All things Boris: has it really come to this?

[Seabass]

Chumocracy!!!

[Scot Dutchy]

Another Johnson failure:

‘Mistrusted’ Johnson feels full force of EU fury as Brexit wrecks G7 summit

European leaders made their feelings about the Northern Ireland protocol known to a PM desperate to score a PR victory

The setting is a small English village on the Cornish coast, but the message that Boris Johnson wants projected from the beachside summit in Carbis Bay is one of big British influence across the globe.

The three-day G7 meeting of world leaders, which ends on Sunday, was identified months ago by the prime minister as the moment to launch his vision of a confident post-Brexit “global Britain”.

The UK, newly independent and sovereign, would show itself to be anything but diminished, having wrested itself free of Brussels.

On the contrary, it would boldly lead initiatives on arguably the two greatest global challenges of our times: the battle to vaccinate the world against Covid-19, and the fight to save it from the destructive effects of the climate crisis. There would be other issues, too, for the UK hosts to show off their leadership abilities, including efforts to devise a new G7 strategy towards China, and rallying more support for girls’ education in developing nations.

But after two full days of seaside photo-ops and largely pre-cooked announcements, including a new US-UK Atlantic charter modelled on the historic statement made by Churchill and Roosevelt on the postwar world order, one narrow, familiar and hugely dangerous issue was overshadowing progress elsewhere: Brexit.

Does anyone trust this git anymore.

[Brian Peacock]

Yeah, just over half the country apparently.

[Scot Dutchy]

The writing on the wall for Boris?

Senior Tories warn Boris Johnson ‘blue wall’ is at risk after byelection defeat

PM’s planning reform blamed for shock loss of Chesham and Amersham

Senior Conservatives have warned Boris Johnson a swathe of seats in the “blue wall” across the south of England could be at risk, as his party was gripped by recriminations in the aftermath of the Liberal Democrats’ shock victory in the Chesham and Amersham byelection.

Downing Street came under renewed pressure to ditch Johnson’s controversial planning reforms, which many backbenchers blamed for the humiliating loss of the Buckinghamshire seat.

The byelection saw a historic 25% swing to Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats, enabling their newest MP Sarah Green to overturn a 16,000-majority in a constituency that had been Conservative since it was created in 1974.

A Tory MP representing a southeastern seat said the upset was “worrying”, and that the Lib Dems had shown they could successfully rally voters against the government’s planning reforms, which would strip powers to object to developments away from local residents.

They said: “There is going to have to be some consideration about either combatting that messaging or changing the policy.” Backbench rebels now believe they have the numbers to defeat the legislation in its current form, though the bill is unlikely to come to the House of Commons until the autumn.

[Scot Dutchy]

Who would trust this guy:

[Scot Dutchy]

Plenty wish he would stumble out again.

Boris Johnson a pundit who stumbled into politics, says Cummings

Former aide says in Substack Q&A that No 10 is now ‘just a branch of the entertainment industry’

Downing Street under Boris Johnson is “a branch of the entertainment industry” and nothing will get done in terms of serious policy focus until he leaves, Dominic Cummings has said in his latest blast at his former boss.

In a question and answer session with paid subscribers to his Substack newsletter, Johnson’s former chief adviser described the prime minister as “a pundit who stumbled into politics and acts like that 99% of the time”.

Giving evidence to MPs last month, Cummings criticised Johnson as completely unfit to be prime minister, describing him as media obsessed and “like a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other”.

On Monday, answering a question on the potential cybersecurity threat to the UK if another country develops human-level artificial general intelligence, or AGI, Cummings wrote that this would be huge, potentially giving those with AGI “the power to subdue everyone – and destroy us all”.

Cummings said that if he had stayed at No 10 – he was dismissed in November – he would have ordered a focus on the threat, but this would not happen under Johnson.

“NOTHING like this now will get serious focus in no10 – no10 now is just a branch of entertainment industry and will stay so til BJ gone, at earliest,” he wrote.

[Sean Hayden]

I didn't know they were so bad off either.

[Scot Dutchy]

[NineBerry]

[Scot Dutchy]

How Chumocracy works:

Labour calls for PM to explain ‘advisory board’ for wealthy Tory donors

Secretive club gives members regular access to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak for ‘political updates’

Labour has called for Boris Johnson to explain the existence of a secretive “advisory board” for wealthy Conservative donors who have received regular access to the prime minister and Rishi Sunak.

The Financial Times reported that party chair Ben Elliot, charged with beefing up Tory fundraising efforts, had created the club for some of the party’s most generous donors, some giving £250,000 a year or more.

The Conservative party confirmed the existence of the board, and the fact that its members meet with senior party figures for “political updates”.

News that the chancellor and prime minister have been holding discussions with super-rich donors comes as the government is facing a series of key decisions on tax and spending, including how to pay for rebuilding the creaking social care system.

Elliot founded Quintessentially, a concierge service for the rich, as well as PR firm Hawthorn. The FT reported he had hosted a drinks party at one donor’s home, at which Johnson was present.

Mohamed Amersi, a businessman and Tory donor, told the paper the club was “like the very elite Quintessentially clients membership: one needs to cough up £250,000 per annum or be a friend of Ben”.

