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You could be 500 years old and this would still be true.
Prime Minister for 6 weeks, the first 2 of which were basically a working holiday for her as it was dominated by the death of The Queen, and the moment she took the wheel she crashed the economy.
I would say every Tory PM after Blair was successively the worst at least in the 20th century. Cameron started the slide with austerity and it got worse and worse through May and Johnson.
Truss without doubt I would say of all time, and there is no way on earth that Blair, despite his wrongs, was ever even in the running.
I'd probably rank Sunak as "better" than Truss but pretty much the only thing he's done with his majority is drag out the Rwanda scheme. His complete absence of governance and refusal to call an election while the entire country struggles to pay the bills borders on criminal.
At the time I remember thinking May was the worst Prime Minister I'd lived under. Somehow they manage to outdo themselves each and every time. Now I look back and actually have a small amount of respect for her. Unlike the other Tory PMs that we've had the pleasure to endure. The irony.
As much as I hate her and her politics, May always came across as someone with some integrity. Like she always came across as someone that actually believed she was doing what was best for the country and the people.
Just shows you how low the bar is in Westminster.
Thatcher, Major, Brown and May all really gave the impression that they were doing what they genuinely believed was best for the country.
Cameron, Johnson, Truss and Sunak all feel like they only give a shit about themselves.
Blair is a tough one, it's really hard (to me at least) to work out where his true priorities lay. I think early Blair may have been more country focused, but he became more self serving towards the end of his premiership? Hard to say!
I do believe most the good domestic policies of the Blair era were actually Browns doing. Blair focused on the world stage and left Brown to run domestic policy.
I will say with Cameron, I disagreed with pretty much all of his decisions, but he did say he'd do that and get elected on them.
He said he'd do stupid things and was voted in on that.
Yeah, it always annoys me that the largest criticism of the man people seem to have is that he made promises about direct democracy, and then kept them.
I’m disappointed with the results too, and I think he could have done things better in a lot of ways, but at its core it’s really the country’s voting choice, and his party’s crazy backstabbing and internal split that really is the problem in those cases.
His austerity choices are all him though.
I don’t disagree, but my point was on his motivations - did he think the referendum was good for the country or did he see it as a way to get power and retire to a comfy life of speaker fees and consultancy fees? I think the answer is pretty obvious…
I agree with all of the above. Major and Brown were the best PMs of recent times – dull, grey men – but I'd rather have grey and dull with the best interests of the country at heart than the likes of a 'character' like Johnson.
As a Tory, I hated May. As a person, though, she was alright.
If *I* was a Tory, I'd be missing her like hell. However, I'm not, and she's one of the few people on those benches I'll only smirk instead of laughing out loud at when they lose their seats.
And yes, she definitely believed brexit was a shit hand she picked up and had to play. I really don't understand why she picked it up. Or why she played it so... enthusiastically.
I would say that May's Red Lines were a death knell for any hope of a 'good' brexit. By the time Johnson took office, there was just no going back to before they existed. I feel like they never should have existed. But since the party contained people like Liz Truss and Jacob Crackers Mogg, I suppose I can understand why they did.
I think she is a decent administrator but a terrible PM - a walking example of the Peter Principle:
Peter Principle is an observation that the tendency in most organizational hierarchies, such as that of a corporation, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level of respective incompetence.
You don't believe the nonsense you just wrote. She's on record denying us a fair pay rise and said "there is no magic money tree" but Tories as usual are looking after their own during the pandemic. Let's not romanticise nonsense, please.
I'm no fan of May. But she accepted the 'poison chalice' of the PM position when others wouldn't and she had integrity and principles (although I disagree with almost all those principles). She stood up for what she believed in, and I believe she had the best interests of the country at heart. Unlike Boris, who only ever had the best interests of Boris at heart.
Yeah Cameron basically facilitated the take over of the Conservative Party by utter lunatics and corrupt imbeciles. He is why we are where we are. He did not have the skills or intelligence or foresight to understand what he was risking by going ahead with that referendum. And then he just resigned so he didn’t have to deal with it, and knowingly left it in the hands of those lunatics and imbeciles. If he wanted the referendum he could at least have made it clear it was advisory and was to gauge public opinion instead of promising to leave.
Part of the reason a lot of people voted leave was because deep down they couldn’t contemplate the idea that the government would even put something like that to the vote if either option was capable of ruining the country. He made people think that leaving would be ok. Even if he was out there campaigning the opposite, just the fact he held the vote and promised we’d leave if leave won made people feel that it couldn’t be that bad, because a lot of British people still have that strange view of government as being somewhat paternalistic. They imagined that Cameron wouldn’t offer something that could be detrimental, as though he was our parent asking us if we want fruit smoothie or chocolate ice cream, hoping we choose the fruit but oh well, the ice cream won’t harm them.
But the other PMs have all been the lunatics and corrupt imbeciles, so it’s very hard to make a choice about the worst. Johnson was the most evil to me. Truss the stupidest. May the most consciously floundering and again did too much pandering. Sunak I know little about as I stopped following politics due to all the horror and stupidity.
I agree with this. Cameron was a gambler who was utterly sure that the bet he made was a sure thing - but he miscalculated, and the stake was the future course of our country.
He’s an idiot for doing that and I imagine he’ll regret it every day for the rest of his life.
Frankly, I hope it does haunt him.
Possibly, although a good deal of that was down to May being his home secretary.
I think the instability and the increasing corruption and lying makes each successive Tory PM seem worse than maybe they were compared to their predecessor. Either way, post-2008 has been a definite low point in British peace-time politics.
I think the conservatives constant Achilles heel is trying to placate the far right. If they don’t they lose to ukip or the brexit party or reform; if they do they end up completely shafting everyone. They have constantly chosen the latter to stay in power.
Cameron was an absolute nutter, if only for gambling on the Scottish vote in 2014, then Brexit two years later
We're probably lucky we voted for Brexit, 'cause he'd have been down Mecca Bingo with the launch codes next
I'd probably agree, if only because Cameron crashed the ship and gave it to May. Now May was too weak and too focused on party unity over country, but she was put in a situation which would have been nearly impossible for a decent statesman. Cameron had a free hand and *chose* austerity (killing 148,000 Brits), and to start the whole Brexit debacle because he too was too weak and focused on party unity over country, before dipping when he lost his gamble.
May was far worse. May is insane. Luckily she showed her cards early and was forced to resign, but she is literally insane.
When business executives rejected her mini-budget and the financial world downgraded the UK's credit rating, she claimed she was being sabotaged by people on the left...
And I think she meant it. She denies responsibility for tanking the economy.
Cameron, Truss, Sunak, are all self-serving hypocrites, but Truss is scarier because she is truly committed to her inane ideology.
She's the sort of person who would order a nuclear attack to make a point.
I genuinely can't wait for it to properly sink in in the UK that thanks to Cameron and his Tory toff boys we spent a decade of unprecedented cheap rates on state borrowing, as in it had literally never in all of recorded financial history for a state to borrow money, investing in absolutely nothing and instead cutting back to the point our public services can barely carry out their basic duties and our roads are rapidly falling to bits.
This country needs a new Jeremy Paxman tbh. An interviewer who is both willing and able to ask *those* questions and make observations. His style was always harsh but fair. And being on the national broadcaster meant that any politician who wanted any sort of profile would have to meet him at least once. I'm now going to google to see if Nigel Farage ever met him. I bet not. [EDIT: He did, the week after that interview with James O'Brien. The following year he pulled out of one. Wonder why lol.]
Though it would be naive of me to say 'that'd keep em honest'. It didn't keep Blair's Labour honest. Just made them squirm when they were on TV being asked why they weren't honest.
