3pm drama on R4 : In the drama France has a femael Muslim who is about to win the presidential election.
.. a male Muslim candidate has just received a msg via child “go back to your own country”
Standard: “Mohammed Nadir Dafallah, 18, and a 17-year-old from Merton, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were charged on Sunday after an 18-year-old man was fatally stabbed on Friday in Wandsworth. ”
Al beeb: “A 17-year-old boy from Merton and an 18-year-old man from Wandsworth have been charged with his murder…”
So even when these savages are over 18, al beeb chooses not to reveal their identity.
I wonder why?
Em if the older guy is the brother of the younger guy
..then naming him could put the name of the younger guy in the public domain
that is one plausible reason.
Channel 4 preparing for the candidate debate with news containing a bit of Trump-bashing. A former Obama aide did the job.
Wonder how little Guru-Murphy will perform? Sure he would have loved to do a bit of Boris-bashing…
Will he turn out to be yet another media Stewart fan?
He begins by telling us the audience are all potential Tory voters.
Wot, like on bbc panel discussions?
Not BBC related, but..
This afternoon, we spent a pleasant afternoon at the small harbour town of Seaham on the Durham heritage coast.
Eating fish and chips on the Terrace Green by the seafront next to the war memorial and the statue of Tommy. (Tommy, referring to the archetype private soldier Tommy Atkins.) accompanied by several Durham colliery brass bands playing in the background. We then had a nice walk along the coastline looking for Seaham seaglass ( mermaids tears) amongst the pebbles.
[url=https://postimg.cc/CZBTHDTG][/url]
A perfect setting and a lovely atmosphere in a north eastern colliery town.
Only one thing was missing.
Not one BAME person of any colour, religion, or ethnicity was there.
So much for the BBC dream of a mixed race population
Vesnadog…. It won’t it was bought by the proud residents of that small northern town
(Copied from Sunniside Local History Society)
There is now a nine foot five inch welded metal statue on Terrace Green. It depicts a soldier of the First World War sitting on an ammunition box, rifle in hand, head bowed. Named ‘Eleven O One’ by its creator, artist Ray Lonsdale, the locals know it, simply, as ‘Tommy’, the universal nickname for a British soldier – particularly of the First World War. He was placed on temporary display in Seaham in the summer of 2014, but Tommy attracted so much affection that a campaign was launched to buy him and keep him in the town. The necessary £85,000 was raised surprisingly quickly and Tommy will remain in Seaham permanently. Practically speaking, it has been estimated that he won’t need to be moved for repair for at least 200 years; a time capsule has been buried beneath him. Seaham, an attractive place but with too many boarded-up windows, does not strike you as a town with cash to spare; paying for this remarkable sculpture is a powerful achievement..
Round one – high spot – Rory going on about trying to get 3 rubbish bags into a bin . Lots of muddle. Gove best rehearsed and looking at the camera a lot . Hasn’t done a line yet and no one has lit up…
‘Rory The Remainer’, well here it is from the horse’s mouth……………..
\\The international development secretary says a no-deal Brexit would be “catastrophic” and is “undeliverable” and “unnecessary”.//
\\He is planning to focus on getting Theresa May’s existing deal through Parliament as there is “no evidence” the EU will offer a different deal.// https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48496082
Forget the Tories, 3 years on and we are still in the EU, despite promising ‘to leave’ over a hundred times.
Vote and support UKIP and The Brexit Party.
Nobody likes Nigel Farage – muddled thinking all round on whether parliament can overturn the brexit legislation as well as shutting parliament . Half way through and it looks like boris made the right decision .
Lotsa blue on blue violence. Lovely to watch.
Dominic is probably the most trustworthy of a dodgy lot.
Uniting Britain: Rory says he is proud LimpDums and Labour voters would vote for him. Says a lot.
Gove puts the climate at the heart of policy.
Sajid says it has to be public services. Too many cuts. (Is he Labour?) Oops, he gets challenged about knife crime. Oops. Well-rehearsed, but -as Home Secretary – didn’t see that one coming
Two candidates said social care is their number one priority as PM – they are Jeremy Hunt and mad Rory . Rory obviously knows it will go down with Tory membership . Good old sajiv invoked the ghost of jo Cox for some reason and had to remind everyone that he is the Home Sec. Gove has mentioned ‘love’ twice and wants to care for kiddies …
Go with what works. There is no point in participating in a TV debate when the electorate is a couple of hundred who will presumably vote with policy not personality?
C4 love island 4
Jeremy Hunt got a laugh for saying his biggest weakness was forgetting the nationality of his wife .mad Rory got a giggle for implying he didn’t want Boris as PM .
C4 love island 5
30 second summaries . Embarrassing waffle . Except for the Raab promising to get out of the EU by 31 Oct .
Summary – an hour and a half wasted . Plenty of red wet tories about ….they had obviously agreed not to slag each other off … mad Rory described himself as ‘frail ‘ – Maggie would be proud of that now wouldn’t she ?
Not – thanks – appreciate it – I have no real time for these red Tories any more but it was instructive . Sajid and Rory were in the same hopeless orbit ….
Fedup2 I didn’t watch the debate hence my interest. It’s funny I used to watch a lot of politics on TV including The Daily Politics and the various Sunday morning shows. Interviews and debates have seemed to become more and more formulaic over time.
Whoever wins the current contest for leader of the Conservative party will have the same May era parliament to work with (or against). Could the Conservatives coalesce and vote as one block on EU policy – I’d be amazed if they did?
NG, me, too, back in the telly days with Paxo on Newsnight. Shows how long ago I was a TV regular. Now, I’m thankful that I cannot (legally) watch it although I think C4 on demand (if they archive the debate) is available to non-Licence holders. But I will not bother anyway. Cannot remember my C4 on demand password. I found their F1 reportage so dire at the start of their first season of coverage that I never went back.
The factors currently uniting the Tories is the thought that The Brexit Party alone, cannot see off a Coalition between the LimpNonDems, SNP, Plaid, Greens & Change plus Labour. Therefore, the Tories unite and hope they can fracture, just possibly, the firm Labour Party Brexiteers (about 12 – 16?) away from Labour toward TBP. Then there’s an electoral chance for the Conservatives to govern in Coalition with TBP.
However, every time people mention polls and polling, I have to remind myself how wrong they can be.
This is the bit I have trouble with so far as EU policy is concerned. Cynical me I just can’t imagine it. I find it easier to believe that “there’s an electoral chance for the Conservatives to govern in Coalition with TBP”.
“Soccer Aid”
Don’t we already send enough “charity” abroad?
What’s the point in sending money to Africa. Is it to pay for their iPhones and dingys to come here?
By the way the wimmin players are hopeless.
Bit of a cheek when banner on screen minimum donation is £10
If the stats I’ve read regarding today’s WWC games are true (and they are from a very reliable app), then the two losing teams today managed exactly one corner BETWEEN them in the two games ????
End to end I’m guessing the games weren’t ????
Rory’s idea to break the Parliamentary impasse is bloody ludicrous.
First he says he’ll give the MPs another chance to pass the deal. If they fail he’ll start trawling the phone book, looking for thousands of our fellow citizens and inviting all races and religions and opinions to try to sort this out. Good luck with that!
