You may be right that this was Sunak's finest hour but analogous to a Morris Marina, almost Britain's worst ever car ( I had 2 ), pulling off say a rescue of hostages, plodding away from the scene of the crime.
I was not so impressed by Sunak. He was shouty and overzealous, losing his cool. The points made included lies and misleading half truths. Employers N.I. does not apply to workers, just because employers are people who do some work. That includes myself who sometimes pays that.
Sunak had something in common with various other Tory leaders of recent times. He did not have a clue what to do as PM, but wanted the job for prestige. Where he most contrasted was Bozo was that he thought he could micromanage the country into a better state by stuffing various info into spreadsheets and number crunching. That is more something for civil servants to consider doing. PM is a big job and is all about delegating and communicating with flair and gravitas. Sunak had none of those. But he did a hyperactive attempt at a hatchet job as his outro, before he rides off into the sunset on a slightly more expensive private plane to California.
But you make a good point that neither of the Tory leadership candidates, nor the two eliminated, would have been capable of Sunak's attempted hatchet job on this rather excellent budget, albeit in difficult circumstances.
"...one of things that sank that campaign so badly was that focus groups had said “No one likes AV, after you explain it to them” - after that revelation, the whole thing was built around the idea that the product was bad and we just had to avoid talking about it."
I recall it well, the polls were initially in favour but then plummeted as people got to understand that AV was not PR, in fact it was potentially less proportional than FPTP. Cameron was cunning enough to offer AV as an "Aunt Sally". This is a game played almost exclusively in my neck of the woods, in North Oxfordshire between pub teams in places permanently arranged for the game. Where a ceramic doll is set up and participants have to try to knock it down from about 15 yards away, using hefty old hardwood clubs, chucked and spun at it. It's difficult and quite physical.
The "No to AV campaign" were basically the Tories. They ran a "punish Nick Clegg for increasing student fees" campaign, when it was the Tories who heavily pressured Clegg to accept this policy. No wonder the Tories have used and abused power more than any other party in the world and one reason why they need to be put down now, for a very long time.
Clegg took the AV bait as it was the only crumb on offer ( even this had Tory MP's extremely reluctant at agree a Referendum) and the only one they were going to offer on the electoral system. I recall pollsters estimating that in some General Elections AV would have only changed the result to the second placed more consensual candidate in as few as 15 constituencies out of 650, although some of those would probably have been LibDems replacing Tories in marginal seats. Now Davey has figured out how to win 72 seats and almost regular by election wins under FPTP, AV now looks very much an irrelevant dead end. It's PR or bust.
There's a similar pathology in the Republican party in the US, where Trump's ownership of their voter base has forced them to nominally accept the madness that comes with Trump. How much of the Conservative party voter's embrace of Brexit forced Sunak to nominally accept policy he knew was irrational and unimplementable? Johnson at least understood the process of turning sow's ears into silk purses didn't involve spreadsheets, except as a distraction. Forcing a rational man to be irrational never works.
He came to the job too early.............by the time he is 55 he will probably be an even more impressive figure, it was the same with Hague..........way too early, even Obama would be much more impressive if he stood now, in his early 60s than his mid 40s, I think even Blair would have been better as a PM mid 50s than early 40s. Thatcher came to power at 55, if she had been 40 she would have sunk.
My heart is breaking for poor old Rishi, and the Tories
You may be right that this was Sunak's finest hour but analogous to a Morris Marina, almost Britain's worst ever car ( I had 2 ), pulling off say a rescue of hostages, plodding away from the scene of the crime.
I was not so impressed by Sunak. He was shouty and overzealous, losing his cool. The points made included lies and misleading half truths. Employers N.I. does not apply to workers, just because employers are people who do some work. That includes myself who sometimes pays that.
Sunak had something in common with various other Tory leaders of recent times. He did not have a clue what to do as PM, but wanted the job for prestige. Where he most contrasted was Bozo was that he thought he could micromanage the country into a better state by stuffing various info into spreadsheets and number crunching. That is more something for civil servants to consider doing. PM is a big job and is all about delegating and communicating with flair and gravitas. Sunak had none of those. But he did a hyperactive attempt at a hatchet job as his outro, before he rides off into the sunset on a slightly more expensive private plane to California.
But you make a good point that neither of the Tory leadership candidates, nor the two eliminated, would have been capable of Sunak's attempted hatchet job on this rather excellent budget, albeit in difficult circumstances.
"...one of things that sank that campaign so badly was that focus groups had said “No one likes AV, after you explain it to them” - after that revelation, the whole thing was built around the idea that the product was bad and we just had to avoid talking about it."
I recall it well, the polls were initially in favour but then plummeted as people got to understand that AV was not PR, in fact it was potentially less proportional than FPTP. Cameron was cunning enough to offer AV as an "Aunt Sally". This is a game played almost exclusively in my neck of the woods, in North Oxfordshire between pub teams in places permanently arranged for the game. Where a ceramic doll is set up and participants have to try to knock it down from about 15 yards away, using hefty old hardwood clubs, chucked and spun at it. It's difficult and quite physical.
The "No to AV campaign" were basically the Tories. They ran a "punish Nick Clegg for increasing student fees" campaign, when it was the Tories who heavily pressured Clegg to accept this policy. No wonder the Tories have used and abused power more than any other party in the world and one reason why they need to be put down now, for a very long time.
Clegg took the AV bait as it was the only crumb on offer ( even this had Tory MP's extremely reluctant at agree a Referendum) and the only one they were going to offer on the electoral system. I recall pollsters estimating that in some General Elections AV would have only changed the result to the second placed more consensual candidate in as few as 15 constituencies out of 650, although some of those would probably have been LibDems replacing Tories in marginal seats. Now Davey has figured out how to win 72 seats and almost regular by election wins under FPTP, AV now looks very much an irrelevant dead end. It's PR or bust.
There's a similar pathology in the Republican party in the US, where Trump's ownership of their voter base has forced them to nominally accept the madness that comes with Trump. How much of the Conservative party voter's embrace of Brexit forced Sunak to nominally accept policy he knew was irrational and unimplementable? Johnson at least understood the process of turning sow's ears into silk purses didn't involve spreadsheets, except as a distraction. Forcing a rational man to be irrational never works.
He came to the job too early.............by the time he is 55 he will probably be an even more impressive figure, it was the same with Hague..........way too early, even Obama would be much more impressive if he stood now, in his early 60s than his mid 40s, I think even Blair would have been better as a PM mid 50s than early 40s. Thatcher came to power at 55, if she had been 40 she would have sunk.
perhaps the point is that it doesn’t work to be parachuted to n10, but to start in opposition makes the future pm…