Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
There's this too:

Tory MP Caroline Nokes, who voted against same-sex marriage, has been elected to oversee parliament’s scrutiny of LGBT+ and equalities issues.

From the people who brought you the Saudi ambassador to the UN being chosen to head the UNHRC Advisory Committee, Tony Blair being "peace envoy" to the Middle East, and Kissinger winning the Nobel peace prize.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
And Javid has now been replaced as Chancellor by Rishi Sunak, who apparently is a deputy to Dom Cummings.
 

version

Well-known member
Cummings sometimes reminds me of Stewart Pearson from The Thick of It, although much less endearing.

 

comelately

Wild Horses
The basic gist though is Johnson/Cummings wanted full control of the purse strings and Javid's Randian tendencies were very much in the way. I didn't think Javid would survive the year though I admit to being surprised he was culled this fast.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah... thought he was a total biddable robot, surprised he had the balls to stand up for himself and resign.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
These things are obviously impossible to quantify, but I wonder how much power Cummings is directly exercising in the government at the moment? It does seem to be increasing all the time, however you look at it. I mean at what point does an "adviser" in fact become an éminence grise?
 

version

Well-known member
Has Dominic Cummings overplayed his hand?

When Boris Johnson first approached Dominic Cummings during the Conservative leadership election, the former Vote Leave mastermind played hard to get.

“He said he needed to be in charge of everything,” one source privy to the discussions at the time said.

They were, he joked, his “terrorist demands” of a prime minister-in-waiting who badly needed a heavyweight enforcer. It took several meetings before the men could agree terms.

But despite the promise since Mr Johnson’s emphatic election victory two months ago, ministers have ruefully noted that Mr Cummings has been on the losing side of the most significant domestic arguments that have landed on the prime minister’s desk.

He vehemently opposed giving the go-ahead to the HS2 rail network that he described as a “disaster zone” and was a hawk on allowing the Chinese tech giant Huawei access to the UK’s 5G networks. Yesterday Mr Cummings was pictured entering Downing Street carrying a book called Chinese Spies on the growth of Beijing’s intelligence network.

Meanwhile, his radical plan to slim down the cabinet and create a trade and business ministry has also been ditched.

The civil service, well used to political zealots, has also seen off his attempts to bring “weirdos and misfits” into Whitehall, pointing out — respectfully — that even the prime minister’s chief of staff could not recruit civil servants.

He even failed in his more modest proposal to rearrange the Downing Street office space when Mr Johnson decided that he didn’t want to leave his study to become part of a Nasa-style mission control centre.

It has led those, who at first feared Mr Cummings as an almost Rasputin-like power behind Mr Johnson’s throne, to question just how far his writ runs.

As one senior government figure put it: “Whenever you get a new team of aides in Downing Street they want to exert their influence. But after a while things always settle down and the normal structures of government reassert themselves.”

Each of the decisions that has gone against Mr Cummings has had a different rationale but they speak to a broader issue that faces prime ministers who are urged to support radical reform.

In the case of HS2 Mr Johnson was persuaded to support the scheme over Mr Cummings’s objections for several reasons.

He was under intense lobbying pressure from Andy Street, the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands who is facing re-election in May. Then a series of big businesses, including HSBC, which had relocated large parts of its operations to Birmingham on the promise of the line, threatened to speak out if the plug were pulled.

Meanwhile Savid Javid, the chancellor, warned that pulling the project would cost billions of pounds in sunk costs and could not be easily replaced by smaller, more effective rail projects. The decision has yet to be announced — but Mr Cummings’s objections have been over-ruled.

Political considerations also torpedoed Mr Cummings’s plans to reshape Whitehall.

He wanted to reduce the size of the cabinet as well as abolishing the culture and international development departments and merging the business and trade portfolios under one minister.

But the original proposal has now been massively scaled back after whips warned Mr Johnson that a smaller cabinet would reduce his power of patronage and create unnecessary enemies from sacked cabinet ministers on the back benches.

At the same time when Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, established a high-powered team of civil servants to work through Mr Cummings’s “machinery of government changes” the plan was swiftly reassessed.

