My cartoon Saturday @TheTimes. Sleaze et al….

Tory Party leadership….. latest

So to summarise, at the same time as the Conservative party was loudly demanding a police investigation into the sale of Angela Rayner's council house, they were deliberately sitting on serious allegations of fraud against one of their own MPs

Kemi Badenoch Robert Rotberg (expert on failed states) lists these indicators of future failure:

1. Failing infrastructure (potholes)
2. Privatisation of failing health and education
3. Huge financial opportunities for those already rich
4. Corruption
5. Falling per capita GDP .

Tory UK.

Rishi Sunak - head boy at Winchester, Goldman Sachs investment banker, married to a billionaire's daughter, prime minister just seven years after entering parliament - has today told the nation 'you don't get anything without hard work'

Counterpoint: she and her ideas need to be mocked, relentlessly. It is relatively unusual for the left to be in a position to punch down. When it can, it needs to be absolutely merciless about it.

In this banquet scene, Paolo Veronese (d. OTD 1588) creates a vast tableau of incredible opulence for the lucky Dominican friars of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. But is it Biblical? The Inquisition wants to know!

It’ll be the DWP and their well-paid contractors whose competence and compassion make them so loved by disabled people and anyone else who has dealings with them.

The Conservative Government’s policy making process in a nutshell…

The 'end sicknote culture' thing is just the latest in the long line of policy topics where the government has decided the goal is weekly headlines about how tough they are rather than any real world change.

Brutal ...

Casual reminder that late-stage New Labour pioneered attacks on 'sick note culture' SIXTEEN YEARS AGO, and it was bollocks then, too...

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Another day, another Tory resignation.

Day after day after day.

bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan…

Rt Hon Grant Shapps MP Conservatives

Exc: Liz Truss broke Whitehall rules by publishing her new book without agreement from the Cabinet Office.

Former ministers are meant to abide by the 'Radcliffe Rules', requiring them to hand over a pre-publication copy of their memoir for vetting.

Truss gave the Cabinet Office

First we had Wragg now we have Menzies. The whole lot are a almost walking, almost talking set of paradigm examples of kompromat. Time, I am afraid, for a two stage national security investigation. Stage 1 - people can mea culpa for lesser sanction. Stage 2 1/2

That phrase 'the executive in Parliament' is telling. The fact that Truss used it shows how successfully the (I think new, wrong and dangerous) idea has been promoted on the right that the government's supreme will is an indispensible component of Parliamentary sovereignty.

Britain’s omnishambolic policy style
blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpol…

Remember when a Chancellor got in a bit of a muddle about VAT on Cornish pasties, & THAT was an omnishambles?

We've had eight years of galactic ultra-mega-shambles...

A lot of moralising on here today. Let he among us who has never been detained in a flat at 3am by some bad men and needed an emergency £5k cast the first stone