POLITICO has decided that Liz Truss has already beaten Rishi Sunak in the September 5 contest for UK Prime Minister resigned by Boris Johnson

 

Brave new world: The first 100 days of Liz Truss’ Britain

Actual Brexiteer wins first round after Boris Johnson resignation

 Former British finance minister Rishi Sunak won the most votes in the first round of voting to succeed Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister, as two candidates were eliminated.

Sunak scored 88 votes, ahead of Mordaunt on 67 and Truss on 50. Finance minister Nadhim Zahawi and former cabinet minister Jeremy Hunt were eliminated. 

Reported here.

Boris Johnson done-in by testicles not his own

 

 

 

 

 Johnson was ultimately undone by his response to fallout from the resignation last Thursday of deputy chief whip Chris Pincher, amid allegations Pincher had groped two guests at a private dinner the night before. While he did not admit the allegations directly, Pincher said in a letter to Johnson last week that "last night I drank far too much" and "embarrassed myself and other people." Other historical allegations of misconduct by Pincher emerged in the ensuing days.

 

Johnson initially denied being aware of some of those allegations, but ultimately the Prime Minister was forced to admit he had been briefed years before and apologize for his decision-making. 

 

It was the final straw for many political allies who had supported Johnson through crisis after crisis over the years. In recent months the Prime Minister had been facing a barrage of criticism from all sides over his conduct and that of his government, including illegal, lockdown-breaking parties thrown in his Downing Street offices, for which he and others were fined. 

 

More.

 

LOL Boris Johnson, leader of Britain's "conservatives"

"It's a very important decision. I've got to tell you, I think it's a big step backwards," he told a news conference in Kigali, where he is attending a Commonwealth meeting. "I've always believed in a woman's right to choose and I stick to that view and that is why the UK has the laws that it does."

Reuters, here.

The UK's Boris Johnson turns on a dime

Remember when the British were famous for the phrase, "steady on"?

Or "steady as she goes"?

Yeah, me neither.

 

Three weeks ago the New York Post was pooh-poohing "hysteria" over the Delta variant in the UK

Rising cases even prompted Prime Minister Boris Johnson to delay the end of restrictions. But the huge case spike didn’t lead to similar hospitalization or death spikes, so Britain’s back on track to lift regulations July 19.

The seven-day average of new UK cases is above 25,000, the highest since late January, when the weekly average had just dropped from a peak of 50,000. But only 2,000 COVID cases are hospitalized, vs. nearly 40,000 in January. Daily deaths average under 20, vs. more than 1,000 in January.

More.

OK, well, daily new cases coincidentally rolled over after July 18th, so there's that, but hospitalizations are up over 542% in two months, and 179% in the three weeks since the editorial.  And daily new deaths aren't in the 20s anymore. They were 131 yesterday.

The confident pronunciamentoes of a month ago don't look so firm today. They were premature, as is typical during this pandemic, which has made fools of us all.

Debates about severity aside, the main point is still that the vaccines prevented none of this in merry old England in July, where 66% were fully (49%) and partially vaccinated as of the end of June.

We are witnessing vaccine failure in place after place, even as the progress of the pandemic changes as the virus mutates and host populations experience transformation. The low hanging fruit easily picked off and killed by the virus in the past will likely not be matched in magnitude going forward by the deaths of what are by definition sturdier hosts. It would be a mistake to miss that and credit the so-called vaccines instead, which are not preventing disease. 

Pinkgelato15, who has followers, thinks Boris Johnson's Latin "sounds off"

Be safe everyone.

No deal Brexit may finally happen after all: Wily devil Boris Johnson, new UK PM, manipulates Parliament schedule to give it about 2 weeks to debate before Oct 31 deadline

Queen approves Boris Johnson’s plan to suspend parliament, making a no-deal Brexit more likely

Get off me!, she yelled at Boris in the wee hours: New UK PM seems to like to get on things in Paris, too

In sharp contrast to Donald Trump Boris Johnson fired everybody upon taking office, a sign he actually might succeed

A "brutal cull" not seen in 60 years.

Bush 41 did the same and ultimately failed because he betrayed Ronald Reagan, so we'll see, now won't we?

