Seizing back control: The ILX lol brexit is how we're all gonna die thread.

Would the Guardian have any reason to withhold it, other than timing?

they'll have to a meeting with their MI5 bosses before publishing it.

anything that might be an impediment to getting boris into no.10 is a national security issue tbf.

Things have deteriorated so far that Liam Fox is now one of the adults. https://t.co/0LAu3EV78m

— Ian Dunt (@IanDunt) June 23, 2019

lol this melt has taken the "adults in the room" meme to oblivion here!

The tape exists. Not sure it would make enough difference if it came out but it would make more of a difference.

It could make a major difference depending on how angry/aggressive Johnson sounds and how scared or distressed Symonds sounds. If it's really bad, and there's no reason to believe it isn't, then Johnson could become electoral Kryptonite overnight, assuming he isn't already.

More generally there is a significant anyone-but-Boris grouping among rank and file Tories, I suspect it's outnumbered several times over by the group who will vote for him regardless. But at some point a light is going to come on even among the dimmest Tory members, like one of those pilot fish that lives at the bottom of the sea. In terms of getting the Brexit they want, if Johnson is starting to look like a hindrance they might abandon him and opt to take their chances on Gove vs Hunt instead.

But at some point a light is going to come on even among the dimmest Tory members

citation needed :-/

I mean the alternative is that they all just double down and go "only snowflakes really care about this" but the release of the tape is going to make it harder to write apologist fanfic about it in their heads.

I am not, just in case it's really unclear, saying "that it's, Hunt's won" - but the scenarios where Hunt wins are ones in which this runs and runs, or there's another fuckup next week, and Boris continues to handle it badly (not taking any questions about it all yesterday was a small gift to Hunt, too)

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/06/this-tape-will-always-threaten-boris-johnson/

no sleep till the party conference in manchester

https://i.imgur.com/igmHQz7.jpg

That's actually a good point that the person who made the recording could just put it on the internet regardless of what The Guardian does.

There's plenty of Tories who can't stand Boris and plenty of those are going to be holding their noses and voting for him because they think he's their best hope of winning them a General Election - and that's really what they care about most. They will drop him like the proverbial hot potato if his electability looks to be in doubt.

not sure why they think he’s electable (good clip on ridge today from edinburgh where they couldn’t find a single person with a good thing to say about him). but tory membership you do you suppose

by contrast:

Hunt also sipped from a can of Irn Bru which he described as ‘very pleasant’ pic.twitter.com/wh3FQDdDxc

— Lucy Christie (@LucyChristiePA) June 23, 2019

"Find me somewhere that sells deep fried Mars Bars"
"What, in Surbiton?"

What happens if Boris were to pull out? very unlikely yes, but does it just go to Hunt? or does Gove come back into the running?

Kezia Dugdale once took pity on me, thrust an Irn Bru into Jeremy Corbyn's hands, and sent me the photos. For that I'll always be thankful. pic.twitter.com/eYJNuxXwgS

— Jamie Ross (@JamieRoss7) August 29, 2017

Get him a tin of Tesco own brand baked beans, a tin opener and a fork and he's in heaven

I think when Andrea Leadsom pulled out then Gove was offered the chance to contest May and declined.

I’d imagine that the feelings of Symonds herself might factor into the Guardian not publishing it. If abuse took place that night, then what is likely to be something painful to her has been released to anyone in the world to listen to and comment on.

It doesn’t actually matter if the tape is her crying and not sounding angry at all, btw - Boris’s defenders will cast him as the victim somehow. I mean, the same people were out there sayinh the Greenpeace protestor deserved everything she got.

Former Tory MP Chris Davies will fight to regain seat
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-48736879

waht. death cult with a death wish is it

He will probably win. He has a comparatively large majority and the backing of both leadership contenders.

Recall him again, go on voters.

you can get 6/1 on that if you think he can win

make a convincing case for it and I'm in!

I'll stick a tenner on it, for sure.

He got nearly 50% of the vote last time with the Lib Dems in second place on 28% or something. In a slightly leave-leaning constituency, i am not sure that i see the Lib Dems winning unless Labour and the Greece decide not to contest the seat. The Brexit Party almost certainly can't win - all they can do is hand the Lib Dems another MP, so i am not sure whether that works in their favour.

More broadly, the senior leadership is fully behind him and his crime was so ridiculously petty, i'm not sure how many people will be that worked up about it, over and above the 10k who signed the petition and who weren't going to vote for him anyway, i'd imagine.

