Bene Tleilax
Well-known member
Direct rule by PM or NI/Home Secretary?
-
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Callan's Graphics and Things
- Thread starter Callan
- Start date
- Location
- Toronto, ON, CA
By the NI Secretary.Direct rule by PM or NI/Home Secretary?
- Location
- Toronto, ON, CA
1963-1970: Terence O’Neil (Ulster Unionist)…
@Gorrister liked this so I’m safe in the knowledge that I wasn’t talking total nonsense about Northern Ireland
Good job! Only issue I'd really have is Gerry Fitt lasting that long - think his personality made him totally unsuited to leadership and he would've flamed out sooner than that.@Gorrister liked this so I’m safe in the knowledge that I wasn’t talking total nonsense about Northern Ireland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Austin Currie for earlier and for longer could be interesting, Currie’s style and general politics are intriguing to imagine, I know Hume and Currie were fairly similar in terms of politics but I feel like Currie is more of a ‘Christian Democratic’ figure than Hume in terms of presentation I guess.Good job! Only issue I'd really have is Gerry Fitt lasting that long - think his personality made him totally unsuited to leadership and he would've flamed out sooner than that.
- Location
- Toronto, ON, CA
From The Illustrated, July 16, 2021
Reading Cusack’s Readings: The Prime Minister’s Book Club
by Danielle Hayden
We are all on Cusack Watch. Curious voters, puzzled voters, suspicious voters — they all want to know who and what exactly the 1,817 highly atypical delegates at the Radical Party’s leadership conference foisted upon the other seventy million Britons as a Prime Minister who has yet to face an election.
So there is a rush to the bookshops and to the printers, as journalists disguised as commentators and commentators disguised as journalists put the man under the miscroscope and dissect his head, heart and every other vital organ.
Three tomes are already on the bookshelves. In 1993, the House of Commons passed a motion of no confidence and foisted a new prime minister called Thomas Caro upon the Commonwealth. He wisely called an election immediately while the public curiosity about the man who’d always previously stood on the sidelines remained intense and ruled Britain for thirteen more years. Cusack has ruled out a general election – at least until the autumn – and thus must endure months of naked exposure while the vultures of the publishing world pick him apart.
The first out of the gate was Dorothy Babish’s The Politics of Kieran Cusack: From Solicitor to Prime Minister. It comes from the left and proves — with a suffocating array of notations and quotes — that this is a man with a scarily powerful mind who with a couple of notable exceptions can and will shift his principles to please as many people as possible. It makes for a set of great attack lines for Charles Beck’s leadership campaign, about two months too late.
The best thing about Paul Mountfitchet’s Man of the Match: The Cusack Story is the striking cover: a fetching photo of the prime minister on the rugby pitch in his university days, ball under his arms, jersey too big and shorts too small, running down the pitch for dear life as other players out of focus chase after him. The book’s words are something else. Mountfitchet teaches and reviews literature at the University of Durham and writes like a poet (meaning that most of his readers will have no idea what he’s talking about most of the time but like general tone of his writing). His insights are confused. Kieran Cusack is ambitious because he chose to join the incumbent party of government. But that party is also in a weak third place in his home nation of Ireland, which means that his joining the Radicals is also a sign that he likes a challenge.
No crime in either of those things, Don Case points out in the best cash-in quickie book to date, a focused look that matches the thrust for the top. It’s called Kieran Cusack: The Making of a Leader.
It’s most revealing anecdote is how in November 2020 Case, then political correspondent for The Daily Sketch, and his editor Andrea Ghaemi approached Cusack with the idea of a biography - gambling that he might be the next PM. While coyly replying he thought that “presumptuous,” he initially agreed to co-operate. Case later reveals that he had been planning to stand for the top job since the summer of 2020 at the latest.
The silliest sentence in the whole book in fact is the first one: “Kieran Cusack’s life has not always been so charmed.” Of course it is. We all know by now his self-confessed “struggles”, those which weren’t leaked by aides and allies to add colour to sympathetic profiles made their way into the prime minister’s uncharacteristically stiff speech launching his leadership campaign. He doesn’t like talking about his life but he finds a way to get everyone else talking about it.
