Reviews of The Right to Rule: Thirteen Years, Five Prime Ministers and the Implosion of the Tories by Ben Riley-Smith and The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson by Nadine Dorries.
To Waterstone’s. I decide to have a surreptitious flip-through of Ben Riley-Smith’s new history of the British Conservative Party in the 2010s: The Right To Rule. We get into trouble right from the jump. Riley-Smith chooses to refer to the Duke of Portland, who served as titular Prime Minister intermittently in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, as a ‘Tory’. The man himself would’ve bristled. In those days, everyone in public life would have called themselves a good Whig – allied both to the revolution of 1688 and to the Brunswick succession of 1715. It was William III that the arch-loyalist Lord Eldon toasted, not Henry IX. There isn’t any thread, organisational or otherwise, that connects Pitt the Younger or the Duke of Wellington with the marginal Tory rump of Bolingbroke’s day.
It’s more than a quibble. It’s part of a kind of folk history, in which a perennial Tory Party stretching all the way back to the 17th Century wages a perennial rear-guard action in defence of an English ancien regime. It’s an attempt to give a spurious coherence to the modern-day thing, which has always been proudly mutable.
Spurious it is. In 2023 the Conservative Party barely exists as an organised political faction. Over the last 13 years, the Conservatives have – let’s not forget – split three times. The first was the departure of several MPs, MEPS and half the party’s voter base to UKIP. Had an election been held in spring 2019 the Brexit Party – UKIP’s spiritual successor – would have displaced the Conservatives as the main formation of the British Right. The second split was to the Independent Group, and the third was the purging of 21 Remain MPs – a little over 6% of the parliamentary party. Shortly before the referendum of 2016, David Cameron and George Osborne drew up plans to purge the entire Right of the party, reconstituting it as a purely centrist force. Nigel Farage now breezes into the Party’s conferences and high command is powerless to stop him. Although the Party is in far less dire straits than Labour on the eve of the election of 2019, its members flee Parliament with much greater alacrity. Leading lights of the British Right increasingly do not bother to cultivate a faction within the party and instead build a personal following outside parliament. Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg forced their way into ministerial careers with meme status. Boris Johnson, famously, maintained an Olympian distance from Westminster, preferring to take himself straight to the people on their TV sets. The current faction of Boris Ultras in parliament are the consequence of this power, not the cause. Over the past 13 years, Tories have spoken blithely about the total dissolution of their party in a way that Labour – always a family – never would.
Increasingly, the British Conservative Party is defined only by a series of journalistic tropes. The Right To Rule trades lavishly in these. “An absolute monarchy, tempered by regicide”; “The natural party of government”; “The men in grey suits”; “The ruthless pursuit of power” – these are all dutifully invoked by Riley-Smith.
These tropes have now come to life. The parliamentary Conservative Party derives what remains of its esprit de corps from them and tries hard to live up to the billing. The result is a strange kind of burlesque. MPs and ministers affect ruthlessness and an amiable cynicism. Journalists are bombarded with texts sedulously drawn up in The Thick Of It style: “Everything’s fucking fucked!” As a minister, Liz Truss turned secret briefings into a fine art, even to the disadvantage of her own career. There are constant sniggering references to House of Cards. Everyone is always “on manoeuvres”, which soon fizzle out. The Men in Grey Suits of the 1922 Committee, too, play their part – shown by the studied abstruseness of Graham Brady.
I’m not invited to any of these parties, but so far as I can tell all these showy intrigues and picaresques add up to very little. On the inside, it all seems to boil down to a series of low bum-slap antics: dull, unpleasant, and naff in equal measure – like a game of Cards Against Humanity. The real Regency roues of the Duke of Portland’s day would have only been annoyed by boring creeps like Crispin Blunt or Chris Pincher – apparently the social lions of the party throughout the 2010s.
