The Last Chance Saloon Budget

 'This is a budget for long-term growth' is how the Chancellor began yesterdays budget but then he said exactly that at the previous budget and we are in recession now it wasn't the best of starts to what many believe will be the final one from the Conservative Government before the General Election.
As all political parties do in the election year budgets, there was the usual bribes and this time it came in the shape of 2p off National Insurance and the promise of scrapping it altogether at some point in the future which would be very well received if we didn't know that with each National Insurance cut comes the proviso that it will mean more years having to work before the state pension kicks in, it has already been quietly raised from 65 to 67 with 68 and even 71 being mooted.
Jeremy Hunt then went on to explain that this budget that was going to cut the overall tax burden, he was obviously unaware that even with his cut to NI, the tax burden over the last 14 years of Conservative Government was at its highest since 1948 but by then he had moved on to how he was scrapping
the Non-Dom's tax who would be expected to pay their tax here to pay for his 2p NI cut, money which the Labour Party had earmarked for the NHS but  it's not as if that public service is on its knees or anything after being horribly underfunded all this time.  
By now the Blue side of the house had almost given up bothering to cheer their man, they knew that the jig was up and Hunt was their last chance to try and pull off something job saving in the last chance saloon but all they got was some warm beer with a fag butt floating in it.   
Fuel duty was frozen despite having said in his Autumn statement that not freezing it was the only way he could meet his own fiscal rules but then this was the Government knowing they were almost certainly going to be moving into the Opposition side of the house when the election does come are are merrily salting the Earth for an incoming Labour government, and then having the cheek to charge us for the salt.

Come To Labour You Unracist Tories

It really can't be easy being a right winger in Britain, i don't mean the centre right or people who considered themselves centre right because the Conservative Party have moved so far to the right that parties that were considered fringe or extreme, are finding themselves very much at home in the Party of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
In the past week alone we have had Senior MP Lee Anderson have the Conservative whip removed for racist comments about London's Muslim Mayor, former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, said that Islamists, extremists and antisemites are in charge now and the deluded Liz Truss has been peddling nonsense about being removed from Office by the 'Deep State' and just smiled when the host hailed the far-right racist figure Tommy Robinson as 'a hero'.
The thinking is that the Conservatives have had to move further to the right to try and recapture the 10% of former party voters who are now behind the likes of the far right UKIP and Reform Parties which puts them in bed with the sort of people David Cameron called 'fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists' but as the polls show Labour between 12%-20% ahead and an election soon, they must figure that what they gain by tying themselves to the loonies and racists will make up for the losses from those they leave behind in the centre.
As i said above, it really can't be easy being a right winger in Britain at the moment, unless you are a frothing at the mouth knuckle dragging racist then you are spoilt for choice but otherwise, where would you go?
Obviously we would have to first wash you down in disinfectant and get you to hand in your Maggie Thatcher mug if you wanted to join the Labour Party but that is a small price to pay to not be associated with who was once called the Nasty Party but are now the Nastily Racist Party.

Makes Sense To Tories I Guess

Tax levels are at a 70-year-high, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and Rishi Sunak is under growing pressure from Tories to get them down before the next general election where they face a regal drumming.
Sunak then is leaning on his Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to do something in this weeks Autumn Statement and being the compassionate Conservatives they are, he has a plan to reduce benefits which will detrimentally affect 53% of the population while scrapping or reducing Inheritance Tax which will benefit
4% of the Population.
The chancellor has warned he will have to make 'difficult decisions' but he will also have to answer some difficult questions as to why he's benefit cut will save the Government £2bn while his inheritance tax cuts will cost them £3bn and with even my iffy grip of maths and economics, leaves the Treasury £1bn worse off.  
Inheritance tax, or Death Duty as it is also jauntily known, is payable on any estate over £1m and the more your estate is worth, the more tax you pay or rather you did, which means the richer you are the more of a tax cut your remaining spouse will receive.  
Ken Clarke, a former chancellor and about one of the only Conservatives i have any time for, has come out and criticised the plans, saying it’s not the tax cut he would choose and leaves them open to the most appalling criticisms for giving tax relief to those families that are lucky enough to have members of it with capital above the limit and not pay any significant amount of tax on the inheritance.
The Conservatives are currently 20 points behind the Labour Party and taking away from 53% of the poorest in society to give to the 4% with over £1m will make sure that isn't closing anytime soon.

Most Scandalous Government Ever?

