Today was very much ‘the day after the day before’ as we seem to have survived the unprecedented heat of yesterday. The sky was a little clouded over and whilst still a bit close and muggy, there was a gentle and cooling breeze which was so welcome after yesterday. Meg and I got slowly underway this morning and eventually I went out by car to collect the newspaper and popped into Waitrose for one or two things. Then it was just a gentle day, taking care of my accounts and filing some paperwork. I imagined that I was going to have to get into an argument with my ex-broadband provider as my email inbox suggested that another bill was on its way. But when I studied my account details on the net it seemed that the ‘bill’ was actually a refund for services not used and the account was now closed, as indeed it should have been. As Meg and I had not had a walk anywhere this morning, we thought that we would have an early lunch but did not fancy anything too heavy. I had got a small quiche out of the freezer so we decided to have this warmed up complemented with some salad type things that I have left over from this week so this was a meal quickly thrown together and easy to clean up afterwards.
We watched Boris Johnson at Prime Minster’s Questions which was Johnson’s last stand at the despatch box as Prime Minister. The performance was much as you would expect with a massive amount of bluster. For his part, Keir Starmer just read a list of the ‘blue on blue’ attacks that have taken place as candidates in the Conservative party leadership race have just been taking great chunks out of each other. But the major event of the day was always going to be the announcement at 4.00pm to see which of the remaining three contenders for the Conservative party leadership would be eliminated leaving the top two to put themselves forward to less than 200,000 Conservative party members. When the result came, it was a bit of an anticlimax as Rishi Sunak secured the first place and the second place was easily taken by Liz Truss as was predicted in this blog yesterday. This was because about one half of the Kemi Badenock (right wing, Brexit type vote) went immediately to Truss with the remaining half split almost equally between Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt. All of the commentators had said that it was going to be an incredibly tight race and all kinds of ‘games’ were being played with some candidates rumoured to be lending votes to others in order to block a third. But it was very simple really as the right wing, Brexit vote just flowed from one candidate to the next and it was pretty obvious (well, to me) that Truss would come through. According to various surveys that have taken place, it seems that Liz Truss is way ahead of Rishi Sunak amongst the Conservative party membership so it is a foregone conclusion that she is going to be the next Conservative party leader and Prime Minister although the result will not be announced until the first week of September. In the meanwhile, Liz Truss has tweeted that she is ‘going to hit the ground running’ but forgot to include the word running which has caused a lot oF amusement in Labour Party circles. I think the Labour Party think that Liz Truss is quite beatable when it comes to a general election in about two years time.
If I have to reflect upon the terrible events of yesterday when several houses in the village of Wemmington in the East of London were consumed by fire, it is that finally the reality of climate change may be brought home to many people. I am not sure how the climate change deniers account for what happened yesterday but I suspect there is a realisation that the scientists were right. Without making an overtly political point here, it does appear that what the Greens have been saying for decades is probably correct and we need to rethink our social and economic structures. One comment heard today is that the London Fire Service has had its busiest day since the Second World War which, of course, ended some 77 years go.
This afternoon, whilst waiting for the Conservative party leadership elections to unfold, I started filing all of my BT broadband paperwork and exploring what the website had to offer. As part of the package, I am given an allocation of eleven email addresses with btinternet.com – normally one would have one’s own name but the evident one has been taken so I am thinking of some variations tht I can use. One of them I have utilised to ‘file away’ most of the email correspondence I have received from BT so that this is all in one place and another I am going to use for email that could be ‘spammy’ but no doubt I will think of uses for the remaining addresses. It seems as though I have unlimited storage, though, and the email system is bare-bones but adequate for the occasional use.
© Mike Hart [2022]