'Don't kid yourselves': EU instantly shoots down UK government plea to protect City access after Brexit Dismissal comes hours after Chancellor asked for a 'durable' system, in blow to Boris Johnson
The EU's chief negotiator has immediately rejected a plea by Sajid Javid to protect the City's access to EU financial markets after Brexit. The Chancellor had called for a “reliable equivalence process” for financial services rules on which “a durable relationship” can be built with the EU.
But just hours after the proposal was published Brussels' chief negotiator Michel Barnier dealt a blow to Boris Johnson's negotiating strategy.
"I would like to take this opportunity to make it clear to certain people in the United Kingdom bearing authority that they should not kid themselves about this - there will not be general, open-ended, ongoing equivalence in financial services," he said.
Mr Barnier added that the EU would "retain a free hand to take our own decisions" and would simply not negotiate with the UK on this point.
As a result of Britain's departure from the EU, City firms will lose their automatic "passporting" rights to keep doing business on the continent.
Mr Barnier added that "the opening of our markets, access to data, and equivalencies for financial services will be proportional to the commitments made to meet a true level playingfield" in the UK staying tied to EU regulations. Some member states like France see Brexit as an opportunity to expand their financial services sectors at the expense of the UK, which has historically dominated.
The more I hear and read about this government the more I shake my head in disbelief. Weren’t they the ones slagging off Labour’s plans to introduce a Mansion Tax, and Nationalise the railways?
Boris is misleading the public on a massive scale over Brexit, but he must get caught out in the end.
If in doubt, with no ability to articulate or strategise a way forward, Boris will just say " We will get this done!"...still , could be worse...we could have Trump or Farage!
The drama of Thursday's cabinet reshuffle fills the front pages - with phrases such as "bloodbath" and "power grab" featuring again and again. Paul Waugh says on HuffPostUK that even though the prime minister's chief strategist, Dominic Cummings, was not in the Downing Street study with Boris Johnson when Sajid Javid resigned, his presence "loomed like a thundercloud crackling with static". He writes that during their meeting, Mr Johnson congratulated the job his chancellor had done during the election campaign, only introducing the idea which would lead to Mr Javid's resignation as a "throwaway" remark at the end of the meeting. According to the Times, when the chancellor was asked to sack his advisers, he demanded to know what they'd been accused of - but received no answer and refused outright. The Daily Mail points to the "anger" in Mr Javid's resignation letter.
Several papers agree he was taking aim at Mr Cummings when he warned about the "character and integrity" of those around Mr Johnson. Theresa May's former aide, Nick Timothy, tells the Telegraph the resignation was "transparently engineered by No 10". An unnamed former cabinet minister tells the Politico website it seemed "perfectly obvious" Downing Street wanted to sack Mr Javid, but because Mr Johnson had promised not to fire him, he had to get him to resign. For the Daily Express, Mr Johnson has demonstrated "ruthless, Thatcher-like determination" which will free "policy-making from Treasury inertia". But the Times believes this profound shift isn't good. It argues that where prime minister should be concerned with overall political fortunes, the chancellor's task is to safeguard the public finances. And it says Mr Johnson may come to regret the move, if it leads to Britain's fiscal credibility being questioned.
Brexiteer complains about airport queue: ‘This isn’t the Brexit I voted for’
A Brexit backer forced to wait in an immigration queue in Amsterdam has complained that “this isn’t the Brexit I voted for”.
Colin Browning, who described himself as one of the 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit, said he was forced to wait for nearly an hour before his passport was checked.
“Absolutely disgusting service at Schiphol airport. 55 minutes we have been stood in the immigration queue. This isn’t the Brexit I voted for,” he wrote on Twitter.
‘I didn’t vote to stand in a queue for over an hour [while] some jobsworth checks our passports’
There's speculation about how Boris Johnson plans to drive the economy forward, following Sajid Javid's resignation as chancellor on Thursday. The Daily Telegraph says the prime minister is considering "ripping up" Mr Javid's fiscal rules to push through new tax cuts, including possible reductions in stamp duty and business rates. According to the FT Weekend, the new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, could delay the target date for balancing the government's books until 2025, allowing him to turn on the spending taps despite the political risks of a splurge. Writing in the i Weekend, Katy Balls says Mr Sunak is "more on Number Ten's wavelength" than his predecessor ever was, and "will not blink if things get tricky" when the Brexit trade talks begin.