As a Labour supporter it could be expected that i would say that this has been the Worst Government in history but as bad as things were under David Cameron and Theresa May, they have gone up a whole level since 2019 under the short lived tenure of Liz Truss and then Boris Johnson and now Rishi Sunak. 
Since Boris Johnson won the election that cold December morning in 2019, he has been found guilty of committing a criminal offence while at Number 10 catapulted out of the Commons after being found guilty of serially lying to parliament Deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, was removed for bullying, Party chair  Nadhim Zahawi sacked for tax evasion, Home Secretary Suella Braverman forced to quit because she committed a security breach and Gavin Williamson ejected from the cabinet the first time for leaking National Security Council meetings, then sacked again for being woefully inadequate as Education Secretary and then forced to quit a third time for bullying and then Health Secretary Matt Hancock resigned from government after breaking his own Coronavirus rules in an affair with an aide.
Junior ministers and backbenchers who have resigned their seats in disgrace include Owen Paterson for a lobbying scandal, Neil Parish who quit as an MP after watching porn in the Commons and Imran Ahmad Khan resigned from parliament after he was sentenced to 18 months in jail for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy.
Julian Knight had the Conservative whip withdrawn after an allegation of sexual assault, Rob Roberts is under investigation for sending lewd texts to a 21-year-old intern, David Warburton had the whip withdrawn following allegations of harassing three women and snorting cocaine and Chris Pincher resigned after groping two men at a club.
One unnamed Conservative MP was arrested on suspicion of rape and sexual assault has been told to stay away from parliament amid an ongoing investigation but there have always been scandals with sexual predators, liars, crooks and bullies  in previous eras but not this many so there is something rotten in our Government or the election process which the Conservatives use to send these dreadful people to Parliament.

Shhh...I Don't Think Anybody Noticed Rishi

It's OK, Rishi, due to the coronation i don't think anyone noticed that your Conservative Party lost over 1,000 seats in the local Elections on Thursday.
Your own spokesman announced before the voting that if you lost 500 it would be awful but if you lost 1,000 it would be catastrophic which we all assumed was an attempt to manage expectations as never in your wildest dreams did you expect to lose that many and you could then deem it some sort of 'success' as you didn't hit the 1,000 losses figure but for that to work you have to avoid doing worse than the lowest expectations you set in the first place, which you never, you went stomping past it.
Some Conservative Councillors didn't try and sugar coat it, they came out and straight up blamed Boris Johnson and Liz Truss for doing the damage to the Conservative brand but some did come out and try to explain away why the nation had flipped them a massive middle digit with Andrea Leadsome being the best.
'What the county is clearly telling us' explained the former Secretary of State for Business 'is that they want more of Rishi Sunak’s policies' which even for the most deluded is a hard sell considering the country had just clearly told the Rishi Sunak Government to feck orf.  
Special mention to John Redwood who insisted that the losses were all because of the party not being nasty enough to foreigners and for abandoning the Liz Truss economic model, the model which tanked the UK economy and shoved up everybody's interest rates, that economic model.
As for Keir Starmer's Labour, with the country finally waking up to how awful the Conservative and their right wing political ideology has been, as long as he isn't photographed punching orphans in the face with a kitten, he should order some curtain samples for Downing Street.

Zahawi Gone But Sunak Still On The Hook

 The Government are trying to spin the Nadhim Zahawi scandal as showing the Prime Minster is strong and full to the brim with integrity for sacking the Conservative party chair for serious breach of the ministerial code over his tax affairs and while it is true that he did him did sack him this morning, it was only after trying desperately not to.
If we rewind to September when it first came to light that Zahawi had deliberately funneled his earnings through an offshore account, the Iraqi born Minister denied being under investigation by HMRC, while at one point being the Minister in charge of HMRC, and threatened to sue any journalists that repeated the claim  calling it: 'inaccurate, unfair and clearly smears'.
When it was announced a fortnight ago that Zahawi had been made to pay £3.8 million in unpaid taxes and been fined £1.2 million for non payment, Zahawi issued a statement saying the tax office had concluded he had made a: 'careless but not deliberate error', careless in HMRC speak is described as
'a failure to take reasonable care, defined as the behaviour which the person did or failed to do', in this case not declare the £27 million he shoveled into a Gibraltar Bank account when he sold his YouGov shares, HMRC deciding Zahawi 'did not conduct himself in the way that a prudent and reasonable person would have done'.
While Zahawi played on the Careless aspect as is he had forgotten to include it on his tax Return or somehow accidentally forgotten to pay the £3.8 million due in tax, The Head of HMRC, Jim Carra, last week stuck the boot in stating that: 'No penalties are given for innocent tax errors'.
After Journalists began to do what we do best and started digging further into the former head of HMRC, Sunak referred his friend to the ethics committee while it was revealed that Sunak had been warned in October when he appointed Zahawi to a Cabinet post that there was concerns over his tax affairs but still promoted him anyway and then this weekends revelations that Zahawi had some very dodgy friends receiving oil contracts in Iraq.
Today's publishing of the verdict that Zahawi had breached the ministerial code on seven separate occasions and the conclusion that 'Zahawi’s conduct as a Minister had fallen below the high standards we can expect from those who serve in the government, left Sunak little choice after his initial 'nothing to see here' and the 'matter 'had already addressed this matter in full' defence and then trying to kick it into the long grass.
Zahawi for his part showed no remorse and issued a statement following his sacking where he blamed the media's conduct which he said went beyond legitimate scrutiny of his tax affairs which showed an arrogance on a grand scale.
Sunak may hope that with Zahawi gone the spotlight won't turn on him and what he knew and when he knew it but that isn't going to happen, journalists smell sleaze and will be rightly gunning for him again, the non-dom wife avoiding UK tax hasn't gone away, and with the Commons Privileges Committee investigations into Boris Johnson lying to parliament over the Parties held in Downing Street while the rest of country was in lock-down once again laid bare in public and the soon to be
published inquiry findings into multiple bullying allegations against his deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, Sunak must be having some very sleepless nights.