Nor does this recreational scheming add up to anything politically. I have none of the insider knowledge needed to assess Nadine Dorries’s claims of a hidden Movement manipulating British politics from the shadows, but it is easy to see that the Movement is little match for the courts, the civil service, or even the Ministerial Code – all of which have become visible factors in politics over this period. Supposed ruthlessness and cynicism in the pursuit of power do not seem to have spared the parliamentary party from the steady winching-up of investigations, expulsions, and arrests. Smoke-filled rooms in CCHQ, plots, briefings, the black books of the party whips – all this can be instantly knocked over by the stiff, swinging arm of Sue Gray.
Insofar as there is any real coherence to “13 years of Tory Government” – another recent journalists’ coinage, which ignores the five years in which the Conservatives were in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats – then it is the persistence of this basic conflict. In the 2010s and ’20s, what the Conservative Party has primarily had to grapple with is New Labour’s constitutional settlement. The question of where sovereignty truly resides in Britain caused each of the party’s splits in the 2010s; if it splits again anytime soon, membership of the ECHR will have been the wedge. The constitutional settlement has, in any event, made much of the party’s legislative agenda illegal. So, what to do? In answering this question, the Party has, again, never acted as anything like a coherent political faction. The history of the Conservative Party in the 2010s has been a succession of small personalist factions, such as Team May, Boris-Gove-Cummings, and Cameron-Osborne – each of whom have commandeered it for wildly divergent ends. To find this much variance in a parliamentary grouping, you have to go back to the era before the emergence of modern political parties. Each of these factions grappled with this constitutional settlement in their own way, and each was eventually unmade by it. To date, the only successful attempt to bring governance back under civilian control occurred in 2019, with a policy of demagoguery against this settlement. One might wonder why a party that is ostensibly ruthless in the pursuit of power is so unwilling to repeat the trick, and, with the appointment of a curious ‘Baron’s cabinet’ earlier this month, seems to have given up on the issue entirely.
But it isn’t a question that can be adjourned forever. As the past year has shown, Britain’s extended Civil Service is willing to use its full complement of legal instruments against someone as meek and mild as Rishi Sunak. It refuses all offers of surrender. As prime minister, Keir Starmer will intensify this; as others have noted, all of his political success thus far has been achieved by purging and arraigning his opponents – and he is too old to learn a new trick. The keystone to his plans will be to rig the constitution anew. If this is allowed to go off without a hitch, then the world that Riley-Smith describes, of the whips, the boozy briefings, the Red Lion, the smirks, the backroom plots – all this will come to an abrupt and muffled end.
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Not much consolation for my old mate in Scotland, where you can be locked up if someone decides they were offended by something you said.
I suppose at least wearing a mask could help with that, since the accused could ask of the accuser ‘Did he see my lips move when he heard that?’
Questions to ask yourself before approaching me asking where my mask is…….
Thanks for pulling all this together in one place. Unfortunately the people who need to understand this aren’t likey to be reading DS.
Abaluck et al. (2021) conducted a cluster-randomised trial of community-level mask promotion in rural Bangladesh from November 2020 to April 2021, with 600 villages and 342,126 adult participants. Previous studies have evidenced that masks act primarily as a source control (they protect others from the person wearing the mask), and there is plenty of intergenerational mixing in rural Bangladesh, so if masks were effective, we’d expect a decrease in COVID-19 infections across all age groups in the intervention villages. However, the reduction in infections in the intervention villages was concentrated among individuals aged over 50, with no significant effect found for those aged under 50. The most parsimonious explanation is that the masks had no effect, and the over 50s, being at greater risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19, practiced more physical distancing and went out less. Making masks mandatory in a community setting fails to pass a cost–benefit analysis.
https://www.poverty-action.org/publication/impact-community-masking-covid-19-cluster-randomized-trial-bangladesh
Inherently unrepeatable one-off experiments are the cornerstone of junk science, no matter how much money interested parties are willing to put into them.
Outside of a health care setting, masks don’t work to prevent respiratory diseases That was the official science until 2020, but then rather remarkably and virtually overnight the “science” changed when the dreaded Rona arrived. This new science is of course the real junk science and is based solely only on hot air and the rustle of money being shovelled into an utterly corrupt academia.
