Tag Archives: Boris Johnson

AI and the weirder aspects of the Bayeux Tapestry: it’s the news from Britain

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Let’s start today’s post in Chicago, which you may already know is not in Britain, but it’ll all make sense if you stay with me a while. 

In May, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a summer reading list, as newspapers do when summer threatens and they need some fluff to fill their column inches. I don’t know if they have any book reviewers left on staff, or if they ever had them, but they farmed the work out to a freelancer, who farmed it out to AI, because why would a responsible newspaper hire someone who actually reads books to write about books?

It might be relevant that the paper cut its staff by 20% recently. Or to put that less delicately, fired 20% of its staff. 

The article that the freelancer turned in and the paper printed recommended six imaginary books, although to be fair they were credited to real writers. It even had synopses for them, and reasons people might like them. 

Irrelevant photo: poppies

The article included a few real books, also by real writers, but nobody’s perfect. 

The Sun-Times said, “We’re looking into how this made it into print as we speak. It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom.”

Which makes it sound a bit like some AI-generated copy stormed the newsroom and locked the reporters in closets so it could put itself into print. 

It might be worth adding, in this context, that a summer supplement quoted a food anthropologist who also doesn’t seem to exist. 

And the connection to Britain? We’ve been told that artificial intelligence is going to play a greater role in British military procurement.

What could possibly go wrong?

*

I was going to leave it there, but I can’t resist an AI-gone-wrong story. Britain’s high court is less than happy about dozens of false citations and quotes from case law being relied on in court–presumably generated by AI. An £89 million damages case had 18 of phantom citations and I have no idea how many phantom quotes, so it seems fair to guess that these aren’t all being generated by your street-corner mom-and-pop law firm.

 

How to tell if you’re in Britain

I mentioned that Chicago isn’t in Britain, and I stand by that statement, but if you ever find yourself in a strange city–or town, for that matter–and need to know if it’s in Britain, the simplest way is to head for someplace that serves food and ask for tea, or better yet, builder’s tea. If you get a funny look, you’re not in Britain. If no one thinks that’s odd, you are. If they tell you they don’t serve tea but get all apologetic about it–yeah, that’s Britain.

*

You could also look for the nearest mass-participation race. If some of the runners are dressed up as anything other than runners, that’s another sign you’re in Britain, although admittedly not as useful a test since races aren’t happening all the time on every corner. Still, an article about April’s London Marathon mentioned runners dressed as Sherlock Holmes, a chicken, Spiderman, the Elizabeth Tower (that’s the tower that houses Big Ben, which is a clock), and a rhino.

The rhino gets special mention, because the runner inside the costume broke a Guinness world record for the most marathons completed in a 3D costume: this was his 113th dressed as a pachyderm. 

Listen, fame is fleeting. You have to grab any chance you get. 

 

How clear is biological sex?

Back in May (remember May?), Britain’s Supreme Court ruled that the words sex, woman, and man in the 2010 Equality Act refer to biological sex. You know: XX or XY. Vagina or penis. Pink baby clothes or blue. 100% pay or 87% pay. Any idiot can tell the difference and as of now everybody has to go to the corner–not to mention the toilet–assigned to them at birth. 

It all sounds simple until you talk to someone who actually knows about this stuff. I’m not going to do even a shallow dive into it here but a Scientific American article does a great job of exploring the complicated reality behind what’s supposed to be simple. 

 Among other things, it says, “Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. . . .

“When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have . . . uncovered variations in . . .  genes that have subtle effects on a person’s anatomical or physiological sex. . . .

“These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms.”

And that’s just the part I happened to grab on my way out the door. It really is worth a read. 

If determining a person’s sex was as simple as the Supreme Court seems to think–

Listen, I don’t know how to put this delicately, but people studying the Bayeux Tapestry–that massive history-of-the-Norman-Conquest in pictures–are debating whether it includes 93 penises or 94. 

If that strikes you as an awful lot of genitalia stitched into a single tapestry, even a massive one, I should mention that 88 of them are on horses. That may or may not normalize the situation.

Why are the experts unsure? Surely, even with the boundaries between the sexes blurring, a penis is still a penis.

Well, in real life, to the best of my knowledge–and I’ll admit to not being an expert on the subject–it probably still is, but this is art, not life, and art is notoriously messy. Some experts say the object in question could be the scabbard for a sword or dagger. 

As Fats Waller said, “One never knows, do one?” Although I’m pretty sure he was talking about almost anything else. 

The Supreme Court has not seen fit to rule on this. Yet. But the debate has led to wonderful quotes, including one to rival Fats Waller’s: “I counted the penises in the Bayeux Tapestry.”

 

Okay, that was weird; let’s talk about politics

Two members of the Middleton St. George parish council got in a fight that ended up with scratches, blood, bruised fingers, and a broken pair of glasses, all of which filled a fair number of column inches and could have saved that Chicago newspaper from having to review nonexistent books.

The men involved in the fight are both in their 70s, and if both are telling the truth they each hit the other one first. Sadly, no one was wearing a body camera, so we may never be sure, but an audio recording does include one of them saying, “David, no, please, there are women in here.”

Women? Horrors! What are they doing in a meeting? Never mind, they won’t stay long. Both of you sit back down and pretend to be grownups until the ladies go back to the kitchen to make the tea.

*

If anyone’s gotten into a physical fight in Parliament lately, I missed the story, so we’ll have to make do with fires in Westminster Palace, where Parliament meets: there’ve been 44 in the past ten years. The building’s also full of toxic material, and no, I’m not casting aspersions on any political parties, although it wouldn’t take much to tempt me. I’m talking about asbestos, which has been found in over a thousand items.

Items? Beats me. It’s an odd word for the context.

The building was built between 1840 and 1860, which makes it newer than a lot of British buildings, but it’s held together by chewing gum and political bile. Specifically, disagreements over whether to spend money on either replacing the building with something new and functional or on the serious repair work that would make it safe. 

The problem is that either approach would cost billions and take ten years at an optimistic estimate. Less optimistically, it could take seventy years. Putting it off would cost more in the long run and risk the whole place going up in highly embarrassing flames. But spending billions on a refurb of Parliament’s meeting place isn’t a good look at a time when we’re being told there isn’t enough money to put the National Health Service back on its feet, when money’s being pared away from the disabled, and when–oh, hell, I could extend the list for many dismal paragraphs but won’t. 

Prediction? The story will drag on for years, unresolved. Unless it goes up in flames.

*

Boris Johnson–former Conservative prime minister and continuing national embarrassment–was selling a photograph (that’s of him, with you, in case I haven’t been not clear) for £121 before an event called “An Evening with Boris Johnson.” Tickets were extra, but for your £121 you did at least get a free handshake. 

If you only bought a ticket, all you got for your money was a seat. 

Unnamed allies of Johnson’s say he’s scoping out the possibility of a political comeback: he’s bored out of Westminster and thinks there’s unfinished business. Which, no doubt, only he can wrap up. 

To be fair to him, he’s not our only continuing national embarrassment. If we could make money exporting embarrassing politicians, we’d even out the balance of trade–which was, as I’m sure you know–£3.70 billion in March 2025. 

*

Meanwhile, back at Westminster, a Conservative MP claimed more than £1,100 in expenses for copies of Whos’ Who, which are available for free in the House of Commons’ library. 

Why did he need his own? I’m speculating here, but probably because he’s listed in it. And, you know, some days you just need to open the book and reassure yourself that you exist. And existed in three previous years, because he bought copies for each of four years. 

I’m sympathetic. Sometimes I have to look at my blog to remind myself that I exist. I mean, who doesn’t? Why else do we publish these things?

A political party, a lettuce, and a tortoise walk into a court: it’s politics in Britain

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Back in 2022–you remember 2022, don’t you?–Britain’s Conservative Party held a big honkin’ majority in the House of Commons and Boris Johnson had just resigned as prime minister, having found multiple creative ways to bring himself and his office into disrepute. 

Great sigh of relief, right? Better days lay ahead, surely.