Enjoying The Leadership Campaign Yet?

Have you been enjoying the Conservative Leadership campaign? Great isn't it, i particularly like the bit where the two candidates complain about the state of Britain and say they are the people to put things right. As the BBC's Nick Robinson said, they will be furious when they realise that they have been running the country for the past twelve years.
It's a refreshingly brave campaign slogan which says that Britain deserves better than them and they can be trusted to fix the problems they’ve caused, it's like your plumber saying i know when i came that first time to fix your leaky tap that i flooded your house then the second time i left the gas on and blew up your kitchen and the third time i sat on your cat and killed it but stick with me because if you choose a different
firm you might get someone who really spoils things.
We can only be grateful that the country voted for them in recent years, remember how Cameron told us in 2015 the alternative was 'chaos under Labour' then Theresa May in 2017 promised she’d make us 'strong and stable' and in 2019 Boris promised us the 'Sunny Uplands' post Brexit and now the same Party is promising a leader who we can trust when at each of the last three elections they’ve said the same, then got rid of the leader themselves.
So it still a few weeks until Liz Truss (or Rishi Sunak but probably not) is thrust into the top job in the country promising to fund the things they’ve been de-funding for the past twelve years and if that doesn't go right, then they always have plenty of other idiots within their ranks to take over.

That Truss Lady Is For Turning

Whisper it quietly but Labour supporters are telling me that they are concerned that despite them being 11 points ahead in the polls against the Conservatives, any new Leader for the Tories will gain a new leader 'bounce' and they may call a snap election to cash in on the rise in support and deny Labour the majority to rule.
There will be a bounce, there always is, but how big it will be in the world outside of the Conservative Party members is up for debate as both Rishi Sunak as Chancellor and Liz Truss as Foreign Secretary are widely seen as irretrievably linked to Boris Johnson who's star dropped so far that he skipped going to the Women's European Cup Final for fear that he would be deafened by the crescendo of boo's aimed his way.
With every poll heavilly suggesting that it is going to be Prime Minister Truss in September, yesterday we had a taste of why the Tories voting in Truss as the third British female Prime Minister should be welcomed by Labour supporters because she may not want to be known as the continuity candidate but she has continued the policy of making major announcements only to U-Turn on them once it is pointed out that the policy is painfully flawed.
Monday evening she announced that one of the first things she would do once elected is pay government employees less in parts of the country where the cost of living is cheaper and save the Government £8.8bn.  
Obviously she went to bed that night feeling very chipper with herself but by breakfast, less than 12 hours later and after someone had obviously whispered into her ear that her policy would mean cutting the wages of Teachers, Nurses and Police and the public wouldn't accept that, she was on TV announcing that: 'Our hard-working front-line staff are the bedrock of society and there will be no proposal taken forward on regional pay boards for civil servants or public sector workers' and blamed journalists for 'wilful misrepresentation' of the policy, aka as reporting on the details in her own press release.
You know what fellow Labour supporters, i think with Liz Truss running the show and making policy, i think we will be alright and by alright i mean Keir Starmer should not stop looking at the carpet samples and wallpaper catalogues for number 10 because the only bounce she is likely to see is her suitcase going into the back of a taxi leaving Downing Street in a few short months.

