You've got to admire the honesty. Our eminent Council Leader, never one to be shy of the limelight and routinely referred to as a leading thinker of the Conservative Party, has referred to the Shadow Cabinet has "my mates". Not much surprise there, Cllr Greenhalgh is certainly well connected. But more unusual was his claim, almost in the same breath, that those same mates had "never run a piss up in a brewery"!Having dealt with Cllr Greenhlagh personally, and from afar, I have to admit I quite like the guy on a human level. But he is a politician to his fingertips and there is absolutely no way he did not realise that these comments would be very widely reported, as they have been here and here.
So what was he getting at? At face value he was making a factual statement that the Shadow Cabinet lacks experience of running things - unlike him. But why would he choose to say this now and in such a politically unhelpful way to his own side? My own take on this is that he is upset he is not one of the soon-to-be Ministers in the Cameron government that the polls keep telling us is inevitable. Maybe it's his way of saying "remember me"! Or maybe it's his way of warning those in power within the Conservative Party, such as his not so great friend Boris Johnson, that he is still a force to be reckoned with and therefore to be listened to. Who knows. But one thing we do know is that our Council will certainly carry on being in the limelight as long as he is around.
[...] seemed to go a little crazy with the Leader claiming that his own party couldn’t ‘run a piss up in a brewery’ while conservative candidate for our constituency had a less-than-stellar appearance on the BBC [...]
ReplyDelete[...] claim that his Cabinet could not, in our esteemed Council Leader’s opinion, “run a piss up in a brewery“, quipping that he’d done several of these ‘Cameron Direct’ events in [...]
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