Case weaves in a sometimes tragic and sometimes uplifting background. He and his twin brother Jacob’s merciless bullying at school, until they learned how to fight properly. His father’s father died when the Cusack brothers were two, their mother’s mother passed when they were six. Their father, a bus driver who never took much interest in his sons’ clear academic talent, died of a heart attack when Kieran was 19, only a week after he and his brother started university (at schools on opposite ends of the country, Case notes).
A reader doesn’t have to possess a doctorate in psychobabble to extrapolate from there to Kieran’s six-month and ultimately annulled marriage with future High Court Judge Jane Murtach, who introduced him to well-connected Dublin legal circles, his gravitation back to Jacob, now President of the Young Radicals and at one point destined for great things in the world of politics; and his by all accounts successful marriage to socialite and once-troubled prime ministerial daughter Georgia Caro.
Case says Jacob “convinced his brother to see a psychiatrist to help him deal with emotional difficulties” mainly, one takes it, to become more willing to discuss family problems and his loneliness in his youth.
What one gets in chewing through these three quickies, which of course rely much more on what went before than what might go in the future, is a brilliant, insecure man who knows he’s brighter than anyone else. Which also sounds like many of Mr. Cusack’s predecessors.
He gives evidence, as does Babbish, of Jacob Cusack’s notorious temper and Kieran’s constant indulgence of it, with many an anecdote of the candidate having to restrain his advisor and smooth things over with shaken aides and officials. (On the other hand it’s hard not to like a man who told Charles Back “I wish I’d known you before the lobotomy” and lived to tell the tale)
Both Babish and Case show how J. Cuasck, in conjunction with Ben Griffin and trade union power broker Nathan Curley, made convoluted tweaks investment deals and changes to consumer protection legislation (which Mr. Cusack was responsible for as Minister of Justice) that, post-Britain’s entry into the Association of European States, led to hundreds of millions of pounds worth of investment from German and Scandinavian firms that all just happily happened to end up in the constituencies of Radical MPs who went on to support Cusack in this year’s leadership election – all just a series of marvellous coincidences.
But by far the most shocking revelation made by Case is that the Prime Minister’s brother/aide/puppeteer is in fact the elder twin by about fifteen minutes - which defies the constant narrative of Kieran’s protective instincts, his constant indulgence of Jacob and even their differing heights and statures. Case implies that this fact is another equation in the Cusack enigma, but like the other two quickies he is competing with he doesn’t seem to know what cracking the code might reveal.
Is Kieran Cusack smart and canny? Is he a lonely man who has long surrendered to those who would manipulate him? We’ll know by Bonfire Night if Guy Fawkes is the only Catholic going up in smoke.
Reading Cusack’s Readings: The Prime Minister’s Book Club
by Danielle Hayden
We are all on Cusack Watch. Curious voters, puzzled voters, suspicious voters — they all want to know who and what exactly the 1,817 highly atypical delegates at the Radical Party’s leadership conference foisted upon the other seventy million Britons as a Prime Minister who has yet to face an election.
So there is a rush to the bookshops and to the printers, as journalists disguised as commentators and commentators disguised as journalists put the man under the miscroscope and dissect his head, heart and every other vital organ.
Three tomes are already on the bookshelves. In 1993, the House of Commons passed a motion of no confidence and foisted a new prime minister called Thomas Caro upon the Commonwealth. He wisely called an election immediately while the public curiosity about the man who’d always previously stood on the sidelines remained intense and ruled Britain for thirteen more years. Cusack has ruled out a general election – at least until the autumn – and thus must endure months of naked exposure while the vultures of the publishing world pick him apart.
The first out of the gate was Dorothy Babish’s The Politics of Kieran Cusack: From Solicitor to Prime Minister. It comes from the left and proves — with a suffocating array of notations and quotes — that this is a man with a scarily powerful mind who with a couple of notable exceptions can and will shift his principles to please as many people as possible. It makes for a set of great attack lines for Charles Beck’s leadership campaign, about two months too late.
The best thing about Paul Mountfitchet’s Man of the Match: The Cusack Story is the striking cover: a fetching photo of the prime minister on the rugby pitch in his university days, ball under his arms, jersey too big and shorts too small, running down the pitch for dear life as other players out of focus chase after him. The book’s words are something else. Mountfitchet teaches and reviews literature at the University of Durham and writes like a poet (meaning that most of his readers will have no idea what he’s talking about most of the time but like general tone of his writing). His insights are confused. Kieran Cusack is ambitious because he chose to join the incumbent party of government. But that party is also in a weak third place in his home nation of Ireland, which means that his joining the Radicals is also a sign that he likes a challenge.
