The most damning resignation letter yet, I think:

We established a decade ago that “a generation” in Scottish politics is “two years”, so this is technically correct.

"Your name will not be made public for now" is completely amateurish when, for this to have the slightest chance of working (if it even can), you need to be able to reassure other MPs as much as possible. When might it be made public? Who is it going to be shared with in the meantime?

Got an unexpected email asking me to review my stay in a very nice-looking Austrian hotel, which I assume means either a review company has garbled its data, or someone stayed in a Vienna hotel using my name as an alias and I am about to be unwittingly thrust into a world of international espionage.

People are accusing Catherine West of “not having a plan” and “not grasping how things work” but there’s nothing wrong with her campaign that a laser-like focus on delivery and a reset speech on Wednesday can’t fix.

On the bright side for Angus Robertson, he absolutely smashed the “two-horse race” between himself and the Conservatives.

I think my most capital C Conservative position is that 'edtech' is almost always an expensive con that distracts us from what we know works best in education and that there really is absolutely no harm in a classroom looking broadly the same as it did 20 years ago most of the time.

I wrote for @timeshighered.bsky.social about Sussex -v- OfS. In short I think the regulator needs to urgently review its current approach. The sector needs to be confident that its regulator is acting lawfully, fairly and proportionately www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/suss...

Voters HATE this one crazy trick to rescue your government: find out now

“Williams [Mahmood’s SPAD] also wrote that the Home Office “will be examining the lawful basis” on which we hold information relating to this story…””

I cannot overstate how completely insane this story is

Judgment now available online. The OfS does not come out of it well at all. Final line: “The Final Decision was vitiated by bias because the OfS approached the decision with a closed mind and had therefore unlawfully predetermined the decision.” www.judiciary.uk/judgments/th...

Important context for the BBC headline about Jess Phillips' comments on asylum seeking people and domestic abuse.

This is the greatest scam email of all time. I now want to start every email with “Yourself there, take good note”. I salute you, random Argentine scammer who cranked the ChatGPT Oirish setting up to 11

It is, today, the 55th anniversary of that gift to satire James Arkell, whose solicitors wrote to Private Eye on this day in 1971, prompting everyone’s favourite reply. You may know the story, but I put it to you that you cannot hear it enough. We begin with that initial letter... 🧵

Really curious as to how the politics of “what if we had a global economic shock and it was really clear that it was caused by one person, really clearly and obviously” plays out in democracies, but I could have lived with finding out at say, the age of 90 not today.

If Reform are to become Scotland’s second largest party, perhaps we can generate a unique cross-party consensus for FMQs on a vastly more frequent basis.

Very good historical survey, which bears out my experience working in the Commons from the late 80s to the early 2020s. I had a committee chair in the 90s who regarded himself as abstemious as he never drank during the day ...

A contribution to today’s discourse: voting on legislation late at night is both a) hugely important and b) often only a confirmation of actual decisions taken at an earlier stage about how to cast that vote, which is such an odd combination that I’m not sure analogies to other jobs make much sense.

I’m sorry, we can all agree that this has been a fascinating experiment, but “the administration has responded to an attempt on the life of the President by seeking to accelerate the construction of a ballroom” is clearly a coding error and I think we are entitled to demand the simulation resets.

Looked at listings at a multiplex for this evening and it’s mad: more screenings of this than everything else put together. I’m not surprised - if disappointed - that it’s popular but *that* popular?

People remember that Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize for discovering an antimalarial drug from traditional Chinese medicine. What they don't remember is that she investigated over 2000 different recipes to find one that worked.

This is a very good piece, although this sent me off at a tangent wondering about what “vocational” means in substance. This probably isn’t what critics have in mind, and at what point does a subject cease to be “vocational” if lots of students don’t end up pursuing that vocation?

