Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Crace
Read between
December 6 - December 7, 2021
A prime minister who doesn’t believe in her own policies but is trying to persuade herself she does. And a former prime minister who did persuade himself he believed in what he was doing and now wishes he hadn’t.
Boris Johnson is now a one-man rogue state, free to do more or less exactly what he wants, safe in the knowledge that no one dares sack him.
His motto: there’s no bad situation that can’t be made worse.
Yep
His mission is not the promotion of peace, it is the tireless promotion of himself.
A walking narcissistic personality disorder, the last remaining believer in his own genius who is oblivious to the destruction he creates.
In his own echo chamber of a mind, everything he does gets rewritten as a major triumph.
he had called for Donald Trump to be awarded the Nobel prize
He forgot there is no area of realpolitik that he can’t be relied on to make the wrong call.
At least there’s one person left in government who still believes in collective responsibility.
Karen Bradley, had spent the morning telling the select committee that both solutions were equally workable. As in equally unworkable.
Even Matt Hancock, who has never knowingly met a bum he doesn’t feel compelled to lick,
was terrifying to realise that someone whose job description is to speak and think is often incapable of doing either.
The Maybot smiled gratefully. It was always nice to know there was someone more delusional than her.
A government that can barely negotiate with itself, let alone the EU.
Indecision and ambivalence are the only things at which she excels.
ministers are keen not to let the good news spread to members of the general public. Careless talk costs lives and all that.
If we didn’t know what we were doing then there was little chance of the EU second-guessing us.
It wasn’t true that Michel Barnier had rejected the government’s idiotic Northern Ireland Brexit backstop plan as idiotic. What Barnier had actually done was to say he would reject the idiotic backstop plan as idiotic in a week or so’s time when the EU Council next met.
It was vital for the sovereignty of parliament that parliament should not be sovereign.
He hadn’t got where he was today by knowing what he was doing.
The battle between cowardice and principle is almost invariably a losing one for Johnson.
There was a time when she might have been a member of the inner circle. There again, she wasn’t even a member of the inner circle in her cabinet any more.
‘We’re in a strong position … we want to sit down and move at pace.’ A snail’s pace.
Why does Theresa May hate making decisions? Because they all go wrong
He had never been the right person to deliver anyone’s vision of Brexit.
May is a psyche in near total collapse. Someone whose only remaining function is to try to do whatever it takes get through to the end of each day in the hope that tomorrow never comes.
Best of all, we were bound to get a great trade deal because as the other EU countries couldn’t speak English they wouldn’t be able to understand when we were negotiating in English. Really.
He was heard in near silence by MPs on both sides of the house. Under the circumstances it was the kindest response. Davis is now a stranger not just to government but also to intelligent life.
there is a ball of self-loathing and insecurity. No one understands his own failure better than him. A man of little courage and fewer principles. The lion that keeps forgetting to roar.
She had got lost ‘in a fog of self doubt’
A black hole of misery that he’s hellbent on inflicting on others.
The send-off to an embarrassing relative you hope not to see again.
Raab hadn’t got to where he had today by knowing what he was doing. Or what was going on.
Baker wasn’t satisfied. It’s not enough for him to be thought an idiot. He won’t rest until he’s proved it.
it was the confidence of a man who had forgotten just how sidelined and out of his depth he really was.
Hard to refute, but equally hard to believe.
Northern Ireland could easily be sorted out with technology that hadn’t been invented yet.
Just about all those whom no sane person would dream of leaving in charge of the country were gathered together to tell the world how they proposed to run the country if given half a chance.
But Minford had news for them: they had all been looking at their graphs the wrong way up. If you turned them all upside down then the UK would see an unprecedented 7% year-on-year increase in GDP. It was simple, if only you knew how. Far from being broke, we were going to have an extra £1.1 trillion to spend.
Why else was he hanging out with these people he didn’t really like if not to get their support for his ambition?
That time of the year when every party briefly forgets about taking on its opponents and concentrates on fighting among itself.
Even the Dutch thought they were better prepared for a no-deal Brexit than us.
She began by highlighting the important work on people trafficking and national security that had been discussed before
She wasn’t there, no one was there. All she had to do was to hang on for the next 10 minutes and the ordeal would be over.
The power had gone down inside No 10 and there was no live news feed. Sometimes the metaphors write themselves.
Fickle doesn’t begin to describe them. Though simple-minded might.
if to prove he really was as stupid as he sounded, Singham went on to suggest that post-Brexit, the UK might do some individual trade deals with separate EU countries. He concluded by saying that deregulation was the way forward
Brexit could make the whole world about 10% richer. After several decades in which everyone was at least 10% poorer.
it was a betrayal of all Labour supporters who had voted Leave in the referendum campaign. The result was sacrosanct and it was just too bad if things didn’t turn out to be quite so rosy as had been promised.
giving everyone the chance to decide on whether they wanted to have two arms sawn off or just the one. It was unthinkable that anyone might be given the option of keeping both arms. That would be against the will of the people.
