‘The only real counsel these elections can offer a Labour politician is that ambition has little downside – they don’t have much left to lose.’ James Butler (@piercepenniless.bsky.social) on the local election results, from our next issue. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Sitting governments always say they are punished in local elections, as if it were an excuse. The degree of punishment this time, however, was exceptional, and does not augur well. But does this government not deserve punishment?’ @piercepenniless.bsky.social: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Really excellent

@piercepenniless.bsky.social @massimofaggioli.bsky.social @jackhanson.bsky.social Thanks for this, helped clarify two things for me: 1. re shift from just war to holy war, US culture war has been great training ground: mission seen as divinely sanctioned, want to change real facts on the ground 1/2

‘Starmer implored voters to “choose progress over the politics of anger”. It is a classic Starmer line, all injunction and no argument. Why shouldn’t voters be angry? Britain is not working.’ @piercepenniless.bsky.social on the local elections, from our next issue. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

How’s it possible to be in office for 24 months & have not one (not one!) single specific proposition for action to offer? And to claim not one (not one!) specific policy or political success? The answer to the question of what went wrong is here. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

By far the best analysis of yesterday’s election results that ive read:

Wrote about the elections for the paper (which went to press last night): www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Honestly it's crazy and sad to me that Corbyn/YP ended up endorsing portfolio landlord Mehmood Mirza in Newham.

Surprised and happy at Green advances in Southwark - including lots of impressively close second places. Southwark Labour has many good people but has done some wretched things in office - bungling the Heygate sale inter alia. ✨Manifesting ✨ Neil Coyle losing his seat in 2029.

I gave up smoking years ago, but election coverage (and general election campaigns) is always the thing that most tests me.

The Enoch Powell and Oswald Mosley fan standing for Reform in Blackburn has been elected to the council.

It is, yes, the old See of Canterbury wheeze: one insanely unsuitable candidate, one reasonable candidate. But inflation being what it is, they presented three insanely unsuitable candidates instead.

On the podcast: if Orbán has fallen, will Orbánism collapse with him? Journalist Dan Nolan and poet and translator George Szirtes join @piercepenniless.bsky.social to discuss why Viktor Orbán was finally voted out and the challenges Péter Magyar faces. Listen here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

"Look, when I put 'CHANGE' on the front of our manifesto, I really meant it. I just didn't say it would be for the better. Panta rhei. Mundus senescit."

Farage donation case is open and shut. He should have declared his financial interests and chose not to. The Commissioner should seek a suspension in sitting (personally, I'd be delighted if it were of sufficient length to trigger a recall petition, though I think he'd win a by-election.)

I guess they're juicing the numbers a bit but even so, fucking hell.

On the podcast: @piercepenniless.bsky.social, Massimo Faggioli, professor in ecclesiology at Trinity College Dublin, and Yale Review associate editor Jack Hanson consider why the conflict between the pope and the American right has escalated so quickly. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

When I wrote this I thought it was disgusting that so many Labour functionaries believe themselves entitled to a peerage as a retirement benefit. Now we discover they wanted to give the grim little man an embassy! www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Did you display good judgement? No. Ok, but did you at least follow due process? Also no. I mean, would be quite funny if they weren’t running the country I live in!

‘We start to think that what we do sexually reveals something very profound about us, and maybe more profound and more true than something that we’ve committed to intellectually.’ @piercepenniless.bsky.social on men looking at men across history, on the podcast. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

‘I don’t think it’s been good for historical practice to obsess about identity framed in those kind of linguistic terms.’ Tom Crewe and @piercepenniless.bsky.social on men looking at men across history, on the podcast. Listen wherever you get podcasts, or here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

So much of the Mandelson affair involves people making objectively insane decisions and thinking, well, this surely will not blow up in my face -- despite substantial precedent that, where Mandelson is concerned, it really will definitely blow up in your face.

‘We’re in a period in which there are these very intense links or affective bonds between men, but the tendency to reduce or to say that that explains away homoerotic material is, I think, implausible.’ @piercepenniless.bsky.social and Tom Crewe on the podcast. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

Mandelson: It's hard to see an official sending his principal out to give a press statement that vetting needs to be examined if either he or the principal knew that the vetting had been overruled. Which suggests Starmer can't have known. Which is crazy.

What man who wages war, asked Erasmus, does not think his cause just? Impossible not to hear the great humanist's contempt, all these centuries later.

I should have broken out the ethel merman wig for this episode (which is Very Very Gay)

War *is* a 'matter of morality'. All Catholic thought rejects this division. You find its contrary in the traddiest of trad authorities - Pius IX or X - or in Gaudium et Spes, which proclaims (§76) the church's 'true freedom' to 'teach her social doctrine' & 'pass moral judgment'.

‘Our own desire can strike us as alien and predictable by turn, make us seem fools or madmen, even to ourselves. Its hybrid character, our own and not our own, accounts for some of its fascination.’ @piercepenniless.bsky.social on gay history and its uses. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

I am sorry that G.M. Tamás is not here to see the deserved fall of Orbán. I hope the incoming government chokes off the vast funding network propping up various petty Lord Haw-Haws across Europe. Exemplary prosecutions for corruption would be salutary well beyond Hungary's borders.

Now when Donald had said these things, He cried with a loud voice, “Jeffrey, come forth!”

You can hear the bones humming You can hear the bones humming

EFF: "To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago."

My favourite audioguide in Seville, narrated by a Brit, exhorted me to look up and appreciate the "trompay low-ill" ceiling painting. It was in fact so charming that I hope it never changes.

Today has been improved a lot by the tremendous comical possibility of a Trumpian Antipope. Perhaps Calvin Robinson's true destiny opens itself before us.

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop."

This is real Mad King shit. It is an open declaration of sheer evil.

‘This peculiar dance of hiding and revealing, shame and secrecy, colours our post-Christian attitudes to sexuality (even in the reversed injunction to “come out”).’ James Butler (@piercepenniless.bsky.social) on gay history. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Tenebrae factae sunt: there are worse things you could do with some of today than sit and listen to the Gesualdo Tenebrae responsories. I like this Hilliard recording: open.spotify.com/album/031Vhx...

There's no better person to explain the relationship between oil, power and contemporary geopolitics than Helen Thompson. So I was delighted to get her into the studio to explain the stakes of Trump's war - and the energy politics which might characterise the 21st century.

I don't think any of this read is wrong, and failing on Hormuz would be a genuine humiliation. But US Empire is also about global dollar hegemony - and for all the excitability about settlement of Iranian tolls in Yuan, it's not going anywhere soon. USD has strengthened through the war period.

‘Homophobia is both a moral and historical category error. Score one for Marcel Proust and Lady Gaga: we were born this way.’ James Butler (@piercepenniless.bsky.social) on gay history and its uses. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Imv if you can't file 1000 words on a book without robot assistance, either you shouldn't be reviewing books or the book isn't worth reviewing. But, a touch of sympathy: this issue is going to keep happening as money keeps draining out of the field and work time gets more pressed.

A little thread on early modern immigration control. Feat. a 'commission for strangers' among other experiments... In 16thC and 17thC common law, subjects had access to both 'legal' protection and 'natural' protection by virtue of birth in the monarch's dominions ("in allegiance").

‘If there is any lesson from history, it is that few sexual orthodoxies endure.’ James Butler (@piercepenniless.bsky.social) on gay history and its uses. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...