Do think it’s notable here that the pool report—the journalists not attending the event, but actually covering it—was the correct one

The Hollywood Reporter account takes a beat to lean into their expertise

Lol it's a bird! it's a plane! No, it's... Trolley Man! #philsky #ethicssky #moraldilemma

Got an uber to the train station earlier and the driver seems to have finished for the day and gone home without ending the trip, with the result that the app keeps on asking me “are you ok? your vehicle isn’t moving” while not noticing that *I* am. Anyway, excited to see what the fare for this is.

:(

Beyond "urgh" (to put it politely), I'm now wondering if the best advice to politicians on social media beyond "why are you on social media anyway?" is "if you have to be here, don't like anything! nothing good will come of hitting that like button! what do you think it's going to achieve?"

People keep quoting Orwell in the replies but I always assumed that the Party at least actually *knew* what 2 plus 2 made.

Kind Hearts and Coronets (Sátántangó Cut)

Any conversation I’ve had about this (not many - my chat isn’t *that* bad) is met with the entirely natural response that people on £100k don’t need sympathy. But the problem isn’t that they’re suffering, it’s that they are rationally responding in ways which are not in the national interest.

I suppose you could with excessive generosity read this as "undue pressure" but "no pressure" is just nonsensical. This was a decision to appoint a specific figure to a hugely important diplomatic role: it did not take the form of a text to the FCDO saying "Mandy for US ambo? no worries if not xx".

Just noticed the gym has a notice requesting users to “cover open wounds and wipe bar of any blood” and now I’m wondering how often that had to happen before they thought the instruction was necessary.

Quite the quote from the John Blake, the former director of fair access at the Office for Students www.thetimes.com/article/1cb6...

Keir Starmer famously said there was "no such thing" as Starmerism. He was half-right: there is no such ideology. There is however an approach to managing and running the country that is core to so many of the government's difficulties that we probably should call 'Starmerism'. In tomorrow's paper:

Keir Starmer has been taking questions for so long that the Strait of Hormuz has closed and re-opened three times during his stint at the despatch box.

Funny to recall that this government, mired in scandal, policy u-turns and infighting, won a huge majority a little less than two years ago. And while the fiscal inheritance was bad, the bar for improvement was also set incredibly low. It was just so hard to see how you could end up here so quickly.

Somewhere Bismarck is looking down in confusion as Germany projects power by sending 4,000 pensioners, 12 buffet stations and a TUI loyalty program through the Strait of Hormuz

This is very sad. I only knew him through twitter and here, but a really good lawyer trying to make the world better.

Oh great, yet another hospital drama.

I have missed two flights through my own stupidity (forgetting my passport; turning up a day late (!)) and both were quick and cheap to fix but it hasn’t made me more relaxed about missing flights; I just kick myself a bit harder to not make the same mistakes again.

There is a tension between the uni critical view that university exists to produce day one work ready graduates who should be experts in [dice roll] AI and the uni critical view that it exists as a debate club where [dice roll] engineering students should be shocked and offended on a daily basis.

It’s much more serious than this but I did enjoy this excerpt from the Palantir manifesto. Nothing wrong with the cast of characters at the helm now, of course! Great bunch of lads; lucky to have them steering the ship.

My assumption is that a PM can’t spend much time on social media because you’re the victim of a completely different sort of attention economy where everyone around you competes for your time. But you want to appear normal which is why you implausibly say “yeah, I’m a generic social media user”.

Offord on the telly again talking about getting '800,000 economically inactive people back to work'. High time journalists start properly interrogating this abject nonsense. bsky.app/profile/step...

Just an incredibly weak line to take in a six-party contest: no the other four parties aren’t each three nationalists in a trenchcoat and voters are not going to buy the idea that they are. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This (h/t @magnets.eurosky.social) is quite something. I can just about accept the idea that the timing was “convenient” (although come on). But “suspiciously convenient”? (And am I missing something? The first lockdown was announced by Boris Johnson, surely?) apple.news/AkY2sTm62TJ2...