Will Boris survive?

[Heid the Ba]

Or be replaced with someone even worse? We’ll find out shortly.

[Arneb]

Not this time, it seems, but 211-148 is very bad news for him. Only 32 MPs to be swayed, my.
In the great scheme of things, it probably does not matter too much if a morally, intellectually and politically bancrupt party substitutes clownish, incompetent, reckless and corrupt PM for a boring, incompetent, reckless and corrupt PM, even though it may reduce the soap opera appeal.

[Мастер]

Or be replaced with someone even worse? We’ll find out shortly.

So we've already excluded the other option?

[Richard A]

Well, happily, the real nightmare scenario, Priti Patel, doesn't score well with Conservative MPs - and under their leadership contest rules, it's the MPs alone that get a vote until it gets down to the final two. (Unlike Labour, where all members get a vote from the start.) Dominic Raab happily scores equal last place with her and I haven't seen any report that has even mentioned Jacob Rees-Mogg as a contender. So, at least from my viewpoint, there's little risk of someone even worse than Boris. I mean, Nadine Dorries surely has to go down with the ship!

Whether any replacement of Boris before the next election will be any better, though, remains to be seen.

[Мастер]

and I haven't seen any report that has even mentioned Jacob Rees-Mogg as a contender.

So he’s the tall thin chap who likes to wear top hats, right?

(Although my own clothing choices these days are sometimes only slightly less odd.)

[Arneb]

That must be him, the Honourable Member for the 18th century.

[Richard A]

Yes, indeed it is. But friends outside the UK, don’t be taken in by his somewhat bizarre appearance, or the fact that he instructed his staff to cease using metric measurements as soon as the Brexit result came through, i.e. way before it became government policy. He is a decidedly dark influence, a figurehead of the Conservative right wing. He led the “European Reform Group”, which was as interested in reforming the EU as the National Socialists were in socialism. With Rees-Mogg at their head, they lobbied at every turn against any suggestion of a reasonable relationship with Europe. I do not doubt for one second that he urged BoJo into the tearing up of the Northern Ireland Protocol - he’ll have thought Boris shouldn’t have signed it in the first place. Curtailing the right to protest, sending refugees to Rwanda, these are all things he will applaud. If Boris does go, I doubt very much that Rees-Mogg will stand for the leadership himself but I think he will work behind the scenes to try to ensure that the successful candidate is a creature of the right. So not just a prat but a thoroughly unpleasant, even dangerous one.

[Richard A]

Well, the odds of BoJo surviving have just got a lot worse. First Sajid Javid (Health Secretary for those outside the UK) and then Chancellor (Finance Minister) have resigned in quick succession. Although some may see them as rats leaving a sinking ship - although that would involve accepting that the ship is sinking - their resignation letters didn’t mince words. Javid: “We may not always have been popular, but we have been competent in acting in the national interest. Sadly, in the current circumstances, the public are concluding that we are now neither.” Sunak: “the public rightly expect government to be conducted properly, competently and seriously.”

[Richard A]

And now more are jumping overboard. From Boris’s point of view, it doesn’t look good.

[Arneb]

And Javid says, in Parliament, that not to do anything is action, too, and that the problem of the CP is at the top. Better late than never, I guess.

[Мастер]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gYkACVDFmeg

[Arneb]

Watch on youtube.com

[tubeswell]

Watch on youtube.com

[Мастер]

Well we now know the answer to the question, "Will Abe survive?"

[Arneb]

The Tories don't seem to have a clear frontrunner for the succession, it seems. They are prestty exhausted in terms of personenel, ideology and, well, competence, methinks.

Two group the Conservatives seem to be attractive for in terms of promotion prospects is immigrants, and women - I find that quite counterintuitive, but maybe Labour hates someone else besides Jews, too, and acts on it. Here are the names of some would-be candidates;
Rishi Sunak, apparently a bit of a front runner, the former Chancellor whose resignation ushered in the final days of BoJo. Maybe that will prove his undoing, because some Tories apparently don't want the honourable Brutus to replace the slain Caesar impersonator.
Sajid Savid, former Health Secretary and the other Brutus; his and Sunak's resignation letters were published 9 min apart, for maximum destructive effect
Jeremy Hunt
Nadhim Zahawi. After BoJo, it might prove inconvenient to have an investigation for tax evasion on your heels. Especially when you are the current Chancellor of the Exchequer (that's Finance Minister, you uneducated rednecks!)
Tom Tugendhat, a liberal and anti-Brexit Tory, some isolated specimens still exist, but count on a first round exit.
Suella Braverman
Kemi Badenoch
Penny Mordaunt
Liz Truss (Foreign Affairs) and Priti Patel (Interior), who has allegations of harassing of subordinates dragging on her, are expected to declare soon.

The count is exected to go up to a dirty dozen or more. You might see it as an embarras de richesse, but I see it more as scraping the bottom of the barrel.

AFAIK, all the candidacies are collected by that ominous 1922 committee (made up of backbench MPs without government jobs) and put up for a vote among the Conservative MPs. They vote on the candidates and eliminate the weakest round after round. When the list has been reduced to two candidates, they put those two to the Tory membership, and whoever wins will be voted in as new PM by the MPs in turn - a rather exclusive intepretation of the term "representative democracy". Fresh general elections seem to not be on the menu, and the Tories know exactly why not.

[Lance]

Chancellor of the Exchequer (that's Finance Minister, you uneducated rednecks!)

So Secretary of the Treasury then?

[Richard A]

First point - Labour don't hate Jews. It's true that there were those in the party who were antisemitic and Jeremy Corbyn, although not one of them, did far too little about them. It's also true that Corbyn, although he has no dislike of the Jewish people, has a marked dislike of the State of Israel. Which the Board of Deputies of British Jews consider to be the same thing, but other Jewish groups don't. But that's a subject for another thread - although as a trailer, the Jerusalem Declaration is informative. And Sir Keir Starmer has worked extremely hard to rid the Labour Party not just of antisemitism (although he has) but more widely of anything that could at all be connected to Jeremy Corbyn.

But back to where this thread was going - those in the running to succeed BoJo. It's now been whittled down to 8. Time, on that too, for a new thread.