I don’t mean to gloat but I bought stock in massive stone tablets a couple of hours ago and they’ve tripled in value in the last 10 minutes.

I could consider forgiving Keir Starmer saying he wants to get on with running the country, maybe even that he’s focused on delivering, if any of these statements were followed by a list of bold things he’s going to do and do differently, but they never are; they’re just bland substance-free waffle.

Has anyone considered finding a safe by-election seat for Jared O’Mara?

Wait! It's all been a fuss about nothing and we can get on with our lives; Starmer is focused on delivering.

An interesting* scenario would be 81+ MPs triggering the formal process by backing a specific contender and that contender being Streeting. If he went head-to-head with Starmer I think I'd have to back the latter, but maybe it'd force Starmer to demonstrate why he's different and become bolder. *‼️

This must be what it feels like to be Katie Price looking for the right husband.

For people wondering "why do Labour MPs think Starmer has to go?" the fourth paragraph of this sets it out.

Quite apart from anything else, this illustrates how important Reform’s backers see Farage himself is to the success of the party. Without him they’d have so much less. Taking him down is insufficient to turn British politics around but it *is* a necessary part of speeding it up.

There is only ONE way for Labour to get out of its current catastrophic mess: Change leader AND change policies. Replacing Starmer with continuity Starmer will make a very bad situation even worse. There needs to be a dramatic shift away from Reform-aping and a strong pivot towards PR and the EU.

What baffles me is the disconnect between how determined Starmer is to stay in office and how lacklustre his efforts have been to be anything other than underwhelming as PM. Why the former if not the opposite of the latter?

I sympathise with those who think Starmer shouldn’t go. I just don’t agree. That the right-wing press wants him out would only be an argument against if we definitely got someone worse, which they think we will. But Starmer can’t and won’t recover, and they’ll have a go at a Labour PM whoever it is.

I do think Starmer should go and am an outlier in feeling Catherine West was right to intervene - nothing was happening. It’s also notable Darren Jones didn’t use his #r4today interview to claim the PM would definitely stay. But I’m alarmed that Shabana Mahmood wants him out. Who does she want in?

1/3 Starmer is “preparing for a speech tomorrow where he’s going to talk about why he wants a closer relationship with the European Union. Not quite sure why Downing Street believes that would be the kind of panacea for Reform-voting, Brexit-voting parts of the country, but it is the kind of thing…

I think I’d cope better listening to Chris Mason’s reports if someone else - absolutely fucking anyone - would read them out for him. His delivery is, I think, the worst thing on Radio 4.

Vox pops on Radio 4’s 6 O’Clock News alert! “Will Reform do better?” asks the sadistic reporter of a woman who claims to have voted Labour in the past but has now switched. “I don’t know,” she says in the tone of a slow child struggling with algebra. “You’ve got to give them a go, don’t you?” No.

Let’s put Starmer at the heart of government in the same sense that he sees the UK as being in the heart of Europe.

"Britain at the heart of Europe" is everything wrong with Starmer is in a nutshell. Pro-Brexit groups hate it for obvious reasons. Pro-EU groups immediately notice it isn't accompanied by any change to red lines, making it an empty slogan with no policy behind it.

It’s all fine. Starmer will just read out that inspiring piece he wrote for the Guardian on Friday about delivering.

Number 10 aides are making one last desperate plea that he not open with, "I may be the son of a toolmaker, but the UK will never be a rule taker."

1/3 A possible new way of voting at general elections… Everyone has two ballots. They can use one, the other or both. The first is who they want. The second, who they don’t want; these cancel out votes for that candidate. It’s fairly obvious what I’m suggesting here and why. What would happen?

It really is. So many lowlights to focus on but the party’s position on green energy is a particular nadir. It’s bad in its own right, and if you want to reduce irregular immigration, speeding up climate change is one of the stupidest things you can do.

To save me having to read the stories, these Reform councillors being booted out for their racist views: are these views too racist or not racist enough?

Honestly thought for a moment that the guy on the right was Robert Webb in sketch about dictators.

Chris Mason on Catherine West’s intervention. Yeah, thanks, Chris. Those are the two options. Do give us more when you have it.

Catherine West, my MP and one I have a lot of time for, isn’t as obscure as people make out. She was a minister in David Lammy’s foreign office and shadow minister under Corbyn till she was sacked for rightly defying the whip on a Brexit issue. She also asked this question that led to Johnson going.

