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The Stupid (Parliamentary) Party strikes again

It would be very easy for Theresa May to pleasantly surprise me, given that I fully expect her to be the worst Tory PM since Edward Heath. She is a known quantity: inept, unprincipled, had a nice word for Sharia law once, and is also authoritarian, which is a hell of a combination. What that means is she is tough, but only against soft targets.

And she voted the opposite way to the majority of Tory voters on Brexit.

41 comments to The Stupid (Parliamentary) Party strikes again

  • RAB

    She is also a covert socialist.

  • Bod

    A perfect leader for today’s Tory Party then …

  • Cal

    What a hopeless bunch the top Tories are. Leadsom cries the moment she gets some stick. Did she think the left-wing media were going to be chanting ‘Ra-ra-ra’ for her? Cameron slinks off because he doesn’t want to do the work required. Johnson can’t overcome his laziness even with the coveted crown in reach. Gove finally admits he does want to be leader at the last possible minute, requiring him to all-too-visibly shaft the man he’s been supporting, and doesn’t understand why this doesn’t look good. Osborne schemes for years, and it’s all for nothing. Fox doesn’t understand he has no hope. And May qualifies merely by hanging around for years staying out of trouble while the others shoot themselves in the foot.

    Mind you, compared to the top Labour people these days they all look like Olympian Gods.

  • Cal (July 11, 2016 at 7:26 pm) “… Leadsom cries the moment she gets some stick. … ”

    Actually, to me it smells of a fix. Vote till there are but two candidates, then take out the other one and claim you are done. No need to consult all those “swivel-eyed loons” in your own party.

    One wonders how the swivel-eyed loons will feel about it.

  • PeterT

    One wonders how the swivel-eyed loons will feel about it.

    Decidedly like fruitcakes.

    http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/07/11/tory-members-defect-ukip/

  • Paul Marks

    It is depressing.

  • JohnW

    What a hopeless bunch the top Tories are. Leadsom cries the moment she gets some stick

    Smells fishy – lots of people suspect there is a reason the UK tax code is so impossibly labyrinthine:

    “Did you really think we want those laws observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against… We’re after power and we mean it… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers…” Atlas Shrugged.

  • James Strong

    Cameron did not slink off because he didn’t want to do the work required.
    He resigned because his recommendation to the country on a fundamental political and constitutional matter was rejected by the voters.
    It would have been quite wrong for him to stay in office to pursue a policy he didn’t believe in.
    His departure was the closest thing we have had to a principled resignation for a long time.

  • Mr Ed

    Cameron did not slink off because he didn’t want to do the work required.

    But he could have triggered Article 50 and then resigned (in disgust at us and himself for asking us).

  • Cal

    >Cameron did not slink off because he didn’t want to do the work required.
    He resigned because his recommendation to the country on a fundamental political and constitutional matter was rejected by the voters.

    Actually, he did it for both reasons. As his comments to his aides revealed.

  • Cal

    >>“… Leadsom cries the moment she gets some stick. … ”
    >
    >Actually, to me it smells of a fix.

    Either way, she’s useless. If she had some things lurking in her tax returns from previous years that she couldn’t bear to see scrutinized, then why did she waste our time running for PM? Why not let Gove have a pop?

    Or do you think she withdrew after getting a guarantee of a good position? Well, that still makes her useless.

  • Regional

    Inept and unprincipled are two vital qualifications for a politician but being lazy and cowardly are two more.
    You might think unprincipled and cowardly are a tautology but it’s not beneath a lot of politicians to straight out lie or change sides for political convenience.

  • JohnW

    Cal, if they had something on her parents’ taxes she may have quit through loyalty to them.
    Secondly, her support within the PCP may have been too thin anyhow.
    Thirdly, her ‘team’ was obviously cobbled together at very short notice and they showed a stunning lack of experience by green-lighting her doorstep apology.
    Thatcher quit prematurely too – following advice from her ‘team’ – and she had bags of experience.

    We may never know the true cause but, either way, it’s good news for UKIP.

  • john malpas

    From the outside it all seems well arranged.
    If you can’t get your way and remain -what to do?
    Nobble Boris – go through make believe to fool the proles.
    Get you ‘remain’ person in power.
    Then slowly weaken the leavers till the ‘the time has come for ‘certainty’.
    Second referendum and back you all go.

