You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 13, 2022.
Candidates for the Conservative Party leadership race began putting their hats in the ring last weekend.
Many of those MPs are promising everything, and pundits are having a field day in the press:
While it is true to say that a lot of them are alike — yet not all — in policies, let us look at the diversity among the original 11 candidates:
Among those original 11, we had five women and six minority candidates.
No one can say today, as Theresa May did many years ago, that the Conservatives are the ‘nasty party’:
The Conservatives had no quotas. These MPs merely had to come forward and declare their interest in the leadership contest.
As I write in the early afternoon of Wednesday, July 13, we now have eight candidates.
Four are women and four are from racial minorities:
Brexit Leaver and former Labour MP Kate Hoey, now an unaffiliated Baroness in the House of Lords, told Mark Steyn of GB News how pleased she is that the Conservatives managed to accomplish what Labour only talk about:
How the winner is chosen
Late on Monday, Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench MPs, announced the Conservative Party leadership rules. The loud voice heard in the background is none other than the daily disrupter, Steve Bray:
Darren McCaffrey of GB News has more:
The goal is to have a new Prime Minister in place by September 5, when Parliament returns from summer recess.
Conservative MPs will participate in a series of voting rounds between now and July 21, when Parliament goes into summer recess. The final two MPs on the list will then spend the next several weeks going around the country to campaign to Conservative Party members.
Party members will receive a ballot with the final two names and vote for their choice.
GB News has more on how the voting will proceed, beginning on Wednesday, July 13:
Sir Graham said the first ballot will be conducted on Wednesday with candidates required to obtain backing from a minimum of 20 MPs.
In the second ballot, on Thursday, MPs are required to obtain support from 30 MPs in order to progress to the next round, accelerating to the final two as soon as possible.
Disillusionment and a wish for Boris to return
Conservative voters, including those who are not Party members, are disillusioned about this contest.
Many wish that Boris Johnson’s name were on the ballot. This petition to ‘reinstate’ him ‘as Prime Minister’ has garnered 15,000 signatures in only a few days. However, Boris is still Prime Minister, just not the leader of the Conservative Party.
Neil Oliver, not a Boris supporter, by the way, tweeted that the leadership decision has already been made:
It is rumoured that Bill Gates arrived in England just before Boris resigned. If true, that would not come as a surprise:
Bob Moran, the former Telegraph cartoonist, hit the nail on the head as he expressed the sentiment of many of those who voted Conservative in 2019. We also need an outsider to win so that we have some fresh thinking in Downing Street:
A number of the candidates have ties with the World Economic Forum. One is known to be friends with Bill Gates. Ideally, we would have transparency in this area:
Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak has been in the lead since the contest began. He was one of the first two main Cabinet members to announce his resignation last week. Former Health Secretary Sajid Javid was the first.
It has come to light that the photo of the Downing Street drinks party held during lockdown in 2020 was taken from No. 11, where Rishi Sunak worked. Some people think that Boris’s then-adviser Dominic Cummings played a part in getting those photos released to the press. Did Rishi know?
Sajid Javid declared his candidacy, possibly taking a pop at Rishi Sunak’s slick candidacy operation.
On Monday, July 11, GB News reported:
Former Health Secretary Sajid Javid addressed media gathered at Westminster this afternoon, outlining his leadership bid.
Mr Javid said “I don’t have a ready made logo or slick video ready to go”, adding: “I have a passion and desire to get Britain on the right course.”
Acknowledging his resignation last week, Mr Javid said “Five days ago I stood up in Parliament and I spoke from the heart and I believe I spoke in the national interest.”
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson endured a series of scandals throughout his premiership, most recently Partygate and the allegations against Chris Pincher.
Addressing the ongoing investigations, the former Health Secretary said: “We need a leader who makes credible promises.”
He added that “our party has lost its way”.
Javid bowed out late on Tuesday. No one was disappointed:
Rishi, on the other hand, seems to have had his candidacy in mind for some time, since 2020. Interesting:
Note his professional campaign logo in the upper left hand corner of this tweet:
Guido Fawkes has a critique of the various logos, some of which have been rushed to market, as it were.
