NEW: Why would Nigel Farage & George Cottrell share the same lawyer? In @thenerve_news we revealed that the Reform donor under investigation by the NCA & the Reform leader under investigation by Parliamentary Standards share the same Carter Ruck lawyers. Why? 1/l

New article: Mark Elliott and Nicholas Kilford, "The Relational Principle of Parliamentary Sovereignty" SSRN draft available to download; forthcoming in Public Law publiclawforeveryone.com/2026/07/21/t... @nearlydoctornick.bsky.social

Woken at 4am by wildfire smoke filling the house. Southeast Wales, one of the UK's wettest regions, is shrouded in smoke today. You can feel it in your lungs. The climate crisis is now.

I genuinely cannot understand how the Labour government has now had two, genuinely cultured prime ministers who both looked at Lisa Nandy’s record there and went “I’m pleased with this. I want this to continue.”

oh so a while back I used to run these fun interviews with MPs for Parliament's in-house magazine - did one with John Healey, which I really enjoyed at the time, and you may like also: www.politicshome.com/thehouse/art...

This is well worth reading: an interview with the new Chancellor, John Healey, from 2021, talking about regional development and economic growth. It's particularly interesting on what he thinks the Blair/Brown and Cameron/Osborne governments got right and wrong.

This is ... silly? The fact that the program was "unfunded" doesn't mean it was free or that cancelling it doesn't save money. It's a real insight into how some people in government have locked themselves in a mental prison of accounting

(1) this is quite obviously correct. People notice visible homelessness! (2) also - and I want to make this very very blunt and direct here - this is a Labour PM and if you think action to end homelessness won’t play well, well, tough? Maybe you need to go vote Tory instead?

The leaf has a song in it... • Mary Oliver •

lmao if your reaction to the prime minister committing to abolishing rough sleeping is "this won't play with the median voter" then you really have drowned in the cult of savviness

Given the wreckage caused at the Ministry of Justice by ministers who were lawyers, from Clarke to Raab to Lammy, we should be relaxed about a non-lawyer as the new Justice Secretary. They are not there to give legal advice, but to run a department. So let’s see how this new Justice Secretary does.

Yeah she's got health.

This feels like a good epitaph of Starmer, driven by the micro-level courteousness and empathy, totally unable to scale that to the job he actually had.

V funny that Burnham offered Reeves defence while planning on making Healey Chancellor.

Omg Andy has just scythed down the FT www.ft.com/content/7cd3...

Oh lord no

John Healey is Chancellor

Football news not over post-World Cup www.theguardian.com/football/202...

From last month. In essence - our body politic retains an admirably efficient discharge system for getting rid of poor PMs, it is the diet which is at fault.

It's becoming an established attack line that Burnham "has no mandate" and "hasn't set out what he'll do". He's not becoming president. He leads the same party that governed yesterday, elected on the same manifesto. His authority comes from Parliament & he'll have to pass his measures through it.

This feels like it got buried amid all of the mounting allegations around Reform and Farage's funding. Farage leases property that he owns, to his own company, at exactly £10,000/year. That's a penny under the "over £10,000" rental-income declaration threshold. What is he trying to hide?

The day’s first casualty: James Timpson resigns as prisons minister. This is a big surprise! Timpson had a long history as a prisons reformer before entering government and seen as one of Starmer’s more innovative & exciting appointments. He’s also delivered a big change programme in gov. So: why?

Overdue for prime ministerial addresses, especially after the last disastrous intrusion.

Andy Burnham just took Steve Bray into public ownership.

Laura Kuenssberg, Andrew Neil, and the BBC apparatus which gave Cambridge Analytica a chance to undermine @carolecadwalla.bsky.social’s investigation before it was published, called law breaking ‘rule breaking’, demeaned her as a mad cat lady, and fluffed Farage, deserve all the ignominy of history

If you want to understand who makes up the real establishment, read on.

I meet people every week when out vox popping who are completely convinced that small boat crossings are rising exponentially. They aren’t - they are falling substantially. Journalists and politicians have a duty to get this message across. Some are mendacious, others just incompetent.

More Control, Less Control Theatre is the key to policy + politics of immigration for a Labour govt that wants a pro-control, pro-contribution, pro-compassion, pro-cohesion, anti-remigration & anti-racism broad coalition of support of liberals, balancers and non-racist moderate migration sceptics

Have many thoughts about this and the wider Year of Reading. Want to say this up front: - I really like Impossible Creatures (& Rundell herself seems ace) so this isn’t about that. - I think this is a lovely idea - Whilst it’s nice, I think that this initiative is a little misguided

Morning, Matt Goodwn.

Andy Burnham plans to “expend real political capital” on reforming social care. It's a big gamble on cross party cooperation | Stephen McNair

Time out among the flickering light, sounds of trickling water, and birdsong of an Irish Atlantic rainforest.

It’s a big day, start of a week of fundraising for @parkinsons.org.uk Listen to BBC R4 at 0754 to learn more

See this little hollow? Its brilliant. There's a wasps nest in the ground just to the left (you'll have to believe me, they were quite annoyed). Its in a badger run, so one evening, a badger spotted the entrance, had a little dig, got stung to hell, and buggered off. All written in a little hole.

On the immigration stuff, it is (in a sense) really easy, it’s going to cost you x per the OBR, how are you going to pay for it? 1. Putting up taxes ❌ 2. Borrowing more ❌ 3. Cutting spending ✅ Oh dear…

So much of this is literally meaningless. What do you mean, 'post-globalisation'. Discuss with reference to, say, food prices.

He isn't going against the manifesto. He will sign off Jackdaw and Rosebank which were initially approved under the last govt. And he might allow expansion of existing fields. Not new licenses. This is so he can avoid the problem James outlines.

Great thread.

To state the obvious, there two things are not compatible.

reflections painterly. a heron spotlit, paused on 1 leg. high point of grasses & heatwave but crowsfoot & foam remind you of icegather you have seen here deepest of winters

In which the Attorney General rightly gets a kicking from the Court of Appeal.

I think this misses the point a little. It’s not stability that’s the principal problem but the erosion of UK competitive advantage (sometimes self inflicted but also a function of unhelpful international changes) which has made the UK relatively cheap (£ and equity market valuations).

Burnham and “the black box” How the intense secrecy of Burnham’s plans for cabinet and government is fuelling rumour and paranoia www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Just finished reading this, I wish so much I hadn't. I've read all the Inspector McLean books and this might just be my favourite* - great characters, gory, weird (as you'd expect) and a strangely beautiful story. (*Book 1 was a long time ago though)

For the record: no-one in Labour disagrees on the goal of net zero. But there is a genuine policy debate to be had about the speed, cost, detail and unintended consequences of some of the policies between groups of people who agree on the aim

Another small step in the long and tortuous process of bringing Andrew Milne to book.

The idea that the minister in charge of the department delivering this level of performative cruelty should be appointed to any high office is incredible. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

"A closed country will be poorer. A country that underinvests will not grow. A state that refuses to reform tax will ration ambition. And a Labour government afraid to say these things will discover once again that caution, too, has costs." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Wow. The Department for Education has just published new projections which estimate that the number of pupils in state-funded schools in England will plummet by more than 9% by 2031 amid falling birth rates And yet this issue receives probably 1,000th of the coverage the immigration debate receives

This is interesting. It seems to have become much worse since 2016.