Nothing Great about Britain

The media spin it as pro-palestine, and as such, anti Israel. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that you can just be anti blanket bombing civilians in Gaza.

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The interesting thing here is why Sunak hasn’t fired her despite her clearly doing her absolute best to get fired.

The Tories’ capitulation to lunatics grows ever more complete. I said when Johnson went that it would get worse. It did and will continue to do so.

Braverman is positioning herself to lead the party after the next election and barring the entry of Farage into the race may well do so.

The longer she is there the better, the Tories are destroying themselves, they’ll be unelectable for the next 20 years with clowns like her heading the party

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She may, as it’s voted on by a bunch of piss smelling nasty geriatrics, but she’s unelectable, and she will be swimming in an increasingly small pond of fetid stagnant water (appropriately in many ways).

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But she’s so thick she doesn’t realise it

I suppose it’s that or back to conveyancing the odd semi-d in the Midlands.

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She’d crash and burn and would most likely be gone within a year or two but would open the way for Farage to get the leadership if he wanted it and if he did he would be extremely dangerous.

Matthew Parris summed her up well today

She’s got to go, Rishi, or the party’s over

There’s no time to dither, the future of the Conservatives depends on sacking Braverman and seeing off the hard right

Matthew Parris

Friday November 10 2023, 9.00pm GMT, The Times

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Forgive a note of exhaustion here. For the umpteenth time, and struggling now to maintain any hope that they will ever learn, your columnist girds himself to warn yet another Tory leader, in yet another stand-off with yet another lunatic on the party’s right, that there’s no accommodating these people.

They will come for you. In the end they will always come for you. You can compromise here, you can give ground there, you can echo their language and try to lure them, you can even put them in your cabinet and hope that office might calm them down; but finally they will come for you. They can smell their own kind and if you aren’t their kind they will sniff that out, and they will kick you.

Suella Braverman kicks from that quarter. Her unpardonable attack wasn’t really about Remembrance Sunday. It is possible to hold a range of opinions, all reasonable, on whether a Gaza-related event should be allowed to compete for attention with the Cenotaph ceremony; but (as the prime minister acknowledged) the final decision was for the Metropolitan Police commissioner.

The home secretary was anyway never seeking agency in the first place. There was no plan for action. As George Osborne remarks in his latest podcast, she was taking the role of “Connie the Commentator” rather than that of the responsible minister. And as commentator her intention was straightforward and obvious: to humiliate Rishi Sunak and recommend herself to thehard right.

Her unauthorised column in The Times, attacking the Met commissioner and in effect branding Sir Mark Rowley’s force as puppets for Muslim extremists, was a direct challenge to collective cabinet responsibility and her own prime minister’s authority. She meant it to look like that. We all saw it like that. The Daily Mail’s “Come for Suella and you come for us” saw it like that. This was a two-fingered salute to the prime minister.

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So why didn’t Sunak react? She should have been sacked on the spot. The moment her column hit the press Michael Gove’s phone should have rung with a call from Downing Street appointing him home secretary. Not Oliver Dowden: a capable and sensible minister but the Home Office needs a captain, not a manager.

Braverman’s open defiance was not a setback for Sunak: it was an opportunity, a clearcut transgression by a mutinous colleague inviting a crisp and immediate response. Here was the chance to show authority. And yet he seems to dither.

This prime minister may not see it like this: he may prefer to mull things over; to put things off until a larger cabinet reshuffle, some time, never; to wait and see how Remembrance goes; or wait until next week’s Supreme Court decision on sending illegal refugees to Rwanda.

I can understand how he may see it as a refusal to be panicked, but it’s beginning to look more like timidity, more like a failure of nerve than a steady hand. I can easily see Sunak bogging himself down in mere calculation when what the moment calls for is not political gaming but a simple display of personal command.

He surely knows that an impression is growing that the PM shies at fences, runs scared of a bullying headline in the Daily Mail, and is afraid of the nutters on the right. The impression that he is running scared is dangerous for him because, as it sets in, every new hesitation will seem to confirm it.

As for Braverman, martyr or survivor, she is going nowhere. Her great and final reverse comes when she fails, as she will, in the ultimate purpose of this latest display: to secure the party leadership.