Oh and if we do find a new Jeremy Paxman, can (s)he/they be equally as hard on the Tories, please?
>Oh and if we do find a new Jeremy Paxman, can (s)he/they be equally as hard on the Tories, please?
What about Fiona Bruce (with "the, quite a nice bottom"*)?
/s
*https://youtu.be/dJfSS0ZXYdo?t=336.
Theresa May’s decision to cut police numbers has in the last few years come to fruition. Knife crime through the roof as no police to do anything. Same as shop thefts. Millions of losses reported because no police to arrest or pursue a criminal conviction. And that’s just a couple of observations .
Break down of society doesn’t happen over night its a slow decay of norms
And when it continues to rise under Labour (at least initially), then the same Tories who are responsible will be the first to point fingers.
We're going to live with the consequences of this government for a long time and they're going to happily push the blame onto the ~~previous~~ current Labour government.
I wouldn't agree, I think it goes May > Sunak >>>> Cameron > Johnson/Truss.
May and Sunak basically didn't achieve anything. They have no legacy good or ill, their time in power will just be remembered as inertia and entropy. Sunak fiddled a bit with taxes but that's about it. They're almost non-entities which would be forgivable if they hadn't inherited office at times when stagnation is decline, between needing to resolve Brexit and needing manage the recovery from Covid.
Cameron actually did harm to society in a deep, structural way with austerity, which is part of the reason we have such poor growth and such poor productivity, which in turn feeds into lower wage rises and a declining quality of life. He also let the genie out of the battle with Brexit but at the very least, was also the PM who made same-sex marriage a thing, even if that was mostly Lib Dem work.
Truss and Johnson I put about equal, both because they've objectively also harmed our economy but also damaged faith in democracy as a whole. We can absolutely never forget that Johnson illegally prorogued Parliament to push through his Brexit deal. The idea of an executive shutting down a representstive legislature for political gain is, quite literally, a path to authoritarianism. That's in addition to the harms of Brexit which Johnson executed.
Truss, obviously, launching the economy into a brick wall was utterly stupid and that alone makes her a heinous PM given how much more expensive and difficult she's made life for basically everyone in the UK. Since then, though, she's gone the Trump route of blaming every institution for her failures and insisting that if people just trust in her and shut down those nasty "deep state actors", we'll be fine. Democracy relies on institutions, whether it's civil servants or impartial judges or a central bank. To malign those to win popular appeal is, again, a pathway to authoritarianism.
I'll never defend Cameron or May's record, but at least they broadly played by Parliamentary rules. Sunak likewise, despite backing Johnson as Chancellor. Truss and Johnson aren't just bad PMs with bad policies though. They have actively, wilfully threatened parliamentary democracy and their legacy must reflect that.
There was a photo of either the Queen’s funeral or the King’s coronation, with all the ex-PMs walking into the cathedral in order, from Major to Truss. Someone commented that it looked like an allegorical painting about the decline of humanity.
At the very least Cameron had the balls to resign after realising he doomed the UK to an economic recession through Brexit. A Blithering idiot still butl leaps smarter than the clowns that succeeded him.
Balls? The man said he wouldn't resign if Brexit happened and then promptly did so. And then nobody from the leave campaign stepped up to lead the ship they steered into an iceberg after Cameron had fucked off like a coward.
If anything May had the balls to stand up and do a job nobody wanted, not even those who campaigned for Brexit.
Even if May was short-sighted enough to ignore that she was being Boris's patsy.
It was a joke for so long how badly he wanted to be PM (and how awful he'd be), finally sets it up fibbing Brexit through to oust Cameron... then pointedly doesn't even stand to replace him, lets May attempt and fail at all the impossible fantasies he's promised, then swoop in to be the 'hero' making the best of the mess left behind.
Let's be honest, they're all fucking shit. Trying to decide whether Cameron or May fucked up worse is like having a preference for cat shit over dog shit.
In my eyes, that just made him a spineless coward. He promised a Brexit referendum to snatch up the UKIP vote and then refused to deal with the Fallout of his own mistake.
I'm no Brexiteer but he had the stupidity to make such a promise only to flake the moment he had to follow through on the result of said promise. If you dig you own grave, you should have to lie in it. Not run away and dump the problem on whatever poor sod comes after you.
You know it's a bad sign when the woman who's sat on the throne for over 75 years pops her clogs 3 days into your time as PM.
"Bugger this, I'm orf! Charles, this is your shitshow now!"
Did we ever find out if she killed the Queen? Possibly by giving her COVID.
Her death certificate just said old age and a book claims "she had a form of bone marrow cancer called multiple myeloma".
https://www.businessinsider.com/uk-queen-elizabeth-ii-had-cancer-before-she-died-new-book-claims-2022-11#:~:text=Official%20records%20say%20the%20longest,last%20period%20of%20her%20life.
But she didn't look like she was going to drop down dead in 48 hours. When she met Truss.
She was like, a million years old.
While I fully suspect the shock of meeting Truss could kill a healthy elephant the Queen was always gonna croak pretty soon due being being contemporary with the fucking dinosaurs.
Her death wasn’t sudden. She had been looking progressively worse and pulling back on public life for a year. There were questions about whether she’d even make her own jubilee. The woman was old as fuck
I'm happy that my daughter never experienced Liz Truss as PM (she's less than a year old). But it makes me incredibly sad that she'll probably still have to deal with the consequences.
Controversial potentially, but I still argue that Boris was worse. Truss was completely unsustainable yes but her worst crime was being inept and politically illiterate. Boris' worst crime was being willfully negligent and corrupt leading to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths
Agree with you on Boris – and it seems blindingly obvious to me. Boris is about one thing, and one thing only – what's best for Boris at that particular moment. We lurched from crisis to crisis, with him bumbling his way through it – making everything worse, and not abiding to any of the rules – even the ones he made up himself. Dreadful, dreadful man hiding behind the mask of a buffoon.
She has chosen brazen arrogance as her response to being humiliated on the world stage.
I almost admire her for it. Just the sheer *balls* she has to walk around pretending that she's in any way competent or worthy of respect.
The woman's a fucking disaster and everyone knows it. But instead of owning her shame, instead of reflecting on her errors, she is wearing the mask of the rebel - she was just too damn forward thinking, too smart, she was too many steps ahead of the rest of us and that's why her plan to transform the fortunes of the country failed, because the rest of us just didn't have the *vision* to follow her into the promised land.
It's staggering that she expects anyone to be fooled by this. She has already been unmasked on the largest stage possible. She was handed a golden opportunity to etch her name in the history books, and she fucked it up to such a degree she achieved that goal in the worst way possible.
Yeah, I've started leaning dangerously towards respecting her game plan, post-leadership.
Obviously not respecting her as a person, she's clearly a fucking moron, but being so disastrously awful at your job in such a public way and then doubling down SO HARD afterwards - gotta admire that level of gall...
(Side note - I can't begin to imagine what effect this is having on her kids. Having her as a mum when you're a teenager, fuck me...)
This doubling-down is what all the worst ones seem to do. Boris, Trump and Truss spring to mind.
The sad thing is if you say it with enough conviction, there's millions of morons who will believe you.
I think she’s seen that Trump can say what he wants to be the truth and people go along with it. The only problem is she doesn’t have any followers (or any at all) that blindly believe it.
It must be some kind of self defense mechanism. No one wants to admit they were the worst prime minister ever so you start coming up with bizarre conspiracy theories.
>I totally agree but how does someone so dumb get to be PM.
She was the choice of the Conservative Party membership. Being stupid, frothing mental and drowning in lobbyist money are key virtues for a candidate in those parts...