He’ll give these poor sods a couple of weeks and then put what they’ve decided before Parliament. And this is the priceless bit. If our MPs don’t agree with what we have decided, we’ll be back where we started.
What’s the bleedin’ point?
They didn’t agree with what 17.4 million of us decided three years ago.
Unless we agree with them there will still be this blockage. This isn’t caused by us, it’s caused by them.
We don’t need all this convoluted bollocks. We need decisive leadership.
We need someone with a bit of gumph and courage.
I didn’t see him tonight…
Philip McLaughlin, aka Phil Mack, the CEO of ‘Keep it Country’ TV channel has issued the bBC with an invoice for £1,328,350.00.
Keep It Country argues that viewers who tune in to their channel are forced to pay a fee toward the BBC. “We feel that independent channels should also be entitled to receive some of this funding,” they said.
“When the fee was changed from a ‘service charge’ to a ‘tax’ in 2006, a situation was created where even viewers who never watch BBC TV or listen to BBC radio were forced to pay for their chosen TV-radio reception while, at the same time, funding a service they never used,” McLaughlin said.
“Given that the TV Licensing Authority is a wholly owned subsidiary of the BBC, we believe that the current method of distributing the license fee revenue is both out-dated and grossly unfair.”
McLaughlin added that the BBC should be subject to Monopolies, Mergers and Competition rules – “just as any other ‘independent’ body would be” – and argued that, since the BBC’s share of viewership is now down to less than 30 per cent, the distribution of the license fee revenue “must be adjusted accordingly”.
Gloves off now. If the government that is supposed to protect it’s people won’t do it, then the people need to protect themselves against these savages. Mark my words, patience is quickly running out.
I think disorder is fairly common for Westfield Stratford . I don’t think plod will be capable of controlling outbreaks in London generated by twitter . The community reassurance officers will be working full time though ….
And its very likely that a large number of MPs/police persons are still expecting our police persons to go on the beat while wibbling and wobbling on their brand new Police Bicycles. Think they were black so I expect some white fuddy-duddies will complain moaning about the bikes being black?
Expect it to appear on BBC Watchdog – 30 minute report possible.
‘Another rotten borough’: Nigel Farage lashes out after observers warn Labour’s by-election win in Peterborough was ‘like corrupt Kazakhstan’ as police probe five cases of ‘malpractice’
The Times….
Vote-rigger’s role casts doubt over Labour win in Peterborough
‘A notorious vote-rigger jailed for forging postal votes played a far greater role in Labour’s narrow by-election victory in Peterborough this month than the party has admitted.
Tariq Mahmood, 51, a numberplate salesman and former taxi company owner who received a 15-month sentence for his part in a “systematic campaign of electoral fraud” in 2008, had denied involvement in the campaign to elect Lisa Forbes 10 days ago.
He said he had met Jeremy Corbyn briefly on the campaign trail but had not known in advance that the Labour leader would visit.
Labour said Mahmood, who also manages property, did “not play any role in its campaign”.
However, a Sunday Times investigation reveals that Mahmood:
● Campaigned extensively with Forbes and at least five MPs in Central Ward, where, a court heard, he had once been “the spider at the centre of the web” of a massive campaign to “hijack” ballot papers and forge postal votes
● Accompanied Corbyn during his tour of the ward’s mosques, community centres and high street days before the vote
● Spent election day at the entrance to a local polling station.
In social media posts, Labour activists described Mahmood as “the mastermind”, “a tireless Labour comrade” and “at the heart of Labour Peterborough”.’
So doubts cast about a Labour win and possible fraud….and the involvement of a Muslim vote rigger previously jailed for his corruption…and the BBC isn’t interested. Why not? you might ask about the Labour supporting, Muslim friendly BBC.
The story is days old now and growing….but no sign of a report on the website.
Pug – The comments on the article are very informative, especially one by ‘Square Peg’. The comment he quotes from Richard Mawrey, Q.C. on postal votes is especially astonishing. There seems to be little faith in the Electoral Commission, and I get the feeling that Commission itself, needs a bit of research.
Lots on the media about a large gang attacking police in Westfield shopping centre.
Nowt on the beeb webshite, which makes me wonder who this ‘gang’ are. Perhaps the wrong sort.
(And once again Trump proves uncannily prophetic. Every time he pronounces on some new place that’s reduced to third world barbarism, the libtards poo-poo him, and within days or even hours he’s proven right. Maybe he’s a Prophet – a real one.)
Not BBC but C4. Did you notice how both on the C4 News and at the start of the debate itself they threw in an “and it’s all men” aside? This snide remark struck me as needless feminist paranoia in the light of two facts. 1. The current PM is a woman. 2. Two women were in the contest but were eliminated in the first round of voting.
There is clearly no barrier to women MPs standing in a leadership election or becoming PM.
I feel she might have, Up2snuff. I wish she had stood. But I’m not much good at the prophecy game. I thought Esther McVey was going to do a whole lot better.
I googled the “Stratford disturbance” and some telling photographs popped up.
Yes, I’m afraid it’s the usual suspects, out doing a bit of Sunday afternoon mugging, when the pesky plod decided they had to intervene.
Understandably the youths, perceiving this unwarranted intervention as racial harassment, decided to pepper the police with bottles and other missiles. It’s all part of the rich tapestry of multicultural London life these days.
So, we’ve had another delightful weekend of mass stabbings, three murders and a shooting and now a full blown riot. Bliss!
And where is our diminutive, virtue signalling mayor while this wall to wall mayhem is going on?
Reminds me of that game we played back in the 70s.
Where’s Wally?
Mr No-Khan-do is probably on Twitter taking the bait…he vanished during Grenfell [shouldn’t he actually have taken charge of the response? ] and was silent for a long time about knife crime…and of course dismissed terrorism as ‘part and parcel’ of life in London.
If only the Youth Clubs were open hey !!!!!! And if only somehow, someone could work out some kind of link / pattern between all these gang incidents in London ?????
I look at the pictures, watch the videos but I seem to see something very very different to what the likes of Khan, Abbott, Lammy, Cornyn , the BBC and msm keep telling me !
A more balanced account of Boris’ time as Mayor of London from Andrew Gilligan [who worked for him for three years] than you get from the BBC which prefers to paint a picture of chaos and failure….
‘They say that with Boris Johnson you never know where you’re going to end up. My own most memorable day with the then mayor of London started with me interviewing him in his City Hall office and ended up with us both crawling around on his roof, trying to demolish his garden shed. It is true that garden sheds are normally found in gardens but in this respect, as in others, Johnson was a rule-maker, not a rule-taker. He had just moved into a new house in Islington, he explained, but it lacked a study. Hence the shed, which he had had erected on a flat roof at the back.
Alas, he had forgotten to get planning permission — awkward, since he headed London’s planning system at the time — and the Labour-controlled council had grassed him to the Daily Mirror. In a panic, Johnson grabbed the next reasonably friendly face through the door — me — to help him erase the Shed of Shame before the story appeared.
We toiled in vain for hours before realising that we were completely useless at practical tasks and in grave danger of falling to our deaths. Remind you of anything about British politics?
