Go for it. I don't even care any more.

As I said he would last week. The idea that Burnham is some kind of reckless socialist is really quite baffling to anyone who's followed his career.

Melania Trump infesting the White House with bees is the funniest thing no one's talking about right now #Bees #WhiteHouse

There’s none of the flow of dialogue in Rings of Power. It’s all stilted Fantasy Speak ™️, as opposed to cribbing from *a literal etymologist* who was himself cribbing from *literal Beowulf*.

This seems very tentative but i will nonetheless seize the moment to reiterate my view that a fundamental reason Jackson LOTR works and almost no other Tolkien adaptations do is that it has actual Tolkien dialogue/prose to work with and is extraordinarily creative about finding ways to use it

It is astonishing* that Angela Rayner's tax affairs - in which the Standards Commissioner found her to have acted "in good faith", in an attempt to protect her disabled son - is STILL a bigger story than Farage trousering £5 million in secret or Tice's taxes. *It's not astonishing, but should be.

If you want engagement get Janan to do his top 100, make it free to read and watch Bluesky fight to the death

It may improve your weekend to know that at least the AI agents are having a crap time as well www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

If voters don't get it now, they will get it very quickly once the campaign is in full-swing.

Interesting intervention from the Green Party's former leader

I am all for joining the EU. However, this brilliant tour d'horizon/state of play piece from my former boss makes it clear that it won't be a walk in the park - but also that the current situation is somewhere between merely unsatisfactory in the short term and completely untenable in the long term.

Exactly. Also true of the Conservatives. And, under FPP, Reform can get a majority on 28%, or could win under 100 seats on 26% - fragmentation plus volatility = chaos under first past the post

The whole thing is just a series of banal cliches. What difficult decisions? What actions?

we only know about the £5m Harborne donation thanks to journalists at the Guardian, but sure trash the MSM for clicks

Well, I think Elon and Trump have been on the same flight logs before

Must we keep holding our politicians to such impossible standards?

They also apologise for being even vaguely interested in detail or politics, rather than earnestly being excited about it, which I find particularly grating.

The BBC’s “retreat to babytalk” became their way of saying “sorry, it turns out when you take a look at the detail of Brexit, we were sold a false bill of goods! Don’t hurt me!”

See this is what people used to think of Charles before he was king, but we are a fundamentally melancholic nation and we respond intuitively to autumnal despair.

predisposition in Westminster to presume coups *always* succeed eg Thatcher & May & Johnson, but: 1995: John Major saw off right wing rebels 2009: Gordon Brown survived multiple cabinet minister resignations 2016: Jeremy Corbyn saw off 64 resignations and 80% of PLP begging him to quit (172:40)

"this would be really bad and so, ipso facto, it can't happen" is the assumption underlying the entire Trump era and it's sort of bleakly funny to see people clinging to it even as the train is jumping the tracks

This is all just so utterly stupid. Reform losing councillors hand over fist, Labour in a nervous breakdown, Tories utterly craven and useless, Greens just anti-environmentalism and posturing, Lib Dems AWOL, SNP about as popular as anthrax. It's all just so... stupid.

Have had multiple reports that Reform UK in Northumberland are going to appoint Councillor Rick Baker as Leader. He’s previously stated “the Muslim Brotherhood are controlling Councillors in Birmingham, where the only allocated social housing, is to Muslim families.”

What we have to accept is that this is a revolutionary moment already. Change is upon us, brought mainly by an institutionally compromised Supreme Court; a power-hungry, morally poisoned GOP; and a would-be dictator in Trump. The questions now are ones of courage, steadfastness, and celerity.

Someone told me lately "Bluesky is just like Twitter." I argued that was untrue on the basis that last time I had a Twitter account most times I got a new follower their bio said "single & looking for fun" & here when I get a new follower it tends to say something like "professor of rare moths".

Such an excellent book. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the Merkava.

And all it cost was the life of one Romulan senator, one criminal, and the self-respect of one Financial Times journalist.

