Paranoia and crises!

We seem to have been seeing prime ministerial behaviour that smacks of trumpism! First of all there was the story of the meeting in Leeds where the people who worked in the factory were sent home and the place was filled with Conservative supporters. And now we have a visit to Cornwall where reporters were said to have been locked in a room so that they could not film her visit. Later reports said that they were not actually locked in but it was admitted that they were shut in a room and banned from filming.

The press appear to have got their own back by posting very unflattering photos of Theresa May eating chips and looking very uncomfortable about it.

 Here is a link to a report of the Cornwall visit.

This deciding who can report fully sounds a little like POTUS selecting which reporters can ask him questions. And there have even been reports of our Theresa only allowing questions that have been pre-vetted.

Here's another bit of odd behaviour. EU people have been saying, rather predictably, that Britain is not going to get an easy ride in the Brexit negotiations. Our Theresa reacted by saying that such comments amounted to interfering with the forthcoming elections. I suppose the fear is that people will hear this and immediately vote against Mrs May. That way paranoia lies!

But now the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg, who usually seems rather pro-Conservative and much more anti-Corbyn, has been speaking out against Mrs May, even accusing her of lying! Here is an excerpt from an article about it:

 "Fighting talk


The Prime Minister accused the EU of interfering with the UK’s general election on 3 May. Sources had leaked damning accounts of a dinner May attended with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker a couple of days before. The details of that meeting were humiliating for the Prime Minister. So May accused the “bureaucrats of Brussels” of meddling in the coming election. She also said that such interference showed how “tough” Brexit talks are going to be. And May urged people to vote Conservative, promising a stern position from her party in those negotiations

How are you not dizzy, May?

But even the Tories’ usual cheerleader, Kuenssberg, had to point out that there was nothing stern about May’s stern warning. As it was in itself a U-turn from that very morning. The BBC‘s political editor asserted that May’s Brexit Secretary and Chancellor had claimed the government won’t engage with “megaphone diplomacy” earlier in the day.

Yet by mid-afternoon, May was doing exactly that. Directly outside 10 Downing Street no less. As Kuenssberg wrote:

'She just used one of the most powerful microphones in the country for blunt diplomacy indeed.'"

 Today, as a kind of dry run for the government election in June, we had elections for the Mayor of Greater Manchester. We began to get a little paranoid ourselves as our voting papers failed to arrive at the house. We knew we had registered and so we went along to the polling station, complete with ID just in case it was needed. All was well. We were allowed to vote. Our fears that someone might have stolen our votes (after all, there are so many stories of election fraud going around at present) proved to be unfounded. Crisis over!

And another crisis has been averted: British-grown iceberg lettuces and other salad ingredients are back on supermarket shelves this week – many at bargain prices – ending the much talked about "vegetable crisis" triggered by the wet Spanish weather earlier in the year messing up heir market garden businesses.

 Phew! What a relief!