How did Farage handle his grilling about Epstein, Bannon, Thiel and Reform’s funding today?

NEW: Understand Scott Bessent and Nigel Farage discussed Diego Garcia and Chagos during their dinner at Davos. US Treasury Sec believed to have credited Farage for getting this issue in the President’s in-tray and subsequent Trump stance.

So they’re not just a bunch of kindly souls worried about the erosion of free speech? Stunned!

Fire Brigades Union leader, Steve Wright: “If people think that Nigel Farage, a city trader millionaire & his mate, Richard Tice, are gonna be the people that can fix this country for the benefit of the majority, they are wrong” #politicslive

Badenoch is alarmingly lightweight

The blame Starmer for everything brigade illustrates the political horseshoe very well. Left and right united. The real question is why would anyone reasonably decent want to run for office here on Normal Island. Thankless job.

Zack Polanski can say what he likes because nobody of any significance knows who he is, so his words don’t matter. Government is a serious business requiring serious, sober responses to rapidly changing and largely unpredictable events

Nice to hear grown ups speak on social media occasionally Govt is difficult, very difficult, if not nigh impossible. The lunatics on here and elsewhere would have their PM wading into every issue like a bull in a china shop, never getting anything done. Starmer has taken the only course right now

A few thoughts on the new US national security strategy that was released today. 🧵 www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

I don’t care if Reform calls me a bad word on WhatsApp. But the story behind its gaffe is far more worrying | Will Hayward

Club TV comes out in support of the manager...

Putin is a far more successful manipulator of Western psychology than he is a conqueror of Ukrainian defensive positions share.google/t4tDq7zXBj7o...

The "Rachel from accounts" thing is sexist, classist, misogyny, and anyone who uses it should be utterly ashamed of themselves. Too many dinosaurs in this country who cannot abide women who succeed. Conservative Deputy Chairman Matt Vickers MP should do better 👇 #PMQs

I’m sure Prof Edelman is the life and soul at parties

Pleased to discover that slightly misnaming the national chess championship you won as a school child is a much more serious offence than repeatedly racially abusing your fellow pupils and telling them they should go to the gas chamber

Magazine that accuses anyone who even dares to think about criticising the Israeli government of ‘antisemitism’ apparently fine with Farage not apologising for allegedly saying ‘H*tler was right’ and making gas chamber noises to descendants of holocaust survivors. Through the looking glass stuff.

Required (if depressing) reading on this subject

There are those on the left and right who offer only grievance: Labour is getting on with the job of economic renewal | Keir Starmer

The people who shout and scream loudest, stamp their feet the most today are the same people who brought us this disaster.

"By 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%" Read the Stanford report: siepr.stanford.edu/publications...

This stuff would end most politicians in a semi-normal country. Sadly, give it 24hrs and he’ll be the victim here.

I knew Gill and Farage and the rest of the UKIP crew in the European Parliament They were crooks and shysters to a man They repeated Putin talking points and appeared on Russia Today UKIP then and Reform now are both a threat to our democracy www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

The “train drivers are all overpaid, lazy bastards”- “definitely a terror attack” - “got to be illegal immigrants” - “wait, they were born here” - “but Matt Goodwin says that’s not enough” - “name them both” - “wait a minute, it’s just one” - “train drivers are heroes” story arc has been some watch

Fwiw, the trend towards disclosing the ethnicity/nationality of suspects in high-profile cases has not solved any problem (disinformation is still thriving) and only fuels polarisation and creates opportunities for grifters.

The sheer greasy desperation from these bastards that any violent crime is committed by an immigrant so they can continue their grift. Even when they know it isn't true. Foul.

I've written a couple of things over the last days about how the government and much of Westminster remaining on X as the platform becomes increasingly toxic is having consequences for our politics...

They've tried Reform voter chasing. It hasn't worked. Why not just do the right thing? Not just on taxes btw, but on everything. On migration, higher education, Brexit.

Counterpoint: at this stage they're probably stuffed regardless, the moral imperative is to stop thinking about 2029 and just bloody well govern

The richest man on earth owns X. The second richest man on earth is about to acquire TikTok and his family could soon own both Paramount and Warner Bros. The third richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fourth richest man owns The Washington Post. See the problem here?

Some Cheltenham and Kelso selections as the National Hunt season gets into full swing youtu.be/2oU_-7uxxA8

This country's politicians are going completely mental. Turn off the phones!

I really hope someone is keeping a list of all the crazy things people like the increasingly unhinged Andrew Griffith and his ilk are personally blaming Keir Starmer for? In 2025 it seems the UK PM is responsible for (and involved in) every decision taken by every public body. A nation of loons

The Tory media's shift from hysterically claiming that Starmer *did* intervene in the China spy case to hysterically claiming that Starmer *should* have intervened in the China spy case is a thing to behold.

‘How do you speak to people who can’t hear your voice?’ Should be the question every political figure on the centre left is wrestling with right now. And they have to find answers

And herein lies the problem…

Conference season is such a waste of everyone's time - a month when our political system could be doing something useful spent coming up with daft announcements no one cares about.

Bloody leftists

Nah, think I’ll stick with what Dan Hodges, Christian Calgie, Peston and rest of the ladz are saying

The alternative is...? The UK doesn't engage with a global superpower? There's a lot of folk with delusions of grandeur on behalf of their country.

Are we seriously being asked to imagine that senior civil servants don’t know the position of their current Govt off by heart enough that they’d have to be directed to in order to write a few lines in a report? 😂😂😂😂 The UK is utterly insane. Social media has picked the political classes’ brains

A 'Russia Hoax' or Russian Hopes? How Putin’s Troll Farms are Boosting Nigel Farage’s Campaigns – Again – Byline Times Support this publication! bylinetimes.com/2024/07/01/h...

Not sure western society has fully accepted how imperative it is to find a way to get people off their phones before it’s too late. And the clock is ticking down rapidly.

The UK is falling under these spells too. Unless the Govt finds a way to snap enough people out of their Facebook/TikTok/Twitter psychosis there’s a real chance the jig’s up Facing up to the issues would be a good start…

These guys weren't great before, but they weren't like THIS. But they spend nine hours a day boiling their brain in a social environment where overt race war rhetoric is how you indicate you're one of the cool kids

One of the things that our political class refuses to admit even though it's obviously true is that Twitter is very obviously radicalizing many American elites into full-bore white supremacy

Went on Facebook to nosey at a couple of boating pages, so I thought I'd look at my feed which is just an endless stream of conspiracy theories,desperate clickbait from newspaper sites, scroll after scroll of complete bullshit mixed with cat pics. Just insane stuff.

A thousand times this!!!!!