Kmflett's Blog

Andrew Griffith was recently appointed as Tory Shadow Chancellor by Kemi Badenoch

Some of his back pages are known. He was one of the architects of Liz Truss’s autumn 2022 Mini-Budget.

Some of the lines in his speech to the Tory Conference on 5th October had a distinctly Truss like character

For those of us who believe in free markets, in enterprise, in lowering the burden of regulation, that is partly our failure, because for too long we failed to properly make our case.

Once she had resigned the question of who would replace her was urgent.

Anthony Seldon’s new book on Sunak at No.10 notes that several MPs were ‘egging on’ Boris Johnson to return (just months after he had resigned) ‘inspired by visions of their hero’s glorious return to power’

Among the MPs were Jacob Rees Mogg and Andrew Griffith.

Ultimately Johnson ducked a contest primarily Seldon reports because Sunak’s supporters had secured the backing of Suella Braverman. Hmmm

Nigel Farage is known for his Proper Fucking Lunches, a habit he picked up while working in the City of London in the 1980s. It was not uncommon, I also worked in the City in the 1980s. Most of us have moved on but Farage has not.

His PFL’s usually include meat, lots of alcohol and cigarettes (he is not a music fan)

Starting what he claims is a pre-Election tour, he was in Doncaster a few days back and the Sunday Times was there.

Unfortunately we don’t get quite the full PFL but the detail reported is

Gin & Tonic

followed by

Red Wine

accompanied by

Numerous fag breaks

The Ambridge Socialist

4^th October

We reveal results of the poll on Amber & George’s baby

The Ambridge Socialist ran an on-line poll asking what the name of Amber and George’s new baby should be. The results:

Zack 40%

Joe 33%

Andy 26%

Nigel 0%

The Ambridge Socialist expects Amber to post the news on her social media. The influence of the Ambridge Socialist is significant.

Walkies

After rejection by Brian and Martyn suggesting he could be over ridden, Lynda appears to have brokered a deal with Brookfield that a dog field would be OK. It’s not clear yet however if this has Daveed’s backing. Martyn is on the case after a lunch with Lynda at the Bull

Lily & Sgt Burns

The liaison continues and Elizabeth perhaps recalling her younger years has taken a liberal view of matters and promised to have a word with Kenton. Ian is also sympathetic. Harrison has accepted an invite to Vince’s 150^th birthday celebrations at Lower Loxley on Sunday. Work in progress.

Brian, Xander and Adam

The feud continues

More babies in Ambridge?

The BBC have reported that a further new baby is on the way in Ambridge. Lily?

David Kynaston’s new social history of 1965 and 1966 contains a number of references to E P Thompson. I extract below some lines from a passage in the Times Literary Supplement  Maundy Thursday 1966 where Keith Thomas introduced a piece on ‘New Ways in History’ which called for a move away from empiricism and engagement with the Annales school of history.

Hobsbawm’s comments aside from appearing to suggest that historians were men- they mostly were in the mid-sixties- might also be seen as a rebuke to Thompson whose lengthy Making of the English Working Class had been published before he was forty.

Thompson’s call for history to engage beyond the academy was a constant theme in his work

Eric Hobsbawm warned that the current publishing boom in history could lead to ‘debasement through over production’ indeed ‘that there are already cases of young historians who have been tempted to write too fast and too much before a man’s fortieth year’ and E P Thompson’s ‘History From Below’ called on historians of the working class to continue broadening their ambitions to avoid ‘a prodigious proliferation of pretentious jargon’ and if possible to ‘remain somewhat dis-established with an extra-mural audience still in mind’

In a recent Tory reshuffle Andrew Griffith was appointed Tory Shadow Chancellor. Griffith has some financial experience in Government including being partly responsible for writing Liz Truss’s September 2022 Mini-Budget which crashed the economy.

Griffiths links with the Truss era were dismissed by the Tory media. However as the Tory conference starts in Birmingham it is reported that Griffiths is still on the same tour of destruction he was on in 2022.

