Election prediction time

[Facecloth]

1 minute ago, Trav Le Bleu said:

I think the fact that James Timpson, of Timpsons, the key cutting company, has been appointed Minister of Prisons.

 

Note to Alannis... that's irony.

https://www.timpson-group.co.uk/timpson-foundation/ex-offenders/

 

This might be why

[Daggers]

1 minute ago, Trav Le Bleu said:

I think the fact that James Timpson, of Timpsons, the key cutting company, has been appointed Minister of Prisons.

 

Note to Alannis... that's irony.

You see all the employees in Timpsons? They’re ex-cons being given a chance to make something good with their lives. I know it was a joke, but this is an outstandingly sensible appointment - the best to the post in an absolute age. 

[Daggers]

1 minute ago, Facecloth said:

https://www.timpson-group.co.uk/timpson-foundation/ex-offenders/

 

This might be why

Snap(ish) 😁

[Daggers]

Day 1.

 

Worked past 6pm, appointed experts to posts to be assessed on measurable outcomes, killed the Rwanda bill. 
 

Proper grown up politics from the get go. 
 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/07/05/starmer-kills-off-rwanda-plan-on-first-day-as-pm/

[Raj]

Good to see labour thinking out the box to try and appoint the right people rather than just their mates.

[urban.spaceman]

6 minutes ago, Daggers said:

Day 1.

 

Worked past 6pm

That’s already an improvement. 

[Daggers]

1 minute ago, urban.spaceman said:

That’s already an improvement. 

I could’ve stoped at the first word and it’d have been an improvement tbf

[urban.spaceman]

Created from Charles Kennedy’s old seat.

 

How wonderfully apt. 

[Izzy]

10 minutes ago, Daggers said:

Day 1.

 

Worked past 6pm, appointed experts to posts to be assessed on measurable outcomes, killed the Rwanda bill. 
 

Proper grown up politics from the get go. 
 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/07/05/starmer-kills-off-rwanda-plan-on-first-day-as-pm/

Starmer doing a press conference at 1pm in a bid to show accountability from the get go.

 

Good.

[grobyfox1990]

23 minutes ago, Trav Le Bleu said:

I think the fact that James Timpson, of Timpsons, the key cutting company, has been appointed Minister of Prisons.

 

Note to Alannis... that's irony.

A sound appointment. A lot of employees in their shops have criminal records. Their charitable funds go to homeless and ex Cons. They offer free suit dry cleaning to homeless people going to job interviews. I think he was previously homeless. There are many other anecdotes like this I believe. I go there to get my watch time changed when the clocks move forward as I’m too dumb to work it out myself, and they ask me to donate to their charity. 

Anyway, a prudent appointment, someone  who understands the system and will

have ideas and energy for change  

[Daggers]

4 minutes ago, Izzy said:

Starmer doing a press conference at 1pm in a bid to show accountability from the get go.

 

Good.

Hope it’s also like TToI

 

 

[fox_up_north]

I wasn't aware of the Charles Kennedy SNP debacle but my word, that's truly awful behaviour by Blackford and his people. Glad Lib Dems won it back but at what a sorry cost. 

 

[Izzy]

12 minutes ago, Daggers said:

Hope it’s also like TToI

 

 

Fvcking brilliant 

 

I'm going to have to watch TToI all over again. One of the best things on telly ever.

[Guesty]

This interview with Timpson is quite interesting. I'm not sure how long ago or when it was recorded.

[FoxyPV]

 

 

Very early on Friday morning, Liz Truss, a politician whose weapons-grade inability to read any room almost bankrupted the nation, appeared unable even to choreograph her own demise. The last minutes of her time in office as an MP were as clumsily inept as much of the previous 14 years of vapid careerism. To begin with, after a brief recount in her South West Norfolk constituency, her fellow candidates were kept waiting on stage for an age while, it appeared, the former PM was outside in a Range Rover with her expensive security detail presumably debating if she might stay behind the tinted glass and avoid the fatal moment for ever.

When she did finally appear through an unexpected side door, following a slow handclap, she stood with characteristic awkwardness to hear the fact that she had somehow, in five catastrophic years – or 49 fatal days – translated a 26,000 Tory majority into a 640-vote defeat. Her victorious Labour opponent, Terry Jermy, gave a heartfelt speech about his win, and the stage seemed set for Truss to offer some kind of response, or explanation, or at least the traditional thank you to tellers and supporters. She looked panicky for half a moment, perhaps with this thought in mind, before scuttling away ungraciously.

