To be horrified that an unelected aide has so much power

[Mammylamb]

Talking about Dominic Cummings here: how on earth has he gotten so powerful??

Totally agree. I know all PMs have their aides and it is a position of power but I've never heard of one being able to run around sacking other Cabinet Minster's aides before with gay and reckless abandon.
He's a really terrifying creature.

He's not the first and he won't the last Special Adviser to terrorise party officials and elected Members. It goes with the territory.

He reminds me of Stephen Miller and his short-lived but damaging stint in the Trump administration.

Fingers crossed Cummings comes spectacularly undone in the same way.

He had someone escorted from Downing Street by armed police 😱 And he yelled at Jeremy Corbyn whilst stinking of alcohol 😮

What on Earth is happening to this country?

He's like someone out of The Thick of It.

I’d never vote Tory and would never have voted for Brexit. But the Tories won a democratic vote, and Brexit was voted for. But this guy seems to wield a disproportionate amount of power. It’s very worrying

And remember Thick of It's Malcolm Tucker was based on Alastair Campbell (and was apparently a watered down version as the truth wouldn't be believable)...

It's not as if they didn't know what Cummings was like, he did untold damage when he was at the Department for Education. The problem is that Johnson is inherently lazy, and obviously thought Cummings would do all the work for him.

It's been interesting over the last couple of days to see how helpless he is in the House of Commons when he doesn't have Cummings to spoon-feed him, and when the weaknesses in his political position and, indeed, his outright lies are exposed to view.

But the Tories won a democratic vote, and Brexit was voted for.

With lies.

If the people had been told the truth do you really think it would have been voted for?

A democratic vote would be now, now that people know what they are voting for.

Where was your outrage over Alistair Campbell?

Peter Mandelson?

I hear a lot about 'lies', and how people 'weren't told the truth'.

But zero facts to back it up. Give us facts!

I must admit, I’m surprised by Johnson. It’s a bit of a shock to realise that the bumbling oaf persona that we’ve always been told is just an act, really isn’t, and he is literally just a bumbling oaf rather that the master strategist we were all led to believe. Very disappointing, and hardly a surprise to see a sociopath running rings found him. But what can we do? We are where we are.

Sadly this is normal. Theresa May had Nick Timothy. Tony Blair had Alistair Campbell. These people aren't normal civil servants. They have so much influence it is sometimes difficult to know whether the PM is just their puppet.

@ScreamingLadySutch - Mandleson was an MP. Without portfolio for a while, but definitely elected!

He's a horrible, nasty bully. He swore at and bullied civil servants who were just trying to do their jobs when he was at the dfe and I think he has just got worse. I cant believe he has such power. I just hope they get rid of him quickly

He might be amazingly bright but he is also a pretty scary looking individual. Makes Alastair Campbell look like a pussy cat.

Most mp have advisors.
After wreckage of Blair, Campbell this is surely the balance that returns.

What I find hideous is the large group of activists that call themselves momentum... The ones behind corbyn et all.

They scare me.

Waaaaay beyond Malcolm Tucker in terms of having an evil aura.

Yes, the Blair years saw the rise of the SPAD.

And it's carried on since then.

I wouldn't bet on it vanishing any time soon either

ScreamingLadySutch

I hear a lot about 'lies', and how people 'weren't told the truth'

But zero facts to back it up. Give us facts!

From Alex Andreou on twitter:

Apologies for the short thread, but I think it is necessary to counteract the deliberate and cynical "everybody lied" white noise generated by Brexiters.

Let's look at the five, plain claims on the front page of the official Vote Leave website under "If we vote stay in the EU":

The EU is expanding with five new countries including Turkey joining.

An outright lie and an islamophobic dog whistle;

Not only was Turkey not about to join the EU, but since the Brexit vote it has withdrawn its application, having lost the main big player pushing for it to get membership (which was, of course, the UK).

The EU will cost us more and more With a graph showing wrong figures

An outright lie;

Everyone now accepts this was a great big porkie. The same Leavers who spent months defending this figure, are currently touring studios defending the divorce settlement bill, by saying we currently pay £10bn a year. That's £180m a week. Which is also a lie.

The European Court will still be in charge of our laws. It already over rules us on everything from how much tax we pay, to who we can let in and out of the country and on what terms

An outright lie;

The European Court has never been "in charge of our laws" in any way. It is the ultimate arbiter on questions of legal interpretation at the EU level, with our full consent and participation: laws, incidentally, that we co-author, co-vote on and co-approve.

We'll have to keep bailing out the Euro

An outright lie;

The UK contributed a total of £5bn to bailouts for Ireland (2010) and Portugal (2011). Both countries have paid these loans back. In 2011 the UK secured an exemption from any further bailouts of Eurozone countries. This was further strengthened in Feb 2016.

Immigration will continue to be out of control

An outright lie and a racist dog whistle;

The UK has always been in absolute control of its borders. It is not a member of Shengen. To suggest, as the pictorial does, that swarthy refugees sneaking under razor wire will just walk in is an absolutely pernicious falsehood.

Those were the five central planks of Vote Leave's argument on why you should not vote Remain. Nothing else. This is what their campaign boiled down to ACCORDING TO THEIR OWN WEBSITE (it is still there). All five were false, all five were cynical and all five were malicious

We were also promised the brexit negotiations would be easy, that we help all the cards. That we would get a 'good deal' and keep membership of the single market^

For full thread with graphics see here.
twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/939899408765857802

Screaming here you go:

www.richardcorbett.org.uk/long-list-leave-lies/

Even the Telegraph appear to have their reservations about Dominic Cummings. And that is saying something! You can read this without a subscription as they let you have a small number of free articles, like the Times do. Quite why Johnson has decided to trust this man's judgement is beyond comprehension. The compromise sounds perfectly reasonable.

www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/09/04/dominic-cummings-personally-sabotaged-tory-rebels-compromise/

Where were you all during the New Labour revolution? Were you asleep?

Alistair Campbell was wholly unelected. Peter Mandelson was wholly unelected.

New Labour was a PROJECT. It was a deliberate plan, with Mr Charming as the front man but he did not drive it. You really don't need to study a whole lot about cultural marxism to see just how much they changed the structure of the UK and how much they redistributed wealth and how much they took control of the narrative - so much so that Cameron called himself the heir to Blair. This confrontation is all about the revolution!

There was a speechwriter called ?Neese? who admitted in the Evening Standard that the open door to immigration was a deliberate campaign to make the Conservatives irrelevant forever. Let me find the link:

""Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser
Labour threw open Britain's borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a "truly multicultural" country, a former Government adviser has revealed.
Tom Whitehead By Tom Whitehead, Home Affairs Editor
6:42PM BST 23 Oct 2009
The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.
He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".
As a result, the public argument for immigration concentrated instead on the economic benefits and need for more migrants.
Critics said the revelations showed a "conspiracy" within Government to impose mass immigration for "cynical" political reasons.
Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s.
Related Articles
'Ethnic majority' areas growing, says report 06 May 2013
Johnson admits Labour immigration mistakes 02 Nov 2009
Writing in the Evening Standard, he revealed the "major shift" in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office, in 2001.
He wrote a major speech for Barbara Roche, the then immigration minister, in 2000, which was largely based on drafts of the report.
He said the final published version of the report promoted the labour market case for immigration but unpublished versions contained additional reasons, he said.
He wrote: "Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
"I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date."
The "deliberate policy", from late 2000 until "at least February last year", when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.
Some 2.3 million migrants have been added to the population since then, according to Whitehall estimates quietly slipped out last month.
On Question Time on Thursday, Mr Straw was repeatedly quizzed about whether Labour's immigration policies had left the door open for the BNP.
In his column, Mr Neather said that as well as bringing in hundreds of thousands more migrants to plug labour market gaps, there was also a "driving political purpose" behind immigration policy.
He defended the policy, saying mass immigration has "enriched" Britain, and made London a more attractive and cosmopolitan place.
But he acknowledged that "nervous" ministers made no mention of the policy at the time for fear of alienating Labour voters.
"Part by accident, part by design, the Government had created its longed-for immigration boom.
"But ministers wouldn't talk about it. In part they probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn't necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men's clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland."

That immigration is required because we are not having enough children and the population is ageing is beyond argument. So before anyone starts the predictable 'racist' screeching, please focus on the key points:

1. "a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett."

1. OPEN immigration.