With Johnson now likely to be prime minister, thousands of words have been, and will be, devoted to what we might call the shed-demolition view of his life: a seat-of-the-pants chancer, unqualified for anything serious, Donald Trump with more syllables and so on. As someone who has known him for 20 years — and worked under him for three years — I believe that such attacks have little effect because the truth is more subtle.
As Rick in Casablanca said of the movie’s cynical police chief, Captain Louis Renault, Johnson is like any other man, only more so. He has both strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures. The question is whether we get the good Boris or the bad Boris — represented by the two big political jobs he has done.
He was not of course, as was claimed by such disinterested observers as Alastair Campbell, “probably the worst foreign secretary we’ve ever had”. Worse than Jack Straw who — in an original screenplay by one Alastair Campbell — presided over an illegal war leading to 200,000 deaths? Whatever we think of Brexit, it hasn’t killed anyone.
Yet there is no denying that Johnson’s time at King Charles Street was unsuccessful. It was not actually without achievement: he won more money from the Treasury to expand the diplomatic service by 10 embassies; he helped build the surprisingly strong global response to the Skripal attacks in Salisbury.
Yet he often made it easy for those who longed to see him fail. Politicians must be able to cope with boredom, never more than when foreign secretary, Britain’s grandest non-job. But one of Johnson’s weaknesses is a low boredom threshold. Inwardly yawning through vacuous meetings with dignitaries, he said too many stupid things. Then there was his excruciating nine-hour trip to Afghanistan, arranged simply to avoid voting against the third Heathrow runway whose very bulldozers he had pledged to obstruct.
He disliked the physical constraints: he had always cycled round London without security, but when he was foreign secretary, his security team wouldn’t let him (it was never spelt out what the main threat was: Islamist terrorists or angry remainers).
He’d do a fine PC Plod imitation of his minders saying he was welcome to ride, as soon as “sufficient officers to form an escort convoy” came on shift. Once, at his official flat, he grabbed my bike and sped off towards Lower Regent Street in a brief, futile break for freedom. His whole time in office was a bit like that.
Yet there is a corrective to those who say that Johnson in power would crash and burn: his mayoralty of London. Getting things done in City Hall is harder than it looks, as Sadiq Khan shows us every day. Johnson’s regime was not perfect. The first months were chaotic. His response to the riots in 2011 was too slow. More than £43m of public money was spent on the unbuilt garden bridge. But his most important and surprising quality, obscured by such vanity projects, was boring competence at his central tasks.
Under Johnson most things that are now going up (crime, council tax, traffic congestion, air pollution, road casualties) went down. Most things that are now going down (capital investment, bus frequencies, passenger numbers, the number of new houses being built) went up. Crossrail, during Johnson’s watch, was on time and on budget. The disastrous Tube public-private partnership, which Ken Livingstone tried and failed to end, was ended by Johnson, saving taxpayers billions of pounds.
To anyone with any knowledge of how Johnson actually behaved in office, the claimed parallels with Trump are absurd. He funded health advice for refugees, spent heavily on public services and raised the London living wage. The ultra-low-emission zone in central London, for which Khan now claims credit, was designed and approved under him. Several of his policies infuriated his base supporters, such as the focus on cycling and the removal of car space for bus and bike lanes.
I declare an obvious interest: I worked for him — as his cycling tsar — at City Hall for three years. It was as far from the recent accounts of Theresa May’s Downing Street as it’s possible to imagine. If she was secretive and controlling, he was inclusive, delegatory and liberal — not in the self-righteous, purity-test sense that has twisted this great creed, but in its true meaning.
He didn’t demand that everyone think like him; several of his advisers weren’t even Tories. Backbiting and briefing, by political standards, was minimal; senior aides were happy and junior staff were treated with respect. He was kind when there was no advantage for him in it and forgiving of mistakes. In a round-robin email when I left City Hall and joined The Sunday Times I managed to circulate his private email address to all the contacts in my address book. Johnson was remarkably decent about it.
Reluctantly, in full knowledge of his flaws and misdemeanours, I and others came to the unfashionable view that he is a good person. One of the reasons we believed this is because he cared so much — too much — about what other people thought of him. This led to another weakness: while often brilliant with sympathetic or neutral audiences, he was much less good dealing with hostility or confrontation.
Every six months as mayor he had to do something called people’s question time, a public meeting where any voter could come and shout at him.
He was sometimes intensely nervous before these events, shutting himself in a room to gather his thoughts. His reluctance to do television debates in the current leadership contest is perhaps of a piece with this; he did do them in both his mayoral elections but not terribly well, and he last appeared as a panellist on the BBC’s Question Time six years ago. It will be interesting to see how he copes with prime minister’s questions.
Other supposed drawbacks are less of a problem. At City Hall, and no doubt in Downing Street, Johnson could master detail whenever he wanted to. He seldom wanted to. Contrary to the usual view, that is a strength, I believe. A leader’s job is to set the general direction and tone, choose the right people and inspire them to implement it. Lots of folk can do detail. That’s what Johnson’s highly effective City Hall chief of staff, Ed Lister, and to a lesser extent the rest of us, was there for.
Far fewer politicians can do what Johnson does. The better presidential parallel — in personality, not policy — is with Ronald Reagan, another broad-brush guy scorned by right-thinking sophisticates, but capable of cutting through to voters, making them feel good about him and about themselves and creating the political juice to get things done. Almost uniquely, YouGov shows Johnson’s ratings as mayor were as high at the end of his eight years in office as at the beginning. If he’d sought re-election against Khan in May 2016, he would have won.
Which Boris will we get? The difference between the Foreign Office and the mayoralty is that at City Hall Johnson was in control, surrounded by people he trusted and had real work to keep him interested. The Johnson gaffe index reached record lows; his mayoral election campaigns were disciplined, as his leadership campaign now is. If he wants something badly enough, he will do whatever is necessary. These conditions seem likely to apply in No 10. He starts with the advantage of low expectations, which he is likely to confound.
The other and greater difference was Brexit, which shattered the old Johnson coalition. Now the middle-class Londoners who had helped to make him mayor were picketing his house. But how deep does the alienation go? Can he rebuild his broad appeal? The answer is we don’t know because he hasn’t yet tried.
I’m less worried than some about his ability to work with the government machine. My concern is that, from day one of a job a thousand times harder than the mayoralty, Johnson may face the hatred of substantial portions of the country, not to mention our European negotiating partners, but without much political capital behind him.
Even in less divided times, the democratic legitimacy conferred by, say, 80,000 Tory members’ votes is not all that great. Expect constant attacks on his right to hold office. He needs to speak more now to the audience beyond the Tory selectorate and his lead in the contest gives him the political space to do so.
In the months after the referendum, Johnson’s error, personally and for the country, was not to reach out to the 48% who voted “remain”. That clearly was his first instinct: four days after the vote he wrote that “we who are part of this narrow majority must do everything we can to reassure the remainers . . . We must heal, we must build bridges.”
That piece, with its have-cake-and-eat-it mentions of new immigration controls alongside “access to the single market”, was deemed to have damaged him in the 2016 leadership race. Michael Gove wielded his knife, Johnson lost his nerve and his newspaper articles lurched towards the territory of describing May’s deal as a “suicide vest”. He is now moving back to the centre.
