Scrutable

lpm wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 4:16 pm That tactical voting theory cannot be right. It wouldn't have stopped Badenoch votes, just redistributed votes up the top.

And that would work. He can't stop MPs voting for Badenoch. But if he had enough spare votes he was confident of, he could have "lent" some votes to Truss and Mordaunt, so making more sure that Badenoch came last. All he needed to do to make sure he went through to the next round himself was keep at least 1/4 of the votes for himself - in fact he had pretty much spot on 1/3.

If he has been lending out votes, then he has more support than we can see. In this final MP vote, provided he is sure of at least 1/3 of the votes for himself, then he can "lend" surplus votes to his preferred opponent in the run-off. And so if he was lending out votes, he'll probably want to bring a few back to himself to get comfortably past that 1/3. But if there are any spares after that, he can "lend" them to his preferred opponent in the run-off. Though in this final round, it might be more important to demonstrate to the membership the depth of his support in the parliamentary party, than to choose his opponent.

Tory leadership contests have sometimes swayed in a different direction from how they seemed to be going, as deals are made and compromises entered into. Like when IDS emerged from below, as it were, apparently agreed as the more acceptable anyone-but-Kenneth-Clarke candidate than Michael Portillo.

How exactly can Sunak "lend" votes so that Badenoch only gained 1? Your maths has gone awry.

This sort of conspiracy never happens in practice. Various people like to pretend they are powerful enough to pull levers behind the scenes. But they are fantasists.

shpalman wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 3:51 pm

dyqik wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 2:31 pm

shpalman wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 2:07 pm “Nearly there.”
Rishi Sunak - 118 (up 3)
Penny Mordaunt - 92 (up 10)
Liz Truss - 86 (up 15)
Kemi Badenoch - 59 (up 1)

This runoff devil-take-the-losingest style obviously hasn't done anything to change the order of the candidates or the final result at any point.

There's technically enough Badenoch votes (plus one spoiled ballot) available to split between Truss and Mordaunt to eliminate Sunak next. 118:119:119

Just because something is technically possible doesn't mean it's going to happen #planetoftheapes
jeff-goldblum-independence-day.jpg

Yeah, but what's the most chaotic thing that can happen to the Tory Party? That'll be what happens.

lpm wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 5:27 pm How exactly can Sunak "lend" votes so that Badenoch only gained 1? Your maths has gone awry.

This sort of conspiracy never happens in practice. Various people like to pretend they are powerful enough to pull levers behind the scenes. But they are fantasists.

You've got that backwards. The idea is that he leant Mordaunt and/or Truss votes, to make sure Badenoch was defeated.

Sunak can lend votes - and will easily win the MP ballot.

But he's not going to win the membership vote - and I fear we are going to get Truss - and she's going to start WW3. Or at least continuously shout about cheese.

lpm wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 5:27 pm How exactly can Sunak "lend" votes so that Badenoch only gained 1? Your maths has gone awry.

I have not claimed he had any power over Badenoch's vote. If Badenoch gained only 1, then that was perhaps luck. The important thing is that she fell well behind Truss. Though by the same toke perhaps he lent Badenoch some votes to push Tugendhat out in the earlier rounds, and then took them away.

I'm not saying this happened either. It is just some entertaining thoughts about what might have happened if we take the rumour that he was lending out votes at face value, and whether what we see might be consistent with such a rumour.

dyqik wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 5:43 pm

lpm wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 5:27 pm How exactly can Sunak "lend" votes so that Badenoch only gained 1? Your maths has gone awry.

This sort of conspiracy never happens in practice. Various people like to pretend they are powerful enough to pull levers behind the scenes. But they are fantasists.

You've got that backwards. The idea is that he leant Mordaunt and/or Truss votes, to make sure Badenoch was defeated.

WTF you talking about? Did Badenoch only go up from 58 to 59 votes thanks to the Great Mastermind Sunak pulling strings? Obviously not. She stalled at 59 votes because all the other MPs realised she was sh.t. Not because Sunak stole votes from her and gave them to Truss/Moredeath.