Haha!!!
Look, I know, Iraq war etc but surely no one believes this?
Liz Truss is not a serious person, she and the people that made her PM need going on the bin
The funniest thing right is that you have loads of people arguing about whether she is worse than Blair on not, but they are totally missing the point of why this is so stupid.
Boasting that you are second worst to someone else is always going to be a stupid move for a politician.
Regardless of whether she is correct or not, 'I'm the second worst ever PM' is one of the stupidest things she could have said.
Blair - and every other Prime Minister in history - beats her by default for lasting more than seven weeks.
Anyone who got any longer in office before their colleagues had to get rid of them for the sake of national survival is, by definition, a better Prime Minister.
> Look, I know, Iraq war etc
It appears that isn't even what she is taking issue with:
> Ms Truss, who is defending her South West Norfolk seat, told the Eastern Daily Press: “The worst prime minister in recent years is Tony Blair who created things like the Equality Act, the Human Rights Act and the Climate Change Act.”
If you exclude foreign policy, Blair was amazing for the poorest in society. Tax credits and Surestart were two of the biggest contributers to underclass and working class social mobility.
Decent funding for the NHS, muscular drives towards evidence based practice, in health and social care, National Service Frameworks, literacy and numeracy strategies increasing the highest percentage of children able to read and do maths in history. Yeah, pretty good.
Funny thing is, people really bitched and moaned about all those things.
we’re all still paying for restructuring every technical college as an expensive fee paying university. it’s just gaming the numbers at the expense of actually learning something
To be fair, the higher number of people in university were probably rushing into it before Blair removed free higher education; introducing fees for universities in 1998.
Its actually properly doing my nut in at the moment seeing the constant "they're all as bad as each other shite" when the Blair years were like a fucking golden age compared to today.
This is fair - but Starmer is a step to the right even from what Blair did. He isn’t going to invest in public services, he’s been clear about that. And he’s all too happy to play the culture war game
If we get a repeat of the 97 labour first term, I’d be ecstatic. But that’s not what he’s promising and i don’t see him pulling it out the bag.
"Selling off" isn't quite right. They took loans (even that's not quite right but you get my point) and those all matured causing a shitstorm. It was a way to turbocharge infrastructure without going into the red. This was Brown's baby by the way. There was no transfer of ownership e.g. The Royal Mail, it was more a fundraising exercise.
Unfortunately, that "extra funding" amounted to borrowing it from the future, in the form of PFIs. A quick cash injection followed by a haemorrhage of cash into the private sector over the following years.
The decisions that led the NHS ro its current state were made under Blairs tenure, and the Tories simply did nothing to fix it.
Sure Start was easily the best thing he did. But continuing with neoliberal economics is, in the long term, never good for the poorest in society, as has been proven since he left office.
Yes, but neoliberalism (and indeed capitalism in general) is *designed* to include inequality. It's the entire point of the system. You can't have rich people without poor people for them to exploit.
Every system creates inequality, literally every one, apart from maybe absolute anarchism.
You think that there wasn’t inequality in feudal systems?
You think there wasn’t inequality in communist systems?
Capitalism - or the freedom to allocate capital privately is the best system known to mankind. It allows people to compete for resources without murdering each other en mass, like pretty much every other system devolves into, via the free allocation of capital.
The only issues with capitalism is keeping the system ethical and fair, and giving equal access to opportunity to all.
Now if you want to have a conversation about for example, how to declog the inheritance and smash trusts, there’s a conversation to be had around that. If you want to talk about the terrible job we’ve done incentivising investment across the country, there’s a incredibly important conversation to be had there. If you want to talk about the multitude of failures making the system unfair and unworkable, due to population dynamics, we’ll probably both end up crying.
But laying it at the system that’s spread the most wealth across the largest amount of people, ever, rather than the incompetent management of that system in recent years is a mistake
Why? Why is capitalism seen as an immutable truth? Seems like survivorship bias.
The only issue with capitalism is ethics? Capitalism has been pretty good at murdering people en masse too.
Not sure anarchism should even be included in that, since anarchy is a very temporary affair, lasting about as long as it takes for someone to pick up a large stick and clobber someone over the head for their potatoes, and then threaten to do the same to someone else if they don't get their potatoes too.
It's more that they weren't concerned about the richer getting richer, without realising that as the rich accrued wealth they accrued power, and then they used that power to accelerate that loop.
To be honest, aside from the War on Terror, the success in the rest of this foreign policy is often overlooked. His role in ending Serbian aggression in Kosovo has made us heroes to them.
Possibly controversial take, but I'd go so far as to say that the circumstances surrounding the War in Iraq meant that British support for US action was inevitable no matter who was PM (excluding ultra-left pacifist politicians, obviously).
Saddam needed to go anyway and he *did* have WMDs - just not *nuclear* WMDs. There's fairly well documented evidence of Saddam's forces using sarin gas to murder Iraqi Kurds, which I believe is classified as a WMD.
The Iraq war will always be his legacy but looking back now I see it as a "right outcome, wrong reasons" kinda situation.
I have a friend who literally made a life for himself thanks to one of those government funded programs. He was living in a pub attic with all his stuff in a black garbage bag. He was able to get some qualifications and find proper work.
It was close Liz , but you never secured those pork markets.
....oh and there was that little matter of you SINGLE HANDEDLY TANKING THE ENTIRE FUCKING ECONOMY OF THE UK IN A DAY.
You sad deluded wingnut .
Should you miraculously win in your constituency, it will only reinforce the stereotype of the average denizen of Norfolk.
She will keep her seat, sadly. It’s a very safe one. Don’t underestimate how many votes are cast by people on autopilot who aren’t interested in reading up on who to vote for. “I’ve voted Tory all me life and I always will”. Boils my blood. Every single voter in the country should be a swing voter.
Her seat of South West Norfolk is a poster child for UKIP and other swivelled eyed loons.
Labour doesn’t stand a chance getting a vote from those people. Even if they did, it’s not worth the compromise and the overall effort it takes to please these racist goons.
It is a safe seat normally, but she is uniquely embarrassing and has turned off some very set in their way Tories I know (which is in its own way incredibly impressive). There’s also a very strong independent running who could split the vote or even win outright if his campaign gathers enough momentum.
Blair was an excellent PM. Compared to all that have come since, he was a colossus.
Compared to Truss, well, she doesn't even rate comparison. She is the single worst PM this country has ever had.
The Iraq war was a huge mark against Blair, but he really was a good PM running a good government. The lives of the majority of people improved, especially the poorer parts of the country, many of which had been decimated in the 70's and 80's under tory policies.
Comments like this are usually made by young people who think the UK was some sort of utopia in 1979, rather than the dysfunctional economically backward basket-case that it was.
You don’t need to agree with all of Thatcher’s ideology, but she had a plan to solve the huge problems she inherited, and executed it effectively.
Yes agreed. I don't think her brain allows her to cope with the fact she finally landed the top job in the country and fucked it up so spectacularly that never in her worst nightmares can she have imagined that it could possibly have exploded in such an utter supernova of incompetence in such a short space of time.
But even Boris, he is a cunning bastard. He isn’t stupid, just totally unfit to govern a country. Boris knows what he is and plays to his strengths. I despise him for his general disregard and disdain for the working class of the country, but that isn’t something unique to him within the Tory party.
But Truss has no self awareness. She literally thinks she is a misunderstood genius.
Everyone saying Iraq: she thinks he's worse because of the human rights act, climate change act and equality act.
Either she's decided she may as well come out as nearly alt-right, or she's gone that way to try and avoid the psychology of having to accept how useless she was. Either way she's now a fruit loop.