In this shambolic cabinet, Suella Braverman fits right in A lawyer who’ll smash up the courts for political gain is hard to find; one well-qualified enough to be this stupid is even harder
Shall we begin merely by attempting to process the news that Britain’s brand new government began life on Friday morning with a fun game of call-and-response blatant lies around the cabinet table? It did. That really happened. “How many new hospitals are we going to build?” Boris Johnson asked them.
“Forty,” they all shouted back, so we are told
“How many more police officers?” “20,000” “How many more nurses?” “50,000
It’s not that you already know that all these claims are lies, though we will go through the motions now in any case. (“20 new hospitals” are upgrades of 6 that already exist; the 50,000 new nurses include 20,000 already doing the job; and the 20,000 more police officers will not replace the 21,000 that the Conservatives have cut since 2010).
So it is especially tragic to have to remember that it is real life. Your life. My life. For two months, being venal enough to trash your country in service of your own personal ambition is the price of entry for a Conservative MP. That’s why, to name but one, Matt Hancock gladly carries on, in service of a Brexit he knows is horrific. That’s why Liz Truss gladly ploughs on as secretary of state for international trade, despite proclaiming in June 2016, when she was a Remainer (she still is a Remainer) that leaving the EU will not lead to better trade terms with any country, anywhere in the world. She was right then; she’s wrong now. But she’s still in a job. and that’s the main thing.
Getting all the way to cabinet though, we now know, has even higher requirements. They’re the guys and girls (though mainly guys) who’ll say and do absolutely anything. And how better to test their mettle than to bring them into one of the most hallowed rooms in government and make them desecrate it by barking out what they know to be total b*****ks?
It does seem a bit cruel. In the army, they just shave your head. We must assume Dominic Cummings felt that to be insufficient, for obvious tonsorial reasons.
At this point, we turn our attention to one such new recruit, Suella Braverman, the brand new attorney general.
It is, in some ways, a thing of wonder that you can replace the attorney general whose legal advice led to you having to apologise to the Queen for illegally shutting down parliament, and the newbie is universally considered to be a downgrade of exponential proportion. (The last guy, of course, was Geoffrey Cox, who, barely more than a year ago, was quoting Milton at Tory Party conference, calling Brexit “a Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks”. How unfortunate the first thing the strong man has done is squish little Geoffrey like a fly.)
Whenever the name Suella Braverman is mentioned in Westminster circles, it is usually amid a discussion of who is the stupidest MP in parliament. This seems a little harsh. Though it cannot be believed, it also cannot be denied that, from a very ordinary background, Ms Braverman graduated from Cambridge with a law degree and has spent many years holding down a job as an actual barrister.
There is a tendency, among the public, to imagine that MPs are not all that bright, because they tend to encounter them through the medium of hostile television interviews, and hostile television interviews are very hard. It is, for example, unfortunate that Suella Braverman has an almost unsurpassed capacity to have what is known as her **** handed to her, every time she appears on television; particularly, though by no means limited to, a short chat with Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy, in which she boldly refused to reveal which Conservative MPs are members of the European Research Group, even though it is publicly funded.
We have no reason to expect, for example, that a practising barrister of 10 years' experience should be any good at arguing her case.
We should also, of course, forgive her for accidentally mentioning in a speech in Westminster last year, that she, and other right-wing people, are “engaged in a war against cultural Marxism”. Anyone can say something stupid. Anyone can say “cultural Marxism”, without knowing that it is a virulently antisemitic term found almost 1,000 times in the manifesto of white supremacist mass-murderer Anders Breivik. Anyone can make a mistake. Anyone can say something they don’t understand. The country’s most senior lawyer, it turns out, can be human, too.
Still, it would not be strictly accurate to say she is only in the job because she’ll do as she’s told. After the government was quite rightly and quite correctly humiliated by the Supreme Court in October, murmurings of revenge have grown ever louder. When the December election purged the Conservative Party of absolutely everyone with any common sense (or at least those who aren’t happy to pretend they don’t have any – hello again, Matt Hancock), lawyers perished more than most.
