Saturday 28th & Sunday 29th January 2023

[refitman]

Morning all.

[frog222]

Morning refit

@Roger , thread on your taxpost last night --
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1619 ... 83264.html

[AnatolyKasparov]

There's always a tweet, innit.

[frog222]

Sanctions, what sanctions ?

[RogerOThornhill]

"After being told by Central Office that it was really not a good look, I feel the need etc"

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Reading Gullis' apology on his less than a day old Twitter account I can't help imagining that he's dictating it while tied to a chair in a dank industrial basement looking a bit worse for wear after being worked over by one of Sunak's heavies with a snooker ball in a sock.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Why is British politics a raging bin-fire? Don’t ask the misunderstood heroes who held the torches - Marina Hyde

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... is-johnson

Marina criticises Corbyn supporters alongside those of Johnson and Truss for indulging in a betrayal narrative and blaming everyone but themselves.

Hilarity then ensues in the comments as Corbyn supporters respond by behaving exactly as she describes.

[refitman]

Just the Press Gazette tagging in one of his victims, to the news of Nick Cohen retiring

[RogerOThornhill]

Oh dear...

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Just the Press Gazette tagging in one of his victims, to the news of Nick Cohen retiring

'Health grounds' my arse. Since when has being a lecherous creep with wandering hands been a health issue? He still seems healthy enough to be writing for The Spectator (who presumably have no problem employing a sex pest).

Decades of allegations ignored by the Observer then when they're finally forced to investigate they sweep the results under the carpet and come out with this tawdry bollocks. Let's be honest if it wasn't for Jolyon Maugham raising the issue Cohen would still be writing for the Observer if Lucy Siegle's account of her meeting with the management is anything to go by. Absolutely shameful.

[RogerOThornhill]

Good to see someone calling out La Birbalsingh's nonsense about her time at the Commission on Social Mobility - Simons and myself disagreed on academies but he knows his stuff.

Love the second tweet..."I know this to be true. Evidence? None at all sorry..."

[RogerOThornhill]

Interesting that both Simons and Sam Freedman who worked closely together, and are very evidence-based and evidence-informed, both dispair of her burblings.

I remember Policy Exchange - in the days when they had a decent edu team - coming out against expansion of grammar schools.

And then they went and appointed that fake vicar...he didn't last long...

[AnatolyKasparov]

Just the Press Gazette tagging in one of his victims, to the news of Nick Cohen retiring

Some people seem fairly confident about who this "insider" actually is, maybe a bit of naming and shaming is in order.

[RogerOThornhill]

And...Zahawi has gone. Sacked. A week too late.

[AnatolyKasparov]

RIP Tom Verlaine, these are getting a bit close to home now.

[RogerOThornhill]

Utterly shameless.

[AnatolyKasparov]

And some Tory MPs were still predicting the enquiry would clear him first thing this morning

[refitman]

[refitman]

Twitter's on one, I see

[frog222]

Two weeks or so since the Eye exposed this other example of Sunak's unerring good judgement , so how long will this joker last ?

The Conservatives have appointed an Egyptian-born billionaire and former minister under the Hosni Mubarak regime to be one of their senior fundraisers before the next election.

Rishi Sunak made the announcement that Mohamed Mansour would be the senior treasurer of the Conservative party at a reception for a group of donors on Monday night.

Mansour’s company Unatrac has donated more than £600,000 to the party. He was also last year given a role on the government’s advisory investment council as founder of his family-owned investment firm Man Capital.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... sour-egypt

ttps://twitter.com/markeverett1977/status/1619486326130343936

A spokesman said they had “scaled back” their Russia operation following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The Sunday Mirror found Unatrac’s website was offering machinery for sale and rent in Russia, which were still listed on its website last night.

The two firms are part of Mansour Group, owned and controlled by Mr Mansour and his brothers Youssef and Yasseen. It had revenues of more than £6billion in 2021.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/ ... i-29076834

[frog222]

[AnatolyKasparov]

Tories can never fail, only be failed.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

So the Gullis Twitter account with the apology was fake. I did wonder given it was only a day old but it looked plausibly legit besides the lack of shit flinging and grunting.

