Gary Monro’s blog

The BBC describes the Conservative Party’s selection process succinctly:

Any Conservative MP with the support of at least two colleagues can stand.
Nominations for the leadership close on a Thursday, with the first round of voting by Tory MPs the next Tuesday.

The candidate with the lowest number of votes drops out. There are then further rounds of voting on Thursdays and Tuesdays until two candidates are left.

There is then a postal ballot of Conservative Party members, with the candidate getting the most votes becoming the new party leader.

That should hand the leadership to David Davis then. Who might - just might - put the ‘conservative’ back in to Conservative Party.

We live in hope…

From the BBC:

A West Yorkshire hospital has banned visitors from cooing at new-born babies over fears their human rights are being breached and to reduce infection.

Some new mothers have already said they are astonished by the rules which stop people asking questions about their babies or looking at them in maternity wards.

Debbie Lawson, neo-natal manager at Calderdale Royal Hospital’s special care baby unit, said: “Cooing should be a thing of the past because these are little people with the same rights as you or me.

“We often get visitors wandering over to peer into cots but people sometimes touch or talk about the baby like they would if they were examining tins in a supermarket and that should not happen.”

Here’s an interesting take on the hospital’s appreciation of the human rights of these ‘little people’:

…in the last two years, 76 girls under 16 have had an abortion at Calderdale Royal Hospital. Of those, 23 were aged 15 and nine were just 14.

Sometimes little people can be just too little to have rights…