What Do You Think Today?

[Avatar]

Honestly, I'm not sure (from my remove of course) that I agree. In fact, I would hazard a guess that far fewer people think (or even know) about the status of his nationality than do about his colour.

--A

[Forestal]

Until recently I would have agreed with you, but prior to the confidence vote in Boris the issue of his greencard was quite prominent in the media so I suspect more people are aware of it than would otherwise be expected.

[peter]

Granted, amongst the Tory Party membership knowledge of his status as a green card holder will be universal - and it will be a serious black mark against him. But it will only reinforce a decision that has already been made at a deeper more gut level. Look at the profile of the average member in terms of age, social class, sex and ethnic background. I'm not saying that the kind of soft prejudice I'm talking of is universal in this demographic - but it's dominant.

Anyway, let's have a look at the papers.

The Telegraph has a corner piece saying that the pound is on its way down to parity with the dollar. This is not big news insofar as it is pretty much expected, but it strikes a chord with me for the following reason. Over the course of my life, simple being that I am, I've never taken much interest in currency fluctuations, but the pound versus the dollar value has always been a (what shall I say) ..... an unthought about fact sitting in back of my knowledge about how things were going.

In my first understanding of such things it was easy. One pound equalled two dollars. Then over the decades it slipped in my mind (as in actuality) to one point eight, followed by an unconscious (almost) revision to one point five. Latterly its been for a decade or so around one point two, and I'm guessing now or before long, It'll change to a round parity of one for one. These are not, I stress chosen bench marks in my mind - just the simplified absorbed rounding out of what is percolating into my consciousness from the media. But suffice to say that it is mirrored I guess, by an overall way in which I see the general fortunes of my country which, not again consciously or deliberately is being chip, chip, chipped away at, over the course of the years. So yes, the arrival of parity is of a rather sad significance for me: we are half that which we were when I first became aware of who I was, what was my standing in the world. When I was young I thought I/we could do anything. Now I/we find that it is not so - that I/we are less than I/we thought...... and always really were. We just didn't realize it.

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Average GP salary is now sitting at around a hundred and forty thousand pounds a year. Doctors work on average a three day week (six half day shifts), a full weeks work being simply too stressful for them. Their pay rose by eleven percent during the pandemic and they will shortly be considering whether they should embark upon industrial action in support of a further pay increase.

People on the other hand, struggle to see a doctor when they need one. It can take days or even weeks to get an appointment. Often the first port of call will be a telephone 'triage' call with a nurse or secretary, followed by a surgery appointment with a health auxiliary. After this, if you are not better, in hospital or dead, you might get to see a GP (though it's unlikely to be one that knows you, knows your particular circumstances).

Gone are the days of an intimate familiarity between the doctor and the patients under his care. Again to harp on about my youth, it used to be that your doctor knew you, knew your family, had intimate knowledge of the circumstances of the families under his care and could apply all of this knowledge to make suggestions and give advice, alongside and supplementary to the treatment he was prescribing. But this is history and it isn't coming back, so what to do?

I'm of the opinion that the GP (in his new truncated role as glorified pharmacist) is one of the most ripe of professional individuals to be swept aside by new technology. His job would be, in the face of the development of a good AI system of diagnosis - quite within our current technical capabilities - completely redundant. We should lead the world in the rapid development of such a system, to be rolled out by the NHS, in which the vast majority of first contacts could be diagnosed, prescribed and treated without any human intervention, the latter only being done when the algorithm decides it is necessary, and carried out at specialised GP clinics set up for the purpose. People would not have a specific GP, but would rather be directed to the one with the earliest available appointment close to their home (or wherever, according to their ability to travel etc).

This is entirely within the grounds of possibility, but will never happen. The medical lobby, too protective of its own lucrative and high status position in society will, like the extension of the right to prescribe being extended to pharmacists, never let it happen.

[peter]

The papers have made much in the last couple of days about the interjection of the opinion of top QC Lord Pannick in respect of the parliamentary privileges committee investigation into whether Prime Minister Johnson deliberately misled the House of Commons when he told them that no rules had been broken in 10 Downing Street during the Covid pandemic lockdowns.