Afterwards I asked the velvet-breeched high sheriff who had conducted the announcement if Truss had indicated that she wanted to speak. “No,” he said. “I think she just wasn’t sure which way to get off the stage.”

 

In an election night overstuffed with Portillo moments – Shapps! Coffey! Mordaunt! Rees-Mogg! – this one provided the final and most fitting sense of closure to some of the least distinguished years in British political history. I happened to be staying for the count in King’s Lynn at a once-grand hotel in which Robert Walpole, the first prime minister and the longest serving, celebrated many electoral triumphs. The tenure of his shortest-serving successor ended in contrastingly banal surroundings, a couple of miles up the road, on the badminton courts of the Lynnsport leisure centre, a venue that might have featured in one of Alan Partridge’s fever dreams.

After successfully locating the exit, Truss gave the BBC her airy take on why she thought the people of Downham Market and Thetford and Swaffham and Methwold had rejected her, ending 60 years of untroubled Conservative victories in the constituency. You might have imagined her argument would be at least prefaced by some reference to the fact her emergency budget had sent the pound crashing to its lowest-ever level and created a £30bn black hole in the economy overnight, casting her as the least popular prime minister in living memory. Instead, of course, she doubled down on the rhetoric that fuelled her risible “comeback” book, Ten Years to Save the West: “The issue we faced as Conservatives was we haven’t delivered sufficiently on the policies people want. That means keeping taxes low, but also … things like the Human Rights Act that made it very difficult for us to deport illegal immigrants.”

It’s interesting to note that not even the Reform candidate in this election, an adult education manager for Norfolk council, Toby McKenzie, cites small-boat immigration as the first issue in his stealing 9,958 votes from Truss here. Instead he suggests that the MP was out of touch on local issues that mattered. “The big thing for me on the doorstep,” he said, “has been the megafarm that is planned near some of the villages here … an absolutely massive site for chickens and pigs. Liz Truss has failed to [campaign to] block it. We are talking thousands upon thousands of animals just a mile away from two villages. Imagine the stench. Pigs are bad enough. But chickens too. She was very much for it,” he said. Before adding, conspiratorially: “And word spreads in Norfolk.”

Truss’s defeat looked like a microcosm of the existential crisis that her party faced in this election and which will define it in the weeks ahead. Her vote was squeezed not only by the populist message of Farage’s party but also by remnants of the remainer centre-right that Truss so shamelessly abandoned after the EU referendum. One nation Tories have been all but purged from the parliamentary party, but there was a well-organised cell of that tradition that took some calculated revenge here.

 

James Bagge (Independent) at the election count for North West Norfolk and South West Norfolk constituencies. 

 

Local landowner James Bagge (who has the kind of old-school name you hear pronounced three ways), a former army officer and barrister who worked for the serious fraud squad, has led the “turnip Taliban” opposition to Truss ever since she was fast-tracked into her safe seat by David Cameron in 2009. This time around, urged to run by fellow Old Etonian Rory Stewart, Bagge stood as an independent, trimming another 6,282 votes from her total by giving true blue constituents “a trustworthy place to go that wasn’t Labour or Reform”.

He was supported in the most urbane of guerrilla campaigns by those benign ghosts of Conservative past, Dominic Grieve and David Gauke. Bagge is pointedly unrepentant that he effectively helped Labour defeat Truss. He had been, he said, fighting above all for “what has gone [from the frontline party]: honesty, accountability, being genuine. One of the things that has undermined trust so badly is ministers endlessly coming on television and defending indefensible lies. And offering very simplistic solutions to intractable problems”.

Bagge is too polite quite to say so, but he is affronted by the way that Truss refused to attend the only hustings in the constituency, in the town hall at Downham Market, tweeting instead images of herself watching an England match in a local pub. Others have tales of her being hustled by her security out of a local chip shop when things got testy, and last week shouted out of the Whalebone IInn, a Wetherspoons, at breakfast time.

