buctootim

Its more to do with the Falklands factor and looking strong. Thatcher was facing election defeat until she became a war hero. Its also why 'strongman' little midget Pootie is still half popular in Russia. Johnson wants to salvage his job and Truss wants to grab it, both using Ukraine.

Typo? nah...quite right.

His continued half 'I don't really mean it' apologies / explanations are what seems to be doing him in. According to various media stories a lot of Tory MPs who were prepared to forgive and forget if he promised to do things differently in future are now thinking - 'he cant change, we have to dump him'

That's true. I'm basically centre so he fits me well. He wouldn't stand anyway, he knows he has no chance. Arguably a Tory leader like him would attract more centrist voters like me than the number of right wingers who would defect to whatever the Ex kippers are called this week.

You'd have thought 'Baltic' might have been a clue for her, but no

Fortunately I think its got to the point where bty behaving like that he is digging his own grave.

I wonder if the Red Wall MPs have seen that quote.

Exactly. IMO there isn't inertia amongst Tory MPs over Johnson its more of a battle over the soul of the party. The Tories are almost equally split. On one side the right wing headbangers who might attract 25% of the electorate but arent electable under FPTP - essentially the right wing equivalent of Corbyn. On the other the traditional one nation MPs and redwallers. They both want rid of Johnson but have very different views over who should take his place and both worry they aren't strong enough to guarantee their side wins. Its almost a Mexican standoff Edit. I see Tobias Ellwood has declared he is sending in a letter. Have long thought Ellwood should be leading the party.

They've been taking the piss out of him all day. Under the heel of his young wife. TV station NTV said he was "the most disliked, disrespected and ridiculed character in Britain" Apparently Russian media is more accurate than portrayed.

Worked out fine in the end - 50 years is nuffink!

I read that as ‘Cheeky Girls’ initially. Was temporarily confused

She used to act as an Ambassador for a charity I worked for. We briefed her on what was quite a simple straightforward issue so that she could advocate to the minister. We then got angry calls from the ministers office because she had been calling him out for not implementing a medical advancement that hadn’t even been discovered yet. She couldn’t even grasp the charity was about finding the cure not implementing the cure

Im not so sure. Politically what he has done is seismic but on a purely criminal basis its minor. So the danger is the Sue Gray report is neutered because the main transgressions are removed from her remit. The people at the parties will probably only get cautioned or get a fixed penalty less than I did for speeding on the A23 last year. That enables him to claim 'hands up' i made a minor boo boo just like many of us do, look over here at how tough Im being on Russia and the EU.

War isnt always hell

An those were the days. Before wokeism and it was fine to sing “Hang Nelson Mandela” at Tory conferences

Ive just read that Sue Gray will now not investigate potentially criminal aspects of Partygate. The Met will only investigate the criminal. So basically the evidence against Johnson has been broken into two weaker discrete parts instead of one whole. Clever. Absolutely atrocious but clever. The disgusting sleazeball might still get off.

Apparently some of the most damaging evidence on partygate has come from the police positioned at / in Downing Street.

`I know you think you sound like a macho Alpha Male but you come across as a really sad old fart who's time has passed by.

Lets hope he doesn't go yet. I want to see ALL the dirt.

Apparently he didn't know it was his birthday. It's his staffer's fault.

I worked in Ukraine over a three year period up till 2019 and went there around 35 times. I think Putin has become disconnected from reality in the way that many autocrats (and PMs) do after too long in power. He thinks the ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine feel loyal to Russia and want to be united with Russia again like they were in the USSR. That might have been true 30 years ago but overwhelmingly its not true now. He should have learned his lesson in 2014 when he expected the whole of the ethnic Russian east to rebel in response to the agitators he sent in. Instead the ethnic Russian mayors of the major cities Kharkiv, Odessa and Mariupol organised resistance and drove them out. Years of intimidation and destabilisation by Putin, especially in the past 15 years has totally alienated them and made people patritiotic about Ukraine in a way they never used to be. The invasion in 2014 created 3 million internal refugees. Everybody in Ukraine knows somebody who was driven from their home and lost everything. Ironically its his actions which have driven the wedge between the two countries, just as its his actions of threatening his neighbours which drove them into the arms of NATO in the first place. His is the author of his own misfortunes. If Putin does invade I think it will be the beginning of the end for him.

Is your house insured? Mine is, against accidental damage or destruction. I don't predict an Elephant in a tutu will fall from a plane onto my house, but I'm covered if it does. Government contingency planning is the same. You plan for things which will probably never happen but would be a worse disaster if they do and you havent prepared. Thames flooding London, nuclear Sellafield exploding, Channel tunnel collapse, comet hitting Winchester. None of the recommendations in that paper are about preventing sudden climate change - they are about getting earlier warning and contingency planning if it did.

Exactly. Housing consumes such a large percentage of many peoples incomes, over 50% in some cases, that everything else is a struggle. And its easily avoidable. Building houses isnt even that expensive. You can build a good 120 square metre 3 bed house for £150-200k. Its only land specualtion which makes houses stupidly, unaffordably expensive