Ha.

 

How Britain forms a government

But before we go on, we need to understand how Britain chooses a prime minister, because it was time to choose Johnson’s replacement. 

The thing is, British voters don’t choose a prime minister. People vote for someone to represent their area–a member of parliament, or MP if we’re going to save ourselves a few keystrokes. Then whoever leads the party with a majority of MPs becomes the prime minister. 

A head of lettuce. Stay with me and it’ll all make sense.

And if no party has a majority? Oops. The politicians head for the back rooms and try to cobble together a coalition of two or more parties that will make up a majority. Usually the party with the most MPs ends up holding a smaller party by the hand like a babysitter taking a four-year-old across the street. Yes, the babysitter has to promise the kid an ice cream or some screen time, but the babysitter’s still in the lead. 

Where the parallel breaks down is if the four-year-old decides to cross the street with a different babysitter–not the party with the most MPs but a smaller one that still has enough for the two to make up a majority. Until the kid commits to one party or the other, she or he still has some power. After that it depends on how canny the kid and the babysitter are. It can get pretty fractious.

Once a coalition’s formed, the king or queen waves a magic feather and turns the leader of the leading party into a prime minister. 

Since the UK tends to have two major parties and a handful of small ones, someone can usually put together a majority. If not, the largest party can govern unsteadily as a minority government and if you bet on a new election being held before too much time’s gone past you’re not likely to lose your money.

But we were talking about 2022, when the Conservatives held that big honkin’ majority and had just lost their leader. Because when you step down as prime minister, you also step down as leader of your party. You’re both things at once and it’s  anyone’s guess how you know at any given time which one you’re acting as.

Or maybe it works the other way around: you step down as leader first, then find you’re not the prime minister anymore. It’s like one of those dreams where you realize you’re riding the bus and realize you’re stark fucking naked. You don’t stop to wonder what came first. All  you want to do is find some clothes.

In that case–and we’re talking here about the prime minister/party leader case, not the bus/no-clothes case–the governing party chooses a new leader, and that leader is ipso facto and several other Latin phrases that not many people understand the country’s prime minister.

I never studied Latin, unlike Boris Johnson, who was known for tossing phrases of (I’ve read) questionable accuracy into speeches, but I can translate this bit of political reality for you: it means that one political party, not the electorate, chooses the country’s next leader. Who–because the position of party leader/prime minister is a powerful one–may steer the country in an entirely new direction. I mean, when you voted for your MP, you knew who was leading the party. You at least had the illusion that you knew what and who you were voting for. Now it’s out of your hands.

The interesting–not to say bizarre–thing here is that the party elects its leader by following its own rules. So if the majority party’s rules say they choose their leader by allowing each member one vote and each local party club 100 votes, then that’s the way the new prime minister will be elected. If the rules say they do it by shoe size–okay, it’s their party. They get to set the rules.

 

Enter Liz Truss; exit Liz Truss, chased by a lettuce

That’s what happened in 2022. Following party rules, the Conservative MPs narrowed the possible candidates down to two and tossed those two to the members like raw meat to the lions.  And the members voted for Liz Truss, who crashed the economy, became the shortest-serving prime minister in British history, and was famously outlasted by a head of lettuce set up in front of a live camera online. 

I should probably add that the lettuce wore a blond wig. Political writers rely on that sort of detail to liven up their column inches. A fake blue plaque–the kind used in Britain to commemorate historical sites–has since been set up at the supermarket where the lettuce was bought.

But back to the election: what’s known is that 81,326 people voted, all of course Conservative Party members. 

How many registered voters did the country have? 48,208,507.

What percentage of the electorage chose the new prime minister? Sorry, I can’t do numbers, but a very small one.

Full disclosure here: the number for the registered voters is two years off–it’s from 2024–but it’s close enough to give you a sense of the weirdness of it all. And it gets weirder than that, because the Conservative Party itself oversaw the election, not any state body, and we can’t peek behind the curtain to know how it was conducted.

All of that led Tortoise Media–new owner of the Observer newspaper–to tug at the curtain, trying to find out how Truss was actually elected. Initially, they asked the Conservative Party how the election was run, how or whether they ensured it was safe, and whether the voters were all citizens, of legal age, and for that matter even real.

The party answered that they didn’t appoint the prime minister, the sovereign did, using his or her (her in this case) magic feather. Furthermore, the party was a private club and no one’s business.

 

The courts

So Tortoise Media went to court, arguing that the party was serving a public function and in that election acting as a public authority, so it should be subject to judicial review and the public’s right to know under European law.

Hang on. European law? Didn’t Britain leave the European Union?

Yup, but it didn’t leave the Council of Europe, which is a different beast with a similar name, so it still recognizes and is subject to the European Court of Human Rights. 

Who knew, right?

To help make their point, Tortoise bought Conservative Party memberships for a tortoise–an actual one–under the name Margaret Thatcher, and for two other dead people. 

Three years and two courts later, Tortoise (the media company, not the actual one) lost. The court ruled that the party wasn’t serving a public function. Boris Johnson had advised the queen to appoint the new prime minister not as party leader but as the outgoing prime minister, so the way the party ran the election wasn’t a matter for public scrutiny.

Did you follow that? Did you picture Boris Johnson naked on a bus? If so, you have my deepest sympathy.

Parliament could, in theory, vote itself or some public body the power to oversee mid-term transfers of power, but my best guess is that the current government is too busy overseeing its own unpopularity to bother. If the prime minister resigns midway through his term, which I wouldn’t rule out since everyone close to him is busy denying the possibility, the election will be overseen by a different party–Labour, this time–and pigs may not fly but tortoises could well vote.

Sewage, patents, and post-truth politics: it’s the news from Britain

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In these days of post-truth politics, it shouldn’t surprise me that someone paid a polling company to ask what percent of the British public thinks one of our many former prime ministers, Boris Johnson, was telling the truth in his memoir. It shouldn’t surprise me but it does. Just when I think I’m cynical enough to keep up with reality, something like this comes along.

What did they learn? For the sake of simplicity, let’s focus on two questions: only 25% of the people polled believed Johnson’s claim that Buckingham Palace asked him to convince Prince Harry not to leave the UK and 31% believed his claim that Britain was able to get Covid vaccines faster because it had left the European Union. 

A baffling number of people gave answers that fell in the probably zone, saying a claim was probably true or probably false. I understand that they didn’t have inside information, and some of the questions asked what they believed Johnson believed, which leads us onto wobbly ground indeed. But come on, people. I wouldn’t believe the man if he told me today was Friday. 

In fact, as I write this, it’s not Friday. It will post on Friday, and you’ll read it on whatever day you damn well please, if at all. I’m typing it, though, on Monday and editing on Tuesday. You see how slippery truth can be? Muddy the waters enough and everyone will stop caring what’s true–or so the theory goes. Still, no matter what day of the week Johnson tells me it is, I’ll check my phone or today’s newspaper. 

Or possibly my phone and today’s newspaper. 

Irrelevant photo: An azalea blossom

If you get past the list of questions, the poll offers some hope for people’s political sanity: 72% of Britons describe Johnson as untrustworthy. True, that’s down from the 76% when he was just about to slither out of office, and I’m not sure Johnson would consider their low opinion a problem–he’s built a career out of convincing people that whatever he gets up to is cute–but it does let me think three-quarters of the population is paying some minimal attention.

I’d love to tell you who paid for the poll and why, but I have no idea. What I do know is that no poll–yea, no breath–gets taken without somebody paying for it.

 

Okay, we know politicians lie. Private companies tell us the truth, though, right?

Of course they do, dear. Now go to sleep or Santa won’t bring you any presents.

*

If the kids, having despaired of ever getting a straight answer, are asleep, let’s tell secrets: Britain’s privatized water companies cheated on thousands of pollution tests.

Did I mention that they got to monitor themselves on those tests? Because all that red tape we used to have was bad for us. 

