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the greatest show in town is over.

the signs and banners have been taken down.

wenlocks and mandevilles have been removed.

the parade has been and gone.

the talk is all about legacy.

the winners are proud of their gold medals. for the moment the spotlight is theirs. in a few weeks they will be forgotten.

the two people who come out of this with big shit eating grins on their faces are seb coe and boris johnson. coe wants to become the head of the international olympic committee. while he denies it boris wants to become the leader of the conservative party and by dint of that become the prime minister.

boris as prime minister: scary.

grace dent in the independent says this of  him: “he’s a politician for people who don’t like or understand politics or policies”

david cameron hoped to get a political bounce from the olympics. what he got was splashback from the omnishambles (a clusterfuck that keeps on giving) culminating in the roars of disapproval that george osborne received as he presented medals at the paralympics.

it must have been galling to him that as the olympics went on steamrollering cynicism in front of it with both the success of the british athletes and the sheer elan of the games themselves that all the glory fell on boris.

boris got the bounce and then some.

a couple of polls now put boris as being the politician of the moment – the man who could save the conservative party and get them elected into power at the next election.  of course for that to happen it means cameron has to go.

in an act of payback for the leveson inquiry several of the newspapers have gotten behind this story.

it’ll make for an interesting conservative conference.

ennui

i have had a bit of a fallow patch recently. little has excited or moved me.

so i haven't turned my attention to such things as louise mensch announcing she was retiring as a mp. while i think she is nice eye candy (and she has made my top tory totty list) i have little time for her politics. even so i have been a bit shocked by some of the comments of her colleagues - with people like that on your side you can see why she might want to give it all up to live near her husband in the states.

nor have i thought too hard about london metropolitan university losing its tier 4 licence. it will be a big blow to the university that it can't teach non-eu foreign students. for universities they are a great source of income. yet i can't help thinking that someone at the london met took their eye off the ball here. anyone dealing with overseas students has known that the government and the uk border agency has them in their sights. true there have been numerous rule changes but none of them are so difficult to understand or to implement that a serious institution couldn't carry them out - especially given the revenue stream that is at risk.
what makes it even more ludicrous is the london met is located in an area that is populated by rogue colleges, many of which have had to be closed down because they failed to meet the needed standards.
oh how i remember that visit from the ukba that lead to the closure of the college i was working in.

i've managed to miss george galloway's twitter farce, he used a word that upset many of the people who followed him. he has apologised for what he said.
this seems to be the standard trajectory for twitter celebs. they say something, people take umbrage, they apologise and life goes on.
quite why so many celebrities manage to make such twats of themselves on twitter and other social media is beyond me.

the tory reshuffle - new faces, same nasty party. the main loss will be less of baroness sayeeda warsi. 

oh and then there was george osborne being booed at paralympics - that is 80,000 gold medals that should be handed out to the spectators there.

time to fight back against the ennui.