Next Tory Leader.

I hope that when Theresa May leaves Downing Street, she will take James Slack with her.

In my view he has been responsible for poisoning our political discourse ever since he wrote the utterly disgraceful "Enemies of the People" headline in the Daily Mail.

May's subsequent use of inflammatory language, using words like "treason" and "betrayal" has encouraged the worst elements in our society to make whatever salacious comments they like and threaten civil unrest if they do not get their way.

"James Slack is the Downing Street Press Secretary and a former British journalist.[1] Previously Home Affairs editor of the Daily Mail, he was appointed political editor of the newspaper in October 2015 in succession to James Chapman, who had been appointed as spokesman for George Osborne, then Chancellor of the Exchequer.[2]

Slack wrote the controversial "Enemies of the People" front page article on 4 November 2016 which criticised senior judges in England's High Court of Justice who had made a decision the British Daily Mail newspaper did not agree with."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Slack

There are loads of counties ending in shire btw.
including the Scottish and Welsh ones (SNP and Plaid) - tartan hair and Welsh dragon tattoos?

blue rinse brigade is such an out-dated cliché.

This will be the second unelected PM.
I thought there had been more? 12 in 100 years - half of all PMs? so not that unprecedented.

fullfact.org/news/unelected-prime-ministers-common-or-not/

I found this interesting and surprising

I agree “blue rinse brigade” is outdated but it is still used to describe the age profile of Tory party female members. I’ve read it in two different articles recently. I wonder what a more updated version might be?

perhaps these young women?
conservativewomen.uk/conservative-young-women

callistemon

You realise that that is the total amount of young women in the Tory party the link I assume? ?

As the average age is 72, I doubt that young conservative women are representative.

At election time there have always only been two parties represented by tellers outside of our local polling station - the Liberal Democrats who have tellers of all ages and the Conservatives whose tellers were all definitely over seventy, mostly over eighty.

At the recent local elections the LibDems were there as usual but the Conservatives were totally absent. It seemed that their old supporters had just given up for one reason or another.

The number of LibDem Councillors elected increased by a record amount, almost wiping out the Conservatives.

The major problem for the conservative party would seem to be that they no longer are able to attract younger skilled manual workers, especially those who have families. Maggie Thacher realised that the above demographic were those that aspired to promotion in their employment and through that upward mobility on the property ladder and to those people Thacher made the Tory party a natural home for their support.

However, in recent decades the above mobility has been very much reduced in the workplace for manual workers. Therefore, just getting into the property market has been seen by many skilled workers as near impossible which has found them all to often trapped in private rented housing accommodation with no security of tenure whatsoever for them and their families.

Any number of surveys in recent years have demonstrated that those younger working family people see the Tory party as having nothing to offer them in their lives and therefore they have drifted away from what was throughout the 1980s and 1990s their natural political home.

The above I feel will not be easily reversed by the Conservative Party as Thacher drew the above demographic to the Tory party by selling off the Council Houses etc to create an entire new generation of property owning middle class families. However, you can only carry out such action once, and the present housing crisis is a direct repercussion of that wholesale sell-off, and in that taking present day skilled and semi-skilled manual workers away from the Tory party.

A bit of light relief

www.independent.co.uk/voices/boris-johnson-conservative-party-leadership-jacob-rees-mogg-chris-grayling-a8917026.html

Thanks Whitewave!

Grandad
“Younger skilled manual workers” that’s difficult to define, it might include Nurses, care workers, truck drivers, brick layers, carpenters, anyone that has done extended training rather than a weeks instruction.
I’m sure they are not happy with the Tories, mostly because rents or mortgages are too expensive but we already have a massive house building program, in this area there are sites everywhere and plans extending 20 yrs plus. I really cannot see more being built in that time frame.
So to win their votes Labour are going to need to subsidise private ownership just like Thatcher did and control private rentals, then Corbyn would have a chance of overcoming his leftist image.

David0205, totally agree with your above post as the skills and professions you define are the very people I was thinking of.

I also agree on the housing situation and what may be required to at least begin to remedy that. Here in North Somerset and Bristol, the housing situation is what only can be described as "dire" as many people move into the are to be close to the extensive Employment offered in the Severnside and central Bristol area.

The above I believe along will feed well into existing Labour party policies should there be a General Election in the coming weeks/months. That along with Labour policies on Gig Employment, zero hours contracts, repeal of some anti-trade union legislation and much more it would give Jeremy Corbyn and other leading members of the Labour movement "much to go on" in that election.

One thing I am sure of, whatever the situation is, the next General Election will not all be about Brexit, and that will really sink Farage.

A 60-strong group of Tories led by Amber Rudd and Damian Green will launch a bid to block leadership candidates backing a no-deal Brexit, as they urge MPs to reject "narrow nationalism” and the “comfort blanket of populism.”

The One Nation Caucus, which is backed by eight pro-EU Cabinet ministers, is preparing to issue a "declaration of values" tomorrow before going on to hold hustings to interrogate would-be successors to Theresa May.

The document, designed as a draft manifesto for the next Conservative leader, will state that the “climate change emergency” should be given a comparable level of attention and urgency as counter-terrorism, to help draw support from younger voters.

In an apparent swipe at Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab, the former Cabinet ministers, sources claimed that the One Nation group would "stop any leadership candidate who endorses a 'Nigel Farage no-deal Brexit' which would damage the economy and make it harder to release public funds" - equating strident pro-Brexit candidates with the former Ukip leader.

www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/05/18/tory-remainers-launch-bid-block-no-deal-brexit-leadership-candidates/

The ERGs have always been in a minority, yet have had far too much influence in the Tory Party. They are no doubt determined to push forward a brextreemist as the next party leader. Good luck to this "One Nation Caucus" in their efforts to stop a disastrous no-deal brexit but I wonder how long it will be before these 60 Tory MPs are threatened with deselection?

I think they will be deselected.

What would that say about the Tory Party? Is it trying to go further to the brexteemist right than Farage?

The tories are worried that their voters are deserting them to Faragit. So between a rock and a hard place for them

I think you will find that Labour is worried by the Farage vote as well.

Just listening to Hancock on R4.

Dear oh dear. He can’t possibly be the next leader. Mediocrity is his middle name.

Both labour and Tories are loosing their core voters.

They will both be decimated on Thursday.

I will take Matt Hancock and up you Ester

McVeigh!

You have to wonder how they ever think they could be PM! The arrogance of these people!

I think you are misreading the vote for the EU parliament Mycat. However it turns out it is not going to be easy to read over to actual figures in a General Election, although, of course, people will try. By the time we have a GE any party could have disappeared.

We shall see.

Re a general election goodness knows how that will pan out! Things are changing so fast.

Change U.K. may have disappeared or be flying high! Tories under a new leader may do better? Labour may well be up or down and Brexit party?

Totally unable to call.

Today 9.06 I am not so worried about their arrogance Mycat, I presume you need some arrogance, preferably not quite so poorly used but generally so many are simply not up to the job. I think the way the world is now you need to have more able people but people of that calibre simply don't go into politics since the Tories gave the economy away to big business an individual extreme wealth. If you can't control the economy to some extent, what's the point.