How’d they rig the tests? They stopped the outflow of effluent–a polite name for liquid waste or sewage that gets discharged into rivers or seas–when they were about to test the outflow. And guess what: everything was fine! Isn’t that wonderful? Then they opened the taps and the sewage poured forth.

Britain has a serious water-pollution problem. To quote the BBC, “The amount of raw sewage spilling into England’s rivers and seas doubled in 2023, with 3.6 million hours of spills compared with 1.75 million hours the year before.”  A different BBC article says just 14% of Britain’s rivers are in good ecological health, and the problem comes not just from untreated waste (we have a lot of that) but also from sewage that’s only partially treated. The final stage of treatment, sand filtration, is optional. (See above for how red tape is bad for us.)

Meanwhile, in the 2021/22 financial year, water companies paid their shareholders a total of £965 million and their CEOs took home £16.5 million. Thames Water, the biggest of the water companies, was almost £15 billion in debt as of last March. In July, it asked the regulator to increase annual bills by 23% between 2025 and 2030. Since then, it’s said it needed to raise them by 53%. 

Pay up, folks. You get what you pay for–with sewage on top.

There’s talk of renationalizing Thames Water, but that will stick the government with its debt (it just got a £3 billion loan that will help it survive past Christmas), along with its other problems. I think I see why the government’s hesitating.

 

Yes, but what’s Britain really like?

Well, you can tell a lot about a country from its patent applications. Here are a few inventions Britons patented in 2023:

  • A flatpack coffin
  • A robot dog that vacuums and can go up and down stairs
  • A computer table that lets you lie under your desk and work looking up (it can also work as a conventional desk)
  • A plywood cow–useful if you want to practice lassooing cattle
  • Smart gloves that record a goalie’s performance data
  • Cheese made of potatoes
  • Shoes that can be worn on either the left or right foot 

and most practical of all

  • A machine that vibrates the mucus out of your nose

What does this tell us about Britain? I’m at a loss. You tell me.

Of mice and men and women and Barbie dolls

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It’s not easy for me to write about the news these days without wanting to slit either my wrists or someone else’s–I lean toward the second choice, always–but I can offer you a few wristless bits and pieces. Let’s start with a mouse in Wales.

Yes, the world is indeed going to hell when the best news I can offer starts with a mouse. 

A retired postman in Wales, Rodney Holbrook, noticed when he got to the workbench in his shed, small objects–clothespins, corks, nuts, bolts–weren’t where he’d left them: they’d been gathered up into a box. So Holbrook set up a night vision camera and it captured a mouse tidying away the stuff he’d left out. Holbrook thinks it’s using the junk to disguise its stash of nuts, but to date no one’s asked the mouse, so that’s guesswork. 

He’s named it Welsh Tidy Mouse.

To understand the story fully, you have to understand the relationship between British men and their sheds. I don’t come anywhere close to understanding it, unfortunately. All I can tell you is that there’s some sort of magnetic attraction between the two.

Irrelevant photo: Sunrise

 

I can also tell you that when I say “a shed” I’m not talking about a place outside the house to stuff all your junk but about a workshop. The shed’s roots run so deep in the male side of the culture that when I consulted Lord Google on the subject of men and sheds he led me to the Men’s Sheds Association, which reassured me that I hadn’t made up the connection. The group provides sheds that are “community spaces where men can enjoy practical hobbies. They’re about making friends, learning and sharing skills. Many guys come just for the tea and banter – everyone’s welcome.“

They might or might not welcome someone who isn’t of the male persuasion (they did say “everyone”), but my guess is that they’d be less thrown by a tidy mouse joining them. When they say “everyone,” they could easily mean everyone we’re thinking of. 

 

Speaking of men and women, though

Mattel, the company that makes Barbie dolls and that was thoroughly spoofed in the movie Barbie, is trying to cash in on the film by releasing four new dolls: a studio executive Barbie, a film star Barbie, a director Barbie, and a cinematographer Barbie. In response to which screenwriter Taffy Brodesser-Akner tweeted, “Where is Screenwriter Barbie? Does Mattel not know how to make sweatpants? Does Mattel not know how to get avocado toast on a t-shirt and just kind of leave it there?”

David Simon, who created The Wire went a step further, calling for a grip Barbie, a teamster Barbie, a “key set PA Barbie who has to go into Movie Star Barbie’s trailer and tell the delicate flower to get the fuck down to set because 120 other pissed-off Barbie’s are waiting for her. That film taught Mattel nothing.”

 

Enough of that. Is it safe to talk about politics?

Yes, but not for long or my (or someone else’s) wrists will be in danger. We’ll stick to the peripheral stuff.

When Boris Johnson was mayor of London, he made regular appearances at LBC Studios, which Lord Google tells me is a talk radio station but which uses a camera. Don’t ask me; when I hosted a radio show, we were invisible and free to wear as much avocado toast as we wanted, although this was so long ago avocado toast hadn’t been invented yet, and neither had avocados. Or toast. There wasn’t a camera to be found.

The reason the camera’s important is that Johnson made such a habit of mumbling and sliding his chair out of camera range in response to tough questions that eventually they bolted the guest’s chair to the floor. They called it the Boris Bolt. It didn’t stop him from mumbling when he didn’t have anything sensible to say, but it did at least keep him on camera when he did it.

*

Okay, just a little more about politics. This is from Ottawa County, Michigan, where a group of commissioners affiliated with Ottawa Impact, a right-wing Christian group, took over the county board in November 2022. One of the things they did was try to get rid of the county’s public health officer, Adeline Hambley. She and her department had supported mask mandates and Covid vaccinations, making her an instrument of government tyranny. They’d also offered sexual health tests at a Pride festival, which the new commissioners saw as “encouraging sexually perverse behavior,” according to a Washington Post article. 

Hambley wasn’t about to go quietly. As she saw it, her job was about health, not about serving the board. “I want to work with the commissioners so we can protect the community,” she said. “But I am not their subordinate.”

After ten months of negotiation (fighting might be a better word), both parties agreed that the county would pay her $4 million in return for her resignation.

Then the commissioners discovered that bad things would fall off the top shelf of the county’s financial closet and smack them on their heads if they went through with the deal, because they hadn’t consulted the most important player in the game, their insurers. 

What sort of bad things am I talking about? They’d lose their insurance, which would lose the county its AAA bond rating, which would drive up the cost of borrowing.

Oops.

At last call, the county was trying to back out of the deal and Hambley and her lawyers were trying to enforce it. 

If they ever do get rid of her, the plan is to replace her with a local HVAC (that’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) safety manager who’s never held public office and, I think we can all assume, knows a bit more about public health than the Welsh Tidy Mouse.

Hambley? She’s an environmental health specialist with an MBA in business administration and a minor in government tyranny. 

In the most recent article I found, the mess was still working its way through the courts.

Politics, phones, and pandemics: or, normal life in Britain

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Before we get going, could we have a brief moment of thanks to Britain’s recent governments? Through several recent prime ministers, their ongoing strength has been their ability to give satirists and unofficial wiseacres an endless supply of material.

[   ] 

Are we done being grateful? Good. Let’s get down to business.

Many and many a month ago. Boris Johnson set up a commission to look into how the government had handled the Covid epidemic. 

Why did he do that? Probably because it wouldn’t meet for a long time and wouldn’t report back for an even longer time, and meanwhile it would look like he’d done something, thereby allowing him to tell  those pesky relatives of the pandemic’s dead that he’d taken care of the problem. And also possibly because he was deluded enough to think the commission would give him an A+, or at least if he took the pandemic pass/fail, a passing grade.

Either way, the thing about long times is that eventually even the longest of them will end, and the commission is now in high gear and has demanded the unedited versions of Johnson’s notebooks and WhatsApp messages. Johnson, of course, is no longer prime minister–in fact (see below), since I started writing this, he’s put the lid on the trash can that was his career as an MP and is just some private schmuck of a citizen, like the rest of us–so it was the current government that responded to the demand.

No, the government told the commission, you can’t have the full versions. Too many irrelevancies to trouble your little brains. We’ll sort through them for you and give you edited versions. You’ll like them better. They’re shorter. 