David Gauke, Ken Clarke, Dominic Grieve: these are people who don’t want to smash up the independent judiciary, because they know such a course of action would be incredibly unwise.
There is a word for “taking back control” from the judiciary and giving it to “the people” – which is to say, giving it to politicians. One doesn't use it lightly, but it begins with F. Ms Braverman appears to have no such concerns. When the government loses a court case, it is because the judiciary has politicised itself. As she made clear in an article two weeks ago, Brexit was also, apparently, about “taking back control” from the judges. The ones, no doubt, who were denounced as “enemies of the people” on the front of The Daily Mail. A lawyer who’ll smash up the courts for political gain is hard to find; one well-qualified enough to be this stupid is even harder. In this government of call-and-response bulls**t, Ms Braverman will go very far indeed.
Cabinet dutifully chant Boris Johnson's dodgy election slogans at first meeting "How many hospitals are we going to build?", the PM asked. They replied: "Forty!". "How many more police officers are we recruiting?" They replied: "20,000!" He added: "How many more nurses will we recruit?" They replied: "50,000!"
Boris Johnson's new Cabinet dutifully chanted his dodgy election slogans today as ministers did little to dispel claims of a No10 power grab. The Prime Minister rattled off statistics on police, hospitals and nurses in a call and response after reshuffling his top team.
Brexiteer moans about airport immigration queue 'not being the Brexit he voted for' Colin Browning, purportedly a Brexit-loving football fan from Leicestershire, said he was "disgusted" by the lengthy wait at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport yesterday
"Without a level playing field on environment, labour, taxation and state aid, you cannot have the highest quality access to the world's largest single market," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a speech at the London School of Economics.
To what does a level playing field refer?
It is a trade-policy term for a set of common rules and standards that prevent businesses in one country undercutting their rivals and gaining a competitive advantage over those operating in other countries. In other words, it's about fair and open competition - and it's an important part of the EU single market (in which member countries allow the free movement of people, goods, services and money).
Part of a trade negotiation is working out how widespread level playing field provisions should be. But the areas in which the EU is most insistent they must be maintained are: workers' rights environmental protection taxation state aid (or subsidies for business)
What are the options?
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he wants a zero-tariff zero-quota deal but also insists on the UK's right to diverge or move away from EU rules and regulations when it wants to. So that could mean sticking close to EU rules in some areas but not in others. The EU adds a third zero to the equation - "zero dumping", which means the strictest level playing field rules it can negotiate. One option is to have what are known as non-regression clauses, which means the two sides would agree not to water down the shared rules they currently have. Another, tougher, option is to insist on what's called dynamic alignment, which would mean if the EU changed its rules in the future, the UK would automatically make the same changes.
And that's partly what the trade negotiations will be about?
Yes. And both sides are - predictably - digging in a bit. The early signs are a number of EU countries, including those that do a lot of trade with the UK, are taking a tough line and insisting on dynamic alignment in several policy areas, including state aid and environmental regulations that affect businesses. But that won't be acceptable in London. Last week, Chancellor Sajid Javid told the Financial Times: "There will not be alignment, we will not be a rule taker." Former Prime Minister Theresa May's initial version of the withdrawal agreement with the EU contained a series of legally binding level playing field provisions within it. Boris Johnson's version doesn't - it relegates most of those rules (apart from some that relate to trade between Northern Ireland and the EU) to the non-binding political declaration. So agreement on a level playing field regime is going to have to be negotiated before the end of the post-Brexit transition period, in December 2020. And it is fair to say the two sides will begin a long way apart. Not only is there disagreement on what should be covered, there is also no meeting of minds yet on how any future disputes should be resolved. It's another reminder that, after Brexit, the UK will remain a friend and partner of the EU but it will also become a rival.