What he actually believes was a subject of occasional debate among his City Hall team. For less kind spirits, the answer was whatever he’d heard from the last person he had spoken to, but that’s not fair. One Nation Toryism is his factory setting. He was often also resolute about policies that came under heavy flak, including bike lanes and police station closures.
In today’s Britain, people have simple views about complicated subjects, such as the life and career of Boris Johnson. Bluntly, we’ve had too much binary thinking, intellectual inflexibility and diehard chest-beating. If we’re going to reach any kind of detente with each other, what we all need is a bit more swivel-jointed opportunism.
Most of the other main candidates, especially the former remainers, are doing their best to demonstrate this important quality — but Johnson is better at it. ‘
Just had to laugh at this bit, pug. “he helped build the surprisingly strong global response to the Skripal attacks in Salisbury.”
It was deja vu for me all over again (if I may borrow that famous expression) when the BBC reported this morning Jeremy Hunt’s latest statement about the tanker attack. IIRC, the word ‘almost’ has now been used about its attribution. That took a little longer than some previous rollbacks.
If Andrew Gilligan cares to look back, I think he will find that Bojo, far from ‘build the surprisingly strong global response to the Skripal attacks’ went verbally nuclear earlier than anyone apart from the PM – long before any facts were known and the OPCW had investigated and reported – and then spent successive days unwinding with qualification after qualification.
After the OPCW had reported, Bojo was noticeably quiet on the matter.
I wonder why?
PS: Gilligan appears to be a Remainer. Is that why he is promoting Bojo?
I don’t know how many PMQs there are before 31 October -I’m guessing not too many – maybe 10 ? But if Alex Boris can bluff his way through them to a no deal brexit – then who gives a damn what he says or does .
Fed, yeah, if …
… if Bojo does not flip-flop, like Stewart appears to now be doing
… if Bojo can inspire confidence among his wider Party colleagues
… if Bojo can get through the normal business ….
Who did you like out of the four apart from Javid & Stewart?
Carolyn Quinn talking with Sam Gyimah right now about Bojo u-turning on Brexit ….. hhhmmmmmnnnn.
CQ really pushing the 2nd Referendum thing on R4’s TWH hard.
Up2
Boris would do well to avoid the BBC – but if his appearance doesn’t adverse affect his coronation then the number 2 is Raab or Hunt. Judgement call on whether to have Gove inside the tent or not .
A majority brexit cabinet is vital .
As I was watching the five? guys – I thought how an equivalent labour pageant would have looked with real blood letting between Cooper, Nugee Abbot , wrong daily and token white .male .
As for gyimah – just a toxic remainer to be disguarded like any other token …
I thought in the husting Gove was quite funny – he sounded like an 18 year old applying for a job with a whole line of ‘ competencies ‘ .
Is it just me but do all ‘Radio 4 women’ in their dramas sound as if they are all played by Juliet Stevenson and that their characters are 21st century women regardless of the time in which the drama is set?
Tonight I heard The Trespasser’s Guide To The Classics – The Nose in which the male players put on accents and adopt mannerisms suited to the part and the women play identikit Radio 4 women and sound so similar that it was hard to tell them apart.
(The story was nominally based on Cyrano de Bergerac but being the BBC got converted into yet another lesbian love affair).
One of the actresses really, really sounded like the reader of the following story, about Annika Stranded, probably written by the husband of Juliet Stevenson and played by Juliet Stevenson, both operating under nom de plumes. Actually it could be written by Ricky Gervais as it is so boring.
Last season Annika helped kill of her male forensic photographer, who has now been replaced by a female. I guess this will be building up to Lesbians in Lapland, it is the BBC after all.
Jim – there’s the red northern lass who makes a good living doing voice overs for adverts – and the Asian one who was in some paki comedy thing who also turns up in just about everything . Really glad i avoid it…
Medialand vs real world
Like 10 days ago they really thought that cos May had been dry we’d soon be at risk of a drought.
“that drain is at 1/3 level & sluiced to keep it at that low level cos to leave space for drainage when rain comes”
– Thursday June 6th Lincolnshire drought could be coming
– Tuesday June 11th Lincolnshire rivers have flooded
..doh it’s worse than these pics show
… cos on that Thursday report the enviro reporter chose to stand next to a river much lower than this photo
a fenland drain which was at 1/3 level
And I thought ‘this is con cos that drain is probably got a sluice gate at the end and it’s probably been set to keep the drain low
so that when rain comes there is space for drainage’
– By Thu June 13th there was a megaflood at Wainfleet
. There is a particular reason for that : the banked river keeps water off the fenland had breached the bank repairs
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3pm drama on R4 : In the drama France has a femael Muslim who is about to win the presidential election.
.. a male Muslim candidate has just received a msg via child “go back to your own country”
11 likes
Jeez, second again ☹️
7 likes
theleftwilleatitself
Despair ye not, for the second mouse gets the cheese.
3 likes
Rod Liddle in the Times
basically says :
If a lefty makes a HATEY sneer at a righty’s expense, it counts as a JOKE
If a righty makes a JOKE ……… at a lefty’s expense, it counts as a HATE CRIME
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/i-wouldn-t-do-it-but-the-bbc-should-have-sacked-jo-brand-for-her-display-of-acid-wit-5m2gcgnzh
29 likes
So ‘Hate is Comedy’
and ‘Comedy Is Hate’
in UK 2019
#Orwellian
14 likes
Al Beeb don’t do comedy.
9 likes
Spot the difference.
Standard: “Mohammed Nadir Dafallah, 18, and a 17-year-old from Merton, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were charged on Sunday after an 18-year-old man was fatally stabbed on Friday in Wandsworth. ”
Al beeb: “A 17-year-old boy from Merton and an 18-year-old man from Wandsworth have been charged with his murder…”
So even when these savages are over 18, al beeb chooses not to reveal their identity.
I wonder why?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-48652848
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It’s a form of censorship. The media decides what is and what is not allowed to be known.
These are facts that they are hiding.
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Em if the older guy is the brother of the younger guy
..then naming him could put the name of the younger guy in the public domain
that is one plausible reason.
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The BBC don’t name the 18 year old but The Standard does. The BBC don’t name him because his name gives his religion.
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Channel 4 preparing for the candidate debate with news containing a bit of Trump-bashing. A former Obama aide did the job.
Wonder how little Guru-Murphy will perform? Sure he would have loved to do a bit of Boris-bashing…
Will he turn out to be yet another media Stewart fan?
He begins by telling us the audience are all potential Tory voters.
Wot, like on bbc panel discussions?
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KGM sneers ‘we have an empty lecturn here for Boris’
.. A million miles from being impartial
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Not BBC related, but..
This afternoon, we spent a pleasant afternoon at the small harbour town of Seaham on the Durham heritage coast.
Eating fish and chips on the Terrace Green by the seafront next to the war memorial and the statue of Tommy. (Tommy, referring to the archetype private soldier Tommy Atkins.) accompanied by several Durham colliery brass bands playing in the background. We then had a nice walk along the coastline looking for Seaham seaglass ( mermaids tears) amongst the pebbles.