To which the commission replied, Are you fuckin’ kidding us? 

The italics there are to show–in case you managed to wonder–that those aren’t actual quotes. Both sides have been more diplomatic and to have kept sober and serious faces when they said whatever it was they actually said.

Irrelevant photo: A lily. The name starts with a Z, but that’s as close as I can get.

The two sides tossed messages back and forth over the fence a few times until the commission changed tactics and threw over a subpoena and the government went to court to keep the commission–which its own party set up, remember–from getting its hands on what we can only assume is something juicy, since as soon as someone says you can’t see something, every last one of us thinks it’s worth seeing.

Before the courts had a chance to consider the issue, never mind rule on it, though, Johnson offered the commission his phone, complete with its unedited WhatsApp contents. 

Why would he do that? Could it be because he’s not the prime minister anymore and the person who now is helped trigger his downfall? 

Is anyone really that petty?

You bet your overworked word processing program that some-unspecified-one is.  

How much does Johnson’s offer mean? It’s hard to say. He had a different phone early in the pandemic, and it’s–um, I’ve lost track of who has it. Johnson? The government? The tooth fairy? Does it matter? It can’t be turned on because of security issues: because the phone number had been publicly available for years, it’s a security risk and can only be turned on in a secure location. Turn it on in the wrong place and children throughout the land will be told, inaccurately, that the tooth fairy does not, in any literal sense, exist.

The government also has Johnson’s notebooks (unless the tooth fairy’s grabbed them too) and isn’t anxious to release the full version of those either.

If Johnson’s willing to turn over his phone, why does our prime minister du jour, Rishi Sunak, have a problem with handing over the rest of it? Well, it sets a precedent, see. The commission might ask for his–that’s Mr. du Jour’s–notes and messages next. Besides, who knows what Johnson said about him? Or anyone and anything else. Johnson’s not known for his discretion. 

The more official argument is that ministers should be able to discuss policy freely, without the fear of being overheard. They need to say–as Johnson did–things like, “Let the bodies pile high in their thousands,” without worrying that they might offend the delicate sensibilities of people whose bodies might end up in those piles.

 

The Sunak part of the picture

It seems fair to guess that Sunak has no problem with the commission unraveling Johnson’s reputation (if he still has one) but doesn’t want his own tangled up with it. Sunak  likes to present himself as having heroically saved the economy during the pandemic. 

“I successfully helped 10 million people protect their jobs and the economy from Covid,” he said, apparently not noticing that he set up that sentence so he needed 10 million people to help him do that.  

Part of Sunak’s heroic effort was the Eat Out to Help Out program, which may well have given the virus a nice bump by tempting unmasked people into public spaces where they could share both appetizers and germs. That one thing (the bump in case numbers) follows another (the program) isn’t proof that the Thing 1 caused Thing 2, but it might make a person look at the possibility that it did. And the commission could just be moved to.

Should he have known at the time that the program was risky? I dunno. I spotted the problem, and I didn’t have his access to epidemiologists. I’m just some damn fool with a computer and an internet connection.

A deep dive into the unedited messages and notes may also show other ways Sunak–along with Johnson and the rest of the government–ignored scientific advice. And may not. At this point, for all we know they could show that the entire government was taken over by shape-shifting lizards bent on the destruction of the planet for reasons that we don’t need to make clear because we’re moving the plot along so fast no one will notice.

I think I stole that lizard thing from a Dr. Who episode, so don’t blame me if it’s not entirely convincing.

 

Johnson’s resignation

Now let’s come back to that MP business: Boris Johnson is not only no longer Britain’s prime minister, he’s no longer a Member of Parliament. He didn’t exactly leave of his own free will–an investigation (different investigation; if investigations were wheels, we could catch any bus we wanted right now)–

Where were we? Johnson saw the report of an investigation into whether he misled parliament about breaking the Covid regulations the rest of the country was expected to follow, and having seen it, he resigned. If he’d waited around, he’d have gotten pushed, so this wasn’t exactly a free choice. 

That will trigger a by-election–a local election to replace him–and that will give Rishi du Jour a pretty sharp headache, because numbers aren’t looking good for the Conservatives just now. 

A couple of Johnson supporters have also resigned as MPs, which will trigger more by-elections, but it’s hardly been a flood. In fact one of them, Schrodinger’s MP–having said she was stepping down with “immediate effect,” which means right this second, you hear me?–hasn’t officially stepped, at least not at the moment I’m writing this. It’s anyone’s guess whether she’ll bail out or not. Stalling like this makes life marginally more difficult for the prime minister, who’d like to clear all those nasty by-elections out of the way at once so he can go about Tthe business of convincing the country that he leads a marginally sane political party.

The tooth fairy was expected to step down but has made no statement as yet.

 

Politicians, government officials, and phones

All this raises the question of why politicians don’t set up their WhatsApp groups to delete messages after seven days, and if that’s a question (it’s not exactly, but let’s not quibble) it’s not one I can answer. Maybe they have an exaggerated sense of their own importance, and therefore of their messages’ importance. And of their phones’ importance, because they hold historic documents, after all. They mustn’t fall into the wrong hands, but heavens to an ice cream sundae, they do have to preserve those messages.

If we’ve established that, I’m about to cheat and tell you the story not of a politician but of an food inspector in India who was taking a selfie at a reservoir (he was on vacation, so he wasn’t doing this wasn’t on government time) and managed to drop his phone in the reservoir. 

It happens. I once dropped mine down the toilet. I wasn’t on a call at the time, so I missed my chance stick my head into the opening and yell, “Can you hear me now?”

The food inspector ordered the reservoir drained. Once enough water to irrigate 1,500 acres of land had been wasted during scorchingly hot weather, he got his phone back. 

It was unusable.

As soon as I’m done here, I’m going to see if he’s eligible to be our next prime minister. He’s in the wrong country, but I’m not sure that rules him out. See, we have this unwritten constitution here in Britain, so who knows what it actually says? 

 

But if we’re talking technology, what about chatbots?

They’re harder to drop down the toilet, being immaterial and all, but they can drop their users down the pan easily enough, which is what happened to a lawyer who asked ChatGPT to help him prepare a case. His client was suing an airline, and the chatbot cited Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and Varghese v. China Southern Airlines.

Are your sure those cases are real? the lawyer asked.

Oh, yeah, the chatbot said. Absolutely. It even cited a source.

Into the brief they went. 

The airline’s lawyers couldn’t find any trace of the decisions, though, and being on the opposing side they were less willing to take anyone’s word for their existence. 

Not one of them turned out to be real.

 

But back in Britain…

That was in New York, where the improbable happens every day, so let’s go back to Britain, where nothing improbable happens. Except possibly at the Gloucester Cheese Rolling, where this year someone won the race while unconscious. 

The race–actually, it’s a series of races–involves chasing a wheel of cheese down a very (very, very) steep hill. No one catches the cheese or is expected to. Cheeses don’t have any sense of self-preservation and humans aren’t round, so the winner is the first person who reaches the bottom after the cheese.

In this case, the winner tripped, went airborne, hit her head, and rolled out in front of the other runners while unconscious. She woke up in the medical tent, and is now the proud owner of a three-kilo wheel of cheese.

Don’t make fun of her for falling, because almost no one stays on their feet all the way down. The winner of a different race said, “I don’t think you can train for it, can you? It’s just being an idiot.” 

The race dates back to no one’s sure when and local authorities have (sensibly and unpopularly) been trying to shut it down for years. Six people ended up in the hospital this year, which may help you understand why, if a person’s job involves projecting some semblance of responsible judgment, it also involves disapproving. The problem is that the race is an unofficial event, and the organizers are unofficial organizers–well, it just sort of happens. Year after year. Magically. Even the cheese is a volunteer.

Police, fire, and ambulance services don’t attend the event–they’re afraid, I believe, of seeming to support it–but they are on standby.