Brexiteer moans about airport immigration queue 'not being the Brexit he voted for' Colin Browning, purportedly a Brexit-loving football fan from Leicestershire, said he was "disgusted" by the lengthy wait at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport yesterday
Brexiteer moans about airport immigration queue 'not being the Brexit he voted for' Colin Browning, purportedly a Brexit-loving football fan from Leicestershire, said he was "disgusted" by the lengthy wait at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport yesterday
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Dismissal comes hours after Chancellor asked for a 'durable' system, in blow to Boris Johnson
The EU's chief negotiator has immediately rejected a plea by Sajid Javid to protect the City's access to EU financial markets after Brexit.
The Chancellor had called for a “reliable equivalence process” for financial services rules on which “a durable relationship” can be built with the EU.
But just hours after the proposal was published Brussels' chief negotiator Michel Barnier dealt a blow to Boris Johnson's negotiating strategy.
"I would like to take this opportunity to make it clear to certain people in the United Kingdom bearing authority that they should not kid themselves about this - there will not be general, open-ended, ongoing equivalence in financial services," he said.
Mr Barnier added that the EU would "retain a free hand to take our own decisions" and would simply not negotiate with the UK on this point.
As a result of Britain's departure from the EU, City firms will lose their automatic "passporting" rights to keep doing business on the continent.
Mr Barnier added that "the opening of our markets, access to data, and equivalencies for financial services will be proportional to the commitments made to meet a true level playingfield" in the UK staying tied to EU regulations.
Some member states like France see Brexit as an opportunity to expand their financial services sectors at the expense of the UK, which has historically dominated.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-deal-financial-services-eu-michael-barnier-sajid-javid-a9329026.html
The drama of Thursday's cabinet reshuffle fills the front pages - with phrases such as "bloodbath" and "power grab" featuring again and again.
Paul Waugh says on HuffPostUK that even though the prime minister's chief strategist, Dominic Cummings, was not in the Downing Street study with Boris Johnson when Sajid Javid resigned, his presence "loomed like a thundercloud crackling with static".
He writes that during their meeting, Mr Johnson congratulated the job his chancellor had done during the election campaign, only introducing the idea which would lead to Mr Javid's resignation as a "throwaway" remark at the end of the meeting.
According to the Times, when the chancellor was asked to sack his advisers, he demanded to know what they'd been accused of - but received no answer and refused outright.
The Daily Mail points to the "anger" in Mr Javid's resignation letter.
Several papers agree he was taking aim at Mr Cummings when he warned about the "character and integrity" of those around Mr Johnson.
Theresa May's former aide, Nick Timothy, tells the Telegraph the resignation was "transparently engineered by No 10".
An unnamed former cabinet minister tells the Politico website it seemed "perfectly obvious" Downing Street wanted to sack Mr Javid, but because Mr Johnson had promised not to fire him, he had to get him to resign.
For the Daily Express, Mr Johnson has demonstrated "ruthless, Thatcher-like determination" which will free "policy-making from Treasury inertia".
But the Times believes this profound shift isn't good. It argues that where prime minister should be concerned with overall political fortunes, the chancellor's task is to safeguard the public finances.
And it says Mr Johnson may come to regret the move, if it leads to Britain's fiscal credibility being questioned.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-51498330
A Brexit backer forced to wait in an immigration queue in Amsterdam has complained that “this isn’t the Brexit I voted for”.
Colin Browning, who described himself as one of the 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit, said he was forced to wait for nearly an hour before his passport was checked.
“Absolutely disgusting service at Schiphol airport. 55 minutes we have been stood in the immigration queue. This isn’t the Brexit I voted for,” he wrote on Twitter.
‘I didn’t vote to stand in a queue for over an hour [while] some jobsworth checks our passports’
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-news-live-brexit-cabinet-reshuffle-dominic-cummings-javid-latest-a9335141.html
The Daily Telegraph says the prime minister is considering "ripping up" Mr Javid's fiscal rules to push through new tax cuts, including possible reductions in stamp duty and business rates.
According to the FT Weekend, the new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, could delay the target date for balancing the government's books until 2025, allowing him to turn on the spending taps despite the political risks of a splurge.
Writing in the i Weekend, Katy Balls says Mr Sunak is "more on Number Ten's wavelength" than his predecessor ever was, and "will not blink if things get tricky" when the Brexit trade talks begin.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-51511426
A lawyer who’ll smash up the courts for political gain is hard to find; one well-qualified enough to be this stupid is even harder
Shall we begin merely by attempting to process the news that Britain’s brand new government began life on Friday morning with a fun game of call-and-response blatant lies around the cabinet table?
