Look to the skies for a Tory loss

I might owe an apology to the Professor of politics predicting unforeseen events affecting the Election (see post 24/11) One of his predictions has come true and there has been a terrorist attack. Although it was dealt with very efficiently by passers-by and armed police who were quickly on the scene and in numbers, it has indeed somehow provided ammunition for an attack on Tory policies

Tories criticised over police cuts in wake of London Bridge attack 

His second prediction was more floods  Look to the skies

Elsewhere, it's rather slim pickings., Guardian journalists seem to disagree about whether the right anti-Tory line should focus on the future (Sarkar) or on the present and near-past (Beckett) . The first focus will galvanise da yoof, but the focus on the future also distracts from who is to blame for the present screw-ups.

My favourite column today is by a guest, Prof Davis, who bangs on rightly about how appallingly amateur is the UK ruling class:

the Conservative party has simply run out of a set of ideas it can unite behind...the UK establishment has become socially and ideologically incoherent. Globalisation severely divided their ranks...The elite can however only agree on what they don’t want: a Corbyn government. 

More widely:

The deterioration of expertise and knowledge stretches much further than Johnson. He is not the only frontline MP who doesn’t seem able to master a simple brief....“expertise” has become a highly devalued commodity. The term itself is almost an insult and not just because Gove has said so....In the 1980s the economic victors of the Thatcher revolution were those who were the quickest to disregard the mores of gentlemanly capitalism. The old corporate and City leaderships were ruthlessly replaced by those ready to ignore business traditions and long-standing relations. In the 1990s and 2000s, New Labour’s spin machine was notorious for its elasticity with the truth, be it selling the Iraq war or the merits of big finance. Now, institutionalised lying, obfuscation and dirty tricks are the new normal.

Johnson gets away with his porkies:

where neither politicians nor commentators are trusted, why not pick Johnson?...Johnson’s skill sets are to be prized by those who just want a winner....The public knows he lies but his open acknowledgment of that can seem almost “refreshingly honest”....In the dishevelled void that is British politics, why not pick a ruthless, Churchill-style leader to guide us out of the national existential threat that is Brexit? Such “strong” leaders are gaining in public support, in the UK as elsewhere.

All that wasted effort by those who lovingly detail flaws or minor linguistic inconsistencies to embarrass people on TV and then hector them with finger-wagging moral superiority demanding answers to their banal questions and telling them what they mean 'in effect', instead of letting us hear the politicians themselves (that's you, E Barnett or E Maitlis of Newsnight, E Davis of Radio 4, or K Guru-Murthy of C4News)!