It's PM Truss (Or Sunak But Probably Not Sunak)

When the list of potential Prime Minister Candidates was announced, i made a joke that i hoped that the Conservatives would pick the worst person which would make it easier for the Labour Party to unceremoniously boot them out of office in 2024 but never in my wildest dreams did i expect they would make it this easy with the only candidate who stood a chance, Penny Mourdant, out of the race Keir Starmer must be in danger of doing a hamstring from all the cartwheels he must been doing.
The line of Conservative succession will now go - Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak or Truss because the Conservative Party have gone even more bonkers than usual and offered up a choice between the man who was Chancellor and is directly to blame for the cost of living crisis, highest taxation this side of WW2, inflation at 9% and the spiraling national debt and a woman who isn’t the sharpest mind around and even got lost on the way to the podium at her own launch party and then got lost trying to exit it again.
Truss's first tweet after hearing she was in the last two was: 'Thank you for putting your trust in me. I’m ready to hit the ground from day one' which i'm sure she will, head first into the tarmac which when you think of it is a fair metaphor for what would happen to the country if they put her in charge, which they will.
The 200,000 Brexit loving, pale and stale old boys and girls of the Conservative Party Membership won't care that Sunak is a non dom, green card dodgy multi-millionaire who received a Police fine for breaking Covid laws, they won't pick him because they blame Sunak for wielding the knife against their Golden Boy, Boris Johnson, and Truss is seen as a continuity candidate, carrying on the sterling work down by her partying predecessor.
We have already had a taste of what's to come, the terrifying blank look on her face when questioned, reminiscent of the circle on a computer screen while the page is struggling to load as she searches her brain for an answer and spluttering into some resemblance of life as you consider whether to reach for the Ctrl, Alt, Delete buttons.
All the polls are suggesting that if a general Election was run today, the Labour Party would not only overturn the 80 seat majority but end up with a working majority themselves but Truss (or Sunak) will have two years to work their magic which is not so good for the country of course, she will be a total disaster as Prime Minister but we have already had 12 years of Conservative Party failures so surely we can wait 2 more and anyway Truss will be so comically bad at the job that if we are all going down, we can go down laughing.

The Very Best Tory Candidate is....None Of Them

Last nights TV debate of the five Conservative Leadership contenders proved two things, first that as this is the best the Party can offer, the Tory gene pool of talent is more of a puddle and secondly that Einstein's Special Relativity theory of time bending is alive and kicking because for a 90 minute programme it seemed to go on for days.
Hiring the same set designers responsible for the Weakest Link, the five candidates spent an hour and a half talking without actually saying anything of value which is quite an impressive feat and when they did speak it had all the sparkle of a spent Catherine Wheel on November 6th.
Most disappointing was Badenoch and Tugendhat who everyone knows are so far behind the top three that they will be yoinked out of the race on Monday and needed to really be on their game to win over the undecided MP's but after initially kicking lumps out of Penny Mourdant over her trans rights stance, Badenoch seemed to realise that Penny may win the thing and be responsible for choosing who goes into her Cabinet and visibly shrunk into her podium while Tugendhat just stood on the end like someone who had wandered into the studio by mistake so went with the tactic of shoehorning in the fact he had been in the Army into every answer.          
Penny Mourdant tried her very best to appear statesman by talking in pure banalities and when asked in the Yes or No question section if Boris Johnson was a liar, decided that one word was not enough and used 600 instead and still never answered the question and was so dull and numbing that nobody could actually tell you what she said seconds after she finished saying it.
Current front runner Rishi Sunak made great play of his time running the economy for the past three years which is forecast to have the second lowest growth in the G20 and the highest inflation rate in Europe so nice of him to remind us he is to blame in the middle of a cost of living crisis although he did admit to reaching the conclusion that Boris was not to be trusted so that's a consolation that the man vying for the top job is only years behind the rest of us for spotting a lying, narcissistic sociopath.
Liz Truss was so wooden i fully expected her to merge with the floorboards which considering whenever she spoke, the words she said never made any sense and if they did it was purely accidental, her disappearing from view may have worked in her favour.
Now it is down to the 320 MP's to have their say of the two to present before the 200,000 Conservative Party Members who get the final choice for the other 65 million of us but at the end of the debate it was if none of them really wanted the job and you know what, that would actually suit the rest of us down to the ground.