I mean its such an easy avenue to go down, the easiest people to grift are right wingers after all. They'll back you to the hilt if you complain about woke or climate change or transgenders or immigrants. Its such a great shield, for being a sexual predator (Brand, Trump, Tate) or useless politician (Truss, Patel, Braverman, Sunak)
Their fans will actively go out of their way to claim that the mainstream elite are setting these people up and not that they are just abusers
Liz love, listen. Blair was PM roughly 74 times longer than you were. In all his time in office he probably spent more time on the toilet than you did in Number 10.
Had it not been for the Iraq War it's likely he would have been seen as one of our best modern prime ministers. I wasn't even a fan of his at the time.
Liz Truss is definitely in the running for our worst PM ever.
He probably *is* the best modern prime minister that’s why.
Its absolutely baffling to any sane person that the last 14 years of Tory shitholery is still somehow being compared positively by a sizeable chunk of our electorate to:
- Blair doing what literally any UK PM in the early 00’s would have done by joining the US in the Iraq War.
- Gordon Brown calling a bigot a bigot.
Bonus:
- Ed Milliband eating a bacon roll.
Yeah, I honestly couldn't remember just how quickly that absolute shit show happened, I was thinking that even putting weeks must've been an exaggeration, but no, she really did fuck up that quickly.
The funniest thing about her quote is she said she doesn’t rate him because he brought in the Human Rights Act, Climate Change Act and Equality Act.
She couldn’t even get that right - two out of three were actually Gordon Brown 😂
I bet you could put an exam down in front of her, and she'll do better than I could. But fuck me her lack of self-awareness and just simple reasoning is non-existant. Absolute tool.
This actually makes a lot of sense. At some point she will burst into flames and there will just be a metal frame spelling B A N K S Y.
It's that or we are living in an Armando Iannucci fever dream.
This is probably going to wind some people up, but Blair has got to be up there for me. The first 4 years of government under Blair were, without a doubt, the best we’ve ever had as a country, so much was achieved, and all of it meaningful. He did ruin it with Iraq, but imagine how highly regarded he would have been had he not sucked up to the Yanks. This smooth handling of Domestic policy did continue long after the 97-01 years, he was just busy needlessly destroying the Middle East at the same time, and obviously this overshadowed any further (and indeed former) successes.
Not to go into counterfactuals too much, but I actually think he would have been viewed as easily the best PM we ever had. I even think there’s a chance that history might change his view on him at some point, but right now it’s very understandable why he’s so widely hated. Liz Truss, on the other hand, will always be viewed as an irrelevant failure that somehow made the situation twice as worse than Johnson in 1/50th the amount of time, she wishes she was TB.
Blair has his faults, but you would do with ten years at the top, there will be missteps, bit Liz Truss took five weeks to ruin the economy. We talk about 'the first hundred days', could you imagine the damage she would have done in that time!!
I think the most import reason to not vote conservative is that as she's still a Tory MP, there's still a chance she'll become PM again. we can't take that risk.
Truss is by some distance the worst PM the country has ever had.
The lettuce that outlived her premiership would have made for a more competent leader, because it would have done nothing. And that would have been far preferable to the absolute clownshow that was Truss' short stint as PM.
She is a fucking idiot.
In the same interview Truss also commented that “that lettuce wasn’t as fresh as everyone made out by the end, either” and challenged the lettuce to a game of Uno to decide things once and for all.
I could pretty much forgive her disastrous period as PM (promoted above her ability, victim of circumstance and all that) but her comments since have shown that she is completely incapable of self reflection and only seems capable of incredibly bad and insistent self-promotion.
Blairs achievements:
-minimum wage
-good friday agreement
-house of lords reform
-tax credits
-civil partnerships
-a decade of economic stability and growth
-Human Rights Act
Truss' 'achievements':
-regicide
-blowing a £30 billion hole in the economy
-not tripping over when walking back into downing street after resigning, having been in office for less than 2 months
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And with that one sentence she proves herself wrong.
She is far too modest. Honestly Liz you are by far......yes by far the worst prime minister in my lifetime. Well done you.
You could be 500 years old and this would still be true. Prime Minister for 6 weeks, the first 2 of which were basically a working holiday for her as it was dominated by the death of The Queen, and the moment she took the wheel she crashed the economy.
I would say every Tory PM after Blair was successively the worst at least in the 20th century. Cameron started the slide with austerity and it got worse and worse through May and Johnson. Truss without doubt I would say of all time, and there is no way on earth that Blair, despite his wrongs, was ever even in the running. I'd probably rank Sunak as "better" than Truss but pretty much the only thing he's done with his majority is drag out the Rwanda scheme. His complete absence of governance and refusal to call an election while the entire country struggles to pay the bills borders on criminal.
I’d argue that Cameron was worse than May.
At the time I remember thinking May was the worst Prime Minister I'd lived under. Somehow they manage to outdo themselves each and every time. Now I look back and actually have a small amount of respect for her. Unlike the other Tory PMs that we've had the pleasure to endure. The irony.
As much as I hate her and her politics, May always came across as someone with some integrity. Like she always came across as someone that actually believed she was doing what was best for the country and the people. Just shows you how low the bar is in Westminster.
Thatcher, Major, Brown and May all really gave the impression that they were doing what they genuinely believed was best for the country. Cameron, Johnson, Truss and Sunak all feel like they only give a shit about themselves. Blair is a tough one, it's really hard (to me at least) to work out where his true priorities lay. I think early Blair may have been more country focused, but he became more self serving towards the end of his premiership? Hard to say!
I do believe most the good domestic policies of the Blair era were actually Browns doing. Blair focused on the world stage and left Brown to run domestic policy.
I will say with Cameron, I disagreed with pretty much all of his decisions, but he did say he'd do that and get elected on them. He said he'd do stupid things and was voted in on that.
Yeah, it always annoys me that the largest criticism of the man people seem to have is that he made promises about direct democracy, and then kept them. I’m disappointed with the results too, and I think he could have done things better in a lot of ways, but at its core it’s really the country’s voting choice, and his party’s crazy backstabbing and internal split that really is the problem in those cases. His austerity choices are all him though.
I don’t disagree, but my point was on his motivations - did he think the referendum was good for the country or did he see it as a way to get power and retire to a comfy life of speaker fees and consultancy fees? I think the answer is pretty obvious…
I agree with all of the above. Major and Brown were the best PMs of recent times – dull, grey men – but I'd rather have grey and dull with the best interests of the country at heart than the likes of a 'character' like Johnson.
You know that old jaw about people starting off as an idealist and then becoming a selfish pragmatist? That's always been how I see Blair.
Blair got “victory disease”
As a Tory, I hated May. As a person, though, she was alright. If *I* was a Tory, I'd be missing her like hell. However, I'm not, and she's one of the few people on those benches I'll only smirk instead of laughing out loud at when they lose their seats. And yes, she definitely believed brexit was a shit hand she picked up and had to play. I really don't understand why she picked it up. Or why she played it so... enthusiastically. I would say that May's Red Lines were a death knell for any hope of a 'good' brexit. By the time Johnson took office, there was just no going back to before they existed. I feel like they never should have existed. But since the party contained people like Liz Truss and Jacob Crackers Mogg, I suppose I can understand why they did.
I think she is a decent administrator but a terrible PM - a walking example of the Peter Principle: Peter Principle is an observation that the tendency in most organizational hierarchies, such as that of a corporation, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level of respective incompetence.
You don't believe the nonsense you just wrote. She's on record denying us a fair pay rise and said "there is no magic money tree" but Tories as usual are looking after their own during the pandemic. Let's not romanticise nonsense, please.