She will fail because if the unreconstructed Tory right pursues its mission to destroy the Conservative Party as a party of government and consign it to the fringe, they will make Nigel Farage — an altogether more formidable politician — their candidate for the leadership, as he fully intends. Braverman’s only contribution would be to assist in the wreckage of the party’s last hope for moderate and intelligent direction.

Enough then, of her. Back to the dark side of the Tory right, for whom she acts only as useful idiot and who will finally discard her. Their more immediate aim is to destroy Sunak’s premiership. I think he still thinks he can win them over. And, at this point in this column, that sense of exhaustion I spoke of at the outset creeps in.

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For all the decades since Iain Duncan Smith was chosen to lead the party, I’ve been saying the same thing, and begin to wonder how often it’s worth repeating. The fanatical fringe we call the Tory hardline right will be the death of modern Conservatism unless Tories wake up to the reality that these people are not the party’s friends. Not only are they wrong, but they are intellectually bankrupt. Deprived of their last big idea — a Singapore-style Brexit — they are guided only by antipathy. Hate and fear are their pillars of fire and cloud on a journey to a promised land they are no longer able to describe.

The last aggressively right-wing thinker of any intellectual calibre to lead the party was Michael Howard. Since then we’ve seen a crowd of headbangers but with no head or shoulders above the rest. A claque among whom Duncan Smith is seen as a leading personality is a claque short of brainpower.

The claque is not, however, short of certitude, armouring it against any awareness of the country whose electoral endorsement it would need. And there’s a slim chance Sunak could use this latest mutiny to foment a mutiny of his own: a rebellion by the sensible majority of Conservative MPs against a fifth column that threatens to bring the whole party down.

Braverman’s disloyalty has brought to the surface the alarm the quiet majority in the parliamentary party feel: the colleagues who don’t believe the Met are jihadist puppets, who don’t see in some poor, broken rough-sleeper someone who has made a lifestyle choice, who don’t think everyone worried about events in Gaza is a hatemonger, who don’t see stopping the boats as fighting off “invaders”. Such colleagues’ instinct until now has been to play down these noises in the hope they will go away.

They won’t. Theresa May once invited me for a cup of tea in Downing Street. I warned her that the hardline Tory right would destroy her if they could. I doubt she heard me. If, now, Rishi Sunak still ignores that warning, all is lost. I repeat: what he faces is not a setback but an opportunity. Seize it.

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In most major conservative parties around the world the “constitutional” conservatives have chosen to “work with” the far right rather than face them down. This doesn’t work for the same reasons it didn’t work in 1930s Germany. You only get consumed by them and you can’t take back control them from because their propaganda works and drives the base of the party ever further into the nutty zone. The only chance you have of taking back control of the party is a total calamity and humiliation. Sunak only got in because he came after the calamity and humiliation of Truss and he was acclaimed as leader rather than elected, and then he walked straight back into the trap of “working with” the nutcases. He’ll most likely step down as an MP in 2025 and then it’ll be straight into a lucrative career in the world of public speaking, global investment and advisory gigs. What will be left behind in the Tory party will be feral.

The tories will be wiped out next year. The only question now is the margin of defeat.

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Yes but it will be Sunak who is seen to preside over a heavy defeat. Sunak is bad but is not seen as one of the lunatic figures in the party and therefore they will very likely return to a Truss type oblivious lunatic like Braverman as leader rather than go for Jeremy Hunt or somebody along those lines.

They will. And they’ll be out for at least two terms.

100 hundred years ago in 1923 the British Empire covered a quarter of the world.

Where did it all go wrong

https://x.com/reverend_makers/status/1723288958350569775?s=46&t=hLFVM4tcaAF7TEDm5mgJyQ

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Stan’s made some big mistakes but he’s not afraid to stick his head above the parapet :clap:

https://twitter.com/StanCollymore/status/1723328373789757571

https://twitter.com/StanCollymore/status/1723628696811036743?t=1JN1aJWtQxZlRHHcOKMyvw&s=19

Jaysus, dripping with bile. Sacked in the morning.

Not sure what Stan did to deserve that but fair play to him for standing up to them

@briantinnion giving it big licks there

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