TheAlbionist
All Star
My favourite line from PMQs today was Starmer's "it's not looking good, Prime Minister... but at least the staff at Number 10 know how to pack a suitcase"
UK Politics Thread 🇬🇧
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My favourite line from PMQs today was Starmer's "it's not looking good, Prime Minister... but at least the staff at Number 10 know how to pack a suitcase"
It's so bad that brehs are praising Starmer
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
it's been an enjoyable weekBritain’s acute cost-of-living crunch will hit in April, instantly stretching household and company budgets and penalizing the poorest households, many of which have already been most impacted by Covid-19.
The squeeze is coming from all sides. U.K. consumer price-growth hit a 30-year high of 5.4% in December, and is wiping out wage gains. The Bank of England is jacking up interest rates faster than the Federal Reserve. A cap on domestic energy costs is expected to rise by 50% in April, just as taxes increase in a bid to repair the U.K. public finances. Brexit hasn’t come cheap, either.
It's getting untenable.
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It just gets worse.
There is no way he survives this.
parliamentary whips are gonna whip innit
that's normal
they aren't called "whips" for nothing ...
Way back when Sat 12 Jul 2014 22.29 BST
For young and idealistic backbenchers, the whips' tactics were a brutal introduction to Westminster. One MP from the 1992 intake recalled last week how they rang members of his family at all hours. "They even kept phoning my wife and saying 'you should tell him to vote with the government'. It was quite extraordinary," he said. "They would try everything – threats and inducements – saying they knew things that they didn't want to have to make public, implying they would if they had to. With some it was affairs, or things like visits to gay nightclubs. It didn't matter if it wasn't true, or was gossip, they still tried it on."
A member of the whips' office during that period recalls how, every day, he and all the other Tory whips would be expected to write notes into a "black book", and that these entries would be discussed each morning at a team meeting in the chief whip's office. "It was mostly fairly mild stuff, about who said what at some meeting of the 1922 Committee, or that kind of thing. But it might be rumours of one sort or another about private things."
For seasoned MPs and ministers it was all run of the mill, just the way things operated. Tristan Garel-Jones, who was a senior whip under Margaret Thatcher and is said to have been the inspiration for Francis Urquhart in Michael Dobbs's House of Cards trilogy, kept the "black book" locked in a safe, and the rumour is that the code to open it was the date of his birthday.
Whips – whether Tory, Labour or Lib Dem – have long inhabited a secret, often dark, world at Westminster, one that no one has ever seriously called into question. But now – just possibly – that could change. When wide-ranging inquiries were announced by home secretary Theresa May on Monday into allegations of child abuse in all corners of public life, including into unsubstantiated claims that a paedophile ring involving political figures operated around parliament in the 1980s, questions about the whips' role as guardians of deep and sometimes sinister information began, at last, to surface.
Labour MP Lisa Nandy was first to draw attention to the possible role of the whips in holding information relevant to the child abuse inquiries. In a Commons debate she referred to comments made by former Tory whip Tim Fortescue, who served in Edward Heath's government between 1970 and 1973. In a 1995 TV documentary, Fortescue, who died in 2008, said: "Anyone with any sense, who was in trouble, would come to the whips and tell them the truth, and say, 'Now I'm in a jam. Can you help?' It might be debt, it might be … a scandal involving small boys, or any kind of scandal in which … a member seemed likely to be mixed up. They'd come and ask if we could help, and if we could, we did."
Black books, threats and rumour: secrets of the whips may be laid bare
For young and idealistic backbenchers, the whips' tactics were a brutal introduction to Westminster. One MP from the 1992 intake recalled last week how they rang members of his family at all hours. "They even kept phoning my wife and saying 'you should tell him to vote with the government'. It was quite extraordinary," he said. "They would try everything – threats and inducements – saying they knew things that they didn't want to have to make public, implying they would if they had to. With some it was affairs, or things like visits to gay nightclubs. It didn't matter if it wasn't true, or was gossip, they still tried it on."
A member of the whips' office during that period recalls how, every day, he and all the other Tory whips would be expected to write notes into a "black book", and that these entries would be discussed each morning at a team meeting in the chief whip's office. "It was mostly fairly mild stuff, about who said what at some meeting of the 1922 Committee, or that kind of thing. But it might be rumours of one sort or another about private things."