  • mike

    Agree with Niall Kilmartin and Cal: it does look like it was fixed, but even so I’m bitterly disappointed in and angry at Leadsom for even bothering to stand in the first place. The moment she apologized to May over the “motherhood” comment, it was all over. She should have never apologized. It was in fact the perfect moment to take the knife to the Telegraph people and May allies: refuse to apologize and lay bare that their reporting was nothing more than a bullying tactic premised upon the “equality and diversity” tosh of political correctness. She should then have insisted that the public, and particularly Tory members, were fed up to the back teeth with political correctness in all its stripes and that she would continue to stand.

    Instead, she caved. Possibly there may have been some behind the scenes threat too. We’ll likely never know. But she should have anticipated this too.

  • Lee Moore

    I think the motherhood thing also showed that May isn’t a very good politician. It was the perfect opportunity to come out and say “Andrea has been completely misunderstood, it was a very unfair headline, she was saying quite the opposite. Let’s all simmer down and have a nice friendly contest.”

    She couldn’t possibly have lost anything by saying it, it would leave her smelling of roses, gone down well with the swivel-eyed loons and the general electorate, and it would prevent nine tenths of the simmering rancour that is now likely to bubble under her PMship until she makes a public cock up and the rancour comes out into the open.

    Instead she looks like someone who has walked by on the other side while her allies have given a weak rival a good kicking. Just not very bright. One of Cameron’c great strengths was to be a B’stard while coming across as friendly and genial. May was obviously not paying enough attention.

  • PeterT

    The problem with Cameron was that he had bad beliefs. Nothing wrong with his skills set; for the most part a very skilled politician, until the EU referendum, when he seems to have lost the plot somewhat.

  • Gregory Kong

    I am so looking forward to the inevitable 2020 GE, where it is entirely possible that UKIP will give the other parties a major trouncing. Not saying that it will work out that way, of course, but I’m looking forward to the possibility, at least.

    And whichever way it goes, it’s about time the politicos got rubbished properly.

  • Jim

    “He resigned because his recommendation to the country on a fundamental political and constitutional matter was rejected by the voters.”

    That’ll be the man who made a categorical pledge during the campaign to stay on as PM regardless of the outcome of the vote, and to implement the wishes of the UK public, who stood outside Downing Street a few days before the vote and said ‘Brits don’t quit’, who then quit the moment he didn’t get his own way.

    In other words a lying piece of sh*t.

  • Dr. Toboggan

    Cal
    July 11, 2016 at 9:46 pm

    >Cameron did not slink off because he didn’t want to do the work required.
    He resigned because his recommendation to the country on a fundamental political and constitutional matter was rejected by the voters.

    Actually, he did it for both reasons. As his comments to his aides revealed.

    What’s this? Comments to aides?

  • Gregory Kong

    There are reports that Dismal Dave complained to his aides something to the effect of “Why should I have to do all the shit and let the next guy get all the credit?”

    Linky for what it’s worth: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3659281/Why-hard-s-Cameron-told-aides-d-quit-spend-six-months-working-Brexit-hand-rival.html

  • Johnathan Pearce (London)

    Chatting to friends over a drink last night I agreed that we all invest way too much significance in which individual gets to get the keys to 10 Downing Street. Is it going to be the woman with the scary shoes and the uneven record on X, or the lady whose name I can’t spell correctly who walked into a trap about her kids, or the Scottish guy with the funny lips and glasses who seemed a nice chap but isn’t, or the Etonian who does a sort of self-parody of a twit but who is apparently really clever and who shags his female colleagues? At this point I am tempted to ignore the whole circus.

    Meanwhile, in the South China Sea, there is a growing level of anxiety about what China is up to, but that hardly makes the front pages.

  • Watchman

    To be fair, that seems a fair commment – why should he do that considering he lost the referendum. If he had been neutral, fine, he should do it, but he is not the person to do the job of sorting an exit when he clearly does not believe in it.

    That the person doing it also clearly did not believe in it is however a bit of a bummer…

  • Lee Moore

    I think JP and his mates may be underestimating the importance of which individual gets to be leader of the Conservative party. The leader of the party is very important in determining who gets to be, and remain, a member of the Parliamentary party. Control of the party nomenklatura, approved candidate lists, preventing local parties ousting MPs who they don’t agree with – all these are vital and it is this that allows a fairly clearly Eurosceptic party, with fairly clearly Eurosceptic supporters and voters to have a fairly clearly Europhile Parliamentary party. The so called Tory “split” on the EU has really been about the minority of Europhiles imposing Europhilia on the majority of “swivel eyed loons.” The party leadership is vital for maintaining this control. And it is the parliamentary Tory party which will ensure that we get Brexit-lite (if we get Brexit at all.)