The “science” changed because Globocap and their psychologist puppets decided masks would help their fear message and re-inforce the 1984 imagery.
I suspect most of us in here are well versed with this but it doesn’t hurt to reinforce. I’ve yet to be challenged and hopefully that will continue even if the mandate is reintroduced.
Dunno how you’ve managed that – up until July I had loads of hassle from jobsworth twats in supermarkets and on trains. On one occasion had a trio of plods form a “welcoming committee” at the top of the steps out of the subway at a station.
I gave in and got one of those sunflower lanyards last time. I don’t think I’m prepared to wear it again – and if any supermarket door goon starts demanding proof I’ll ask to speak to the manager and ask them to explain why they are asking for proof when it’s not required. Had enough of pandering to Covidians now and quite prepared to get into arguments!
Ditto. Worst arguments have been hospital nurses following admittance for a heart attack.
I didn’t back down.
My wife attended a breast screening appointment at a local hospital – I don’t wear a mask and invested in a £3 lanyard which acts like garlic on a vampire
Many so called health professionals don’t wear blue surgical masks correctly to start with, many of them handle it and then ttransfer any “germs” elsewhere
A few don’t wear them and I get knowing lokks and wry grins from them
She went back for her results yesterday (all clear) and I forgot the lanyard – no problems at all
In fact we had a coffee and sitting down the virus obviously understood it shouldn’t infect people drinking and eating
The Mask Mandate like the Jab Mandate is absolute theatre
I was challenged for the first time last week , when I went to the opticians.
Camp young receptionist: “Mfffl wbble drbble”
Me : “Sorry?”
Him : “Frrgll hvvfft splongh”
Me: “I’ve no idea what you’re saying”
Him, lifting gimp mask: “Can you wear a mask, please”
Me: “No, I’m exempt”
Him: “Do you have an appointment?”
A few minutes later he had another go “Do you have an exemption certificate?”
Me: “They don’t exist”
The optician and saleswoman were fine.
I am a 6 foot 2 surly Yorkshireman, though!
Had a run-in with an Australia Post employee when I went maskless to pick up a parcel delivery. I was outside his little cubbyhole, in the open air, and there was a screen between us but as he approached he skidded to a halt at least six feet away, horrified by my naked face and from behind his mask mumbled something about me needing to wear a mask as the South Australian Health government website said so. I said I was exempt (I have self-exempted from bullshit and the physical harms attendant on mask usage). Still frightened, he asked to see my doctor’s exemption authorisation so I calmly asked if he was an ‘authorised officer’ as only police and such like are authorised to check people’s reasons for not using a mask. He, a lowly government worker, was not aware of the whle ‘authorised officer’ thing, so obviously he wasn’t duly authorised to ‘check my papers’. After a little bit of a stand-off, he grumpily consented to fetch my parcel, will ill-disguised bad grace. But it was a victory to me!
Stand your ground! I’m a very easy-going guy but after 18 months of Covid lunacy, I’ve had it with the tinpot little jobsworths.
Point 2) needs to include the risk of bacterial infection that could result in pneumococcal pneumonia, and it should note that mask manufacturers such as 3M issue guidance for the safe use of their masks key among which is that they should not be worn for protracted periods -typically 2 hours in the case of N95 or higher spec. Together with the strictures about not touching the mask filter surface and not wearing more than once makes it impossible to follow the government guidance for school children or adults in restaurants etc.
I just reviewed comments in The Telegraph.
Usually a haven of sanity.
Total panic over booster availability.
This is good information and neatly summarises it all. Incidentally I have spent a few days in Cambridge and you can see that the Covid propaganda and precautions e.g. mask wearing, has worked wonderfully well for the behavioural scientists. As many are still wearing masks, even in the open air. They have even embedded Covid/social distancing messages into the paving slabs at multiple strategic sites and where people assemble. I suppose the thought behind it all is to capture the minds of the academics and intelligentsia and the sheep will follow…
Highly educated towns are the worst in my opinion – places where average folk just want to get on with their lives in a common sense kind of way tend to be a mix of masks and non masks. Unfortunately I live in a town with a high level of education and I can tell you Waitrose is mask central even now …. Morrisons, not so much.
