Boris leadership 2019

The chances he'd beat Boris in a head to head are so slim that 11-1 is poor odds really.

I'm in it for the cash out, obviously.

Johnson is clearly laying low in this debate, studiously ignoring any challenges (i.e. just continuing to say his piece), and keeping out of any disagreements. He's being very quiet. Probably the right tactic. The absence of a live studio audience makes it a bit lacking in atmosphere (and I wouldn't be surprised if that was a condition of Johnson's participation). So far, Lynton Crosby must be rubbing his hands with glee behind the scenes.

That good and outstanding schools quip by give didn't sit well with the ofsted revelations recently.

Abdullah

https://twitter.com/abdullahpatel94/status/1141085674948497413?s=21

And now it does work

You mean 'my friend over there?'

Can’t really work out why there are these adverts for the Tory party. There are 314 mps and 150,000 Tory party members. These are the only people who can influence the choice. When was the time 2 x 1 hour programs were targeted at such a small audience?

Johnson is clearly laying low in this debate, studiously ignoring any challenges (i.e. just continuing to say his piece), and keeping out of any disagreements. He's being very quiet. Probably the right tactic.

It's essentially the same content-less bollocks as 'it's time for a change'.

(I wasn't watching the 'debate', but Crosby always does the same thing--ignore policy as much as possible and attack opponents, often savagely and generally mendaciously.)

"Emily, I appeal to you!"

Doubt it mate.

You think that was an advert?

How many people could have watched more than a minute of that and thought "yes, good answer, eloquently and politely put. That's who I want to run the country."

Good first paragraph in Johnathan Freedland's summary:

Perhaps the most scathing line of the night was the title. It was called Our Next Prime Minister and as the hour wore on, those four words sounded increasingly like a rebuke to the nation. Look at us, they seemed to say: a fabled country with a long, proud history and one of these five jokers is actually going to be our next prime minister.

Because many of them aren't that far from death anyway so they don't care :(

The Conservative Party being destroyed option shows you how many Tory members are really Brexit Party supporters.

many Tory members are really Brexit Party supporters.

Nicely mirrors the 'hard left influx' in Labour a couple years back. I wonder to what extent both parties memberships have been sitting way beyond the parliamentary parties policies on the spectrum for a couple of decades now.

The Conservative Party being destroyed option shows you how many Tory members are really Brexit Party supporters.

I wondered that from that mental graph yesterday - it suggests that the party is wildly out of touch with it's members (like Labour I guess) and that can't have just happened through time with its long serving members.

Is there any evidence of entryism of the Tory party I wonder. I guess you can't tell easily tell without published numbers..

Yes, Cameron's desperate (but typically lazy) move to appease UKIP voters does seem to have backfired spectacularly, both in terms of retaining a sizeable group of extreme anti-EU members within the party, and also, of course, in deciding to go ahead with the referendum in the first place. The Tory party is pretty fucked.

And they know it. The nerves were palpable from the candidates last night when discussing a general election, and they were all so determined to make noises of unity. They know they're on shaky ground and are trying to make a show of stability.

Update on Abdullah

https://twitter.com/hzeffman/status/1141284190782132227?s=19

this is being spun to divert attention away from the fact that the tory party still has a rampant islamophobia problem it has so far so much as failed to acknowledge in 3... 2...

wonder when they'll get round to suspending johnson for half the shit that's spewed out of his fatuous maw.

I don't understand why he's been suspended?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/06/the-questions-the-bbc-must-answer-about-abdullah-in-bristol/amp/

UPDATE: The BBC has released the following statement in response:

‘We carried out background research into the online and social media profiles of all out questioners for last night’s debate. Following the debate, one individual reactivated a public twitter account he had previously deactivated, whose tweets were not visible during our research period. Had we been aware of the views he expressed there he would not have been selected.’

Not to get all tin foil, but if that's true it all seems very odd.

Ta, I hadn't seen any of the old views

Rory Stewart for Labour leader

By advert I meant free air time for their views to an extremely limited audience (154,000) of people who get to vote on the next prime minister.

I now see the figure of 160,000 mentioned who apparently have a vote in the Tory leadership contest. Haven't many people, when speculating how many members the Tory party has, been mentioning a figure of 60,000 recently (down, allegedly, from 120,000)?

How many members do the Tories really have?

160 is mentioned on that font of all knowledge Wikipedia. I got the slightly lower figure from the web last week.