United Kingdom

What might that be? Could be anything. Clear evidence of Russian funding for the Leave campaign? Proof of Russian bot-armies helping Leave spread their message? Confirmation of Russian infiltration of the Tory Party? Possibly even actual names named of who the Russians have under their control? Conceivably all of the above with Russo-American in place of just Russian? For all we know the Secret Services could have mapped out the entire influence, manipulation and bribery network that made ALL of 2016’s major failures of democracy happen and handed them to Number 10 wrapped in a big, red bow, but we just don’t know, because Downing Street is deliberately concealing it from us. It’s not hard to see a wide range of reasons Johnson would want to keep the Report bottled up until after the Election, but it is hard to see why an independent Media dedicated to keeping the British Public informed about the major news stories of the day wouldn’t be making a MUCH bigger deal about his deeply-suspicious order to supress it. If only we had one. For example, the BBC didn’t even have the story on their website until very late in the evening after the story broke, and you’d struggle to find it there even now. Needless to say, I can’t imagine that happening if a hypothetical Labour Administration were supressing an Intelligence Report about pressing national security threats. They’d be on it like a drake on a passing lady duck and wouldn’t cover a single other story until it all came out. Still, the topic isn’t going away and every day Johnson sits on it is another day he can get violently buffeted by accusations of complicity with Putin’s aims for the UK. Serves him right.

What’s next? The Advertising Standards Agency has forced the Government to pull its latest tranche of expensive advertisements about the much hated ‘Universal Credit’ system (Welfare or Social Security, I think you guys call it) for being chockablock full of misleading inaccuracies (i.e. blatant lies). That’s a good few hundred thousand pounds of public money spaffed into the void trying to defend yet another Tory project that has as its main purpose inflicting cruelty and misery on millions of defenseless people. Not a good look just weeks before an Election where Labour are making their determination to scrap Universal Credit a centerpiece of their campaign.

It’s been revealed that the figures bandied about by the Government for affordable houses constructed since they won election promising to build 200,000 of them might have been a little bit inflated. Rather than the 200,000 expected, the real figure is a lot more like, uh, just let me check my notes here, ah, more like…. zero. That’s right. Zero. Nada. The big Duck Egg. More millions wasted on incompetence and graft, and what do we the public get out of it? A whole lot of land with absolutely shit-all on it in the midst of a massive affordable housing crisis. Wow, talk about a vote winner, eh guys? They’ll be popping the corks all night at Conservative Central over this one, won’t they? What’s that? Those pops aren’t corks? Then what….? Oh, well, yeah, they obviously knew the price of failure when they took the job on.

Let’s see. In the debate over Johnson’s Withdrawal Bill his Government made a clear promise to MPs of all parties that of course Parliament would have a vote on extending the transition period between agreeing to leave the EU and actually leaving past the December 2020 cut-off should any hypothetical Johnson Government fail to agree a Free Trade Agreement with the EU in that time. This was the infamous No Deal time-bomb identified as the real reason the Brextremists who’d scuppered May’s Withdrawal Bill three times voted for Johnson’s very similar one. If they just held their nose and waited a year, they could force a No Deal Brexit by voting against signing off on whatever rushed and unbalanced FTA the UK and EU managed to cobble together in such a short period of time. The promise to MPs that they could prevent a No Deal by voting to extend the transition period to cover however long it took to get an FTA agreed and signed won a lot of votes over to Johnson’s Withdrawal Bill, but now they’ve bluntly announced that MPs won’t get any such thing, making it crystal clear that Flobalob wants the threat of No Deal back on the table to wave at the next Parliament’s MPs should they reject the terms of any FTA he negotiates. This has not gone down well at all, and leaves Johnson wide open to accusations that he’s just a lying sack of shit who will say whatever he has to in order to get the person he’s talking to to drop their knickers, which has the added benefit of being oh so true.

Next, the Secretary of State for Wales, one Alun Cairns, has been forced to resign from his post after an e-mail emerged proving that he’d been (prepare to be shocked) lying his stumpy little arse off when he denied knowing anything about a former aide (who he had later backed to become a member of the Welsh Assembly) deliberately sabotaging a rape trial in order to get a friend of his off. The thing is, Johnson didn’t sack him, and he’s not stopping him standing as a candidate in the election. On the contrary, he thanked him for his service and is apparently looking forward to welcoming him back when he’s spent enough time in ‘exile’. It’s a really, really bad look and gets worse when (as has been pointed out by Labour) neither Cairns nor his boss seem to have given a moment’s thought for the actual real-life victim in all this at any point during the proceedings. Coming very soon after another Tory candidate in South Wales was outed for having used social media to tell everyone the people featured on Godawful poverty-pron reality TV show ‘Benefits Street’ should be “put down”, this isn’t doing anything good for the Tory campaign to pinch lots of Leave voting seats across South and Central Wales.

And then there’s Flobalob himself, who just can’t seem to get through a single sentence without segueing off into a fat old lie or three. That’s been the key to his success for all these years, but things are a tiny bit different when electoral ‘purdah’ rules are in effect, because the national media have to at least look like they’re being unbiased now that everyone is starting to tune in. In other words, there’s immediate fact-checking going on and (important) the fact-checking is being reported on in real time.

So when he claims that Parliament blocked his Withdrawal Deal from passing, it’s immediately pointed out that, no, Parliament started passing his Withdrawal Deal but rejected his attempt to restrict the whole process of passage to three days, at which point he pulled the Deal and demanded an Election, you fucking liar.

When he claims that electing Labour would mean two Referendums next year and no Brexit, its immediately pointed out that Labour promise one Referendum (on Brexit) and have actually ruled out giving the SNP another Independence Referendum early in their first term, you fucking liar.

When he claims that the Tories are building 40 brand new hospitals, it’s immediately pointed out that the Government has announced six hospital upgrades, with dozens of others being promised some funds to plan these upgrades themselves, you fucking liar.

I could go on, because this shit incenses me and there’s just so much of it happening in such a short period of time, but you get the point. This is supposed to be an Election Johnson and his cronies have wanted and planned for, yeah? So why is this bed piled so high with shit you could throw a sheet over it and provide low-cost skiing opportunities for daredevil midgets? Why can’t the Tories stop stepping on each other’s dicks like they’re trying to skip across Todger River? Could it possibly be that, despite the hype, they’re actually not that good at this unless they get to define the terms and cheat the system in every situation? This is supposed to be Day One of the Greatest Arsekicking Ever Delivered To The British Left and, I’m sorry, but I’m really decidedly unimpressed by the quality of the beating I’m receiving. If I was paying for this, I’d want my money back. Hell, Johnson and Co are paying for this, but they’re using public money to do it, so I feel doubly aggrieved.

Maybe we are going to come out of this with a Government that isn’t actively trying to run some sort of enormous con to immiserate the country in order to enrich their business sponsors. That would be just great, thanks. So if the Tories want to continue being garbage at the job they’ve given themselves, that would be great too, because it looks like Labour are really up for this and chewing up that poll disadvantage even faster than they did in 2017.

Fingers crossed. What’s happening over there? I hear you had some elections that went well?