Actually he's a bigger moral trainwreck than Trump will ever be, so there's that

The once free world deserves these two.

Just great, like Trump the UK's Boris Johnson wings everything and is hopelessly disorganized

Now where did I put that submarine?

Boris been bad, playing the cad

Boris Johnson 'splits from long-suffering wife after she accused him of cheating' 

Laugh of the Day 2.0: Boris Johnson objects to "The New English Letter Box"

Quoted here:

"If you say that it is weird and bullying to expect women to cover their faces, then I totally agree," he said.

"I would go further and say that it is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes."

And he added that "a female student turned up at school or at a university lecture looking like a bank robber" he would ask her to remove it to speak to her.

Brexiters Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage both back Andrea Leadsom for UK PM

Story here.

5 Years Of Uncommon Snows Give London Mayor Boris Johnson An Open Mind

Lord I wish Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, England, were my mayor, my governor, hell, my president for crying out loud.

This guy, trained in the study of classical antiquity, utters more civilization and common sense in one brief column than I've heard in four years from Barack Obama on any subject, let alone from nearly anyone else in this increasingly barbarous republic of ours, if it can still be called a republic. And that's saying a lot because President Obama has been talking non-stop now for four years and hasn't said one damn thing yet, even when the teleprompter is working properly. Where else can you learn about the Maunder minimum, Martinis, the Dalton minimum, William Shakespeare and solar science all wrapped up in a delightful bow about winter snow? I know not where.

Notably, the mayor ends his column with the humility characteristic of a man who one day will doubtless be the leader of many more in England than just the happy inhabitants of London, or at least it can be hoped:

I am speaking only as a layman who observes that there is plenty of snow in our winters these days, and who wonders whether it might be time for government to start taking seriously the possibility — however remote — that [astrophysicist Piers] Corbyn is right. If he is, that will have big implications for agriculture, tourism, transport, aviation policy and the economy as a whole. Of course it still seems a bit nuts to talk of the encroachment of a mini ice age.

But it doesn’t seem as nuts as it did five years ago. I look at the snowy waste outside, and I have an open mind.

And on this quotation, "Sometime too bright the eye of heaven shines", which he makes from Shakespeare's sonnett, in the bleak mid-winter I can live for days as I remind myself that not everything dies forever, least of all the good, the true, and the beautiful:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Boris Johnson, The Only Man Talking Sense In Britain

Hell, he's the only man talking sense in Europe, except for that hippie in Sweden, Anders Borg. Alexis Tsipras, call your office.

From the Mayor of London's column in the UK Telegraph, here:

[T]he euro ... has been a catastrophe for Greece and pretty bad (with one notable exception) for the rest of the continent. ...

We are told that the only solution now is a Fiscal Union (or FU)[!]. We must have “more Europe”, say our leaders, not less Europe – even though more Europe means more suffering, and a refusal to recognise what has gone wrong in Greece.

The euro has turned out to be a doomsday machine, a destroyer of jobs, a killer of growth, because it entrenches and exacerbates the fundamental and historic inability of some countries to compete with Germany in making high-quality goods with low-unit labour costs. Unable to devalue their way back into the game, these countries are forced to watch industry wilt under German imports, as the euro serves as a giant trebuchet to fire swish German saloon cars and machine tools across the rest of Europe. ...

Europe now has the lowest growth of any region in the world. We have already wasted years in trying to control this sickness in the euro, and we are saving the cancer and killing the patient. We have blighted countless lives and lost countless jobs by kidding ourselves that the answer to the crisis might be “more Europe”. And all for what? To salvage the prestige of the European Project, and to spare the egos of those who were wrong and muddle-headed enough to campaign for the euro.

Aging American Leftist: Social Security is Unaffordable

One Janet Daley, formerly of Berkeley, California, purportedly also a former leftist, in the UK Telegraph here:

Relying on the free market to support a vast system of entitlements (whichever of the two you choose to make your first priority) is not sustainable. The market economy simply cannot afford the enormous cost of the social security programmes that are now regarded as politically untouchable in Europe and in the US – as both of their political elites are painfully discovering.