…but this seems like cruel and unusual punishment.
The prime minister will remain in Downing Street, to shoulder the blame for what are expected to be dire results for her party from Thursday’s European elections – and to host Donald Trump when he visits.
If I were her, I’d ask for something more medieval. Drawing and quartering, burning at the stake, the chopping block? All would be more humane.
So, UK…what slime-oozing gibbering abyssal nightmare are you going to replace her with? I know better than to wonder if politics will improve, it never does.
Now that Theresa May has taken the blame for Brexit in the minds of voters, Boris Johnson is apparently putting his name out. But I’m also seeing people say Jeremy Hunt as a strong contender (in the sense that the party likes him, not in the sense of actually being able to get anything done). Apparently, the internal “logic” is that they want somebody who actively campaigned for Leave in the referendum. (Which is what they really ought to have done in the first place. Brexit is going to be a disaster; it was always going to be a disaster, and the disaster should have been overseen by the people who courted it so that there would be no doubt in the minds of the public who bore responsibility. As it is, Theresa May — who is an awful human being and was a lousy PM, but was a Remain campaigner — is going to get the blame instead, with the claim that she either didn’t try hard enough or actively sabotaged things.)
Also: unless a general election is called PDQ, this means that the UK will have 3 out of 4 consecutive Prime Ministers chosen directly by the bigwigs of their party without any say by the general populace. Next time you hear a Brit criticizing the US electoral system, keep that in mind.
There are a couple of reasons she wants to hang on just a little longer:
1) For some reason no rational human can work out, she wants to still be in office when your big orange fascist comes over here for a state visit.
2) More importantly (to her, by all accounts), she wants to be in office longer than Gordon Brown was. She’ll overtake him in the next few days and become merely the 6th shortest-serving Prime Minister since 1900 rather than the 5th.
I’m having trouble understanding why any sane, rational person would want to be prime minister of the UK right now; there is no good way out of the Brexit mess and whoever is the next PM will spend his or her entire term taking incoming fire from all sides.
For that matter, I also don’t understand why any Democrat would want to be President right now, since the next Democratic administration will do little else than clean up the huge mess Hair Furor will be leaving behind.
Damn, having Boris there would have been our chance to see if bird brain Trump would attack his own reflection.
In the end it doesn’t matter who steps into May’s leopard print shoes, we’re fucked. BoJo is a raving shit-gibbon of the highest order who shouldn’t be left in charge of the TV remote control, never mind 4 increasingly divided countries. He’s likely just to pull the trigger on leaving the EU without a deal and saunter through the carnage without a care in the world. One small solace is that I’m fairly sure that the majority of his own party can’t stand him.
If Hunt gets the nod, I expect the For Sale sign to go up on the NHS faster than you can say “health insurance”. I’m trying not to think about a possibility where we might be saddled with Michael Gove or Rees-Mogg.
I have heard that if bloody stupid johnson becomes PM some of them tory gits ,i mean mps will table a vote of no confidence in him to force a general election .
This statement is true much like predicting the weather by saying that tomorrow will be like today. Most of the time you are right but then every once in a while you get a tornado/hurricane/etc. where things get spectacularly worse during the storm and then get amazingly better afterward (then you get to assess the damage).
I hope (politically) that we are in the worst of the storm right now, but I don’t know.
@5 best case ,1 bojo becomes pm ,see my comment at 6 .
2 ,The voters of Uxbridge turf him out at the next GE because of
how he acted over Heathrow
3 Labour win the GE ,they revoke article 50 .
4 nigel fargo’s head explodes .
5 We all forget about britshit while labour puts right all the damage the nasty bastards have done since 2010 .
6 We all have honey for tea.
Looks like May is out, she is resigning – last day June 7th:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/05/theresa-announces-resignation-brexit-chaos-190524085118484.html
davidc1: Corbyn is in favour of brexit though. He would have been PM for two years by now if he’d been against brexit. Why should I believe he’ll declare backsies on article 50?
