Todays #PMQs shows why Sunak's latest Vote-for-Me-or-it's-World-War-Three "relaunch", just like the many resets before it, is doomed to fail. A short 🧵 1/ Here is the basic issue: Tory MPs, at every level, look at the same polls we do and they are desperate. That panic is poor counsel. They will get more tribal, noisier, more aggressive, baser. They will reach for personal attacks, for culture wars, for stunts, for cheap digs. 2/

The poet Odysseas Elytis wrote that the truth of someone is contained in the character that only they know and the memories that only they value - and so, it is lost when they die.

It wasn’t so with Mama. And this was the gift Alzheimer’s granted us, along with the horrors. 1/ There was a time - fleeting and at once immense - when she was still well enough, but the disease had lightened every burden and stripped every veneer - of duty, of marriage, of self-consciousness, of the rush to cook and scrub and wash, of work, of motherhood, of religion… 2/

Last night, my beautiful, darling Mama, having been serenaded by her grandson on the guitar, obviously decided it didn't get much better than that, drifted off to sleep, and didn't come back to us this morning. 1/





She snuck off - just like she used to, far too early, to go and clean somewhere before her 9-5, to make sure that we wanted for nothing. There were times she worked three jobs and yet was somehow, miraculously, still, always there - to cook and iron and help with the homework. 2/

Blessed as I feel to be unblocked, you’re doing it again. Screen grabs don’t carry the time of the grab, but of the tweet. You were in a Twitter storm before Phillips got involved, to the extent that you’d already deleted your original post before she first tweeted you. 1/4

https://twitter.com/miss_snuffy/status/1675607314974273536

You say I excused her behaviour. I didn’t. Maybe you feel she shouldn’t get involved; lthat she should be more mindful of her position and following. But that’s NOT the argument you chose to make. You chose to say she instigated the issue and did so because she’s a racist. 2/4

Just a few factual points on Birbalsingh's letter about @jessphillips, which involves - rather unsurprisingly - several dubious claims. 🧵1/

https://twitter.com/Miss_Snuffy/status/1675064540508168192

The timing of events, as described, is entirely misleading - and I would point to the time being cropped off tweets selectively as evidence that this is deliberately. Birbalsingh's original post was all over twitter and trending, an hour before Phillips got involved. 2/

Watch Badenoch get into trouble, saying bilateral FTAs are no substitute for comprehensive multilateral deals, "we haven't joined a bloc like this in 50 years", "there is strength in numbers", etc.

Then slowly panic, as she realises she's basically making the case for Rejoin. 🤣 "Being in a trade bloc means you have more influence," she added.

No. Way.

Three years later, the same people who attacked me for this arrive at the same conclusion.

The proof was always there. What's changed is that their pro-Johnson 'he got the big calls right' zeal has been overtaken by anti-lockdown fanaticism; the conclusion now fits their agenda.

https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1267444560764026880

Only this time, they're going the opposite way. Trying to suggest the science was certain about, for instance, masks being no use at all, when this is patently still the topic of live debate. AND going on to assess it against entirely imagined, faux libertarian harms.

I don’t think Johnson will go for it. He is far too wily to try and sort out this awful mess and then almost certainly lose an election. He will want to preserve his reputation as a ‘winner’ above all. He is just trolling rivals. Chucking grenades via media proxies. 1/3 Then he will look all so humble, sweep his hair from his forehead and say: “it’s nice to be wanted, but I need to take some time off”. And be king-maker to some other idiot. He’ll come back in 10 years, as a saviour, having replenished his bank balance. 2/3

Remember my nutcase, who emails regularly with pro-Johnson fandom and news from her Brexiter drinking group? Just got her BEST email yet. I set it out in full:

"Dear Alex

Give Truss at least 100 days before passing judgement (though admittedly the early signs appear mixed)." 1/ Take your mind back to the late eighties. In 1987 a new BBC1 TV show launched called Going for Gold. European contestants competed for the prize of European quiz champion. The early episodes were a disaster. The critics hated it and the viewing figures were terrible. 2/

Battle lines drawn today. Mail, Sun, Telegraph, Express handing pages over to gov't. Political landscape will be SATURATED with the ludicrous notion that, despite UK going to shite after 12yrs of Tory corruption and incompetence, it's actually a change that is the REAL danger. Progressives must NOT underestimate this danger. Right-wing newspapers individually may be much less powerful than they used to be, but when they unite like this, to create a frenzied wall of noise, their message WILL be effective and WILL seep into voters' conversations.

