than your average member, possibly in a non-rural marginal, of an age to remember when the chart show was on a Sunday...

Maybe it's a Cameron-type Tory. They probably want to keep a low profile. xp

Nick Boles?

Why not bring back hanging while we’re about it? And the birch. They’re ancient English customs after all. And bound to be popular among the older party members.

— Nick Boles MP (@NickBoles) July 3, 2019

He’s gone, remember “oh no Nick don’t go?” I know it was a century ago but still.

oops yeah..

"I would have been very unhappy if the chart show was used to make a political point" Tory MP John Whittingdale. So ban all political songs?

— Neil Harding (@NeilHarding) April 12, 2013

btw Hunt's comments were a lot to take for Aaro, which is amusing:

Been busy most of the day. I've just now read Jeremy Hunt's comments about Auschwitz and Corbyn. They manage to be demeaning to everyone involved, including the Jewish community. Through naivete or calculation He's managed to make the profoundest issue into a cheap partisan jibe.

— David Aaronovitch (@DAaronovitch) July 3, 2019

We’ll be waiting forever for that penny to drop.

re the fox hunting, In 'normal' times it might make sense to try outflank Boris, he's a rank outsider and needs a roll of the dice. But Brexit has taken over to such an extent, do the members have eyes for anything else?

I'd say the fact he obviously doesn't gaf about it himself mutes its appeal, totemic or not, it doesn't make him one of them. Suspicion already high that politicians don't 'believe', think his lack of authenticity on this will count against. As Matt DC says, a desperate move, but don't blame him, he has to come up with something. Think he'll fling a bunch more things at the wall and see what sticks

But Brexit has taken over to such an extent, do the members have eyes for anything else?

I think they do? Brexit the topic on which both candidates can barely explain what they want, let alone position themselves differently to the other. So we get dice rolls: tax cuts, sugar taxes, fox hunting, guillotines etc

Brexit is the one thing in which the mostly comfortably off membership aren't going to be affected by. They have time for issues like foxhunting and anything to guillotine the poor.

They're not going to be affected by it, but they want it real bad

I don't understand this really - like at what point did small business owners and corporate managerial types stop joining the Conservative Party? Serious question. Because they certainly aren't going to be unaffected and a lot of them are implacably opposed to Hard Brexit.

"They have nowhere else to go", I guess??

Also re the fox hunting thing, the leadership ballots should be on their way out now, the vast majority are expected to be on their way back by Monday afternoon, so you might expect a few more random swings of the pike by Hunt over the next few days.

Tory Summer ball yesterday, including the auction:

One rich Tory donor bid £15,000 for a hunting trip to Scotland, where they and seven pals will be allowed to shoot 200 pheasants on a grand estate. The lot was described as “an opportunity to take a 200-bird, high-quality pheasant shoot in Dumfriesshire,” with the lucky winner staying at “the splendid Raehills House (here it is), with dinner, accommodation and breakfast included for eight guns.”

Boris in the Spectator:

"For three years, we have failed to get across why we believe in free markets," he says. "We have failed to articulate the case for enterprise. In fact, it's been a massive missed opportunity — we've failed to make the case for business."

so much for ‘fuck business’ eh boris

Make the case for free markets by pushing our biggest free trade arrangement out of the window.

Or to put it another way, these people don't actually care about free markets out of principle, they favour them for as long as they facilitate the flow of wealth in their direction and for no longer.

I guess small business types probably think/hope the party will turn around and they will give them until 11:59pm to do so. When you've believed in a thing forever I think you often stay in it till the bitter end and the reveal -- that Tories only ever gave crumbs to those people -- is not something they will ever manage to process.

both Boris + Hunt of have pro EU histories that are in the archives for all to see. But Hunt's disadvantage is he turned sides later and members are more likely to have selective amnesia for a "big character" like Boris. But obv their commitment to their own careers will always supersede any ideological classic tory beliefs. It is pretty hard to make an argument for anything when politicians are so shamefully self serving and your policies are the cause of rampant poverty, homelessness, the dying of social mobility etc.

Boris's advantage is that he is (or was) the Tory That Regular People Like - the Bufton Tufton set hold onto this (which probably isn't true any more, but Conservatives are not that bothered about noticing the passing of time) and the newer UKIP / TBP members don't trust him but don't trust Hunt any more, and reckon they can influence Boris.

Make the case for free markets by pushing our biggest free trade arrangement out of the window.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 4 July 2019 6:35 PM (forty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

If you need a case study in this pick just about anyplace anytime ever.

"Boris's advantage is that he is (or was) the Tory That Regular People Like"

"Or was" could do without brackets around it.

It is, if you will, a parenthetical.

I unwillingly got into a discussion about all this with the strongly pro-Brexit owners of a (as far as I can tell) moderately successful small business the other month. I found their views to be fairly incoherent* (also **) but I surmised their irritation with "red tape" like health and safety, monitoring employees' passports, accounting requirements and so on and in their head they'd managed to place the blame for all these annoyances squarely at the door of "Europe".

The business supplies other local companies, and has no customers from outside the county, let alone the UK. It's conceivable that they might be able to get supplies more cheaply than at present if those goods originate from outside the EU***, but I am also fairly sure that the business will be properly knackered by a recession in the UK.

*TBF we were both getting busy with our respective bottles of wine, I can't imagine I was a model of coherence
** One of the arguments I heard for leaving the EU was "just go to Italy, their Police have got guns and they'll shoot you if you step out of line, why can't we do that?" which was a treat, and TBF when I pointed out the various glaring stupidities in this line, they did accept it was "a bad example"
***This was not the stated argument, they took more of a standard "there's a whole world out there for us to trade with" Brexity line

this is kind of the least important point to make -- also i am ILL and possibly FEVERISH -- but actual real bufton tufton types are quite thin on the ground these days (the telegraph stopped paying them mind some years ago)

tufton victor hamilton beamish, latterly baron chelwood, mp until 1974 for lewes (obv), himself departed this vale of tears in 1989

Hunt is already rowing back over the fox hunt, apparently.

The line in the Telegraph was "I would soon as there's a majority in parliament that would be likely to repeal the fox hunting back I would support a vote in parliament." which is a bit of a masterclass in promising and not promising.

It does make me wonder (and this I think is covered by mark s's concerns about difficult-to-repair damage) - if he brought this for a whipped vote on the first day and 30% of the tories said "Nah", what then?

Obviously there are a number of unlikely things in this scenario.

it be clear i'm entirely fine with damage to the tories and pleased if it can't be repaired

it be

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51yL023V6kL._SX425_.jpg

120,000+ people killed by austerity, Great British Public = ok fair enough

unban fox hunting, Great British Public = TOO FAR YOU MONSTERS

Was going to make that exact point, ecofashy state of mind that.

has always been the case as far as i can tell