Her apparent inability to recognise that she may be among people whose mortgage payments she had trebled, and whose pensions she has hollowed out, was a source of baffled fascination to all her opponents.

In her campaign literature, without irony, Truss insisted that she was “running on her record in government”. For once, she was taken at her word.

 

[StanSP]

34 minutes ago, Raj said:

Good to see labour thinking out the box to try and appoint the right people rather than just their mates.

I hope it lasts, genuinely.

[Izzy]

I had no idea about James Timpson, what a potentially inspired appointment (and apparently Teressa May also sought his expertise when she was PM tbf)

[leicsmac]

Solid substantial competence, without flash, should be the bywords for this government. Enough reality TV con artists promising short term gain that either isn't delivered or comes at the expense of any kind of long-term empathy.

 

Good start.

 

Foreign policy is an area not being talked about much here that may be critical: Starmer has to negotiate a plethora of stupidly nationalist governments (especially if another arises in November) to try to help guide some kind of global consensus on issues that really need addressing.

[Paninistickers]

28 minutes ago, FoxyPV said:

 

 

Very early on Friday morning, Liz Truss, a politician whose weapons-grade inability to read any room almost bankrupted the nation, appeared unable even to choreograph her own demise. The last minutes of her time in office as an MP were as clumsily inept as much of the previous 14 years of vapid careerism. To begin with, after a brief recount in her South West Norfolk constituency, her fellow candidates were kept waiting on stage for an age while, it appeared, the former PM was outside in a Range Rover with her expensive security detail presumably debating if she might stay behind the tinted glass and avoid the fatal moment for ever.

When she did finally appear through an unexpected side door, following a slow handclap, she stood with characteristic awkwardness to hear the fact that she had somehow, in five catastrophic years – or 49 fatal days – translated a 26,000 Tory majority into a 640-vote defeat. Her victorious Labour opponent, Terry Jermy, gave a heartfelt speech about his win, and the stage seemed set for Truss to offer some kind of response, or explanation, or at least the traditional thank you to tellers and supporters. She looked panicky for half a moment, perhaps with this thought in mind, before scuttling away ungraciously.

Afterwards I asked the velvet-breeched high sheriff who had conducted the announcement if Truss had indicated that she wanted to speak. “No,” he said. “I think she just wasn’t sure which way to get off the stage.”

 

In an election night overstuffed with Portillo moments – Shapps! Coffey! Mordaunt! Rees-Mogg! – this one provided the final and most fitting sense of closure to some of the least distinguished years in British political history. I happened to be staying for the count in King’s Lynn at a once-grand hotel in which Robert Walpole, the first prime minister and the longest serving, celebrated many electoral triumphs. The tenure of his shortest-serving successor ended in contrastingly banal surroundings, a couple of miles up the road, on the badminton courts of the Lynnsport leisure centre, a venue that might have featured in one of Alan Partridge’s fever dreams.

After successfully locating the exit, Truss gave the BBC her airy take on why she thought the people of Downham Market and Thetford and Swaffham and Methwold had rejected her, ending 60 years of untroubled Conservative victories in the constituency. You might have imagined her argument would be at least prefaced by some reference to the fact her emergency budget had sent the pound crashing to its lowest-ever level and created a £30bn black hole in the economy overnight, casting her as the least popular prime minister in living memory. Instead, of course, she doubled down on the rhetoric that fuelled her risible “comeback” book, Ten Years to Save the West: “The issue we faced as Conservatives was we haven’t delivered sufficiently on the policies people want. That means keeping taxes low, but also … things like the Human Rights Act that made it very difficult for us to deport illegal immigrants.”

It’s interesting to note that not even the Reform candidate in this election, an adult education manager for Norfolk council, Toby McKenzie, cites small-boat immigration as the first issue in his stealing 9,958 votes from Truss here. Instead he suggests that the MP was out of touch on local issues that mattered. “The big thing for me on the doorstep,” he said, “has been the megafarm that is planned near some of the villages here … an absolutely massive site for chickens and pigs. Liz Truss has failed to [campaign to] block it. We are talking thousands upon thousands of animals just a mile away from two villages. Imagine the stench. Pigs are bad enough. But chickens too. She was very much for it,” he said. Before adding, conspiratorially: “And word spreads in Norfolk.”