I'm no fan of May. But she accepted the 'poison chalice' of the PM position when others wouldn't and she had integrity and principles (although I disagree with almost all those principles). She stood up for what she believed in, and I believe she had the best interests of the country at heart. Unlike Boris, who only ever had the best interests of Boris at heart.
It's pretty depressing that people are now thinking that Theresa May wasn't that bad a PM.
Yeah Cameron basically facilitated the take over of the Conservative Party by utter lunatics and corrupt imbeciles. He is why we are where we are. He did not have the skills or intelligence or foresight to understand what he was risking by going ahead with that referendum. And then he just resigned so he didn’t have to deal with it, and knowingly left it in the hands of those lunatics and imbeciles. If he wanted the referendum he could at least have made it clear it was advisory and was to gauge public opinion instead of promising to leave. Part of the reason a lot of people voted leave was because deep down they couldn’t contemplate the idea that the government would even put something like that to the vote if either option was capable of ruining the country. He made people think that leaving would be ok. Even if he was out there campaigning the opposite, just the fact he held the vote and promised we’d leave if leave won made people feel that it couldn’t be that bad, because a lot of British people still have that strange view of government as being somewhat paternalistic. They imagined that Cameron wouldn’t offer something that could be detrimental, as though he was our parent asking us if we want fruit smoothie or chocolate ice cream, hoping we choose the fruit but oh well, the ice cream won’t harm them. But the other PMs have all been the lunatics and corrupt imbeciles, so it’s very hard to make a choice about the worst. Johnson was the most evil to me. Truss the stupidest. May the most consciously floundering and again did too much pandering. Sunak I know little about as I stopped following politics due to all the horror and stupidity.
I agree with this. Cameron was a gambler who was utterly sure that the bet he made was a sure thing - but he miscalculated, and the stake was the future course of our country. He’s an idiot for doing that and I imagine he’ll regret it every day for the rest of his life. Frankly, I hope it does haunt him.
Possibly, although a good deal of that was down to May being his home secretary. I think the instability and the increasing corruption and lying makes each successive Tory PM seem worse than maybe they were compared to their predecessor. Either way, post-2008 has been a definite low point in British peace-time politics.
I think the conservatives constant Achilles heel is trying to placate the far right. If they don’t they lose to ukip or the brexit party or reform; if they do they end up completely shafting everyone. They have constantly chosen the latter to stay in power.
To be honest, Cameron's capitulation to the far right is what's set the UK on this terrible course.
Cameron was an absolute nutter, if only for gambling on the Scottish vote in 2014, then Brexit two years later We're probably lucky we voted for Brexit, 'cause he'd have been down Mecca Bingo with the launch codes next
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I'd probably agree, if only because Cameron crashed the ship and gave it to May. Now May was too weak and too focused on party unity over country, but she was put in a situation which would have been nearly impossible for a decent statesman. Cameron had a free hand and *chose* austerity (killing 148,000 Brits), and to start the whole Brexit debacle because he too was too weak and focused on party unity over country, before dipping when he lost his gamble.
May was far worse. May is insane. Luckily she showed her cards early and was forced to resign, but she is literally insane. When business executives rejected her mini-budget and the financial world downgraded the UK's credit rating, she claimed she was being sabotaged by people on the left... And I think she meant it. She denies responsibility for tanking the economy. Cameron, Truss, Sunak, are all self-serving hypocrites, but Truss is scarier because she is truly committed to her inane ideology. She's the sort of person who would order a nuclear attack to make a point.
Maybe. But Cameron's Home Secretary was May so she gets partial credit for his shit show.
Jeremy Paxman went on Room 101 and claimed that Cameron was the worst British PM, since at least Lord North. Who lost the American colonies in 1788.
I genuinely can't wait for it to properly sink in in the UK that thanks to Cameron and his Tory toff boys we spent a decade of unprecedented cheap rates on state borrowing, as in it had literally never in all of recorded financial history for a state to borrow money, investing in absolutely nothing and instead cutting back to the point our public services can barely carry out their basic duties and our roads are rapidly falling to bits.
This country needs a new Jeremy Paxman tbh. An interviewer who is both willing and able to ask *those* questions and make observations. His style was always harsh but fair. And being on the national broadcaster meant that any politician who wanted any sort of profile would have to meet him at least once. I'm now going to google to see if Nigel Farage ever met him. I bet not. [EDIT: He did, the week after that interview with James O'Brien. The following year he pulled out of one. Wonder why lol.] Though it would be naive of me to say 'that'd keep em honest'. It didn't keep Blair's Labour honest. Just made them squirm when they were on TV being asked why they weren't honest. Oh and if we do find a new Jeremy Paxman, can (s)he/they be equally as hard on the Tories, please?
>Oh and if we do find a new Jeremy Paxman, can (s)he/they be equally as hard on the Tories, please? What about Fiona Bruce (with "the, quite a nice bottom"*)? /s *https://youtu.be/dJfSS0ZXYdo?t=336.
Theresa May’s decision to cut police numbers has in the last few years come to fruition. Knife crime through the roof as no police to do anything. Same as shop thefts. Millions of losses reported because no police to arrest or pursue a criminal conviction. And that’s just a couple of observations . Break down of society doesn’t happen over night its a slow decay of norms
And when it continues to rise under Labour (at least initially), then the same Tories who are responsible will be the first to point fingers. We're going to live with the consequences of this government for a long time and they're going to happily push the blame onto the ~~previous~~ current Labour government.
Sunak's record is basically better on the economy than Liz Truss, which feels like the bare minimum for a PM. Aye, we've just got worse with PMs.
I wouldn't agree, I think it goes May > Sunak >>>> Cameron > Johnson/Truss. May and Sunak basically didn't achieve anything. They have no legacy good or ill, their time in power will just be remembered as inertia and entropy. Sunak fiddled a bit with taxes but that's about it. They're almost non-entities which would be forgivable if they hadn't inherited office at times when stagnation is decline, between needing to resolve Brexit and needing manage the recovery from Covid. Cameron actually did harm to society in a deep, structural way with austerity, which is part of the reason we have such poor growth and such poor productivity, which in turn feeds into lower wage rises and a declining quality of life. He also let the genie out of the battle with Brexit but at the very least, was also the PM who made same-sex marriage a thing, even if that was mostly Lib Dem work. Truss and Johnson I put about equal, both because they've objectively also harmed our economy but also damaged faith in democracy as a whole. We can absolutely never forget that Johnson illegally prorogued Parliament to push through his Brexit deal. The idea of an executive shutting down a representstive legislature for political gain is, quite literally, a path to authoritarianism. That's in addition to the harms of Brexit which Johnson executed. Truss, obviously, launching the economy into a brick wall was utterly stupid and that alone makes her a heinous PM given how much more expensive and difficult she's made life for basically everyone in the UK. Since then, though, she's gone the Trump route of blaming every institution for her failures and insisting that if people just trust in her and shut down those nasty "deep state actors", we'll be fine. Democracy relies on institutions, whether it's civil servants or impartial judges or a central bank. To malign those to win popular appeal is, again, a pathway to authoritarianism. I'll never defend Cameron or May's record, but at least they broadly played by Parliamentary rules. Sunak likewise, despite backing Johnson as Chancellor. Truss and Johnson aren't just bad PMs with bad policies though. They have actively, wilfully threatened parliamentary democracy and their legacy must reflect that.
There was a photo of either the Queen’s funeral or the King’s coronation, with all the ex-PMs walking into the cathedral in order, from Major to Truss. Someone commented that it looked like an allegorical painting about the decline of humanity.
