The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel - The Tory leadership elections

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuDtreoXQAEi8iU.jpg

Latest odds:

Boris Johnson – 3/1
Dominic Raab – 5/1
Michael Gove – 8/1
Jeremy Hunt – 10/1
Andrea Leadsom – 16/1
Matthew Hancock – 16/1
Rory Stewart – 16/1
Sajid Javid – 16/1
Penny Mordaunt – 20/1
Amber Rudd – 33/1
Jacob Rees-Mogg – 33/1
James Cleverly – 33/1
Priti Patel – 33/1
50/1 bar

Hancock may be worth a punt at 16/1 but would expect someone going for the full Brexit. Bold prediction it won't be BoJo.

Docked points for resisting 'cunt-off'

https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/next-conservative-leader

them odds are stale, boris is widely available at odds on.

My feeling is that the old rules of 'dull compromise candidate wins' don't work any more with their newish voting system, so people may be overrating Jeremy Hunt

xp love reading the 750-1 odds whenever these things come up.

This time: William Hague, Ken Clarke, Michael Portillo, Grant Shapps, John Redwood, Louise Bagshawe, Heidi Allen

people may be overrating Jeremy Hunt

this goes without saying, i'm just noting that he'll win

he's a steady cuntinuity character.

Was a bit premature with my list as a big beast prepares to enter the fray:

Sir Graham Brady confirms he's considering standing to be PM so has stood down as chair of the 1922 backbench committee

— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) May 24, 2019

I can't believe you put Liz Truss above Some other Muppet.

to be fair to the tories, this only underscores what a deep bench of ghouls, frauds, idiots and maniacs they have

Seamless succession already laid on.

https://www.conservatives.com/-/media/Images/Site-Redesign/Profile-Pictures/Stephen-Crabb/Crabb-01.ashx?h=600&la=en&w=519&hash=FC4D54583B4C91F888D7EFC05B608CCDA414BC82

that lad who was 7th person to take the dwp brief in 2 years, really stood head and shoulders above the rest of them by erm.. being welsh.

And sexting to 17 year old constituents - that was him wasn't it?

... I beg his pardon, 19 year old.

and i seem to recall rumours he was afflicted with some old good fashioned christian fundamentalist hypocrisy when it came to fucking men as well!

it'll be Rory won't it?

too fey and asexual for nasty party imo.

the logical conclusion of that post could mean I'm sexually attracted to Boris and Theresa. Just checking if my local vets practice castrates humans as well.

the internet's thriving nullo community has come great diy advice if the vet is reluctant

Went for Penny Morduant - little to no public profile (and if you want to do evil and fool ppl that you aren't quite that this is important), and a Brexiteer. Kate Maltby said that (unlike Leadsom) she isn't socially conservative. Lol and all but if she can get to a Cameron-type likeability across then I can see it happening.

negatives: name is a jk rowling villain

Negatives only to libs, the con faithful are all 1000 years old and wouldn't know wtf that is

xxp I think not socially conservative is a little bit of a stretch because that certainly doesn’t apply to her stance on the military or historical war crimes

Yeah totally, what Kate must mean is will be sympathetic on women's issues or some such guff.

cometh the hour cometh the man, michael gove

Voted Gove cos he’s clearly done the legwork to make fellow MPs forget what a snake he was, he’s headbanger enough for ERG & the membership and has a lot of press sympathy. Plus the MPs can block Boris but they can’t block everyone and Gove seems as likely to get to the final two this time as anyone. Plus let’s face it, the banter heuristic demands it.

Too weird looking to be PM, sorry not sorry.

This is also SV’s logic but it doesn’t apply outside a GE scenario (and applies to Stewart at least as much?)

Applies to 95 percent of UK prime ministers tbh

And also Gove is what the Tory party (but afaict no other part of the country) considers to be warm and intellectual and personable, so...

Too weird looking to be PM, sorry not sorry.

negatives: name is a jk rowling villain

last time they basically chose Dolores Umbridge, so

Write-in vote for Coldplay's In-a-Gadda-da-Vida album

weird looking UK PM's from the old era don't count, these days Anthony Eden would get arrested walking too slowly past a school. Back then he was a certified sex symbol - proof: he had a hat named after him!

Hitler had a moustache named after him tbf

if you asked for a Hitler on Savile Row they wouldn't pass you a moustache tho!

Hold on, Boris isn't popular enough with the (non-Tory) general public but Michael Gove is??!?!? This is Boris all the way unless there's a concerted effort by the parliamentary party to stop him, in which case it's Raab. Hunt insufficiently Brexity.

the general public just need the same XXX strength beer goggles sarah Vine wears.

Feel like the canniest candidates might just turn up on Love Island this summer

I’m talking about this specific election which is confined to Tory MPs and members. Gove would get turned over in a GE.

(xxp) Sarah Vine, there's another drawback. I'm wondering if Boris might even decide to sit this one out when he realizes the enormity of the shitshow that's developing.

