LEAVE the Conservative Party and save your country!

Both sides of the house tried to screw May over with anything she tried to resolve re Brexit, particularly after her ill though General Election that lost most of her majority.

May's first big mistake was Johnson as FS. This legitimised him as a big party player and gave him a foothold for the later PM selection. I know why she did it, to appease the Brexit wing, but had she not done so I genuinely believe he would never have been PM.

Her Brexit red lines effectively killed her time as PM, it also led further down the line to Johnson's oven ready turkey and also the expulsion of all those sensible Tory MP's that worked against the harder Johnson Brexit.

Brexit was always likely to ruin the Tory party but the decisions May made contributed to its near destruction and certainly played a huge role in dramatically changing the political scope to the much further right party that exists now.

May doesn't have leadership skills which is why failed.

Hell of a dancer though, she does a cracking robot.

It seems to Gillian Keegan ex conservative Education secretary husband who was the boss of Fujitsu is now admitting to meet Paula Vennells on more than one occasion. He previously applied for a press complaint when a paper said he met her more than once.

He also acted as a government advisor until his wife lost her seat.

Maybe the Tory fanbois on here could get round to filling in the longstanding answer void to that open question: name the top 5 achievements of the Tory GINO, whichever era from Gammonface through to HiRisk.

And fyi, giving a £ multimillion PPE contract to little Hattie Mancock's mate's pub landlord is not one of them.

. I know you're trying to get one back at Loon, but there's some seriously dodgy use of statistics throughout that article. The police one is a classic: they've added 20,000 officers since 2017, after getting rid of 20,000 before 2017.

Bragging about increasing spending on the state pension is a weird one, too.

He asked for 5 and he can pick his favourites from the 13 above. I was generous enough to give him a choice 🙂

Baby boxes (cardboard boxes with some formula, about a week's worth, no causal link to better outcomes)

Reduced child poverty (its gone up)

Education (they've helped lots of other countries climb the literacy rankings, by selflessly taking one of the lower rankings)

Free uni tuition (which reduces available places for Scottish people, because the unis can't afford enough "free" spaces)

New ferries (over budget by something like 5 times, and delayed nearly a decade)

Dualling of the A9, (which hasn't happened).

Independence (they are closer than ever, apparently)

Free prescriptions (paid for by higher taxes for most people)

Tackle the drug death problem (by allowing people to die as fast as possible - should be running low on addicts by now so the death rates should start falling)

Bottle return scheme (make everyone drive to the supermarket to get 20p back, thereby improving the environment, except it didn't work)

Minimum alcohol pricing to reduce the degree to which Scots drink more than anyone else] (the evidence of it having no effect is so compelling they've put it up again)

Transgender rights (not sure what they think now - depends if you ask the leader or the deputy leader, who isn't keen on it at all, which is fine because her bigotry is protected by faith)

The NHS (which is devolved but still someone else's fault)

They are a fucking shambles.

Does that list of Conservative achievements really include falling waiting lists?

It is absolutely breathtaking how much they have got away with.

The list doesn't include embezzlement, serial breaches of FoI, interference with the courts, rigging their own party and even parliamentary disciplinary procedures, or the exact same abject mistakes made during Covid as the Conservatives, including sending hundreds of typhoid Marys back to care homes.

They are, by any measure, corrupt. But because they are "fighting the good fight", anything goes.

Badenoch was on Today this morning getting very irritated with people asking her questions about things she had said. The conversation was roughly:

MH:"You gave an example of a small café that had to close because they couldn't afford to pay the minimum wage or maternity pay. Do you think the minimum wage is too high?"

KB:"No, but the general burden of regulation is too high for small businesses"

MH:"If not minimum wage, what areas specifically?"

KB:"I can't talk about specifics just general principles."

This circuit was repeated a few times. Who knows what she believes.

It was pretty striking that she couldn't even put the general shape of a single policy on the table. Just policy aspirations and what "we" stand for, with policies to follow later.

My energy policy is cold fusion instead of wind power. My travel policy faster than light travel and artificial gravity. My immigration policy is zero immigration and all tasks conducted by human like robots so we all have more free time.

As long as we can all agree that these are the general policy directions we want, we can figure out how to achieve them later.

I would actually have been more credible than this morning's interview.

Just decided to see what the membership of the Tory party was..... off down a rabbit hole!

They don't publicise it but it seems it is somewhere about 1.5 million and probably less than half that of Labour. Overall party memberships have been dropping for many years but went up in 2022 - reaching a massive 1.5% of the electorate.

And about 15 years ago we had one of the lowest % party memberships in Europe

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2013/05/06/decline-in-party-membership-europe-ingrid-van-biezen/

I find her similar to Farage in this respect