Now, don’t get me wrong here. People row. That’s who we are, especially when we’re in stressful situations and some entitled walrus spills red wine on the couch/finds you spaffing off to Naughty Butlers clips on your laptop. Even Tories are allowed to have private lives, though, obviously, it would be absolutely hunky-dory if more of them kept children, animals and ritual sacrificial knives out of them. I don’t like it when the Press sticks its sticky little stick of a snout in there grubbing around for scandal, but that’s not what happened here. The Police turning up in the early hours of the morning to check whether the prohibitive favourite to be our next PM was murdering (or being murdered by) his girlfriend is a legitimate news story, and more to the point, not only are concerned neighbours calling the Police to investigate when it appears such fears might be a plausible concern absolutely the right thing to do, recording audio of the incident for use in a potential court-case is smart and would very likely be instrumental in cutting through the obfuscations of your average domestic abuser’s ‘He said/She said’ defence.

What civilised person could possibly disagree with that, enquired Major Snark of the 3rd Light Sarcasm Dragoons?

The problem here, in the great tradition of the cover-up being worse than the crime, is in how the British Right chose to respond. The next day the story was all over the news, as you’d expect, but never fear, Operation ‘Don’t You Think Political Correctness Has Gone Maaaaad?’ was soon dispatching Johnson’s surrogates all over the airwaves to attack, attack, attack and smear the neighbours in a manner which will be very, very familiar to you Norteamericanos, but which we naïve Old Country types haven’t previously seen deployed in such a hyper-partisan way. They were “left-wing snoopers”, ‘Corbynista curtain-twitchers’, ‘theatrical luvies’ (i.e. pawns of the homosexy agenda), and even compared to the Stasi by one absolute charmer. The Telegraph (for whom Johnson is still a very well-paid columnist) dug up the shocking revelation that the wife of the neighbour had once swore at Johnson in the street, and that he and all of his friends were (brace yourselves) shameless Remoaners. Coverage in Murdoch’s grimy little tabloid shitrag The Sun (spit) was rapidly veering towards an outright denial that anything untoward had taken place, while the tape of the incident was obviously a Fake News construct concocted by Venezuelan secret-police as part of an anti-democratic hit-piece on Sir Boris of Brexit, but then all of Symonds’ other neighbours came forward to back up the initial reporting, which tripped up this angle of attack and caused a back-scuttle of human centipede proportions. Undaunted Johnson’s defenders circled back around to condemning all of the neighbours for ‘spying’ on their man, and no less an authority in neighbourly conduct than the until recently incorporeal shade of long-buried evil known as Jacob Rees-Mogg (nearest neighbour 12.3 miles beyond the Forbidden Wood which encircles his dark estate) went on Radio 4 to declare that the Christian thing to do in the event of hearing a woman screaming at a man to “Get off her” was to turn up the volume on ‘Songs of Praise’, mind your own bloody business, and let the man deal with his woman as God intended.

Now, you’d think that Johnson’s rival for the Tory leadership would be licking his lips and huddled over kitchen tables with his unofficial Cabinet gaming out the best way to exploit this humungous own goal by Team Boris, wouldn’t you? Sadly, you’d only be partly right. Poor old Jeremy Hunt has had his own scandal to deal with. On Thursday the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip ‘Fuck Boris’ Hammond was due to give the annual Mansion House speech to the great and the good of the City of London when, as has become de rigueur, it was interrupted by a very nicely dressed contingent of Greenpeace activists out to draw attention to Britain’s crappy environmental record and the vast, existential threat of global climate change. All well and good, you’d think. Everyone was polite, short speeches were read, and there was even a smattering of applause. How very civilised.

But, uh oh, what’s this? A single Greenpeace protestor in a delightful red off the shoulder number attempted to sneak around the other side of the audience. Presumably she was planning to assault the Chancellor with the very many sharp-edged leaflets she had in her open purse, or perhaps perturb him with an organic courgette in the name of Militant Veganism, but she was stopped in her tracks by Tory MP, junior Foreign Office minister and Hunt campaign official Mark Field, who grabbed her by the neck, slammed her face first into a marble column, and frog marched her out of the door under the shocked, horrified, but ultimately completely static eye of every other fucker there. You can see the footage yourself online, it’s pretty ugly, and will be all too familiar to any woman who’s had to deal with the casual violence of the Furrier Sex. By a happy coincidence one of Field’s roles as a Hunt deputy at the Foreign Office has been to handle Britain’s response to the Chinese Government’s treatment of protestors in Hong Kong, calling for investigations into their officials’ “inappropriate use of force”. Oooh, Alanis would have loved this one.

Now, in comparison to the ‘Johnson Row’ response, Field himself was suspended the following morning and his pitiful whining about “feeling threatened” didn’t last very long, presumably because Hunt got on the phone and told him to apologise and then shut the fucking hell up ASAP. But the media misdirection campaign, ah, that was a different matter and suspiciously similar in tone and theme. Tory MPs and professional mouthpieces for the Second Counter-Reformation (Motto – “It’s a Straight White Conservative Christian Man’s World, Let’s Keep It That Way”) vomited out of the gates with salvos of pre-scripted bullshit. She could have been a terrorist! It was a citizen’s arrest! What about protestors evicted from television studios, eh? Was that assault too, Comrade Journalist? The response of the British Media was also the same. Baffled confusion, stuttering repetition of “With the greatest of respect…” when trying to counter crimson-faced projection and openly disrespectful accusations of media bias. Like red-shirted movie characters confronted with their beloved household pet turned into a rabid flesh-eating zombie, they just couldn’t process the change in the dynamic and huddled up in foetal balls of denial, waiting for the violence to pass and looking forward to the inevitable letter of private apology, handwritten on expensive stationary and without a shadow of a doubt expressing genuine contrition. After all, these people went to the right school and ate at the right restaurants, they couldn’t really mean what they were saying… could they?

All in all, an absolutely terrific week for the Conservative Party and Britain in general, I’m sure you’ll agree. So terrific that it’s overshadowed even the timed-like-clockwork ‘revelations’ of division on the Labour benches over how to handle the last few spasms of Brexit. The sheer scale of the misogyny and the vehemence of its defenders has been so loud everything else has been drowned out. It’s still Boris Johnson’s race to lose, of course. His policy of keeping his head down and leaving the Tory membership to justify his bullshit to themselves without his input has served him well. A double-digit majority of crazy right-wing bellends – still – consider him to be the more trustworthy and capable candidate, but outside the Base Bubble the hits just keep on coming. His former employer (and impeccably connected former Editor of the Telegraph and London Evening Standard) Max Hastings has described him as “unfit for national office, because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification”. Jeremy Hunt has emerged from behind his couch and decided that lambasting his rival for “cowardice” in ducking 99% of Press interviews and televised debates while accusing him of attempting to “slink in by the back door” is the way to go. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Bank of England, and even bought-and-paid-for pro-American billionaire lobbyist and cork-brained shill for naked capitalism Liam Fox, who is also our International Development Secretary, have all criticised his lies about GAT-24 (transparent bullshit about tariff agreements making the Northern Irish border a non-issue that only the Brextremists even pretend to believe) and labelled his entire Brexit plan “pie in the sky”. The EU have (once again) helpfully reminded the British Government and Media that, regardless of what promises anyone makes, there’s not going to be a renegotiation or even an extension to the October 31st deadline for agreeing a withdrawal deal without a General Election or a new Referendum. Tory Remainers are floating great, big neon signs advertising their willingness to vote against any prospective Johnson-led Government in a No Confidence vote, and even big money Tory donors are starting to mumble that maybe Boris isn’t all dat and shit.

