Britain needs stability not a “soap opera”, Penny Mordaunt has said as the Prime Minister faces calls to resign from Tory MPs.
Sigh.
Britain needs stability not a “soap opera”, Penny Mordaunt has said as the Prime Minister faces calls to resign from Tory MPs.
Sigh.
“Our country needs stability not a soap opera.”
Only took her a “couple” of years to figure that one out, eh?
I can’t think of any problem in which Penny Mordaunt features as part of the solution, no matter how small a part she plays.
As I half tongue in cheek quipped on Twatter: Kemi or bust. More likely Kemi and still bust, but at least she’ll get some valuable experience and for next time.
Why anybody would want to be Tory leader right now, when they’re almost certain to crash and burn at the next election, is beyond me. I’d have thought the sane option is to work hard to keep your seat on a personal rather than party basis and then aim become the next but one (or two depending on how bad the crash was) Tory leader.
I don’t care who’s in charge so long as she’s got big tits.
One stands for election in Britain, we’re not Yanks.
BiND,
“As I half tongue in cheek quipped on Twatter: Kemi or bust. More likely Kemi and still bust, but at least she’ll get some valuable experience and for next time.”
There’s a handful of good people in the Conservatives but the problem is the army of donkeys who seem more interested in nothing changing, business as usual. The Conservatives in power for 12 years have achieved almost nothing: cut the rate of the increase in spending, free schools and Brexit. And the last was forced on them by UKIP and the Brexit Party.
There’s always that thing of FPTP systems leading to a duopoly. That even if you prefer the Libertarians, it’s a wasted vote because Labour will get in, so you vote Conservative. But there’s really no reason to do that if you’re on the right-wing with the current lot because a fag paper’s width separates Lab and Con now. Starmer struggled to be leader of the opposition because everything that Boris did was favourable to the more sensible end of Labour: zero privatisation, zero reform bloated government projects.
Supporting and voting Reform is zero cost as far as I’m concerned. And the Conservatives won’t be getting my vote until someone takes over who purges the wets, sends them running to the Lib Dems or whatever.
Is a Penny Mordaunt anything like a Penny Dreadful?
Nice hair, not much under it.
@bom4
Steve Davies (head of education at the IEA) has a really interesting twitter thread that’s an extension of what you’re talking about, suggesting that there’s a “rock paper scissors” thing going on in the Tory party between libertarians, red wallers (including “traditional” conservatives outside the red wall) and what he calls “whigs” (right-wing liberals). https://twitter.com/SteveDavies365/status/1576892380594475008
Once you accept that the Tory Party in Parliament and tory voters nationally are actually three increasingly distinct parties, you can understand why since Brexit (which ruptured the stable coalition that existed), they have been changing leaders the way Chelsea do managers. 1.
It’s a Condorcet paradox at work. Three groups: libertarians, right-wing liberals (whigs), red wallers (traditional tories). Each group ranks themselves top. For libertarians rws>whigs, for whigs libertarians>rws, for rws whigs>libertarians. 2.
In a choice between libertarians and rws, libertarians win. If libertarians vs whigs, whigs win. If whigs vs rws, rws win. This explains the way the Parliamentary Party is cycling through the three positions (we’ve had May/whig, BoJo/rw, Truss/libertarian).3
Not true for members, where there’s a Condorcet winner (libertarians). What broke the stable balance between the three factions was Brexit because it leads libertarians to prefer rws to whigs (previously the whigs were Condorcet winners in Parliament). Time for a divorce or two?
Not sure how accurate it is, particularly when it comes down to the preference. I thought MPs’ preferences in the leadership contest were a bit all over the place, and often based more on personality than political “tribe”, Gove4Kemi being only the most extreme example. But thought-provoking. If Davies is right about the shifting balance of inter-tribe competition, it may take fewer people of your ilk in the Tory party to shift things around (particularly as some of the older tribe literally die off) than you might think.
Hmm problem is that a significant group that we could call Cameroons/OneNation/Establishment are identical to LibDems : Remainers, tax and spend, money printing, ecoloons and so on. They have the ascendancy and have captured power and are hlding Truss hostage. Johnson sold out to them and Sunak was their candidate.
Let’s rather consider the possibility that they are not in the least interested in ideological factions rather by other considerations like money, approval, influence and an easy life. This isn’t the mooted rock/paper/scissors nonsense but a straightforward demonstration that other forces decide what is to happen if the voters get it wrong. Probably the same ones the conspiracy people say. Don’t you think that they, the ones who dispense money, approval and the rest, get what they want? The kind of money etc that would tempt any person however honest is as nothing to those entities if they stand to achieve their desire.*
* Rhoda is of course available to listen any properly framed offer/bribe.
@Ottokring
Hmm problem is that a significant group that we could call Cameroons/OneNation/Establishment are identical to LibDems : Remainers, tax and spend, money printing, ecoloons and so on. They have the ascendancy and have captured power and are hlding Truss hostage. Johnson sold out to them and Sunak was their candidate.
That’s Davies’s point, really: in the parliamentary party “If libertarians vs whigs, whigs win” whereas in the membership “there’s a Condorcet winner (libertarians)” … i.e. Truss could win majority of members but only plurality of MPs if what Davies calls the “whigs” and you call the “Establishment” gang up on her. As for your point about Boris selling out, or if we prefer to put it more generously, choosing to go along with a lot of the “Establishment” agenda rather than pitching Singapore-on-Thames free-marketry, that’s what Davies notes with “for rws” – which was Boris’s adoptive tribe for 2019 onwards – “whigs>libertarians”.
I’m not sure Davies quite captures the dynamics of the leadership election where for many of them it looks much closer to @rhoda’s perspective, is “Let’s rather consider the possibility that they are not in the least interested in ideological factions rather by other considerations like money, approval, influence and an easy life”… certainly the way some MPs tried to herd behind whoever they thought the next favourite might be, in an attempt to curry favour with the likely victor, looked consistent with that, plus there were plenty of personality clashes and not just ideological differences. The contest probably got talked up as more ideological than much of it really was, due to Truss and Sunak coming from two clearly different tribes – if it had ended up as Truss vs Mordaunt, or Hunt vs Sunak, or Zahawi vs Javid then I imagine the commentariat talking points would have been rather different.
But I do think Davies is onto something. It captures Otto’s observations pretty well, and this Brexit realignment idea makes a lot of sense, explaining why the “Cameroon Project” was smashed up so (apparently) decisively by Brexit, but re-emerging with a vengeance when the more libertarian faction won the leadership:
“What broke the stable balance between the three factions was Brexit because it leads libertarians to prefer rws to whigs (previously the whigs were Condorcet winners in Parliament).”
Ultimately Cameron governed with the sometimes reluctant support of both traditional Tories and Thatcherite radicals, because neither of those groups preferred each other to life under The Project. Post-Brexit, the libertarian/radical types knew that the thing standing most firmly in the way of their Singapore-on-Thames utopia was the Establishment they’d previously been willing to back, but who wanted to tether Britain closely enough to Brussels that it could never sail its own course. At that point they were willing to switch to supporting the more uncouth and less fashionable traditionalists in their Red Wall project, who they knew wouldn’t want Singapore-on-Thames either but were at least loyal to Brexit and so ensured it remained a possibility for the future. And when they did get what they thought would be their chance to get radical (or at least, cancel some tax rises…) then the Red Wall crew and Establishment ganged up on them. It’s a plausible story even if not completely persuasive!