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https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/12/tory-rebel-s-last-stand
If I lived in beaconsfield I would campaign for Grieve. It's a great read.
“If we go into Europe,” he said, “we go in… as one of the great states… If we go into an Atlantic Community, can it be as anything other than the 51st state?”
“He would be very pained to see that I and the Conservative Party had parted company. But then he would be extremely pained to see what the Conservative Party was doing to itself.” Would he understand? “Oh,” said Grieve, “I think he’d understand perfectly.”
“The way he raises tension and then suddenly drops it away is classic Maoist stuff. You create turmoil in order to achieve your objectives. And then you relax the turmoil and people say, ‘Oh, how wonderful. We’re being offered the way out.’”
When I spoke to Ken Clarke, who was also driven out of the Tory party on 4 September after 49 years as an MP, he saw parallels with how Cummings had operated as the head of Vote Leave in the 2016 European referendum. “The Leave campaign was going in for dog-whistle racism, with Michael Gove going on about millions of Turks – and wink, wink, they’re brown and Muslim – who would come here if we didn’t get out. And what was it Boris was going on about? All this money for the health service. It was the worst style of dishonest campaigning, but it was brilliantly successful.”
“Boris was resigned to no deal,” said Ken Clarke, when we met in his London home two weeks before the election. “All his efforts were at first put into blaming Europe and blaming parliament.”
Johnson, said Clarke, was now “desperate for a deal. He’d go for anything. That’s why in the end there was no proper negotiating. It was all settled by a one-to-one meeting between him and Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar [held in Cheshire 10 October]. An hour and a half. On their own. They shook hands and did the deal.”
“Now Varadkar was able to do that,” Clarke continued, “confident the [EU] 28 would be all right, because what he shook hands on was what the EU had already agreed to offer Theresa May 12 or 18 months before. It was quite obvious from what Johnson said afterwards that he hadn’t understood what he was agreeing to. He had not recognised it as the original EU proposal. He still refuses to accept that he signed up to a customs union down the Irish Sea.”
Grieve had spent large parts of the hustings being attacked – explicitly by the Brexit Party candidate, implicitly by the equally pro-Brexit Tory. And yet he scarcely reacted. Why? “Anger is something I tried to control a long time ago. I very rarely get angry with anybody. Anger contributes very, very little to achieving anything. I learned that lesson as a teenager, I think, when I was very angry because my sister was unwell and everything was going wrong around me.”
If I lived in beaconsfield I would campaign for Grieve. It's a great read.
“If we go into Europe,” he said, “we go in… as one of the great states… If we go into an Atlantic Community, can it be as anything other than the 51st state?”
“He would be very pained to see that I and the Conservative Party had parted company. But then he would be extremely pained to see what the Conservative Party was doing to itself.” Would he understand? “Oh,” said Grieve, “I think he’d understand perfectly.”
“The way he raises tension and then suddenly drops it away is classic Maoist stuff. You create turmoil in order to achieve your objectives. And then you relax the turmoil and people say, ‘Oh, how wonderful. We’re being offered the way out.’”
When I spoke to Ken Clarke, who was also driven out of the Tory party on 4 September after 49 years as an MP, he saw parallels with how Cummings had operated as the head of Vote Leave in the 2016 European referendum. “The Leave campaign was going in for dog-whistle racism, with Michael Gove going on about millions of Turks – and wink, wink, they’re brown and Muslim – who would come here if we didn’t get out. And what was it Boris was going on about? All this money for the health service. It was the worst style of dishonest campaigning, but it was brilliantly successful.”
“Boris was resigned to no deal,” said Ken Clarke, when we met in his London home two weeks before the election. “All his efforts were at first put into blaming Europe and blaming parliament.”
Johnson, said Clarke, was now “desperate for a deal. He’d go for anything. That’s why in the end there was no proper negotiating. It was all settled by a one-to-one meeting between him and Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar [held in Cheshire 10 October]. An hour and a half. On their own. They shook hands and did the deal.”
“Now Varadkar was able to do that,” Clarke continued, “confident the [EU] 28 would be all right, because what he shook hands on was what the EU had already agreed to offer Theresa May 12 or 18 months before. It was quite obvious from what Johnson said afterwards that he hadn’t understood what he was agreeing to. He had not recognised it as the original EU proposal. He still refuses to accept that he signed up to a customs union down the Irish Sea.”
Grieve had spent large parts of the hustings being attacked – explicitly by the Brexit Party candidate, implicitly by the equally pro-Brexit Tory. And yet he scarcely reacted. Why? “Anger is something I tried to control a long time ago. I very rarely get angry with anybody. Anger contributes very, very little to achieving anything. I learned that lesson as a teenager, I think, when I was very angry because my sister was unwell and everything was going wrong around me.”
Different county I'm afraid (not always the case) but yep, it's Becky. And not a lot of people know that (or probably care)
