Starmer going on the Downing Street Christmas party last year. Johnson doesn’t deny it and deflects by asking a question about Starmer’s party this year. Starmer reads him the government’s own rules from the time. This could quickly get interesting. #PMQs
Johnson desperate to talk about the rules *right now*. He has not denied that he held a Christmas party last year, which was in direct contravention of his own lockdown rules.
Starmer twists the knife by pointing out his own MPs not following the current rules on masks. Ties it in with his ‘one rule for us, another for them’ line of attack. This could and should be a story. #PMQs
Now Johnson telling the usual barefaced lie about new hospitals and shouting the usual bullshit. I lasted a full eight minutes this week. Over and out
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I know the reshuffle has divided opinion but I think it’s been broadly positive. Cooper’s one of Labour’s only genuine big hitters and carries more gravitas than anyone in the government. Lammy as foreign sec a great fit. Nandy in the role she should have had from the start.
Of course Cooper is further to the right on immigration than many of us would like, but that’s where Labour is right now and Patel won’t stand a chance against her. But bizarre to relegate Thornberry and sideline Miliband. Labour needs all the star performers it can get.
Interesting too to look at some of the promotions lower down. Bridget Phillipson has been quietly devastating when attacking gov’s cruelty to children and should flourish at education. Streeting should be effective at health, but that job ought to have Allin-Khan’s name on it.
The irony of the last five years is that Theresa May’s empty slogan is the one thing that was actually true and which the British government has never managed to accept: Brexit means Brexit
Neither May nor Johnson ever accepted that Brexit came with consequences: specifically, consequences the UK would itself choose as a direct result of its policies, and which it would then have to live with.
The Northern Ireland debate has been stuck in the same unsquarable circle for five years: that if you deliberately erect a regulatory and customs border with another trading entity, it must actually go somewhere.
The people who quit GB News because it’s too populist are as much a mystery as the people who quit the Conservative Party because it’s too conservative
What do these people think they’re signing up for? Why do they always insist against the obvious reality? Why is it so hard for an insider to understand something nakedly transparent to everyone else?
It’s a serious question, by the way. You used to see it when people quit UKIP because it was too xenophobic or now when people resign as advisers to the Tories because they aren’t taking race or LGBT rights seriously enough. What evidence did they ever have to the contrary?
Seriously: what more must Boris Johnson do to show Red Wall voters that he despises them?
It’s a serious point because it cuts to everything Johnson is. These moments are not slip-ups. They’re fresh gambits in the permanent game of satisfying Johnson’s adrenaline narcissism.
Johnson’s shtick is not to do a good job, change people’s lives or effect substantive policy. It is to make fools of the people who support him - to push them, fail them, humiliate them and still retain their support. This is the heart of the con. And he’s still pulling it off.
If it’s #PMQs it must be Johnson claiming credit for Hancock’s resignation and boasting about Europe’s fastest vaccine rate even though we currently have the highest levels of Covid
Starmer raises the case of a leukaemia patient whose family were unable to visit because of Covid rules. Johnson sounds bored and talks about the Westminster bubble. Starmer sounds genuinely appalled and calls for Johnson to withdraw the remark. Shameful, shameless.
Johnson refuses to withdraw the remark and instead tells the naked lie that we wouldn’t have been able to manage our own vaccine rollout inside the European Medicines Agency