Pannick, who I believe was acting on instructions from Johnson himself, has looked into the matter in which the investigation is being carried out, and has come out with some pretty critical observations about the way that it is being conducted. He has said that were it not protected from challenge in the Courts, it would be found to be illegal in a number of respects, not least of which is that certain members of the committee have previously made comments respecting the PM which call into question their neutrality.

He has also singled out the (what he calls) moving of the goalposts in the wording of the statement of what the committee will be investigating - namely "whether the Prime Minister misled the House as to (etc)". This misses out the fundamental word 'deliberately' that is included in the code of conduct for Ministers, and means that the intention to mislead is not part of the consideration. Slightly funny that in Pannick's own arena, the Law Courts, ignorance is not considered to be an admissable defence, but let that go.

Now I happen to believe that he has a point. I myself was not happy to hear the now ex leader of the committee making comments to the tune that he considered the PM to be an incorrigible liar and could not see how a non-biased investigation could be carried out if one of the jury on the committee started from this assumption. This never sat well with me: I know Johnson's reputation as well as the next man, but in any such investigation as this he deserves to be given a fair hearing and so such assumptions must be put aside. I'm sure that the committee leader in question, MP Chris Bryant, would have done this, but it was foolish and inapropriate in the extreme for him to come out with the comments that he did.

On the deliberately issue I agree again. If a Minister gives what he believes is truthful information to the House that is later shown to be incorrect, then the onus is on him to come to the House and rectify the error at the earliest possible opportunity. In respect of the Johnson hearing, whether the PM deliberately misled the House is key. If he didn't, then fair enough - this isn't after all, a court of law. Either play it straight and by the book, or don't play it at all.

But this is exactly what the PM and Pannick, and the papers know that we will believe. And so they are using these arguments to suggest that the committee investigation should be watered down, fundamentally changed to make it easier for Johnson to be exonerated. Either changed or even dropped altogether. This I believe is wrong. Johnson stood at the dispatch box and gave the House details of what he believed to be the case. If he was lying and it can be proven beyond reasonable doubt (and no - his mouth moved will not do) then he must be censured. It's fundamentally important for our political process that breaches of the code of conduct do not go unpunished. If the precedent is set of allowing a Minister to 'get away with it' because they have left office, or because another apparent goal has been achieved (that of unseating him in Johnson's case), then the rot that will bring the whole system down has been allowed to creep in. Gosh knows, our politicians are slippery enough beasts when acting within the rules as laid down in the code of conduct - it beggars belief to think of what they'd get up to without such constraints being applied with Draconian stringency.

[peter]

Normally when a new leader is elected they get a honeymoon period where they are thought of as a saviour - the best thing since sliced bread.

Not so in the case of Liz Truss, who now seems all but certain to be announced as winner and the new UK Prime Minister tomorrow.

In an unusual level of post-leadership campaign animosity (despite Boris Johnson's plaintiff call for the Party to unite in today's Sunday Express, following this most divisive of contests) Truss is warned that if she packs her cabinet with Johnson lackeys and right wing ERG members, she will effectively tear the Party in two.

The parliamentary Conservative Party is a pretty broad spectrum affair (as indeed is the Labour Party who sit opposite them) and holding it together, especially in these post-brexit polarised times, is proving very difficult. Truss, whose background would suggest that she should sit fairly to the left of the Party, is rumoured to be going to build the most right wing cabinet that we have ever seen. She is vocal in announcing her own damascene conversion to the right wing of the party (though she doesn't put it like that unless questioned) and it may be that she really is now a true convert to the more extreme wing of the Party - but the jury is out on it. Certainly it is the right wing of the parliamentary party that is wielding the power at present, and any PM who wants to survive more than a short period has to keep this wing of the party on-side, like it or not.

And on the latter point, as if the above warnings to Truss were not enough for her to think about, the Sunday Mirror and another paper is running a story that there is an actual plot afoot to have her ousted from the job that she isn't even in yet, already! By this account, twelve MPs have already written up their letters of no confidence, ready for them to submit to the 1922 Committee the moment her victory is announced.

