STOP PRESS
Excellent results for South Oxfordshire District – Conservative controlled council
For more details see the Council website and the Henley Standard.
Despite a couple of sad losses to the Lib Dems in Oxfordshire these are best results for the Tories in 15 years.
The long awaited and requested first podcast featuring Boris is available on Webcameron. The above link will take you to a Webcameron page where you can either subscribe to the Podcast or just view it. You can also access the podcast options at the bottom of their homepage.
Wednesday 4th October 2006
Conference choice debate.
Chaired by Theresa Villiers MP, Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
Panel:
Anna Soubry, + Gedling PPC in 2005, Conservative PPC for Broxtowe
Matthew Parris, Journalist
Boris Johnson MP, Shadow Higher Education Minister.
The debate choice was:
1. Road pricing is the future
2. Is Jamie Oliver a national hero?
3. Supermarkets have too much power.
4. We like the new look conference.
The choice made by the audience was #2: Is Jamie Oliver a national hero?
The panel was introduced and the Chair focused immediately on Boris Johnson in the light of the furore surrounding his alleged comments regarding Jamie Oliver at the conference. Johnson embraced this opportunity with gusto and declared himself to be not only in support of the motion but, in response to a muttered comment from the panel, that he is a determined member of the pie-eating liberation front. Also that the BBC had told him they were at a loss as to how his comments had been reported upside down.
Boris had pointed out that while schools are going to the often unfunded expense of ‘providing alfalfa or what have you’, as long as the children have the choice of crisps and junk food then it will be ‘difficult’ to persuade them to chose the healthy option and what is needed is a completely paternalistic approach. With not enough funding from central government, Boris simply voiced that he didn’t know how the initiative would work without parents’ support and an ‘eat what you’re given approach’.
Matthew Parris then told us he had bumped into William Hague and, as a short notice replacement, had asked him for advice on this issue. “Support the issue” was apparently Hague’s advice, “and if Boris was suggesting otherwise..”, “I wasn’t” added Boris. “But on personalities” continued Matthew Parris, ” support Boris” to loud agreement from the audience. Parris then made a serious point: In politics we want politicians to speak their minds and when they do we shoot them down in flames. Parris then recounted the press feeding frenzy over Boris and that Boris had been subjected to a circle of ‘about 200 photographers’ whilst he wrote an article.
Comments in favour or against the motion were then invited from the floor.
Continue reading Party Conference Choice Debate 06 – Jamie Oliver
Are you a Henley constituency resident bursting with ideas? and keen to get more involved in local party politics and in sharing Boris’s aim of regenerating the youth vote? Then you might relish the chance to meet Boris at a small lunch to be held on Tuesday 29th November in a private dining room in the House of Commons and would happily buy a ticket.
For more details on lunch with Boris please contact me.
Monday 3 October
* 12.30 – 14.00 The Future of Conservatism The Telegraph Debate with Boris, Charles Moore, George Osborne MP and Alice Thomson. Chaired by Matthew d’Ancona
* 22.00 The Policy Exchange Quiz Journalists v Politicians. Boris and Charles Moore will captain the teams to include Iain Dale and Michael Gove MP.
Tuesday 4 October
* 13.00 Politeia Any Questions? Speakers: Boris and Rt Hon Oliver Letwin MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
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Dominic Grieve, Theresa May, Boris Johnson
This week local MPs from across the Thames Valley area met to discuss the ongoing problems on the railway.
Continue reading Local MPs unite to campaign for better Rail Services
Insightful editorial in this week’s Spectator
How to breed poodles
Conservative MPs and candidates have spent the last four years campaigning against two connected evils of the Labour style of government. In innumerable speeches and press releases, they have stood up for local and national democracy, and against the tendency of the government to centralise power and to hand it over to quangocrats, bureaucrats and officials in Brussels. They have also launched countless philippics against Labour’s love of the target and the quota, and all manner of diktat from Whitehall.
STRONG WIN FOR BORIS
Majority: 12,793 (last election 8,458)
As in the DT column today
Boris was seen to be going begging recently …..
I threw off my bedclothes and charged out into the rain to continue knocking on doors and accosting strangers in the hope of persuading them to vote Conservative
Labour has run out of hope, money and ideas
Look. Please. I know it is always undignified when a grown man begs, but I woke up recently and had a horrifying thought. I seemed to see Tony in power for another four years. There he was, once again on the steps of Downing Street, with Cherie draped all over him like a flannel, and then the camera zoomed in for the tight head shot, and the look of holy rapture on Blair’s face started subtly to mutate, and omigosh, I thought, it’s coming, here it comes, here it comes… And aaargh, I thought. This is it.
The lips drew back; the corners of the mouth went up, and there it all suddenly was, that gigawatt dentistry, grinning a smile of luminous and incandescent prime ministerial triumph, like a cross between the Joker in Batman and a sex-crazed chipmunk. And with a howl of horror I threw off my bedclothes and charged out into the rain to continue knocking on doors and accosting strangers in the hope of persuading them to vote Conservative, and I hope you will not think it amiss, dear reader, if I now ask you, at this eleventh hour, to consider doing the same.
Continue reading Vote Tory for freedom, democracy and taxpayer value
Here we are in beautiful Whitchurch, canvassing and getting a generally excellent response. What mystifies me is the state of these opinion polls — how can Labour really be ahead, when I can’t find anyone going to vote Labour?
But then I’m out in the wilds of Oxfordshire – as they say in Apocalypse Now, I’m 75 clicks up the Nong River, and out of touch with base.
I have only one comment on the national campaign, and that follows a garbled radio report of what Charles Kennedy is supposed to have said about pulling British Troops out of Iraq. I may have misheard, but I can say from direct experience that a British withdrawal is the last thing the people of Iraq either want or need. For better or worse, we toppled their regime and transformed their country. It is our duty to see that through, and to restore security. That does not mean an indefinite commitment – and comparisons with Vietnam or Ulster are just absurd – but an immediate withdrawal is not on, and should not be the agenda for a serious prime ministerial candidate.
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