the boris project: slouching blond beast who can or shrunken cowardly lump who was never going to

(xp) Competitive Dad syndrome.

neighbours said cricketing mass slayer was shy, quiet, kept self to self

I imagine a lot of this went on:

https://img2.thejournal.ie/inline/2390363/original/?width=623&version=2390363

'Can't get to a member's vote' requires that there's enough organisation that two other candidates rise above him in the MPs votes - this is new magic* and it's hard to see some backroom expert getting it exactly right.

* "If not for Leadsom's withdrawal, Conservative Party members would have directly elected a new Prime Minister for the very first time." - but I can't easily find when it changed.

as a slouching blond beast myself i resent this line of attack

dude it says "you can"

The thing that is most likely to hurt him is if the Brexit field is overcrowded and pro-Brexit-stop-Boris MPs coalesce around another candidate.

I'm assuming there will be only one Remain Tory in the field and that might be enough to get them to the final two (where they will promptly lose).

A thing about him is that he is roughly half a Trump - not a details person by choice but can put on his glasses if necessary, fond of vanity projects but doesn't stick has name on everything, has shit blonde hair but not an affront to the human eye.

banter timeline is that he is elected and turns out to be not really pushed about a hard Brexit.

I'd definitely pick him over Raab.

another element that makes prognostication tricky right now is the 1922 committee's evident willingness (per wednesday's declaration) just to change their rules behind closed doors to get the result they want, which has implications for the contest except who knows what they're going to be yet

jesus fvck he's younger than me how had i not dealt with this already DRACARYS! DRACARYS!

i think it'll be a soft brexit/compromise/former remainer like hunt, rudd, hancock, javid or truss vs a big brexiter

What are the rules for the contest now?

they might need to parachute drop Rudd into a tory safe seat, but I could imagine her as a shock winner.

Britain needs an experienced, pragmatic leader to take us through the next stages of our journey post-Brexit. We are #Avid4Javid.

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— Avid For Javid (@Avid4Javid) May 23, 2019

absolutely cursed account

mark francois just said he would back a steve baker bid. lol STEVE BAKER!

#cuntsforhunt

#whobutstewart

part of the dark topsyturvy energy of the last contest was that may vs leadsom was some kind of counter to the failson political hegemony of the omnipresent mediocre white man -- a social fact that i suspect may reached for any tiny time she doubted herself (she treated all the cameroon ascendency as idiots bcz -- vicar's daughter beset by toffs -- she knew they WERE idiots)

anyway i think this tories-are-the-real-feminists energy is now again dispersed and the hegemony back with a vengeance = just a flood of EVEN MORE USELESS TWATS convinced they can do this bcz look at the idiots who were already given the job

also i think it will be hunt #bantz #huntz #secretweapon #weapon

Boris is in no way a hard Brexiteer, he only decided to support Leave at the last minute.

He’s and unprincipled opportunistic cunt and will support whatever benefits him most.

^^^^ this absolutely. Ed will remember all the times that idiot wound up in the pub, playing table football with the cycle couriers while waiting to score in other ways.

Except the genie's out of the bottle now, it has to be Hard Brexit or nothing, else he'll be eviscerated by his own backbenchers. Or his own Cabinet if he stuffs it with headbangers.

"this guy has no principles at all, this could work out well for us"

i mean obviously a lot of ppl are going to be resting their full weight on this in days to come but it is not going to work out well for them IMO

Also "he's the one PM Jeremy Corbyn would love to face at an elections" hmmmmm if only there were any recent examples of this line of argument having gone badly wrong.

man of no principles vs man with all the principles: a nation decides

despite no majority for no deal, it seems fairly likely if boris acts the bollocks for a while the eu will stop giving extensions, right?

I would think Boris (or whoever) would have to call a general election as soon as they got into Tory leadership, as they'll have to face the numbers like May has.

I still don't believe it will happen. YouGov poll has something like 50% of people think Boris is a useless cunt, 24% believe he'd do a good job. The headline: 1 in 4 Britons think Boris would make good pm.

