Agreed. I can respect any Tory who, although I disagree, think that Conservatism is genuinely the best policy for society as a whole. John Major might be an example of that, as well as Derek Ammess (though he never came across my radar when he was alive.
The problem is, that there seems to be a great many (more these days than in the past) who are nothing but venal graspers who I have difficulty in believing can’t seem to see it.
The Conservative Party’s asset and weakness can be the same I think. They are a “broad church” - ie. outside of the extremities, anyone right of centre is basically in the Conservative Party, whereas the left has some variations in parties to belong to/vote for which can split their vote.
The broad church is great at election time, but it does mean you have a lot of moderate/centre right people tarnished with the same brush as the far right of the party (ahem, 1922 Committee) so it becomes easier to say “I hate Tory’s” with little thought. That is their great weakness.
The left are so split that their equivalent of the 1922 Committee are likely (or used to be) not in the Labour Party, so they avoid this generalisation BUT it’s a split vote at election time.
Of course… the Labour Party have become…broader let’s say during Corbyn.
I don’t disagree, but I think you might have your committees mixed up. 1922 is all the Tory backbench MPs. ERG and Covid Recovery Group are the nut jobs.
You’re probably right. I only previously (before Covid) heard negative things alongside “the 1922 Committee” so take that with a pinch of salt on my part.
I will trust your knowledge on the specific groups - but the broad church issue remains both with and without Covid.
Clearly concerns coming from the Mayor in London over the new variant.
They not giving up on the Boris bashing:
I literally can never recall what rules were in place on which dates. There probably should be a website where you enter the day and your location and it tells you 
I think there is a link in the article 
That was about the time the police were running around public parks threatening to arrest anyone who wasn’t visibly ‘excercising’.
They’ve tried to claim it was a business meeting… a meeting where there are no laptops, pens or notepads, there is wine and food, and the host has apparently invited his wife.
They ve also claimed it is ‘impossible’ to tell if people were two meters apart in that photo, as were the rules for a work meeting.
I mean seriously how tenuous can your defence get?
So the numbers over the past few days… They’re high, but they seem to be bouncing around the 90k/day mark rather than containing to significantly rise.
It’s still very early to say, but could this be the first sign that we’re nearing the peak, or has Test and Trace just reached its capacity?
Thankfully deaths are sort of stable too, if not slightly reducing.
A short spike that quickly falls off was one of the models that was suggested, so it’s good news if that happens.
We won’t know until after christmas apparently.
Monday lag. See what tomorrow brings and then the next 10 days will be very important.
I feel like we’ve been saying this since day one 
Weekend at the moment so jury is out until tomorrow, I agree. After that it’s watching hospitalisation for the next couple of weeks and deaths for the couple of weeks after that.
Hopefully neither of those two numbers move significantly so we can stand down from whatever we’re stood up to.
We wouldnt see a linked increase in death rates until early January due to the time the virus takes to overwhelm the body.
It’s still a good thing though? Obviously things can change but as it stands right now the data is better than rising.
And we won’t see a change in hospitalisations just yet because that data lags 7 days behind (“today’s” data gives cases reported on the 20th, and hospitalisations from the 14th)