[Scot Dutchy]

It has come to this:

Boris Johnson’s approval rating slips to lowest level since he became prime minister

Bad news for the Tories does not necessarily lead to good news for Labour: backing for Keir Starmer is also down

Boris Johnson’s personal approval rating has slipped to its lowest level since he became prime minister, according to the latest Opinium poll for the Observer.

His overall approval rating has fallen to -16, down from the -13 he recorded two weeks ago and -8 a fortnight before that. It is even lower than the -15 he recorded back in January, when Britain was in the grip of a Covid peak, lockdown measures were in place and the NHS was under severe pressure.

The latest poll shows that 34% of voters now approve of the job he is doing as prime minister, while 49% disapprove – up two points on the previous poll. When rounding was taken into account, the overall approval rating amounted to -16.

However, the poll suggests that bad news for Johnson does not necessarily lead to good news for Labour. Keir Starmer’s approval rating is also down, with a net score of -11. It fell from -6 two weeks ago. 28% approve of the job he is doing, while 39% disapprove. It is his worst score since Opinium started tracking him in this way.

Chumocracy has not filtered down to the masses and never will as someone has to pay.

[Scot Dutchy]

Why public schoolboys like me and Boris Johnson aren’t fit to run our country

Our elite schools foster emotional austerity and fierce clique loyalty. Here a privately educated writer of the prime minister’s generation reveals the lasting damage public schools do

had a feeling I couldn’t immediately place. I wanted to go out but wasn’t allowed. Shelves were emptying at the nearest supermarket and instead of fresh fruit and vegetables I was eating British comfort food – sausages and mash, pie and beans. My freedom to make decisions like an adult was limited. I wondered when I’d see my mum again.

March 2020, first week of the first lockdown: I was 53 years old and felt like I was back at boarding school. Which wouldn’t have mattered, but for the fact that at a time of national crisis my generation of boarding-school boys found themselves in charge.

My first night at Pinewood school was two days after my eighth birthday in January 1975. A term earlier David Cameron had left his family home for Heatherdown preparatory school in Berkshire, while also in 1975, at the age of 11, Alexander Johnson was sent to board at Ashdown House in East Sussex. This means I know how two of the past three British prime ministers were treated as children and the kind of men their schools wanted to make of them. I know neither of these men personally but I do know that they spent the formative years of their childhood in boarding schools being looked after by adults who didn’t love them, because I did too. And if the character of our leaders matters then I’m in possession of important information.

At the age of 13, after prep school, Cameron and Johnson progressed to Eton. I went on to Radley College near Oxford. The exact school picked out by the parents didn’t really matter, because the experience was designed to produce a shared mindset. They were paying for a similar upbringing with a similar intended result: to establish our credentials for the top jobs in the country. We were being trained for leadership, or if not to lead then to earn. The most convincing reason to go to a private school remains to have gone to a private school, with the prizes that are statistically likely to follow.

It is noticeable, and often noticed, that something immature and boyish survives in men like Cameron and Johnson as adults. They can never quite carry off the role of grownup, or shake a suspicion that they remain fans of escapades without consequences. They look confident of not being caught, or not being punished if they are. Cameron has his boyishly unlined face and Johnson his urchin’s unbrushed hair, and his arch schoolboy’s vocabulary.

But what kind of boyhood was it, in our paid-for rooms in those repurposed mansions that housed our schools? What of the distant past still works in us as adults and can we pass on the harm to others? Are we the right people to steer the country, either clear of trouble or in the direction of sunlit uplands? The answer to these questions depends on lessons learned at an impressionable age. Unless, of course, we learned nothing. And no one pays hundreds of pounds a term, even in the late 70s, to learn nothing.

...

In his book The Old Boys, David Turner has the statistics for the “highly disproportionate share” of public school alumni in the top jobs of the UK. These figures come from 2014, to include boys at school at the same time as me in their middle-aged professional prime: “seven in 10 senior judges, six in 10 senior officers in the armed forces, and more than half the permanent secretaries, senior diplomats and leading media figures”. Seventeen out of 27 members of Johnson’s full cabinet in 2020 went to private school. Of the more visible recent political buccaneers, leading English private schools have sent out Rees-Mogg, Hunt, Mitchell, Cash, Redwood and Cummings: English boys with English minds.

A follow-up report by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission, Elitist Britain 2019, paints a mostly unchanged picture. Private schools account for nearly 70% of the judges and barristers in the country. To this list can be added more than 50% of bishops and ministers of state and lord lieutenants and the England cricket team, these doors not even half open to anyone else.

Chumocracy.

[Brian Peacock]

Tell us something we didn't know.

[pErvinalia]

I think we can replace Scot with a bot that is preprogrammed to randomly utter the phrases "chumocracy", "fairy data", "anglo-saxon mindset" and "corruption".

[Scot Dutchy]

I think we can replace Scot with a bot that is preprogrammed to randomly utter the phrases "chumocracy", "fairy data", "anglo-saxon mindset" and "corruption".

Why dont you go away and play in your sand pit and leave the adults alone TB.