Would a new leader really risk an election? If you want no deal why do you need the numbers?

cometh the time, cometh the grayling

new zugzwang: it's even zugzwangier

post

Boris could really fuck things up. Whatever his personal beliefs are (if he even has any), he's certainly painted himself into a hard brexit corner now. It's pretty much no deal or revocation at this stage of the game, and while no deal would be a disaster, to even get to no deal he'd have to fuck things up even further. This parliament won't deliver no deal so he'd have to consider calling an election and go into cahoots with Farage or something.

Yes that's assuming a new leader would want to go through parliament for this rather than - if you are a hard brexiteer - just crashing out the country. That's the one thing that Boris would be qualified for.

xposts

It doesn't seem hard to make ridiculous demands repeatedly then wait for the EU not to extend and no deal by default happens, thenbblame the EU, not least given Macron and others seem fairly close to this.

There's a paper from the Institute of Government to the effect that parliament might not have further chances to block No Deal:

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/new-prime-minister-intent-no-deal-brexit-cant-be-stopped-mps-0

The main counterargument aiui is John Bercow is craaazy:

New:

Whips are tonight alarmed about *this* exchange involving John Bercow

The Speaker hints he could enable votes on Brexit alternatives such as Customs Union by allowing neutral motions to be amended so they are substantive

'It's massive,' a source said pic.twitter.com/CIwLpJUIlc

— Steven Swinford (@Steven_Swinford) March 18, 2019

Except a crash would unleash...all the stuff we have talked about. Food, medicine shortages, border chaos in NI. It's too unstable a situation that could destroy the Tories.

An election could give a Tory leader the numbers for a more orderly Brexit and a full term.

Genuinely what planet do you live on.

I find it hard to believe that if there is a clear majority against no deal (as there is), parliament can't find a way to handcuff a government and force it to revoke if there is no deal at the deadline.

I think that would be a perfectly reasonable line from some quarters.

xp

that article seems fairly alarmist given it concludes that yes, a vonc would stop no deal and force an election. so there is a way.

Let's see what happens in the Euro elections before making any bold claims about the Tories rolling the dice on an election.

Dutch results are encouraging.

Brexit: Boris Johnson vows to let UK crash out of EU without a deal if necessary

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-brexit-no-deal-uk-eu-talks-theresa-may-conservative-leader-resigns-a8928876.html

But he vowed that people would “hear more than you want to hear” about his bid to replace her over the coming days.

Yes, and they were completely out of the blue. Where our Tory pm picked the new far right douche on the block as his main challenger, the media followed this narrative, and no poll got even close to this result. Labour walked it, pro-EU won, Wilders' party obliterated.

xp

think i've reached that point already

xpost

speaking of the ERG, this was a small piece of good news yesterday: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/tax-funded-research-by-rees-moggs-erg-must-be-released-tribunal-rules/

It's not just the ERG nutters (although Farage is still evidently able to put major pressure on the Tories). It's the Remain-at-all-Costs group as well - I doubt there are the numbers in Westminster or the country at large to support a Soft Brexit and neither side seems especially interested in compromising. Even if a deal was somehow hammered into place and managed to carry Parliament it feels like a centre that can't hold for long, any WA is just the beginning of the process after all.

i guess but i'm not sure what form the pressure from the Brexit side could take, once we're "out" it's a question of arguing about trade deals and that's not going to command public attention in the same way as "the EU are our evil overlords".

hadn't thought about the melt side and you've a point there but again it only really applies to the current Parliament? the Lib Dems would no doubt be free to reap the hundreds of seats that their "rejoin immediately" policy would command and the Labour party would have to thrash out a position but from the relative comfort of dodging the betrayal narrative and campaigning from some kind of ground zero

nb i'm just pondering hypotheticals i agree that there is no soft Brexit outcome actually visible from here

and a hard Brexit option is only marginally more visible

so i wrote up the fintan o'toole piece:

.@POTUS just now @BorisJohnson: "Good man. He's tough and he's smart. They're saying Britain Trump. They call him Britain Trump."

