Odd that in the hour build up to the Polls closing, the BBC seem to be having a blackout on the Election (until 9.55)reporting on various irrelevant items to fill the time. And yet Sky News are running already, their Election Night with reports from around the countries Counting Halls as well as giving us a little bit of flavour of the excitement to come.
Not a chance that exit poll is right. I'm calling bunkum.
I simply refuse to believe that there are enough deluded citizens in this country to vote in sufficient numbers for Labour to make this projected result even remotely likely.
It wasn't altogether clear, but sounds like John Curtice may have projected a swing at the polling station (younger voters) on to the postal vote (older voters?) as well. That may be a big clue as to where he's gone wrong.
I'm sticking with my original guy instinct of a Tory majority in the order of 50+.
Gonna be a long night but it's a clear victory for Fake News Central (wholly owned by Globalist Inc). Sustained propaganda...relentless barrage...undermining the Brexit vote...undermining the Tories (never refer to them as Conservatives is the first rule of MSM journalists) at every turn. It's true that May screwed up the campaign. They should have chosen Boris but the Remainer Conservative MPs were determined to exact their revenge. Well in this case revenge is sour.
I missed the opening bell as I had to go to New Jersey to help a friend with some computer issues. Turned onto BBC website, saw smiles all round, knew there is no Tory majority. So apparently no overall majority?
Did they rough up Curtice before bringing him into the studio? It's only midnight your time and he looks like he's been dragged through the briar patch.
It's clear that anti-conservative bias is so deep in the DNA of the BBC news jurnos and editors that they are still sticking to their unlikely exit poll despite results seeming to show it's inaccuracy. However if the exit polls are true, we'll be back at the polls within the year.
Some very glum faces on the BBC Wales coverage, where the welsh nationalist bias is virtually official. They are still sticking by the exit polls though, even suggesting a Labour minority government propped up by SNP / PC, I don't know what they are actually looking at ?
"Bloody hell," exclaims Dimblebum as the Tories gain Renfrewshire East from the SNP, presumably thinking he was off mic.
Genuine surprise, or glum disappointment as the prospect of a Tory majority improves a little...?
Not that my earlier prediction is going to come to pass now. My esteem for my fellow citizens was sadly misplaced.
Millions of folk have fallen for the free stuff for everyone bribes of the Labour party, though as David says above, truly May only has herself and her own hubris to blame for this result.
If she does fall short of an overall majority, or even gains an unworkably slim one, I guess we do this all again in October with Boris at the helm?
Labour making gains from the Conservatives in England but, unnoticed so far by David Dimbleby & Co, Walsall North has just been announced as a Conservative gain from Labour.
That, of course, was the one with the dodgy 'Newsnight' voter panel - the one where no one said they would be voting Conservative!
This qualifies as an unmitigated disaster. In a way, I'm glad I wasn't able to watch most of the BBC coverage this year, as I'm sure it was insufferable. Now we're going to have smug Beeboids for weeks.
Lesson learned at last: never, ever doubt the QT audiences when the BBC bosses rig them properly.
Is Western civilisation doomed? Have enough of our young been trained to vote for self-extermination? The seeds sown by the evil post-modernists are shooting up.
It's been done before hasn't it? WW1 - young people in their millions marched into a hail of bullets for the imperialist ideal that was to evaporate in a puff of smoke within 50 years.
There are some interesting nuggets of information that the BBC haven't mentioned yet. Jeremy Corbyn is 68 years old. He lost this election despite the might of the BBC's publicity machine behind him. Will he have the same appeal in five years time?
A comparison with the 2010 coalition government puts the Conservatives in a stronger position now than then. Cameron formed a coalition with 305 seats against Labour's 258. This time, (with three seats yet to declare) the Conservatives have 316 seats, and increase over their 2010 result of 11, and Labour have 261 seats, an increase over their 2010 result of just 3.
Having slept on it for all of two and a half hours, I feel that Theresa May is, even now, the only person to negotiate Brexit for us, and when as she does so, she should also bring in some legal requirement for the BBC to remain impartial - especially in the run-up to a General Election.
I couldn't watch the BBC coverage last night, I ended up watching Sky with the sound off.