Durham is dreadful; Hexham, where I live is nearly as bad, particularly in places where the middle class incomers go, such as Waitrose. The farmers and other local workers gave up a long time ago. My home town, a Red Wall Town, gave up long before July and now masks are rare.
I do occasionally carry a copy of https://evidencenotfear.com/why-face-masks-dont-work-a-revealing-review-john-hardie/ that shows the real efficacy of face masking in a clinical setting.
Even that is over-stating their effectiveness – writing ‘significantly’ implies that there may be some measurable impact. The reality is that there is absolutely no measurable impact – look at infection, hospitalisaation, death graphs for any country, or any state within a country such as the US, and see if you can tell whether there was a muzzle mandate, and when it was imposed. In every case, it is impossible to tell as the mandate has absolutely zero impact on the graph.
The only reasonable conclusion is therefore that masks have no impact at all in the real world (as opposed to contrived experimental situations). Prior to last year this complete lack of real-world impact would have been taken as evidence that they don’t work, but now of course we are ‘guided by The Science’, which means that if some contrived experiments, or even mathematical modelling, says that something works then we (or rather, the government, their advisors and the MSM) have to continue to insist that it does indeed work and is in fact very effective, even though every single set of real-world statistics show the opposite…
Did anyone watch tonight’s Shit Show? Masks, masks and more fucking masks! In between “get yourself pricked or we’ll make your life a bloody misery” it was “wear a [sodding] mask”! FFS! If they are so bloody good at stopping the Wuhan Lab Flu then here’s what we do: everyone wear a mask at all times for the next two weeks. Inside, outside, in a whore’s bedroom, everywhere. That should see off the little bugger – surely?
I can’t watch these choreographed shitshows any more – I’d end up shouting a constant stream of expletives at the screen!
Never worn them for very good reasons. Many I know are saying they’re not going to wear them again. What I am seeing though is a new culture of people coughing, sneezing, and spluttering into their naps, and LEAVING them across their faces!!! Jeez, like when a baby fills its nappy! I saw a young bloke putting out vegetables in the supermarket, whilst hacking into his flimsy mask, and it blowing our at the sides. He did it repeatedly. I thought he must have to change it, it must be disgusting inside. But no he just carried on coughing up plegm…How have we got to this? What is wrong with using handkerchiefs and tissues? Why is it suddenly now perfectly acceptable to have bacteria-ridden rags strapped permanently across incontinent noses and mouths, that are constantly fiddled with…and, even more disturbing why is it that some people seem to bloody love it!!!!
There’s a middle-aged woman who works on the checkouts in one of the supermarkets I use, who always wears a muzzle and always has it below her nose, and constantly fiddles with it while handling the shopping. It’s really not pleasant – and of course even the government concedes that wearing it below the nose is completely pointless.
I try to avoid putting my shopping through her checkout!
Went to see my dental hygienist today amongst the topics of conversation she asked me whether I had my booster shot!.She was complaining of swollen lymph nodes following hers.I gave my opinion which she agreed with.I told her do you know people are dying from these jabs?she was aware though went ahead because BUPA had put pressure on her also they wanted her to charge £40 extra per patient because of PPE and risk which she refused!Increased ‘safety’ measures in place the crazy carousel continues.
Just don’t put the bloody thing in. Never, never, never.
The other day I saw a group of young lads all laughing at their friend because his glasses had steamed-up, and that “he should have mini windscreen wipers for his glasses, ha, ha, ha…” But, all of them were wearing masks and not one of them realised the significance of the glasses steaming-up. No logical connection was made between the inability of the mask to confine air vapour, either in or out.
The obvious issue with mask MANDATES is that they are essentially unenforceable – anyone who disagrees can subvert them by wearing their mask exactly the wrong way (as most people do, even those who think they are effective). So regardless of whether MASKS work or not, mandating them and hoping for the best is utter bs. Somehow this shocking realization has escaped all the clever scientists and serene law makers for 18 months. But maybe that’s for the better, or else they might come up with introducing some sort of muzzle gestapo next.
