Luckily alcohol is more a crutch....

In a touching tribute to his mentor, Morgan McSweeney has resigned in disgrace.

Yeah, he’s gone sooner rather than later…

mashallah he is gone, to celebrate I've made the piece I wrote last year about arguably the most embarrassing project I've ever worked on free to read: youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/so-about-t...

The thing is, back in the day if you wanted to become a conspiracy theorist you had to go to a meeting, probably in a dodgy pub, with some really nasty looking guys who'd hand you a pamphlet written by Barry and that meant they were relatively few. The Internet has made becoming a nutter costless.

Excellent and clear - as Sam says there us relatively little room to maneuver and not that long, in political terms, left. The big opportunity is around immigration: stopping the present proposals and focusing on making the existing system work + better rhetoric woulf have a huge impact on vibes

My reaction when @lukemiddup.bsky.social told me this

Thanks for the kind words on this everyone. It was certainly cathartic to write.

I actually get why Bezos thinks subsiding a newspaper is more trouble than it's worth given how Biden "rewarded" him for letting The Post go after Trump '45 to the detriment of his wider businesses. Bur this is just obscene. The American elites really are doing their best to provoke a revolution

About as intellectually robust a defence as you can mount for Starmer

itcouldbesaid.substack.com/p/it-could-b... This was meant to be about Labour's alternatives to Starmer but I just wrote & wrote about what a moral disgrace he is that I realised that was the column. Starmer is a bad man doing bad things for bad reasons. Quitting now is the only way to prove me wrong

5) Sir Keir Starmer Government (before a jury of their peers)

This is the mistake Labour keeps making. THEY'RE NOT IN OPPOSITION ANYMORE. Farage can say what he likes. Labour can do & doing small things well makes people happy Their focus on infrastructure has negated that advantage because they're spending money on stuff that won't happen until the far future

Stars of which were recently seen in a David Attenborough New Year's Day special

We really don't give the Germans enough credit to what a "normal" country they became after WW2 compared to Italy or Japan

In all seriousness, wasn't this kinda Tony Blair's belief? That the Liberal/Labour split had been a historic mistake? Like a lot of things...really starting to think he had a point

Not sure quitting when people have been incessantly demanding you do so for at least six months is "leaving on your own terms". I also think this suggests somebody may have had chance to look back at all those emails he sent to his former patron

I cannot believe that an Irish Blueshirt is lecturing the British Labour Party about socialism and how to meet the needs of the urban working class. I mean, where is their self-respect!?!

Something that keeps nagging at me. Are we sure that Mandelson wanted to be US Ambassador until he was offered the role? I can't escape this nagging feel that this all happened because McSweeney wanted to impress his mentor by getting him a plumb job & this was the one he thought he could swing

And you all mocked Dan Jarvis for sticking to that one speech

can we get a "hell yeah" in the chat?

So the story of the honourable Sir Keir acting the same as that lying cad Mr Johnson ends with the same constitutional outrage of his team threatening to dissolve a parliament from which a viable new government could be formed, solely to threaten his internal opponents with losing their seats

Good excuse to reshare one of my favourite pieces from last year: this brilliantly written and illustrated piece on the folly of “The Line”, which was oddly, hauntingly sad:

Says everything about how incestuous labour had gotten that the same leadership election saw a husband and wife have to coordinate which of them was going to stand

And the reality is we could quadruple MPs pay and they *still* would be poorer than the super-rich and working to worst terms and conditions. At some point eithrr you're in politics for the right reasons and have a sense of proportion, or you're not.

This is exactly what so many of them are doing & it's why politics is breaking down. Good political leaders aren't the actors or musicians but the director or conductor. We need politicians to stop obsessing about details & focus on the big picture. That's how you get a programme for government.

I really hope people advocating to ban kids from SM read this. Some kids are isolated by disabilities or circumstances. Furthermore, some kids grow up in abusive households. “Ideally, a child’s exposure to online worlds should be moderated by their parents” isn’t a reassuring sentiment for everyone

I'm actually ok with spending a fair bit on Parliament and it being a nice place? It's an important location for our nation and what passes for our democracy, it having a bit of splendour and being a place people might actually want to visit and learn things is good imo.

The thing is politicians are so bland and safe nowadays. Ken Clarke may not have voted against the whip once in his first 27 years in parliament, but he clearly wasn't afraid to speak his own mind. Modern MPs are in many ways the reverse of that

Praying that one of the panel bought shares in Mandelson on the grounds that the price is low and Labour is bound to offer him another job at some point

I think the problem with this approach is the power of US money rapidly makes them the only ideological show in town on the right, and then regardless of domestic opposition to MAGA, you are one bad economic run from them getting power.

Cannot wait for the eventual film adaptation of this story

I remember doing the figures in my head and realising if the Tories got a majority around 200 you could start to get some seriously weird social policy passed as social conservatives might have enough support to overwhelm their liberal colleagues & the progressive parties

One of the pro Ed arguments is that imo he'd be the only person willing to take "Do what you want and leave before the election"

I can't take the "we're ungovernable! none of the levers work!" chat seriously when given a working "appoint peter mandelson y/n" lever, good choices were not made.

Let's say a new leader became PM on 1st April. They could be Prime Minister until the 16th August 2029. That would make them the Prime Minister with the median time in office - 29 would have served more, 29 would have served less. Three Years & a few months is actually a really long time in politics

Over the past two weeks I've begun to realize that rich people only started funding chatbots once they could no longer email Jeffrey Epstein

The problem with Dan’s argument is, I think it looks really cool, and I think they should spend the money. It’s literally spread over 2 decades. It’s a rounding error in one year’s annual budget! Spend the money.

I suppose the inevitable destination of wanting to turn Britain into Germany was to ultimately want it to be Vietnam

Watching The Muppets. Sabrina Carpenter should have been the Disney+ Doctor Who companion. Has exactly the type of energy plus international and *ahem* intergen(d)erational appeal the series needed for it's big American push

One of the things I never understood about Lisan al Gaib was his obsession with the importance of Labour being “a party of the future”. Now I realise that Tony’s neophillia is the only way to push back against Labour’s hankering for a past when men were men, women were women, and Labour always lost.

Well that's great. We had to hear incessant whining about how the labour party needed to be in power to protect those who needed it the most and all the other boring self mythology but I guess what that means is that when it got really hard they'd quit

I'm all for having a more robust attitude with the Americans, especially under Trump. I do however sometimes think takes like this overlook they are a former colony of ours and so they may be a tad less forgiving of us dressing them down than other countries.

Brings a tear to your eye to see that the Stalinists have still got it

I mean!!!!

Honestly it was like the reference to him being an esteemed lawyer forced him to briefly confront that it was him, with all his beliefs and achievements before entering politics, that did this rather than some venal politician who somehow happens to temporarily inhabit the same body

You have to admit, its hard to come up with a poetic ending for the Sir Keir character, but if he gets removed due to the same humble address gimmick he popularised in opposition, the scriptwriters really have gone above and beyond to find one.

Steve Swinford on Times Radio has a good point - the way the humble address is phrased it covers all communications Mandelson had whilst Labour has been back in government. Doesn't take a genius to imagine which leadership contender that is most likely to impact negatively.....

By-election bar charts, off-licence edition

A rare example of me believing in nudge theory is that the delivery apps should use the in-store prices. They can add whatever delivery or packaging fees they like, but the core prices must be the same. I think a lot of people would choke on seeing just how much more they're spending bluntly stated