And to be fair to them they have a point. No-one in the country has any confidence that Truss is remotely capable of doing the job that she has by default as it were, won. It would be nothing short of a miracle - sort of on the level of those chimpanzees typing out the works of Shakespeare - if the parliamentary Conservative Party had any faith that she could do the job. She is without the slightest ability, charisma or history to suggest that she might even begin to make a better fist of it than those who have preceded her. She is vacillating of opinion, shifting this way and that according to the prevailing wind direction, she has no history (despite her claims to the contrary) of delivering on anything she is tasked with, and she will prove easy meat for the powerful forces that will push her this way and that, according to their wants. So in fairness, the parliamentary party's belief that she will flounder almost from day one sits on fairly solid bedrock.

But where to then is almost anybody's guess. It's been rumoured that the party has been told to prepare for a snap election, and it's not rocket science to see why they might want to. Any Prime Minister wants to have a mandate from the public to be in office: until they have actually won a general election (as opposed to a party leadership one) they cannot truly be said to have won that highest of office's. But in the current circumstances that the country finds itself in there's more. Things are likely to get so bad, so quickly, as the cumulative costs of brexit, the pandemic response, the war and now the cost of living crisis stack up, that the new PM has a choice between two really nasty options. Sit in office until the time of this electoral period runs out (January 2025) and then face the country almost certain of defeat because the shit has really hit the fan by then, or try and outrun the coming storm by holding the election asap, and hope you can get elected on the back of the previous huge conservative win (by an eighty plus seat majority) in 2019. It would be unprecedented for a party to loose that level of majority to the point where they failed to get elected - voting swings can be big, but not that big - but this is now....... So which will she go for? And will she even make it that far? Rumor has it that Johnson, like a stone in your shoe, simply will not go away. He is there, always, grumbling around in the background, and as his parting words in the Commons let it be known ("Hasta la vista baby!") has definite plans to be back, should circumstances allow for it.

So, safe to say, no easy ride for Truss in the coming months. I wonder if she's tough enough to take it. Theresa May wasn't - she had a virtual breakdown while in power, though it was very well concealed at the time - and for all Truss might be an idiot, I don't wish suffering on anyone. But hey, politics is a rough game and you go into it understanding 'the breaks' (as Johnson put it in his resignation speech).

It is what it is.

[peter]

I've had a gruelling few days involving heaps of pain and loss of work. To spare you the details, it finished up yesterday with a day spent in my local hospital, mostly passed waiting to be seen in the emergency dept.

At the end though, the wait was worth it: over the day I was assessed for triage purposes, blood and urine analysis was carried out, examined by a doctor and then given a second examination by a surgeon.

It was a difficult day, and not one I would choose to repeat, but at the end the NHS had functioned exactly as it was intended to and delivered a service that I can only be grateful to an almost pathetic extent for. We are so, so, lucky in the UK to have this service to turn to in times of desperate need. Our gratitude to the founding fathers, in particular Aneurin Bevan, the then Labour Health Secretary tasked with setting up the service based on the recommendations of the Beveridge Report of 1943, should know no bounds.

Ex US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, speaking at an Enough is Enough campaign event the other day, paid homage to it, stating that the recognition that health was a right, not a privilege to be bought and sold, and while this position may be argued with, the sentiment behind it is both clear and good.

This morning I can say from the bottom of my heart, thank you NHS.

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Today will see Liz Truss raised to the highest position of political power in the country. She is faced by a daunting task as she surveys the wasteland that twelve years of Tory rule has resulted in. Never since Churchill took up the reins in the darkest days of WW2 has a Prime Minister assumed office at such a critical time and facing such seemingly insurmountable odds. She has fought for this job, she has wanted it. More perhaps than her rival Rishi Sunak - an observation made in one of the morning papers and mirroring the words of Andrew Marr, who said that at the end of the day, the Tory Party crown always went to the one who wanted it most, who was prepared to be most ruthless in order to secure it.

