rubl
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Post by rubl on Jul 16, 2022 8:28:22 GMT 7
The Tory Party will choose a new Prime Minister from amongst its ranks. Maybe a poll should be set up?
In this I'm just an interested spectator looking in from outside. Mind you, I'm wondering why I'm reminded of ...
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rott
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Post by rott on Jul 16, 2022 11:17:58 GMT 7
Rubes I think your observations on the UK would be better received on An Phoblacht.
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rubl
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Post by rubl on Jul 16, 2022 12:10:03 GMT 7
Rubes I think your observations on the UK would be better received on An Phoblacht. I doubt you want to imply that it doesn't really matter to the Brits. BTW I didn't do much in observations, certainly nothing really in comments. Afterall you guys are now non_E.U.
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rott
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Post by rott on Jul 16, 2022 13:52:08 GMT 7
Yes, let it matter to those it matters to. I am not one, whatever will be will be as someone once sang. But to me it is sad and embarrassing. I don't follow currency movements closely but what effect did Boris stepping down (almost) have on sterling.
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Post by rgs2001uk on Jul 16, 2022 20:41:29 GMT 7
The Tory Party will choose a new Prime Minister from amongst its ranks. Maybe a poll should be set up? In this I'm just an interested spectator looking in from outside. Mind you, I'm wondering why I'm reminded of ... I dont know how you sleep at night, you cruel heartless bastid, whats Ronnie ever done to p**s you off? You will be sending his blood pressure off the scale, his new lord and master being elected and he doesnt get a say. Dont know what he is complaing about, twat should be used to the medieval feudal clan system north of the border by now, its nothing new, they have only had it in place for the last 1000 years. He will be first in line down the dole queue on monday morning with his claymore in his hand demanding a recount and swearing allegiance to his new master.
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rubl
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The wondering type
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Post by rubl on Jul 16, 2022 21:09:04 GMT 7
The Tory Party will choose a new Prime Minister from amongst its ranks. Maybe a poll should be set up? In this I'm just an interested spectator looking in from outside. Mind you, I'm wondering why I'm reminded of ... I dont know how you sleep at night, you cruel heartless bastid, whats Ronnie ever done to p**s you off? You will be sending his blood pressure off the scale, his new lord and master being elected and he doesnt get a say. Dont know what he is complaing about, twat should be used to the medieval feudal clan system north of the border by now, its nothing new, they have only had it in place for the last 1000 years. He will be first in line down the dole queue on monday morning with his claymore in his hand demanding a recount and swearing allegiance to his new master. After a job well done it's easy to sleep in satisfaction and with a smile on your face.
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Post by rgs2001uk on Jul 16, 2022 21:28:25 GMT 7
^^^ good man, be advised Ronnie has never forgiven you lot for taking over his favourite porridge oats company, hope he effin chokes on his oatcakes tomorrow as he reads this and gives us peace.
The rest of us brits have no problem with the house of orange.
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chiangmai
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Post by chiangmai on Jul 17, 2022 7:16:23 GMT 7
I look forward to seeing the reaction from posters, if and when a new Prime Minister with Asian origins is elected. How can this be possible they will cry, it's not legitimate! If you can't trace your ancestry back to Alfred, Edward or Cedric, you shouldn't even be in the country. (in Chapter II we discover he's also really a Muslim and he drives a Tesla).....arf arf
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siampolee
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Post by siampolee on Jul 17, 2022 9:42:15 GMT 7
Not unknown for a ''foreign Johnny'' or a ''four by two'' to be a successful English/UK P.M.