This is the thing - he'll have to do work, which is beneath him

Sarah Vine would be piiiiiiiiiiisssed offffffff if she had to give up her column, for which she is paid silly but not quite Boris Johnson at the Telegraph money. Come to think of it, Boris Johnson must be skint from divorce lawyers etc....

Oh yeah he won't be able to keep it in whenever he meets a hot head of state either.

Boris wins the vote.

He calls a GE as soon as the reins are in his hand, convinced of his own popularity.

He loses.

...to such an alarming degree he's forced into forming a coalition government with Labour.

What, those Marxists?!

Matt Hancock, who is apparently the Health Secretary, has thrown his hat into the ring.

Was going to make that exact point, ecofashy state of mind that.

has always been the case as far as i can tell

So I’m reading CH and dying at this Jeremy Hunt encounter

“Wotcha!” The Foreign Secretary’s greeting yesterday morning was genial, but strangely reminiscent of The Sun’s famous “Gotcha” headline during the Falklands War.

We were hurrying along on the 8.24 from Waterloo to Alton, in Hampshire, and Jeremy Hunt, last encountered in the splendour of his official residence at Carlton Gardens, approached me from behind, and took me by surprise.

He followed up his one word greeting with an extremely firm handshake.

So Hunt can do self-deprecation. He is an admirably English candidate, a sensitive and prudent man who can be relied on to behave like an officer and a gentleman, and who fortifies himself with swigs from a bottle of Evian water.

“Boris is a great character and I don’t want to say anything against Boris,” he said.

He is in favour of fox-hunting, wants a Commons vote if there is any prospect of success, and would vote for it, but “I don’t hunt myself. It’s not particularly my thing. But I think it’s part of the countryside.”

He added, in a wry reference to his name, that perhaps one of his ancestors hunted.

When ConHome asked Hunt if his view of Boris “has improved or worsened as the campaign has continued”, he replied: “It hasn’t changed, actually, because the great thing about Boris is we all feel we know him.”

ConHome: “I think there’s something imponderable about Boris, actually.”

Hunt is certainly less known to the general public than Johnson, but is, in principle, more knowable. He is a fine representative of his class, public-spirited, energetic, reliable, intelligent, a pleasure to deal with.

He is not as exciting or original as his rival, but not all Conservatives want a Prime Minister who is exciting or original. As he speeds round the country, he is bending every sinew to make this a two-horse race. We shall know soon enough whether he has succeeded.

There's always something dickish about blokes who go for the crushing handshake

Now reminded of the 'great porn parody names' - An Orifice and a Gentleman - can also be used to caption any number of photos of two (or one) tories.

the CH definition of what fortifying oneself with swigs from a bottle is, is doing it totally wrong.

Can’t believe Tory leadership candidates take in fluid, truly unbelievable

Johnson falling back on the old racist 'immigrants must speak English within our earshot at all times' gibberish now.

xp it's an evian bottle but it's full of replenishing reptile serum made from the crushed dreams of poor people

Truly no language has ever been threatened as much as the English language.

xp

It's not so much that the English language is threatened but that paranoid racist weirdoes feel threatened when someone talks another language in front of them so they can't tell if they're talking about them - and that's our next Prime Minister.

He added, in a wry reference to his name, that perhaps one of his ancestors hunted.

^thus speaks a man from a noble lineage of plumbers

"can't even speak the language" a classic trope of racist cunt Jack Straw iirc

paranoid racist weirdoes feel threatened when someone talks another language in front of them

Tbf the only time this happened to me so far involved a couple of American tourists seated at the table next to ours at a pub in London, 'subtly' mocking my French wife's typical pronunciation of certain anglophone actors' names. It can indeed be amusing, and neither of us has any qualms with it in a friendly setting, but in this instance it was clearly intended to demean. The upside, of course, is that once you catch on to it you can openly discuss their idiocy in the very language they are belittling. Anyhow, my sole xenophobic run-ins with Brits have been of the 'racist unbeknownst to themselves' variety, such as utterly tanked students asking for my name in addition to a light and immediately expressing bewilderment at my 'lack of accent', which is quite amusing since I sound North American af.

worth a read 4 years on
http://theconversation.com/theresa-mays-hidden-british-value-monolingualism-39258

I'll probably regret this, but what should I search to find this view of Boris's?

I was in Paris waiting in the queue for the Eurostar and there was an American family in front of me, and one of the Eurostar employees asked them which train they had tickets for (in order to make sure they were in the right queue) and they couldn't understand him at first and had to ask him to repeat, and once they did understand, and after he had started moving away, they smirked to each other and began mimicking the guy's accent and rolling their eyes, all very much "can you believe how bad this guy's English is" and I'm just boiling inside. DO YOU REALISE YOU'RE IN PARIS RIGHT NOW MOTHERFUCKERS? HOW'S YOUR FRENCH???

which is quite amusing since I sound North American af.

lol the NA accent can be quite scathing when it needs to be, although I concede that its Canadian variant further dulls the edge.

Yeah but you don’t have the scathing rolled R though, francophone version is no substitute.