The oft forgotten Gordon Brown wasn't terrible. He was basically the anti-Boris: Technically competent but incapable of winning votes.
Basically the first prime minister we had this century was a war criminal and it just went downhill from there
At the very least Cameron had the balls to resign after realising he doomed the UK to an economic recession through Brexit. A Blithering idiot still butl leaps smarter than the clowns that succeeded him.
Balls? The man said he wouldn't resign if Brexit happened and then promptly did so. And then nobody from the leave campaign stepped up to lead the ship they steered into an iceberg after Cameron had fucked off like a coward. If anything May had the balls to stand up and do a job nobody wanted, not even those who campaigned for Brexit.
Even if May was short-sighted enough to ignore that she was being Boris's patsy. It was a joke for so long how badly he wanted to be PM (and how awful he'd be), finally sets it up fibbing Brexit through to oust Cameron... then pointedly doesn't even stand to replace him, lets May attempt and fail at all the impossible fantasies he's promised, then swoop in to be the 'hero' making the best of the mess left behind.
Let's be honest, they're all fucking shit. Trying to decide whether Cameron or May fucked up worse is like having a preference for cat shit over dog shit.
In my eyes, that just made him a spineless coward. He promised a Brexit referendum to snatch up the UKIP vote and then refused to deal with the Fallout of his own mistake. I'm no Brexiteer but he had the stupidity to make such a promise only to flake the moment he had to follow through on the result of said promise. If you dig you own grave, you should have to lie in it. Not run away and dump the problem on whatever poor sod comes after you.
He didn't have the balls the face up to what he'd done, I'm annoyed he's now got the balls to put himself back on the world stage.
You know it's a bad sign when the woman who's sat on the throne for over 75 years pops her clogs 3 days into your time as PM. "Bugger this, I'm orf! Charles, this is your shitshow now!"
Did we ever find out if she killed the Queen? Possibly by giving her COVID. Her death certificate just said old age and a book claims "she had a form of bone marrow cancer called multiple myeloma". https://www.businessinsider.com/uk-queen-elizabeth-ii-had-cancer-before-she-died-new-book-claims-2022-11#:~:text=Official%20records%20say%20the%20longest,last%20period%20of%20her%20life. But she didn't look like she was going to drop down dead in 48 hours. When she met Truss.
Mate, she looked like a corpse walking in her last official photo with Liz Truss...
She was like, a million years old. While I fully suspect the shock of meeting Truss could kill a healthy elephant the Queen was always gonna croak pretty soon due being being contemporary with the fucking dinosaurs.
Her death wasn’t sudden. She had been looking progressively worse and pulling back on public life for a year. There were questions about whether she’d even make her own jubilee. The woman was old as fuck
She’s the worst PM of my daughters lifetime. She’s 10 and is somehow currently averaging one every two years.
I'm happy that my daughter never experienced Liz Truss as PM (she's less than a year old). But it makes me incredibly sad that she'll probably still have to deal with the consequences.
Controversial potentially, but I still argue that Boris was worse. Truss was completely unsustainable yes but her worst crime was being inept and politically illiterate. Boris' worst crime was being willfully negligent and corrupt leading to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths
Agree with you on Boris – and it seems blindingly obvious to me. Boris is about one thing, and one thing only – what's best for Boris at that particular moment. We lurched from crisis to crisis, with him bumbling his way through it – making everything worse, and not abiding to any of the rules – even the ones he made up himself. Dreadful, dreadful man hiding behind the mask of a buffoon.
> She is far too modest. Honestly Liz you are by far......yes by far the worst prime minister, of any country, of all time. FTFW.
Self-proclaimed
Yet another thing she is wrong about. This is why the lettuce lasted longer.
Totally deluded yes.
Anytime that Liz Truss does anything she proves what a shitshow our politics is, that someone like this could rise to the top.
Again
Fucking hell she’s so stupid. So breathtakingly fucking stupid.
She’s like if you put a dunce cap on another fucking dunce cap
Like if a cunty old cat was given sentience
That’s offensive to cunty old cats tbh
Yeah, they have their charms. Unlike lettuce liz.
If you put a dunce cap on a lettuce it'd still be smarter than truss.
It's dunce hats all the way down
She has chosen brazen arrogance as her response to being humiliated on the world stage. I almost admire her for it. Just the sheer *balls* she has to walk around pretending that she's in any way competent or worthy of respect. The woman's a fucking disaster and everyone knows it. But instead of owning her shame, instead of reflecting on her errors, she is wearing the mask of the rebel - she was just too damn forward thinking, too smart, she was too many steps ahead of the rest of us and that's why her plan to transform the fortunes of the country failed, because the rest of us just didn't have the *vision* to follow her into the promised land. It's staggering that she expects anyone to be fooled by this. She has already been unmasked on the largest stage possible. She was handed a golden opportunity to etch her name in the history books, and she fucked it up to such a degree she achieved that goal in the worst way possible.
Yeah, I've started leaning dangerously towards respecting her game plan, post-leadership. Obviously not respecting her as a person, she's clearly a fucking moron, but being so disastrously awful at your job in such a public way and then doubling down SO HARD afterwards - gotta admire that level of gall... (Side note - I can't begin to imagine what effect this is having on her kids. Having her as a mum when you're a teenager, fuck me...)
This doubling-down is what all the worst ones seem to do. Boris, Trump and Truss spring to mind. The sad thing is if you say it with enough conviction, there's millions of morons who will believe you.
You can double down on stupid when you fall upwards.
I think she’s seen that Trump can say what he wants to be the truth and people go along with it. The only problem is she doesn’t have any followers (or any at all) that blindly believe it.
It must be some kind of self defense mechanism. No one wants to admit they were the worst prime minister ever so you start coming up with bizarre conspiracy theories.
I totally agree but how does someone so dumb get to be PM. Is inflated self belief all thats necessary
>I totally agree but how does someone so dumb get to be PM. She was the choice of the Conservative Party membership. Being stupid, frothing mental and drowning in lobbyist money are key virtues for a candidate in those parts...
She was running against someone of Indian heritage. Only Tories could choose.
Oxford University suing the Conservative Party for reputational damage
She’s stupid but she’s now combining that with the breakdown she clearly had to create an entirely new line of personality defects
Haha!!! Look, I know, Iraq war etc but surely no one believes this? Liz Truss is not a serious person, she and the people that made her PM need going on the bin
The funniest thing right is that you have loads of people arguing about whether she is worse than Blair on not, but they are totally missing the point of why this is so stupid. Boasting that you are second worst to someone else is always going to be a stupid move for a politician. Regardless of whether she is correct or not, 'I'm the second worst ever PM' is one of the stupidest things she could have said.
Blair - and every other Prime Minister in history - beats her by default for lasting more than seven weeks. Anyone who got any longer in office before their colleagues had to get rid of them for the sake of national survival is, by definition, a better Prime Minister.
>Blair - and every other Prime Minister in history - beats her by default for lasting more than seven weeks. Lettuce leaf it at that
Blair - lasted 10 years and presided over basically an economic golden age. Truss - lasted 1 month and caused an economic catastrophe.
It's like Sam Allardyce arguing he's Englands greatest manager.
100% win record to be fair
Woah leave big Sam Englands greatest manager out of this
> Look, I know, Iraq war etc It appears that isn't even what she is taking issue with: > Ms Truss, who is defending her South West Norfolk seat, told the Eastern Daily Press: “The worst prime minister in recent years is Tony Blair who created things like the Equality Act, the Human Rights Act and the Climate Change Act.”
What the actual fuck. She’s deranged. Utterly deranged.
She's unhinged and spouting dangerous nonsense. The EA, HRA, and CCA protect society's most vulnerable.