No crime in either of those things, Don Case points out in the best cash-in quickie book to date, a focused look that matches the thrust for the top. It’s called Kieran Cusack: The Making of a Leader.
It’s most revealing anecdote is how in November 2020 Case, then political correspondent for The Daily Sketch, and his editor Andrea Ghaemi approached Cusack with the idea of a biography - gambling that he might be the next PM. While coyly replying he thought that “presumptuous,” he initially agreed to co-operate. Case later reveals that he had been planning to stand for the top job since the summer of 2020 at the latest.
The silliest sentence in the whole book in fact is the first one: “Kieran Cusack’s life has not always been so charmed.” Of course it is. We all know by now his self-confessed “struggles”, those which weren’t leaked by aides and allies to add colour to sympathetic profiles made their way into the prime minister’s uncharacteristically stiff speech launching his leadership campaign. He doesn’t like talking about his life but he finds a way to get everyone else talking about it.
Case weaves in a sometimes tragic and sometimes uplifting background. He and his twin brother Jacob’s merciless bullying at school, until they learned how to fight properly. His father’s father died when the Cusack brothers were two, their mother’s mother passed when they were six. Their father, a bus driver who never took much interest in his sons’ clear academic talent, died of a heart attack when Kieran was 19, only a week after he and his brother started university (at schools on opposite ends of the country, Case notes).
A reader doesn’t have to possess a doctorate in psychobabble to extrapolate from there to Kieran’s six-month and ultimately annulled marriage with future High Court Judge Jane Murtach, who introduced him to well-connected Dublin legal circles, his gravitation back to Jacob, now President of the Young Radicals and at one point destined for great things in the world of politics; and his by all accounts successful marriage to socialite and once-troubled prime ministerial daughter Georgia Caro.
Case says Jacob “convinced his brother to see a psychiatrist to help him deal with emotional difficulties” mainly, one takes it, to become more willing to discuss family problems and his loneliness in his youth.
What one gets in chewing through these three quickies, which of course rely much more on what went before than what might go in the future, is a brilliant, insecure man who knows he’s brighter than anyone else. Which also sounds like many of Mr. Cusack’s predecessors.
He gives evidence, as does Babbish, of Jacob Cusack’s notorious temper and Kieran’s constant indulgence of it, with many an anecdote of the candidate having to restrain his advisor and smooth things over with shaken aides and officials. (On the other hand it’s hard not to like a man who told Charles Back “I wish I’d known you before the lobotomy” and lived to tell the tale)
Both Babish and Case show how J. Cuasck, in conjunction with Ben Griffin and trade union power broker Nathan Curley, made convoluted tweaks investment deals and changes to consumer protection legislation (which Mr. Cusack was responsible for as Minister of Justice) that, post-Britain’s entry into the Association of European States, led to hundreds of millions of pounds worth of investment from German and Scandinavian firms that all just happily happened to end up in the constituencies of Radical MPs who went on to support Cusack in this year’s leadership election – all just a series of marvellous coincidences.
But by far the most shocking revelation made by Case is that the Prime Minister’s brother/aide/puppeteer is in fact the elder twin by about fifteen minutes - which defies the constant narrative of Kieran’s protective instincts, his constant indulgence of Jacob and even their differing heights and statures. Case implies that this fact is another equation in the Cusack enigma, but like the other two quickies he is competing with he doesn’t seem to know what cracking the code might reveal.
Is Kieran Cusack smart and canny? Is he a lonely man who has long surrendered to those who would manipulate him? We’ll know by Bonfire Night if Guy Fawkes is the only Catholic going up in smoke.
Walpurgisnacht
It was in the Year of Maximum Danger
- Location
- Banned from the forum
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We’ll know by Bonfire Night if Guy Fawkes is the only Catholic going up in smoke.
Extremely high levels of British Journalist here.
This acts as a fun way to introduce a character--we get, by design and in a reasonable way, just enough info to see the murky shapes of everything we don't know.
