Verbal

Corbyn's Labour party have been all but wiped out as the governing party in the English counties, and Labour have lost control of Glasgow for the first time in 40 years. The most deprived ward in the entire UK (in supposedly Tory-unfriendly Scotland) has gone from Labour to Tory. Still, all this will change when voters get to know Corbyn better. (Corbyn's own reaction to the disaster was to call himself 'Monsieur Zen'). And if not, the cult can always wheel out Diane Abbott to make stuff up. This, from her, on ITN earlier today: Abbott: 'The net losses are about 50.' ITN: 'They're 125.' Abbott: 'Well the last time I looked they were about 100.' Brilliant.

Apparently not. The cult leadership is delighted with the results so far. McDonnell has just told Sky News that the party's losses are "not as bad as some were predicting." Far more important to defeat the psephologists than the Tories.

According to the Financial Times, Tory Party Central Office has been phoning the BBC to complain that Corbyn is not being given enough air time. Corbyn has been largely invisible in key local election battlegrounds, which is presumably by Labour party design. Is any of this normal?

This extra leverage that May thinks she's going to get from having an inevitably thumping Parliamentary majority is going to work wonders in bringing the EU to heel. This would be the same EU that fell straight into line when Syriza went and collected its own thumping majority in Greece, and then ended up with a worse deal than the one on offer before their election. That showed 'em.

Well that didn't last long. May has gone from 'strong and stable' to 'rattled and unhinged'. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-general-election-brexit-eu-countries-influence-uk-with-leaks-a7715851.html

This obsession with demanding a 'simple yes or no' on whether we should have nuclear annihilation is freakishly bizarre. [video=youtube;3z-a5hy7QO8]

Diane Abbott's offence isn't that she's some kind of racist. It's that she's blisteringly incompetent. And so it goes with a number of other Corbynist frontbenchers. The tragedy is that a lot of Labour's policies - including the one Abbott was mumbling about yesterday - are popular with voters. But so long as these policies are espoused by politicians who see an interviewer's trap - really not an easy one to miss: 'how much does it cost?' - and dive straight into it, Labour doesn't have a prayer of holding on to much outside English cities. And the primus inter pares of air-headed uselessness is Corbyn himself, who thought Abbott's performance was just fine. Labour are coming to represent what they actually are on the frontbench - middle class metros with overwhelmingly public sector jobs, secure pensions, and a glut of signalled virtues. That's a pretty narrow, self-congratulatory constituency, worthy only of a party determined to test Disney's theory about lemmings. The greater tragedy is that we need a functioning opposition as never before, but we're going to be left with the Dictatorship of the Maybot, which has its own cliff to leap from.

That thread is doing the rounds because it's staggering - a damning insight into the true character flaws of May, which are being imposed on the Brexit negotiations. The worst of it is that May has now sidelined Oliver Robbins, the senior diplomat who was supposed to be the key British negotiator for May's agenda. This means (a) that no one on the EU side has any idea who to talk to in trying to get talks moving; (b) May still can't grasp the complexity and scale of what's needed to achieve agreement by March 2019, and has no one in a position of sufficient influence to save her from herself; and ©, worst of all, the negotiations have reached a deadlock before they've barely begun, all of because May's ignorance of the other side's red lines and its unanimity. Control freakery and micro-management are all survivable if the control freak has a grasp of the brief. May doesn't - and Britain is headed for a 'no deal' Brexit which will leave us with worse UK/EU trading conditions that pretty much every other country in the world barring N Korea (even Turkey has a detailed customs union agreement with the EU). I'll say again, if the Brexit cult are serious about wanting to leave the EU, they should be very worried about May.

This is something of a trope among the Brexiteers - the belief that the EU is unable to coordinate anything on anything and is constantly on the brink of collapse (see Grexit, Deutsche Bank, the Italian banks, the Euro itself, ad nauseum). It must be such a surprise to the cult that the EU 27 are united and in the shot-calling seat.

Whatever else this election is, it's certainly through-the-looking-glass weird. May has gone to the country just before the CPS announces criminal prosecutions against up to 30 Tory MPs and their agents for electoral fraud - a scale of corruption so large that it might easily have denied the Tories a governing majority in 2015 (and all that followed)... Large numbers of Labour MPs are campaigning on the grounds that it's safe to vote for them because their leader is so epically useless that he's completely unlikely ever to be PM... And all of it framed by a Brexit now being openly talked about in the whackier wings of the civil service (i.e. some higher-ups in the Brexit departments) as "Empire 2.0". An outbreak sanity would be nice.

When did Brexit happen? I must have missed it.

There's also the pleasing irony that while the remaining 27 EU nations are united in their approach to Brexit, the May government, with its competing fiefdoms, split across four government departments and three egotistical loons, can't get even a vaguely coherent message out to the EU. Winners tend to speak with one voice. With the May bunch it's like herding cats.

