Thursday 7th December 2023

[refitman]

Morning all.

[refitman]

[gilsey]

I wonder how widely it'll be reported.

[gilsey]

[gilsey]

In his LBC interview this morning Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, played down the significance of Robert Jenrick’s resignation last night as immigration minister over the Rwanda bill. He said:

I don’t think it’s as big a story as is being made.

I generally don’t like anybody resigning from my party … [but] when I was Boris’s chief whip pretty much everybody did, so maybe I have a sense of scale and proportion that others don’t.

[AnatolyKasparov]

Well, that's not a bad line tbf.

[gilsey]

RIP Benjamin Zephaniah.

[AnatolyKasparov]

Sunak begging Rwanda not to torpedo his own madcap scheme, is that what we have come to now?

[Sky'sGoneOut]

I wonder if Jonny Mercer will be pissed again. I do hope so.

[AnatolyKasparov]

Peter Hitchens is always good value, as they say. Mostly mad as a hatter but with the occasional nugget of genuine insight.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

So now we have Johnson's evidence to the Covid enquiry and what did we learn? We learned how well he was coached by his tax payer funded lawyers. Nothing else. The only mistakes he was prepared to admit were those that were so glaringly obvious he couldn't deny them, and which were shared by others so there was collective blame. Anything specific to him was either denied, brushed aside, or explained away in the most preposterous fashion. Yes No10 was a toxic, chaotic environment but it was like that on purpose, he wanted people at each others throats because the only other alternative was to have a bunch of nodding dogs. Apparently government can only be run as either one of those extremes and nothing exists between them. Yes he said all those things about letting the virus rip and allowing old folks to die, but you see he was merely playing Devil's advocate, he didn't actually mean what he was saying, in fact he was only doing his job. Same for the fact that he kept veering wildly between positions, he was merely expressing contrary opinions. If this were the case you would have thought those around him would have twigged that this was his modus operandi, yet none of them did, ever.

It was all pre-prepared transparent bullshit designed to defend every charge that could be laid against him no matter how absurd the explanations he offered sounded. Will anyone believe he ran the most shambolic, toxic operation that senior civil servants could ever remember intentionally? Will anyone believe he was just play acting when he said all those horrible things? Will anyone believe he deleted 5000 WhatsApp messages and wiped his phone by accident? A few no doubt, but for the rest of us all we saw was a pathetic excuse for a man completely unwilling to admit a single mistake or failing that was his and his alone. A deceitful coward whose only concern was avoiding personal blame. We've seen and heard it all before. He's learned absolutely nothing and if he thinks his performance has in any way rescued his heavily soiled reputation he's got another thing coming.

[RogerOThornhill]

Central Office playing a blinder this afternoon...

[AnatolyKasparov]

Mind you the BBC making Moshiri apologise for it isn't much better.

[refitman]

Glass houses and stones

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Mind you the BBC making Moshiri apologise for it isn't much better.

Perhaps, but on the other hand it allowed us to gauge opinion (at least on Twitter) and from what I could see it was about 90% people thinking it was funny and 10% whingeing puce faced gammons who for various bizarre reasons seemed to take it personally. Who knows, maybe she was giving them the finger. I would.

[RogerOThornhill]

Monbiot telling it like it is...and not a single interruption.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Question Time came tonight from Petersfield in Hampshire and despite what Eva Green said not all of the audience were shitty peasants. Just the handful who clapped Peter Hitchens.

So let's start off with Peter Hitchens shall we? Peter inadvertently offered us great hope in the form of a warning. You see according to Peter, Blair was the most radical politician since Cromwell and Starmer is going to be the same. He claimed Starmer was a 'red/green fanatic' who still held the radical beliefs he had when he was a student and young lawyer. Hence the bland Starmer the rest of us see is just a pretence and if Labour win the next election we'll get an extreme left wing government. Unfortunately after threatening us with a good time I'm afraid Peter went down a couple of climate change denial, anti-lockdown rabbit holes so it's possible he's a pompous buffoon with a tenuous grip on reality so his promise of a new leftie utopia may sadly never come to pass.

On the other side of the commentariat divide we had George Monbiot. George had a bad throat which he cured over the course of the programme with righteous anger. His voice improved every time he laid into the government, whether it was for their performative cruelty when it came to refugees, their corrupt pandering to their fossil fuel donors, or the appalling response of Johnson's government to Covid. He didn't have much good to say about Starmer's spineless courting of the right wing press either. It was hard to disagree with anything he said.

For the Tories we had Jonny Mercer. Much to everyone's disappointment Jonny was sober this evening but that didn't stop him being hilariously thin skinned. Monbiot clearly got into his head early on and poor Jonny spent much of the rest of the programme in a sort of affronted, huffy fit of pique which resulted in him indulging in some excruciating virtue signalling (going on about visiting Afghan refugees) while repeatedly denying he was a sadist. Monbiot had simply said the Rwanda policy was sadistic but Jonny took it personally and went on about not being a sadist all night. He probably still is, I bet he's on the train right now telling everyone in first class he's not a sadist and they're putting their headphones in even if they're not listening to music just so they can avoid talking to the mad bloke.

For Labour we had Anneliese Dodds. Anneliese is usually quite, shall we say passive? That's probably too harsh but tonight she was anything but. Gesticulating, finger pointing and vociferously advocating for her cause. Unfortunately for her that cause is Keir Starmer's Labour Party and despite the shitshow I've described above much of what she said fell on deaf ears. The peasants of Hampshire might not be keen on the Conservatives but even they can smell bullshit when 'taxing non-doms' is wheeled out once again to pay for everything. Anneliese got on fine when attacking the Tories but was met with complete silence when asked to explain how Labour would be any better. Which might not seem like a problem now but should worry Labour strategists.

It's one thing hearing silence in response to Conservatives, and Mercer experienced that again tonight, but quite another when a Labour MP defends Starmer and offers a vision for a future government and faces tumbleweed.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Monbiot telling it like it is...and not a single interruption.

After that Fiona Bruce asked the Conservative majority audience if anyone wanted to defend the Rwanda policy and of the three people who put their hands up only one made a half hearted go at it.

They've lost the plot and become completely unmanageable.

As a Manchester United supporter I should have some sympathy with their predicament but last time I looked Bruno Fernandes wasn't on Question Time trying to persuade people he wasn't a sadist.

[Sky'sGoneOut]