 

Book banning and word unbanning

You’ve been reading about books being banned from US schools and libraries because someone thinks they’re not appropriate for kids, right? The books that’ve been given the boot include a lot ofL LGBTQ literature, a lot of Black and antiracist literature, and a lot of books about sexuality, grief, loss, poverty, puberty–you know, things kids wouldn’t have a clue about if those books hadn’t shoved their noses right up against the shop window.

How do you fight back against book banning? Well, in 2022 Utah passed a law banning “pornographic and indecent” books from the schools, and now some genius has challenged the Bible as having content inappropriate for young kids. It’s vulgar and violent, apparently. 

One school district has already pulled copies from its shelves.

This should be fun.

*

Meanwhile Apple has unbanned a word that its autocorrect used to change to “duck.” As Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief explained, “In those moments where you just want to type a ducking word, well, the keyboard will learn it, too.” 

Users could always turn off autocorrect, and they could do it without having to drain the reservoir, but a lot of us, ahem, never get around to it and send out ridiculous texts because we don’t bother to proof them. 

A Guardian letter writer claims that her phone routinely changes angry to seagull, although it’s always let her type fuck as often as she wants. 

Drugs, denials, and British politics

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It’s always fun when you can wring a denial out of a politician, and the denials are rolling in: Unspecified people who do equally unspecified work at Chevening–an estate used by Britain’s secretary of state–reported finding “suspected class A drugs” after parties thrown by Liz Truss, the lettuce who became prime minister but was then secretary of state.

Lettuce? Well, yes. Her tenure as prime minister was so short that a lettuce publicly outlasted her. She’ll never live it down. 

What kind of class A drugs? Something that registered as cocaine when it was tested with a swab that changes color when it gets high. Or, more accurately, when it comes into contact with cocaine.

Irrelevant photo: This is from our recent cold snap.

Is cocaine legal in Britain? Nope. Possession carries a sentence of up to seven years or an unlimited fine or both, and in July the government launched (or anyway, announced; I can’t swear that they did any more than that) a crackdown on casual users. 

Casual users? Yes. Those are the kind of users who have passports, because it was going to confiscate them. That’s a more fitting punishment for a high-end user than jail time, which is a better fit for the low-end, no-passport, no-invite-to-Chevening kind of drug user.

An unspecified insider says cocaine’s used widely in Whitehall (“Whitehall” being shorthand for British government offices) and around Parliament. And you know how it is: These are important people. You can’t just toss them in jail when they do something illegal.

During the ten minutes when Truss was prime minister, one of her spokes-salads said cracking down on illegal drugs was a priority. 

Cleaners report finding white powder at no less a residence than 10 Downing Street after two of the parties that were held during lockdown back when Boris Johnson was prime minister. Johnson outlasted many lettuces as well as a head of broccoli, and although several barbers are rumored to have attempted damage control on his hair he outran them all. 

No one’s saying either Truss or Johnson put the powder up their own personal noses. In fact, Johnson’s said not to have been at either of the No. 10 parties that left powder behind. But it does raise questions about the culture around them and what’s tolerated at high levels and not at lower ones. 

So what about those denials? 

When the Guardian, which broke the story, asked for a comment, Truss’s spokes-salad said, “If there were evidence that this alleged activity had occurred during her use of Chevening, Ms Truss would have expected to have been informed and for the relevant authorities to have properly investigated the matter. As it is, the Guardian has produced no evidence to support these spurious claims.”

A spokescomb for Boris Johnson said, “Boris Johnson is surprised by these allegations since he has not previously been made aware of any suggestions of drug use in 10 Downing Street and as far as he is aware no such claims were made to Sue Gray or to any other investigators.

“It was a feature of Mr Johnson’s premiership that he strongly campaigned against drug use, especially middle-class drug use. His government made huge investments in tougher policing to help roll up county lines drugs gangs, which cause so much misery. He repeatedly called for harsher punishments for the use and distribution of class A drugs.”

A spokesdriver for No 10’s current U-turn expert said, “The Guardian has provided no evidence to support these claims. If there were substantive claims, we would expect these to be reported to the police.”

So there you go. Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.

Larry the Cat refused to comment but is alleged to have a serious catnip habit. As for me, I don’t usually post in the middle of the week, but this was too much fun to ignore.

“A very British way” of saying no: It’s the news from Britain

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“A very British way” of saying no: It’s the news from Britain

Our most recent ex-prime minister, Liz Truss, may not have outlasted that famous lettuce, but she hasn’t dropped out of the news. 

In spite of being prime minister for only 44 days, she and the loyalists who stayed in place around her insisted she had the right to draw up a resignation honors list–a list outgoing prime ministers create to nominate supporters, donors, and hangers-on for knighthoods or seats in the House of Lords.  

I’m not sure if a knighthood’s worth much, financially speaking, but a member of the Lords can collect £323 for any day they bother to show up, which a lot of them don’t. And they get bragging rights and can get people to call Lord or Baroness Whatsit and wear a very nice ermine robe on dress-up days. 

At least it’s very nice if you go for that sort of thing, although it’s a lot like a bridesmaid’s dress: Where can you wear it once the wedding’s over? 

That may be why they’re lent to the Lords, not given. 

Sorry, did I go off topic there? 

Irrelevant photo: a neighbor’s dahlia

Other than the money, the robe, and the bragging rights, I’m not sure what a person gets out of being in the House of Lords, but who’s there matters to the rest of us because they have a political impact. The more of its loyalists a party packs in there, the better. For it, if not for the country.

There’s a certain irony in a party–the Conservatives–adding to the House of Lords after it argued for slimming down the Commons needed because it was too expensive, but that was a while ago and it’s okay because we’ve all forgotten about it.

But we were talking about our most recent ex-prime minister, Liz of the Lettuce. There was a lot of push and pull over whether she should get to submit an honor list–or for that matter whether Boris Johnson, who lasted longer but left office in disgrace and is surely still hoping to bumble back in, should. Rumor has it that the word honor filed a lawsuit at being associated with either of them, but I haven’t been able to confirm that in the responsible press.

Now Buckingham Palace has stepped in to handle the situation in what an anonymous source (this is from the responsible press) described as “a very British way,” telling Truss that she can’t submit a long list. That apparently means she can submit a short one, but at least someone’s setting limits.

How will they do that?

“It will be a case of . . . you don’t want to embarrass the king, do you?” No formal rules govern the system of resignation honors (that may in itself be very British: This is a country with an unwritten constitution, after all) but tradition dictates that the new prime minister doesn’t object to the former prime minister’s nominees. So “don’t embarrass the king”? Tradition allows for that. 

As an ex-PM, Truss is also eligible for the £115,000 per year that former prime ministers are allowed to collect in order to fund a private office to handle the public role that’s at least theoretically involved in being a former prime minister, and there was, briefly, a flap about whether 45 days in office justified the money. No one seems to be arguing that she should get the money, but we’ve all gone on to new outrages since then. 

We have the attention span of a lettuce lately.

There were (and still are) assorted rumors that the money was a pension. It isn’t. 

*

When Boris Johnson dropped out of the latest contest for prime minister, leaving the way open for Rishi Sunak to waltz in without Conservative Party members voting on their–and our–new leader, speculation was that he did it because he didn’t have enough support. 

Not so. It turns out he did have enough support, and he also had some advice (or so people in the know believe) that if he lost to Sunak it would cut into his potential earnings on the international speaking circuit. So to hell with leading the country. Let’s make cash.

Johnson still hasn’t submitted his list of resignation honors. We may have some outrage left when that happens or we may be tapped out by then. 

*

Now that Truss is safely out of office, a former aide’s come forward to say that when she was justice secretary she avoided appearing on BBC’s Question Time by claiming family members had died–ones the aides described as “minor people like aunts and cousins and things.”  

Forgive me for getting personal about this, but I’m an aunt. Also a cousin. And a thing. So if you happen to be one of my relatives, please understand that I do not appreciate being killed off, even fictionally, no matter how minor I am in your life or how badly you want to avoid some commitment you made. I’m surprisingly central to my own life, thanks.