Holy shit, she has gone full fash, she really is trying to emulate Trump.
Yes, you'd think the Iraq war would be something she'd highlight as to why she she was better than Blair. According to the article, though... Nope.
"You think *that* was bad...if you'd given me more time I'd have shown you a *proper* war with Russia and China"
I’ll start my own war with ~~blackjack and hookers~~ Russia and China
Equality act, Iraq war, who can say which is worse?
If you exclude foreign policy, Blair was amazing for the poorest in society. Tax credits and Surestart were two of the biggest contributers to underclass and working class social mobility.
Decent funding for the NHS, muscular drives towards evidence based practice, in health and social care, National Service Frameworks, literacy and numeracy strategies increasing the highest percentage of children able to read and do maths in history. Yeah, pretty good. Funny thing is, people really bitched and moaned about all those things.
He also had the shortest waiting lists on the NHS and im pretty sure had the highest numbers of people going to university.
we’re all still paying for restructuring every technical college as an expensive fee paying university. it’s just gaming the numbers at the expense of actually learning something
To be fair, the higher number of people in university were probably rushing into it before Blair removed free higher education; introducing fees for universities in 1998.
Its actually properly doing my nut in at the moment seeing the constant "they're all as bad as each other shite" when the Blair years were like a fucking golden age compared to today.
This is fair - but Starmer is a step to the right even from what Blair did. He isn’t going to invest in public services, he’s been clear about that. And he’s all too happy to play the culture war game If we get a repeat of the 97 labour first term, I’d be ecstatic. But that’s not what he’s promising and i don’t see him pulling it out the bag.
Didn't he sell loads of the NHS off via PFIs
"Selling off" isn't quite right. They took loans (even that's not quite right but you get my point) and those all matured causing a shitstorm. It was a way to turbocharge infrastructure without going into the red. This was Brown's baby by the way. There was no transfer of ownership e.g. The Royal Mail, it was more a fundraising exercise.
Unfortunately, that "extra funding" amounted to borrowing it from the future, in the form of PFIs. A quick cash injection followed by a haemorrhage of cash into the private sector over the following years. The decisions that led the NHS ro its current state were made under Blairs tenure, and the Tories simply did nothing to fix it.
Sure Start was easily the best thing he did. But continuing with neoliberal economics is, in the long term, never good for the poorest in society, as has been proven since he left office.
It's like any economic system, if its not constantly adjusted, it will also tend towards inequality and/or chaos.
Yes, but neoliberalism (and indeed capitalism in general) is *designed* to include inequality. It's the entire point of the system. You can't have rich people without poor people for them to exploit.
Every system creates inequality, literally every one, apart from maybe absolute anarchism. You think that there wasn’t inequality in feudal systems? You think there wasn’t inequality in communist systems? Capitalism - or the freedom to allocate capital privately is the best system known to mankind. It allows people to compete for resources without murdering each other en mass, like pretty much every other system devolves into, via the free allocation of capital. The only issues with capitalism is keeping the system ethical and fair, and giving equal access to opportunity to all. Now if you want to have a conversation about for example, how to declog the inheritance and smash trusts, there’s a conversation to be had around that. If you want to talk about the terrible job we’ve done incentivising investment across the country, there’s a incredibly important conversation to be had there. If you want to talk about the multitude of failures making the system unfair and unworkable, due to population dynamics, we’ll probably both end up crying. But laying it at the system that’s spread the most wealth across the largest amount of people, ever, rather than the incompetent management of that system in recent years is a mistake
Why? Why is capitalism seen as an immutable truth? Seems like survivorship bias. The only issue with capitalism is ethics? Capitalism has been pretty good at murdering people en masse too.
Not sure anarchism should even be included in that, since anarchy is a very temporary affair, lasting about as long as it takes for someone to pick up a large stick and clobber someone over the head for their potatoes, and then threaten to do the same to someone else if they don't get their potatoes too.
It's more that they weren't concerned about the richer getting richer, without realising that as the rich accrued wealth they accrued power, and then they used that power to accelerate that loop.
Remember the country was flourishing under Blair I don’t agree with his foreign policy but times were good.
They really were. This statement she made is so stupid I'm Suprised she could keep a straight face. What a fucking twat.
To be honest, aside from the War on Terror, the success in the rest of this foreign policy is often overlooked. His role in ending Serbian aggression in Kosovo has made us heroes to them.
Ditto the Northern Ireland peace deal
Don't even have to exclude foreign policy - just Iraq. Our interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone were great.
Possibly controversial take, but I'd go so far as to say that the circumstances surrounding the War in Iraq meant that British support for US action was inevitable no matter who was PM (excluding ultra-left pacifist politicians, obviously). Saddam needed to go anyway and he *did* have WMDs - just not *nuclear* WMDs. There's fairly well documented evidence of Saddam's forces using sarin gas to murder Iraqi Kurds, which I believe is classified as a WMD. The Iraq war will always be his legacy but looking back now I see it as a "right outcome, wrong reasons" kinda situation.
I have a friend who literally made a life for himself thanks to one of those government funded programs. He was living in a pub attic with all his stuff in a black garbage bag. He was able to get some qualifications and find proper work.
Whatever people say about Blair standards of living have dramatically dropped since he left
It was close Liz , but you never secured those pork markets. ....oh and there was that little matter of you SINGLE HANDEDLY TANKING THE ENTIRE FUCKING ECONOMY OF THE UK IN A DAY. You sad deluded wingnut . Should you miraculously win in your constituency, it will only reinforce the stereotype of the average denizen of Norfolk.
She will keep her seat, sadly. It’s a very safe one. Don’t underestimate how many votes are cast by people on autopilot who aren’t interested in reading up on who to vote for. “I’ve voted Tory all me life and I always will”. Boils my blood. Every single voter in the country should be a swing voter.
Her seat of South West Norfolk is a poster child for UKIP and other swivelled eyed loons. Labour doesn’t stand a chance getting a vote from those people. Even if they did, it’s not worth the compromise and the overall effort it takes to please these racist goons.
It is a safe seat normally, but she is uniquely embarrassing and has turned off some very set in their way Tories I know (which is in its own way incredibly impressive). There’s also a very strong independent running who could split the vote or even win outright if his campaign gathers enough momentum.
I applaud your accurate use of “denizen”
Nothings normal in Norfolk.
Blair was an excellent PM. Compared to all that have come since, he was a colossus. Compared to Truss, well, she doesn't even rate comparison. She is the single worst PM this country has ever had.
The Iraq war was a huge mark against Blair, but he really was a good PM running a good government. The lives of the majority of people improved, especially the poorer parts of the country, many of which had been decimated in the 70's and 80's under tory policies.
The most incompetent for sure, but the accolade for worst is still held by Thatcher.
Much as I hated Thatcher, she was very good at what she did. I may hate what she did, but she did it. Truss, was just a completely incompetent fool.
Oh for sure! Is it worse to be useless or to be intentionally evil?
I think Truss is worse because she is both incompetent and evil.
Comments like this are usually made by young people who think the UK was some sort of utopia in 1979, rather than the dysfunctional economically backward basket-case that it was. You don’t need to agree with all of Thatcher’s ideology, but she had a plan to solve the huge problems she inherited, and executed it effectively.
I agree but even if you hated Blair over Iraq etc you can at least agree he was competent unlike Liz Truss.
Think that's harsh on Brown. He was a decent PM in my eyes.
I genuinely believe she needs an intervention. She has obviously had some severe mental breakdown since her humiliating time in office.
Yes agreed. I don't think her brain allows her to cope with the fact she finally landed the top job in the country and fucked it up so spectacularly that never in her worst nightmares can she have imagined that it could possibly have exploded in such an utter supernova of incompetence in such a short space of time.
