The Conservatives are tired and corrupt, and it’s time for a change
Britain’s Conservative Party, beset by an aura of decay, corruption, and mismanagement since the Boris Johnson era, got more bad news last week. It was revealed that individuals close to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the campaign placed bets on the July 4 election date in the days and hours before he announced it.
A police officer from his personal protection team, his parliamentary aide, the campaign director and chief data officer at Conservative HQ, and the latter’s wife, a Tory candidate, are all being investigated as to whether they had sufficient inside knowledge to classify their bets as illegal.
Sunak is refusing to suspend the candidates until the allegations are proven, strictly speaking correct protocol, but it fails to read the political mood — that the Conservatives are tired and corrupt, and it’s time for a change. It’s an echo of 1997, when repeated scandals wore down Conservative PM John Major, and made space for a fresh-faced Tony Blair to lead Labour to its largest postwar landslide.
Governor Ron DeSantis, who’s turned Florida into one of the most conservative states, and Gavin Newsom, who governs California, bastion of liberalism, have found themselves unlikely allies on the issue of smartphones for children. An almost-certainly horrified Newsom has rushed to point out that he hasn’t followed DeSantis’s complete ban on smartphones in schools, he’s merely legislating for tighter restrictions on smartphones in classrooms. Both governors are fathers of young children, which is apparently enough to trump their vast differences on almost everything else. It’s another chapter in the fightback against Big Tech, with parents increasingly concerned about the effects of smartphones and social media on their children’s mental health.
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