Undecided If I Want Best Or Worst Option For Leader

It is fair to say there are many things in this world that are way beyond my understanding, with being a Conservative being right up there and after a few minutes reading up on the kind of magic beans those remaining are offering (lower/higher taxes, complete change/no change from the Boris Johnson era) it’s fair to say i remain none the wiser.
Not only do i still have very little idea what Conservative values are offering (or perhaps more pertinently are not offering) beyond being a potential fast road to the poorhouse for most, after trying to learn more my eyes have glazed over and my head is thumping like a speaker at one of 10 Downing Streets infamous lock-down parties so i'm going with the look them in the eyes and go with your gut method.
Problem is my gut said: 'What you looking at those idiots for, just shove a baked potato in me' but what my gut doesn't grasp is my dilemma on which of those Conservative MP's will soon be the Prime Minister and therefore have an effect on my life?
On the one hand, as a Labour voter, i wanted to see Boris hang around until the next election where he would have been as roundly spanked as Chris Pincher at the Carlton Club but the Conservatives saw through that and he has resigned so they will now elect a new leader but do i want the very worst to win or the very best?
The worst will keep the Tories are rubbish momentum and it's all hail Angela Raynor (and of course Keir Starmer) but as the election could be two years away, Great Britain will be a basket-case by then or do i want the best Tory possible who will pick us up and shake off the crud Boris dragged us through which is beneficial for us all, but could mean less chance of Angela Raynor and her boss popping their feet under the Downing Street table?  
To make it even worse, the worst of a bad bunch have already fallen by the wayside with Nadhim Zahawi and Jeremy Hunt joining Grant Schapps on the sidelines which leaves only the terminally stupid Liz Truss and now that she has had her head surgically removed from Boris Johnson's backside, Suella Braverman, as the choice for the role of 'even worse than Johnson'.
The favourite is Rishi Sunak and he would be easy prey as his pitch seems to be to roll back the tax hikes that he was responsible for bringing in while Chancellor 'to spur economic growth and productivity' and that's before we even get to the fixed-penalty notice and his family’s financial affairs.  
The worst people for Labour would be Tom Tugendhat or Penny Mordaunt who are untainted by what went on before although with no cabinet or shadow cabinet experience, Tugendhat is expected to fall sooner rather than later so it's Penny Mourdant who would be the person Labour would least like to see sitting across from them at the dispatch box in September.
What has been good is the way the Conservatives have been ripping into each other as they scramble for the votes needed to progress so that's made it worthwhile and now that a baked potato is working its way through my intestines, my stomach seems more content also as we wait and watch the Tories tear each other apart to see which of them remains standing.

Told Ya!!

The builders are in number 10 Downing Street painting over the fingernails marks in the woodwork as Boris has been finally dragged out of Office amidst much celebration and while i am not one to say I Told You So...actually, i am one for that so...See, I Told You So!!!    
I told you here and here when Theresa May was wobbling and about to fall that people should be careful what they wished for as Boris Johnson was primed to take over and that is exactly what we got and boy he was a disaster in the short time that he has had the keys to number 10.
That Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was being lined up although he had already been sacked from jobs twice for lying and had a history of racism, homophobia and whilst Foreign Secretary, Theresa May didn't trust with secret information and even managed to get a woman's prison term increased whilst trying to get her freed, meant that it was always going to end badly for us.
Now that he has been finally removed, or will be once the Conservatives elect a new leader and therefore Prime Minister, we look at the Tory Party names putting their heads above the parapet and throwing out their names as potential leaders, the cheers may stick in the throat a bit because most of them were enablers and defenders of Boris when he was breaking the law and doing the things which nobody with a working sense of morality would be doing in his position.
We won't get to choose the next Prime Minister, the 200,000 Conservative Party members will and that comes with a very strongly worded warning that last time they overwhelmingly chose Boris and although it is hard to think of anyone being as awful at the job as he was, the next Prime Minister will be yet another atrocious right wing zealot and the vicious, nasty Tory circle will begin to turn again.

End For Boris Coming Soon

Carrie's is probably attempting to peel the £850 a roll wallpaper off the walls after the resignation of two Cabinet Minsters, it is certainly looking to be over for Boris Johnson and the notice has gone out for the fat lady to start gargling and warming up her vocal chords and now it is just a matter of how long it will take his enemies to finish him off.
The resignations of the Health Minister Sajid Javid and Chancellor Rishi Sunak have made the outcome almost inevitable and the whispers are that more Cabinet ministers will follow them out (as i type Andrew Murrison MP has announced that he has also resigned as a trade envoy) as they finally get where much of the public got months ago, that Boris Johnson is not fit to serve as our nations Prime Minister.
In his resignation announcement, Sunak said that 'The public rightly expect government to be conducted properly, competently and seriously' while Javid said: 'I can no longer continue in good conscience' so the first question they should get asked is why have they only now discovered a sense of morals and not when he got fined for breaking his own laws and mocked the British people or lied repeatedly over the thousands of other examples of the scandals that followed him around like a shadow?
They have been complicit every step of the way as he has run the country into the ground and under his awful Covid plan, buried many under it, so changing the top man won’t fix things if the people who willingly backed him remain in place.
Anyone who comes out and backs Boris now are making sure that they won't be included in the shake up when the new leader is chosen, tainted by their closeness to the worst Prme Minister in my life time, and i was alive during the Thatcher years, so there will be a few Ministers keeping their head down and turning off their phones this evening.
It might happen tonight, it may drag on for a few more days, Boris could even panic and call a General Election as a way of delaying things but it is difficult to see how he will cling on which i was hoping he would because as long as he stayed he was damaging his own party and making a Labour Government more likely so if there is a way he will cling on, i hope he finds it.