More than £47bn  of cuts in spending are planned

Griffith’s tour of destruction now includes according to the Guardian:

The plans would also save £8bn by cutting 132,000 civil service jobs, another £1.6bn by scrapping almost all of Labour’s clean energy scheme and more than £7bn by cutting international aid.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/oct/03/conservatives-extend-cuts-andrew-griffith-leaked-comments?CMP=share_btn_url

James Bond & the Tory Party

I have never been a great fan of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books or the films that came from them. I don’t like the machismo, the sexism or the politics and the world of spies and the cold war is not something that I find myself engaged with.

You might think that the Bond books and particularly the movies are mainly about sex and stunts, but there are politics too

What, for example, was James Bond up to in 1956? In the novel From Russia With Love, Bond jumps from the Arlberg Express as Heinkel and associates confront him at about the time of the Hungarian uprising. It is not clear if Bond was in Hungary, but those who have spent more time pondering the book than I have suggest that this is very likely, since the train in question ran through Hungary, Austria and Switzerland to London.

This may amount to no more than Fleming providing a topical reference to events in his book. However, the Old Etonian Fleming was closely connected to the British secret service and his plots were based in many cases on real-life scenarios. It may be suggested that his story lines were often fanciful and far-flung affairs, but this may tell us more about the secret service than it does about the plots’ likely veracity.

I should note that according to the Financial Times MI6 does indeed find Bond a bit far-fetched. Not so much so that he might not be a modern CIA agent, but British intelligence prefers to think of itself more in the Smiley model of espionage.

Fleming, not surprisingly, was a Tory. Slightly more surprisingly, he was the kind of Tory that David Cameron rather than Kemi Badenoch might have claimed for his own.

After the 1951 general election victory, Fleming argued that the Tories had no long-term future unless they ditched their association with the rich and renamed themselves the People’s Party.

Fleming, partly through marriage, had serious connections with the upper echelons of the Tory Party. He was a friend of John Profumo and also an acquaintance of Anthony Eden, the Tory Prime Minister in 1956.

Hence, when Eden’s health collapsed after the launch of the illegal invasion of Egypt at the end of October 1956 and his doctor ordered “complete rest,” it was to Fleming’s Jamaican retreat Goldeneye that Eden and his wife decided to go.

Incidentally, Fleming lifted the name James Bond from the leading authority on Caribbean birds of the same name.

The arrival of the British prime minister sent the colonial administration and the ex-patriot community into something of a flap. Noel Coward, who lived nearby, procured some caviar and Earl Grey tea for Eden and arrived at the gates of Goldeneye to deliver them. He did not, however, get beyond the gates.

Unfortunately, Fleming’s house was infested by rats, with which Eden became obsessed. After a late night rat hunt, when seven of the vermin were killed, Eden had to return to London, before the whole thing made his health even worse.

Still with the Tory Party shaken if not stirred by political and economic crisis James Bond may remind them of a time, pre Suez 1956, when the sun had not quite set on the British Empire and the kind of values that Boris Johnson holds dear were still something that found some kind of popular echo in some quarters.

Munich’s Oktoberfest ends this weekend but UK drinkers need not worry, the special festival beers are widely available here and the date is taken literally, meaning it goes on well into October.

Oktoberfest this year has not been without issues. 170 beer pourers formed a campaign against the far right, noting an upsurge in racist and homophobic language from drinkers. Supporters of the fascist AfD party are in the frame for this.

Another issue has been the circulation of upskirting clips on social media by influencers to make money.

One Oktobefest attraction a spinning wheel goes ever faster until it throws people off and when that happens women wearing tne traditional short skirts may end up revealing their undies. Taking shots is illegal in Germany but it still happens. The attraction owner has been giving out shorts for women to wear and beer pourers are also wearing them.

This is not part of a temperance campaign btw. Drinking good beer in good company should not be the occasion for divisive behaviour, even if it must be accepted that there are elements of that in drinking culture. Accepting less of it is important.