Well, you've got your wish Liz, it's all yours now - let's see what you do with it. I can give you some advice - not that you'll take it, but I proffer it anyway. Play it straight. Cut out all of the mendacity and bullshit that we have seen with Johnson. You are the head of the government and must lead by example and crack down ruthlessly on any monkey business. Be seen to be honest and sincere in what you are doing, work in the interest of the people not the party, the many not the few, and people will cut you all of the slack you need. You have a mountain to climb, but get the people behind you and forget the vipers nest in which you will be immersed and you will do okay.

That's about it girl. I've said some beastly things about you before now - it's what I do. But it's clean sheet time...new start, tabula rasa stuff. Good luck. Go out and prove all of your critics, prove me, wrong. Believe me when I say, I want you to do this. My criticism of my country is because of my love of it, not because of my hatred of it. You guys have messed up big time and now you have the chance to begin to undo some of the damage. Go to it!

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Odd little story on the bottom section of the front page of the Telegraph today. It appears that any foreigner who begins a romance with a Palestinian while visiting the West Bank must declare it to the authorities within 90 days or be forced to leave the country. Doesn't sound like a terribly moral ruling to me, though no-doubt the Israeli authorities have sound reasons for wanting it. But it won't go down as a particularly proud moment in the upholding of the rights of freedom and democracy in the country that's for sure. Still, no-doubt they know their own business best.

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You must know that your career as a photographic model has hit rock bottom when you appear on the front of the Daily Star as one of their working class stereotypes - pictures that regularly show men with huge exposed beer-bellys and string vests quaffing pints of lager over a suitably composed play on words relating to the issue of the day. (Today's is "Tears for Beers" - a nod to the price of beer going through the roof along with everything else at the moment).

The models used often have to pull a ridiculous face - one that must have their family members curling their toes in embarrassment - that I can only believe they must be payed shed loads of money for, or why would they do it?

But then, the peculiarly English pastime of gurning has always been a bit of a mystery to me. It takes, I'd think, a peculiar lack of inhibition, to be prepared to twist your face into it's most contorted form, in full view of the public at large. Either that or an inordinate amount of self confidence. It's not something I could ever bring myself to do, even in the privacy of my own bathroom in front of the mirror. (Having said that, I imagine that I came pretty close to it yesterday in the A&E department of the local hospital, such was the pain I was in.) Occasionally you'll get a celebrity to have a go on TV, but you can tell that they never put their heart into it - not like those people up in Yorkshire who put their heads through a horse collar and really go for it. Those guys finish up looking like a face cast in play-dough that someone has dug their fingers into and twisted round in a circle.

I have to say that I don't get it though. There are, or must be, fundamentally different types of human being - there can be no other explanation for it. But more power to their elbow. It would be a dull world if we were all made the same. And apologies if today's posting has been a bit odd; my experiences of the last few days have left me somewhat.... drained, shall we say. Sort of wrung out.

Hmmm.....

[Avatar]

Well, I see (unsurprisingly) that Truss is indeed the new PM.

(With...57%?) (I can't be bothered to go back and check, but wasn't your prediction 56%? )

Sorry to hear about your travails though Peter, nothing too severe or prolonged I hope.

Lucky to have the NHS indeed.

--A

[peter]

Thanks Av: feeling much better today.

On the Truss result, forgive me a little trumpet blowing, but I got closer than that. For the record, on August 25 I posted,

Okay it's prediction time. Let's do the math.

I then gave a list of reasons why Sunak would be slaughtered - or actually, only one (because he was brown), the rest being on the makeup of the tory party membership - and said that they would never be able to reveal the true result because it would expose them for what they are - a bunch of racist bigots - and that would be highly embarrassing.

I went on to work out the strategy of the deception that they would follow, and came up with the following,

.....So that's it. Fifty seven/eight percent Truss, forty two/three percent Sunak it is. Job's a good 'un. Pass me the envelope.

The actual result came in at Truss 57.4 percent, Sunak 48.3 percent. That's not accurate - that's frikkin' spooky!

