I hear this from people a lot, and if you'll allow me to be blunt, I think this position is insane, when the country is heading into exactly the kind of omnicrisis that birthed people like Orbán. The longer we have a prime minister and a cabinet of loyalists who are happy to serve up bigoted, lunatic "red meat" strategies to "Save Big Dog", the less recoverable our situation is.
And the longer he stays around, the greater the chance of the kind of staff turnover that leads to kakistocracy. Why would anyone who is actually good at their job and keen to carry out a public service stay around to take the blame and get even more dirty with scandals not of their making?
It's like Trump didn't happen.
So who do you think is most likely to replace Boris as PM, if he is kicked out? Truss? Sunak?
Frankly, I prefer incompentent corrupt Tory leaders to competent corrupt Tory leaders. Boris is an albatross around the Tories' neck, and if they do remove him, it'll be because they can see that he's a liability. It's good if the Tories are encumbered by a clown.
It's important to internalise that Boris is not a clown. That is the wrong way to look at him, not least because clowning requires empathy.
Good luck with that! I don't think he has a snowflake's (and I don't think he'd run). Sunak will bring back austerity and handouts for bankers (Sunak is a banker).
> It's important to internalise that Boris is not a clown.
I agree that he's not so green as he's cabbage-looking. He's not stupid. But he does treat everything as a joke, including his own hair. At any rate, I don't think it's important to internalise anything about Boris; I'm pretty sure he's finished.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tom-tugendhat...
As to a snowflake's, as of a week ago when the prospect of a contest really emerged, the betting markets thought his chance was 16/1 and now his odds are between 6/1 and 9/1 depending on where you look. Not far off Truss's odds.
Not a snowflake's -- he's in fourth place and it's more like we need to see whether Jeremy Hunt will run or endorse. Tugendhat has pull in the national party (even if half of the parliamentary party hate him for being a "swot" -- i.e. actual public service instead of a PPE degree and some time at a hedge fund). I think if Hunt decides not to run, there is a good chance he gets to take it to the country.
I would observe that Jeremy Corbyn started out with longer odds in the 2015 Labour leadership campaign.
Boris's hair is not a joke. Nothing about his appearance is a joke. It is carefully crafted to maximise his innate characteristics and play up to a distracting stereotype. He had his flat done up for £100,000 by an exclusive designer, his wife is a smart dresser, and he is surrounded by PR people. Everything about the way Boris looks and acts is planned. Understand that he's a sociopath. And sociopaths do what they do. This will be a rough contest.
There seems to be a tendency here to contrast "populism" with "democracy".
I don't think either term is well-defined. "Democracy" is usually taken to mean electoral democracy, whether PR of FPTP; "populism" is a vaguer term, commonly used as an insult to hurl at your adversaries. But I take it to refer to the espousing of policies that appeal to ignorant people, but don't make sense.
Those two things are orthogonal; if populists win the most votes in a democratic election, the winner is both democratic and populist.
I completely agree that the PM is a populist, and that his government is corrupt.
For what it's worth, I think it's a good thing that his party has so far been unable to unseat him. He is the Labour Party's greatest asset (especially so, given that Keir Starmer's main spiel is attacking Johnson and his antics and lies).
I'm no admirer of either the Tories or Starmer's centrist Labour. I'm just saying that while I don't think Labour can win under Starmer, I think the Tories can lose, if they don't dump Boris soon. Regrettably, I don't think there's any prospect of Labour dumping Starmer.