The difference between now and 2010 is that now there is no Liberal Democrat party, ready to grab onto the Conservatives coat tails for the first sniff of power since 1922. The history of parties without an overall majority is not good. Corbyn’s statement this morning on the Radio 4 news appeared to suggest that Labour had won the election. Clearly the medium-term strategy for Labour is too wait six months or so when the government, amid the ensuing chaos of a hung parliament is forced to call another election. Expect the BBC propaganda machine to be running flat out from today. This election was Theresa May’s to lose and although she has just held on, to all intents and purposes she lost it.
It’s impossible to quantify the effect of the relentless bias from the BBC, but what is certain is that Theresa May’s judgement and the Conservative campaign was lamentable. She is certainly in no position to reign in the BBC now. Rather than strengthening our hand in the Brexit negotiations she has considerably weakened it.
No Otto, May has been a disaster. She is not a leader. She was not strong and credible on Brexit, terrorism, and mass immigration. She wobbled and her manifesto was a SPAD-authored disaster.. She has to go immediately. Boris was and is the only credible leader for the Conservatives.
He didn't really have the BBC with him in the last two years but he was the beneficiary of a sustained "anti-Tory" campaign that has been ramped up because the BBC is trying to reverse the Brexit vote. The BBC switched from a Boost Farron strategy to a Boost Corbyn campaign. They had hopes the Lib Dems would use the Remain rump to unseat maybe 40 Tory MPs in s progressive alliance tactic. Didn't happen of course. They could see the strategy wasn't working so when the polls moved, in desperation they started bigging up Corbyn. But of course all this was only possible because of May's schoolgirl errors in the campaign.
1. This was the jauntiest election/referendum night I've seen from the BBC for years. The serious looks and tired eyes on the faces of the BBC regulars familiar from the 2015 general election, the EU referendum and the US election were absent. (It was ME with those this time, whereas I'd been jaunty on the three previous occasions. Roll-reversal!)
2. John Curtice & Co. did themselves (and the three big broadcasters proud) with that exit poll. I didn't believe a word of it but it turned out to be right.
3. YouGov were meant to be one of the losers of the night but they were the biggest winner among the polling companies. (Most of the rest embarrassed themselves as usual). YouGov's decisions to factor in young voters actually bothering to vote and their much-derided prediction of a hung parliament were both correct. No wonder Peter Kellner was looking especially bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
4. Mishal Husain is a very limited interviewer. It's always the same thing with her with politicians, whatever the occasion - the same tone, the same over-obvious questions. Her first appearance last night saw her spin round in her chair like a Bond villain. She didn't become any more natural as the night wore on.
5. The Conservatives have lost their majority but won the second largest popular vote ever (some 13.7 million) and is the highest vote share (42.4%) achieved by the Tory Party since Mrs Thatcher's famous landslide in 1983. Jeremy Corbyn's hefty tally (some 12.9 million) is lower than Tony Blair's in 1997 (13.5 million).
6. It was strange watching Mrs May's Downing Street speech. It was as if everything in the garden was strong and stable and she wasn't changing a thing, including her 'robotic' style of delivery.
7. Laura Kuenssberg looked so white and ghost-like on her first appearance that, until I recognised her, I wondered if she was a holographic projection (one of Jeremy Vine's gizmos).
8. Andrew Neil should have been doing the Mishal Husain bit. He's much better at it. He didn't sound too happy NOT to have been doing so on Twitter. He replied to someone who asked him why he wasn't on (overnight) and advised them to ask the BBC!
9. The apparent surge in young voters and the apparent fact that they voted overwhelmingly for Labour - and the polls showing that this is very recent, perhaps just over the last few weeks - looks real to me. It was only 2 years ago though that the BBC was doing programmes about 'Generation Right'. In just a few weeks they seem to have become 'Generation Left'. There's a fascinating Spectator article about it, giving entirely plausible reasons why so many of them paid no attention to Jeremy Corbyn's past record. It makes me think that this was a sudden uprising, akin to the Brexit uprising - not a counter-revolution by young Remainers but a parallel revolution against 'the way things are'.
10. As proved by my comments here perhaps, one big lesson that we keep learning is that most political pundits haven't got a clue. They keep on getting it wrong. But they dust themselves down and carry on as if nothing had damaged their reputation (like Mrs May after meeting the Queen). They are at it again today, having failed to see pretty much any of what happened coming yesterday they are now 'explaining' everything to us again and giving us their instant theories. They should give it a rest for a few days and have a good long think about things. (Just like me here!)