[url=https://postimg.cc/CZBTHDTG][/url]
A perfect setting and a lovely atmosphere in a north eastern colliery town.
Only one thing was missing.
Not one BAME person of any colour, religion, or ethnicity was there.
So much for the BBC dream of a mixed race population
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Davy
Nice picture – there are some bits of Blighty that are just about still Blighty … best be quiet about them though …..so sad .
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davy, “Tommy, referring to the archetype private soldier Tommy Atkins.”
There’s an important anniversary coming up. I wonder if the BBC will miss it?
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davy,
And let any one of those obnoxious work-shy middle to upper class anarchists try and destroy or take that wonderful statue away.
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Vesnadog…. It won’t it was bought by the proud residents of that small northern town
(Copied from Sunniside Local History Society)
There is now a nine foot five inch welded metal statue on Terrace Green. It depicts a soldier of the First World War sitting on an ammunition box, rifle in hand, head bowed. Named ‘Eleven O One’ by its creator, artist Ray Lonsdale, the locals know it, simply, as ‘Tommy’, the universal nickname for a British soldier – particularly of the First World War. He was placed on temporary display in Seaham in the summer of 2014, but Tommy attracted so much affection that a campaign was launched to buy him and keep him in the town. The necessary £85,000 was raised surprisingly quickly and Tommy will remain in Seaham permanently. Practically speaking, it has been estimated that he won’t need to be moved for repair for at least 200 years; a time capsule has been buried beneath him. Seaham, an attractive place but with too many boarded-up windows, does not strike you as a town with cash to spare; paying for this remarkable sculpture is a powerful achievement..
Would this happen in London?
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C4 Tory love island
Round one – high spot – Rory going on about trying to get 3 rubbish bags into a bin . Lots of muddle. Gove best rehearsed and looking at the camera a lot . Hasn’t done a line yet and no one has lit up…
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‘Rory The Remainer’, well here it is from the horse’s mouth……………..
\\The international development secretary says a no-deal Brexit would be “catastrophic” and is “undeliverable” and “unnecessary”.//
\\He is planning to focus on getting Theresa May’s existing deal through Parliament as there is “no evidence” the EU will offer a different deal.//
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48496082
Forget the Tories, 3 years on and we are still in the EU, despite promising ‘to leave’ over a hundred times.
Vote and support UKIP and The Brexit Party.
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May went to Brussels two years ago simply to conspire with the EU. Her aim was to keep us in the EU. That’s why the discussions were ‘secret’.
Aided if not led of course by the upper echelons of the Civil Service.
The arrogant, double-dealing woman thought that Leavers such as myself were too thick to decry her false Brexit document.
I hope that there will be retribution.
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Dover Sentry
Hear, hear!
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C4 Tory love island 2
Nobody likes Nigel Farage – muddled thinking all round on whether parliament can overturn the brexit legislation as well as shutting parliament . Half way through and it looks like boris made the right decision .
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Lotsa blue on blue violence. Lovely to watch.
Dominic is probably the most trustworthy of a dodgy lot.
Uniting Britain: Rory says he is proud LimpDums and Labour voters would vote for him. Says a lot.
Gove puts the climate at the heart of policy.
Sajid says it has to be public services. Too many cuts. (Is he Labour?) Oops, he gets challenged about knife crime. Oops. Well-rehearsed, but -as Home Secretary – didn’t see that one coming
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C4 Tory love island round three
Two candidates said social care is their number one priority as PM – they are Jeremy Hunt and mad Rory . Rory obviously knows it will go down with Tory membership . Good old sajiv invoked the ghost of jo Cox for some reason and had to remind everyone that he is the Home Sec. Gove has mentioned ‘love’ twice and wants to care for kiddies …
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That Rory is the choice of so many leads one to wonder what dey iz smokin.
https://order-order.com/2019/06/16/rorys-bizarre-marr-interview/
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Looking more and more like Boris pulling an Ed Miliband and vanishing is a work of genius.
Maybe he should ditch la Mateless?
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Go with what works. There is no point in participating in a TV debate when the electorate is a couple of hundred who will presumably vote with policy not personality?
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Boris def getting Trump advice.
Ignore the far left media – they’ll make up shite anyway.
Guru Murthlty truly is a piece of shit.
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Thatch
I agree – I think boris might well pull out of the BBC mud throwing show – if he has any sense.
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C4 love island 4
Jeremy Hunt got a laugh for saying his biggest weakness was forgetting the nationality of his wife .mad Rory got a giggle for implying he didn’t want Boris as PM .
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C4 love island 5
30 second summaries . Embarrassing waffle . Except for the Raab promising to get out of the EU by 31 Oct .
Summary – an hour and a half wasted . Plenty of red wet tories about ….they had obviously agreed not to slag each other off … mad Rory described himself as ‘frail ‘ – Maggie would be proud of that now wouldn’t she ?
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Thanks for the review.
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Not – thanks – appreciate it – I have no real time for these red Tories any more but it was instructive . Sajid and Rory were in the same hopeless orbit ….
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Fed, echo NG but who came out top in your estimation, if SJ & RS were bottom of the heap?
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Fedup2 I didn’t watch the debate hence my interest. It’s funny I used to watch a lot of politics on TV including The Daily Politics and the various Sunday morning shows. Interviews and debates have seemed to become more and more formulaic over time.
Whoever wins the current contest for leader of the Conservative party will have the same May era parliament to work with (or against). Could the Conservatives coalesce and vote as one block on EU policy – I’d be amazed if they did?
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NG, me, too, back in the telly days with Paxo on Newsnight. Shows how long ago I was a TV regular. Now, I’m thankful that I cannot (legally) watch it although I think C4 on demand (if they archive the debate) is available to non-Licence holders. But I will not bother anyway. Cannot remember my C4 on demand password. I found their F1 reportage so dire at the start of their first season of coverage that I never went back.
The factors currently uniting the Tories is the thought that The Brexit Party alone, cannot see off a Coalition between the LimpNonDems, SNP, Plaid, Greens & Change plus Labour. Therefore, the Tories unite and hope they can fracture, just possibly, the firm Labour Party Brexiteers (about 12 – 16?) away from Labour toward TBP. Then there’s an electoral chance for the Conservatives to govern in Coalition with TBP.
However, every time people mention polls and polling, I have to remind myself how wrong they can be.
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Up2snuff
“the Tories unite”
This is the bit I have trouble with so far as EU policy is concerned. Cynical me I just can’t imagine it. I find it easier to believe that “there’s an electoral chance for the Conservatives to govern in Coalition with TBP”.
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Fed,
Not love island.
I’m still fuming about the news that Ms May is doing all her best to stop Brexit going through!
Unbelievable; so she was lying to every one all along.
Surely there must be some rule or law that she can be prosecuted with?
Hate the BBC as well. (thought I’d just say that as it always makes me feel good – and its Monday)
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“Soccer Aid”
Don’t we already send enough “charity” abroad?
What’s the point in sending money to Africa. Is it to pay for their iPhones and dingys to come here?
By the way the wimmin players are hopeless.