What a wonderful time to be alive. (eyeroll)

Will any of this spike Johnson’s long climb to Absolute Power? Nah, probably not. He’s got the bulk of the Tory membership wrapped around his pudgy little finger and Jeremy Hunt is too much of a bloodless technocrat in the mould of Theresa May to inspire any kind of energised counter-offensive. The man got where he is today by fucking up his ministerial briefs in ways that profit the right people, not by building a constituency amongst the hoi polloi of local Conservative clubs, most of whom have bought hook, line and sinker into the Deep Myth of a ‘clean Brexit’ leading to a White Free State bestriding the Atlantic like a tweet-suited, tea-drinking colossus. It would take something very special indeed for them to lose their faith in Boris’ essential qualities of bumbling failure and self-serving deceit greasing the way to their Brexiteerian promised land.

OTOH, all of this can’t be doing much for Johnson’s other claim to relevance, namely his public personae as ‘Boris’ being a draw for middle of the road floating voters who only go by what the headlines say and can be expected to plump for “that funny blond toff from the telly” over Comrade Corbyn and the New Holocaust Party in any future General Election. What sells to the Church of the Blue Moonies (half of whom are quite open about never wanting a Muslim PM) won’t necessarily go over quite as well to Joe and June Bloggs of Dagenham, however much ‘economic anxiety’ they might have about brown boys in hoodies and women in burkhas. When ‘character’ stops being a selling point in politics all you have left is enthusiasm and policy, and the Tories have to be shitting bricks of jagged obsidian at the prospect of waging an electoral war on that kind of battlefield.

That’s it. Back to your regularly scheduled programme of Trumpian volk-stroking and international willy-waving. We’ll be over here feeing comparable levels of shame and ignominy.

Before the voting the candidates were scheduled to have their first Leadership Debate live on Channel 4. I say ‘the candidates’ but there was a huge Johnson shaped gap in the proceedings as the Bard of Brexit was dutifully following the advice of his Australian campaign advisor, Lynton ‘I sell sheep-shit to sheep” Crosby and keeping himself locked in a gaffe-proof box until after everyone else dropped out and/or the BBC’s ever-so-friendly political editors could manage proceedings in a manner he’d be comfortable with. Prior to that the latest instance of Trumpian sabre-rattling in the Gulf of Oman gave the other candidates an opportunity to play the macho hardmen by affirming their unqualified support for whatever lunacy the Autonomous Amerikan Oblast was tweeting out as official policy. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt was first out of the blocks, displaying his level-headed calmness in a crisis by insisting – without a shred of evidence – that the Foreign Office was almost (like, 99.9% and a bit more) certain Iran was responsible, and rounding on Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn for daring to suggest that maybe we should keep our rockets in our pockets until actual evidence emerged that didn’t stem from badly photoshopped stills lifted from CoD: Modern Warfare 3. The other candidates (sans Boris the Silent) followed along, waving fists in the general direction of Tehran and castigating Corbyn for being insufficiently loyal to Imperator Smallgloves. The Media started lubing up to ride this latest instance of Corbyn Rules deep into The Narrative, but were caught flat-footed when the Rest of the World (other than the Likud-Saudi Axis) confirmed that they were very much with Red Jezza on this and frankly didn’t believe a word emanating from Mike Pompeo’s pie-crust of a face or, by extension, from Blue Jezza’s mysterious Intelligence sources. Oooooh, that’s gotta sting. Funnily enough the topic didn’t come up during the Channel 4 debate and the candidates were spared an embarrassing climb-down, concentrating instead on domestic issues revolving around the omnipresent B-Word.

Opinion after the debate basically boiled down to a few essential truths. Hunt was a bit dull and would probably have been much happier standing in front of a mirror practicing variations on Blue Steel. Gove wanted to base his whole campaign around that one time he was rude to Corbyn while standing in for May at Prime Minister’s Questions (probably out of his face on three lines of Bolivian Devil, that stuff’s proper Bo). Everyone ganged up on Raab and bricked him for his talk about proroguing Parliament (translation – telling Parliament to go and stand in a corner and count to a hundred, no peeking) to prevent MPs from stopping the UK from crashing out of the EU without any kind of withdrawal agreement in place. Javid hoped his humble non-Oxbridge background would make him the obvious choice to take on the Aristotle of Eton in the final round of voting (just don’t mention Chase Manhattan or Deutche Bank, yeah?). Stewart had a good debate and stood out as the only candidate with a couple of toes and maybe part of a heel still firmly planted in the Real World, enabling him to slam the others as macho poseurs without a clue how to make good on their promise to force the EU back to the negotiating table. Johnson was (of course) declared the real winner by the Media, since his empty-chaired absence kept him in everyone’s mind while simultaneously sparing him the irresistible opportunity to say something disastrously empty-headed and borderline offensive every few minutes. Now that’s some privilege on display right there.

In between the Channel 4 debate and the BBC extravaganza where Johnson’s programmers were planning to unveil their shiny new product came the second round of voting. As noted, only candidates who could garner 33 votes or more would get through to the later stages, and whoever got the fewest supporters would be dropped regardless of the number. In the lead-up various bombs were half-heartedly tossed around while the political world waited with bated breath for The BoJo Show to finally debut, hair trimmed and tassels a-whirling.

Rory Stewart’s post-University links with MI6 were somewhat oddly ‘revealed’, like potentially being an operative of Her Majesty’s Secret Service in your early 20’s would count against a Tory candidate? Seriously? All Stewart had to do was state – accurately – that he could neither confirm nor deny (wink wink) the claims and reap the benefits of being within a Kevin Bacon of Daniel Craig. Not bad for a man who looks like a pre-pubescent garden gnome in his uncle’s best interview suit.

Jeremy Hunt dropped his campaign right in it by agreeing ‘150%’ with the sentiments expressed by your own National Embarrassment when Tang Toad Wang retweeted onion-eyed hate-spout and Ann Coulter wannabe Katie Hopkins as part of his disgusting racist attack on London’s Muslim Mayor, Sadiq Khan. After initially trying to style it out Hunt soon realised he was being abandoned by Downing Street and outflanked by his intermittently Muslim rival Sajid Javid and so beat a hasty retreat by clarifying that, while he had been totally right to agree with the offensive sentiments, that didn’t mean he agreed with the sentiments that gave offense, or something. Ladies and gentlemen, our Foreign Secretary, on a one-man mission to remind the world that Boris Johnson wasn’t exactly an outlier when it came to privileged dildoes with microphones.