Queen Victoria was somewhat enamoured as were the population in general with, ''Dizzy'' (Benjamin Disraeli) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Disraeli)
Question: of which British prime minister was the following written: "He came up Regent Street when it was crowded wearing his blue surtout, a pair of military light blue trousers, black stockings with red stripes, and shoes! 'The people,' he said, 'quite made way for me as I passed. It was like the opening of the Red Sea, which I now perfectly believe from experience. Even well-dressed people stopped to look at me.' I should think so!" The more than somewhat camp individual thus described - prefiguring Oscar Wilde both sartorially and verbally by fully half a century - is still discernible behind the only slightly less fantastical figure evoked by Christopher Hibbert at the end of his engaging new biography and of its subject's life: "The [dyed] black curls carefully arranged in the centre of his forehead, one of his eyelids drooping now, his tired, pale face gently rouged, rings worn over the fingers of his white and lavender gloves." The word exotic is scarcely adequate to describe the sheer strangeness of Benjamin Disraeli within the 19th-century British political establishment, or indeed within its social life. It is very much to the credit of both that they were able to embrace a personage so antithetical to every norm they enforced. But the ascent to what Disraeli himself called "the top of the greasy pole" was slow and arduous, strewn with obstacles.
Firstly, of course, there was the matter of his race, which his very name (as his Venetian ancestors had intended) made it impossible to ignore. Irritated by the demands of his local synagogue, the future prime minister's book-obsessed father, Isaac D'Israeli, had impulsively converted to the Church of England when Benjamin was 12 years old, and Disraeli was thereafter a regular and modestly devout churchgoer, but neither that name nor his appearance nor his manner could leave anyone with any doubts about his ethnic provenance. If anything, he seemed to have emphasised what might be termed certain orientalism of comportment: the ringlets, the rings, the curving tuft of beard, the colourful clothes, the sleepy, serpentine manner, the bows and the bobs, and the tendency (particularly, of course, in the presence of Queen Victoria) to fall to his knees. This physical manifestation outraged many of his contemporaries. "I think no man would go on in that odd manner, wear green velvet trousers and ruffles, without having odd feelings," the portrait painter Benjamin Haydon confided to his diary. "He ought to be kicked. I hate the look of the fellow." That there was a certain strand of bisexuality in Disraeli seems highly probable. Throughout his life, he had intense relationships with young men, many of them his secretaries: the youthful and comely Lord Henry Lennox wrote to him: "Remember my dearest D, I am henceforth your own property, to do what you like with ..."
But it was not any perceived effeteness that riled Disraeli's contemporaries: it was his Jewishness, and even at a distance of 170 years, their - mainly private - slights are pretty stomach-churning stuff. "We are all dreadfully disgusted at the prospect of having a Jew for a prime minister," wrote Lady Palmerston; Salisbury (a member of his own cabinet) habitually wrote of him as a "Hebrew varlet", while to Carlyle he was not only a "Hebrew conjurer" but a "sham-Jew, a quack-Jew". Everything about him was blatant, nothing more so than his ambitiousness, which produced yet more paroxysms of spleen: "a mere political gangster", Salisbury called him, "without principles or honesty"; while Shaftesbury, that great philanthropist, said: "He is a leper with no principles, without feeling, without regard to anything human or divine, beyond his personal ambition."
Disraeli made no concession whatever to these people, biding his time, cunningly manoeuvring himself into a position of indispensability, all the while taking quiet pleasure in provoking them. When he became chancellor in Derby's administration he crowed: "Now we have got a status", telling Melbourne - in another unexpectedly camp image - he felt "like a young girl going to her first ball".
Some 20 years earlier, Disraeli had found himself sitting next to Melbourne, then prime minister, at supper. Melbourne asked the young man what he wanted to be. "I want to be prime minister," replied Disraeli, at which Melbourne gave a long sigh. This quest for power is the defining drive of Disraeli's life. "If I become half as famous as I intend to be ... I must have riches and power," he cried at the age of 20, abandoning his legal studies. "Pooh THE BAR! To be a great lawyer, I must give up my chance of being a great man ... to have personal distinction a man must have either blood, a million or be a genius."
