Excellent analysis ⁦George Parker⁩ ⁦Anna Gross⁩ ⁦Leah Quinn (she/they)⁩ ‘How the Conservatives lost touch with prosperous Britain’ by some great real conservatives ⁦Greg Clark⁩ ⁦David Gauke⁩ ⁦Sir Bob Neill KC (Hon)⁩ via Financial Times on.ft.com/4cyYGg9

If the future of right of centre politics in the UK is going to be a battle between Johnson and Farage, that is a dismal prospect.

On Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, “we gave him a very good reason”.

“The EU was wrong to peacefully allow new countries to join it and Russia was wrong to flatten countries as they join it”.

This apparently makes Nige a Putin apologist.

Labour’s Brexit policy in the news this morning. Some thoughts here.

Farage a past regular on Russia Today has been a Putin apologist for a decade all initially driven by his belief that the EU is a more dangerous empire than the Russian empire. In March 2014 during TV debate with Nick Clegg he claimed “We should hang our heads in shame. The

Bloomberg is a terrible name for a baby.

Worth remembering that unlike in the USA there is almost no cleavage on support for Ukraine here: 74% of Brits think it is important to us here in the UK that Ukraine wins, just 9% think that it is unimportant. Ukraine scepticism is very unpopular.

That Nigel Farage is a fanboy of President Putin is neither new nor a surprise. It’s long been the case and it’s a common feature of the populist right on both sides of the Atlantic (think Trump, think Orbán). They have a curious soft spot for the Kremlin and a hostility to NATO,

Nigel Farage Jeremy Corbyn

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Blaming the invasion of Ukraine on Ukraine

If the Tories had any teeth left they’d be *everywhere* with this message this morning.

The guy nicking your voters in droves is on the back foot. Why not put the boot in? Why so reluctant to fight something and someone that’s only going to try consume you anyway? Chinless.

Asking Tory insiders to sum up this campaign in one word yields some colourful results – from “calamitous” to “shitshow”. One simply replied: “I haven’t found a bleak enough word yet.”

My deep-dive into what has gone wrong with the Conservative party

newstatesman.com/the-weekend-re…

Nobody forced Eastern European countries to join NATO or the EU. Those countries did so because that’s what their democratically elected governments wanted. But Nigel Farage wanted Russia to have a veto on other countries exercising their national sovereignty.