I speak English with a standard Canadian anglophone accent and Romanian with a standard Romanian accent but I can't, for the life of me, even when I'm sloshed, combine the two. I can do an English accent in French and a French accent in English but I am utterly unable to sound Romanian in any language other than Romanian. The beauty of ILX, however, is that you can still choose to hear that arch-scathing Eastern European accent in your head – I'm all for it.

Anyway, sorry for hijacking this thread again, I just wanted to say: fuck off, Boris.

To make matters worse, his French is semi-decent for an occasional speaker. He's not fluent by any stretch of the imagination and he makes some amusing mistakes, but he seemingly understands the value of speaking more than one language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEGtpSvGXEA

Boris’s French is better than Gove’s (https://youtu.be/PlUJ-36-4ho) but worse than Cunt’s. Can’t find a good video of this but there’s about fifty videos of Hunt speaking Japanese, wtf.

Boris’s French is better than Gove’s (https://youtu.be/PlUJ-36-4ho) but worse than Cunt’s. Can’t find a good video of this but there’s about fifty videos of Hunt speaking Japanese, wtf.

Also this video of TM speaking French is awful
https://youtu.be/0dbvZJqgp0A like even the Queen made more of an effort speaking Irish

Bercow makes me angrier than Gove in that clip.

Bercow is always like this but he and Gove hate each other & genuinely cant think of a situation where I’d side with Gove.

Yeah, it's just the "well we're all just mates having a laugh here" vibe of it. Endemic to parliament I know.

Jesus fuck have we really got another two weeks of this?

I don't think Johnson's French is very good in that youtube given that he spent some of his childhood and several years of his adult life in Brussels. It's just the bare minimum enabling you to get by, ie typical Boris

Again wondering out loud if any of BJ’s Eton fees were paid as part of an expat employee package that went with Daddy’s EC job, because wouldn’t that be *delicious*?

but Johnson is more immune to shame than most Tories, even. i think he'd be comfortable benefiting from something he intends to deny to other people.

I don't think Johnson's French is very good in that youtube given that he spent some of his childhood and several years of his adult life in Brussels.

Tbf it's a lot easier to live in Brussels (a bilingual, even trilingual city) with a bare-bones grasp of French than it is in Paris. By the same token, there are born and bred anglophone Montrealers whose French is poorer than Boris's, alas.

Regardless, I’d love to see him answer a question about it on telly. The waffling would befit Belgium.

lol

xpost you're no doubt right about Brussels although all the British people I know there speak French a damn sight better than Johnson!

Will never forget taking a train from Brussels to Brugge and at a certain point they just abruptly stopped doing announcements on the train in French.

there are born and bred anglophone Montrealers whose French is poorer than Boris's

A random example of this: Steven Pinker, who spent the first 20+ years of his life in Montreal, gave a conference at the École normale supérieure in Paris and wasn't even arsed to take QUESTIONS in French. The amount of anglophones who don't bother learning foreign languages even in contexts where you'd expect it is absurdly high, and it's not even entirely their fault. This is simply how linguae francae work: language is power, etc.

all the British people I know there speak French a damn sight better than Johnson

I assume they want to be there, though, whereas Brussels appears to have been Johnson's In Bruges.

tbf pinker is a massive twat in other areas of his life also

Will never forget taking a train from Brussels to Brugge and at a certain point they just abruptly stopped doing announcements on the train in French

yeah when we were in Bruges the other week I had to explain to my son why his attempts at French weren't necessarily appreciated

tbf pinker is a massive twat in other areas of his life also

Can't argue with that.

Mind you the francophone bruxellois don't bother to learn Flemish, although they're literally surrounded by Flanders

Yeah, there's a clear hierarchy. Regional languages in France have also been systematically quashed. My wife's grandfather, who was German-Alsatian, decided not to teach his children either German or Alsatian after WW2, although he himself continued speaking them as needed (in Strasbourg).

my father, a South American immigrant to the USA, didn’t teach us Spanish because he thought it would slow our assimilation. We learned it anyway.

I don’t know anything about pinker (some popular scientist? not gonna bother) but people at the ENS pride themselves on doing everything public in English. Of course internal ENS power (all ENS people *really* care about) is carried out in French. Pinker just showed himself uninterested in that, which is fine, for the locals as well.

Most francophones wouldn't go out of their way to give a talk in English at the ENS for the sake of showboating. And no bilingual Montrealer would ever consider such a thing, in such a context. I'm not taking issue with the ENS's openness to English here, I'm just saying that given the environment in which Pinker grew up, it's fair to expect some amount of linguistic sensitivity. Same goes for Naomi Klein, who comes from a similar background, and whose politics are far removed from Pinker's.

No, I meant he probably asked what language to speak and was told English (maybe with relief). Unless the entire audience is francophone an academic talk in Paris will be given in English. At least that is the norm ime

he probably asked what language to speak

What I'm saying is this certainly didn't happen.

It’s probably the least of his problems today...

but what about Steven Pinker pic.twitter.com/YNwqNZ0SRM

— Matt Hammington (@MattHammington) July 7, 2019