As for Zahawi, do the Tory Party really expect us to believe he was given senior positions by Johnson, Truss, and Sunak without any of them being aware of the serious allegations against him that were a matter of public record? That he simply lied to all three of them and nobody bothered checking? If so, and they really are that gullible and incurious, I think I may contact all three of them claiming to be a suitably attractive bit on the side and see how much money I can con out of them. Johnson and Truss should be easy but given Sunak's track record he'd probably turn the tables on me and end up emptying my bank account.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Season of the Witch.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479997/

Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman are badass crusaders who don't play by the rules. This is going to be awesome! Or maybe not.

After deserting their crusade disgusted by the murder of innocent civilians Cage and Perlman find themselves tasked by Christopher Lee to help transport a young witch accused of starting a plague to some monks so she can have a trial or something. The best thing about this film is the number of decent actors who appear in tiny roles because they were either being blackmailed or were desperate for money. The Hound from Game of Thrones has a single line of dialogue, as does the Irish lass from His Dark Materials. Christopher Lee is in it for all of two minutes and Stephen Graham has a pointless minor role as thief. The Witch herself is played by Claire Foy who I'm reliably informed played our dear, departed Queen in The Crown (I've never watched it) and she absolutely steals the show.

This is largely because the script is appallingly lame, a sad state of affairs only exacerbated by Nicolas Cage putting on a sort of medieval fantasy faux English accent despite Ron Perlman doing no such thing and sounding exactly like he does in all his other films. So you end up with this gruff American in a kind of buddy double act with someone who sounds like he's politely asking his gran for a cup of tea.

None of this is helped by the fact that for the first hour of the film the most exciting sequence is them getting a cart over a rickety bridge.

On the Cageometer I'd have to give this one a 2/5.

In truth you should only be watching this kind of thing if you're drunk in the afternoon.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Has there been any sign of the Tiny Clanger of late?

It's their fault I started watching all these terrible/disturbing/insane/glorious/wonderful Nicolas Cage films.

[AnatolyKasparov]

They come and go from here, hopefully due another appearance soon.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

So for my own amusement I've spent a week counting how many Telegraph opinion pieces mention the word 'woke'.

Sunday night to Sunday night, here's the final one.

Where does wokery end? With The Guardian accused of ‘colourism’

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/0 ... colourism/

Guess how many articles were published in a single week about 'wokeness' by the people who claim it's the left who are obsessed with this kind of thing.

Fourteen.

Written by such luminaries as Daniel Hannan, Camilla Tominey, Tim Stanley and of course Allister Heath.

Now I don't know about any of you lot but if I don't like something I tend to avoid it rather than obsessing about it endlessly.


Edit: Messed up the link then went on about cauliflower.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Even Fraser (worst accent in the world) Nelson is asking questions in The Spectator.

Do we really have the full story about the Zahawi affair?

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/doe ... wi-affair/

The Magnus report goes into detail about the offense. A minister facing an HMRC investigation would have been expected ‘to inform their permanent secretary and seek advice’, it says (paragraph 9) and then ‘update their declaration of interests form’. We’re left to believe that Zahawi did neither, thereby committing a career-ending breach of the ministerial code.

But is it really so? Allies of Zahawi say he did tell Tom Scholar, the then Treasury Permanent Secretary, about both the HMRC investigation and the penalty paid. And that his ministerial register of interests was up to date in September, when Liz Truss appointed him Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. So it’s a puzzle. Zahawi believes the Cabinet office authorities were fully in the picture when Sunak was made Tory Chairman a month afterwards [sic].

Fraser Nelson is right and this stinks to high heaven, I must admit I have a soft spot for Zahawi, he's an arsehole to be sure but the Tory party have used and abused him for years, chucking him out at every opportunity to defend the indefensible. Yes he's presumably done that willingly but so many of those fuckers owe him for taking the flak on their behalf and where has that got him? Barely any of them voted for him to be leader and his political pinnacle has been a mad few months bobbing up and down the ministerial league before being sacked.

Imagine how that would make you feel if you were an ambitious, egocentric twat who thought wrangling over a few million quid with HMRC was barely worth mentioning. If it were me I'd be fucking furious and would be out for revenge.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Anyway listen to this.

I'm reading this guy's biography at the moment. He was a violent, unpleasant alcoholic and then a heroin addict who used and abused everyone he ever knew. The whistling at the start of this song is there because members of Dinosaur Jr who'd been brought in to help him finish the album offered him 50 bucks if they could fuck around with the start of his album and he said yes because he needed the money for heroin.

It's a beautiful song.