drink up to help out

my most libertarian belief is that you should still be able to buy a ten-pack of cigarettes

I beg your pardon

Starmer-ultras using the Peter Hitchens polling quote means that the discourse has finally hit the Hitchens-singularity. Previously the only example of genuine horseshoe-theory IRL were both the far-left & far-right approvingly sharing this image. We're through the looking glass here.

A reminder that Hercule Poirot once covered up embezzlement by a Tory Prime Minister in order to stop Labour getting in at the next election.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine Labour frontbenchers going into Greggs and ordering eight sausage rolls - for ever.

RETVRN

this is very funny but also this is exactly what I would be doing if I was a troublemaker from another party trying to cause maximum chaos

I know this isn't the most important thing about this email but I'm struck by the fact that this list includes two mandelsons and a mandelbrot.

be careful what you wish for

not only is anthony horowitz a terrible person but he is also not very good at being a novelist if this is what happens when he is faced with a character getting poisoned and blown up

Before people get steamy, this is a ‘page issues’ warning template. As in, ‘someone included AI content in this article, and we recognise that is a Bad Thing, so proceed with caution’. It’s not @wikipedia.org condoning AI-generated content, it’s the *opposite*.

lots of people getting angry about this but Wikipedia editors don't tend to put these sort notices on the top of pages if the page is good! this is a "pls someone sort this article out & take it with a pinch of salt before they do" notice, surely?

why would you make this your vinted username

One of my favourite things my small child does is when he furiously corrects adults who have shortened his name. Long may it continue!

if true then not only is this dreadful optics but also risks the Tories sending a bunch of MPs in to vote for the bill meaning that it passes and then in theory it could go to second reading (although it's unlikely to do so in practice)

lord of the rings is a childrens book anyway, no-one over the age of 11 should be using a book about goblins to make a political point

Ed Miliband has become the new David Miliband* *a figure that Labour people think, through desperation, can become the leader of the Labour party and sort everything out, despite showing no inclination to or interest in becoming the leader of the Labour party

obviously there are much worse things about Twitter turning into a far-right cesspit but I have to say I do miss the biannual tradition of Peter Hitchens becoming furious about clocks

As someone who spends far too much time thinking about the Millennium Dome, it's good to see the tradition of taking out adverts to promote your machinery that was used in a jewel heist continues to this day. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

just remembered about the guy who grew a giant onion and gave it to Keir Starmer

Every few months there's the "we should move parliament to a floating oil rig in the north sea and all the MPs would live in boxes & get paid minimum wage and can only eat gruel and cup noodles" chat and usually the same people ask "how can we get better people to become MPs" a couple of days later

oh my god it's still online

Found another of these, namely the 1960's block of flats in Portsmouth where Conan Doyle wrote the first couple of Sherlock Holmes stories

1. Agatha Christie is possibly the most inventive novelist of the 20th century. 2. Nobody can write like Dr Seuss and childrens publishers should refuse to publish anyone who tries. 3. Nobody over the age of 12 should be allowed to read or quote George Orwell except for his defence of English food.

Ok this is quite a random question but would love to know if there was any way of finding data on this: What percentage of today's teenagers know who the following people are? 1. Princess Diana 2. Elvis Presley

amateurs (*54 tabs on desktop, over 100 on mobile)

further evidence for my pet theory about Kemi Badenoch's entire political worldview being shaped by going to the University of Sussex in the early 2000s and getting wound up by everyone banging on about Hegel the whole time

Tony Blair used to carry a Belinda Carlisle CD around with him everywhere he went which he would listen to every time he was writing a speech. It's not clear what CD it was but reasonable to guess it was probably "Heaven on Earth" (1987).

gnawing at a rare steak whilst your colleagues open the packets of their meal deals

it will never not be funny that a load of weird far-right people are super into being cosplay catholics but have never really thought about what it is that catholics actually believe. Pastor aeternus is right there!

sounds like Martin Lewis has been reading about Harold Wilson's list of "little things that mean a lot". And given that Starmer named Wilson as his favourite Labour PM, Starmer should probably do this as well.

My "I'm not hopeless and I know how to add up" t-shirt etc etc

33 years after the original apocryphal incident the specter of guacamole still haunts the depiction of a typical Labour party activist

ok this is all good but we accidentally watched episode 2 of Alien Earth instead of watching episode 1 of Alien Earth and kept waiting for a bit of explanation as to who everyone was and eventually assumed that the director was trying not to insult their audience's intelligence

Lots of people angry about this but worth bearing in mind that Bella Sankey represents a council where Labour lost a seat to the Greens less than 2 weeks ago, in a city where two out of the three seats are likely to have the Greens as the main challenger at the next election.

This graph from today's Telegraph seems to have mislaid three of the last four elections. I would be intrigued to know whether adding them would create quite the same narrative.

Once again thinking of the house up the road from me that had this NO2ID sign in their window consistently from 2005 until about two years ago, and who is now presumably kicking themselves for not hanging on to it for a bit longer.

Filing this poll in my "Very Liberal Democrat Polling" folder, along with the poll where they wanted to remove the head of state & replace them with the Queen, and the one where they were asked to design their ideal House of Commons and didn't even make themselves the largest party.

my child was trying to eat an orange in one bite and I muttered something about Stephen Milligan and he asked what I was on about and I thankfully managed to duck giving too many details of the tragic auto-erotic-asphyxiation death of a Tory MP in the 1990s

ended up on the Sonic the Hedgehog wikipedia article and there's some wild bits of trivia on there

obviously everyone remembers the "bloody difficult woman" line about May but another striking part of Ken Clarke's hot mic moment was talking about Gove & saying "I think with Michael as prime minister we’d go to war with at least three countries at once."

Every now and again you see someone on here who almost entirely posts reactionary talking points & starts banging on about how it's only on BSky they're considered to be a conservative and they are actually a wet liberal. Oh do they not think you're a weirdo on the nazi website owned by a racist?

Found this copy of the Mirror a few months ago whilst sorting out various old boxes of things. Sixteen years is a long time in politics.

inner steel

things could be worse you could be liz truss who has just posted a photo on instagram titled "celebrating 50 years of the laffer curve"

in a very "don't create the torment nexus" way this is essentially taking the plot of one of Julian Barnes's funniest satirical novels and making it happen in reality.

was making a convoluted and silly joke with a friend about how Tony Blair and Bart Simpson are the same person and ended up putting together this uncanny BlairBart moodboard

it's quite funny that one group of people are going around saying "please Labour can we have a few social democratic policies as a treat" & meanwhile another group are howling "MAO HAS BEEN REBORN"

Any Westminster number-crunchers up for shortlisting who the onion-vomiting-MP is? What % of the 2024 intake represent a seat they grew up in and seem like someone who can't handle their onions?