It did. That really happened. “How many new hospitals are we going to build?” Boris Johnson asked them.
“Forty,” they all shouted back, so we are told
“How many more police officers?”
“20,000”
“How many more nurses?”
“50,000
It’s not that you already know that all these claims are lies, though we will go through the motions now in any case. (“20 new hospitals” are upgrades of 6 that already exist; the 50,000 new nurses include 20,000 already doing the job; and the 20,000 more police officers will not replace the 21,000 that the Conservatives have cut since 2010).
So it is especially tragic to have to remember that it is real life. Your life. My life. For two months, being venal enough to trash your country in service of your own personal ambition is the price of entry for a Conservative MP. That’s why, to name but one, Matt Hancock gladly carries on, in service of a Brexit he knows is horrific. That’s why Liz Truss gladly ploughs on as secretary of state for international trade, despite proclaiming in June 2016, when she was a Remainer (she still is a Remainer) that leaving the EU will not lead to better trade terms with any country, anywhere in the world. She was right then; she’s wrong now. But she’s still in a job. and that’s the main thing.
Getting all the way to cabinet though, we now know, has even higher requirements. They’re the guys and girls (though mainly guys) who’ll say and do absolutely anything. And how better to test their mettle than to bring them into one of the most hallowed rooms in government and make them desecrate it by barking out what they know to be total b*****ks?
It does seem a bit cruel. In the army, they just shave your head. We must assume Dominic Cummings felt that to be insufficient, for obvious tonsorial reasons.
At this point, we turn our attention to one such new recruit, Suella Braverman, the brand new attorney general.
It is, in some ways, a thing of wonder that you can replace the attorney general whose legal advice led to you having to apologise to the Queen for illegally shutting down parliament, and the newbie is universally considered to be a downgrade of exponential proportion.
(The last guy, of course, was Geoffrey Cox, who, barely more than a year ago, was quoting Milton at Tory Party conference, calling Brexit “a Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks”. How unfortunate the first thing the strong man has done is squish little Geoffrey like a fly.)
Whenever the name Suella Braverman is mentioned in Westminster circles, it is usually amid a discussion of who is the stupidest MP in parliament. This seems a little harsh. Though it cannot be believed, it also cannot be denied that, from a very ordinary background, Ms Braverman graduated from Cambridge with a law degree and has spent many years holding down a job as an actual barrister.
There is a tendency, among the public, to imagine that MPs are not all that bright, because they tend to encounter them through the medium of hostile television interviews, and hostile television interviews are very hard. It is, for example, unfortunate that Suella Braverman has an almost unsurpassed capacity to have what is known as her **** handed to her, every time she appears on television; particularly, though by no means limited to, a short chat with Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy, in which she boldly refused to reveal which Conservative MPs are members of the European Research Group, even though it is publicly funded.
We have no reason to expect, for example, that a practising barrister of 10 years' experience should be any good at arguing her case.
We should also, of course, forgive her for accidentally mentioning in a speech in Westminster last year, that she, and other right-wing people, are “engaged in a war against cultural Marxism”.
Anyone can say something stupid. Anyone can say “cultural Marxism”, without knowing that it is a virulently antisemitic term found almost 1,000 times in the manifesto of white supremacist mass-murderer Anders Breivik. Anyone can make a mistake. Anyone can say something they don’t understand. The country’s most senior lawyer, it turns out, can be human, too.
Still, it would not be strictly accurate to say she is only in the job because she’ll do as she’s told. After the government was quite rightly and quite correctly humiliated by the Supreme Court in October, murmurings of revenge have grown ever louder. When the December election purged the Conservative Party of absolutely everyone with any common sense (or at least those who aren’t happy to pretend they don’t have any – hello again, Matt Hancock), lawyers perished more than most.
David Gauke, Ken Clarke, Dominic Grieve: these are people who don’t want to smash up the independent judiciary, because they know such a course of action would be incredibly unwise.