I’m not saying I’m an oracle (or that West actually wants to be PM, though she’s of very sound character and has good judgement on policies), but still…

It seems there has been a development. Well, good on Catherine. She’s great. I’m not predicting she’ll become leader but I *will* say it’s often unexpected outsiders who come forward successfully. I was once asked on here who in the parliamentary Labour party could lead and I said my own MP…

You know how Labour and Tory MPs continued to call Lib Dems just Liberals way after they’d changed their name? I think I’m going to start referring to Reform as the Brexit Party, and I invite you to join me. If Brexit had been a success, they’d mention it more. It hasn’t so they don’t. We should.

My MP has come out in favour of Starmer stepping down. She’s one of the least opportunistic politicians there is, so this is a serious moment. It’s notable that a question she raised in parliament was one of the links in the chain of events that led to Johnson’s departure…

Sick of being dismissed as a sheep-shagger, Welsh Man has turned to fucking a ewe in a field.

‘I used to vote Labour but’ is the new ‘I’m not racist but’.

ITV News just vox-popped an older northern woman who said that she had switched from Labour to Reform because she was angry that illegal migrants were “getting hotels when British people can’t get hotels”. At some point Labour surely just has to say these people are completely politically illiterate

Labour is fucked. People who want Labour to sort its shit out are fucked. The Tories and its voters are fucked. Ditto the Lib Dems in the grand scheme of things. The Greens won’t form a government. And Reform voters’ victory is pyrrhic: they’ll remain bitter and miserable. The only winner is Farage.

Amusing story from my dad today. It’s 1974. He’s on a business trip to Madrid during General Franco’s time in power. “He’s like a cat with seven lives,” says his Franco-sceptic chit-chatting Spanish counterpart. “Seven?” says my dad. “In England we say nine.” “Then it’s lucky Franco’s in Spain.”

If you want to take your mind off The Horrors, you might enjoy this tale of trivia. I’ve taken the ferry to the Netherlands to celebrate my Dutch cousin’s 25th wedding anniversary this weekend. My parents are here too. This afternoon, we had a bit of time on our hands, so we drove to Baarle-Hertog.

“By the bowels of Christ, we need electoral reform,” says @iandunt.bsky.social at the end his newsletter today. It’s hard not to forgive the sacrilegious image, so on the money is this opinion and the way he argues for it.

Empty words from Starmer in an email to members. He’ll just carry on as he has been doing. ‘Responsibility’ is meaningless in this context. Yes, Labour has done some good things. But they’ve not been enough, they’re offset by a lot of indefensible things, and there’s no coherent message of hope.

One of the many things Labour strategists need to realise is that people vote Reform because of how it makes them feel, not what they think it’ll achieve. Labour can’t compete on that - anti-immigration and spite, basically - so shouldn’t try. But they CAN compete on hope to attract other voters.

I’d love it if David Attenborough announced today that he’s been really getting into Tinder or Hinge or something lately and he’s mainly targeting lady darts players. That way, a ‘ONE-HUNDRED AND DATE-Y’ headline joke I’ve been workshopping for the past minute or two wouldn’t go to waste.

Nothing we say ever makes a difference - that much has been drummed into us by the permanently cynical. So who’s up for joining me in spending the day screaming insults about Reform and Reform voters into the Bluesky void? It won’t make things any worse. I’ll start: halfwits.

Feeling rather out of patience and out of compassion today. A lot of us have had a lot of shit in life, we didn’t all vote for the far right. What the fuck are people doing

Nigel Farage refuses to take a question about his £5m donation from a crypto billionaire.

I fear Labour people risk falling into an ecological fallacy visible from space when reacting to these results. Here is what is very clear in results so far: Labour are losing *seats* to Reform, but... Labour are losing *votes* to the Greens Greens split the vote, Ref comes thru middle

I’m very much struggling with the maxim ‘hate the sin, not the sinner’ today.

A short while after the Brexit referendum, right-minded people were discouraged from calling idiots and racists idiots and racists. Many did, me included for the large part. I’m starting to think it doesn’t make a difference either way, so am tempted to go back to venting, because why the hell not?

people who voted for a monorail to improve their lives have - despite the monorail making them poorer - voted for a new, more racist, & impoverishing monorail to improve their lives

Happy birthday, Sir David Attenborough or, as I imagine my children think it’s spelt, David Atten-bruh.

It’s easy to dismiss Reform voters as small-minded little Englanders, so I do hope you’ll join me in doing so this morning.

If you’ve just woken up, a reasonable summary is that the idiots have voted for the cunts.

1/2 Here’s a question for budding answerers: For a long time, scientists have known 1) about the basic nature of planets in the solar system (size, distance from the sun, orbits, likely makeup), and 2) that they probably can’t and certainly currently don’t support complex life as we know it. But…