18 July 2019
Blast from the Past
A Refresher from Corbynista (episode 3)
by Don Urquhart
Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary in July 2018. Hunt took over.
10 July 2018
The resignations of Davis and Johnson leave the Prime Minister with a docile cabinet and to that extent the Chequers away day was a success.
27 July 2018
His speech last week was clever, serious and accommodating by rejecting bitterness and extending a willingness to work with the Prime Minister if only she would keep to what she originally said was her policy – a truly open global Britain.
The Tory party conference in Birmingham at the end of September – when party members will have a chance to voice their own concerns about the Chequers agreement and the Prime Minister’s cowardice – looks set to be a true humdinger.
Will Johnson become the conference darling once more? He has all summer to figure out how to seize the day.
This is City A.M. actually making the case for Boris Johnson to succeed Theresa May as Prime Minister, under the headline:
Only Johnson can stop May, Raab or Hunt leading us to national humiliation
Would he do to the country what he did to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe still languishing in an Iranian prison?
2 October 2018
I have watched a couple of Tory Conference speeches. In general the Ministers appeared to be going through the motions like well-dressed zombies.
It is the quiet before the storm. Boris appears today and the Prime Minister speaks tomorrow.
26 November 2018
On Andrew Marr yesterday the Foreign Secretary referred approvingly to the British public as BOBs (Bored of Brexit) and we will be told many times over the next few weeks that we are instructing our legislators to just get on with it.
8 December 2018
Reports of the gilets jaunes in France tell us that it is all about extremists on both sides combining to express revulsion at the political establishment. Where have I heard that one before?
Never one to eschew a ride on a bandwagon our Foreign Secretary chooses this moment to warn of the insurrection that could result from a People’s Vote. Here’s what he says in a Times podcast:
You’d have 48 per cent of the country who had voted to Leave twice. They would be incredibly angry and I wouldn’t rule out real social instability in this country.
21 December 2018
Jeremy Hunt warns us that reversing Brexit would bring people onto the streets. He has failed to notice that they are there already.
24 January 2019
Two of the 5 panellists on tonight’s Question Time were Tory no deal Brexiteers. Nick Ferrari started into a list of companies who had expressed enthusiasm for Brexit including JCB, a major Tory donor which has just signed up David Davis for 20 hours work at £3,000 per hour and recently paid Boris Johnson £10,000 for reasons unknown.
30 January 2019
The reason a lot of people on my side of the argument were willing to, as it were, give our negotiators the benefit of the doubt is that we know we have the opportunity to have another vote.
Boris Johnson’s response on Newsnight to the passing of the Brady Amendment empowering the Prime Minister to agree with the EU alternative arrangements to the Backstop.
So the can is kicked further down the road.
26 April 2019
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been in an Iranian prison for 3 years. Gone are the days when subtle diplomacy could be relied on to assist British nationals in dire straits abroad. The last Foreign Secretary extended her sentence with his gormless utterances. Now, in response to an offer by Iran to release Nazanin in a prisoner exchange deal the current Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt dismisses the initiative as a “vile” diplomatic ploy.
Last year Hunt breached anti-money laundering legislation by failing to declare his interest in a property firm within the required 28 days. He had bought seven luxury flats at Alexandra Wharf, Southampton, with the help of a bulk discount from property developer and Conservative donor Nicholas James Roach.
If Jeremy Hunt succeeds in his party leadership ambitions who will benefit most from his administration? Money launderers and property developers might feel well placed.
Hopefully he is not the best candidate the Tories can field.
2 June 2019
According to Tim Shipman in the Sunday Times, Donald Trump is a big fan of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage but not of Jeremy Corbyn. Just saying. Draw your own conclusions.
12 June 2019
Boris Johnson will become Prime Minister, hopefully by coronation to reduce the waste of time. Given our next Prime Minister’s lack of interest in principles and consistency, a second referendum might well give him his opportunity to show leadership and save his party.
14 June 2019
Boris Johnson and his acolytes claim that his tenure as London mayor was a great success. Channel 4 has done its own analysis which does not look so rosy. Here are some of the findings:
He promised to end rough sleeping in the capital by 2012, but in 2015 there were 940 people sleeping on the streets;
He undertook to increase police numbers but in fact reduced them by more than 1,000;
He claimed that he would double the number of special constables but in fact reduced the number considerably;
At the start of his tenure 10,000 affordable homes were being built each year. By 2016 he had it down to 500.
15 June 2019
Conservative Party supporter Matthew Parris was on Any Questions and made two contributions that stuck with me.
For a start he claimed to be able to induce a sneeze by tickling a particular spot behind his ear, and he demonstrated this remarkable skill.
Secondly he questioned the character of the odds-on favourite to become Tory Leader challenging him to reveal how many children he has fathered. Mr Parris thought it was somewhere between 5 and 7 and reminded us that Johnson took out a super injunction to prevent reporting of one of them.
There are quite a few things that your average Conservative Party member might take a dim view of and this might explain why there are 5 other contenders hanging in. The TV hustings over the next few days could rival Game of Thrones for random brutality.
16 June 2019
In the BBC series Years and Years, Emma Thompson plays a populist Prime Minister implementing cruel policies in a burgeoning dystopia.
She has this exchange with Rory Kinnear’s naive civil servant:
If I could do it I’d go – sail away far from all this, just head for the horizon and…gone! Imagine if I did!
You’re the Prime Minister you can do what you want.
They’d kill me.
Who would?
They would have me killed.
Boris Johnson’s backers represent large corporations, hedge funds and property companies. Harry Cole in The Daily Mail depicts Johnson as the front man for a well-financed operation.
17 June 2019
In yesterday’s Tory leadership hustings on Channel 4 the word Corbyn came up 20 times. For example Jeremy Hunt lambasted him for not immediately accepting the American view of the tanker incident in the Gulf of Oman.
But as is so often the case, the Leader of the Opposition is in tune with our neighbours while at odds with the right wing in his own country.
18 June 2019
It appears that there will not be a deal of any kind, but the Tory leadership candidates are speaking freely about a General Election if that is the only way to avoid a no deal result. And who knows which way Boris will jump. It is surely not out of the question that he will “show leadership” by engineering a second referendum in order to avoid a General Election.
19 June 2019
It was unedifying – 5 grown men fighting like rats in a sack for the opportunity to present themselves to a group of English Nationalists* as a potential Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. They bumbled, temporised, shouted over each other and abused political opponents, in a random incoherent miasma. It was like watching an embarrassing early audition on Britain’s Got Talent.
For this was the BBC programme called Our Next Prime Minister.
*A Yougov poll of Conservative Party members showed that they are relaxed about Scotland and Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom as long as Brexit is delivered on time.
On 20th June the contest was reduced to Hunt versus Johnson
