Thread 20 Sunak and the Winter of Discontent

[DuncinToffee]

Previous thread www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/4672210-thread-19-from-trussterfuck-to-sunakered

Never under estimate their cunning though!

2 months was long enough to go from criminal investigation to oops I lost it down the back of the sofa.

You are both right, I am being naive here

Surely if it is less than a 50% threshold it doesn't count?

That's a pretty low bar. Less than 50% of his employees are making complaints against him so he's fine!

Welcome back @jgw1. I’ve missed your wit.

Wonder if Raab has clocked up more bullying allegations than Patel.

Get ready for Rishi...to do what Johnson did and ignore the report findings, publish only select parts and for Raab to issue a "I'm sorry if you were offended" apology.

Sorry at some point I lost track of where the thread was.
Some people on other threads do not seem to appreciate my contributions!

Well we appreciate you!
Very amusing article in the Times suggesting Sunak is so cross that he hasnt spoken to Zahawi since the weekend. I think we are supposed to think Sunak has only just discovered the tax issues - when we know that they've had a lot on information for sometime.

That's so pathetic. So little Rishi is cross enough to ignore him. Well done Rishi That'll sort it.

Perhaps he is hoping his freeze out of a couple of days will force Zahawi to resign so that he doesn't have to grow a pair of balls and sack him.

He's apparently livid. Livid I tell you!!
They are all off to Chequers today to discuss election strategy - personally I'd rather they were focusing on neogtiating an end to the strikes and sorting out the issues within the NHS & social care but maybe I've got the wrong end of the stick and that's not what we are paying them to do.

I saw that story and thought the same Notonthestairs

Image is more important than the little people.

It's not corruption if it's Britain!

twitter.com/mattgreencomedy/status/1618326566957621268?t=IRkBtkDhw95dLPh2MZJBgw&s=19

Well as we know Sunak's political secretary is James Forsyth (close friends and godparents to each others children) and Forsyth was a Times columnist until December so I expect the Times are being fed even more tales to tell us. Such a small world. 🙄

Very funny - alarmingly on the nose.

Oh look, more 'coincidence'

BBC chair Richard Sharp owns multimillion pound stake in healthcare company granted nearly £600,000 for Covid research while he was No 10 adviser
twitter.com/PippaCrerar/status/1618529271827533824?t=IRkBtkDhw95dLPh2MZJBgw&s=19

Don’t know why they’re bothering to formulate election strategy, it’s just a question of how much they’ll lose by if the polls are anything to go by.

At this point strategy is easy. If you want the conservative party to have any chance of winning an election in the next century, call an election ASAP.
If not, carry on as you are.

twitter.com/Steven_Swinford/status/1618560474504695808?t=aD91Q6XjmOKCGZ3Z9lVQ6g&s=19

Breaking:

Nadhim Zahawi has not made an 'innocent error' in his tax affairs, head of HMRC has suggested

Jim Harra told Public Accounts Committee that 'there are no penalties for innocent errors'

'If your error was result of carelessness then legislation says a penalty applies'

Oh and Johnson's photo op in Ukraine was paid for by the tax payer, No10 confirmed.

As an aside, has anyone else been following Carole Vorderman's rants at the government and Zahawi? She is a woman on a mission

She is on R4 Jeremy Vine at the moment, she's doing well !

Yes I've been reading Carol V! She is very annoyed by the tax dodging antics. Rightly so.

Sunak directly sked Johnson NOT to go to Ukraine according to the Times - so it's odd that we should have to pay. It would have made sense for Wallace to attend.

You were/are very greatly appreciated by me on the “other” thread where you single handedly saved my sanity 😁 Thank you!

That’s just enraging. They really don’t care, like @DuncinToffee says, it’s all what could benefit them, and not a thought for us.

Interesting that today’s Telegraph has resorted to acknowledging that they’re going to spectacularly lose the next election and asserting that Labour won’t be any better.

The Tories misled their voters in four catastrophic ways. The first was to keep insisting that the NHS was the world’s greatest health system. The second was to downplay the cost of Covid and lockdowns; their true price, it turns out, was mass inflation, dislocation and a broken labour market. The third was to pretend that net zero carbon was a costless exercise with no authoritarian undertones. The fourth was in failing to make the case for capitalist economic growth.

"Rishi is a submarine. We’ve just given out £2bn for levelling up and the reaction across the media is relentless criticism,” one former cabinet minister said. “We are being hammered on the front pages and there doesn’t seem to be any proper strategy to regain the narrative.”

www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/25/cabinet-heads-to-chequers-rishi-sunak-survival-course-tories-2024-election-strategy

Quote from end of article, unnamed Tory MP. It's annoyed me.
That £2 billion is taxpayers money. You don't get to play Lord/Lady Bountiful with it. The money shouldn't be a bloody bribe. We shouldn't have to be grateful that areas have to compete for Government investment to compensate for their local authority cuts!

The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that between 2009-10 and 2019-20, English councils' non-education funding per resident had fallen by almost a quarter, after adjusting for rising prices.
The Institute for Government found that councils in the most deprived areas had been worst hit because they were the most reliant on central government funding.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/56238260.amp
Gah I'm pissed off with their whole attitude.

Lets suppose that Sunak did not know anything about Zahawi's tax evasion until the weekend.
What does that say about the quality of vetting that occurs in the Tory party?