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

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

So I’m reading CH and dying at this Jeremy Hunt encounter

“Wotcha!” The Foreign Secretary’s greeting yesterday morning was genial, but strangely reminiscent of The Sun’s famous “Gotcha” headline during the Falklands War.

We were hurrying along on the 8.24 from Waterloo to Alton, in Hampshire, and Jeremy Hunt, last encountered in the splendour of his official residence at Carlton Gardens, approached me from behind, and took me by surprise.

He followed up his one word greeting with an extremely firm handshake.

So Hunt can do self-deprecation. He is an admirably English candidate, a sensitive and prudent man who can be relied on to behave like an officer and a gentleman, and who fortifies himself with swigs from a bottle of Evian water.

“Boris is a great character and I don’t want to say anything against Boris,” he said.

He is in favour of fox-hunting, wants a Commons vote if there is any prospect of success, and would vote for it, but “I don’t hunt myself. It’s not particularly my thing. But I think it’s part of the countryside.”

He added, in a wry reference to his name, that perhaps one of his ancestors hunted.

When ConHome asked Hunt if his view of Boris “has improved or worsened as the campaign has continued”, he replied: “It hasn’t changed, actually, because the great thing about Boris is we all feel we know him.”

ConHome: “I think there’s something imponderable about Boris, actually.”

Hunt is certainly less known to the general public than Johnson, but is, in principle, more knowable. He is a fine representative of his class, public-spirited, energetic, reliable, intelligent, a pleasure to deal with.

He is not as exciting or original as his rival, but not all Conservatives want a Prime Minister who is exciting or original. As he speeds round the country, he is bending every sinew to make this a two-horse race. We shall know soon enough whether he has succeeded.

There's always something dickish about blokes who go for the crushing handshake

Now reminded of the 'great porn parody names' - An Orifice and a Gentleman - can also be used to caption any number of photos of two (or one) tories.

the CH definition of what fortifying oneself with swigs from a bottle is, is doing it totally wrong.

Can’t believe Tory leadership candidates take in fluid, truly unbelievable

Johnson falling back on the old racist 'immigrants must speak English within our earshot at all times' gibberish now.

xp it's an evian bottle but it's full of replenishing reptile serum made from the crushed dreams of poor people

Truly no language has ever been threatened as much as the English language.

xp

It's not so much that the English language is threatened but that paranoid racist weirdoes feel threatened when someone talks another language in front of them so they can't tell if they're talking about them - and that's our next Prime Minister.

He added, in a wry reference to his name, that perhaps one of his ancestors hunted.

^thus speaks a man from a noble lineage of plumbers

"can't even speak the language" a classic trope of racist cunt Jack Straw iirc

paranoid racist weirdoes feel threatened when someone talks another language in front of them

Tbf the only time this happened to me so far involved a couple of American tourists seated at the table next to ours at a pub in London, 'subtly' mocking my French wife's typical pronunciation of certain anglophone actors' names. It can indeed be amusing, and neither of us has any qualms with it in a friendly setting, but in this instance it was clearly intended to demean. The upside, of course, is that once you catch on to it you can openly discuss their idiocy in the very language they are belittling. Anyhow, my sole xenophobic run-ins with Brits have been of the 'racist unbeknownst to themselves' variety, such as utterly tanked students asking for my name in addition to a light and immediately expressing bewilderment at my 'lack of accent', which is quite amusing since I sound North American af.

worth a read 4 years on
http://theconversation.com/theresa-mays-hidden-british-value-monolingualism-39258

I'll probably regret this, but what should I search to find this view of Boris's?

I was in Paris waiting in the queue for the Eurostar and there was an American family in front of me, and one of the Eurostar employees asked them which train they had tickets for (in order to make sure they were in the right queue) and they couldn't understand him at first and had to ask him to repeat, and once they did understand, and after he had started moving away, they smirked to each other and began mimicking the guy's accent and rolling their eyes, all very much "can you believe how bad this guy's English is" and I'm just boiling inside. DO YOU REALISE YOU'RE IN PARIS RIGHT NOW MOTHERFUCKERS? HOW'S YOUR FRENCH???

which is quite amusing since I sound North American af.

lol the NA accent can be quite scathing when it needs to be, although I concede that its Canadian variant further dulls the edge.

Yeah but you don’t have the scathing rolled R though, francophone version is no substitute.

I speak English with a standard Canadian anglophone accent and Romanian with a standard Romanian accent but I can't, for the life of me, even when I'm sloshed, combine the two. I can do an English accent in French and a French accent in English but I am utterly unable to sound Romanian in any language other than Romanian. The beauty of ILX, however, is that you can still choose to hear that arch-scathing Eastern European accent in your head – I'm all for it.

Anyway, sorry for hijacking this thread again, I just wanted to say: fuck off, Boris.

To make matters worse, his French is semi-decent for an occasional speaker. He's not fluent by any stretch of the imagination and he makes some amusing mistakes, but he seemingly understands the value of speaking more than one language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEGtpSvGXEA

Boris’s French is better than Gove’s (https://youtu.be/PlUJ-36-4ho) but worse than Cunt’s. Can’t find a good video of this but there’s about fifty videos of Hunt speaking Japanese, wtf.

Boris’s French is better than Gove’s (https://youtu.be/PlUJ-36-4ho) but worse than Cunt’s. Can’t find a good video of this but there’s about fifty videos of Hunt speaking Japanese, wtf.

Also this video of TM speaking French is awful
https://youtu.be/0dbvZJqgp0A like even the Queen made more of an effort speaking Irish

Bercow makes me angrier than Gove in that clip.

Bercow is always like this but he and Gove hate each other & genuinely cant think of a situation where I’d side with Gove.

Yeah, it's just the "well we're all just mates having a laugh here" vibe of it. Endemic to parliament I know.

Jesus fuck have we really got another two weeks of this?

I don't think Johnson's French is very good in that youtube given that he spent some of his childhood and several years of his adult life in Brussels. It's just the bare minimum enabling you to get by, ie typical Boris

Again wondering out loud if any of BJ’s Eton fees were paid as part of an expat employee package that went with Daddy’s EC job, because wouldn’t that be *delicious*?

but Johnson is more immune to shame than most Tories, even. i think he'd be comfortable benefiting from something he intends to deny to other people.

I don't think Johnson's French is very good in that youtube given that he spent some of his childhood and several years of his adult life in Brussels.

Tbf it's a lot easier to live in Brussels (a bilingual, even trilingual city) with a bare-bones grasp of French than it is in Paris. By the same token, there are born and bred anglophone Montrealers whose French is poorer than Boris's, alas.

Regardless, I’d love to see him answer a question about it on telly. The waffling would befit Belgium.

lol

xpost you're no doubt right about Brussels although all the British people I know there speak French a damn sight better than Johnson!

Will never forget taking a train from Brussels to Brugge and at a certain point they just abruptly stopped doing announcements on the train in French.

there are born and bred anglophone Montrealers whose French is poorer than Boris's

A random example of this: Steven Pinker, who spent the first 20+ years of his life in Montreal, gave a conference at the École normale supérieure in Paris and wasn't even arsed to take QUESTIONS in French. The amount of anglophones who don't bother learning foreign languages even in contexts where you'd expect it is absurdly high, and it's not even entirely their fault. This is simply how linguae francae work: language is power, etc.