Truss’s defeat looked like a microcosm of the existential crisis that her party faced in this election and which will define it in the weeks ahead. Her vote was squeezed not only by the populist message of Farage’s party but also by remnants of the remainer centre-right that Truss so shamelessly abandoned after the EU referendum. One nation Tories have been all but purged from the parliamentary party, but there was a well-organised cell of that tradition that took some calculated revenge here.

 

James Bagge (Independent) at the election count for North West Norfolk and South West Norfolk constituencies. 

 

Local landowner James Bagge (who has the kind of old-school name you hear pronounced three ways), a former army officer and barrister who worked for the serious fraud squad, has led the “turnip Taliban” opposition to Truss ever since she was fast-tracked into her safe seat by David Cameron in 2009. This time around, urged to run by fellow Old Etonian Rory Stewart, Bagge stood as an independent, trimming another 6,282 votes from her total by giving true blue constituents “a trustworthy place to go that wasn’t Labour or Reform”.

He was supported in the most urbane of guerrilla campaigns by those benign ghosts of Conservative past, Dominic Grieve and David Gauke. Bagge is pointedly unrepentant that he effectively helped Labour defeat Truss. He had been, he said, fighting above all for “what has gone [from the frontline party]: honesty, accountability, being genuine. One of the things that has undermined trust so badly is ministers endlessly coming on television and defending indefensible lies. And offering very simplistic solutions to intractable problems”.

Bagge is too polite quite to say so, but he is affronted by the way that Truss refused to attend the only hustings in the constituency, in the town hall at Downham Market, tweeting instead images of herself watching an England match in a local pub. Others have tales of her being hustled by her security out of a local chip shop when things got testy, and last week shouted out of the Whalebone IInn, a Wetherspoons, at breakfast time.

Her apparent inability to recognise that she may be among people whose mortgage payments she had trebled, and whose pensions she has hollowed out, was a source of baffled fascination to all her opponents.

In her campaign literature, without irony, Truss insisted that she was “running on her record in government”. For once, she was taken at her word.

 

She's basically the Diane Abbott of the Tories. 

 

There's academic intelligence there somewhere, as their education proves, but somehow, both are amongst the thickest people I have ever witnessed in politics. 

 

Socially awkward I can get. Misunderstood I can get. Unintelligent I can get. But she's none of those and all of those and essentially just plain stupid. 

 

Will she ever work again? Who'd take her on?

[Foxdiamond]

6 minutes ago, Paninistickers said:

She's basically the Diane Abbott of the Tories. 

 

There's academic intelligence there somewhere, as their education proves, but somehow, both are amongst the thickest people I have ever witnessed in politics. 

 

Socially awkward I can get. Misunderstood I can get. Unintelligent I can get. But she's none of those and all of those and essentially just plain stupid. 

 

Will she ever work again? Who'd take her on?

Delighted that Truss, Coffey and Rees Mogg no longer MPs

[FoxyPV]

7 minutes ago, Paninistickers said:

She's basically the Diane Abbott of the Tories. 

 

There's academic intelligence there somewhere, as their education proves, but somehow, both are amongst the thickest people I have ever witnessed in politics. 

 

Socially awkward I can get. Misunderstood I can get. Unintelligent I can get. But she's none of those and all of those and essentially just plain stupid. 

 

Will she ever work again? Who'd take her on?

Wash your mouth.

 

[Foxdiamond]

3 minutes ago, Foxdiamond said:

Delighted that Truss, Coffey and Rees Mogg no longer MPs

I see Coffey has been made a dame by Sunak. Seems more suited to a pantomime than an honour

[OntarioFox]

1 hour ago, urban.spaceman said:

Created from Charles Kennedy’s old seat.

 

How wonderfully apt. 

It's a shame there wasn't just a hint more tactical voting - we could have ended up with the Lib Dems as the official opposition.

[Izzy]

What an excellent, honest, open, transparent, press conference this is.

 

I'm rapidly turning into a Starmer fanboy I'll be honest.

 

Finally, a no BS PM I think I can trust.

[Brizzle Fox]

1 hour ago, Guesty said:

This interview with Timpson is quite interesting. I'm not sure how long ago or when it was recorded.

He is a brilliant appointment to be Prisons Minister.  His business model is unique and works.

 

Feels like the grown ups are in charge again.