The Cesspool Which Is The Tory Run Westminster

The day must have a Y in it because we woke up to yet another Conservative resigning due to 'embarrassing himself' or as everyone else calls it 'sexually assaulting two young men'.  
This time it's the Chief Whip, Chris Pincher, but he is an old hand at this sexual misconduct lark, he was previously accused of 'touching up' another MP and accused of luring a former Olympic rower back to his home before undressing and saying: 'You’ll go far in the Conservative party' for which he said at the time: 'If anyone has felt offended, then I can only apologise'.
Despite all this, Boris Johnson still promoted him to Chief Whip, the actual person who investigates any allegations of sexual misconduct, but third time unlucky for Pincher because 'embarrassing himself' again has proved a sexual assault too far for the Tamworth MP and he has handed in his resignation.
As is the way in a Government led by Boris Johnson, their concern is not for the men sexually assaulted by the MP but for their colleague with the Government telling their MP's to 'think about how he feels today' and waving away any investigation or suspension because: 'The PM thinks he’s done
the decent thing by resigning' therefore showing all the compassion of a house brick for the victims.
When it is someone so immoral and devoid of values as Boris Johnson setting the benchmark of what is to be considered 'the decent thing' then we know we have really fallen down the rabbit-hole but it's just the latest in a long line of Tory scandals under the current blob of human kindness which includes..deep breath...defending Dominic Cummings lock-down busting trips, Charlie Elphicke imprisoned for three sexual assaults, Rob Roberts suspended for repeated unwanted sexual advances towards member's of staff, wallpapergate, the Health Secretary resigning due to breaking his own Covid Rules with his mistress, the PM accepting free holidays from donors, Owen Paterson breaking lobbying rules, Andrew Griffiths raping his wife, multiple lock-down parties, the PM failing to disclose Whatsapp messages to his own (first) ethics advisor regarding seeking £112,000 for a Downing Street refurbishment, David Warburton suspended for sexual harassment and cocaine use, Imran Ahmad Khan, sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy, Neil Parish twice seen watching pornography in the House of Commons and an unnamed Tory MP arrested on suspicion of rape and other sexual offences.
After one of the above scandals, i can't remember which one, the Government spokesman wheeled out the 'one bad apple' line and how the public can still trust Tory MPs and i have no doubt that in the future there will be more scandals, including Labour and Lib Dem MP's also, but when the top guy is a vacuum of acceptable standards, morals and respectability and is keen to overlook appalling behaviour because it may implement him in many cases, Westminster will remain a cesspool of the worst of us.

Why Boris Shouldn't Quit

If we found out anything from the Sue Grey report into Downing Street lock-down parties, it was that the half-arsed response to the Pandemic could be explained by most of the people responding to it were either drunk or hungover.
With WTF (Wine Time Friday's) and WTT (Wine Time Tuesdays), Thursday was the only midweek day when a decision could be made when the decision makers weren't either pissed or recovering from being pissed unless of course if someone was leaving that day and even Thursday's then saw the mini-fridge stocked up with alcohol from the local off-licence.
Anyone with any self-worth would have trudged off to whoever runs these things to hand in their resignation in disgrace but this Government doesn't do disgrace, Boris Johnson and the top Civil Servants who were photographed necking bottles of booze in rooms full of people while being in rooms full of people was banned for the rest of us, have refused to resign and are hoping to divert attention away with the shiny baubles of financial help with the cost of living.
If all it took for the Government to actually give a toss about the people it represents then maybe they should get caught out having even more piss-ups but the opposition parties are not taking it and are insisting that the Prime Minister resign but i say hang on Keir Starmer and whoever that guy is currently in charge of the Liberal Democrats, think about this.
Anger at Boris Johnson is everywhere, he is easily the most unpopular Prime Minister since Margaret Thatcher in her Poll-Tax pomp and Tony Blair when he teamed up with George W Bush to invade Iraq so leave him in power because everytime he shows up on TV bumbling inanely about something or other, he is a constant reminder of how he and his gang partied while telling us the most important thing was to stay at home and protect each other and under no circumstances should we party.
More and more Conservative MP's are getting this and are saying how they can see their seats disappearing at the next Election so why would you want to remove a man who is continually punching his own people and the already discontent electorate in the face?
Just leave him there and let the sore fester and don't allow the Tories to say they have 'changed', 'moved on' or 'learnt their lessons' and come the next election, Boris won't be able to find a fridge big enough to hide from his enraged, now unemployed, colleagues and we can have some proper grown ups running things.