The sixth form college where I work has just reimposed a mask mandate for all after half term. Apparently it is the teachers job to ensure the students comply. Previously many of my colleagues were enthusiastic mask enforcers and several still routinely parade around with their own masks on, though the most avid of all is currently off sick, with..
More abuse of young people.
When the mask mandate came in I made a mask out of gauze purchased from a haberdashery. You can quite clearly see me smile through it and it was perfectly legal under the letter of the law at the time but not the spirit, however that is irrelevant as this is in England.
There is no law and no letter.
You know what makes me laugh?
You can wear any old piece of rag over your mush and it passes as a virus blocker!
Since when has an old t-shirt been proven to stop a virus from spreading? NEVER! Yet there’s nothing to stop you cutting and sewing one together and the psyched up, dumbed down society accepts it without question!
Crazy beyond belief!
Q7: Leopard print or side vent?
Does my chin look big in this?
The list of exemptions is not exhaustive as far as I know. The wording is pretty classic vague legalese. In general unless stated explicitly wording like “include” before a list means it’s not exhaustive. The law is unenforceable IMO – how could anyone determine what constitutes a reasonable excuse with any consistency based on a non-exhaustive list.
‘If wearing a muzzle causes you acute distress…’
If wearing a muzzle does NOT cause you acute distress, you are subhuman.
Added argument: Someone who’s really a fully-capable human being wouldn’t need protective clothing to survive among them.
An oft-cited counter-argument to the face mask sceptic is that “The NHS insists on its workers covering their faces throughout their shift, so they must achieve something useful, since they are the experts”.
The widely accepted consensus pre-2020 was that facemasks outside of healthcare settings do little or nothing to curb the spread of respiratory viruses. But implicit in this statement is assumption that they do work to control the spread in health-care settings (principally hospitals).
Of course, in a hospital, there is more at stake with respect to the risks of a respiratory virus outbreak – the consequences are greater than anywhere else, barring perhaps care homes. So greater caution has to be taken in these settings. But why are the dynamics of spread and the associated mitigation of it by use of a face mask, perceived to be any different in health-care settings than in, say, a crowded London tube?
If they don’t work outside health-care settings (and I believe they don’t), then why would they work inside health-care settings? Surely they either work, work partially, or don’t work, regardless of where you are.
Would be great to hear anyone’s thoughts on this, but I suspect that it has a lot to do with the fact that they are continually compelled to assert that they work in hospitals and care homes, because as soon as the mandate in hospitals and care homes is ditched, they’ll have to ditch it everywhere else as well, and the psychological control tool of the masked face will be no longer.
.
A proper Covidian scenario would be I’m wearing this mask to prevent viruses in my body from reaching you! vs I’m building this fence to prevent fleas on my body from jumping onto you!
Presumably it could be argued that in health care settings, users are trained in their use and there are regulations (regular replacement etc) that might conceivably make them effective? Also leoparfd print not generally seen there
Surely then, the correct guidance stated by the WHO would have been words to the effect of “masks, properly used, have an effect in curbing the spread of respiratory viruses” (since whether we’re talking health case settings or otherwise the important aspect is their correct use). Assuming that they were effective, the reason to wear them in these places and not others would be that the consequences of an outbreak in a population of potentially hyper-vulnerable patients could be catastrophic. If this were the case then the ONLY places they should be used (taking into account the potential harms from masking) should be hospitals, care homes, and other locations densely populated by vulnerable people.
However, nothing in the meta-data such as that on Our World In Data points to their ability to make even the slightest dent in infection rates in about 90% of the countries Coronavirus profiles I’ve looked at.
The problem with this is that it’s basically impossible to determine what – if anything – the effects of mask wearing in health care settings are. All which can be done here is unrepeatable observational studies establishing correlations. People in favour of mask wearing quote the ones with the correlations. And people who are opposed to it quote the others.