To make matters worse, rumours have circulated about infighting and dirty tricks among Conservative MPs. The public have taken note:
The Sun‘s political editor, Harry Cole, tweeted:
On that note, is it possible that Conservative Party members might not even get a vote should one of the final two winners concede to the other? That is what happened in 2016, when Theresa May became PM. Andrew Bridgen MP thinks this is a possibility:
Voting records
This graphic (credit here) shows how the candidates have voted in Parliament on various issues:
Candidates who bowed out
Let us look at the candidates who have bowed out thus far.
Sajid Javid
Conservative voters thought that Sajid Javid was a safe pair of hands as Health Secretary until he started laying out his coronavirus wish list. Only last month, Desmond Swayne MP pointed out the online job advert for a national manager of coronavirus passports:
On July 10, Javid appeared on a Sunday news programme.
He promised tax cuts. No surprise there. It was also unconvincing, considering the tax burden we have been under the past several months, possibly higher than we would have had under Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn:
Javid also discussed his non-dom status, which is curious, as he was born in Rochdale:
On Tuesday, July 12, broadcasting from Northern Ireland, Mark Steyn said this about Javid’s bowing out of the race:
Rehman Chishti
Rehman Chishti had an even more lacklustre campaign.
He was still on the fence last Saturday, proving that dithering gets one nowhere quick:
He declared on Sunday. Unfortunately, the photo is not a good one:
He dropped out on Tuesday:
Grant Shapps
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps declared his candidacy on Saturday, making much of his loyalty to Boris (Nadhim Zahawi is pictured below):
He appeared on Sky News on Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, viewers and voters rooted round to find out more about Shapps’s parliamentary career.
Cabinet of Horrors has a fascinating profile of him, the first half of which follows (emphases mine):
Grant Shapps resigned as a minister in 2015 following revelations of his involvement with a bullying scandal that had led to a young Conservative Party activist taking their own life. Few would have imagined he could ever be reappointed to cabinet, still less to a more senior role. But in July 2019 Boris Johnson replaced the hapless and incompetent Chris Grayling as Transport Minister with someone even more discredited: Grant Shapps.
Then again, Shapps is no stranger to the art of reinvention. Indeed, he has proved remarkably inventive with his own identity.
In 2012, one of his constituents noticed that, while working as an MP, Shapps had also been peddling get-rich-quick-schemes online under the assumed names ‘Michael Green’ and ‘Sebastian Fox’. The schemes, marketed by Shapps’ company How To Corp under such titles as ‘Stinking Rich 3’, promised unwary punters that they could make large amounts of money very rapidly if they followed ‘Michael Green’s’ instructions. These included the instruction to recruit more punters to sell get-rich-quick schemes to the public – a classic feature of pyramid-selling schemes.
Shapps at first attempted to deny this, saying: ‘Let me get this absolutely clear… I don’t have a second job and have never had a second job while being an MP. End of story.’ He also threatened to sue the constituent who had uncovered what he had been up to. Days later, he was forced to admit the truth, though he did this in a characteristically slippery manner, saying that he had ‘over-firmly denied’ the story.
One might think that being exposed as a liar, a huckster and a bully would have led to an immediate end to Shapps’ career in politics. Instead, he was demoted from cabinet but handed a more junior ministerial portfolio and allowed to continue as co-chair of the Conservative Party.
On Sky News’s Sunday news programme, Shapps presented his credentials.
He was squeaky clean. Hmm:
He took credit for Boris’s resignation as party leader. Really?
He promised a tax cut:
He said he was relaxed about identity issues:
And he was sure he had the numbers:
Then, suddenly, he didn’t.
Oh, well. Too bad.
Conservative Party voters name their candidates
Since the weekend, various polls have been conducted of rank and file Party members.
The results go against the MPs’ wishes.
This is where MPs are as voting opens on Wednesday afternoon. I’ll post results tomorrow:
A Conservative Home poll (image credit here) shows that Party members want either Penny Mordaunt or Kemi Badenoch to win. Rishi Sunak is a distant third on 12.1% support:
The next poll shows the wishes of Conservative members in Mrs Thatcher’s birthplace of Grantham, part of the Grantham and Stamford constuency. They are not fans of Rishi Sunak, either:
However, Rishi does top another poll of Conservative and other voters. Note the Don’t Know (read Boris?) percentage:
Some dispute the results. However, as someone points out, this could have to do with name recognition from news programmes and the papers:
I’ll have more on today’s vote tomorrow.
Churchmouse Campanologist 