Truss and Mordor could have beaten Badenoch's final 59 with their 2nd round scores, let alone with their 4th. Stop imagining dramatic stories. This isn't f.cking twitter.

lpm wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 4:16 pm That tactical voting theory cannot be right. It wouldn't have stopped Badenoch votes, just redistributed votes up the top.

...to make Badenoch 4th.

lpm wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 6:23 pm

dyqik wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 5:43 pm

lpm wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 5:27 pm How exactly can Sunak "lend" votes so that Badenoch only gained 1? Your maths has gone awry.

This sort of conspiracy never happens in practice. Various people like to pretend they are powerful enough to pull levers behind the scenes. But they are fantasists.

You've got that backwards. The idea is that he leant Mordaunt and/or Truss votes, to make sure Badenoch was defeated.

WTF you talking about? Did Badenoch only go up from 58 to 59 votes thanks to the Great Mastermind Sunak pulling strings? Obviously not. She stalled at 59 votes because all the other MPs realised she was sh.t. Not because Sunak stole votes from her and gave them to Truss/Moredeath.

Truss and Mordor could have beaten Badenoch's final 59 with their 2nd round scores, let alone with their 4th. Stop imagining dramatic stories. This isn't f.cking twitter.

I'm really not convinced that this is going on at a level that would be significant.

But it could be argued that Badenoch not rising was due to similar games behind played in the previous round.

lpm wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 5:27 pm How exactly can Sunak "lend" votes so that Badenoch only gained 1? Your maths has gone awry.

This sort of conspiracy never happens in practice. Various people like to pretend they are powerful enough to pull levers behind the scenes. But they are fantasists.

If he'd previously lent votes to Badenoch to get rid of Tugendhat, he could then move those votes to Mordaunt to get rid of Badenoch.
If 10 of Tug's votes moved to Badenoch, but Sunak had moved 9 votes to Mordaunt, that's how Sunak could "use his votes" with Badenoch only increasing by 1

Lol. You're going to get into an endless loop of "and then in the previous round he lent..."

The reality is that people like winners and are turned off by losers. Same as the pop charts. If others are buying it, the herd is more likely to follow and buy it. Each time the 2nd worst candidate has been next to fall because people don't want to back failures.

None of us are Tory MPs (as far as I know). But this one thinks there's been some funny business going on...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 26906.html

The main thing that looks suspect - it's simply implausible that only 3 of Tugendhat's 31 supporters switched to Sunak going into the 4th round.

Tbf that's David Davis. If he said it was daytime I'd look out of the window just to be sure.

bob sterman wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 9:07 pm None of us are Tory MPs (as far as I know).

Not yet, but it's in my ten year plan.

El Pollo Diablo wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 10:05 pm Tbf that's David Davis. If he said it was daytime I'd look out of the window just to be sure.

Hmmm...depends which Davis, he occasionally says something sensible but that cannot be said of the following proponent of the skulduggery idea...

"Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, who is fiercely loyal to Boris Johnson and doesn't want Sunak to succeed him, tweeted that the former Chancellor's team was using "dirty tricks/a stitch up/dark arts" to ensure that fellow candidate Jeremy Hunt made it onto the ballot because he can "definitely" beat him later in the contest."

https://www.politicshome.com/news/artic ... te-lending

But the theory has persisted...

https://news.sky.com/story/tory-leaders ... t-12655167

Ah, I get it now! That article makes perfect sense. At last a clear explanation of why Sunak is doing this!

Sunak fears Truss the most. So he lent Truss a bunch of votes to give her a boost going into the final round. Truss then appears more popular, so anti Sunak MPs will gather around her, ensuring she makes the final two. Which... er... well what you can see is Truss appearing to be popular with lots of Tugendtwat supporters. But that's just Sunak dirty tricks. He's so clever, making her look like the popular choice with the big momentum on the final day! This reduces her chances in today's vote because... wait... no, run this by me again?

Saving his billionaire kompromat till the last minute, perhaps?