Women given free shorts at Oktoberfest to prevent upskirting – BBC News

The crisis of the Tory Party revisited

Much of the media in the UK is right-wing or very right-wing so much news focus is on what is happening in the Labour Party,  and why it can’t resolve the problems of British capitalism and whether Reform might do better.

With Andy Burnham as Prime Minister Labour now has a capable politician in charge, but as even he seems to realise doing much to sort out anything is a struggle which will require a lot more than votes in Parliament.

This should, but often does not, raise the question of whether the historic party of British capital, the Tories, can help the bosses to achieve their agenda.

Kemi Badenoch recently reshuffled her Shadow Cabinet. With just over 100 MPs choices are limited but she did manage to appoint as Shadow Chancellor someone who was one of the main architects of Liz Truss’s 2022 mini-Budget.

Amongst those on the right who do think about these things, this has raised some history questions.

The Tory Party often claims to be the most successful electorally focused party in modern history. It has achieved that primarily by shapeshifting in the late  nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reconfiguring membership with the Liberals over Ireland and Free Trade. A little more recently, from 1931, it was able to draw in sections of Labour and Liberal support for a pro-bosses agenda in the wake of the 1929 financial crash and from 2010-15 it allied with the Liberal Democrats to force through an austerity agenda.

Badenoch has been attempting her own shapeshifting by excluding those who back net zero and the European Convention of Human Rights from being Tory candidates. The problem here is that this narrows rather than increases Tory support

As right wing commentators have grasped this is a history of the present. Allistair Heath the Editor of the Sunday Telegraph is usually given to hyperbolic ‘end of the world’ headlines. However he did analyse recent local election results in a more restrained manner.

He noted that after a Reform Councillor had resigned in Merseyside, Labour regained the seat. It also held one in Wandsworth despite Tory front bench door knocking including Kemi Badenoch. In Dover a three way split between the Tories, Reform and Restore saw the Greens win a seat.

Heath argued ‘While not all of the Right’s woes can be attributed to division, a three-way split of the conservative electorate in the present moment would guarantee a Left-wing victory at an early general election. A lot more unity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a Right-wing victory’.

In this history of the present, it is often the context that in Canada the right split in a similar way to the UK but reunited with the harder right forces dominant that is quoted. It did not however win them the 2025 election.

Another figure on the political right Anthony Seldon has just published the latest in his series of books on recent Prime Ministers, this one covering Rishi Sunak’s 2022-24 Premiership.

He frames the study on the question of whether the Tory Party is finished. Noting that the 2024 General Election result was the worst in the Tories 190 year history he writes ‘talk of the replacement of the party would have seemed delusional  ten years ago but is now a credible possibility. He continues ‘had things become so desperate by 2024 that the keys back to power had rusted away’.

He concludes that this is not inevitable, and rightly so, but in terms of media fixation on Nigel Farage and Labour, it’s an important history of the present. The split on the British right gives the left a chance to promote an alternative beyond Westminster politics.

This post originally appeared in the Morning Star

I rarely agree with the Spectator (I occasionally do stuff on beards for them) but they do have it right on the temperature that cask beer should be served at.

At a fringe meeting at Labour conference a junior Minister opined that country pubs that sold warm beer and admitted dogs (unlike Wetherspoons) were right wing.

A Times Editorial of course complained about it but repeated the warm beer point. That occasioned a rare Fletter to the Times pointing out that drinking in a country pub is neither right or left wing and that the beer should not warm but tepid around 12C. That’s what might be called the John Major test who famously went on about beer and cricket.

A further letter from New Zealand in response to mine pointed out that bathing in 12C water would be chilly. No doubt but one is drinking beer not bathing in it. I hope.

Anyway the Spectator has it right on this. Rory Hanrahan writes:

My ale is room temperature, as cask ale ought to be, and it is good. I take pride in that, not in the “warm ale” used in conference speeches. Dogs are allowed in the saloon, the sports bar and the garden. They are not permitted in the restaurant on the days we are cooking. The village is middle class, firmly Liberal Democrat and, as far as I can judge, completely without fascists.