Edward

I would argue Hague certainly bears blame for doubling down on European psychodrama rather than trying to move on from it. It's not coincidental that he voted for IDS as his successor.

But crucially, Maggie after she had lost her marbles.

what if I told you that taking accountability for your actions was traditionally considered a load-bearing feature of masculinity?

Especially because the wait to get on any kind of rehabilitation program is longer than the time he would actually have spent inside.

If Badenoch's replacement can't turn things round, then certainly the consensus will be that she was a disaster but she was left an empty shell and everybody from Johnson on is to blame. Almost certainly Cameron because of Brexit. Will May escape blame? How about Howard?

Riffing on @stephenkb.bsky.social's idea that the first biography to try to rehabilitate Rachel Reeves will fail but will eviscerate Jeremy Hunt's reputation, I wonder how many Tory leaders you will have to go back before later historians stop ascribing blame to them for the death of the party.

Something to the idea that Thatcher raised the Tory floor but lowered their ceiling.

And it's slightly less partisan in general, so you still get eg the CSJ organising events with government members. The ideas coming out of that aren't actually good, but they are a bit more ideologically diverse.

Not even a literate one. You can only say that "the whole point of a status like... indefinite leave to remain is that it is still a live conversation" if you do not know what the word indefinite means.

It's fascinating living through a period of "for conservatives the true principle is that out groups can be thrown under the bus at any time" with a conservative party that considers all the main demographics who might vote for them (rather than Reform) as out groups.

This whole obsession with "too many people going to uni" is such a classic example of the parochialism of UK policymaking. No one bothers to ask why the % here is lower than in most other developed countries or whether that might be relevant.

It all starts from a mindset that thinks of mental health as a moral failing rather than something that has an economic cost.

This assumes that they have proper financial controls and none of it is being spent on the 3.40 at Sandown.

Yeah, staff at CCHQ quiet-quit en masse in the short campaign in 2024. Maybe even those rehired afterwards never really came back to work?

A fractured skull? Has the concussion left you with a fuzzy idea of what "non-contact" is meant to involve?

wint on X: "me and a bunch of stupid assholes are going to start a community in the middle of the desert to either die or prove a very important point" / X me and a bunch of stupid assholes are going to start a community in the middle of the desert to either die or prove a very important point

Kemi's motivational briefing to the Shadow Cabinet: x.com/dril/status/...

A thread of inspirational quotes from two of my idols: Kemi Badenoch and Ange Postecoglou

(uh-oh, I may have gotten some mixed up... or have I??)

🧵

Is it a problem having a leader whose actions and motivations are best expresssed by dril tweets?

Couple moved in next door. Old bloke lived there before had a beautiful garden. He spent every day in it. New guy ripped out everything & put fake grass in. So I've planted trees next to the boundary that will fill his lawn with dead leaves in the autumn. This one's for you Alf

Morgan McSweeney's alt detected.

I understand a court of appeal ruling is due this month on the question of whether a judicial review of the ban can go ahead in November. The government is opposing it, but I think they might be wiser to get this cleared up as soon as possible. The current situation looks awful & is not sustainable.

I mean that would remove the major factor preventing him from forming a government.

It was, but that relied upon a fundamental failure to internalise that Jeremy Hunt was not Ken Clarke. Sticking to the plans of a basically responsible government was one thing, but that wasn't the last government at all.

I think the big mistake was backing Hunt's NI cuts. I see why they did it, but in retrospect it was clearly a mistake. They overestimated the difficulty of getting in to government and underestimated the difficulty of governing.

I don't even think the Labour manifesto promised the moon on a stick, it was remarkably thin. They just vaguely implied that everything would be better and assumed this didn't require much planning.

Always assuming you can find a buyer. East Cambs tried to do this back in the 2010s and none of it was commercially viable, so they offloaded it on to parish councils and mine found itself having to hike the precept significantly to pay for the maintenance costs of unusable buildings.

If the estimates of the renovation costs for the Commons are accurate, scalps have got a lot more expensive?

Right, that's it. I'm founding a new populist party of the centre called Go Outside!

Every panel member of the Moral Maze should be referred to Prevent.