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

a friend well-versed in such things pointed out that focus groups are currently more or less impossible

the right has generally done p well in arenas with lowest common denominator, unedited viral/meme content on social media, it's one of the reasons for the pivot to flooding, it plays on all sorts of cheap feelings while also lowering trust

Lol can’t believe I’m going to watch the daily briefing again but here we are. It’s a good thing our tv is on its last legs in case Pesto appears again.

it might just expire in frustration like the rest of us

gaslighting fucks. You only need to review fines if something has changed – and the whole argument is that DC was within the law at the time

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52797859

This'll be an interesting test of how far Johnson can stand up to the lunatic fringe in his party, and the US.

I guess the good news is that there'll be fewer 5G masts for people to set fire to.

Peston trying out a short question, but with no follow-up he's sunk

Montie says another government resignation tonight

boris is gonna resign

Junior Minister for Paper Clips and Office Requisitions no doubt.

he's still dead

lol a survey conducted in scotland before the cummings story broke puts sturgeon 50 points ahead of johnson for people thinking she’s done a good job in handling the ‘rona

You try telling that to fat Rangers supporting mods.

Hoi that was only a childhood dalliance

there's something really heartbreaking about seeing Scottish Unionists fall over themselves to claim Sturgeon and the SNP have failed as badly as Westminster, it's like watching people stick their fingers in their ears and know you're never going to change their mind on anything - and I say this as someone who remains skeptical about independence and critical of the SNP for various other reasons

Politics in scotland is dead. Culture war bullshit between nats and yoons ad nauseam forever

when I used to be on twitter I would get abused for being a unionist despite having been a nat my whole life and mainly voting for nat parties (SSP in my first election, Nats and Greens, until Labour under Corbyn)

IndyRef exposed a lot of people in Scotland as being basically indistinguishable from NI Unionists/Loyalists, something that was partly hidden by pretty much all of that energy being channeled into supporting Rangers - plus the fact they all voted Labour. Now, the genie's out of the bottle a lot of them are not only proudly Tories but they've got that Orange Walk strut and swagger about the fact.

Yoons both sides of the Irish Sea the exact same kind of tragic

And this is the Danny Kruger note pic.twitter.com/7YBdh2dO1A

— Nicholas Watt (@nicholaswatt) May 26, 2020

That’s Prue Leith’s son btw

cool, nice to have a yardstick by which to measure the continuing calls for domcum’s head

jeremy just high as shit in the back garden today, chugging litres of apple juice and going "the world's just kind of like... a big allotment man" https://t.co/WQz0PQ9Get

— joe (@spinningjoe) May 26, 2020

GET-BREXITDONE
LEVEL-UP-THE-REGIONS
FIX/WHITEHALL

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcSOlkK9Q99uFf6ZGdZw6BZWZsKeVJqMqhdDZGYgp9MqIq1NteDU&usqp=CAU

EXCLUSIVE: Police break up illegal #lockdown birthday party at Tory MP's house#Coronavirus #DominicCummings #Cummingshttps://t.co/Y7Svhied2j pic.twitter.com/V8m2S1O31d

— Mirror Politics (@MirrorPolitics) May 26, 2020

Mail moves Cummings off the front, Telegraph puts him on.

a) the fuck is that guy only 40 and b) he has the most minimalist Wikipedia entry I have ever seen on an elected representative. Basically it says "this guy exists".

he has that great aged well tweet in the early days of corona

I can't get the face of that tory mp out of my head, he looks like they are lancing piles from Boris's arse and raising them in a petri dish where they are never ever told they shouldn't do something until they are released into parliament.

large adult mp

He’s basically a rung below a fictional American baseball player with that name.

He looks like he's been raised on an unregulated battery farm

Bit of a shit story from the Mirror however, although the party was at his house he wasn’t actually at it

he's basically Baron Harkonnen after a pustule removal makeover

It was his wife’s birthday!

Should have driven her to Barnard Castle as a treat and everything would have been fine.

tories can have a little barnard castle, as a treat

Conservative poll lead cut by 9 points, the biggest sudden drop in a decade pic.twitter.com/KBxD6r4XCJ

— Jim Pickard (@PickardJE) May 26, 2020

Amazing
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EY-QmdeX0AEjW9n?format=jpg&name=large

chefkiss

lmao

oh god I hope that's real

It’s real

I am actually going to buy the daily star tomorrow, what strange times we live in

now more than ever, we must do our part to support quality journalism

Lads Rob Roberts’s twitter profile contains the phrase “real person”

NEW: Poll in tomorrow’s Daily Mail (that well known left wing paper) finds 66% of people think Dominic Cummings should resign.

But most damning of all, 55% of Conservative voters say he has to go. pic.twitter.com/vUuqjmHmWA

— Paul Brand (@PaulBrandITV) May 26, 2020

YouGov / Times poll

Conservatives: 44% (-4)
Labour: 38% (+5)
LIb Dems: 6%
Greens: 4% (-1)
Brexit: 2%

9-point drop in the Tory lead since last week.

— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) May 26, 2020

Sorry, I'll knock it off on the tweets after this

One final comment this evening on my firm's new poll.

This is the most consistently one-sided political topic I have ever ran a poll on. I expected nuance, there was no nuance. Public completely united in their views https://t.co/jaTdkhB7QF

— James Johnson (@jamesjohnson252) May 26, 2020

This might still all be forgotten in a few weeks but I think the people itt and elsewhere who are confidently claiming it will be, or claiming it's of no real significance, don't seem to have factored in the unique situation literally everyone in the country is living through.