But come on. This result is for the birds. The bulk of the people voting in this contest would be in UKIP now if it weren't for Johnson. They'd be hovering around the BNP if they could get away with it. Anybody who believes that forty plus percent of this lot are going to vote for an Indian Prime Minister (as they see him) is away with the fairies!

Think about it. Sunak is spared humiliation, the party is spared embarrassment, everyone is happy. The press will make the right noises and pretend that Sunak stood a chance. They are already saying, "the result was a lot closer than everyone expected, it could have been Sunak". Yeah right. Tell me another one!

[Forestal]

The actual result came in at Truss 57.4 percent, Sunak 48.3 percent. That's not accurate - that's frikkin' spooky!

I think the spooky bit is that's 105.7% and no one has said anything!

[peter]

Sorry - pride before a fall and all that! Should have been 42.3 percent. My mistake. (But that's a technical error in my last post: I was still frikkin' bang on! ).

[peter]

Liz Truss, as you would expect, is being feted in all the papers today, though the adulation score is by no means up to the normal levels that is usually seen on the morning after a new PM is elected.

In fairness, it's never quite the same as when a politician wins their party leadership while the party is in opposition, and then carries the party forward to victory in the polls at the next election, but the Tories are making a habit of pulling down PM's while they are still in office and one wonders if Truss will be any different.

For today her real work starts, and boy has she picked a time to do it. With the country facing the worst crisis in it's history, barring having the massed armies of the third Reich sitting ready to roll on the other side of the Chanel, it's a wonder that she is not running screaming for the hills rather than preparing to hop up to Balmoral for her traditional audience with the Queen.

In fact, I'm struggling to remember the last Prime Minister we had who actually resigned following a defeat at a general election. Johnson, May, Cameron......all went while in office. Brown maybe? (Five minutes 'Wikipeding') Yes Brown. The fact is that for the Tory Party, the 'broad church' of their membership is becoming increasingly difficult to hold together and what we are seeing is likely the end of the (much touted by its adherents) "most successful political party in the world". Well yes - I suppose so......if years of survival as a coherent (well - sometimes) unit are anything to go by. It's death throes are twisting and tortured, and have all revolved around our much lamented and argued about membership of the European Union, but are likely nearing their end. It is not an impossibility that Liz Truss may be the last Conservative Prime Minister that this country will ever see.

Because, let's face it, this can only go on for so long, and the internecine war within the party has effectively on this occasion, brought the country close to existential ruin. We have heard the incoming PM describe Nicola Sturgeon as an "attention seeker" who should be ignored. Well good luck with that. Sturgeon's calls for a second Scottish independence referendum are likely to become evermore strident and difficult to ignore, and she will fight the next general election as if it were no less than this. A resounding win for the SNP north of the border and it is indeed curtains for the Union. After the loss of Scotland, that of Northern Ireland and Wales could never be far behind. And despite the rhetoric in parliament about the commitment to the Union and whatever, out in the country there are a surprising number of Conservative voters who are comfortable enough with that. For many older ones all of the other countries of the United Kingdom are really only an extension of their England based thinking anyway - and in the younger Conservative voters (particularly in the North) they simply don't hold the Union as being anything special or worth fighting to preserve. To them, Northern Ireland and Scotland are just a problem, a drain on English money that they could do without.

So Truss is going to have a fight on her hands simply holding her own party together. She has already started doing exactly the stuff that will result in her loosing the right of the party - announcing big socialist style forthcoming interventions in order to prop up domestic households for the onslaught of the coming winter (with its multifarious dangers and pitfalls) - and let's face it, what other choice has she? If she doesn't do something big then she'll have people out in the streets. But in so doing, she will enrage the right wing of her party who while they might buy some support in preventing businesses from toppling like nine-pins, won't believe much in spending money on propping up the poorest households who will never be voting for the party anyway. So it can safely be said that unless Liz Truss is a political genius, unless she combines the wisdom of Gandhi with the political skills of de Gaulle, she is already on the path to her downfall. The signs of this kind of genius are, I'm afraid, not jumping out at us.

But it's not unheard of for the least expected of politicians to suddenly prove way more adept than anyone ever thinks that they will be, so let's hope that Truss falls into this small but serendipitous category.