Johnson himself got a bit of a working over when it was revealed that much of his support was based on – and you may need to be sitting down with a stiff drink to hand while you digest this bombshell – his willingness to promise different factions completely contradictory things in order to secure their votes. Imagine that! Boris lying? Who would have thunk it? Telling the Brexiteers he would utterly rip up May’s withdrawal agreement and its hated Backstop provisions (which even steroid-necked peanut head Dominic Raab wasn’t willing to do) while simultaneously promising more moderate MPs that of course the already agreed withdrawal agreement would form the basis of his negotiating position, with a few tweaks. Oooh, Boris, purred the political press, you dashing rogue, you. Honestly, as an example of how infuriating it is when the Media unilaterally shield their favoured candidate from blowback, their treatment of Johnson is a towering phallic monument to the style. They keep on wondering if the crap he pulls might possibly hurt him, then in the next line they turn around and declare that “for some unknown reason” it’s not damaging him. No shit, Sherlock. It’s almost like he can knife a man on Carnaby Street and get away with it, isn’t it?

[Breaks for a spot of heavy breathing and snapping pencils. Gets splinter. Curses. Returns]

The second round of voting occurred yesterday against back-and-forth whispers that Johnson might be instructing some of his supporters to vote for Hunt in order to inflate his numbers and weaken the others. In the event that didn’t seem to happen, but the results were a bit of a shocker all around.

Boris Johnson – 126 (+12)
Jeremy Hunt – 46 (+3)
Michael Gove – 41 (+4)
Rory Stewart – 37 (+18)
Sajid Javid – 33 (+10)
Dominic Raab – 30 (+3)

For all the talk of the inevitability of Boris and the near certainty that scores of Tory MPs would start flocking to his banner out of ambition and a very real fear of being labelled an internal enemy once his substantial arse gets poised above the Number 10 hot-seat, he’d still only picked up 12 new voters, which I’m pretty sure is fewer than the combined votes confirmed Brexiteers Leadsom and McVey had in the first round. That’s not a great showing, not even close. Dare I say it Johnson is hovering around the crazification factor for the Conservative Parliamentary Party which you can estimate by seeing how many voted against May last December when the ERG group was manoeuvred into trying to remove her from the Premiership at the worst possible moment for a leadership challenge. He’s still the prohibitive favourite, probably, but as far as momentum goes, I don’t see it.

Jeremy Hunt has been the official winner of the Runner-Up Trophy twice now, but he’s also having a momentum problem. To me he gives off a very strong “British Mitt Romney” vibe and his essential privileged dullness seems to be working against him. People keep dropping out but he’s not picking up many of their voters. The same is true of Gove, he’d like to be the guy who can unite Brexiteers and moderates in opposition to Johnson, but the truth is not many people like or trust the slimy little turd, which is doable if you have the institutional power to command obedience through threats of retribution (let’s call it the Trump Doctrine) but is a real handicap when you’re trying to become Primes inter Pares of a group as reflexively vicious as Tory MPs.

Rory Stewart was, of course, the big surprise of this round, picking up the most new voters and winning plaudits for rejecting the groupthink on Brexit and negotiations with the EU. OTOH there have been wobbles, with the ‘Not really that Tory for a Tory’ gloss being tarnished first by some overdue attention to his voting record (loyal to the Government on all of the policies that have hollowed out public services and social care under the banner of Austerity) and then by his vote against Labour’s motion to rule out the No-Deal Brexit he’s supposed to oppose and his flip-flopping between “I’d never serve in a Johnson Cabinet” and “Oh yes I’d definitely serve in a Johnson Cabinet”. Defenders would point out that he’s fighting for the votes of Tory MPs and Tory Party members, so voting with Corbyn’s Labour on a motion so contrary to the opinions of the radicalised Party Base would be suicide, and that’s a fair point, but politics isn’t fair, is it? And vacillating about a Cabinet post just made him look shallow and easily moved about. You’re supposed to be the principled Tory that can win votes from Labour and the Lib-Dems, dude, not a fucking weathervane.

Sajid Javid just scraped into the running for the next round of votes, which is rather surprising considering his policies. I don’t know what it is about this devoted Thatcherite who dragged himself up by his own bootstraps to make a shitload of money in international finance and then gave it all up to become an MP comfortably on the Right of the Party that the bulk of his fellow MPs can’t get behind. It’s really odd. Far be it from me to cast aspersions, but a person could be forgiven for thinking that it might just be a teensy-weensy tiny little bit to do with the institutional Islamaphobia that is absolutely rife within the Conservative Party, so much so that the vast majority of Tories who would otherwise see Javid as the perfect Stop Boris candidate if his name were, say, Simon James, can’t see the point of getting him to a run-off where the electorate are openly and increasingly prejudiced against ‘those people’.

Dominic Raab was the biggest loser, falling below the 33-vote threshold and going out of the race. Not that surprising. He’d tried to define himself as the arch-Brexiteer, but with Johnson staying out of the media spotlight and working the Westminster factions by promising everyone whatever they wanted, Raab was forced to compete with a phantom. That’s what his gaffe about proroguing Parliament was about, staking out an extreme position where he thought Johnson ‘might’ not be willing to go and paying for it when he had to justify it in front of the cameras. His people complained after the fact that Johnson stole away his natural constituency of ERG-branded Brextremists even before the contest began by making outlandish promises Raab couldn’t match, but that simply makes him look like an idiot for persevering with his candidacy. Goodbye, peanut-head, I’m sure we’ll see your altogether too pleased with himself for no discernible reason face again soon enough.

The real jaw-dropping event of yesterday was the release of a YouGov poll of Tory Party members that… well… I’ll just drop these here and let them stand as a tribute to what the ‘Natural Party of Government’ has become.

“For each of the following scenarios say whether you would rather Brexit did or did not take place, even if Brexit led definitely to the scenario becoming a reality.”

Scotland leaving the United Kingdom
Do Brexit = 63% Drop Brexit = 29%

Significant damage to the UK economy
Do Brexit = 61% Drop Brexit = 29%

Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom
Do Brexit = 59% Drop Brexit = 28%

The Conservative Party being destroyed
Do Brexit = 54% Drop Brexit = 36%

Fucking hell. It’s officially a cannibal cult.

There is one scenario where the cultists would let their precious drop into the fiery heart of Mount Doom, though. Can you guess what it is?

Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister
Do Brexit = 39% Drop Brexit = 51%

Oh, and there’s this.

“Would you be happy or unhappy if Nigel Farage became leader of the Conservative Party?”

Happy = 46% Unhappy = 40% Neither = 13% Don’t Know = 1%

Now, there has been a lot of talk, officially poo-pooed by the Conservative Party’s mandarins, of large-scale entryism into the Party from UKIP and even further Right. Some estimate up to 30% of the membership are basically agents of the Brexit Party (which doesn’t have its own membership rolls, being in fact a limited company selling shares in the Nigel Farage brand) on a mission to either drag the Tories with them or force the ‘moderates’ to split off so that they can wear the Party’s skin like a onesie. But even so, these numbers are absolutely fucking horrifying. I can only imagine the seismic shift in openly hostile media coverage that would follow any similar kind of polling amongst Labour Party members, but since it’s Tories happily casting aside the Union, the economy and their own Party in pursuit of Brexit unicorns… one day wonder and a plunge down the memory hole for you, inconvenient facts.