Completely unacceptable from the Board of Deputies. This nakedly partisan hypocrisy does not represent me or many other British Jews. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

This is beginning to feel like when they tried to meme The Shah back into power in Iran

The government spent a year or so saying it had "no plans" for a youth mobility scheme, citing its manifesto commitment on free movement.

No, this is the strategy working. First you lose a bunch of support, and then you just start gaining votes You see, at the moment, Labour have burnt off all but the most affluent liberal voters, the most repellent to real Labour. But soon they'll be gone and the coalition will be all real Labour

Farage has 3 key weaknesses on which the other parties should be laser-focused: - His insatiable appetite for money, and his willingness to prostitute his party to billionaires, crooks & tax-dodgers; - His subservience to Donald Trump; - A nasty temper, which he struggles to hide under pressure.

Without minimising the dire results for Labour, it’s extraordinary how chipper the Tories are. They’ve lost 500 seats from a low watermark, lost historic major councils to Lib Dems and Reform, show no signs of recovery in the esp LD areas they need to win. But MPs seem to think it’s going well.

Tbh if youre seeing this and still going 'Labour needs to target reform voters' you need to give your head a wobble

The difference between Green 20% / Lab 14% and Green 18% / Lab 17% - saved Labour around 200 seats vs projections. First past the post is sooo sensitive to tiny variations when parties cluster like this.

My off air politics were too much for BBC - they never played a part in how I presented the Infinite Monkey Cage but I was told they damaged the BBC’s “journalistic integrity” - I was not a BBC journalist - now look at Robbie Gibb’s utterly acceptable career flipping between BBC journalism & Tories

Blue Labour will say “better to turn Camden into a marginal in order to win Barnsley” and then get absolutely destroyed in Barnsley.

Here are the average shares so far across 60% Remain wards in the BBC keywards system: Labour 24% Green 24% Con 22% LD 19% Ref 10% And here are the average shares in 60% plus Leave wards: Reform 40% Con 17% Lab 16% Grn 12% LD 12%

There needs to be a drastic appraisal of the voting system. A party winning power with 75% opposed is not a recipe for a peaceful country.

Whenever the Greens announce a policy, people are always like “but have they thought about…?”or “have they considered…?” No, they have not thought, they have not considered, and they won’t be doing so. The political incentives being what they are, they have no need. It’s slopulism all the way down.

Exeter St Loyes ward - Con 25.3% Ref 25.5% LDs win...with 25.6%. Pure chaos. FPP fruit machine

my father-in-law, who is currently lamenting high gas prices and thinks war with Iran is stupid and pointless, told me a few days ago that he thought Trump had a very high IQ, maybe higher than any other president. It’s fucking wild

If true, a devastating failure by the US & Israel.

“The US admin is announcing the end of the war in effect without having achieved regime change, ending Iran’s nuclear program or eliminating its missile program. Its focus is now on solving a problem which didn’t exist prior to the war: a closed or nearly-closed Strait of Hormuz” - Jim Scuttio, CNN

Statements that have now come to light from a handful of @TheGreenParty candidates are totally unacceptable & require immediate action. There’s no place for anti-semitism or any hate speech in the party. This is a society-wide problem & needs to be rooted out wherever it’s found

People who are critical of Zack Polanski (and I’m increasingly one of them) need to be able to recognise that, even if you think he’s handling antisemitism within his party really badly, he is himself a victim of antisemitism.

This is a terrible and deliberately divisive piece of reporting by the Times. Somewhere near the bottom of the article, they admit that actually Muslims prioritise the cost of living above Gaza. It's not even close - cost of living was prioritised by 50%, Gaza by 25% www.thetimes.com/article/5c7c...

The nominal strategic purpose of the U.S. Navy is to ensure global freedom of navigation to guarantee stable global trade. It has not only not done that, the United States instigated the conflict which undid it. This is known in foreign policy analysis as a “whoopsie doodles.”

GMB looks at the newspaper front pages and instantly goes into a big discussion about The Sun 'story'. A great example of how newspaper reviews like these inject a virus into the entire political/media ecosystem every day.