If Labour doesn't contest it and the Brexit Party does, i think he's toast but, otherwise, he'll probably be fine.

*Greens

is he liked or disliked locally? Thats a lot of signatures!

It is a lot of signatures but it’s also 2k fewer than the number of people who voted Lib Dem last time. idk.

I don't know how the recall process works but the words "MP" and "expenses" elicit a kneejerk in lots of people who mightn't read into the specifics or indeed give it a second's thought beyond clicking the "bun dem" option

3 years today since Brexit result.

any MP pushed to the petty crime of minor expense fiddling these days is obv not playing the game right, it could could be a sign they just aren't corrupt enough and need to read the Barry Sheerman guide to professional lobbyism.

Apologies for the never-ending naïveté but I still don't get why 160,000 Tories get to elect the next PM, especially in light of the current climate. Wouldn't a proper GE make more sense?

Canada is also subject to the Westminster system and we've had plenty of snap elections over far less.

johnson telegraph column today is strong stuff. no idea how he’s going to get us out on 31/10 short of going for no deal

: |

Fixed Term Parliament Act *hollow laugh*

a proper GE makes 100% sense

just look at the press’ supine head nodding when the tory front runners argue that they don’t want a GE because they’d lose. blatantly know they can’t carry the country and yet they’re never confronted with how arrogant and undemocratic this is

a key difference between UK and canada is the fixed-term parliament act of 2011, which creates obstacles for calling or forcing snap elections -- before 2011 each of may's large losses on the WA wd have led to an election, but since 2011 a VONC was also needed and that never happened

(canada i think has a fixed-term election structure but snaps are still relatively easy to call?)

(canada i think has a fixed-term election structure but snaps are still relatively easy to call?)

It varies from province to province but at the federal level, the PM is indeed more or less free to request a GE at their leisure.

Denmark changes prime ministers without elections every now and then as well. Though I'm not sure it has ever happened that the party in charge needed to have a leadership election partway through, mostly it's just like the Blair->Brown handover. There was a fun one in 93, though, where the Conservative government got caught up in a major scandal, and just handed over power to the Social Democrats with no election or anything. The joy of a multi party system. Actually, that might be the key difference, in a multi party system mostly governed by minority governments, it's much more likely that a smaller party would take down the new prime minister.

In Holland you can't change PM's without an election. If the PM goes it's the end of the government and new elections are held. The situation in England has bemused me as well - you've a failing/leaving PM, and just the members of PM's party get to pick another one? Sad! - but it's not without precedent. A year ago Spain got a new PM (Sanchez), after his initiated VONC on Rajoy won a majority. So Spain got a new PM from an opposing party, without elections. Imagine Corbz launcing a VONC on May, winning it, and by proxy becoming PM himself.

In a sane country the media would be demanding one and attacking Johnson or whoever the way they did Brown, but this stopped being a sane country a while ago.

For people outside UK: Geoffrey Boycott is a former cricketer with a conviction for beating up his girlfriend, not an expert in trade agreements or N. Ireland. Good Morning Britain is broadcast nationally and my home country is officially off its tits. https://t.co/BCHIzgc3eT

— Graham Fallowes (@Bloodyromcom) June 24, 2019

Jingoism is a helluva drug.

Went to see David Olusoga at the Southbank yesterday, premiering a doc he did on the unofficial history of the Hostile Environment pre-May: Attlee trying to bring Windrush immigrants to peanut picking jobs in Africa instead, Churchill's proposal to fight an election on a promise to "keep Britain white", a tory commission asking civil servants to keep a secret tally of how many ppl claiming benefits were black. It sadly jumps straight from the early 70's to the Windrush scandal with only some short footage of Thatcher, Blair, Cameron engaging in xenophobic rhetoric, presumably because this is the story of a particular generation of immigrants. Gentleman was there, as were a lot of witnesses from that generation, including ppl who had gotten orders to leave during the Windrush scandal. It's on tonight on BBC2.

Do these fuckers realise we only finished paying for world war 2 just over ten years ago?

xp: sounds good (its the continuity I was talking about from Enoch Powell to Ed M a few weeks ago).

The Brexit party is to launch a formal legal challenge against the result of this month’s Peterborough byelection, where it was narrowly beaten by Labour, alleging that allegations of corruption connected to postal votes need to be investigated.

Nigel Farage, the party leader, insisted the challenge was about more than the loss to Labour by 683 votes, saying the wider use of postal votes was open to abuse and needed to be investigated.

lol butthurt

more like Nigel Erdofarage

He's gone postal.