— Cordelia Lynch (@CordeliaSkyNews) July 23, 2019

boiling down that i think's wrong with it to two lines of attack:
1: it wastes much elegant time close-reading the faint fine line between the "real" boris and boris the performer (as if getting this right will somehow mitigate the public affect of the performance: it won't)
2: it doesn't do much more than handwave at the milieu which enables and empowers and uses him: using cliched shorthand derived from 1 to obscure (a) its scale and nature and (b) its dynamics

i'm tempted to simplify this almost into a diagram

"boris :: churchill" as a decoy mask for "empire 2.0 :: empire 1.0" -- meaning that every time someone says e.g. "boris thinks he's churchill, lol he's no churchill" and brays some (no doubt deservedly) venomous gag abt etonians or putin or silicon valley billionaires or whatever you think the centre of darkness is, we get *less* purchase on the second bit of the diagram

empire 2.0 is indeed "not like" empire 1.0 –– and maybe words like akratic and stuplime can help diagnose how the disguise functions from day to day -- but what IS it like? what is the shape being disguised? how far is it evolved? does it still manifest as hard-to-credit chaos bcz it is still mutabler and merely emergent? and (more to the point) how to we get good at fashioning a politics* from its unmasking and its overthrow?**

*i'm a writer and an an editor and a critic, so this is definitely going to include how we write about it (lol at some point)
**also (not exactly irrelevantly) it is too hot for me to think well abt anything, let alone matters of urgency

I was thinking of reviving this last night to speculate on how Boris could do it.

I read James Butler's piece in the NY times yesterday (which did a speedier mining of Johnson's literary ouevre) and it seemed to be focusing on Johnson (as Freedland on Newsnight last night, although Butler is a higher class of analyst) as something of a dark day for British democracy in which this liar and vulgar person has been appointed to the job, as if the Tories wouldn't ever resort to the lowest of the low if it could save them. They'd totally have Farage in there if they could.

That brings us to the things which he could do. Cummings as appointment could be interesting, although there will be a lot more of a focus on him and his activities. Its also about what kind of deal Boris strikes which makes the Brexit Party go away - and whether that deal means a No deal manifesto pledge, which is pretty much unpopular. Seems like the key thing on which an election could depend on although the numbers are precarious (and Charlie Elpicke being charged yesterday was as big a story really) for him and he might not have a choice. The depressing Newsnight discussion on whether he could revive May's deal with cosmetic changes I think underestimates the damage she did to it - we'll see on that, but trying to revive that dead dog is a huge risk as he could lose votes - and more of his mind - on the attempt.

i can't tell what the "it" is that you think he might do

But, to focus on personality for a sec there was a Michael Cockerell profile last night -- doing as he usually does. I do wonder whether the Boris boosters are recalling a person who did have that ugly charisma (which was charm to many of his friends) and whether a recollection is what it remains. Its probably fancilful to think this will be noticed but I wonder beyond the (again) ugly affairs (which were being written off as MPs behaving like human beings, like we've forgotten there is a tape of him out there having an argument or worse with his current gf), the number of people he has pissed off, is the thing that really sinks him.

xp = you mean to revive the deal?

total thermonuclear war or gtfo afaic xp

xp = you mean to revive the deal?

why are you asking me what you meant?

I put in a couple of things he might try an do so was wondering if you were being more specific.

the "could do it" was going back to the "who can" of the title you set up. I assumed that was about how he might be successful as PM/get out of the hole he has dug for himself.

He did the 'can' yesterday, the question in the thread title has been settled.

yes as andrew says, at the time the thread began, "blond beast who can" really just meant "can become PM" (i think i had in the back of my mind the little engine that could) -- so i re that query YES HE CAN and there's nothing more to debate really :(

as to the specific projects before him, i'm increasingly inclined to see "deal brexit" and/or "no deal brexit" as alternative routes towards a much larger asset-stripping and firesale and social reconfiguration, which may well be a medium-term success even if he fails to deliver some specific version of whatever ppl are claiming will satisfy them today -- trump's deals aren't functional in old-school technocratic terms, but they don't even slightly have to be for the ppl that benefit to recognise they're benefiting

(i do actually continue to think of him as much more of a hollow scarecrow figure emptied of personal agency and will than he was before he flinched in the clinch)

innarestin' to wonder where we'd be now if he hadn't flinched back then

all dead, probably

Ok I saw it as a sequel to the Theresa May thread, which iirc was about how good was she really at her job -- getting Brexit through, winning people over, that kind of thing.