I heard one news commentator saying that all eyes will be on her to see whether she can "fix the cost of living crisis". Not being funny but God in his heaven could not fix the cost of living crisis at the moment, so what chance Liz Truss has could sit on the head of a pin. If she can prevent the country from descending into the chaos of social disorder and civil unrest it'll be enough, and that is going to be hard enough when the chips are down. This is a black time that is just going to have to work itself out. Everything is going to have to find itself a new level (much lower) and survival until this point will be the order of the day. There are alternatives, ways of revitalising the country's fortunes and getting it onto an upward trajectory that doesn't involve huge sacrifice by the bulk of the populace - it could be done. But without a change of the vested power interests that hold this country by the balls it ain't never going to happen. At present we are headed to a different place. One of a much reduced middle class, a hugely increased impoverished mass at the base and a small elite who are doing better than ever at the expense of everyone else sitting at the top of the pyramid.

But hey-ho, nothing is for certain. Let's see where it goes.

[Avatar]

So, when's the next government election going to be?

--A

[I'm Murrin]

Depends on when the riots start. We'll have to see just how inadequately they deal with the energy price crisis.

[peter]

Crazy thing is it could be stopped in its tracks tomorrow - if we could only get a leadership in place who would dump all of this ideological bullshit and do what we clearly, clearly, clearly should have done in delivering the mandate of the people instructing us to exit the EU.

This of course is to approach the EU and reopen the negotiations with a view to joining the single market and customs union.

In one stroke you solve the Irish border issue (the Northern Ireland Protocol simply ceases to exist), the labour shortage issue, the export of goods (so impacting our trade) issue, our food/goods shortages issue, our export of services issue and stop the erosion of the value of the pound in its tracks. And ninety five percent of the people who voted for brexit wouldn't give a toss. They don't even think about trade with the EU and never did. The leaving of the EU is yesterday's news to them and the rejoining of the single market and customs union would not even register on their radar.

But ideology and a leavening of vested interest just simply won't let this happen. Only a new polity with zero connection to either of the big two parties could even begin to pull it off.

So we are screwed on the back of our own stupidity. How sad is that?

[peter]

Something just went wrong and I lost my morning's post.

I'd gone into the Truss plans for the bailout in some depth and said how they were being fairly well received (at twice the cost of furlough they should be). I'd said how she wanted to go for one big intervention with long lasting certainty rather than piecemeal stuff and had thus committed to freezing energy prices for a couple of years, going further than even the Labour plans. The plans, costed at around 150 billion will be funded by borrowing, as perhaps will be the hole left by the fifty billion of tax cuts she has promised as well.

She has taken a swathe to the Johnson administration and surrounded herself with loyalists rather than build a unity cabinet (some say that this is foolish). Her rival Sunak doesn't get a look in, and neither do any of the people who didn't support her. Come to that, neither does anyone who didn't fully and vocally get behind her either.

Her Chancellor is Kwasi Kwartang, her Home Secretary Suela Braverman and her Foreign Secretary James Cleverly; all pretty right wing as predicted and not much experience. Less than three years in Cabinet between the lot of them.

Truss has also by accounts slimmed down the Downing Street staff of advisors and hangers on. Cutting a swathe through all of the spads and civil service flunkies, it appears that she will retreat into the lager from day one, confining herself to a close circle of trusted colleagues and doing away with all the potentially troublesome extras.

One fat fly in the Truss ointment remains in the form of the irksome Boris Johnson who dead, will not lie down. In his usual flamboyant style his exit speech yesterday, normally an ignored event overshadowed by the expected entrance speech of the incoming PM, was full of classical reference and Shakespearian drama (totally outshining Liz Truss's rather stilted and business like affair it must be said). Having taken a swipe at his colleagues for "changing the rules" half way through his premiership and turning the race into a relay, he finished by referencing some obscure Roman general and saying that he was "returning to his plough". Well in Johnson's case I suppose we have to look no further than his trouser crease to see the plow he might be referring to, but it has been noted that Cincinnatus the Roman general in question subsequently returned from his plow back to his former office. A veiled reference to a return to power at some point in the future perhaps? As always with Johnson, difficult to know if its a real intention or simply bluster and fun, but as someone observed, as with Trump, the one way you can face defeat with dignity and keep yourself from sliding into obscurity is to imply that your standing there is not as an ending, but as a beginning of a return. Who knows.

