Basically Ed Miliband and Sadiq Khan need to sit down for a high-stakes game of poker and the loser becomes PM

Has any Labour MP come out and said Starmer should go yet? Feels odd that there's an emerging consensus he should but no heads over the parapet at all.

As popular beat combo James pointed out, only "if [they] hadn't seen such riches could [they] live with being poor"

Labour mps when actual fascism arrives at their door and they are literally in power and capable to stop it:

Also the premise is just wrong, because they didn’t really weather the previous storms, they were hugely damaging, and it’s incredible they don’t get that. If a storm doesn’t actually sink your boat but critically damages so much that it’s effectively useless, you didn’t really “weather” the storm

Imagine having enough money to run whatever total war game at high resolution, or commission the greatest gaming table ever created for a warhammer game, and still being unhappy? Skill issue

*Sigh* Apart from anything else, this isn't actually true, there are currently 29 mentions of Starmer in the Epstein Files. All of them innocent, not incriminating. (They're all from after his death and mostly stuff like newspaper cuttings). Unfortunately, the same is true of Farage.

Labour just needs to close its eyes, elect Angela Rayner or Ed Miliband as leader now, and hope for the best. No one is going to emerge from this broken government as a better alternative than them so you're only wasting valuable time until the inevitable happens

Fingers point at Morgan McSweeney, the chief of staff who championed Mandelson, but the final blind eye was Starmer’s. www.ft.com/content/1a29...

The only way Labour can win the next election is by governing well. That might not be enough, but it’s the bare minimum. The questions to be asking about any potential new PM are “what is their agenda and can they achieve it?” Not “do they currently poll well?” Or “can they handle a media round?”

If some random MP's can meme Al Carns to leader on the basis, essentially, he was in the military we can meme Yuan Yang leadership from Bluesky on the basis of her dog.

Blairslop ought to be the name of the book covering the Starmer premiership

This is why, for all that people love Larry, we have to be honest, it's a humiliation stat Starmer can't even sack him. Terrible at his job, constantly on social media, visible signs of failure, and yet he stays in place. Weak. Weak. Weak.

This is all true but also it's yet another sign if a party that wishes politics would go away and they wouldn't have to make hard decisions. It doesn't matter how good the honeymoon was, if you don't make the relationship work when you get home your marriage is dead either way.

Peter Mandelson Will Return In Avengers: Doomsday

If Morgan McSweeney ends up having to go because he didn't look closely enough into Peter Mandelson, which seems quite possible, what would be the effect on American public life of applying a similar standard?

It's a finely balanced decision. On the one hand, you have the architect of a strategy that is not working, who could not do this job in opposition *the first time*, and buy the PM breathing space. On the other, moving it would involve admitting that some of the PM's old legal buddies were right.

I go on about the bro culture in number 10 a lot but it's hard not to think that a setup that included more women and actually listened to women might have correctly identified that this was utterly disqualifying

Marvellous and thought-provoking piece this on what the policy lessons for today from the period when cities grew at pace are:

Full comic here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/waste #smbc

sorry, this is just the most On The Nose headline of all time

Imagine Mandelson is under a lot of stress right now so just as well his husband is a trained osteopath.

i actually think you could set up a youtube channel, a la Big Jet TV, to watch self driving cars attempt certain London roundabouts. bonus episodes in Swindon

exactly. this is not difficult. as.ft.com/r/58ed1b23-d...

'Bring back the two-child benefit cap to cut the price of a pint by 5p' is actually a perfect Reform policy, though. Immiserate thousands of people for a meaningless stunt.

Something that strikes me about the lack of new ideas from Starmer's circle is that they've avoided learning from the big failure of the Labour Right in local government post-2010, such as the HDV debacle in Haringey and the collapse of Croydon's finances.

ME: I knew Pagliacci was a stage name, but the joke didn't work unless I pretended it was his real name. CHOTINER: So you misrepresented the doctor. M: Well, I didn't know it would be popular. It was just for our followers. C: Right. It's okay to lie when it's only close friends. M: Hold on

A concerned editor makes a welfare check tomorrow:

I'm assuming that the FT story about Mandelson conspiring with the Jacobite claimant to overthrow the monarchy is scheduled for tomorrow?

The ceremonial procedure for expelling a peer from the Lords definitely needs to involve Gordon Brown throwing a phone at them.

"There are too many black musicians in jazz bands" is comfortably the most delusional thing I have ever read

DOCTOR: I told him he needed to get out to a show, that was how he would cure his depression. CHOTINER: So you learned this technique in school? DR: No, not— listen it was good advice. Pagliacci was in town. C: Right. Is it standard to give advice before learning a patient’s name? DR: Now look

BREAKING on ft website: Lord Peter Mandelson leaked a sensitive UK government document to Jeffrey Epstein while he was business secretary that proposed £20bn of asset sales and revealed Labour’s tax policy plans www.ft.com/content/fdf7...

a lot of americans are convinced we need to re-invent the entire financial wheel just because they're still paying for things with cheques. This is a you problem/skill issue, guys

ⓘ Readers added context: Matt Taibbi wrote a pedophile tourism book about Russia

Keir starmer most resembles an average labour voter down to the fact that he seems to think the pm isn't great at its job but what can you do

The extent people have hallucinated a completely different novel based on a film version a decade or so ago and earnest online influencers will never not be fascinating to me

Performative politics on the populist right aren't unusual, but what is unusual about Goodwin is that he's trying to convince himself he's happy with where his life has ended up.

I keep hearing a lot of breathless coverage about what a huge deal it would be if a Trump official loses their job over the ICE killings - something which is yet to happen. Here’s a list of senior officials forced out during his first term.

The gang in Scooby Doo simply would not have time for that volume of trips and adventures given how time consuming all their various depositions and court dates would be for ongoing criminal cases they were key witnesses for

"Radicalised even suburban pensioners" What do they mean even?

just imagine how certain outlets would have reported this, and how certain politicians would have reacted, if the bomber wasn’t white

The thing I don't get about the latest Mandelson revelation is that it wasn't uncovered during vetting by the security services for the Ambassador position.

I'm used to seeing Tube-style maps used for almost everything, but I was still taken aback to see one used in Wiki for the travels of Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466ish-1536).

Honestly what is the point of having a programme that is *not* live if you are not going to use that function to aggressively factcheck the people on it?

i am happy to fight for freedom with the libertarians but also, we don’t really need to *talk*

Remember, the difference between gender ale and gender lager is in the fermentation style: gender ale is a top, whereas gender lager is a bottom

Neoliberals (like me) put too much thought into how much the planning system explains why we used to build more stuff, and not enough into how we used to have muscular local authorities and actually nationalised industries doing it all