  • to be fair….why should he do that considering he lost the referendum. If he had been neutral, fine, he should do it, but he is not the person to do the job of sorting an exit when he clearly does not believe in it.

    So

    1. he shouldn’t have said he’d stick around whatever the result
    2. he shouldn’t have said a Leave vote would lead to a rapid Article 50 trigger
    3. he shouldn’t have waited until after the vote to set up a civil service Brexit unit
    4. he shouldn’t even have gone into the “negotiations” with the EU without having a dedicated Brexit unit, as not having made any preparations at all was an obvious signal that he wasn’t serious

    So “to be fair” – he’s (a) useless and (b) mendacious.

    But I could have told you that in 2005. Indeed I did just that.

  • JohnW

    The leader of the party is very important in determining who gets to be, and remain, a member of the Parliamentary party. Control of the party nomenklatura, approved candidate lists, preventing local parties ousting MPs who they don’t agree with – all these are vital and it is this that allows a fairly clearly Eurosceptic party, with fairly clearly Eurosceptic supporters and voters to have a fairly clearly Europhile Parliamentary party. The so called Tory “split” on the EU has really been about the minority of Europhiles imposing Europhilia on the majority of “swivel eyed loons.” The party leadership is vital for maintaining this control.

    Very true.

    On the bright side, Francesco Lari of UKIP following the May announcement:

    “Sorry about people experiencing delays in the process of their Ukip membership but central office swamped with 1000s of applicants.”

  • tomsmith

    The end of the Conservative party is the best we can hope for from this unacceptable turn of events. We will not get a real EU exit until a party that believes in doing it gains control.

  • JohnW

    @tomsmith The sickening smiles of May and her fellow cucks will not be forgotten in a long time. It will interesting to see how many people take revenge at the next General Election by voting UKIP.

  • Mr Ed

    Mrs May is like Harriet Harman, but being a Conservative, the difference is that Mrs May is a bit common.

  • shlomo maistre

    Tory politicians are self-interested not stupid. The widespread view that the Tories in the UK (or the GOP in the US) is the ‘stupid party’ is usually based on the misguided notion that Tory politicians serve their voters; they serve the Establishment, the City, the bureaucracy, the civil service, the intelligentsia, and globalist stakeholders.

  • shlomo maistre (July 13, 2016 at 1:09 am): “… Tory politicians are self-interested not stupid …”

    Embrace the healing power of ‘and’.

    Intellectuals (some of whom are Tory politicians though even more pollute other parties), passionately believe they are clever, not stupid. By contrast, I think that snatching the chance to vote away from the Tory party at large will prove a very serious error for precisely those Tory politicians that were most pleased to do it. However I also _wish_ to think that, so take my opinion with caution. Will the upcoming Tory party conference be lively, or will it be like the Thatcher years, when the left complained that a cleaning lady could walk on stage to ask if whoever parked the blue mondeo in front of the bins could move it and be greeted with sustained cheers and applause? I do not know how, when, or in truth whether this will play out.

  • shlomo maistre

    shlomo maistre (July 13, 2016 at 1:09 am): “… Tory politicians are self-interested not stupid …”

    Embrace the healing power of ‘and’.

    Intellectuals (some of whom are Tory politicians though even more pollute other parties), passionately believe they are clever, not stupid. By contrast, I think that snatching the chance to vote away from the Tory party at large will prove a very serious error for precisely those Tory politicians that were most pleased to do it. However I also _wish_ to think that, so take my opinion with caution. Will the upcoming Tory party conference be lively, or will it be like the Thatcher years, when the left complained that a cleaning lady could walk on stage to ask if whoever parked the blue mondeo in front of the bins could move it and be greeted with sustained cheers and applause? I do not know how, when, or in truth whether this will play out.

    And yet the fact remains that Tory politicians are self-interested not stupid.

  • Tory politicians are self-interested not stupid.

