The most significant example of this in recent times being Karen Bradley’s admission that she didn’t understand the polarisation between unionists and republicans in Northern Ireland.

I can imagine her mental cogs whirring as she thought to herself, “wow, these two groups of people who spent large chunks of the last hundred years trying to kill each other really don’t vote for each other. Who could have guessed that?”

‘The most significant example of this in recent times being Karen Bradley’s admission that she didn’t understand the polarisation between unionists and republicans in Northern Ireland.’

Bradley was as well suited to that job as Patel and Raab are to head the Home and Foreign office respectively]

Whilst most politicians to be fair are considerably above average intelligence, it makes no sense to hand plum role to those that aren’t

Tim – but you are again letting your prejudice get in the way of the facts.

Raab is both objectively intelligent and suited to that role from his CV. A First in Law, prosecuting war crimes at the Hague and so on.

It reminds me of those on here who derided Fox [because they hate his views] as both unsuitable for Health and not bright compared with a certain Labour Education spokeswoman who left school after having failed all of her exams! Their CVs speak for themselves, especially in their 20s.

There are many examples of intelligent Labour people (although I’d argue far fewer than in the days of Peter Shore and Tony Benn) in the House and stupid Tory MPs, but not the ones referenced on here.

Next GE Odds

Cons 2/5
Lab 7/2

Labour to win a majority 12/1

Next Lab Leader Starmer 5/1 (now ahead of all of the women)

Kevin Maguire on the Sky News Paper Review was right in predicting that a couple of chicken suits have been spotted.

He opined that the Sun or Express were likely to doorstep [or follow them on College Green] Jezza or Thornberry et al in the same way the Mirror used to follow Major around in the dying days of his Govt.

I didn’t see it, but I understand Andrew Neil was his usual self and totally defenestrated Corbyn on BBC last night.

A review today said he refused four times to apologise for anti-Semitism in the Party. He admitted the abolition of the married couples’ allowance would mean tax rises would affect the average taxpayer and not just the top 5% and he refused to say that a marauding terrorist should be shot dead.

I expect Boris & Swinson to be attacked in the same way, as none of them appear good on detail.

That’s if Boris agrees – they still haven’t got him to agree a date.

The most astonishing thing about the interview was that he seemed more remorseful about his implementing much-needed middle-class tax rises than any of the thing he should have been apologising for!

Still, it won’t touch the polls. Already been forgotten, 24 hours later – I suspect the party had been sitting for a while on that US trade dossier, for deployment when they really needed it.

The climate change part of the trade deal is getting noticed on social media. Saw someone I went to Uni with and who has never posted anything political posting about it. Could be something that moves even more of the remain vote back to Labour.

The BBC’s Chris Mason says Labour wants to plant billions of trees here by 2040, which works out as:

200 trees per minute, 24/7 and a forest the size of Wales!

Planting trees is great and I certainly support a target that isn’t as unachievable as some are saying; certainly it’s a far more realistic target than decarbonising within ten years. My concern is where those trees are going to be planted; I suspect that he is treating them as a resource to be enjoyed by people, and will want to put them right on the edge of conurbations. But that’s just catnip for NIMBYs, the worst and most powerful special interest group in Britain, and in my opinion the trees should purely be seen as carbon sinks and kept as far away from civilisation as possible.

AFAIK a national strategy was in fact agreed last year: one by a quango of sorts and the other by a charity.

Frank Field gained approval from HM Queen for the Commonwealth Canopy of trees (I forget but think it’s 1m+ trees over the next decade).

Plus the Woodland Trust are currently giving away 150,000 trees for free to anyone with a Nectar card.

I agree with most of what you said except the last sentence: randomly planting them on rural hillsides would if anything spoil the landscape.

Andrew Neil has ran rings round every politician he has interviewed on the BBC thus far, although the Corbyn interview was particularly brutal

Best PM:

Leavers: 76% BJ v 6% JC

Working class: 46% BJ v 17 JC%

Women 32% BJ v 20% JC

18 – 24s: 32% BJ v 29% JC

Even London was neck and neck

There will be an almighty effort by ‘the centrists’ to get like minded people to join Labour between now and the cut off date, 20th January.

A day after the closure of Parliament, we are told the PM has caught Covid19. I hope he recovers quickly & fully.