Really? The same YouGov (and ICM) that gave the Leave campaign a 4-5% lead just before the vote in June? http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-icm-idUKKCN0YS0XO Seems bang on the money to me.

So is this your schtick now? You dig a hole you can't get out of (Trident) so move a couple of feet over and start digging another one (the non-scandal of Wales' leaving the board of one media company to set up another media company)? How much whack-a-mole can we be expected to play?

In the same week that a group of prominent American psychiatrists declared Trump insane, the great orange ball of gas offered evidence to the contrary in an interview with Associated Press: If they can fit it onto a tombstone, this gibberish should be his epitaph.

Like watching a man chasing a pram down a hill.

I'd have thought 'King C n u t was more your style. Celebrating wave-defying dyslexics everywhere.

You have to keep in mind that there's far better talent on the Labour backbenches than the sorry parade of Corbynist nincompoops presently embarrassing themselves on radio and TV. As the election campaign progresses, you might start to see and hear more from those backbenchers, because many are seduced by the fervent hope that Corbyn will pack his bags after heavy defeats on 4 May and 8 June - and they'll be jockeying for position in a rejuvenated post-cult party. Sadly, Corbyn himself has no intention of resigning no matter how bad things get - and his minions are already putting up the excuses ('evil MSM' mostly). Besides, those propping Corbyn up don't want him to leave until the party's leadership election rules have been rigged in favour of the far left, and that can't happen until Autumn at the earliest. But you never know, events might finally do Corbyn in - and you could get your dearest wish of a post-election parliamentary Labour party that will really start being a credible opposition, doing actual damage to a Tory party locked in the grip of economic extremism.

Democracy is already in full swing in this election. May is refusing to take questions during her orchestrated stand-ups, and Corbyn, during his, is employing party members to heckle journalists. Meanwhile, Gerard Coyne, challenging arch-Corbynist Len McCluskey for the UNITE leadership and winning in early returns, has been suspended from his union post without explanation.

It seems to a hallmark of those absorbed into the Brexit cult to be unable to distinguish between lies and forecasts that turn out - gosh! - to be wrong. Or worse, to be unable to distinguish between the current relative plain sailing of the economy while still in the EU, and the the fate of the British economy with a 'hard Brexit'. Here are some straightforward fact checks of what are actually demonstrable lies - as opposed to incorrect predictions - on both sides: https://www.buzzfeed.com/jamesball/are-eu-telling-porkies?utm_term=.mqRqR5akv6#.edZVBevK8D

We were all having a perfectly sensible discussion until you trolled along. What a putz. ...and back to the thread.

Indeed they are. The Mail in particular is rabidly, almost violently for hard Brexit, with its repeated banner headlines about saboteurs and gay (therefore suspect) supreme court justices, etc. However, May has to head off a number of huge political and economic problems, including a constitutional crisis that could lead to the break-up of the UK, a growing wave of UK companies and banks setting up EU safe houses, and falling foreign investment (including remerging panic attacks from companies like Nissan). She also learned last week that not one of the remaining 27 in the EU would agree to substantive negotiations on a trade deal without the terms of divorce being known. This is the clearest indication yet that she's up against an increasingly united EU, at least on the issue of Brexit. (Her rather idiotic provocations haven't helped win friends.) So she's going to need political wiggle room to do a deal that's not 'no deal', just to stop several threads all unravelling at once. (The idea that she actually thinks no deal is workable in any way is another Brexiter wet dream that won't see the light of day). His return is a bit of a challenge for me, quite frankly. My multilingual skills are quite tested by having to translate his Irvingisms into Yiddish while having to rabbit with Lord Pony, truly the Di ck Van Dyke of Cockney rhymers. A right pair of kippers in any language.

Laughable of May to offer as an excuse for a snap election that she was being sabotaged in Parliament. The idea that Corbyn is harrying her every move is quite a fantasy, as is the notion that the LibDem troops behind Farron make a damned bit of difference. The reality is May calculates (1) that Corbyn is the worst leader of the Opposition since records began and there's a small danger of his resigning, thus strengthening Labour's position in the country and in Parliament; (2) that she has to outflank the likely CPS prosecutions for electoral fraud in enough Tory seats to wipe out her overall majority; and (3) her real enemy are the hard-Brexiting Tory right, and she needs a majority comfortable enough to deliver a much softer Brexit than they would allow.

Corbyn will bury the Labour party in three stages: first with a disastrous outcome in the 4 May local elections, second by slashing Labour's representation in the Commons the 8 June general election, and thirdly, despite all that, by staying on as leader of the party.

Pipe down. Sir Lynton Crosby, Theresa May's own campaign manager, has warned her she could lose 27 Tory seats to the Lib Dems.