No doubt he’ll be straight off to a private job somewhere, raking in millions, despite being less useful than a chocolate teapot. Despite what he says online.
Don't forget his 115 grand of the taxpayers money that he'll be getting every year for the rest of his life for "office costs and secretarial costs arising from his special position in public life” as well as severance and a special pension. Pocket change to him of course, but you know he's going to claim every single penny of it just for the joy of fucking over regular people, and then probably invest it in arms manufacturing or oil and coal companies or private prisons or something else evil like that, as a treat.
I was going to say “up to” £115k but it looks like most of them claim as close to the maximum that they think that they can justify.
I’d have thought that the costs would go down year after year as the financial impact on their lives went down over time. Theresa May’s is going up for some reason and why the hell are Tony Blair, John Major and Gordon Brown still claiming the full amount!?
As an American who is absolutely horrified and embarrassed about our own political climate and voter behavior, it's very good to see a sane and dull transfer of power.
Sunak's speech after stepping down:
Whilst he has been my political opponent, Keir Starmer, will shortly become our prime minister. In this job, his successes will be all our successes, and I wish him and his family well. Whatever our disagreements in this campaign, He is a decent, public spirited man who I respect.
He and his family deserve the very best of our understanding as they make the huge transition to their new lives behind this door. And as he grapples with this most demanding of jobs in an increasingly unstable world.
So does Britain. Something like 75 of the last 100 years have had Conservatives in power. Obviously, what that means has changed over time, but it's clear that every time Labour gets a shot at governing, Brits yell "Not good enough!" and put the Tories back in office.
He didn’t have to do this. It has nothing to do with the transfer of power. Just tradition to run away when you lose but you’re 100% allowed to stay party leader
Yep our country is screwed in many ways but at least we haven't so far dabbled in that kind of madness. It is fundamentally a properly functioning democracy.
I feel like the UK is lagging behind and we will see a rubber banding effect. After a decade of cons we will see a weak centrist labour party that will try to right the wrongs of the previous government while also taking all the blame for it. Then come next election cycle, because they were too pussyfoot to change FPTP, a stronger than ever right wing party will undo anything.
The FPTP system in the UK is what makes this incredibly likely. Yes labour won huge with their Tory lite platform, but turnout was shit and their huge majority win isn't even 35 percent of the people who even bothered voting. That's a very fragile landslide and it will turn around when these milquetoast liberals fail to change anything (because they don't want to change anything).
Labour got less votes than 2019. What a landslide! I’m not sure their Tory lite platform did them any favours. They were just Not The Tories and reform split the Tory vote because they were also Not The Tories and promised that everything would be perfect if we just hate immigrants a bit more
Yeah, FPTP is a shitty system and needs to be changed. But it's disconcerting to consider how many hard right Reform MPs we'd have now if we had proportional representation.
Obviously not feeling remotely sorry for him, but it makes me laugh when other MPs pile on the prime minister for their losses.
Like… it’s all of you fuckers that have done this over the past 14 years. Rishi was part of that as well, but Conservatives had already lost by the time he became PM.
We really need to be able trigger by-elections for nonperformance, he's still an MP after all. Fall below minimum attendance at the commons and can't prove it's because you're doing constituency work and a recall petition should be triggered.
That outfit looks like it was purchased by a stylist and the tags were removed just before taking this picture. “Make sure you pull up the sleeves so it looks like you’re hard working!”
Depressing that the UK clearly still wants a conservative government, they've just, after 14 years, finally realized the Tories are incompetent perverts.
This is exactly right - the exact same "Let's burn down the system sell off the system to the highest briber bidder" sentiment that's been ruling the Republicans has been eating away at the Tories as well. Now, every time leadership fails to make changes, they toss them out and put someone more extreme in their place (until you hit a Liz Truss)
Then you end up with Boris, Truss, Sunaak in a single parliament and then wondering why your party is seen as being incapable of selecting anyone decent and then a crushing electoral defeat.
Labour were like 1% point better than 2019. The only difference was the collapse of SNP, and the collapse of the Tory nationalist vote that ran to Reform.