“It quickly became clear that all our energy was going to be spent moving people around rather than getting on and doing things,” said one adviser.

Other eye-catching initiatives have also fallen flat.

A leaked proposal to move Tory HQ to the north of England was disowned and a ban on ministers from the “people’s government” sipping “champagne with billionaires” at Davos was ignored by Mr Javid. Plans to force the House of Lords to relocate to York have also gone quiet.

At the same time Mr Cummings has got much of the blame for Downing Street’s aggressive media strategy in which ministers have been banned from Today on BBC Radio 4 and newspaper journalists barred from official briefings.

His handling — and the subsequent briefing — of the sacking of the government’s climate tsar Claire O’Neill is also seen to have badly misfired. She chose to use Today to take her revenge, accusing Mr Johnson of “not getting” climate change on the day the prime minister was due to launch COP26.

Some ministerial aides have speculated that, with Brexit now done, the frustrations of government may sooner rather than later cause Mr Cummings to reassess his position.

But those close to him deny this. They say his reforming zeal is undimmed even if it is not always shared by his boss.

They point to his time in the Department for Education working for Michael Gove when he was never happier than engaging in trench warfare with the parts of the media, the educational establishment and quite often Downing Street.

As one put it, in the kind of emotive language favoured by Mr Cummings himself: “Whitehall is littered with the bodies of those who have underestimated Dom.”

Chinese whispers

Mr Cummings has told advisers to read books by Silicon Valley tech bosses. Now weeks after Mr Johnson gave the go-ahead to Huawei to take a stake in Britain’s 5G network he appears to have espionage on his mind.

He walked into Downing Street yesterday with a copy of Chinese Spies — a book on Beijing’s intelligence services by Roger Faligot. But Mr Cummings — who opposed the Huawei decision — may find solace in its conclusions. A Times review suggested it showed China’s spies were too devious for their own good. “In their constant quest to discover the imagined layers of meaning . . . the spooks may be tying themselves in knots,” Roger Boyes wrote.
 

version

Well-known member
Suella Braverman as Attorney General is fucking scary.

Attorney general Suella Braverman belongs to controversial Buddhist sect

The new attorney general is a member of a controversial religious sect which continues to venerate its founder despite well-documented claims that he was a serial sexual predator, the Observer can reveal.

Suella Braverman is a mitra – Sanskrit for “friend” – within the Triratna order, one of Buddhism’s largest sects, which has been rocked by claims of sexual misconduct, abuse and inappropriate behaviour.

“The new attorney general must surely be aware of the long-standing allegations against the organisation,” said Mark Dunlop, a former follower, who said he had felt compelled to have sex with Lingwood over a four-year period.

Lingwood’s abuse of his position down the years has been well documented, with many male followers saying they were coerced into having sex with him. But the Triratna community continues to promote his teachings and life. Its websites feature many photographs of Lingwood and his writings and stress his centrality to Triratna. Lingwood, who took the Buddhist name Sangharakshita and died in 2018 aged 93, presided over a sexually licentious culture that influenced others in the sect.

Last year, the Observer published the findings of a report produced by nine members, who call themselves the Interkula, which found that of 423 Triratna followers who responded, 13%, said that either they, or someone they knew, had “experienced sexual misconduct by either Sangharakshita or other Triratna order members, in past and recent times”.

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...ella-braverman-in-controversial-buddhist-sect
 

comelately

Wild Horses
And there's High Anglican Andrew Sabisky, one of Cumming's 'weirdos'

My friends was telling me the other month that the 'High Anglicans' wield a lot more power in the UK than you might think. Though we were slightly toasted and listening to Eurodisco, so I didn't pursue the idea further.
 

luka

Well-known member
That was awful. Comelately how organised and how Nazi do you think the right are atm?
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
We get together over tea and biscuits and lament over how things were back in the day. Every Sunday at 2pm. Its pretty well organised.
 

luka

Well-known member
Fuarking hell I just googled Andrew Sabisky lmao it's literally like josef k getting a job with Cummings this world is hilarious
 
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