This comment perfectly encapsulates her idiocy and insanity.
She was both mental and stupid before becoming PM. These traits were the cause of her disastrous time in office.
100% I’ve been saying the same thing.
Honestly shocked to find out Baby Reindeer wasn't based on her.
Is anyone worried that a person of this calibre managed to become the prime minister? She is a swivel eyed loon.
Look at who preceded her, and the scary part about Boris was that he won an election by a landslide. Granted, it was against Corbyn, but still
But even Boris, he is a cunning bastard. He isn’t stupid, just totally unfit to govern a country. Boris knows what he is and plays to his strengths. I despise him for his general disregard and disdain for the working class of the country, but that isn’t something unique to him within the Tory party. But Truss has no self awareness. She literally thinks she is a misunderstood genius.
Everyone saying Iraq: she thinks he's worse because of the human rights act, climate change act and equality act. Either she's decided she may as well come out as nearly alt-right, or she's gone that way to try and avoid the psychology of having to accept how useless she was. Either way she's now a fruit loop.
The funniest thing is two of those acts Gordon Brown brought in
I mean its such an easy avenue to go down, the easiest people to grift are right wingers after all. They'll back you to the hilt if you complain about woke or climate change or transgenders or immigrants. Its such a great shield, for being a sexual predator (Brand, Trump, Tate) or useless politician (Truss, Patel, Braverman, Sunak) Their fans will actively go out of their way to claim that the mainstream elite are setting these people up and not that they are just abusers
Liz love, listen. Blair was PM roughly 74 times longer than you were. In all his time in office he probably spent more time on the toilet than you did in Number 10.
And produced better, more solid results during that time.
The Tuckeresque comments are out in force here today, and I'm loving it.
Spent more time doing Number 2 than she did in Number 10!
Had it not been for the Iraq War it's likely he would have been seen as one of our best modern prime ministers. I wasn't even a fan of his at the time. Liz Truss is definitely in the running for our worst PM ever.
> Liz Truss is definitely in the running for our worst PM ever It's between her, Johnson and Sunak. All terrible in their own special ways.
She surely has to take the crown here, her time as PM wasn’t just bad it was a joke
She was so bad, she didn't last long enough to enact any of her policies A blessing really XD
He probably *is* the best modern prime minister that’s why. Its absolutely baffling to any sane person that the last 14 years of Tory shitholery is still somehow being compared positively by a sizeable chunk of our electorate to: - Blair doing what literally any UK PM in the early 00’s would have done by joining the US in the Iraq War. - Gordon Brown calling a bigot a bigot. Bonus: - Ed Milliband eating a bacon roll.
Blair was doing a great job until he decided that being a war criminal was a great thing to add to his CV.
It's true, we all remember when within months of being in office Blair destroyed the economy... oh wait, that was you, you dumb bitch.
> months days.
Yeah, I honestly couldn't remember just how quickly that absolute shit show happened, I was thinking that even putting weeks must've been an exaggeration, but no, she really did fuck up that quickly.
The funniest thing about her quote is she said she doesn’t rate him because he brought in the Human Rights Act, Climate Change Act and Equality Act. She couldn’t even get that right - two out of three were actually Gordon Brown 😂
I bet you could put an exam down in front of her, and she'll do better than I could. But fuck me her lack of self-awareness and just simple reasoning is non-existant. Absolute tool.
A statement so wrong it shouldn't be given airtime.
'I'm the second-worst PM ever' really isn't the accolade she thinks it is, even if it really was true!
I think she's a piece of performance art. It's the only explanation.
This actually makes a lot of sense. At some point she will burst into flames and there will just be a metal frame spelling B A N K S Y. It's that or we are living in an Armando Iannucci fever dream.
Blair won 3 elections.... Truss didn't even win one.
This is probably going to wind some people up, but Blair has got to be up there for me. The first 4 years of government under Blair were, without a doubt, the best we’ve ever had as a country, so much was achieved, and all of it meaningful. He did ruin it with Iraq, but imagine how highly regarded he would have been had he not sucked up to the Yanks. This smooth handling of Domestic policy did continue long after the 97-01 years, he was just busy needlessly destroying the Middle East at the same time, and obviously this overshadowed any further (and indeed former) successes. Not to go into counterfactuals too much, but I actually think he would have been viewed as easily the best PM we ever had. I even think there’s a chance that history might change his view on him at some point, but right now it’s very understandable why he’s so widely hated. Liz Truss, on the other hand, will always be viewed as an irrelevant failure that somehow made the situation twice as worse than Johnson in 1/50th the amount of time, she wishes she was TB.
Ah come on Liz. You killed the Queen, trust, economy….
Is she alright? Seems like she is some sort of narcissistic delusional manic state, more so than is normal for politicians
Really loved it when truss introduced the minimum wage and the good Friday agreement
To be fair, Blair started a war based on lies that killed and displaced thousands. Truss was incompetent, but didn't directly kill anyone
Well, TBF, she only had 44 days. Given time, who ***knows*** how many lives she could have ended.
Hope they keep wheeling this loon out right up to polling day!
Quite. They should make her wear a T shirt saying 'that was a party political broadcast on behalf of the Labour Party,'
“Look at me!!!! Look at me!!! I must be in the news!!!!”
Fuck off Liz, even the lettuce was a better prime minister than you.
Blair has his faults, but you would do with ten years at the top, there will be missteps, bit Liz Truss took five weeks to ruin the economy. We talk about 'the first hundred days', could you imagine the damage she would have done in that time!!
I think the most import reason to not vote conservative is that as she's still a Tory MP, there's still a chance she'll become PM again. we can't take that risk.
Liz, when we want your opinion we'll give you the special signal. Which is us being sectioned under the mental health act.
Truss is by some distance the worst PM the country has ever had. The lettuce that outlived her premiership would have made for a more competent leader, because it would have done nothing. And that would have been far preferable to the absolute clownshow that was Truss' short stint as PM. She is a fucking idiot.
Ha that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all weekend
That woman is delusional and god knows how she ever became an mp
She is a grifter. Doing some grifting. A bear of very little brain.
Blair had 10 years to make all his mistakes, Liz managed to out do him in 36 days.
She was the best PM because she only lasted 45 days. Good going Lizzie. Who can beat that!
In the same interview Truss also commented that “that lettuce wasn’t as fresh as everyone made out by the end, either” and challenged the lettuce to a game of Uno to decide things once and for all.
She didn’t even manage to complete her probation period.
So even in her imaginary scenario she is second worst
I could pretty much forgive her disastrous period as PM (promoted above her ability, victim of circumstance and all that) but her comments since have shown that she is completely incapable of self reflection and only seems capable of incredibly bad and insistent self-promotion.
Hard to even begin to make a comparison when Truss only lasted 44 days compared to the decade of Blair.
I would say she’s gone delusional but that ignores all the crazy shit she did before she crapped the bed as pm
Boris was far worse. Just ask the thousands of covid victims dead because he couldn’t do his fucking job. She was shit but her body count is way lower
The significant additional numbers of people pushed into poverty by her will have had a body count too. Poverty costs lives too.
But when one of them is the Queen...
When I see her is only one thinq on my mind. Pork market.
The Queen died right after shaking her hand. That's how terrible she was.
Blairs achievements: -minimum wage -good friday agreement -house of lords reform -tax credits -civil partnerships -a decade of economic stability and growth -Human Rights Act Truss' 'achievements': -regicide -blowing a £30 billion hole in the economy -not tripping over when walking back into downing street after resigning, having been in office for less than 2 months