He was very conciliatory and generous to the LOTO yesterday who was heard with respect and silence in the HoC at PMQs. It’s a terrible shame and regret that in PMQs, Corbyn was shouted down, howled at and ridiculed right from the off way back in September 2015. And also had to endure with stony faced unfriendliess by most of his own MPs!

He’s now saying, “I’ve been proved right”. Well he was, wasn’t he?

No, not at all and if he honestly believes that, then he’s more stupid than I thought he was.

He wanted to spend billions more as a matter of course. These are largely emergency loans etc. Quite apart from the fact that he was wrong on almost every major issue from Salisbury to anti-Semitism and Momentum. He can now return to the backbenchers and the amusing oddity he always was.

Difficult to judge Corbyn’s reaction to this crisis since he’s been pretty invisible since December. I think the “told you so” stuff is motivated reasoning of the highest order; and even if he had a point, I’m not sure it would be that helpful to the overriding goals of saving lives in the next twelve months and making sure we have a liberal, dynamic society to get back to afterwards.

This is a very difficult time in which to be leader of the opposition. Scrutiny of the government must obviously continue, but opposition will be strangely non-ideological because, for this duration of the pandemic, the Tories and Labour will have exactly the same goals. (This is something that is yet to catch up with a certain sort of left-wing culture warrior.) Instead, opposition will need to be measured, analytical, conciliatory and constructive, geared towards pointing out and rectifying government errors, rather than having a “gotcha” at PMQs which you can pump our on your social media channels.

That’s a tough gig for Corbyn, well outside his comfort zone. But I suspect it’s a role in which Keir Starmer will excel. He’ll br 2020’s Attlee to Boris’s Churchill.

If Corbyns comments are motivated its clearly doing him no harm. Last three polls; Opinium, Ipsos and Number Cruncher all show Corbyns personal ratings improving. No where near as good as Rishi Sunak who has taken the country by storm and is as popular as 2002 Tony Blair

Latest polls show the Tories on 54%.

Thanks JC – you ended as well as you began.

It really is extraordinary. With those kinds of ratings, Boris is the luckiest Prime Minister since early Blair, and looks set to dominate the political scene for as long as he did (God willing, that he only suffers mildly from the virus himself). The recession in 2020 which was always going to happen anyway, as they come along every 10 years or so, will now be known as the Coronavirus recession not the Brexit recession, giving the government an easy get out of jail free card politically.

The support for the Tories is less to do woth Corbyn than it is to do with Corona. Pretty much every government is receiving a boost from public showing of unity. Trumps personal ratings are 12% higher than they were and unemployment has shot through the roof. He could be the first President to win re election during a recession

It depends where you believe the “rally round the flag” effect comes from. In my view it’s more just a form of motivated reasoning – people in a crisis know they can’t do anything about who’s in charge, and want to feel safe. Obviously this calculation would change if voters *could* do something about it. Hence I am kind of disregarding non-covid polling for the duration, it’s fairly meaningless data in my eyes.

Though I do agree that the recent polling gaps are not Corbyn’s fault, and the dreaded “centrists” (for want of a better word) have painted themselves into a corner over the notion that “Starmer would be ten points ahead.”

Matt W – except Spain’s and Italy’s Govts, of course!

Populists are popular and so it’s not surprising that those who called Trump racist (as well as telling New Yorkers to still party & go to restaurants etc) – when he stopped flights from China – are now regretting that call. Cuomo (unlike De Blasio) is usually accurate and decent and I like him, unlike his brother on CNN. But he was apparently offered 30,000 ventilators 6 months ago for emergency use but he declined and only ordered 6,000.

The Dems appear incapable of assessing public opinion. Indeed they only supported the stimulus by larding it with their favourite pork: 350m for illegals & refugees, 120m for the Kennedy Center for the Arts & 87m for PBS tv. The Kennedy Center then promptly made the orchestra redundant.

Will anyone even notice if/when Starmer and Biden become their Parties’ choice.

Lega Nord appear to continue to have a healthy lead over SD while their junior partners 5 Star have crashed and burned. I have not checked up on Spain for some time.

Edit: Pedro Sachez appears to be dominating his rivals in popularity. Not as much as the Tories atm but all the same.

No, no one will know or care when Keir Biden become leader