The worst thing is that 𝙝𝙖𝙙 Kwarteng published provisional OBR forecasts, squared measures in a red book, offered even a 𝙗𝙖𝙙 medium-term plan of how and when he planned to return UK finances to sustainability, he would have had several billion more with which to do it. 1/5

https://twitter.com/PippaCrerar/status/1574426322985705474

Because the severe market reaction was not to a bad plan, but to the complete 𝙖𝙗𝙨𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 of a plan. A reaction to the gov't showing itself to be irrational and arrogant with it, the notion one can just wish alternative facts into being - the intellectual legacy of Brexit. 2/5

I would encourage you to watch in full the first time sentencing remarks have been televised from the Old Bailey (starts about 10:50).

You will glean the complexity of a judge's job and realise that we know very little from two paragraphs in a newspaper.

The case is deeply traumatic. Both in terms of the horrific nature of the crime, but also in the tragedy of this young man's story. The judge is particularly excellent in the calm and clear way she sets everything out. In my view, this should be shown in high schools.

Here is Kwarteng's soul-sucking pitch in support of Truss:

1. The highest tax burden in 70 years is a really worrying thing that, like weather, just... happened.

2. Boris Johnson, under whom the tax burden jumped to this record high, was JUST ABOUT to tackle it.

Gaslighting. It's like a surreal version of the Cameron/Osborne austerity narrative, that goes "we have to make difficult decisions, because of the mess we inherited from <checks notes> well, us."

SHORT THREAD: The thing is Boris Johnson WAS ousted by the people. And this is key to understand. Today is a victory for progressives, whatever comes next. Those same MPs who, mere months ago, voted to change the rules retrospectively to accommodate Paterson's grimy lobbying, 1/

https://twitter.com/toryboypierce/status/1544959014915686403

... those same MPs who minimised law breaking, and propped up a clown, gaslighting people with lies - they didn't suddenly discover a conscience. They LOOKED AT THE DATA - local elections, by-elections, polls. They looked at their INBOX. It is the people who forced their hand. 2/

I've been thinking a lot about #Carriegate and why No.10 threw so much at suppressing it, when the story was actually no worse than the average excesses of this gov't and the decision to supress it, so obviously fraught with risk. I have a theory. This is pure speculation. 1/ The possibility of a Streisand effect making the story much bigger than if left alone was always so great that the heavy-handed intervention makes no sense - especially given that most of the information in it had been in the public domain for months and passed largely unseen. 2/

This isn’t quite right. The Mail didn’t turn it down. It published it TWICE, then spiked it twice. The Times version made it to print. You can see it in the attached. The Mail version was syndicated by MSN. I screen grabbed it. It’s in the next tweet.

theneweuropean.co.uk/boris-johnson-… So here is the Mail version of the story that Johnson tried to hire Symmonds as his Chief of Staff at the FCO, as syndicated by MSN.

Note the pernicious use of the word "foreign". The ECHR is, of course, international, not foreign - no more than the UN or the WTO are "foreign".

And it was designed this way, precisely because all those things kept happening to people who thought they could never happen again. I just don't understand how Dan We-Won't-Leave-The-Single-Market Covid-Will-Not-Kill-You Hannan is still seen as any sort of credible voice in British politics, let alone a sage by some in the Tory Party.

He's been consistently and provably wrong about everything, all the time.

There is one angle of #Partygate that is not being discussed. I have heard not a single journalist ask questions about it so far. And it is, in my view, one of the most important - if not the most important, in terms of learning lessons. THREAD 1/ That angle is #Partygate in the context of a deadly pandemic. Not the breaking of law. Not the vapid debate of whether a leaving do is work. Not the lurid details of people puking and fighting. But the national security risk the country was put in. Let me explain. 2/

Just had a REALLY disappointing work meeting. Come on @PodmastersUK. We know what PROPER work events looks like now. The days of you thinking you can get away with a black coffee and a couple of jammy dodgers are OVER.

For all you professional useful idiots out there - the reason this stuff annoys people is not because it's controversial or not sensible in any way, but because it's obvious, patronising, and what everyone struggling to survive has tried to do every f'kin day for centuries.

https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1526144901146107906

It's the equivalent of a lifeguard, having pushed you into the water, standing over you as you drown, saying things like "try not to sink" and "what you want, longterm, is to become more buoyant", instead of doing her job and helping you.

This is such UTTER NONSENSE by Bulford. The whole point, which she is unable or unwilling to grasp, is that the BBC is complicit in giving these entirely opaque orgs the veneer of respectability they crave. It doesn't matter whether their views are challenged (which they're not).

https://twitter.com/Ross_Greer/status/1493606863195226113

Imagine I launched a private co called The Royal Trust Against Poverty. Would I ever be invited to comment on economic policy? NOT IN A MONTH OF SUNDAYS. And yet The Taxpayers Alliance or the (formerly) Institute of Ideas are precisely the flip-side of that.