Bit of a cheek when banner on screen minimum donation is £10
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If the stats I’ve read regarding today’s WWC games are true (and they are from a very reliable app), then the two losing teams today managed exactly one corner BETWEEN them in the two games ????
End to end I’m guessing the games weren’t ????
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Rory’s idea to break the Parliamentary impasse is bloody ludicrous.
First he says he’ll give the MPs another chance to pass the deal. If they fail he’ll start trawling the phone book, looking for thousands of our fellow citizens and inviting all races and religions and opinions to try to sort this out. Good luck with that!
He’ll give these poor sods a couple of weeks and then put what they’ve decided before Parliament. And this is the priceless bit. If our MPs don’t agree with what we have decided, we’ll be back where we started.
What’s the bleedin’ point?
They didn’t agree with what 17.4 million of us decided three years ago.
Unless we agree with them there will still be this blockage. This isn’t caused by us, it’s caused by them.
We don’t need all this convoluted bollocks. We need decisive leadership.
We need someone with a bit of gumph and courage.
I didn’t see him tonight…
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http://www.theirishworld.com/give-us-fair-share-of-tv-license-fee-says-keep-it-country-boss/
Philip McLaughlin, aka Phil Mack, the CEO of ‘Keep it Country’ TV channel has issued the bBC with an invoice for £1,328,350.00.
Keep It Country argues that viewers who tune in to their channel are forced to pay a fee toward the BBC. “We feel that independent channels should also be entitled to receive some of this funding,” they said.
“When the fee was changed from a ‘service charge’ to a ‘tax’ in 2006, a situation was created where even viewers who never watch BBC TV or listen to BBC radio were forced to pay for their chosen TV-radio reception while, at the same time, funding a service they never used,” McLaughlin said.
“Given that the TV Licensing Authority is a wholly owned subsidiary of the BBC, we believe that the current method of distributing the license fee revenue is both out-dated and grossly unfair.”
McLaughlin added that the BBC should be subject to Monopolies, Mergers and Competition rules – “just as any other ‘independent’ body would be” – and argued that, since the BBC’s share of viewership is now down to less than 30 per cent, the distribution of the license fee revenue “must be adjusted accordingly”.
Facebook link
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100 yoofs attack police in London.
Must be the Khan-do approach.
(Sorry!)
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Gloves off now. If the government that is supposed to protect it’s people won’t do it, then the people need to protect themselves against these savages. Mark my words, patience is quickly running out.
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I think disorder is fairly common for Westfield Stratford . I don’t think plod will be capable of controlling outbreaks in London generated by twitter . The community reassurance officers will be working full time though ….
Better no tell President Trump !
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Fed, this is what I understand at the moment:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7147411/Gang-100-youths-bombard-police-bottles-missiles-Lawless-London.html
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Thank you Cassandra – I thought it might be a replay of the India – paki cricket ….
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Fed,
And its very likely that a large number of MPs/police persons are still expecting our police persons to go on the beat while wibbling and wobbling on their brand new Police Bicycles. Think they were black so I expect some white fuddy-duddies will complain moaning about the bikes being black?
Expect it to appear on BBC Watchdog – 30 minute report possible.
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BBC news management in operation in Peterborough?
The Mail…
‘Another rotten borough’: Nigel Farage lashes out after observers warn Labour’s by-election win in Peterborough was ‘like corrupt Kazakhstan’ as police probe five cases of ‘malpractice’
The Times….
Vote-rigger’s role casts doubt over Labour win in Peterborough
‘A notorious vote-rigger jailed for forging postal votes played a far greater role in Labour’s narrow by-election victory in Peterborough this month than the party has admitted.
Tariq Mahmood, 51, a numberplate salesman and former taxi company owner who received a 15-month sentence for his part in a “systematic campaign of electoral fraud” in 2008, had denied involvement in the campaign to elect Lisa Forbes 10 days ago.
He said he had met Jeremy Corbyn briefly on the campaign trail but had not known in advance that the Labour leader would visit.
Labour said Mahmood, who also manages property, did “not play any role in its campaign”.
However, a Sunday Times investigation reveals that Mahmood:
● Campaigned extensively with Forbes and at least five MPs in Central Ward, where, a court heard, he had once been “the spider at the centre of the web” of a massive campaign to “hijack” ballot papers and forge postal votes
● Accompanied Corbyn during his tour of the ward’s mosques, community centres and high street days before the vote
● Spent election day at the entrance to a local polling station.
In social media posts, Labour activists described Mahmood as “the mastermind”, “a tireless Labour comrade” and “at the heart of Labour Peterborough”.’
So doubts cast about a Labour win and possible fraud….and the involvement of a Muslim vote rigger previously jailed for his corruption…and the BBC isn’t interested. Why not? you might ask about the Labour supporting, Muslim friendly BBC.
The story is days old now and growing….but no sign of a report on the website.
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Pug – The comments on the article are very informative, especially one by ‘Square Peg’. The comment he quotes from Richard Mawrey, Q.C. on postal votes is especially astonishing. There seems to be little faith in the Electoral Commission, and I get the feeling that Commission itself, needs a bit of research.
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Lots on the media about a large gang attacking police in Westfield shopping centre.
Nowt on the beeb webshite, which makes me wonder who this ‘gang’ are. Perhaps the wrong sort.
(And once again Trump proves uncannily prophetic. Every time he pronounces on some new place that’s reduced to third world barbarism, the libtards poo-poo him, and within days or even hours he’s proven right. Maybe he’s a Prophet – a real one.)
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BBC Online News:
“”Golan Heights: Israel unveils ‘Trump Heights’ settlement””
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-48656431
How to wind up the BBC/Left anti-semite and anti-Trump brigade.
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Priceless – good on them .
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Not BBC but C4. Did you notice how both on the C4 News and at the start of the debate itself they threw in an “and it’s all men” aside? This snide remark struck me as needless feminist paranoia in the light of two facts. 1. The current PM is a woman. 2. Two women were in the contest but were eliminated in the first round of voting.
There is clearly no barrier to women MPs standing in a leadership election or becoming PM.
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I wonder whether Priti Patel might have survived the first round of voting, Z?
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I feel she might have, Up2snuff. I wish she had stood. But I’m not much good at the prophecy game. I thought Esther McVey was going to do a whole lot better.
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I googled the “Stratford disturbance” and some telling photographs popped up.
Yes, I’m afraid it’s the usual suspects, out doing a bit of Sunday afternoon mugging, when the pesky plod decided they had to intervene.
Understandably the youths, perceiving this unwarranted intervention as racial harassment, decided to pepper the police with bottles and other missiles. It’s all part of the rich tapestry of multicultural London life these days.
So, we’ve had another delightful weekend of mass stabbings, three murders and a shooting and now a full blown riot. Bliss!
And where is our diminutive, virtue signalling mayor while this wall to wall mayhem is going on?
Reminds me of that game we played back in the 70s.
Where’s Wally?
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Mr No-Khan-do is probably on Twitter taking the bait…he vanished during Grenfell [shouldn’t he actually have taken charge of the response? ] and was silent for a long time about knife crime…and of course dismissed terrorism as ‘part and parcel’ of life in London.
Opportunistic Islamist barrow-boy chancer.