Anyway that's the best replacement for my lost post I can cobble up. Distilled to the bare bones, l hope it furnishes the details required to at least have some basic grasp of what transpired yesterday. Chow and to steal a phrase from the Johnson playbook, asta la vista baby - I'll be back!

[peter]

.....(quicker than I imagined actually, when I posted above.)

There's an old adage, 'revenge is a dish that's best eaten cold' - you've all heard it.

But lying in the bath a moment ago it suddenly seemed very pertinent to the events of the last few days. For what is this, if it is not the culmination of the plans of Dominic Cummings to bring down the man who turned his back on him, throwing his case in behind that of his wife, when he, Cummings, believed that he was the one who should have had his support?

So let's just remember how we got here, because I haven't heard a single mention of it in the mainstream media.

It all began with the dramatic exit of Cummings through the front door of 10 Downing Street, carrying his box of belongings in his arms in as deliberate a statement as it would have been possible to make in a thousand words, that he considered he had been wronged.

What followed were the Partygate revelations that, if Cummings was not the originator of, he certainly recognised as the vehicle by which his revenge could be actualised. Statements and publications of private emails followed, and when those named as coming from him dried up, yet more appeared with acutely timed regularity, the source of which was widely assumed to be him. Gradually over a period of months the erosion began to set in, both in the country and within the parliamentary party itself, and Johnson became further and further enmeshed in a web of deceit and half-truths as he struggled, week after week, to extricate himself from the tightening net of accusations and evidence of his wrongdoing.

And ultimately when the Chris Pincher scandal broke - a scandal that Johnson would ordinarily have brushed aside without even flinching - the accumulated weight of scandal surrounding him became to much to bear. It might have been Pincher that brought the house down, but it was Partygate that had done the legwork, and it was Cummings who had made sure it never went away.

But even Johnson in his last speech seemed to have forgotten the role of his nemesis Cummings in his downfall. His ire was reserved for his backbench MPs who he said had "changed the rules" half way through the race (never mind that he was perfectly happy to see those same rules changed when it was him doing the changing, and Theresa May that was being ousted). But in back of his inner self he must know that he paid the price of slighting a man who was much cleverer than himself. (And I'd put a pound to a penny that the other unnamed part of this nemesis was Gove; I'd like to name the whole saga 'Cummings and Govings', but that would be silly.)

But either way, I somehow doubt that there'll be much dancing around to the tune of 'Winner takes it all' in the Johnson household today. And as for the svengali himself, well I somehow doubt that we have heard the last of Dominic Cummings - I doubt it very much indeed.

[peter]

Just as Boris Johnson began his premiership on a single issue demanding immediate attention, so does Truss, and today is the day it comes home to roost. That issue of course is energy.

On top of the crippling cost increases facing households, the catastrophic impact on business is already being felt. A BBC report yesterday referred to a study predicting that nearly sixty thousand medium sized businesses with a turn over of a million pounds or more would go to the wall. This is a conservative estimate. Another reported in the'i' newspaper predicted a figure of a hundred thousand plus. In the BBC report a woman with a glassware production business said her energy costs had risen from fourteen thousand pounds to over two hundred thousand. (That seems ridiculous but I'm sure I have it correct. Maybe that was the figure it is predicted to rise to if no capping or freezing of costs is put in place.) The point is she said that her business was simply unsustainable at this level of cost increases and that she would have to close down.

But it seems that Liz Truss does intend to go in big guns blazing and is prepared to grasp the nettle of a major increase in borrowing in order to get us through this. Estimates vary, but a general consensus is that the energy capping/freezing plans will come in at 150 billion pounds with an upper figure of 200 billion if you add in the cost of her promised tax cuts on top. Ex-Chancellor Phillip Hammond has said that this level of borrowing is simply not possible to sustain without tax rises to fund it, even if those tax rises are deffered to the future. The Truss team when faced with the tax rise argument respond that tax was not an issue in the furlough intervention and why should it be now.

