2022 Tory leadership election

[Blumf]

Is the plan, perhaps, to use her time in office to manoeuvrer in an actual replacement into position, ready to take over after she's sponged up all the coming bad news. "Yes Liz, Stanley Talkinghorse would make a fine Chancellor for you. Don't worry about all these websites he's registering."

Fuck it, I'm granting them far too much intelligence.

[Huxleys Babkins]

Is the plan, perhaps, to use her time in office to manoeuvrer in an actual replacement into position, ready to take over after she's sponged up all the coming bad news. "Yes Liz, Stanley Talkinghorse would make a fine Chancellor for you. Don't worry about all these websites he's registering."

Fuck it, I'm granting them far too much intelligence.

As long as nobody is willing to have an honest conversation about the damage Brexit has done and continues to do to the economy, useless idiots like Truss are the best we can ever hope for.

[BlodwynPig]

I'm saying nothing original here but I still really can't believe I'm living in a time when Liz Truss is possibly going to be prime minister next month. What the fuck? Things really do get shitter and shitter in ways people would've laughed at you for suggesting the year before.

Trump, Boris, Truss, Corden, Baby Hitler

[Fambo Number Mive]

Johnson clearly favours Truss, but the reasoning I've heard is that she's more likely to screw up badly, and when she does, he thinks the party will be begging him to return.

I think he could be right about the former, but while the party membership would love him to return I think most Tory MPs would  not want him back as leader. They know that if he became PM again he'd fuck up again a year or so afterwards.

Even Truss taking over is likely to be very divisive among Tory MPs.

[Fambo Number Mive]

I do wonder if the Johnson protest vote could help Sunak, given that people who wanted him on the ballot would be more likely to vote Truss.

[Alberon]

Voting for the next prime minister has been delayed after GCHQ warned that cyber hackers could change people's ballots, The Telegraph can reveal.

The Conservative Party has been forced to abandon plans to allow members to change their vote for the next leader later in the contest because of the concerns.

The sudden alteration means postal ballots have still yet to be issued to the around 160,000 Tory members who will pick Boris Johnson's successor. The ballots had been due to be sent out from Monday, but members have now been warned they could arrive as late as Aug 11.

The decision was taken on the advice of the National Cyber Security Centre, part of the UK's GCHQ listening post. The Telegraph understands fears were raised that nefarious actors could change the votes of scores of party members, causing chaos to the democratic process.

This all seems to play into Sunak's hands, and it is very easy to see this as an attempt to give Truss enough time to self-destruct (as today has shown she's very capable of doing).

[vanilla.coffee]

With such global uncertainty and the real possibility of mass civil disobedience at home with the rising "don't pay your energy bills" gathering momentum - why would anyone want to be the prime minister?

Penny Mordaunt is probably now rather relieved she didn't make it to the final round.

[pigamus]

I thought even Liz Truss wasn't stupid enough to fuck it at this stage.

I may have made a key mistake.

[Auntie Beryl]

Any more U-Turns and she'll be known as Spin Lizzy!

_{sorry about that}

[Huxleys Babkins]

A very thick slice.

[Alberon]

The Telegraph is doubling down on backing Truss with several op-eds attacking Sunak today. Something even the comments underneath the opinions have noticed.

[Alberon]

A YouGov poll for The Times published last night showed that Liz Truss has a 34-point lead over her rival, Rishi Sunak, among Conservative party members.

The poll, which the paper said was conducted over the past five days, showed 60% support for Truss versus 26% for Sunak, with the remainder undecided. Almost nine in 10 Tory members have already made up their minds about who to vote for, it said.

The results of the poll suggest a significant widening of Truss's lead. The last YouGov poll, carried out on 20 July, had support for Truss on 49% compared with 31% for Sunak. Truss is ahead of Sunak among all age groups, across different parts of the country and among men and women.

The poll also suggested that Boris Johnson would "easily beat" both Truss and Sunak if he were on the ballot paper, with widespread resentment among Conservative party members about the way he was ousted from office.

Absolutely barking, the lot of them.

[Paul Calf]

It's the Thatcher cosplay, and the media coverage.

And the racism.

I mean, she is going to be shit at this and I think everyone knows it.

[Mr_Simnock]

Bring boris back I say, show the electorate just how very very little of a shit they give about their opinions, and then watch as even beige nothing beats them at the next election

[George Oscar Bluth II]

With such global uncertainty and the real possibility of mass civil disobedience at home with the rising "don't pay your energy bills" gathering momentum - why would anyone want to be the prime minister?

It is bizarre watching this play out how it is when we know what's coming down the track. Austerity was managed to ensure supporters of the Conservative Party were exempted or could buy their way out of it. And that's fine when austerity is "your local leisure centre is shut now" or "schemes for poor kids are getting axed". But now austerity is "you can't get a GP appointment" or "four hours till you can have an ambulance for your chest pains sorry". Can't buy your way out of those.

Add the newly austerity affected middle classes to a massive populace that'll be literally unable to pay their electricity bill in January and...well. It's gonna get interesting.