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If only the Youth Clubs were open hey !!!!!! And if only somehow, someone could work out some kind of link / pattern between all these gang incidents in London ?????
I look at the pictures, watch the videos but I seem to see something very very different to what the likes of Khan, Abbott, Lammy, Cornyn , the BBC and msm keep telling me !
Strange hey !!!!!!!
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A more balanced account of Boris’ time as Mayor of London from Andrew Gilligan [who worked for him for three years] than you get from the BBC which prefers to paint a picture of chaos and failure….
‘They say that with Boris Johnson you never know where you’re going to end up. My own most memorable day with the then mayor of London started with me interviewing him in his City Hall office and ended up with us both crawling around on his roof, trying to demolish his garden shed. It is true that garden sheds are normally found in gardens but in this respect, as in others, Johnson was a rule-maker, not a rule-taker. He had just moved into a new house in Islington, he explained, but it lacked a study. Hence the shed, which he had had erected on a flat roof at the back.
Alas, he had forgotten to get planning permission — awkward, since he headed London’s planning system at the time — and the Labour-controlled council had grassed him to the Daily Mirror. In a panic, Johnson grabbed the next reasonably friendly face through the door — me — to help him erase the Shed of Shame before the story appeared.
We toiled in vain for hours before realising that we were completely useless at practical tasks and in grave danger of falling to our deaths. Remind you of anything about British politics?
With Johnson now likely to be prime minister, thousands of words have been, and will be, devoted to what we might call the shed-demolition view of his life: a seat-of-the-pants chancer, unqualified for anything serious, Donald Trump with more syllables and so on. As someone who has known him for 20 years — and worked under him for three years — I believe that such attacks have little effect because the truth is more subtle.
As Rick in Casablanca said of the movie’s cynical police chief, Captain Louis Renault, Johnson is like any other man, only more so. He has both strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures. The question is whether we get the good Boris or the bad Boris — represented by the two big political jobs he has done.
He was not of course, as was claimed by such disinterested observers as Alastair Campbell, “probably the worst foreign secretary we’ve ever had”. Worse than Jack Straw who — in an original screenplay by one Alastair Campbell — presided over an illegal war leading to 200,000 deaths? Whatever we think of Brexit, it hasn’t killed anyone.
Yet there is no denying that Johnson’s time at King Charles Street was unsuccessful. It was not actually without achievement: he won more money from the Treasury to expand the diplomatic service by 10 embassies; he helped build the surprisingly strong global response to the Skripal attacks in Salisbury.
Yet he often made it easy for those who longed to see him fail. Politicians must be able to cope with boredom, never more than when foreign secretary, Britain’s grandest non-job. But one of Johnson’s weaknesses is a low boredom threshold. Inwardly yawning through vacuous meetings with dignitaries, he said too many stupid things. Then there was his excruciating nine-hour trip to Afghanistan, arranged simply to avoid voting against the third Heathrow runway whose very bulldozers he had pledged to obstruct.
He disliked the physical constraints: he had always cycled round London without security, but when he was foreign secretary, his security team wouldn’t let him (it was never spelt out what the main threat was: Islamist terrorists or angry remainers).
He’d do a fine PC Plod imitation of his minders saying he was welcome to ride, as soon as “sufficient officers to form an escort convoy” came on shift. Once, at his official flat, he grabbed my bike and sped off towards Lower Regent Street in a brief, futile break for freedom. His whole time in office was a bit like that.
Yet there is a corrective to those who say that Johnson in power would crash and burn: his mayoralty of London. Getting things done in City Hall is harder than it looks, as Sadiq Khan shows us every day. Johnson’s regime was not perfect. The first months were chaotic. His response to the riots in 2011 was too slow. More than £43m of public money was spent on the unbuilt garden bridge. But his most important and surprising quality, obscured by such vanity projects, was boring competence at his central tasks.
Under Johnson most things that are now going up (crime, council tax, traffic congestion, air pollution, road casualties) went down. Most things that are now going down (capital investment, bus frequencies, passenger numbers, the number of new houses being built) went up. Crossrail, during Johnson’s watch, was on time and on budget. The disastrous Tube public-private partnership, which Ken Livingstone tried and failed to end, was ended by Johnson, saving taxpayers billions of pounds.
To anyone with any knowledge of how Johnson actually behaved in office, the claimed parallels with Trump are absurd. He funded health advice for refugees, spent heavily on public services and raised the London living wage. The ultra-low-emission zone in central London, for which Khan now claims credit, was designed and approved under him. Several of his policies infuriated his base supporters, such as the focus on cycling and the removal of car space for bus and bike lanes.
I declare an obvious interest: I worked for him — as his cycling tsar — at City Hall for three years. It was as far from the recent accounts of Theresa May’s Downing Street as it’s possible to imagine. If she was secretive and controlling, he was inclusive, delegatory and liberal — not in the self-righteous, purity-test sense that has twisted this great creed, but in its true meaning.
He didn’t demand that everyone think like him; several of his advisers weren’t even Tories. Backbiting and briefing, by political standards, was minimal; senior aides were happy and junior staff were treated with respect. He was kind when there was no advantage for him in it and forgiving of mistakes. In a round-robin email when I left City Hall and joined The Sunday Times I managed to circulate his private email address to all the contacts in my address book. Johnson was remarkably decent about it.
Reluctantly, in full knowledge of his flaws and misdemeanours, I and others came to the unfashionable view that he is a good person. One of the reasons we believed this is because he cared so much — too much — about what other people thought of him. This led to another weakness: while often brilliant with sympathetic or neutral audiences, he was much less good dealing with hostility or confrontation.
Every six months as mayor he had to do something called people’s question time, a public meeting where any voter could come and shout at him.
He was sometimes intensely nervous before these events, shutting himself in a room to gather his thoughts. His reluctance to do television debates in the current leadership contest is perhaps of a piece with this; he did do them in both his mayoral elections but not terribly well, and he last appeared as a panellist on the BBC’s Question Time six years ago. It will be interesting to see how he copes with prime minister’s questions.
Other supposed drawbacks are less of a problem. At City Hall, and no doubt in Downing Street, Johnson could master detail whenever he wanted to. He seldom wanted to. Contrary to the usual view, that is a strength, I believe. A leader’s job is to set the general direction and tone, choose the right people and inspire them to implement it. Lots of folk can do detail. That’s what Johnson’s highly effective City Hall chief of staff, Ed Lister, and to a lesser extent the rest of us, was there for.
Far fewer politicians can do what Johnson does. The better presidential parallel — in personality, not policy — is with Ronald Reagan, another broad-brush guy scorned by right-thinking sophisticates, but capable of cutting through to voters, making them feel good about him and about themselves and creating the political juice to get things done. Almost uniquely, YouGov shows Johnson’s ratings as mayor were as high at the end of his eight years in office as at the beginning. If he’d sought re-election against Khan in May 2016, he would have won.
Which Boris will we get? The difference between the Foreign Office and the mayoralty is that at City Hall Johnson was in control, surrounded by people he trusted and had real work to keep him interested. The Johnson gaffe index reached record lows; his mayoral election campaigns were disciplined, as his leadership campaign now is. If he wants something badly enough, he will do whatever is necessary. These conditions seem likely to apply in No 10. He starts with the advantage of low expectations, which he is likely to confound.