But the truth is that this huge intervention - one that goes against the grain of every Conservative principle that Truss has sworn to uphold right from the start of her leadership campaign - is existential. For her Government, for households and businesses up and down the country, for the country itself. It's a war of its own right, just as threatening in its own way as any other we have faced in our history. The country we know simply cannot stand such a battering as is approaching down the tracks without some serious, serious, propping up in the form of protective measures being put in place to mitigate the damage before it occurs. If Truss can give us a soft landing then it will be the best she (and we) can hope for.

I saw professor Neil Ferguson (the historian, not the eponymous epidemiologist) on an American news channel the other day saying that the forthcoming economic shock could be worse than the one experienced in the 1970's. To me this was not a brilliant piece of economic revelation - it was a no-brainer. The economic shock he refers to was caused by the oil producing countries of the middle east suddenly upping the price of their commodity and the world economy adjusting in response. This one is caused by stopping the entire world economy in its tracks, like running a steam train at full speed into a concrete blast wall, and then trying to restart it at full speed again an instant after it has been stopped. And then throw a war in on top. (And he thinks that "it might be worse than the seventies"? Give me a break!)

And this is what Liz Truss has to see us through, but with the brexit damage heaped on top. No wonder she wants to go in big - she is right to do so. This is not a situation that can be dealt with in fits and spurts. With a sticking plaster here and some salve there. It demands bold and immediate action and the courage to play it big despite what a large part of the membership that voted for her and the Tory voting public (not to mention her own backbench MPs) might think. Yes this is a socialist thing to do. But there are times when only a big state socialist intervention will work the oracle. The world wars were such a case, the pandemic was another (no matter how badly mishandled) and so is this. And I'm glad that our new Prime Minister, despite her leadership winning rhetoric about no handouts and whatnot, seems to understand this.

She's going to come in for some serious flak. No doubt about that. Labour, caught on the hop by a Conservative Prime Minister who is adopting a more extensive and socialist intervention than they themselves have recommended, will be furious. Stamer will be seen by his own MPs as having been blindsided and will respond by shouting that the cost of the borrowing will have to be born by the working people when it should be being paid for by the energy companies who have benefited from the windfall - but let's face it, what else can he say. (It might actually be true, but this is another argument.)

But there you have it. Today in a nutshell. I'm going to post now, but will probably be adding some stuff in via an edit a bit later. I don't want a repetition of yesterday's loss happening again.

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Well she has certainly hit the ground running. Lifting the fracking ban, opening up the north sea to oil and gas drilling, moving to introduce new legislation on human rights, all on day one. Certainly not going to please lots of people, but she seems to be determined that we will be energy independent in as short a time possible. Prepare for howls of anguish from the climate change activist community in the not too distant future.

Meanwhile the pound has tanked to a value of 1.14 dollars - down by fifteen percent this alone and lower than that caused by the onset of brexit or the pandemic. This is apparently because the money traders are unhappy with all this talk of borrowing and are unloading pounds as fast as they can.

And finally in a bizarre little story from the front of the Telegraph, I can give you some serious information on toilet paper. Rolls are apparently fifteen percent higher in price than they were a year ago but eight percent shorter. A roll of Charmin' now has 244 two-ply sheets per roll as compared to 264 a year ago. Luck that you've got a copy of the multi-paged Telegraph to hand then isn't it. Make sure you wash your hands after using though because the crap that comes out of that particular orifice on a regular basis will take some scrubbing off!

[Fist and Faith]

Wow. A time of great change over there. RIP Queen Elizabeth.

[Forestal]

Liz Truss was the last person photographed with the Queen before she died.

Ergo: Liz Truss killed the Queen.

[peter]

Liz Truss was the last person photographed with the Queen before she died.

Ergo: Liz Truss killed the Queen.

This will be whispered in not so many words around the journo pubs and bars in the coming days and weeks to be sure!