There is a defence for this embarrassing behaviour - Machado is trying to steer Trump away from wholesale support for Rodriguez - but God it's so pathetic and degrading.

Holy hell, what an obituary

breathtakingly embarrassing for absolutely everyone involved lol

To underline the point that a lot of Americans have a cartoon understanding of dictatorships, consider that even Hitler had to worry about public opinion and in fact one of the key functions of the gestapo was assessing the mood of the country.

Following on from this thread, a more detailed post about my frustrations with the latest auction round for offshore wind - open.substack.com/pub/chaitany...

Record breaking offshore wind auction results today! Whopping 8.4 GW of capacity secured. This is great news for keeping the clean power mission on target and making Britain a clean energy superpower. Quick thoughts and a few big BUT's 👇

The single biggest thing (in cost terms) I’ve changed my mind about is UK tuition fees. Dreadful system, need to scrap it.

This "open borders" line is *infuriating* - these people came here to study or work, because they had a uni place or a job to come to. They paid visa fees, student fees, NHS surcharge - and many of them are doing challenging and important work - staffing our care homes, for example, including Mum's.

Jenrick the latest conservative voice to use Poland & Bulgaria as rhetoric vehicles to advance the 'broken Britain' narrative, it's SO BAD that EVEN EASTERN EUROPEANS are (close to) doing better than us. But Poland's success isn't UK's failure. Two different stories, mixed up.

📉 Waiting lists have fallen by 312,000 since Labour came into government & 88,000 in the most recent stats 🚑 Ambulances are arriving faster 📈 Patient satisfaction with access to GPs is up 🩵 There's so much more to do - but today shows that we're turning round the NHS & getting it back on its feet

Jenrick will lose btw. Farage is much better at this.

This is not going to work. Jenrick and Farage are going to kill each other. It's going to be very funny.

Honestly i don't buy that this is good for Farage. Feels like Badenoch took the moment away from him, lumping him with this half-arsed disloyal automaton.

Jenrick’s defection remarks began as a very generic rehash of right-wing political points, and is rapidly descending into a fired middle manager listing his grievances about his old employer after one too many drinks.

Incredibly, no-one on Nigel Farage’s team has got round to deleting this post. It’s still live as Robert Jenrick gives his big defection speech.

Agreed. I'm Grant-level tired of it.

‘You kicked out a failed government with me in it; but now your only hope of salvation is a government with me in it’. 🫨

This is the right take. The Tories now have the chance to explain why a race-baiter and authoritarian grifter like Jenrick belongs with Reform and not them. Will they take it? Almost certainly not. As Stephen says, they see Reform as lost family rather than a distinct and dangerous political foe.

"A man whose pronouncements on race and skin colour would have seen him ejected from the Conservative front bench by any leader from Edward Heath to Rishi Sunak is no longer in it" - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @stephenkb.bsky.social

My latest for the Observer on the growing Green threat to Labour and why London’s “all up” local elections could provide some of the biggest drama in this May’s local and devolved elections observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

BREAKING Kemi Badenoch has sacked Robert Jenrick from the shadow cabinet, removed the whip and suspended his party membership. She says she was "presented with clear, irrefutable evidence that he was plotting in secret to defect" to Reform

Brexit functions as a structural regime shock that reorients, rather than reduces, the United Kingdom’s migration, from Assaf Razin www.nber.org/papers/w34665

On House of Lords Tv right now - Digital committee hearing on AI and copyright with Secs of State Liz Kendal and Lisa Nandy. #AI #art #music #AIandcopyright www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/...