For seasoned MPs and ministers it was all run of the mill, just the way things operated. Tristan Garel-Jones, who was a senior whip under Margaret Thatcher and is said to have been the inspiration for Francis Urquhart in Michael Dobbs's House of Cards trilogy, kept the "black book" locked in a safe, and the rumour is that the code to open it was the date of his birthday.
Whips – whether Tory, Labour or Lib Dem – have long inhabited a secret, often dark, world at Westminster, one that no one has ever seriously called into question. But now – just possibly – that could change. When wide-ranging inquiries were announced by home secretary Theresa May on Monday into allegations of child abuse in all corners of public life, including into unsubstantiated claims that a paedophile ring involving political figures operated around parliament in the 1980s, questions about the whips' role as guardians of deep and sometimes sinister information began, at last, to surface.
Labour MP Lisa Nandy was first to draw attention to the possible role of the whips in holding information relevant to the child abuse inquiries. In a Commons debate she referred to comments made by former Tory whip Tim Fortescue, who served in Edward Heath's government between 1970 and 1973. In a 1995 TV documentary, Fortescue, who died in 2008, said: "Anyone with any sense, who was in trouble, would come to the whips and tell them the truth, and say, 'Now I'm in a jam. Can you help?' It might be debt, it might be … a scandal involving small boys, or any kind of scandal in which … a member seemed likely to be mixed up. They'd come and ask if we could help, and if we could, we did."
Black books, threats and rumour: secrets of the whips may be laid bare
parliamentary whips are gonna whip innit
that's normal
they aren't called "whips" for nothing ...
Way back when Sat 12 Jul 2014 22.29 BST
For young and idealistic backbenchers, the whips' tactics were a brutal introduction to Westminster. One MP from the 1992 intake recalled last week how they rang members of his family at all hours. "They even kept phoning my wife and saying 'you should tell him to vote with the government'. It was quite extraordinary," he said. "They would try everything – threats and inducements – saying they knew things that they didn't want to have to make public, implying they would if they had to. With some it was affairs, or things like visits to gay nightclubs. It didn't matter if it wasn't true, or was gossip, they still tried it on."
A member of the whips' office during that period recalls how, every day, he and all the other Tory whips would be expected to write notes into a "black book", and that these entries would be discussed each morning at a team meeting in the chief whip's office. "It was mostly fairly mild stuff, about who said what at some meeting of the 1922 Committee, or that kind of thing. But it might be rumours of one sort or another about private things."
For seasoned MPs and ministers it was all run of the mill, just the way things operated. Tristan Garel-Jones, who was a senior whip under Margaret Thatcher and is said to have been the inspiration for Francis Urquhart in Michael Dobbs's House of Cards trilogy, kept the "black book" locked in a safe, and the rumour is that the code to open it was the date of his birthday.
Whips – whether Tory, Labour or Lib Dem – have long inhabited a secret, often dark, world at Westminster, one that no one has ever seriously called into question. But now – just possibly – that could change. When wide-ranging inquiries were announced by home secretary Theresa May on Monday into allegations of child abuse in all corners of public life, including into unsubstantiated claims that a paedophile ring involving political figures operated around parliament in the 1980s, questions about the whips' role as guardians of deep and sometimes sinister information began, at last, to surface.
Labour MP Lisa Nandy was first to draw attention to the possible role of the whips in holding information relevant to the child abuse inquiries. In a Commons debate she referred to comments made by former Tory whip Tim Fortescue, who served in Edward Heath's government between 1970 and 1973. In a 1995 TV documentary, Fortescue, who died in 2008, said: "Anyone with any sense, who was in trouble, would come to the whips and tell them the truth, and say, 'Now I'm in a jam. Can you help?' It might be debt, it might be … a scandal involving small boys, or any kind of scandal in which … a member seemed likely to be mixed up. They'd come and ask if we could help, and if we could, we did."
Black books, threats and rumour: secrets of the whips may be laid bare
Yeah but when have we ever heard of the whip's tactics being referred to the police? This isn't normal politics.
Sounds like a scene from House of Cards.
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Sure it happend in the past BUT ...
'Unveiling priorities for the Westminster strand of its investigation, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse said it would also look into whether police and prosecutors were prevented from pursuing sensitive cases involving politicians."
Child abuse inquiry to cover 'concealment of evidence against MPs'
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Tribaligenesis
All Star
They found the e-mail warning Johnson over the legality of the party.
Sue Gray uncovers email warning on No 10 drinks | News | The Times
Sue Gray uncovers email warning on No 10 drinks | News | The Times