- Location
- Toronto, ON, CA
Bandwagon
1937-1938: Neville Chamberlain †
1938-1941:
1942-1944:
1944-1945:
1945-1953:
1953-1957:
1957-1968:
1968-1968:
1968-1971:
1971-1977:
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
1937-1938: Neville Chamberlain †
1938-1941:
1942-1944:
1944-1945:
1945-1953:
1953-1957:
1957-1968:
1968-1968:
1968-1971:
1971-1977:
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
I Saw A Red Sky
He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but 🤓
1937-1938: Neville Chamberlain †
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945:
1945-1953:
1953-1957:
1957-1968:
1968-1968:
1968-1971:
1971-1977:
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945:
1945-1953:
1953-1957:
1957-1968:
1968-1968:
1968-1971:
1971-1977:
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
Beata Beatrix
Camille Paglia on Judge Dredd
- Location
- Portland, OR
- Pronouns
- she/her/hers
1937-1938: Neville Chamberlain †
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953:
1953-1957:
1957-1968:
1968-1968:
1968-1971:
1971-1977:
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953:
1953-1957:
1957-1968:
1968-1968:
1968-1971:
1971-1977:
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
I Saw A Red Sky
He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but 🤓
1937-1938: Neville Chamberlain †
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953: Stafford Cripps
1953-1957: Denis Pritt
1957-1968:
1968-1968:
1968-1971:
1971-1977:
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953: Stafford Cripps
1953-1957: Denis Pritt
1957-1968:
1968-1968:
1968-1971:
1971-1977:
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
zaffre
fdril
- Location
- Massachusetts
- Pronouns
- he/him
1937-1938: Neville Chamberlain †
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953: Stafford Cripps
1953-1957: Denis Pritt
1957-1968: John Freeman
1968-1968:
1968-1971:
1971-1977:
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953: Stafford Cripps
1953-1957: Denis Pritt
1957-1968: John Freeman
1968-1968:
1968-1971:
1971-1977:
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
- Pronouns
- He/Him
1937-1938: Neville Chamberlain †
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953: Stafford Cripps
1953-1957: Denis Pritt
1957-1968: John Freeman
1968-1968: Walter Walker
1968-1971:
1971-1977:
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953: Stafford Cripps
1953-1957: Denis Pritt
1957-1968: John Freeman
1968-1968: Walter Walker
1968-1971:
1971-1977:
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
1937-1938: Neville Chamberlain †
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953: Stafford Cripps
1953-1957: Denis Pritt
1957-1968: John Freeman
1968-1968: Walter Walker
1968-1971: John Freeman
1971-1977:
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953: Stafford Cripps
1953-1957: Denis Pritt
1957-1968: John Freeman
1968-1968: Walter Walker
1968-1971: John Freeman
1971-1977:
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
I Saw A Red Sky
He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but 🤓
1937-1938: Neville Chamberlain †
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953: Stafford Cripps
1953-1957: Denis Pritt
1957-1968: John Freeman
1968-1968: Walter Walker
1968-1971: John Freeman
1971-1977: Derek Ezra
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953: Stafford Cripps
1953-1957: Denis Pritt
1957-1968: John Freeman
1968-1968: Walter Walker
1968-1971: John Freeman
1971-1977: Derek Ezra
1977-1980:
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
Beata Beatrix
Camille Paglia on Judge Dredd
- Location
- Portland, OR
- Pronouns
- she/her/hers
1937-1938: Neville Chamberlain †
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953: Stafford Cripps
1953-1957: Denis Pritt
1957-1968: John Freeman
1968-1968: Walter Walker
1968-1971: John Freeman
1971-1977: Derek Ezra
1977-1980: Peter Parker
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953: Stafford Cripps
1953-1957: Denis Pritt
1957-1968: John Freeman
1968-1968: Walter Walker
1968-1971: John Freeman
1971-1977: Derek Ezra
1977-1980: Peter Parker
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-:
Spiderman?1937-1938: Neville Chamberlain †
1938-1941: Anthony Eden
1942-1944: John Anderson
1944-1945: Herbert Morrison
1945-1953: Stafford Cripps
1953-1957: Denis Pritt
1957-1968: John Freeman
1968-1968: Walter Walker
1968-1971: John Freeman
1971-1977: Derek Ezra
1977-1980: Peter Parker
1980-1989:
1989-1991:
1991-: