Starmer was Mandelson's creation to finish destroying Left Labour - even centre Left figures like Rayner. How can the puppet be left in place now the puppet master is finally gone?

Just a reminder that my In Conversation event at Peckham Library is tonight at 6.

We need access to Mandelson's financial affairs to check that eg Government contracts with Palantir were not entered into because he was paid to lobby for them.

Get Palantir out of the UK. Protect our NHS. Protect our country. www.thenational.scot/news/2582860...

Mandelson was known as the Prince of Darkness and Starmer believed he was telling the truth?

There is no reason for a General Election if Starmer goes. The Right will push for one in the hope of installing Farage as PM before people realise how badly he is compromised with Epstein, Bannon and Russia. The next Labour PM must put the boot in hard.

When Starmer goes - by the weekend? - who's the Stop Streeting candidate? I guess it's probably Rayner. She's a bit tarnished and compromised but she'd knock spots off Badenoch and Farage. Trump would hate her so much.

It was nice to see Corbyn putting the boot into Starmer and Mandelson. At long last. Revenge is a dish best served cold. LBJ and the camel...

Remember this forgotten bit of history. Starmer and Corbyn negotiated a possible very soft Brexit package with Tusk that Corbyn tried to sell to May only to have Starmer pour cold water on it in the meeting with May, The source for this is May's Chief of Staff Barwell. .

Coming this Friday...please come!

At what point did Starmer decide that Mandelson had become so compromised that he should no longer take his advice? Clearly not during the period when the entire Labour Right were plotting against Corbyn even if it meant a Johnson government and a much harder Brexit.

Might we tactfully point out that to obsess negatively with trans people when the richest and most powerful men in the world are trying to reverse centuries of humane progress and equality to acquire impunity for rape and murder shows a weird sense of priorities?

If you are close friends with a notorious trafficker of young victims of abuse and joke that he 'likes them on the young side', it at the very least calls your judgement into question. If you go on to joke about sharing a wonderful secret, it at the very least implies complicity.

One of the significant takeaways from the Epstein files is that Epstein was also catering to members of the elite like Gates who weren't paedophiles, but must have known or guessed what else was going on at those parties or on the island but chose to ignore it.

Various people mentioned this without explaining why it was important. Now I get it.

A cynical view is that Trump is sending a carrier group to attack Iran in order to divert attention from ICE and Epstein. A more cynical view is that he is sending a carrier group into harm's way to whip MAGA into a vengeful frenzy when Iran manages to use drones to kill US soldiers while boosting..

Fourteen years ago I wrote a sonnet sequence. THE POET TO HER YOUNG COMRADES about the coming of Fascism, and some possible futures. It gives me no pleasure that I was Cassandra. www.facebook.com/share/p/1ByP...

I have an event with @tgirlsonfilm.bsky.social this coming Saturday afternoon at the ICA. www.shortfilms.org.uk/programme/tr...

Presumably all the BBC nreds to do to stop Trump's absurd libel case is announced that they will call Jack Smith as a witness.

Another event I'm doing...so busy

It's disturbing in the extreme to hear the Today programme presenter move from enabling a Tory shadow minister's Islamophobic conspiracy theories to asking him leading questions about whether Kemi Badenoch's Tory party is transphobic and by implication homophobic enough?

One of my upcoming History Month events...

Me and Charlie Jane...

Upcoming event...

Tiny Pieces of Skull by @rozkaveney.bsky.social is such a treasure to get to read - written in the late 80s it sat in manuscript form, untouched by publishers until 2015. A piece of our literary history I really enjoyed - and appreciated - reading

Tom Paine warned us all.

Read and loved Alix E Harrow's The Everlasting, a timely clever meditation on stories and the abuse and cost of stories. Damn her but she's clever. Also a bit of a soppy softhearted romantic but that's allowed.

Given that Bondi wants the FBI to target anyone who isn't ( the right sort of ) Christian or doesn't hate trans people, that's a lot of my US friends in danger.

Veronica is a wonderful writer. Also a delightful person whom I've not seen often enough in the last few years

As Gibbon said in a different context that is somehow exactly the same "I have described the triumph of Christianity and barbarism".

Everything Miller said about seizing Greenland also applies to Trump's desire to 'acquire' Canada and impose fascist governments on the states of Western Europe. NATO was dead the moment Trump was re-elected.

Exactly. The sacking of FEMA's First Response team isn't a distraction either. It's all of a piece - the Trump regime does criminally bad and stupid stuff every day because that is what it is for.

How long before Trump orders a strike on London and the abduction of Keir Starmer? Or at least of Sadiq Khan?

A corrupt murderous traitor like Trump has no moral authority to attack a corrupt murderous tyrant like Maduro. This attack is illegal and a war crime: it puts Trump on a par with his ally Putin. He should be impeached and put on trial.

It should never be possible for any minister to revoke citizenship with a stroke of the pen. #checks #balances Jenrick - like Farage - wants to be an unaccountable tyrant like Trump.

When natural causes and obvious criminality remove Trump in due course, we get Vance. There must have been Romans who breathed a sigh of relief when Tiberius or Claudius died, only to wake up with Caligula or Nero. Be careful what we wish for.

At this point we have to assume that all prominent figures on the Right of politics are both in the pay of the Russo-American brand of elite Christian Nationalism and its devoted and willing acolytes.

Slovakia rewrote its Constitution to erase rights for LGBT+ people and reject international human rights protections. The EU has opened an infringement procedure – but stronger action depends on us. Add your name now. a.allout.org/s/v0qyx/

Liz Truss is helping Trump sue the BBC. Are there no depths of national betrayal to which Tories won't sink. Hopefully the decision of the Pulitzer board to demand his financial and health records in disclosure will deter Trump from using lawfare to silence critics' and Truss will look even more dim

Slovakia rewrote its Constitution to erase rights for LGBT+ people and reject international human rights protections. The EU has opened an infringement procedure – but stronger action depends on us. Add your name now. a.allout.org/s/v0qyx/

Slovakia rewrote its Constitution to erase rights for LGBT+ people and reject international human rights protections. The EU has opened an infringement procedure – but stronger action depends on us. Add your name now. a.allout.org/s/v0qyx/

Elon Musk is one of the worst human beings in history and is a white male. This is not propaganda as he thinks just propaganda There are a lot of good reasons for transitioning, most of them having to do with not hating yourself, not being made miserable by dysphoria and so on.

Badenoch and Truss corrupted the already low standards of UK public life by appointing a deliberately fraudulent enquiry into medical care for trans adolescents and packing a public body with people fundamentally opposed to the purposes it was set out for. This ought to be considered a scandal.

The only possible consensus on trans issues between Streeting and Badenoch is his abandoning all pretence of believing in our human rights and agreeing with her that we should be eliminated altogether for our own good.

"I can speak out even if it is to the detriment of my career." An act like this is, in itself, a victory for kindness and empathy.

It's notable that the right-wing parties that the USA wished to impose in Europe are at best appeasers of Russia and more probably it's conscious paid agents. Trump is handing Russia Europe on a plate - he is a traitor and Europe must tell him to fuck off and expose Farage, the AFD etc as traitors.

This is the argument of an empire talking to client kingdoms, not an ally talking to partners. He wants to impose the election of Reform and the removal of non-white politicians from office.

Farage's teenage racism is important because it has led to his adult belief that we should appease Putin and make him our ally against Islam. He publicly opposes helping Ukraine and all his projects from Brexit onwards objectively serve Russia's interests. At best he is a useful idiot, at worst...