AGI may never happen. But in some tasks, 'as good as human' intelligence does already exist - yet there is still one vitally important thing that AI can't take, which is responsibility. Some thoughts on that in my column this week:

It's a sign of the concerns within the PLP and the level of debate within the party that multiple MP's are now putting out pieces on the wider approach like this. Suspect that'll grow as we approach May/unless polling changes

Couldn't possibly agree more with @stephenkb.bsky.social 's piece today on ID cards. Make ID cards genuinely useful and compulsion isn't required. Classic Starmer to sell them as a stick to beat immigrants, rather than on their benefits to public service users. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Been thinking a lot about how we are talking about health and society so I wrote down some thoughts about what happens when self-care replaces collective care, and why joy, connection, and shared spaces are as essential to a nation’s wellbeing as any diet zoegrunewald.substack.com/p/when-whats...

boy that gyre sure keeps getting wider

'Another Warrington has hit the North-West'.

One of the things that is massively depressing about the UK is how slow it is to develop important infrastructure projects. The government has announced the revival of Northern Powerhouse Rail linking Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield but it won’t be available till 2045.

Today's announcement is the opposite of what it says it is. It's the formal cancellation of the high speed line across the Pennines. What's left - additional TRU scope - is a good idea but should be delivered as a business as usual enhancement in 2027, not some far off fanfaron.

I was 20 when HS2 was announced. Great to know i’ll probably be in my late 60s when the Birmingham-Manchester section starts work let alone finishes. Seems like a country doing things the right way!

Gender criticals treated the Cass Review as the word of God, and cast anyone disagreeing with it as dangerous/unscientific/not fit for polite society. But now the entire GC movement is united in opposing a puberty blockers trial, despite it being something Cass called for. They are not honest people

Banning social media for kids may be good or bad but that guy is a comically obvious bullshit artist with entire books full of trite lessons extrapolated from anecdotes that are themselves barely half-true.

The United States needs military access to Greenland, which it already has, to defend the Arctic, which it already does, from Russian and Chinese ships, which aren’t actually there, and this is so important we should destroy the Western alliance to get it, do I have that right?

The article itself is interesting and even-handed, but putting a Dow Chemical guy's quote in the headline is clickbait

"Jacobin" has a huge article on Jewish politics in which they claim the fact that Mamdani's career was not destroyed by allegations of antisemitism, as Jeremy Corbyn's was, is evidence politics are changing. They do not even consider the possibility Corbyn is an antisemite and Mamdani is not.

If the figures we're getting out of Iran are in the right league, this weekend was, I think, one of the bloodiest state crackdowns of all time. People are talking 12,000-20,000 dead; for comparison Hungary in 1956 was about 2,500, Tiananmen - across country, in multiple cities - probably 1000+

The scariest phrase in the English language: “JD Vance will host.”

Michael Deacon: it’s not young men getting radicalised, it’s young women! Just ignore my own trajectory from genuinely funny young token liberal at the Telegraph to raging right-wing bigot.

It is underrated that apart from being composed of vicious, corrupt thugs, the present Israeli government is also monumentally stupid

But there's more As I wrote at the time, NESO said net-zero "Holistic Transition" was the "cheapest option", once you take account of the economic damages from CO2 adding to climate change It said a fossil energy system is only “cheaper” if we “ignore” carbon costs www.carbonbrief.org/... 9/10

🧵A political/media guide to the "truth" about net-zero 1) Add up costs to install & run a net-zero energy system 2) Pretend fossil-fuelled alternatives wld be free 3) Do say "eco zealots are bankrupting us" 4) Don't say "free cars if we scrap net-zero" cos it sounds ridiculous 5) That's it! 1/10

wokeness was exactly the same as the new left, a groundswell of concern about structural inequalities that got completely devoured by marketing and became synonymous with extreme individualism and self promotion

If this keeps a future HS2 extension alive, then do it and build one to Leeds as well.

In the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement with Denmark, the US unambiguously recognized ‘the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark’ over Greenland.

Ultimately it’s not a hard question, or shouldn’t be: if there were a website called creepywank dot org, where you could upload any picture or screengrab of anyone and get AI to produce a photorealistic picture of that person, regardless of age, in a state of undress…should it be legal in the UK?

Asteroids have missed earth by a smaller distance than Kemi’s missed the point here.