Chris Terry-Enescu

Giving you a chance to reconsider

I feel like you guys should still consider sacking Budapest for the bit

Given the speech has ended I assume she's finding out..... now

Viktor, don't make the Romanians go over there and sack Budapest again, Viktor. They'd love to do it.

ending her career lying about an orwell quote while the entire room is getting news notifications about how she’s been fired and clearly doesn’t know it, perfect

I long took the stance that Nicușor Dan was not actually that great a politician and hoo boy am I regretting being a good judge of character now

Shield of Americas appears to be a summit to establish a new regional body for the Americas. I'm unclear on what the regional body does but given how the board for peace has gone I'm assuming principally redistribution of money from national budgets to Donald Trump

No but with the right campaign a progressive candidate could probably take it off Labour at a GE in current circumstances

Yes, perhaps one where the government doesn't keep telling itself that a strategy that objectively failed actually worked and that's why they're in power

Yes, but they didn't vote Labour. Like if you look at the types of voters that Labour won even in the most Tory areas they weren't the types that they called 'hero voters'. Labour won because of tactical voting and because of splits on the right, not because the strategy worked, because it didn't

Not because they won their 'hero voters' though, primarily because of strategic voting

The supposed theory is that they're the voters you need to win a big majority. Except they did win a big majority without them

"Hero voters" IE a category of voter who did not vote Labour in 2024.

We do literally have evidence that says 2024 was the first time in history that a government was voted into office with a majority of its supporters backing a pro-migration position.

That's the most real life thing about BlueSky

The really funny thing to me is your Matt Goodwins etc. who used to reflexively tell people that twitter wasn't real life who now seem to take the stance that actually it is.

Many people are saying this!

You want me to show up in person for a meeting? The same thing that killed the Ayatollah?

Now I'm not one of them fancy big city electoral strategists but personally I tend to think it helps that if you're promising to do something if it's something you might actually be able to deliver on

Indeed. Classic example of this was the Tories spent half the last parliamentary term standing behind podiums with "stop the boats" emblazoned on the front of them when they knew that within their preferred policy framework they could not, in fact, stop the boats

Honestly think a great deal of the reason why parties like Reform and the Greens can do well is if Labour and the Tories can't level with the public about where we are why should anyone trust other parties when they start telling untruths

Yes quite. It's why their economic policy has turned into a list of things they don't like that the government is doing, and 'we're going to join the customs union' and 'split up the Treasury'. Finding a position that works for them that actually engages with questions of tax and spend is tough

He was a publicity hound in the last parliament too. Continually driving tractors into blue walls after by elections and so on. And to be honest you do basically need to be a publicity hound if you're hoping to lead a third party to electoral success because it's the only way to get noticed

Buckley feels like a man forever on the cusp of experiencing self-realisation but never quite making it.

One of the funny things about the family voting thing is that by all accounts, older Muslim men were more likely to stick with Labour

Maybe Matt should read Brexitland by Ford and Sobolewska, available from all good bookshops

I personally enjoy the bit where he wonders aloud why Muslims would vote for a party that wants to decriminalise drugs not long after he has reflexively described Longsight by reference to the proportion of its residents who were born in the UK.

Squeezing the Tories down to less than 2% of the vote wasn't bad going really too