And these are the people who will get to choose the next Prime Minister. We’re doomed.

On to the BBC leadership debate itself, which by all accounts was a bit of a damp squib. I didn’t catch it myself, being out with my partner while she pitched for (and won) funding for a Community Garden she’s setting up in our area, but I’ve caught the highlights and I can see what they mean. Johnson was as you’d expect, blustering and evasive, with no grasp of issues or even his own policies. You’d be forgiven for thinking he really wasn’t that enthusiastic about winning the contest, which wouldn’t be all that surprising, given the insane Party he’d be leading into nailed-on disaster.

Stewart came in for a kicking from the other three also-rans who have clearly decided that he’s getting above his station with this ‘Nice Guy’ campaign and needs to be reminded that David Cameron patented that line of bullshit roughly a decade ago and he won’t be allowed to make the rest of them look like shitbags by comparison.

Hunt and Gove didn’t do much to move the needle either way, with the former promoting decrepit and out-dated pro-business, anti-regulation quackery as the solution to all Britain’s ills and the latter trying to thread a needle between claiming Brexit as his baby while also shedding tears for the poor and the marginalised. Javid got a good moment when he pivoted from Johnson and Hunt’s really cringingly bad responses to a question about Islamophobia and the racist language they’ve used to a call for a full-on independent inquiry into how prevalent it is in the Tory Party, but then you remember what Party it is he’s trying to win the leadership of and it don’t look so much of a win.

In the aftermath, the usual polling took place. Some of the highlights include:

Amongst Tory voters Johnson was declared the winner, with Hunt second and Stewart third, while amongst Labour and Lib-Dem voters Stewart was the runaway winner with Hunt second and Johnson way back. That’s not good news for Saint Rory, but very good news for the Johnson campaign. He could drop a turd on the stage and as long as he turned to camera, smirked, and muttered something about “Miffle piffle…. Corbyn’s head” his support would still rocket.

There is something very, very wrong with these people.

So currently it’s about halfway through the next round of voting. I expect that the bulk of Raab’s support will go to Johnson, which should elevate him over the 150 mark, and maybe even to over 50% of MPs. Short of a scandal even he couldn’t shrug off (Dead girl, live boy, undead panda) he’s going to go into the final round as the favourite of the nutbars who make up the Tory Party membership. The only question is which of the other candidates will join him there. Hunt looks shaky, Javid looks doomed, Gove looks stuck, Stewart may have shot his bolt after the results of the polls. I really do not know what is going to happen. One thing is for certain, though, whoever wins this election will be feted by the Media as a fresh new start for the Conservatives deserving of a chance to solve the Brexit Problem, and they’ll fail.

General Election before the end of the year, semi-official Tory/Brexit Party pact, and we’ll see how the last three years of epic fusterclucking has changed the opinion of the electorate.

******

Post Vote Addendum

So, the votes came in while I was on my way home and Stewart is out on his bony little arse.

Boris Johnson – 143 (+17)
Jeremy Hunt – 54 (+8)
Michael Gove – 51 (+10)
Sajid Javid – 38 (+5)
Rory Stewart – 27 (-10)

It looks like either Stewart’s supporters decided he was done for after the last debate or – more likely – a big chunk of his 2nd Round vote was ‘loaned’ to him by Johnson’s faction who wanted to ensure that Raab was picked off to free up his Brextremist voters for the front-runner. Now Johnson is within touching distance of 50% and the suspicion will be that he’s artificially propping up one or more of his opponents to orchestrate who his final opponent will be. Of course, he and his team may not be doing any such thing, but the suspicion is there, and you can be damned sure Team Bozo will be fanning it like mad.

What now? Well there’s another vote tomorrow and obviously there’s going to be a ton of pressure on Sajid Javid to fold up his tents and either bring as many of his supporters as possible across to one of the other Not Boris candidates or, since he’s an ambitious fellow with Brexiteer credentials, do what most of the other defeated candidates have done and bend the knee to the Lord of Misrule in return for a nice Cabinet post. OTOH it’s entirely possible that Johnson would prefer to have Javid with him in the final two (for obvious reasons) and might prop him up with spare votes over the next two rounds, which puts yet more pressure on Javid to drop out and take away Johnson’s ability to meddle.

Gove and Hunt’s teams will likewise be communicating to see what kind of deal there is to be done, but I don’t think either man will be willing to budge unless they have to. They’ll both be looking to see where Stewart’s 27 supporters go tomorrow and how their own vote totals hold up.

Bloody hell, these Tories, it’s never simple. That’s why I prefer reading about American politics. It’s all happening safely far, far away and to someone else. s/

Boris Johnson – 69 (yeah, it would be) supporters
Jeremy Hunt – 31 supporters
Michael Gove – 30 supporters
Dominic Raab – 21 supporters
Sajid Javid – 18 supporters
Matt Hancock – 15 supporters
Mark Harper – 6 supporters
Esther McVey – 5 supporters
Rory Stewart – 5 supporters
Andrea Leadsom – 4 supporters

Now you may be looking at those figures and wondering how the bottom four could get into the race when they have less than 8 backers. I refer you to the above-mentioned maxim about Tory MPs being duplicitous bastards. Some may be lying about who they support, some of the support may be amongst the 1/3 of MPs who haven’t given an opinion, some may be backing more than one horse. Whatever the truth of the matter, all of them have at least 8 MPs backing their candidacies and will be involved in the contest. Let’s look at them in reverse order and see how very, very bad and unsuited for any post higher than ‘Nameless Dead Extra in GOT spin-off’ they all are.

Andrea Leadsom (4 official supporters)
Dear, dear me, this one’s a floater. Former Leader of the House of Commons, during which time she waged an ultimately unsuccessful war against John Bercow to prevent Parliament from having any say whatsoever in Brexit policy. Came through the usual Tory career route of working in Finance before being parachuted into a safe seat. Perfected the art of saying how very, very important she thought issues like environmental protection and marriage equality were before being ‘forced’ on some damned technicality to vote against laws that would improve or expand them. You may well be familiar with the type. Justly infamous for saying men shouldn’t be child minders because they’re probably paedophiles, has a very shady history with her taxes, and is basically a brand-stamped right-wing Tory nitwit who gets by because she’ll do whatever her bosses tell her and is always ready to say something colossally stupid when a distraction is called for. Bounced back and forth on the issue of Europhobia; supporting a Referendum in 2011, saying that leaving the EU would be an economic disaster in 2013, then being a loud Leave voice in 2016. Came 2nd to Theresa May in the last Tory leadership joust, forced to retire after saying that the fact she had children gave her more of a stake in the future than the (medically) childless May. Ouch!

Her campaign launch this time had her insisting that Parliament didn’t have the right to block a No-Deal Brexit and that the 31st of October was her red line for being out of the EU, which translates into Tory patois as “Imma gonna go WTO, melonfarmer!” and is all about appealing to the Brexit Ultras to save her already stumbling campaign, which won’t be helped by her recent equivocation over whether she’d let the Scots have a 2nd Independence Referendum. Double Ouch! Other than being a complete Brexiteer her big thing is claiming she wants greater funding for policies that support childcare, which is pretty much par for the hypocritical course for a former minister in a Government that slashed all of these programmes to the bone and condemned millions of children to hunger and poverty. She really opposed all that, you see, because she’s a mother. Take her word for it? Nah.