Eventually she either ran out of relatives or it all got too obvious and she had to appear on the show.

*

In his first day or so as prime minister, a photo of Rishi Sunak appeared, looking crisp and tailored and being stalked by someone with a lettuce (complete with googly eyes) on his head. The humor there strikes me as particularly British, although I’m damned if I can explain why. If anyone else can, I’d love to hear it. Sadly, I’ve lost the link. It was on Twitter, I think, which is another way of saying I’ll never find it, and googling Sunak, lettuce, and googly eyes got me nowhere. 

And here I thought I had such a good relationship with Lord Google.

 

Speaking of very British ways…

The 1960s Profumo scandal involved British cabinet ministers, a Russian spy, and a young woman who was involved with all of the above. Newly released files note that MI5 pegged the Russian as a spy when he arrived at the London embassy as an assistant naval attache because he didn’t know much about ships and because he carried an umbrella. 

“Russians who frequently carry umbrellas are more likely to have an intelligence function,” someone noted.

Keep that in mind. You never know when it’ll prove useful.

 

In other political news

A while ago, Jeremy Hunt, currently the chancellor of the exchequer–a.k.a. the guy who’s in charge of the government’s money and on a good day is expected to make taxing, spending, and borrowing match, or at least not set each other on fire–set up a charity (if you’re American, that’s a nonprofit) called Patient Safety Watch to research preventable harm in healthcare. In the year that ended in January 2022, it spent two-thirds of its income–that’s something more than £110,000–paying its only employee, who’s it’s chief executive and who just happens to be Hunt’s former advisor, Adam Smith. 

Smith lost his job as Hunt’s advisor in a 2012 lobbying scandal but is now Hunt’s parliamentary aide because we have the attention span of a lettuce.

Hunt set up the charity in 2019 and part-funds it himself. So far, it’s produced zero papers. 

Sorry–”appears to have produced” zero papers.

And in the nonpolitical news

Since this is a roundup of the British news, let’s go to some art news from Germany, which for the sake of clarity I should remind you is not in Britain, it’s in, um, Germany. 

A painting by Piet Mondrian that’s been hanging in a museum in Dusseldorf since 1980 turns out to be upside down. 

Why couldn’t anybody tell? Mondrian was an abstract artist–so abstract that he painted nothing but grids–and he never got around to signing this one, so they didn’t have much to go on, but a photograph of his studio shows it hanging the other way around, so presumably that’s what Mondrian had in mind. 

But you know what? In a new show of his work, they’re going to hang it the way it’s been anyway.    

*

A study reports that unborn babies grimace when their mothers swallow capsules packed with powdered kale 20 minutes before an ultrasound. They don’t  grimace when the mothers swallow capsules filled with powdered carrots. 

Use that information in whatever way suits you. 

*

A study estimates that 20 quadrillion ants live on earth. 

How many ants in a single quadrillion? Lots. Enough that there are 2.5 million ants to every human now living. 

Use that in whatever way suits you as well.

An incomplete guide to Boris Johnson’s downfall, or How to have fun with British politics

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Let’s do a quick review of recent British political mayhem for the benefit both of folks who don’t live in Britain and of the ones who do but want a few extra moments to gloat: 

Boris Johnson has stepped down as prime minister and head of the Conservative Party. But Boris Johnson is also  still the prime minister and head of the Conservative Party.

Confused? I can’t think why. Stick around. It’ll all make something vaguely approaching sense before we’re done. 

Or else it won’t. I make no promises.

 

Irrelevant photo: Purple toadflax

What went wrong for Johnson?

You might as well ask what didn’t, but as so often happens he wasn’t brought down by the real scandals–the corruption, the lies, a Brexit cobbled together from high-end wine corks and journalistic fairy dust, not to mention heartless policies, destruction of the infrastructure, drunken parties during lockdown, lost elections, and the resignations of two ethics advisors–but by a sex scandal. And not even one he participated in. 

What happened was that he appointed someone named Chris Pincher as deputy chief whip, ignoring accusations that he was not a pincher but a groper.

Deputy chief whip? No, that’s not the sex scandal. It’s one of those weird British things that we can blame on history and that I won’t bother to explain.. 

When the accusations became public, Johnson said he hadn’t known about them.

Then it became public that he had been told. Formally. 

Then more allegations surfaced.

For the record, the people Pincher groped were male. I’m not sure if that had an impact in how the scandal’s played out. It would an interesting study. Or in the absence of evidence, an interesting essay. You could assert all kinds of things you couldn’t actually demonstrate.

Anyway, once all that happened, resignation letters from cabinet ministers and assorted less impressive governmental appointees began to flutter to the pavement outside 10 Downing Street like autumn leaves–first two, then more, than dozens, including, eventually, resignations from people who’d been appointed to replace people who’d resigned earlier.

At this point, any normal politician would have put their hands in the air and surrendered peacefully, but this is Boris Johnson we’re talking about, and it wasn’t until the resignation letters formed a layer dep enough to resemble Larry the Cat’s litter box that he finally, grudgingly, made a resignation speech that blamed herd mentality for running him out. 

Why did this particular scandal bring him down when other equally lurid ones haven’t? It’s a mystery. If enough autumn leaves fall onto a balance scale, eventually they’ll outweigh the political convenience on the other side. That’s the best I can do. 

But (see above; you’re supposed to be paying attention here), he’s not actually gone yet.

You know about Rasputin? He was a mystic, a faith healer, a self-proclaimed holy man, and a key hanger-on in the court of Russia’s last tsar–assuming, of course, that we don’t count Putin. He was assassinated by other court hangers-on who were desperate to get rid of him, and the story goes that he was poisoned, stabbed, beaten, shot three times, and finally wrapped in a rug and tossed into the River Neva. When he was fished out he was decisively dead, but he had water in his lungs, indicating that he was still alive when they threw him in.

The rug was ruined.

To be fair, it may not have happened exactly that way, but that’s okay, we’re not doing Russian history here, we’re just giving it a passing glance because I suspect it’s going to take something along the same lines to get Johnson out of Number 10, even now that he’s resigned.

And just for the record, I’m not advocating that particular set of actions, just contemplating overblown similarities. 

Johnson, they say, likes the perks of office. I can’t imagine he’ll give them up willingly. Already he’s had to move a postponed wedding reception from the grand mansion where prime ministers get to play to I don’t know where but wherever it is it’s less impressive.

Hasn’t the poor man suffered enough already?

 

What has Johnson learned from all those resignations?

The names of people he wants to take revenge on, although whether he’ll have the power to do them any damage is still up for grabs. Other than that, nothing that I can see. He new appointments aren’t much better than his old ones. One of the new crop (because he’s still the prime minister and is expected to have some semblance of a functioning government around him) has been accused by someone Pincher groped of asking if he’s gay, because if he is then surely what happened isn’t straightforward sexual harassment. 

In other words, she wanted to know if he asking for it.

Another appointee demonstrated the political judgment and sensitivity that she’ll bring to her new position by giving the finger to demonstrators outside Number 10. That may breach the ministerial code, which expects “high standards of behavior” and “propriety.” But that’s okay because  who’s going to enforce it? 

A third appointee doesn’t believe people are really having trouble affording food–presumably they’re using food banks because, hey, it’s free food–and compared taking the knee to giving a Nazi salute.

The big appointment, though, is to the chancellor’s job, since the last one resigned and is a front runner in the race to replace Johnson. The chancellor’s the guy who counts the money and makes financial policy. Or tries to, anyway. The new one is Nadhim Zahawi, and reports leaked out that civil servants sent out warnings about his finances. That’s not the same as saying he’s guilty of anything, only that disturbing allegations are buzzing around his head like flies around cowpies.

Wise politicians might want to be careful where they set their foot, although a wise politician is not what we’re dealing with.

An unnamed Conservative grandee accused Johnson of making unsuitable appointments so that he could leave a mess behind for his successor, but it’s also possible that no one suitable will take his phone calls. Or that he doesn’t know a bad appointment from a convenient one.