EDIT TO ADD: the other thing here is that a lot of people on not-very-much-money have been able to live a Tory-like life thanks to cheap credit. You could have a Merc on the drive of your new build (in certain parts of the country) on a very normal salary. That's over too.

[idunnosomename]

I keep voting for a praying mantis with its cock out

Do they have.... a prayer!

[Buelligan]

My top pick too. 

If I were a tory, which I am not, I would deffo be voting Sunak.  I find it impossible to intuit the appeal of Truss.  Impossible to comprehend anything about her that would encourage me to trust in her guiding hand.  So impossible, it leaves me feeling thoroughly othered in a not altogether unpleasant way.

A praying mantis with its cock out though, that is a horse of a different colour.

[Sebastian Cobb]

People who vilify Britain will be treated as extremists and referred to the Government's deradicalisation Prevent programme under plans by Rishi Sunak.

https://twitter.com/charleshymas/status/1554710430366449664

telegraph link

Has anyone noticed archive.ph being blocked btw? I'm on Virgin Media and am getting 'connection refused' errors but going through a VPN works.

Edit: my ISP are not blocking archive.ph... I had my browser set to use the cloudfare dns over ssl and they appear to be directing it to a machine that refuses the connection.

Edit2: this is old but it might actually be archive.ph taking exception to cloudfare's dns withholding information https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/

[Alberon]

Criticising the government will obviously be vilifying Britain. The wanker is proposing making thoughtcrime law.

Thank god he won't win.

[superthunderstingcar]

That's about half of Scotland, (probably more than) half of Northern Ireland, and a fair proportion of Wales getting referred to Prevent, then.

[Buelligan]

France gets forgotten.  AGAIN.

[Terence Bowl]

People who vilify Britain will be treated as extremists and referred to the Government's deradicalisation Prevent programme under plans by Rishi Sunak.

I've just run the above statement through the AI translator at www.whatpoliticiansreallymean.com and it came out as..

"See? If I really was one of those muslim terrorists that they have now I wouldn't be saying stuff like this now would I? Please vote for me, my skin may be a different shade but underneath I'm English through and through and hate foreig... I mean love Britain just as much as you."

[Fambo Number Mive]

Not sure how vilifiyng Britain is defined but no doubt under the Tories it would include criticising Brexit or Alezander Johnson. Sunak won't win but it  scary what is being proposed by mainstream politicans. Ten years ago only the far right would want "vilifying Britain" to be some kind of crime.

[shoulders]

Only hope the margin for victory is embarrassingly close that whoever wins has effectively minimal authority from the word go.

[Wonderful Butternut]

At what point will Sunak promise to have rough sleepers destroyed by flamethrower wielding soldiers whilst Truss claims she'll personally eat every 5th refugee baby that enters the country if made PM?

I reckon we could be there by the end of next week.

[jobotic]

I will make your, your children and your grand children's lives full of terror, misery and hatred.


YEAH!!!

[dissolute ocelot]

Sunak at 4/1 against could be good value. It's at least possible that the Truss campaign will implode under the weight of all the stupid things she says, like Andrea Leadsom did in 2016. You may think "there is no way Truss can say anything so stupid and evil that Tories will be upset." But do not underestimate her. Maybe it's a requirement for all NHS staff to have "Vote Tory" tattooed on their forehead and NHS patients to say they love the government before they get treated, maybe it's a scheme to make children do an hour of hymn-singing every morning, maybe it's executing Prince Harry for treason. She is capable of all these things. One of them may prove unpopular. (By contrast, Dishy Rishi knows exactly how offensive he can be.)

[Sebastian Cobb]

The really concerning part of the article is it looks like he's going to turn a blind eye to right-wing extremism.

Mr Sunak also announced proposals to "refocus" Prevent onto Islamic extremism as the biggest threat to the security of the UK after complaints that it had tilted too much towards Right-wing militants radicalised over the internet.

Yet it looks like they already are focusing on Islamic extremism:

At present, only 22 per cent of referrals to Prevent and Channel deradicalisation programmes are Islamist even though Islamists account for 80 per cent of live counter terror investigations and 68 per cent of all extremists in jails.

Yet

Since 2017, counter-terrorism forces have foiled 32 plots: 18 were Islamist related, and 12 were from the extreme right wing

^source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/may/16/terrorism-in-the-uk-the-rising-threat-of-far-right-extremists

[Kankurette]

We did Prevent training in the hospital I worked in and it covered Islamists AND the far right.

[Huxleys Babkins]

Sunak at 4/1 against could be good value. It's at least possible that the Truss campaign will implode under the weight of all the stupid things she says, like Andrea Leadsom did in 2016. You may think "there is no way Truss can say anything so stupid and evil that Tories will be upset." But do not underestimate her. Maybe it's a requirement for all NHS staff to have "Vote Tory" tattooed on their forehead and NHS patients to say they love the government before they get treated, maybe it's a scheme to make children do an hour of hymn-singing every morning, maybe it's executing Prince Harry for treason. She is capable of all these things. One of them may prove unpopular. (By contrast, Dishy Rishi knows exactly how offensive he can be.)

But do remember that Leadsom never faced the membership, she stood down.

Tories don't stand down in shame any more. They just double down and carry on.