Rory Stewart (5 official supporters)
The Humble Hufflepuff with the backstory of a much-loved but little-attended 2nd son from a Victorian Era Top 10,000 family. The International Development Secretary has done it all, if by ‘all’ we mean “Things you need to be well-connected and financially carefree enough to say bugger the consequences about”. Born in Hong Kong, raised in Scotland and Malaysia, educated at Eton and Oxford, private tutor to the Royal Princes, served briefly in the Black Watch, employed straight off the bat by the Foreign Office (with whispers he may have been doing his bit for MI6 at the time) before taking up a post in Occupied Iraq, during which he was involved in a siege and won an OBE. Walked across Central Asia, worked for a development charity in Afghanistan, speaks many languages, became a Tory MP and has pushed numerous policies that aren’t actually cruel or destructive, which is really odd and out-of-place considering the Party he campaigns for. Brad Pitt bought the rights to his life story with Orlando fucking Bloom lined up to play him in the oddest bit of casting since a young Charles Bronson did that season and a half as Mr Ed. Joanna Lumley says he’s “Just lovely, darling” and he personally delivered his own firstborn child, for fuckity fucksake. Voted Remain in the Referendum, totally opposed to No-Deal and has been scathing about the rightward drift of the Tory Party on the matter since 2016. On the debit side, a close friend of the slimy Michael Gove (about whom more later) and is a Minister in the same Tory Government that brought us Austerity and the current spiral into grotesque inequality, so yeah, it’s not all golden sunshine and iced tea on the veranda.

In all seriousness, though, by far the best of a bad bunch. Seems like a pretty decent guy with the instincts of a diplomat. Woefully out of place in the modern Tory Party and has absolutely zero chance of winning the leadership, but this run might stand him in very good stead when he runs for leader of the Reformed Conservative and Orthodox Wiccan Party in 2030.

Esther McVey (5 official supporters)
Absolute fucking horror show and a disgrace both as a human being and a carbon-based lifeform. Memorably described by colleagues as someone who would “unplug you from life support so she could charge her phone” she’s the base mould for the neo-Thatcherite Tory MP. After a short career as a TV presenter (good luck finding anyone from that period with a good word to say about her) she entered politics and had various stints in and around the Dept of Work and Pensions where she gained a well-deserved reputation for having complete contempt for the poor and for brazen lying in pursuit of far-right ‘policies of punishment’. It’s a long list, but highlights include having oversight of the Health and Safety Executive taken away from her when she was Employment Secretary because the family business she’d been director of was revealed to have violated H&S laws and lying to Parliament about the recommendations of a National Audit Office report into the Government’s brutally nihilistic Universal Credit scheme, both of which she survived by dint of being so nasty her bosses could always use her as a hate sponge. More recently she deleted a tweet claiming all member states would have to adopt the Euro in 2020 (then lied about it) and sneeringly declared that the poor people her policies had immiserated only used food banks because they spent all their money on expensive mobile phones.

A hard-core Brexiteer who has announced she favours a No-Deal Brexit on or before October 31st and would purge anyone with a hint of Remainer heresy from her cabinet, she’s got no chance of getting the big job, but that’s not why she’s running. Her entire campaign is a profile-raising audition for a place in the eventual winner’s cabinet and a favour to equally extreme but less universally despised candidates who can paint themselves as moderate in comparison.

Mark Harper (6 official supporters)
Who? Sounds Australian. Is he an actor? A singer? He’s not a chef, is he? Ah, yes, I remember, a former Chief Whip who had stints in the Shadow Cabinet and later in Cameron’s Coalition Government as Minister for Making Sure Liberal-Democratic Policies Went Nowhere and Minister for Making It Harder for Disabled People to Claim Benefits. Makes a big deal of being a State School educated candidate, though he did of course go to Oxford, and had a career as an accountant for KPMG (lovely people, so trustworthy) before entering politics. Despite a resume that includes enthusiastically implementing May’s ugly ‘Hostile Environment’ policies while Immigration Minister and being a fervent foreign policy hawk he’s pretty much a moderate in Tory terms (if not in actuality), which makes him a nobody and his campaign an exercise in offering a non-existent ‘Tory Centre’ someone to coalesce around.

On Brexit, he voted Remain, but now is doing the usual hot-coal dance of saying he thinks he can get a negotiated deal (unicorn flavoured and sprinkled with magic pony dust) but won’t rule out a No-Deal, and would support a can-kicking extension after 31st October. That alone guarantees he’s getting nowhere with the Tory membership and he’ll be lucky to make it past the first couple of rounds.

Matt Hancock (15 official supporters)
The very ambitious Health Secretary who thinks he can be the dark horse candidate the ‘Anyone but Boris’ majority would prefer to elevate to the Big Chair. Private school and Oxbridge educated economist who served as Chief of Staff to Chancellor George Osborne and so was one of the architects of Austerity. Whereas a lot of the Tory candidates come to Politics via Business and treat the job as a route to buying that Grift City penthouse, Hancock appears to be a real Politics First boy, bopping around various jobs as enforcer of Conservative Austerity policy and being the go-to guy when you need someone who can bullshit economics numbers to make those policies seem less disastrous for the country. Fast tracked at every opportunity he apparently considers himself the ‘cool, young candidate’ that The Yoot will swing Blue for. Why? Well he knows the Internet isn’t a series of tubes and has his own App, which, if you ignore the fact that it’s been scathingly reviewed by privacy campaigners as a nightmare of data capture for anyone using it, at least sounds Kewl.

Brexit wise, he voted Remain and he’s saying some of the right things, like No-Deal isn’t an option and the only choice is between leaving the EU with May’s withdrawal agreement or not leaving at all, but that’s going to cut no mustard with the fanatically Europhobic Party membership, for all that he’s cosied up to the Brexiteers post-Referendum. Basically, he’s doing the same “Oooh, I can renegotiate the Deal once I’m PM, trust me” bollocks as most other candidates and it’s just not what the very base Base want to hear. I don’t see a route for him to win if he gets to the last 2 standing, but maybe that’s as far as he intends to get. What sane person would want to become PM right now anyway?

Sajid Javid (18 official supporters)
The Saj! How does a working-class (non-practising) Muslim boy from Rochdale via Bristol become a Conservative Home Secretary of the UK? Easy. All he’s got to do is define himself as the Tory Party’s Asian Best-Friend, definitely not one of ‘those’ browns, who he’s always happy to rubbish and talk down while defending the Conservatives from accusations of Islamophobia. One of the few non-Oxbridge graduates in the Cabinet, The Saj made his way via Chase Manhattan and a stint as an aide to Rudi Giuliani’s 1993 Mayoral campaign, before deciding all that was far too milquetoast and moving to Deutche Bank for some hardcore bastardy. Jumped ship from his incredibly profitable banking role in 2009 [Ed- I can’t imagine why] to become a Tory MP. Devoted Thatcherite, eager neo-con, early-adopter Randian, steadfast defender of Israel and all its deeds. The Saj really should have joined the Republican Party, but then there’s that pesky Section 1/Article 2/Clause 5 thing blocking his way to the Oval Office, and The Saj isn’t having that. When he’s not lambasting Rochdale’s Muslims as paedophiles and telling Muslims in general that they have a unique responsibility to speak up against terrorism, he’s to be found pushing Immigration policies that would have kept his parents from settling here. What a fucking peach.