In the beginning, he seemed to have no political programme, no philosophy, no representation. These things evolved as they became necessary: power itself, for itself, was the goal - as it most usually is. Later he was magisterially, to sum up what he came to stand for ("the splendour of the crown, the lustre of the peerage, the privileges of the commons, the rights of the poor ... that magnificent concord of interests"), but that came much later. On the hustings, he proved to be a superb orator; when he finally entered the House of Commons, he became its absolute master despite profound resentment from both sides of the house - his own perhaps even more fiercely than the other. Denied office by Peel, he set about destroying him, reducing that noble if frosty man to parliamentary impotence, as he delivered yet another "sarcasm, hissing hot, into the soul of the victim". There was a streak of icy vengefulness in his temperament; even as a young man he had written down and filed away the names of those who crossed him. "Something usually happens to them."
The reverse of this was his great capacity for loving and tender feelings, most conspicuously and touchingly for his wife Mary Ann. After a sexually profligate youth, narrowly escaping some rather serious venereal diseases, he suddenly settled for the much older and somewhat eccentric widow of his parliamentary running mate, Wyndham Lewis; their mutual devotion is the core of Hibbert's book. "Bless you, my sweet little dove, Disraeli wrote to her, "soul of my existence", and he meant it. From the moment they married, the exotic, the sophisticated, the cynical Disraeli became the most uxorious of men, and she repaid his love a hundred-fold. "Yr own little slave your darling yr friend sweetheart companion and bedfellow - yr own property," she wrote in unpunctuated and unfeigned passion. Increasingly, she was the centre of his life, and, since "my nature demands that my life shall be perpetual love", her death condemned him to a rather miserable late-life courtship of a woman who found merely tiresome the elaborate gallantries that had enraptured Mary Ann. His chivalric wooing of Queen Victoria is well known; it is slightly alarming to contemplate how close to subverting the constitution their mutual admiration came, as Disraeli fed her delusions of supreme power and she plotted to keep him her chief minister forever. Yet these exchanges, too, are curiously touching.
Hibbert calls his biography A Personal History, and has, at the age of 80, written a book that focuses on evocation rather than analysis. The political history is swiftly dispatched; the novels are barely evaluated; the emotional history reported without curiosity - Disraeli had at least three nervous breakdowns and appears, certainly in his early years, to have suffered from a form of bipolar disorder, frantic activity alternating with long periods of inertia and collapse, but Hibbert merely records the facts. He relies greatly on the letters; Disraeli was certainly one of the greatest correspondents of the 19th century and Hibbert has drawn extensively and divertingly on the great and still incomplete University of Toronto edition. Frustratingly, he does not quote from the speeches, so we are left with vivid contemporary accounts of his fabled oratorical method, but no sense of the substance or style of the texts themselves.
In the end, the author leaves us with a mystery, the mystery of personality. As with so many extravagant individuals, there seems a curious impersonality at the centre of Disraeli and unknowability. Most of us accrue our identities bit by bit, but some assume theirs in one great creative stroke. Such people always appear mysterious to others, because they do not bear the marks of their evolution. The assumption is often exhausting, and by his mid-60s Disraeli appeared worn out. His relationship with Mary Ann is particularly fascinating in this context: by her enthusiastic endorsement she seems to have given him the strength to go on being Disraeli, this figure confected out of dandyish affectation, conscious Orientalism, elaborate chivalric gallantry, but which somehow became a conduit of power and even wisdom.
It is surprising that Disraeli had so little interest in the theatre because his whole being was that of an actor, one of genius. "I would as soon have thought of sitting down to table with Hamlet or Lear or the Wandering Jew," wrote the Scot, Skelton. "People say 'what an actor the man is!' and of course he is. But the ultimate impression is of absolute sincerity and unreserve." Hibbert's final lines from the diarist Brett perfectly sum up the story: "No more curious figure ever appeared in English parliamentary life ... he captivated the imagination of the English people and triumphed over their not unnatural prejudices."
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oldie
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Post by oldie on Jul 17, 2022 11:24:57 GMT 7
Is Kenny Everett still vertical? He's got my vote.