11. Samira Ahmed is straight back on her hobby-horse about Nigel Farage being given too much airtime on the BBC. She's pointing out on Twitter that BBC News's editorial policy recalculates the formula about the percentage of due airtime based on vote share at the past two general election results, at plus local elections, so at some point in the coming months UKIP's share of airtime "should be recalculated" (i.e. we'll be seeing less UKIP on the BBC). I suspect the likes of Samira will be keeping a very close eye on that to make sure it happens.
Some good random thoughts there, Craig. One or two things the BBC won't be focussing on:
1. There has been a vicious social media campaign among the young with bullying tactics being used to ascertain how people will be voting. Gross lies - far worse than the slightly misleading that the "£350 million per week" from the Leave campaign have been used by left campaigners e.g. suggesting women are going to be charged for getting pregnant. In other words lefty social media has been awash with political lies, intimidation and Fake News. All the things the BBC claims to be greatly concerned about.
2. That the "Tories" racked up their greatest popular vote since 1983. Not exactly a disaster.
3. That most of the people who voted Labour are poor, left behind, welfare dependent and uneducated. :) Well by their definition of a Brexit voter, that's more than true.
Also, there is an elephant in the room called Boris. Be under no illusions, the BBC consider Boris the greatest threat to their ambitions. I've noticed that - very oddly - although the BBC have been happy to speculate about May's removal (all part of the BBC-Remaniac campaign) they have been silent on her possible successors. Not like them to be so slow in coming forward with names. They fear that Boris the Populist might sweep the Conservatives to a landslide victory next time and that he will make mincemeat of Corbyn and co. The BBC are now stuck with Corbyn, so they know they have a problem on their hands. Expect the BBC to campaign hard against Boris when the leadership campaign begins, as they did after Cameron's resignation, but even more so. Who will the BBC campaign for then? It will have to be a Remainer - so I am guessing either Hammond, Rudd or Fallon (probably Hammond when all is said and done - might be why they tend to give him an easy time). It would be Ruth Davidson of course if she were in the running but as she is not a Westminster MP they can't fulfil that fantasy.
I'm not sure Boris isn't past his sell-by date at this point. Will his shtick continue to play well across the country?
Nor am I sure that the BBC would want Ruth Davidson as Tory leader and PM. Can't present the Tories as rich, white, racist pensioners and other lost souls with her as the public face of the party.
If someone were asked to resign and open up a safe seat for her in a few months, she could be in the running. And she would wipe the floor with Corbyn, or anyone else Labour would put forward in his place, and I include the remaining Blairites.
If Boris was past his sell-by date then you can be sure the BBC would be telling us that. If the leadership battle ensues, that will in fact be the first thing they say. But for the moment the game is not to mentiono him. No, the BBC have always been keen to neuter the Conservative Party...so it resembles one of those shell parties they used to have in the DDR - there was a Christian Democrat party there that was allowed to stand and win seats as long as it never challenged the Communist regime.
That's the BBC dream solution: a modernised Conservative Party that doesn't ever get a majority again. Ruth Davidson would be perfect for that part. Her weaknesses would soon be exposed if she were to take over leadership of the Conservatives.
Odd that in the hour build up to the Polls closing, the BBC seem to be having a blackout on the Election (until 9.55)reporting on various irrelevant items to fill the time. And yet Sky News are running already, their Election Night with reports from around the countries Counting Halls as well as giving us a little bit of flavour of the excitement to come.
ReplyDeleteJohn - London.
Exit poll: Please God, don't let it be right! (I speak as an atheist) - I won't be able to cope with Kuenssberg & Co's smug,ear-to-ear grins if it is.
ReplyDeleteNot a chance that exit poll is right. I'm calling bunkum.
ReplyDeleteI simply refuse to believe that there are enough deluded citizens in this country to vote in sufficient numbers for Labour to make this projected result even remotely likely.
It wasn't altogether clear, but sounds like John Curtice may have projected a swing at the polling station (younger voters) on to the postal vote (older voters?) as well. That may be a big clue as to where he's gone wrong.
I'm sticking with my original guy instinct of a Tory majority in the order of 50+.
RobNotts
Theresa May turned off a lot of people, and lurching to the Left didn't bring in any new voters. What a disaster she has been.
DeleteUnfortunately, it IS a hung parliament......
DeletePeter Kellner now alluding to something similar regarding the postal votes on the BBC's coverage.