Of coures, correlations not occurring consistently ought to rule out causation. But as this is not about science but about politics, all which matters is to have to right kind of study to prove the rightness of one’s preconceived opinions.
There are studies on this prepandemic if you Google. My memory is that they don’t work there either. They stop droplets, I guess.
In healthcare they are there to reduce spread of bacteria rather than viruses.
The amount of Covid spread which clearly happens in hospitals and other healthcare settings shows fairly clearly that, notwithstanding the higher quality of muzzle and better procedures for use, they still don’t work…
I don’t need 6 reasons. I wont wear a face muzzle.
Doesn’t protect me, doesnt protect others.
This is what virologists wear to protect themselves from a virus. Now tell me that a small, ill-fitting, soggy paper/cloth face mask does the same.
I’ve never worn a mask.. at first i went into shops with a defensive mindset, feeling a bit edgy, ready for confrontation, but fairly confident in my knowledge should i need it.
Near to Christmas, i felt i needed to change my approach. I vowed to enter shops, say hello to everyone, spend a little more time chatting to the staff, be overtly polite and look confident in myself (not that I wasn’t polite before the BS began)
I went to Tesco, the masked lady on the door stood there as i approached..
‘good evening i said.. how are you today, Merry Christmas to you’
She nodded her head, and her eyes squinted so i hope she was smiling, and didn’t question me as i walked into the store. On i went only to find the masked security guard by the inside entrance. I went with same approach, adding if he knew if the flowers were fresh from today.
He followed me over, and proceeded to help me pick out the best flower bunch for my wife, nothing was said about me not wearing a mask..
It was gold!
And encouraging at the same time
I just spent a long weekend walking with some old friends, all apparently intelligent, professional people. Yet they couldn’t seem to accept that masks are, at best, useless, and were happy to argue that they must at least stop something and therefore are worth wearing if mandation returns.
To be fair, not one of us wore a mask for the whole 5 days although we were in pubs, restaurants and B&Bs every evening.
Q7, Are they bad for the environment, being a source of non-recyclable rubbish? No shortage of it being fly-tipped and so on, over the last year.
I’ve not worn a mask at the doctors, in the hospital and going through airports, but my bravest moment was in Gare du Nord when I was told to put a mask on by a policeman with a gun, and just kept walking…admittedly out of the station!
Point of order: I am not “required” to disclose my muzzle exemption to anyone, whether it’s a Day-Glow Denzil, a Stasi, or a bench of frothing magistrates.
It may be in my interest to do so, but there is no (separate) offence committed by refusing, and nothing compels me.
Let’s please be very careful with our language here.
“Face coverings are dehumanising”
The sole reason for their introduction and those mandates.
Google Gessler’s hats.
What is the effect of masks on microbial evolution? First of all, we’d expect Covid to evolve in light of the environment in which it finds itself. Just as it will evolve in response to vaccination, it should evolve in response to masks. So widespread masking could result in the appearance of strains that thrive on masked crowds – perhaps especially efficient at being aerosolized by masked breathing patterns, remaining airborne, and infecting people whose breath is concentrated near their faces.
But Covid isn’t the only microbe in the world, and it’s hardly as dangerous as we’ve been told. What I’d really worry about is bacteria and fungi. Are we cultivating strains of Staph that will become especially skilled at infecting facial skin? We’re already seeing acne, including some really ugly boils on people’s mask areas.
There are species of mites that are adapted to living in the pads on clarinets, of all things. There are microorganisms that inhabit the puddles of water that pool in the leaves of bromeliads. Parasites evolve to occupy every niche imaginable. We should absolutely expect to see a range of nasties that will specialize in masks, even with variations depending on materials.
Won’t that be fun!
“Furthermore, you are not obliged to disclose your specific reason for exemption to anybody other than an official enforcement officer (usually a police officer); “
Eh? I thought my medical details were confidential and just between me and my doctor?
Has anyone got up-to-date graphs showing infection rates since the start of the pandemic in different European countries annotated to show the date mask mandates and lockdowns were introduced?