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rubl
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Post by rubl on Jul 17, 2022 13:28:49 GMT 7
Is Kenny Everett still vertical? He's got my vote. Had to check. Since this is a Tory internal affair I assume plusses and minuses as I see it, they're mine only. + Everett was dismissed from the BBC in 1970 after making remarks about a government minister's wife. +/- Everett openly supported the UK's Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher - He said he would stand up for gay rights if he were asked providing "it was a jolly occasion", but he also felt that being in a minority and in the public eye, he could do more for gay rights by showing that he was funny and human rather than by marching in the streets. - He died on 4 April 1995, aged 50 + A Catholic requiem mass was held at Church of the Immaculate Conception in Mayfair, London. -- His body was cremated en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_EverettI'm afraid the last really disqualifies him.
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chiangmai
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Post by chiangmai on Jul 17, 2022 13:56:03 GMT 7
Is Kenny Everett still vertical? He's got my vote. Had to check. Since this is a Tory internal affair I assume plusses and minuses as I see it, they're mine only. + Everett was dismissed from the BBC in 1970 after making remarks about a government minister's wife. +/- Everett openly supported the UK's Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher - He said he would stand up for gay rights if he were asked providing "it was a jolly occasion", but he also felt that being in a minority and in the public eye, he could do more for gay rights by showing that he was funny and human rather than by marching in the streets. - He died on 4 April 1995, aged 50 + A Catholic requiem mass was held at Church of the Immaculate Conception in Mayfair, London. -- His body was cremated en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_EverettI'm afraid the last really disqualifies him. Not when compared against John Major it doesn't.
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rubl
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Post by rubl on Jul 17, 2022 15:39:04 GMT 7
Had to check. Since this is a Tory internal affair I assume plusses and minuses as I see it, they're mine only. + Everett was dismissed from the BBC in 1970 after making remarks about a government minister's wife. +/- Everett openly supported the UK's Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher - He said he would stand up for gay rights if he were asked providing "it was a jolly occasion", but he also felt that being in a minority and in the public eye, he could do more for gay rights by showing that he was funny and human rather than by marching in the streets. - He died on 4 April 1995, aged 50 + A Catholic requiem mass was held at Church of the Immaculate Conception in Mayfair, London. -- His body was cremated en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_EverettI'm afraid the last really disqualifies him. Not when compared against John Major it doesn't. In this history might be again you. In that highly acclaimed TV series Rome (2005) after the battle of Pharsalus. When Caesar hears that Vorenus has met Pompey Magnus and let him go he asks Vorenus to explain himself. Vorenus says something like 'old, water in his eyes, trembling, etc.' and that he thought it wrong to apprehend him. Caesar raises his voice and says "you had him and you let him go? Pompey is dangerous. As long as he can be propped on a horse he's dangerous and be a symbol around which our enemies can gather". Well, John Major may be somewhat wooden but he can still be propped on a horse whereas Kenny Everett ... ...
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siampolee
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Post by siampolee on Jul 17, 2022 17:07:09 GMT 7
Who knows? Might be a major shit shift in power...
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smokie36
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Post by smokie36 on Jul 17, 2022 18:04:32 GMT 7
The Tory Party will choose a new Prime Minister from amongst its ranks. Maybe a poll should be set up? In this I'm just an interested spectator looking in from outside. Mind you, I'm wondering why I'm reminded of ... I dont know how you sleep at night, you cruel heartless bastid, whats Ronnie ever done to p**s you off? You will be sending his blood pressure off the scale, his new lord and master being elected and he doesnt get a say. Dont know what he is complaing about, twat should be used to the medieval feudal clan system north of the border by now, its nothing new, they have only had it in place for the last 1000 years. He will be first in line down the dole queue on monday morning with his claymore in his hand demanding a recount and swearing allegiance to his new master. All thirteen of my 'dole cheques' are paid directly into my Swiss bank account. I don't care which <theduck> wins!
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