Winning the Tory Party contest was -- to me anyway -- a nothing sort of achievement. xp

i guess my sequence of thought is:

a (basic assumption) : there is actually a complex machinery of state that needs delicate steering to pull this off
b (TM thread thesis): TM thinks she's the dedicated and focused technocrat who can pull it off (but IMO she isn't and can't)
c (this thread when it started): BJ bottled it then bcz he's daunted by the "complex machinery of state" and his judgment (that he's not up to it) is widely shared
d (belated realisation)**: the "complex machinery of state" has been massively damaged by may in the process of delivering her version of brexit (without it being delivered), its own structures are no longer part of the landscape we're passing through
e: whatever exists now -- SHAPE TO BE DETERMINED, THE ACTUAL IMPORTANT AND INTERESTING QUESTION -- is no longer daunting to BJ, bcz it's basically hired him and is pointing him in the direction it wants us all to go

**this shd probably not have taken me so long to realise maybe, i'm conflicted abt it bcz its dismantlement is in principle a good thing but as a consequence i think a lot of bad things are going to happen first, just bcz there's very little now slowing them down

its dismantlement is in principle a good thing

i'd be inclined to agree were it happening as a careful taking-apart with a clear view of how it will be reassembled and to what end rather than boris' inevitable approach of kicking over the sandcastle and hope the free market shores it up before the rising tides (quite literally) carry it all away

he can only kick anything over because it's already entirely hollowed out (like him)

for better or worse careful taking-apart with a clear view to reassembly never happens anyway so let's just enjoy this brief pause for breath and the wreckage of the ancien regime before the Terror starts

the terror is when you look in the mirror and realise you are actually trapped in Toby young's body and have to go through and endless loop of him writing that piece where he imagines Boris "with his broad Germanic forehead" wearing lederhosen.

although it was a relief to see he was trending for that fawning piece of homo-erotica rather him being unveiled the minister for eugenics and prevention of undesirable reproduction.

still time yet

here's sociologist and twitter-user @philbc3 rooting things in the decline of the tory party as an institution: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4391-the-meaning-of-boris-johnson

i don't disagree with this as sociology but it goes hand-in-hand with the hollowing out since the 70s of many key state institutions, plus the transformations in media since the 80s

shrunken
hunched
cowardly
lump who is never going to

i mean he's prime minister i guess, but is he going to? is he?

he's trying as best he can to channel his slouching beast, but the cowardly shrunken lump can never be fully exorcised.

my theory (for it's worth) (= nothing, i'm posting it on ilx) is that he actually really truly realised he didn't want it when the first clinch came, and flinched as everyone saw

but in the interim, during the may years, a *lot* of ppl with a lot of clout (= money and pet media-outlets) came to him and said, "no, go for it, we're behind you" -- and he still didn't really want it but he went for it, bcz at least all this gave him some kind of comfortable fallback and support network, and, well, time spent in rooms being gladhanded by toadies and the slick liaison ppl of various billionaires, and he began to convince himself it could and would work out, so here we are

very cool that we’re all gonna die because this priapic sack of rancid mayonnaise was stupid enough to be flattered by parasites, idiots, and his own throbbing ego into grabbing power he never wanted or ever had the faintest idea how to wield

this priapic sack, etc., no longer commands a majority

bg... welcome to the club

I'd never noticed his horrible little yellow-grey teeth until yesterday.

he is rotting from within iirc

"The EU.. to force us.. that's what they want, the EU, to force us..."

He's saying it all but it sounds so forced, so unconvincing. After today I am resigned to believe he doesn't have a clue. Which is a relief tbh, with all the "but he's smart not dumb, he's got a cunning plan just you wait!" comments. He's out of his depth, throwing the dice without having a plan, hoping for the best. Knowing that at the very least he'll be on wikipedia under the 'past MP's' header.

(relief for me obv not relief for the uk ppl)

But but Dominic Cumberbatch is the brains of the operation...

His name is now Quentin Taranchemo, do keep up!

i know too many columnists like him. He embarked on this wheeze after deciding the 800 words he had cranked out for "leave" were funnier than the "remain" draft and that's about all there is to it.

It's sort of beautiful that May spunked all the valid options they had away, so now they're actually in charge and they have little left to do but bluster over the dregs.