The other and greater difference was Brexit, which shattered the old Johnson coalition. Now the middle-class Londoners who had helped to make him mayor were picketing his house. But how deep does the alienation go? Can he rebuild his broad appeal? The answer is we don’t know because he hasn’t yet tried.
I’m less worried than some about his ability to work with the government machine. My concern is that, from day one of a job a thousand times harder than the mayoralty, Johnson may face the hatred of substantial portions of the country, not to mention our European negotiating partners, but without much political capital behind him.
Even in less divided times, the democratic legitimacy conferred by, say, 80,000 Tory members’ votes is not all that great. Expect constant attacks on his right to hold office. He needs to speak more now to the audience beyond the Tory selectorate and his lead in the contest gives him the political space to do so.
In the months after the referendum, Johnson’s error, personally and for the country, was not to reach out to the 48% who voted “remain”. That clearly was his first instinct: four days after the vote he wrote that “we who are part of this narrow majority must do everything we can to reassure the remainers . . . We must heal, we must build bridges.”
That piece, with its have-cake-and-eat-it mentions of new immigration controls alongside “access to the single market”, was deemed to have damaged him in the 2016 leadership race. Michael Gove wielded his knife, Johnson lost his nerve and his newspaper articles lurched towards the territory of describing May’s deal as a “suicide vest”. He is now moving back to the centre.
What he actually believes was a subject of occasional debate among his City Hall team. For less kind spirits, the answer was whatever he’d heard from the last person he had spoken to, but that’s not fair. One Nation Toryism is his factory setting. He was often also resolute about policies that came under heavy flak, including bike lanes and police station closures.
In today’s Britain, people have simple views about complicated subjects, such as the life and career of Boris Johnson. Bluntly, we’ve had too much binary thinking, intellectual inflexibility and diehard chest-beating. If we’re going to reach any kind of detente with each other, what we all need is a bit more swivel-jointed opportunism.
Most of the other main candidates, especially the former remainers, are doing their best to demonstrate this important quality — but Johnson is better at it. ‘
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Just had to laugh at this bit, pug. “he helped build the surprisingly strong global response to the Skripal attacks in Salisbury.”
It was deja vu for me all over again (if I may borrow that famous expression) when the BBC reported this morning Jeremy Hunt’s latest statement about the tanker attack. IIRC, the word ‘almost’ has now been used about its attribution. That took a little longer than some previous rollbacks.
If Andrew Gilligan cares to look back, I think he will find that Bojo, far from ‘build the surprisingly strong global response to the Skripal attacks’ went verbally nuclear earlier than anyone apart from the PM – long before any facts were known and the OPCW had investigated and reported – and then spent successive days unwinding with qualification after qualification.
After the OPCW had reported, Bojo was noticeably quiet on the matter.
I wonder why?
PS: Gilligan appears to be a Remainer. Is that why he is promoting Bojo?
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Looks like a certain someone is after a job …
I don’t know how many PMQs there are before 31 October -I’m guessing not too many – maybe 10 ? But if Alex Boris can bluff his way through them to a no deal brexit – then who gives a damn what he says or does .
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Fed, yeah, if …
… if Bojo does not flip-flop, like Stewart appears to now be doing
… if Bojo can inspire confidence among his wider Party colleagues
… if Bojo can get through the normal business ….
Who did you like out of the four apart from Javid & Stewart?
Carolyn Quinn talking with Sam Gyimah right now about Bojo u-turning on Brexit ….. hhhmmmmmnnnn.
CQ really pushing the 2nd Referendum thing on R4’s TWH hard.
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Up2
Boris would do well to avoid the BBC – but if his appearance doesn’t adverse affect his coronation then the number 2 is Raab or Hunt. Judgement call on whether to have Gove inside the tent or not .
A majority brexit cabinet is vital .
As I was watching the five? guys – I thought how an equivalent labour pageant would have looked with real blood letting between Cooper, Nugee Abbot , wrong daily and token white .male .
As for gyimah – just a toxic remainer to be disguarded like any other token …
I thought in the husting Gove was quite funny – he sounded like an 18 year old applying for a job with a whole line of ‘ competencies ‘ .
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Is it just me but do all ‘Radio 4 women’ in their dramas sound as if they are all played by Juliet Stevenson and that their characters are 21st century women regardless of the time in which the drama is set?
Tonight I heard The Trespasser’s Guide To The Classics – The Nose in which the male players put on accents and adopt mannerisms suited to the part and the women play identikit Radio 4 women and sound so similar that it was hard to tell them apart.
(The story was nominally based on Cyrano de Bergerac but being the BBC got converted into yet another lesbian love affair).
One of the actresses really, really sounded like the reader of the following story, about Annika Stranded, probably written by the husband of Juliet Stevenson and played by Juliet Stevenson, both operating under nom de plumes. Actually it could be written by Ricky Gervais as it is so boring.
Last season Annika helped kill of her male forensic photographer, who has now been replaced by a female. I guess this will be building up to Lesbians in Lapland, it is the BBC after all.
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LOL X 5, Jim
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Jim – there’s the red northern lass who makes a good living doing voice overs for adverts – and the Asian one who was in some paki comedy thing who also turns up in just about everything . Really glad i avoid it…
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Medialand vs real world
Like 10 days ago they really thought that cos May had been dry we’d soon be at risk of a drought.
“that drain is at 1/3 level & sluiced to keep it at that low level cos to leave space for drainage when rain comes”
– Thursday June 6th Lincolnshire drought could be coming
– Tuesday June 11th Lincolnshire rivers have flooded
..doh it’s worse than these pics show
… cos on that Thursday report the enviro reporter chose to stand next to a river much lower than this photo
a fenland drain which was at 1/3 level
And I thought ‘this is con cos that drain is probably got a sluice gate at the end and it’s probably been set to keep the drain low
so that when rain comes there is space for drainage’
– By Thu June 13th there was a megaflood at Wainfleet
. There is a particular reason for that : the banked river keeps water off the fenland had breached the bank repairs
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Al Beeb wrong again.
Ask yourself the question, why do you pay for such rubbish?
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Where did that Look North presenter get the idea that there was a drought ?
Ricard Drake points us a Guardian article pushing Climate alarmism
and a later letter backing it up
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/27/weatherwatch-england-is-desperate-for-rain
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Darn I just screwed up that my first post there
the line “that drain is at 1/3 level ..” is not supposed to be there
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Not al beeb, sorry, but good luck Justin Rose tonight against the Yanks! ????
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theleftwilleatitself
You are right – Not Al Beeb.
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Time for the new Thread I think ….
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Grumpy git ????
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Taffman that is ????
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7149611/Zero-viewers-tune-21-shows-BBCs-new-32m-Scottish-TV-channel.html
More than 20 shows on the BBC’s new £32m Scottish TV channel attract ZERO viewers as public brands it ‘rubbish’ and a ‘waste’ of the licence fee
No viewers tuned in to 21 programmes on BBC’s new £32million channel
On another day programmes on Scottish channel averaged 7,200 viewers
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