Con trick. £30bn extra cuts. That lower immigration thing is no longer operative. Voting on the European Arrest Warrant or maybe not. They get precisely nothing from their “renegotiation” and then the courts take the whole point away.
Miliband goes to the CBI and the members hiss a journalist for talking leadership crisis. The Libyan recruits in Bassingbourn turn out to be so bad the only good news is that here we keep the rifles locked up, so they can’t set up checkpoints on the roads like they did in Jordan. Even so, the army sends half a battalion of Royal Highland Fusiliers to keep them in line until they can get rid of them.
The government announces a revival of their awful national roaming scheme because of Crimson Dave’s dropped calls, but then they launch the consultation on the next lot of spectrum without a coverage requirement.
Can anyone smell omnishambles?
The press seem committed to predicting a Tory victory this week. But I suppose a UKIP win in Rochester may change the narrative again…
For a party that has framed the economic debate so successfully, it seems remarkable that they are repeating Labour’s error by chasing UKIP headlines. Maybe they are that stupid.
The debacle over the arrest warrant was particularly striking ,though the media seem to have dropped it almost immediately.
Anyone seen anything that describes how it happend , and whose decision it was – May/Gove/Cameron ?
I’d also include that they are on their 3rd attempt to appoint a chair for the child abuse inquiry.
Peter Oborne says
“The Prime Minister has been advised exceptionally badly by Michael Gove, who has quickly established himself as the most incompetent and ineffectual Government Chief Whip since Tim Renton at the back end of the Eighties. Mr Gove has lost control.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/11242034/No-sign-yet-of-a-solution-to-the-shambles-within-the-Tory-party.html
Meanwhile Dominic Cummings, Gove’s former advisor, says
“It’s the nature of the Cameron team. Quite simply, chaos is all they have ever known. They operate in a bubble in which it is at most 10 days planning or more usually 48 hours or 72 hours. There is no long-term priority. There is no long-term plan.”
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/nov/19/cabinet-secretary-david-cameron-balls-dominic-cummings-jeremy-heywood
So there’s a growing consensus that there’s chaos, and now they’re just arguing about who is to blame.
Cummings didn’t know the cabinet secretary was important. Too funny. That said, the 3-hour news cycle is interesting; I would have put it at 3 seconds, just trying to make it to the end of the sentence.
Didn’t he notice anything about Johnson?
No chance at all that the events of the last sentence are at least partially caused by those of the preceding one?
Very few of them seem to be what I would consider as normal. Gove appears to be a prime example of someone with no management experience becoming a Minister, which was one of Cummings’ main points. Cummings is not a “zone of calm”. The Tory awkward squad have a kaleidoscope of different way-out opinions, though a lot of them look to Liam Fox who Cameron tried to keep in his Cabinet even when his departure was inevitable. Peter Bone wants Cameron and Farage to come to an agreement so as to avoid splitting the right-wing vote (though he appears to think that this agreement would mean the Tories accepting a whole load of UKIP’s ideas).
Can anyone make any sense of today’s Conservative Party? And why do the LibDems have anything to do with this sack-full of fighting ferrets?
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/20/peter-bone-not-defecting-ukip-tory-eu-referendum
Cummings himself is a fine example of someone with no experience outside politics/thinktanking/media. As you know Bob, my bet for post-Cameron is on Greasy Phil Hammond.
“Cummings himself is a fine example of someone with no experience outside politics/thinktanking/media.”
Other people with no or minimal experience outside politics, think-tanking and the media: Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee.
There’s a trench full of Turkish soldiers who would have disagreed with you about Major Attlee MC. I’d call that more than minimal.
Yeah. Also, social worker is a real job, and I would even go so far as to say being a mayor counts. Even WSC was a regular officer (and a novelist) before he was a journo.
1) Just because Boris agrees with you doesn’t mean he agrees with you
2) Cummings is strangely blind to his hero Gove’s hero-worshipping of his arch-enemy Cameron, isn’t he?
3) Reckless and Boris have been at loggerheads over the latter’s airport plans to a more bitter and high profile degree than you might expect for two people notionally on the same side.
4) Boris, so far as I know, never appeared in the Tory interest in a by-election campaign right on his doorstep for which his party leader had supposedly deployed all the big guns. No one apart from me seems to have wondered why (did Gove even ask him? They hate each other, so possibly a mutual avoidance pact was engaged).