 

What didn’t happen

Under the current law, the prime minister can call an election at any time, and at one point Johnson hinted that he might just do that. Since his party has a huge whackin’ majority and polls indicate that right now it’s scraping caked-on crud off the linoleum, his party will be against this. As one article says, it would be “constitutionally very unusual.” And the queen could, if her advisers advised, refuse the request on the grounds that the existing parliament is viable.

From what I’ve read, that would be done via back channels, not in public. A message would go to Number 10 saying, basically, “Do not embarrass the queen by requesting this.” Only they’d capitalize queen.

 

So why’s he still the prime minister?

The best I can do by way of an answer is to say, Because that’s the way it works. Prime ministers aren’t elected directly. They’re (usually) the leader of the majority party, if there is one, or of the biggest, baddest party in the case of a coalition government. So if they step down, guess who gets to choose a new one.

You got it: the biggest, baddest party in the House of Commons. Which does it by following its own party rules instead of rules drawn up by anything as finicky as the government. So the process can take time, depending on the rules. 

Of course, since the rules are the party’s, the party can also change them at will–at least if its rules allow it to. If it wants to choose the next prime minister by seeing who can throw a rock farthest, I can’t see what would stop it.

Prime ministers can always resign effective immediately, in which case their party texts a temp agency and says, “Send us someone of prime ministerial quality, please. Must make public appearances and know how to wear a suit convincingly.” And then that person will run a caretaker government.  

But that’s not what’s happened. When Johnson finally bowed to something approaching reality and agreed to resign, he proposed hanging on until October, when the Conservatives hold their convention. 

To which the party said, “Not a chance,” but it didn’t roll him in that rug, so the date when he’s fully replaced depends on how quickly it can organize its replacement procedures: First the people who wanted to replace Johnson had to get support from at least 20 of their fellow Conservative MPs (that knocked a few out of the race), then those same MPs have (or had–I’m writing this a bit in advance of the fact, so I’m not sure if it’s happened yet) to vote until they’ve narrowed the list to two.  Then the party’s members vote. 

They’re rushing it as fast as they can and he should be gone by September 5. What happens after that is anyone’s guess. They might roll him in the wallpaper * and head for the river.

 

  • Yeah, that was another scandal. It’s breathtakingly ugly, it was very expensive (but then so was the rest of the furniture), and Johnson got caught arranging for a Conservative donor to pay for it. The next prime minister will either be haunted by it or bringing in a team of people with acetylene torches to get rid of it.

How no-confidence votes work in Britain

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Boris Johnson, Britain’s alleged prime minister, survived a vote of no confidence this week, and we could get all mopey about that if we wanted to, but instead let’s take the opportunity to have a good old crawl around the dusty corners of the British political system and see what we can find. Old coins? Abandoned rulebooks? Spiders? 

Nope, sorry. We find the no-confidence vote, in all its convoluted glory.

 

What is the no-confidence vote? 

The one Johnson just survived was an internal party affair, run by the Conservatives, the party with a majority in the House of Commons. That’s because what they’re voting on isn’t just the leader of the country but the leader of their party, and what takes precedence is the party, since–as should be clear to everyone–that’s more important. So it was only Conservative members of parliament who got to vote.

The same was true last time they held a no-confidence vote, back when Theresa May was prime minister. We could go back further, but I’m getting full of cobwebs so let’s head off in another direction. 

Screamingly irrelevant photo: a peony

While Conservative MPs cast their votes, the rest of the country got to sit back and wonder how many would vote which way. It’s like catching the clowns crawl out of that tiny car at the circus and wondering how many more there’ll be. Except the clowns are running the country.   

If it strikes you as odd that a single party gets to choose the head of the country, we’re nowhere near the center of the issue yet. The party also gets to set the rules on when and whether there’ll be a vote and how it’ll be run.

Yes, this business of having an unwritten constitution’s a barrel of laughs. I recommend it to any country that feels like the fun’s gone out of politics. 

 

The rules

Under the party’s current rules, if 15% of the Conservative MPs send a letter of no confidence in the prime minister to something called the 1922 Committee, then the committee has to call a vote.

At least I think it has to. What I’ve read goes a little hazy there. Maybe they have to and maybe they don’t but always have. So far, they’ve always called a vote.

The 1922 Committee, by the way, is called that because it was set up in 1923.

We’ll move on before we get upset, okay?

The committee’s an arm of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons and seems to insert its nearly-hundred-year-old hand into every Conservative leadership battle. It meets weekly, gathering up the backbench Conservatives–and by backbench I mean the MPs who don’t hold government positions, the ones down the food chain who aren’t personally in power even when their party is.

So the committee gathers the backbench Tories (Tory means Conservative but takes less time to type) and gives them a forum, allowing them to “air their concerns” and be a pain in the keyhole of Number 10 Downing Street, where the people who really have the power both govern and (since we’re talking about the current bunch), drink, fight, party, and vomit. 

To repeat myself, since I’ve wandered: Once the committee collects the letters from 15% of the Conservative MPs, it calls for a vote. Given the current breakdown of the House, it took 54 letters to trigger a vote. Once that happens, a prime minister then has to win a majority of the Conservative MPs plus one–in the current situation, 180–to stay in office.

The letters can be anonymous or the writers can make them public. They can also withdraw them if a) they decide the timing’s wrong, b) they were threatened thoroughly enough, or c) they were offered a juicy government post. 

Government posts? Johnson had already handed out 173 government jobs, making his MPs everything from members of the Cabinet to junior ministers to dog wranglers to extras who don’t have any lines but do hang around the edges of the scene in costume and then hope they don’t get edited out of the final cut. 

If you happen to hold one of those jobs, you’d think two or three times before voting yourself out of it.

Johnson carried 60% of his MPs–211 votes–which was a smaller-than-expected number according to at least according to one newspaper.

The party’s rules say that, having survived the vote, a prime minister is safe from another challenge for a year.

So is he in the clear? Well, no. The last time the Conservatives held a no-confidence vote, Theresa May was the prime minister and she scraped together a larger proportion of her party than Johnson has, but within eight months she was out on her ass.

How’d that work? Well, the committee threatened to change the rules and allow another vote before the year was up unless she set a date for her resignation. 

Better to jump than be pushed, she figured. Johnson, however, will need to not only be pushed, he’ll need to be wrapped in canvas, tied, and thrown overboard.

But there’s talk that the MPs who voted against Johnson may not wait for that. If they refuse to vote with the government–not necessarily voting against it but abstaining–they’ll deny Johnson hte powerful majority he’s had in Parliament, paralyzing him. Since they represent all the available wings, feet, and claws of the party and refer to themselves as a coalition of chaos, it’s hard to know if they’ll do anything that coordinated.

 

What happens when a prime minister loses a no-confidence vote?

They limp on as prime minister until they’re replaced, because the country has to have a prime minister, however vague and ineffective. Meanwhile, the party that tossed them out selects a new one–according to its own rules.

But that’s if it has a majority. If it doesn’t–say if two parties governed as a coalition–or if the party’s so badly split that it can’t come up with a candidate, it gets messy.

You thought it was already messy? Ha. Shows what you know.

I’ll simplify this, but basically if someone–anyone–can gather enough support for a new candidate, there’s a confidence vote held in 14 days. If they survive that, they’re the prime minister. If not, there’s a general election and all the MPs have to run for their seats again–something they very much don’t want to do unless, of course, they think their party can come back with a big majority, but that’s always a gamble. It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future, as Yogi Berra is said to have said.

If no candidate emerges, then somewhere along the way the prime minister has to advise the queen that there’ll be an election, because the queen needs to know stuff like that.

The queen says, “Oh.”

Then everyone involved tears off their clothes and runs around Westminster Palace playing either banjos or tubas and throwing confetti.

Okay, I made some of that up. If you want a full (and sane) explanation of how it works, go look at the BBC’s graphic.

 

How other parties run a no-confidence vote

So far, I’ve only talked about how the Conservative Party holds a no-confidence vote, but since each party sets its own rules, they have no bearing on what other parties do in a similar situation. So let’s take a wider look.