Can The Queen Sack Boris Johnson?

A question i have been asked three times now is can the Queen remove Boris Johnson, the man we are referring to, for now at least, as the Prime Minister?
I always answer that i doubt it due to antiquated rules established around the time of the Magna Carta and the whole Oliver Cromwell thing but i thought i had better checked so i looked up the House of Commons Library which say's no she can't sack him but there was a but...
While the Prime Minister may be head of the government appointed by The Queen, there are certain residual powers retained by the monarch from bygone days where if the UK Prime Minister loses a vote of confidence in the house, and then 14 days later loses another one, it should sound the starting whistle on a general election and the matter is put to the electorate to resolve.
If after the two votes of no confidence, if the Prime Minister refuses to resign, then the Queen can't sack him but can invite another political leader from the same party or the shadow Government to try to form a government and then if they win a vote of confidence from the members in the Houses of Commons, the Queen swears in the new Prime Minister replacing the old one.
This leaves the ultimate power of appointing and dismissing Prime Ministers in the hands of the elected representatives in Parliament and the Queen therefore can't do anything until a second vote of No Confidence has been tabled and succeeded and only then if Boris refuses to pack up his bags and leave Downing Street.
It is unlikely the Labour Party will pushing for a vote of no-confidence, it is in their favour to leave a hugely unpopular leader on the opposition benches hemorrhaging votes so it will probably come from the Conservative Party itself and the 1922 Committee who can call a vote of no-confidence if 15% of Conservative MPs (54) send a letter requesting one.
This will stop a General Election they would probably lose and keep a Conservative Government in place until at least the next election in 2024.

Taxi For Boris

His proper name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and his title is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party but you could call him Boris. Or Bojo. Or, preferably, nothing at all but you had better do it quick because while while some Politicians are natural leaders fully prepared to take on any challenge in the pursuit of improving the lot of their citizens, others are lucky to get their trousers on in the morning without serious injury and de Pfeffel Johnson is definitely one of the latter.
Even amongst his Eton buddies, he was always considered the joke one, the person you would trust to snort milk out of nose but you wouldn't necessarily trust with anything serious, a saying amongst them was 'If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. If it's not worth doing, give it to Johnson' so quite how he ended up running the country is probably as much a mystery to him as the rest of us.  
Typically, his time as Britain's Leader where he said he wanted to be remembered as a modern Winston Churchill, is coming to an end in circumstances which would be hilarious if they were not so disastrous with scandals dogging him to the very end as the nation belatedly decide that the guy is a actually a massive bell-end.
You do have to give him credit for not being disrupted from making his blatant lies with things so frivolous as evidence as we are seeing with the Downing Street Lock-down Parties which he was still insisted never happened even while we were watching the video of his advisors discussing how they could spin it so it didn't look like a Party.
Then, to add another level of farce to the whole thing, the man he appointed to investigate to see if there had been a party afterall was removed from the invesitigation because his own office had held an illegal lock-down party.  
Then there is the insistence that he never knew who was paying for his £100k refurbishment of his Downing Street residence despite a Whatsapp message where he actually asked the guy to pay for it and this week he oversaw the loss of A Conservative Safe Seat, in their possession for almost 200 years, to the Liberal Democrats.
This is a man who as Foreign Secretary went to Iran to secure the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe who had been sentenced to 1 year in prison for allegedly plotting against the Iranian government but once he had spoken to the Iranian, her sentence had been increased to 5 years and whilst Lord Mayor of London was described as "a fairly lazy tosser who just wants to be there while doing very little work'.
His response to the Coronavirus Pandemic has left Britain with one of the greatest global death tolls and we are currently staring at 100,000 new infections a day in the coming days which is where him being entertaining stops being quite so funny, it's hard to find humour in a situation which ends with that many funerals which is exactly where Alexander has taken us and that distant rumbling isn't thunder or the Underground, that's the many fire engines rushing to Blenheim Palace where Winston Churchill is buried because he was rolling so fast in his grave that the cemetery caught fire.