LPM's right. Sunak isn't some incredible Machiavellian mastermind.
He's nothing but a spawny a rich boy who is moderately good at maths (hence a job in banking rather than PR like Cameron), who got lucky in marrying a very rich girl. That's why he's insanely wealthy, that's why he's a tory MP ('cos he doesn't need to work, so he can pursue power as a hobby) &, because he's an idiot who believed that Brexit was somehow good for the UK, that's why he was in the cabinet.
To suggest that this adds up to some scheming genius is to fall into the tories' trap of believing their hype. They want you to think that they are rightly the natural power of government and that what you perceive as chaos and rats fighting in a sack is actually 4-d chess being played out by geniuses - it's like god's ineffable plan, and you just can't eff it 'cos you're not effing good enough, so best leave them to run every effing thing.

Still on her feed. Well, it was earlier.

That's always an interesting one - people thinking it's better when politicians erase history and hide their past ill-advised. And criticise them with "OMG still on their feed what a crime". f.cking stupid twitter.

C'mon, by 2011 everyone who paid the slightest attention knew that he was a predatory nonce.

lpm wrote: Wed Jul 20, 2022 6:27 am Ah, I get it now! That article makes perfect sense. At last a clear explanation of why Sunak is doing this!

The front page of the Daily Heil, another, er, reliable source, is also suggesting Sunak is up to dirty tricks, reproduced at BBC. They suggest he's trying to organise a run-off against Mordaunt, to close the right out. Whereas Sky and Davis think he wants to organise a run-off against Truss. Which, as you imply, seems even more lacking in logic than what the Heil writes.

Perhaps these rumours have only ever been an attempt to damage his reputation.

A non-conspiracy explanation, consistent (maybe) with the known behaviour of Tory MPs, for why Sunak picked up so few votes after Tugendhat's ejection is that some Sunak-voting MPs decided to switch. They might have decided they now had a better idea of which way the wind was blowing, and wanted to divert their support to the candidate they saw as emerging as the winner. Because they do like to be able to say that they supported the winner, for reasons of personal advantage. Similar thoughts can explain the previous round also, perhaps.

Would that, maybe, be an explanation of the data you would find more satisfactory?

Weird that Sunak decides that today is good optics to promise to continue the ban on on-shore wind turbines.

It's good optics for tory members. c.nts, innit.

Opti wrote: Wed Jul 20, 2022 10:15 am Weird that Sunak decides that today is good optics to promise to continue the ban on on-shore wind turbines.

Well TBF they are horrific eyesores as demonstrated by the picture below, I shouldn't need to point it out but the wind turbines can be located in the distance, just beyond the open-cast coal mine. As you can tell they completely ruin the view!



The picture was taken from the top of Northumberlandia and both it and the coal-mine are partially owned by Old Etonian Matt Ridley arch-climate change denier, anti-wind turbine campaigner and all-round "good egg" whose principled scientific opposition to AGW is in no way related to his deranged libertarian beliefs and ties to the coal industry. His genius business insights saw him rise to becoming Chairman of Northern Rock where he is widely-credited with a performance truly unrivalled in over 130 years of British banking. Absolutely meteoric* in every sense.

Having gone a bit quiet since late 2007 for reasons that I can't quite recall ATM, he still occasionally pops up to promote Brexit, deny AGW and lobby for fracking in the HoL. In unrelated news he received £50,000 from a fracking company prior to this lobbying that he must have forgotten to disclose, as you do.

He truly is a titan of modern British business so it was no surprise he was awarded the Institute of Economic Affairs Free Enterprise Award in 2014, presumably for services to the bailiff industry. Unconfirmed rumours were that they had originally offered it to Robert Mugabe. Once again the IEA demonstrate how on-the-ball they are and in no way are a thoroughly discredited bunch of f.cking rightwing clowns who shouldn't be left with scissors unattended nevermind having a microphone shoved in their slack-jawed mushes every 5 minutes to explain how Brexit is really going really well, no really!




*in the sense of the E.L.E. Chicxulub impact crater