Technically, she’s auto-dumped. In reality, it’s the Parliamentary Conservative Party (PCP) that’s dumped her. The rest of us didn’t get a say in any direct sense, although the expected dire results for the Tories in the Euro elections (held on Thursday in the UK, although counting won’t happen until tomorrow, and results won’t be announced until tomorrow or maybe Monday) would probably have led the PCP to change its rules in order to dump her.
The Vicar@1,
Hunt voted Remain in the referendum. He’s been pretending to be a born-again Brexiteer, but I doubt anyone’s fooled. If he wins, which is unlikely, it means the Tories are not committing themselves to crashing out of the EU.
Er… I think you’ll find that most Brits who criticise the US electoral system also criticise the UK one, but the situation you draw attention to is not one of the main problems (which include First Past the Post elections, unelected head of state and upper house, over-centralisation…) It’s in part a natural consequence of the fact that we don’t directly elect the head of government, because we have a partliamentary not a presidential system, in part a result of the political turbulence of the past few years. But of the 13 PMs who have come to office in my lifetime, only 5 (Wilson (twice), Heath, Thatcher, Bliar, Cameron) have done so as a result of a general election, and until recently, no-one complained, because it was accepted that we choose a governing party, and its leader takes office (and of course has less individual power than the US President for that very reason).
The big problem here is that the method by which the Tory party chooses its arch-bastard puts the decision in the hands of an eye-wateringly narrow group of people. If there is only one candidate nominated (you only need two proposing Tory MPs for that), then the decision is entirely in the hands of the parliamentary party – about 300 individuals, almost all of them white men over 65. If two or more individuals are nominated then it goes to a vote of the Tory party membership in general – the average age of whom is 68, over three quarters of whom are male, and less than 5% of whom are of any discernible ethnic minority.
Given how it was the elderly and the senile who voted overwhelmingly for this Brexit fiasco in the first place, while the young voted overwhelmingly against, I propose that we start culling the over 65s at some point soon, adding their names to the list of the rich we are already preparing the tumbrels for. Maybe we can appoint a panel of teenagers to hear appeals from special cases.
“So, UK…what slime-oozing gibbering abyssal nightmare are you going to replace her with?”
A perfect description of Boris Johnson, the current front-runner to replace May as Prime Minister!
We’re doomed. Six candidates so far, and there will almost certainly be more, but I can’t see any of them uniting their own party, let alone the country. If there’s a general election, there won’t be any reasonable way to vote. All our parties are currently unelectable. All this happened because a referendum gave a result that parliament wasn’t prepared to implement. Maybe we need a written constitution after all. Or maybe it’s time to emigrate.
I have a feeling that the results of the European elections are only going to make matters worse.
And incidentally, inciting hatred between generations doesn’t help one bit.
Are you going to cull all the working class Northerners too?
cartomancer@12,
Nope. I can’t find separate figures for Tory MPS, but this figure makes it absolutely clear most of them can’t be over 65. Most of them are white men, however. For party members, a figure of 57 is often quoted, but its basis is not clear, and I’ve also seen 72.
I propose that we start culling those who propose culling others for no reason other than their race, gender, age, sexual orientation, etc.
You could vote for the only significant party that takes the survival of civilization seriously – whichever Green party is active where you are.
Note that right now Theresa May is only resigning as leader of the Conservative party (the Tories), not as Prime Minister of the UK. This is because by custom she’s supposed to present the Queen with a new PM before she can resign as PM herself. Since, also by custom, the top Tory becomes the PM (as long as the Tories have a majority in parliament, anyway), there needs to be a leadership contest in the Conservative party first, and that will take some time because a shortlist of candidates must be picked and the membership needs to be polled. So the fact that she’ll still be in office when Trump comes to visit is not a surprise.
All of this will waste more time before the notional date (31 October) on which the UK’s EU membership ends, and by which the exit arrangements should have been approved by the UK parliament (which is what Theresa May didn’t manage to arrange). This may not be a problem for the likes of Boris Johnson, who aren’t all that interested in striking an exit deal with the EU, anyway, presumably because they hope that, without one, some of the nasty divorce-settlement obligations of UK to the EU will simply go away.