On Brexit, despite being officially Remain during the Referendum to please his boss, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (conviction politician, boo-yah!) he was always a severe Eurosceptic and is now one of the fantasists insisting he can win concessions from the EU by ‘digitising’ the Irish Border (using technology that doesn’t exist) while preparing for a No-Deal (like the Government hasn’t spunked away tens of millions of pounds doing just that). Can he win? He’s Thatcherite enough, lies enough, and says all of the cruel and stupid things the Tory membership love to hear, but he’s…. you know…. not really quite…. a bit too… eeehhhhhhhh… “something something Darrrrk Sssside”.

Dominic Raab (21 official supporters)
It might seem odd that a former Brexit Secretary who expressed surprise that the Dover-Calais route was a major conduit for British trade and gave a heartfelt speech in favour of May’s withdrawal deal before resigning in opposition to it would think that he had the necessary mental engine to take on the role of PM, but it’s quite possible that Raab hasn’t thought that far ahead. Another Oxbridge graduate who went the lawyer route before finding his way into politics as Chief of Staff to fellow pudding brained delusionist David ‘Blank Slate’ Davis and eventually MP for Safe Tory Seat-in-the-Wold by 2010. If you ever need someone to argue the retrograde side about human rights, union rights, women’s rights, prisoner’s rights, parliament’s rights, any kind of rights at all, really, Raab is the guy for you. One of the authors of ‘Britannia Unchained’, a blueprint for turning Britain into a ‘Tiger Economy’ by slashing regulations, corporate taxes, wages, unions, etc, etc, blah blah, copied and pasted from American Enterprise Institute press releases and the annotated rantings of Ming the Merciless, he’s a fucking idiot with a head like an inflated peanut.

On Brexit, come on, he was Brexit Secretary, which means he’s someone the Brexiteers could feel confident in. He’s all about ‘forcing’ the EU to reopen the withdrawal agreement and if they won’t do that (which they won’t, duh) then being happy to crash Britain out into the waiting arms of the WTO, were we’ll be tearfully embraced and handed a glass of the finest champagne while the music swells and ticker-tape rains from the ceiling. In other words, fantasy bullshit, but the kind that Tory members gobble up, because they, like Raab, are dumb as a bag of horsecocks.

Michael Gove (30 official supporters)
The slimy little worm who, along with Boris Johnson, fronted the Leave Campaign back in 2016 and was Johnson’s campaign manager right up until the morning he was supposed to declare, at which point Gove stabbed the Great White Joke in his ample back by calling him unfit to lead and announced his own candidacy. Ah, those were the days. Yet another Oxford graduate, went into journalism after being told he wasn’t ‘political’ enough for the Tories and ended up at the Times, where he became and remains a devoted admirer of Rupert Murdoch. Served as Minister for Education under the Coalition and spent four years shitting that bed so completely that Cameron had to move him to Chief Whip in 2014. Sacked by May after coming a distant third in the 2016 leadership race, his return to Government in 2017 was seen as an attempt to shore up her pro-Brexit flank while also sticking it to Boris and sucking up to the Murdoch Machine. Outwardly a May loyalist, he is first and foremost the eyes, ears and voice of Murdoch within the Cabinet, and is about as trustworthy as an armed mole. Initially quite badly hurt after being prompted (probably by advance warnings from friends in the media of revelations to come) to admit to cocaine use while a journalist, he seems to be weathering it as the Press starts wondering aloud why poor ickle Govie is being hammered for something Boris admitted to ages ago. Heart. Bleeding.

On Brexit, he’s obviously a Brexiteer, and another one spinning fantasies about getting the EU to re-open the withdrawal agreement by threatening a No-Deal while also being careful to underline that he’s not opposed to a ‘short delay’ should negotiations call for it – i.e. another extension past October 31st. His problem is, what’s the point of Michael Gove? He’s not the anti-Boris, and he’s not the other-Boris, he’s just the guy who once shafted Boris but lies almost as much. Plus, he has the face and manner of an outraged Vicar in a Richard Curtis film.

Jeremy Hunt (31 official supporters)
Rhymes with c….orrupt incompetent arsehole. Born a Tory to an ancient Tory lineage, processed through Charterhouse and Oxford, destined for Offices of State regardless of any failing in ability because that’s just how those people roll. After being President of Oxford University’s Conservative Association he would have been expected to progress straight to Chief Politics Editor for the oh-so studiously neutral BBC, but instead made a nice pile selling off a company he founded selling guides to studying abroad through old-school tie connections with the British Council, a style of shady grifting he has yet to abandon even as a Government minister. Co-wrote a pamphlet (with Michael Gove) calling for the NHS to be sold off and replaced by a U.S. Insurance system, then denied holding those opinions (like Michael Gove). As Culture Secretary he cut funding for the Arts to the bone and acted as a point-man for Murdoch’s News International, and as Health Secretary was a complete disaster, constantly blown up for lying, in and out of court for exceeding his Ministerial powers and generally doing whatever he could to destabilise the NHS so he could push stealth privatisation. Rewarded for his long record of cock ups with Boris Johnson’s abandoned Foreign Secretary post he immediately inserted his tongue up the conjoined rectums of Saudi Arabia and Mike Pompeo, defending arms sales to the Saudis while comparing the EU to the Soviet Union, as you do.

On Brexit he’s taken the slow Damascene route from Remain voter pre-Referendum through advocate for staying in the Single Market to supporting May’s hard Brexit, with a more recent swing through opposing No-Deal to his current pose of being comfortable with threatening one, while insisting that various European leaders have told him on the QT that they’ll renegotiate May’s withdrawal agreement once he’s PM [Narrator – They haven’t, and won’t] All in all a dodgy ‘free-enterprise’ spiv who’ll say whatever you want him to if the money is right. Quite the complete modern Conservative.