Labour: Okay, this is awkward. I haven’t found a clear explanation of how the Labour Party holds a no-confidence vote. Possibly because it doesn’t really hold them. When Jeremy Corbyn led the party (which was the opposition then, not the government), his fellow MPs held a no-confidence vote but he didn’t resign since the party doesn’t have any rules governing what that meant or what to do about it if it should happen. He argued that his support among the members outweighed his lack of support among MPs. And you know what? Why shouldn’t it? When your party doesn’t have any relevant rules, it doesn’t have any relevant rules.

Liberal Democrats: I couldn’t even find that much for the Lib Dems. 

Other Parties: I gave up, leaving a few parties floating free.

What does it all mean? I haven’t a clue. A party being able to dump its leader, as the Tories can, sounds democratic but in practice it seems to give a lot of power to small groups within the party, such as the extreme Brexiteers. If that’s true, you could argue that the forms of democracy are giving a great deal of power to a minority at the expense of the majority, but I’m raising that as a question rather than offering it as an analysis. 

 

Parliamentary votes of no confidence

It’s also possible for parliament as a whole, not just the majority party, to hold a no-confidence vote, and if the government loses, that would, once upon a time, have triggered a general election. But the rules changed when David Cameron was the prime minister. He introduced a new system called-fixed term parliaments. Since then, nobody has a clue what happens. 

As the House of Commons Library explains it, “The consequences of a government losing what would have been considered a question of confidence before the Fixed-term Parliaments Act have not been tested since the Act was passed.”

In other words, it hasn’t happened since the rules changed. Maybe everyone moves one seat down the table and cries, “No room, no room.” Maybe we go back to the scenario with the confetti and the musical instruments. We’ll all just have to wait and see. 

Remember what I said about how much fun an unwritten constitution is?

 

The important stuff

Can we get to the stuff that really matters now? Sooner or later, Boris Johnson will be carried out of Number 10 kicking and screaming and wrapped in canvas, and the question on everyone’s mind is, What will happen to the wallpaper? 

What wallpaper? The horrible and very expensive wallpaper that Johnson and his wife paid for, but only after they were caught trying to have a major party donor pay for it.

I’m not prone to imagining myself in public office, for oh so many reasons, but I can’t help putting myself into  his successor’s comfortable slippers–you know, the ones she or he puts on after work when he or she tries to turn back into her or his real self if (could we use the plural here, please?) if they still remember who that is.

Where were we? I was putting myself in that person’s slippers and  looking at the wallpaper that Johnson will leave behind (but only because you can’t take it with you). On the one hand, it was ruinously expensive–£840 a roll. You can’t just tear that down, can you? On the other hand, it’s awful. Who could live with it? And what sort of impression does it give other heads of state? You couldn’t have a serious conversation in front of it. I’m not sure you could eat a frozen pizza in front of it either.

I’m not sure what you can do in front of it other than run.

Is the next prime minister going to have to break with tradition and live somewhere else? I wouldn’t rule it out.

By now, of course, you want to see it. You’ll find a couple of photos here, along with a discussion of the money and who’s related to who in what way. It’s all deliciously scandalous and, except for the occasional wallpaper joke, has been pretty much forgotten by now.

Party news from Britain and–oh, you know, other places

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The recent news from Britain demonstrates my theory that politicians aren’t brought down by corruption, by undermining democracy, or by heartlessness toward the vulnerable. It’s the human-size scandals that do them in. Not the kind that  wreck a country–we’ve developed a high tolerance for country-wrecking–but the ones that show the politicians as human-size jerks, people no larger than ourselves who we can afford to wipe off our plates.

Yes, it restores my faith in the basic lunacy of my species. (I’m assuming that’s your species as well.)

What’s happened, you ask? Or you ask if you’re not British, because over here we’ve been following this with either glee or despair or fury, depending on our pre-existing political convictions, our temperaments, and how warped our senses of humor are. Or in my case with a destabilizing mix of both glee and despair–a mix that leaves me wondering what kind of excuse for a human being I really am.

What I’m talking about is a drip feed of stories about Boris Johnson–Britain’s prime minister when he can spare the time and attention–along with the circle around him having broken every rule of the Covid lockdown that they imposed on everyone but themselves. At a time when people couldn’t be with family members as they died, Johnson and his cohort were holding parties. Or gatherings. Or work events. With wine and cheese. And, for one of them, a bring-your-own-booze invitation. 

Irrelevant photo: Cornwall’s trees may not tell you which way the wind’s blowing at any given moment, but they do let you know where the prevailing winds come from.

At a time when extended families couldn’t meet in parks, never mind at funerals, they were holding more work events involving alcohol. And in the spirit of screaming irony, dozens of people from the Cabinet Office’s Covid task force showed up at one of them. On the same day the government tweeted that workplaces couldn’t hold Christmas lunches or parties.

The prime minister has variously said that he wasn’t at one or another of them, that he was there but thought he was attending a work meeting, that no one told him they broke the rules, and that he was there but is really, really sorry, especially about the party the day before Prince Phillip’s funeral, which (this being Britain and all) may be the one that sinks him. 

On the other hand, the video of Johnson dancing around with a light saber isn’t from any of the lockdown gatherings. Fact checkers have established that it predates the pandemic.

You feel better now, right?

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Meanwhile, Michael Fabricant, a Member of Parliament from Johnson’s own Consevative Party, accused the BBC of attempting a coup.

How? By covering the Partygate story. 

“This is not news reporting an event,” he said. “This relentless news creation is a coup attempt against the prime minister.”

What the hell, a coup attempt made big news in the U.S. I expect he thought tossing the phrase into the conversation would trigger the same sort of attention here. 

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At more or less (mostly less) the same time and no doubt backing the BBC’s coup attempt, dozens of people in dark suits, Boris Johnson masks, and floppy blond wigs turned up in Trafalgar Square and outside Downing Street with beer, wine, music, and British flags to drink, dance, and chant, “My name is Boris,” and “This is a work event.”

I heard some pundit on the news saying that when the political response shifts from anger to mockery, a politician’s career is over. Stay tuned and we’ll see if it’s true.

 

And in party news from elsewhere

A December 30 charter flight from Montreal to Cancun, Mexico got so rowdy that the passengers were banned from their return flight. 

The trip had been organized by something that describes itself as an “exclusive private group,” the 111 (pronounced  Triple One) Private Club. 

If exclusivity depends on who you exclude, I’m happy to be among the people who get left out of this.

The passengers drank and danced in the aisles, maskless, and of course video’d themselves to provide evidence. Because nothing that happens happened if you don’t have a selfie to prove it. 

The airline they flew down on, Sunwing, canceled their return flight. It did negotiate with Triple One about taking them back, and it got as far as agreeing that the passengers would show up sober and not be served any alcohol on the flight, but negotiations broke down over food: Sunwing said it wouldn’t serve meals. Triple One said that on a five-hour flight they’d fade away without it. 

Okay, I haven’t a clue what Triple One actually said, but negotiations did break down at that point. Last I heard Triple One said it was working to get the passengers home and two other airlines also refused to have them on board. I

Who were these little charmers? Influencers. Reality TV stars. A small handful of the organizer’s business partners. They were facing  fines when they got home. And possibly jail time, which gives a whole ‘nother meaning to the word  reality. 

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And finally, an Australian four-year-old wanted to have a party of his own–he had a birthday coming up–and used his father’s phone to order $1,139 worth of cake and ice cream, including a personalized birthday cake, from Uber Eats. It was delivered to the fire station where the boy’s father works, and the firefighters accepted the order.

What sane person, after all, would ask questions before accepting a thousand dollars worth of cake and ice cream? 

Uber Eats agreed to refund the money and the parents are speaking to the kid again, although I don’t know if he got to eat any of the stuff he ordered. Which doesn’t make it much of a party for him. 

Boris Johnson will be drafted in to consult with him on his party planning as soon as he’s booted out as prime minister.