Ken Clarke caught off camera

JezWynd

Shame he's past his prime, we could do with a politician of his stature and nous just now.

octatonic

I've watched it a couple more times.

I think it was a hatchet job by certain folks in the Tory party, the aim being to thin the herd of the more extreme candidates.

We now basically have a 2 horse race- May and Leadsom- the two people Clarke spoke most positively of.

Tricksy.

Heartfeltdawn

Fretwired said: I always liked Ken Clarke .. he seems down to earth and reasonable. His ideas tended to be sensible as well ... 

Any man who believes that strongly in brown shoes is fine with me. 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1347137/Ken-Clarke-effect-Sales-brown-suede-shoes-plummet-Brits-opt-trendier-footwear.html

It's fab that two minutes of off-camera talk between two senior Tories is more human, more "real", and more honest than the two months of referendum bullshit we've just gone through. 

Roland

ICBM said:

Skarloey said:

Him being Tory leader is one of my favourite speculative political 'what ifs?' along with other questions like 'What if John Smith had lived?'.

I think his worst mistake was to not stand for the leadership again after IDS fell, leaving Howard to get it. The party members should have been firmly reminded that Clarke was consistently the most popular in the country as a whole and the leader who could have beaten Blair in 2005 when the wheels were starting to come off the public spending bus.

Then we would never have had Brown, we'd have probably been out of Iraq years earlier, and if the banking crash had still happened anyway we would at least have had someone competent to deal with it.

And David Cameron would still be an inconsequential junior minister probably.

Ken Clarke is my MP. He turns up at village functions occasionally. We once asked why he didn't stand. He said that he felt he was too old, and no longer had the energy that the job required.

ICBM

Roland said:

Ken Clarke is my MP. He turns up at village functions occasionally. We once asked why he didn't stand. He said that he felt he was too old, and no longer had the energy that the job required.

Ah. That's a rather different spin than the Tory Party and the media put on it at the time.

But rings true as a simple honest answer.