ReplyDeleteGonna be a long night but it's a clear victory for Fake News Central (wholly owned by Globalist Inc). Sustained propaganda...relentless barrage...undermining the Brexit vote...undermining the Tories (never refer to them as Conservatives is the first rule of MSM journalists) at every turn. It's true that May screwed up the campaign. They should have chosen Boris but the Remainer Conservative MPs were determined to exact their revenge. Well in this case revenge is sour.
ReplyDeleteI missed the opening bell as I had to go to New Jersey to help a friend with some computer issues. Turned onto BBC website, saw smiles all round, knew there is no Tory majority. So apparently no overall majority?
ReplyDeleteI knew it would be closer than the pundits said.
Did they rough up Curtice before bringing him into the studio? It's only midnight your time and he looks like he's been dragged through the briar patch.
ReplyDeleteSo you're a shoot the messenger type?
DeleteIt looked to me like he'd been wounded already.
DeleteAnother silly graphic for Jeremy Vine. Kind of pointless to have the constituency names in the little polygons, as you can't really read them.
ReplyDeleteThe Beeboids sure are happy. Can't image why, as they are impartial and have left their opinions at the door.
ReplyDeleteYes, the light infantry on parade and they're all very jolly at the moment.
DeleteWhere the heck is Brillo?
The best political journalist in the country at the BBC's disposal and he's nowhere to be seen on election night!
They really are a lost cause.
RobNotts
It's clear that anti-conservative bias is so deep in the DNA of the BBC news jurnos and editors that they are still sticking to their unlikely exit poll despite results seeming to show it's inaccuracy.
ReplyDeleteHowever if the exit polls are true, we'll be back at the polls within the year.
Some very glum faces on the BBC Wales coverage, where the welsh nationalist bias is virtually official. They are still sticking by the exit polls though, even suggesting a Labour minority government propped up by SNP / PC, I don't know what they are actually looking at ?
ReplyDeleteITV presentation winning tonight I think. :)
ReplyDeleteWell that's the end of Tom Watson's career...dissing women.
ReplyDelete"Bloody hell," exclaims Dimblebum as the Tories gain Renfrewshire East from the SNP, presumably thinking he was off mic.
ReplyDeleteGenuine surprise, or glum disappointment as the prospect of a Tory majority improves a little...?
Not that my earlier prediction is going to come to pass now. My esteem for my fellow citizens was sadly misplaced.
Millions of folk have fallen for the free stuff for everyone bribes of the Labour party, though as David says above, truly May only has herself and her own hubris to blame for this result.
If she does fall short of an overall majority, or even gains an unworkably slim one, I guess we do this all again in October with Boris at the helm?
RobNotts
Labour making gains from the Conservatives in England but, unnoticed so far by David Dimbleby & Co, Walsall North has just been announced as a Conservative gain from Labour.
ReplyDeleteThat, of course, was the one with the dodgy 'Newsnight' voter panel - the one where no one said they would be voting Conservative!
http://isthebbcbiased.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/a-labour-landslide-in-walsall.html
Noticed that one slip under the Beeb's radar and thought both of the Newsnight panel and your piece, Craig!
DeleteRight, time for bed - can see where this is heading now. Sigh.
RobNotts
Walsall North? Lol - BBC/IPSOS Mori got it right, just the wrong way round because of criticisms from both sides.
DeleteThis qualifies as an unmitigated disaster. In a way, I'm glad I wasn't able to watch most of the BBC coverage this year, as I'm sure it was insufferable. Now we're going to have smug Beeboids for weeks.
ReplyDeleteLesson learned at last: never, ever doubt the QT audiences when the BBC bosses rig them properly.
Exit question: Is Brexit doomed?
Is Western civilisation doomed? Have enough of our young been trained to vote for self-extermination? The seeds sown by the evil post-modernists are shooting up.
DeleteIt's been done before hasn't it? WW1 - young people in their millions marched into a hail of bullets for the imperialist ideal that was to evaporate in a puff of smoke within 50 years.
DeleteThere are some interesting nuggets of information that the BBC haven't mentioned yet. Jeremy Corbyn is 68 years old. He lost this election despite the might of the BBC's publicity machine behind him. Will he have the same appeal in five years time?
ReplyDeleteA comparison with the 2010 coalition government puts the Conservatives in a stronger position now than then. Cameron formed a coalition with 305 seats against Labour's 258. This time, (with three seats yet to declare) the Conservatives have 316 seats, and increase over their 2010 result of 11, and Labour have 261 seats, an increase over their 2010 result of just 3.
Having slept on it for all of two and a half hours, I feel that Theresa May is, even now, the only person to negotiate Brexit for us, and when as she does so, she should also bring in some legal requirement for the BBC to remain impartial - especially in the run-up to a General Election.
I couldn't watch the BBC coverage last night, I ended up watching Sky with the sound off.
Otto
The difference between now and 2010 is that now there is no Liberal Democrat party, ready to grab onto the Conservatives coat tails for the first sniff of power since 1922. The history of parties without an overall majority is not good. Corbyn’s statement this morning on the Radio 4 news appeared to suggest that Labour had won the election. Clearly the medium-term strategy for Labour is too wait six months or so when the government, amid the ensuing chaos of a hung parliament is forced to call another election. Expect the BBC propaganda machine to be running flat out from today. This election was Theresa May’s to lose and although she has just held on, to all intents and purposes she lost it.
DeleteIt’s impossible to quantify the effect of the relentless bias from the BBC, but what is certain is that Theresa May’s judgement and the Conservative campaign was lamentable. She is certainly in no position to reign in the BBC now. Rather than strengthening our hand in the Brexit negotiations she has considerably weakened it.
No Otto, May has been a disaster. She is not a leader. She was not strong and credible on Brexit, terrorism, and mass immigration. She wobbled and her manifesto was a SPAD-authored disaster.. She has to go immediately. Boris was and is the only credible leader for the Conservatives.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteHe didn't really have the BBC with him in the last two years but he was the beneficiary of a sustained "anti-Tory" campaign that has been ramped up because the BBC is trying to reverse the Brexit vote. The BBC switched from a Boost Farron strategy to a Boost Corbyn campaign. They had hopes the Lib Dems would use the Remain rump to unseat maybe 40 Tory MPs in s progressive alliance tactic. Didn't happen of course. They could see the strategy wasn't working so when the polls moved, in desperation they started bigging up Corbyn. But of course all this was only possible because of May's schoolgirl errors in the campaign.
DeleteVarious random thoughts:
ReplyDelete1. This was the jauntiest election/referendum night I've seen from the BBC for years. The serious looks and tired eyes on the faces of the BBC regulars familiar from the 2015 general election, the EU referendum and the US election were absent. (It was ME with those this time, whereas I'd been jaunty on the three previous occasions. Roll-reversal!)
2. John Curtice & Co. did themselves (and the three big broadcasters proud) with that exit poll. I didn't believe a word of it but it turned out to be right.
3. YouGov were meant to be one of the losers of the night but they were the biggest winner among the polling companies. (Most of the rest embarrassed themselves as usual). YouGov's decisions to factor in young voters actually bothering to vote and their much-derided prediction of a hung parliament were both correct. No wonder Peter Kellner was looking especially bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
4. Mishal Husain is a very limited interviewer. It's always the same thing with her with politicians, whatever the occasion - the same tone, the same over-obvious questions. Her first appearance last night saw her spin round in her chair like a Bond villain. She didn't become any more natural as the night wore on.
5. The Conservatives have lost their majority but won the second largest popular vote ever (some 13.7 million) and is the highest vote share (42.4%) achieved by the Tory Party since Mrs Thatcher's famous landslide in 1983. Jeremy Corbyn's hefty tally (some 12.9 million) is lower than Tony Blair's in 1997 (13.5 million).
6. It was strange watching Mrs May's Downing Street speech. It was as if everything in the garden was strong and stable and she wasn't changing a thing, including her 'robotic' style of delivery.
7. Laura Kuenssberg looked so white and ghost-like on her first appearance that, until I recognised her, I wondered if she was a holographic projection (one of Jeremy Vine's gizmos).
Er, 'role-reversal' not 'roll-reversal'.
Delete8. Andrew Neil should have been doing the Mishal Husain bit. He's much better at it. He didn't sound too happy NOT to have been doing so on Twitter. He replied to someone who asked him why he wasn't on (overnight) and advised them to ask the BBC!
ReplyDelete9. The apparent surge in young voters and the apparent fact that they voted overwhelmingly for Labour - and the polls showing that this is very recent, perhaps just over the last few weeks - looks real to me. It was only 2 years ago though that the BBC was doing programmes about 'Generation Right'. In just a few weeks they seem to have become 'Generation Left'. There's a fascinating Spectator article about it, giving entirely plausible reasons why so many of them paid no attention to Jeremy Corbyn's past record. It makes me think that this was a sudden uprising, akin to the Brexit uprising - not a counter-revolution by young Remainers but a parallel revolution against 'the way things are'.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/generations-at-war-the-election-has-laid-bare-a-huge-old-vs-young-divide
10. As proved by my comments here perhaps, one big lesson that we keep learning is that most political pundits haven't got a clue. They keep on getting it wrong. But they dust themselves down and carry on as if nothing had damaged their reputation (like Mrs May after meeting the Queen). They are at it again today, having failed to see pretty much any of what happened coming yesterday they are now 'explaining' everything to us again and giving us their instant theories. They should give it a rest for a few days and have a good long think about things. (Just like me here!)
ReplyDeleteI know who does have a clue about what's going on: whoever selects the QT audiences for these specials.
DeleteThey do seem to keep getting it right.
Delete11. Samira Ahmed is straight back on her hobby-horse about Nigel Farage being given too much airtime on the BBC. She's pointing out on Twitter that BBC News's editorial policy recalculates the formula about the percentage of due airtime based on vote share at the past two general election results, at plus local elections, so at some point in the coming months UKIP's share of airtime "should be recalculated" (i.e. we'll be seeing less UKIP on the BBC). I suspect the likes of Samira will be keeping a very close eye on that to make sure it happens.
ReplyDeleteDoes that mockumentary they did about Farage after the EU referendum vote count as part of his air time?
DeleteSome good random thoughts there, Craig. One or two things the BBC won't be focussing on:
ReplyDelete1. There has been a vicious social media campaign among the young with bullying tactics being used to ascertain how people will be voting. Gross lies - far worse than the slightly misleading that the "£350 million per week" from the Leave campaign have been used by left campaigners e.g. suggesting women are going to be charged for getting pregnant. In other words lefty social media has been awash with political lies, intimidation and Fake News. All the things the BBC claims to be greatly concerned about.
2. That the "Tories" racked up their greatest popular vote since 1983. Not exactly a disaster.
3. That most of the people who voted Labour are poor, left behind, welfare dependent and uneducated. :) Well by their definition of a Brexit voter, that's more than true.
Also, there is an elephant in the room called Boris. Be under no illusions, the BBC consider Boris the greatest threat to their ambitions. I've noticed that - very oddly - although the BBC have been happy to speculate about May's removal (all part of the BBC-Remaniac campaign) they have been silent on her possible successors. Not like them to be so slow in coming forward with names. They fear that Boris the Populist might sweep the Conservatives to a landslide victory next time and that he will make mincemeat of Corbyn and co. The BBC are now stuck with Corbyn, so they know they have a problem on their hands. Expect the BBC to campaign hard against Boris when the leadership campaign begins, as they did after Cameron's resignation, but even more so. Who will the BBC campaign for then? It will have to be a Remainer - so I am guessing either Hammond, Rudd or Fallon (probably Hammond when all is said and done - might be why they tend to give him an easy time). It would be Ruth Davidson of course if she were in the running but as she is not a Westminster MP they can't fulfil that fantasy.
I'm not sure Boris isn't past his sell-by date at this point. Will his shtick continue to play well across the country?
DeleteNor am I sure that the BBC would want Ruth Davidson as Tory leader and PM. Can't present the Tories as rich, white, racist pensioners and other lost souls with her as the public face of the party.
If someone were asked to resign and open up a safe seat for her in a few months, she could be in the running. And she would wipe the floor with Corbyn, or anyone else Labour would put forward in his place, and I include the remaining Blairites.
If Boris was past his sell-by date then you can be sure the BBC would be telling us that. If the leadership battle ensues, that will in fact be the first thing they say. But for the moment the game is not to mentiono him. No, the BBC have always been keen to neuter the Conservative Party...so it resembles one of those shell parties they used to have in the DDR - there was a Christian Democrat party there that was allowed to stand and win seats as long as it never challenged the Communist regime.
DeleteThat's the BBC dream solution: a modernised Conservative Party that doesn't ever get a majority again. Ruth Davidson would be perfect for that part. Her weaknesses would soon be exposed if she were to take over leadership of the Conservatives.