    The Tories are indeed the Stupid Party. The biggest threat to their political careers is not the Labour Party but rather UKIP. The great majority of Tory MPs supported REMAIN yet the majority of their own voters supported LEAVE, and that is a huge vulnerability that only UKIP can exploit. Had they appointed a LEAVE supporter as Tory party leader, say an establishment figure like Gove, UKIP would have evaporated into nothingness by next election: vulnerability patched, problem solved.

    But no, instead they did the one thing that makes it a near certainty that UKIP will still be a meaningful political force in 2020.

    They are indeed stupid.

  • Gregory Kong

    @Perry: Would you then think that UKIP is a one-trick pony, then? It would seem to me that most of the establishment agrees with that assessment… or at least they did up to Brexit, anyhow.

    I was actually rather under the impression that in terms of local government if nothing else, UKIP was rather doing very well; their councillors were responsive to the needs of their constituents, and the councillors themselves were regular folk. Is this not the case?

    Not that I disagree with your point. I just think that the Tories believe they can bluff it out, and by 2020, the electorate would have been fatigued and just vote them back in out of sheer apathy.

    Which is stupid, and hence I really do agree with you.

  • Lee Moore

    I think y’all are thinking too far ahead for the average Tory MP. The strategy for the next election depends on whether Labour implodes, whether UKIP descends into civil war, all sorts of stuff that isn’t knowable now. At least half the Remainer Tory MPs are not Remainers-of-the-heart, but just careerists. They expected Remain to win, they knew advancement wasn’t going to come from being awkward, so they did the careerist thing, and backed the winning horse. Except it lost, and then they had to scrabble for position. And May was much the best bet. She’s not going to mount a purge of MPs who had pretended to be Eurosceptic and then came out for Remain. After all, that’s herself. She’s not going to pack her Ministry with Leavers.

    Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof – there’s four years before they have to worry about the UKIP threat. Anything could happen by then. If in early 2020 it proves necessary to hang a few Belgians to show a tough-on-foreigners approach, they”ll hang a few Belgians. The thing to do is keep your tongue in the right backside and await events. It may not be deep strategy, but it’s not stupid.

  • Gove would not have mounted any purges, and he would have neatly solved all their problems in one fell swoop.

  • Lee Moore, July 13, 2016 at 12:29 pm: “there’s four years before they have to worry about the UKIP threat”

    Maybe. A party with a slim majority can never assume the election will be when they call it. If all the Tory Remainers were just cowardly leavers, the danger would not be great, but it only needs six to be fanatic Remainers – or in practice, a few more than that – and/or 50 to be fanatic Leavers convinced they’re being conned – and the next election could be four months away.

    UKIP might well not have died even if a Leaver were Tory PM. I would not want to be a Labour Remain MP defending a Labour-heartland seat against UKIP anytime while this vote and its Labour aftermath are recalled. So I’m with Perry that failure of the Tory parliamentary party to assuage Leavers fears is unwise. UKIP may diminish of course – who knows how good or bad the next UKIP leader will be – but at the moment I agree with Perry that an electoral problem that they could have transferred wholly to Labour is instead still also an issue for them.

  • Lee Moore

    Just for the avoidance of doubt, I was not intending to suggest that the “half the Remainer Tory MPs [who] are not Remainers-of-the-heart” are “cowardly leavers.” Oh Lordy me, no. They are not remainers or leavers at all. They are Me-and-my-careerers. They will become eager leavers if La May points the ship towards OUT. They will become cautious let’s waiters if La May points the ship towards let’s take it veeeery slooowly. Until they’ve worked out whether La May has them on her list for promotion or not. If they conclude they’re on her do not revive list, then they’ll conspire to remove her.

  • Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker!) Gray

    I would like one thing cleared up- how is the upper House of Lords composed? Is it still by hereditary right, or does the government appoint people to fill vacant seats?

  • Lee Moore

    There’s no such thing as a vacant seat. The Queen can appoint as many peers as she likes, as duly advised by the Prime Minister. Hereditary peers get to elect a few – a hundred or so – of their number who are allowed to sit and vote in the Lords. So these days there are many more appointed life peers voting than hereditaries.

    But note that the powers of the House of Lords are largely limited to delaying laws. With a very few exceptions, they can’t block them.

  • The ongoing rebellion against the elite may eventually achieve a return to the good old days when the House of Lords was mainly hereditaries and not full of PC-elitist remaindered rubbish from the commons, but alas, we’re far from there yet. But the thought of rebelling against privilege by restoring a more hereditary form of government is one I enjoy. 🙂