Boris Johnson (69 official supporters)
What can be said about this splatter of half-boiled chicken fat in a swollen pig’s testicle that hasn’t been said before? Eton thug and Oxford vandal, fake journalist and television stereotype, a chillingly solipsistic gush of relentless, cynical, self-serving deceit obscured behind the carefully crafted personae of a bumbling, stumbling but ultimately well-meaning upper-class buffoon. His entire career has been littered with the same accusations and the same excuses. He lies, he cheats, he gets caught out, he shambles off denying any ill-intention and leaves the mess for the proles to clean up. Relationships, jobs, political appointments, it’s all the same to this slovenly fuck. Boris wants, Boris takes, Boris makes the Press laugh and gets away with it. It’s all an act, a big old joke that the Media thinks it’s in on, because more than anything they want the Boris Show dragging eyeballs and clicks to their product. The fact that the Tory Party membership seems to want this shallow creep in the top job is as clear a testament to their callous imbecility as you can imagine, and the fact that a majority of Tory MPs (supposedly) would rather see virtually anyone else (other than Esther McVey) get the job is possibly proof that the Parliamentary Party hasn’t entirely lost its senses. That’s why so many other candidates have jumped into a race that – if you listen to the Tory membership – is Johnson’s to lose, and why Johnson himself has been so loath to step outside the bubble of his well-paid column in the Telegraph; a lot of Tory MPs can see the disaster he represents galumphing towards them and will try to do whatever it takes to make sure doesn’t take them with him. OTOH, a lot of other Tory MPs just see how much the Media love him and hope his talent for dodging responsibility for multiple failures can be widened to include the Party as a whole.

On Brexit, he’ll promise everything to everyone, lie through his teeth and dissemble, deny and fudge as much as he can, but in the end it all comes down to the only question that matters in that weaselly little mind of his – what’s best for Boris? The EU have openly stated their disdain for him, so there’s no way in hell he’s going to get any concessions, and his threat to withhold the £39 billion in ‘divorce bill’ payments owed by the UK to the EU until a satisfactory withdrawal deal is reached is clearly smoke and mirrors designed to impress the gullible. That’s for payments up to 2020, so a large chunk of it has already been paid off. I can just foresee Johnson coming back to London after a humiliating failure to charm/threaten the EU and declaring he’d forced them to give us a rebate, so we had to pay less, so victory! The Media would lap that bullshit up like a dog with vomit.

So, that’s the candidates. A right old horror show, but hey, have you met the Tory Party? This is them on a good day. Who do I think will win? Johnson is the early favourite but it’s very much up in the air. Now that the contest has actually started the knives are going to come out and they will start hacking away at each other with every smear, secret and scurrilous rumour they can dredge up, starting with the front-runners. It already started with Gove’s cocaine revelations, though that quickly turned into a pretty cringeworthy competition between lower tier candidates to see who could confess to the least damaging incident of youthful drug-use (I smoked dope and didn’t like it! Well I may have inadvertently consumed a Mary Joanna cake! Look at me, I possibly had opium with my curry once! Get out of the way, I used to cut my heroin with dog biscuit and inject it during school trips to the farm!….. oh, wait, no, that was someone else, I meant I stood next to someone doing poppers once and felt sick) and Raab’s old issue with harassment allegations and a non-disclosure agreement he signed are bubbling back up. It’s going to be much more brutal than the race of 2016 because the radicalised state of the Conservative Party thanks to Brexit has left the gatekeepers of Party discipline much weaker. One thing’s for certain, none of them want to get into that final run-off with an undamaged Boris Johnson, so I expect the shit to start flying in his direction sooner than you’d expect.

And whatever happens, even though some of them (The Saj, Hancock) have come out of the gates trying very hard to position themselves as the “Who can win a post-Brexit General Election?” candidate, the eventual winner is going to have to offer the membership some kind of a route to a No-Deal crash-out, because unless they can offer a total EU capitulation instead (which just so isn’t ever going to happen like, ever) the Base has been steadily propagandised into wanting Victory over Europe more than they want the Tory Party itself to stay in power. Farage’s Brexit Party is out there (keeping very, very quiet) and would just love to have their votes instead or, even better, a bunch of extreme Tory MPs changing Party labels and forcing a General Election. The way they’re positioning themselves now only Stewart and Hancock are ruling out a No-Deal, while all of the others are slithering around between using the threat as a weapon to force concessions and preferring it to any other option. As the contest intensifies and chunks of reputational flesh start greasing the climbing surface all of the space for ambiguity will be blocked off and – IMHO – it will be a race to see who can slide into that sweet spot between going full-on Coalition with Nigel Farage PLC and convincing the Media that all the talk of having them hung on lampposts is just guff to keep the headbangers riled up and on their side.

Currently that’s Johnson’s territory, but there’s a way to go and nobody ever lost money assuming the worst of an ambitious Conservative politician, did they?

******
Edited to Add –
Last night the Labour Party put forward an Opposition Motion that would have set aside a day for Parliament to vote on officially ruling out the prospect of a No-Deal, but it was defeated on a more or less Party-line vote 309 to 298, with enough MPs abstaining on both sides to leave plenty of space for everyone to get blamed. This is being interpreted as a reason to be cheerful for the pro-No Deal candidates, even as it’s a kick in the head, guts and balls for the country (like the Media cares about that, brah). Now it’s the morning of the first round of votes and updated figures have come out for each candidates’ support since they all officially declared and made their pitches. They are –

Boris Johnson – 83 (+14)
Jeremy Hunt – 34 (+3)
Michael Gove – 32 (+1)
Dominic Raab – 21 (+0)
Sajid Javid – 18 (+0)
Matt Hancock – 17 (+2)
Rory Stewart – 8 (+3)
Mark Harper – 7 (+1)
Esther McVey – 5 (+0)
Andrea Leadsom – 4 (+0)

Make of that what you will. I guess not shitting his pants while resolutely refusing to answer any of the 6 questions he allowed at his campaign launch stood Johnson in good stead amongst the Contra-Intelligencia set. Or maybe it was the defence of racist and homophobic language that ticked their G-minors. Whatever, he’s definitely the front-runner.

Results are expected around 1pm GMT, by which time one or more of the also-rans will be out.
******
Edited again to add-
Right, the votes are in and they were as follows.

Boris Johnson -114 (+31)
Jeremy Hunt – 43 (+9)
Michael Gove – 37 (+7)
Dominic Raab – 27 (+6)
Sajid Javid – 23 (+5)
Matt Hancock – 20 (+3)
Rory Stewart – 19 (+11)
Mark Harper – 10 (+3)
Esther McVey – 9 (+4)
Andrea Leadsom – 11 (+7)

So Johnson has ended up with more or less the same number of supporters as voted AGAINST Theresa May back in the December 2018 leadership challenge. Interesting. Harper and Leadsom are out because they didn’t reach 5% support (16 supporters plus their own vote). McVey is out because she received fewest votes and is a toxic scumbag that only the world’s worst people could ever like, so chances are Johnson gets her voters in the next round.

The next round of voting is supposed to drop anyone with fewer than 33 supporters, which is bad news for Raab, Javid, Hancock and Stewart because, since all MPs voted, the only way they can increase their percentage and get through to the later rounds is by wooing supporters from other candidates, which will be very tough. You can probably put Leadsom’s 11 supporters in the No-Deal pile as well, which leaves only Harper’s 10 supporters for either Hancock or Stewart to cannibalise if they can, and even if one of them gets them all, that’s not enough to survive. It looks very much like Javid, Gove, Raab and Hunt would be well advised to start leaking the dirt they have on Johnson while kicking down against the anti-No Deal pair, trimming or constricting his lead while marking themselves out as the Answer to the problem of Boris. Like I said, none of them want to be up against him when it gets down to the postal votes because the Tory Base will be goo-goo for war on Europe by then with the Flaxen Fuckwit as their standard bearer.

There may be scandals, ahead.