There is a word for “taking back control” from the judiciary and giving it to “the people” – which is to say, giving it to politicians. One doesn't use it lightly, but it begins with F.
Ms Braverman appears to have no such concerns. When the government loses a court case, it is because the judiciary has politicised itself. As she made clear in an article two weeks ago, Brexit was also, apparently, about “taking back control” from the judges. The ones, no doubt, who were denounced as “enemies of the people” on the front of The Daily Mail.
A lawyer who’ll smash up the courts for political gain is hard to find; one well-qualified enough to be this stupid is even harder. In this government of call-and-response bulls**t, Ms Braverman will go very far indeed.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/suella-braverman-boris-johnson-cabinet-reshuffle-attorney-general-brexit-a9336616.html
"How many hospitals are we going to build?", the PM asked. They replied: "Forty!". "How many more police officers are we recruiting?" They replied: "20,000!" He added: "How many more nurses will we recruit?" They replied: "50,000!"
Boris Johnson's new Cabinet dutifully chanted his dodgy election slogans today as ministers did little to dispel claims of a No10 power grab.
The Prime Minister rattled off statistics on police, hospitals and nurses in a call and response after reshuffling his top team.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/cabinet-dutifully-chant-boris-johnsons-21496849
Brexiteer moans about airport immigration queue 'not being the Brexit he voted for'
Colin Browning, purportedly a Brexit-loving football fan from Leicestershire, said he was "disgusted" by the lengthy wait at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport yesterday
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/brexiteer-moans-airport-immigration-queue-21496459
As you mentioned Suella Braverman, I loved this....
"Without a level playing field on environment, labour, taxation and state aid, you cannot have the highest quality access to the world's largest single market," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a speech at the London School of Economics.
To what does a level playing field refer?
It is a trade-policy term for a set of common rules and standards that prevent businesses in one country undercutting their rivals and gaining a competitive advantage over those operating in other countries.
In other words, it's about fair and open competition - and it's an important part of the EU single market (in which member countries allow the free movement of people, goods, services and money).
Part of a trade negotiation is working out how widespread level playing field provisions should be.
But the areas in which the EU is most insistent they must be maintained are:
workers' rights
environmental protection
taxation
state aid (or subsidies for business)
What are the options?
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he wants a zero-tariff zero-quota deal but also insists on the UK's right to diverge or move away from EU rules and regulations when it wants to.
So that could mean sticking close to EU rules in some areas but not in others.
The EU adds a third zero to the equation - "zero dumping", which means the strictest level playing field rules it can negotiate.
One option is to have what are known as non-regression clauses, which means the two sides would agree not to water down the shared rules they currently have.
Another, tougher, option is to insist on what's called dynamic alignment, which would mean if the EU changed its rules in the future, the UK would automatically make the same changes.
And that's partly what the trade negotiations will be about?
Yes. And both sides are - predictably - digging in a bit.
The early signs are a number of EU countries, including those that do a lot of trade with the UK, are taking a tough line and insisting on dynamic alignment in several policy areas, including state aid and environmental regulations that affect businesses.
But that won't be acceptable in London. Last week, Chancellor Sajid Javid told the Financial Times: "There will not be alignment, we will not be a rule taker."
Former Prime Minister Theresa May's initial version of the withdrawal agreement with the EU contained a series of legally binding level playing field provisions within it.
Boris Johnson's version doesn't - it relegates most of those rules (apart from some that relate to trade between Northern Ireland and the EU) to the non-binding political declaration.
So agreement on a level playing field regime is going to have to be negotiated before the end of the post-Brexit transition period, in December 2020.
And it is fair to say the two sides will begin a long way apart.
Not only is there disagreement on what should be covered, there is also no meeting of minds yet on how any future disputes should be resolved.
It's another reminder that, after Brexit, the UK will remain a friend and partner of the EU but it will also become a rival.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/51180282
Oh, & a question.
Given that
Dominic CummingsBoris Johnson re-shuffled his cabinet, how on earth did Liz Truss survive?In all the years I've been around, I can't think of a single Cabinet Minister less suited to her job, less intelligent, & frankly embarrassing.
Scary.
He thinks we have left in January.