We Do Deserve Better

Not that i have any sympathy with Boris Johnson and the rest of the Conservative Party but it isn't easy once you have been in power for a decade to say what things need improving and how they are going to do it because the obvious answer is you been in power since 2010 so why haven't you done it before?
At the last election their slogan was 'We Deserve Better' which seems quite a comment on their performance but not enough people agreed because they were voted back in again so we ended up with more of the same which to be honest hasn't been great.
So this week the grand poo-bahs of the Conservative Party land in Manchester for their annual jamboree to a backdrop of fuel shortages, supply line disruption, Benefit cuts, containers mounting up at ports, food shortages for months, empty supermarket shelves, a lack of medicines in
pharmacies, tax increases and a host of humiliating U-Turns on bringing back the foreign labour they couldn't kick out fast enough due to Brexit, good luck with that.
Boris and the gang are keen to point out that the shortages are not due to the Foreign exodus while at the same time easing the laws and writing to the foreigners about how they can come back and work here.
On the Sunday media trips this morning Boris Johnson managed to make a point of how hew is saving Christmas while admitting that the supply chain problems with HGV drivers will mean a shortage of things this Christmas and saying that the festive season would be 'considerably better than last year' which as he cancelled, is not the best boast.
What is most shocking is that the Conservatives are 8% ahead of of Labour in YouGov's latest poll which is a damning indictment on Labour Leader Keir Starmer who did such a bang up job of making a pigs ear of the Labour conference this year but if you can't overhaul easily the worst Prime Minister the nation has ever had and his motley crew of money grabbing cheats and liars, then he should be stepping aside for someone like Angela Rayner who isn't afraid to call the PM exactly what he is.

Racist, Misogynistic And Homophobic Scum

Labour Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, is being asked to apologise after calling senior Conservative members 'racist, misogynistic and homophobic scum'.
Hang on there Rayner, that's a bit strong because it isn't as if the leader himself said that Muslim women in Burka's looked like letterboxes or that Africans were picanninnies with watermelon smiles or that the problem with Africa is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more. Oh, he did.
Okay then, has he ever described women attending a conference as 'hot totty' or that women vote Labour because they are 'naturally fickle' and the way to treat a woman who could be a problem was to 'Just pat her on the bottom and send her on her way'? Hmm..that's right, he did say all that and there was that comment about his magnificent experience at the 2012 Olympics 'watching semi-naked women playing beach volleyball and glistening like wet otters'.
Ok so he may be a racist and a misogynist but has he ever said that he was against the teaching of homosexuality in schools or said same sex marriage was ludicrous and compared it to bestiality and said gay men were 'tank-topped bumboys'. Damn, he did didn't he.
Ok, but are the Conservatives really scum? Show me when they have cut payments to the disabled or applauded when Nurses pay-rise was refused or refused to give food vouchers to poverty stricken school children as they would be given to crack dens and brothels or or cut Universal Benefits or thanked the NHS staff during the pandemic by stiffing them on a promised pay-rise and offering them a pay-rise of 1%, £3.25 a week or spent billions of our tax pounds on handing Covid-19 contracts to their own friends or family?
Seriously? They did all that and the response from one Tory MP to you was to say that someone should plant a bomb in a Labour front bencher's office?
Wow, they really are scum aren't they, actually scum doesn't seem harsh enough. Carry on Angela.

Another Crazy Scheme From The Desk Of Priti Patel

Despite once admitting that under her own rules, she wouldn't be allowed in the UK, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is doing her damnedest to make sure that other  non-Brits are not welcome here and her latest wheeze is to turn back rickety floating vessels overladen with desperate people in British waters attempting to cross the Channel back towards the French coast.
The French have called it dangerous and insisted that 'safeguarding human lives at sea takes priority over considerations of nationality, status and migratory policy' and has said that a large boat attempting to approach a smaller craft will cause it to capsize for which the Government have hurried out an explanation that it will only be used in 'very limited circumstances for sturdier, bigger migrant boats' which appears a bit pointless when most of the boats are inflatable dinghies
The UN Conventions of the Law at Sea says that 'every state is required to render assistance to any person found at sea in danger of being lost' and in response by lawyers that it could be against the Geneva conventions, EU legislation and Maritime Law to attempt to push back refugees in boats claiming asylum, Patel has ordered officials to rewrite Britain's interpretation of international maritime law.
In an unfortunate turn of phrase, the Immigration Services Union called the plans 'dead in the water' due to the legal implications or maybe it wasn't unfortunate as that is exactly what will happen as seen in the Mediterranean when the Italian Border Patrol tried the same thing and the migrants threw themselves off the ship rather than be forced back, so many drowned that the Italians stopped the practice.
As most of the migrants are coming from Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Iraq, the countries whose citizens are seeking to live elsewhere may ring a bell to anyone who has been paying attention to the news over the last few decades, for those who haven't it is where the West have intervened militarily and left the citizens in a more perilous state for it.  
Maybe our foreign policy needs to be looked at and the floods of refugees accepted as a consequence of our terrible decisions in these countries and not crazy, dangerous hare-brained dog whistle calls from Patel to her right wing brethren with schemes like her other awful scheme to install giant wave machines in the Channel.