It's never the comms. Labour's comms is grey because in the absence of a clear strategy for what the government wants to achieve, no-one can defend or articulate what the government says in an interesting or exciting way.

Latest post In a summer when Westminster went quiet, Nigel Farage filled the silence. While others holidayed, he ran a one-man campaign about “lawless Britain” turning unworkable ideas into viral stories. He isn’t winning on policy. He’s winning on narrative. open.substack.com/pub/itsallst...

The latest from me: what makes Nigel Farage a master political storyteller for our age? open.substack.com/pub/itsallst...

Can someone ask Farage or Zia Yusuf why, if they're so concerned about incitement to violence, they had Lucy Connolly as a guest star at their conference?

I’m enjoying both left wing and right wing critics of ID cards posting their objections on….checks notes….social media.

I chatted with the @financialtimes.com about my writing, the podcast, tech criticism, and being myself. archive.is/2025.09.25-0...

Free speech news

One of the better developments on the Beeb in recent years has been "BBC Verify", which does proper fact-checking & analysis. But this substantive analysis seems entirely divorced from its political commentary, which is entirely focused on "showbiz" & sports-punditry. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Started this week's newsletter trying to be impartial about Angela Rayner but just got angrier as the newsletter went on itsallstorytelling.substack.com/p/the-week-i...

*sound on* This is Andrea Jenkyns's ACTUAL singing entrance to the Reform UK conference. Utter crackpots. And anyone who thinks this kind of idiotic look-at-me amateurs are how this country will "rediscover its pride" needs to have a lie-down.

Enjoyed writing this Superman piece over the summer. I learned that Superman was essentially a New Deal Democrat. So people complaining about the politicisation of the character look kinda silly. open.substack.com/pub/itsallst...

One for @edzitron.com. Yet another example of a journalist interviewing an executive at Anthropic and letting them speak in vague truisms. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

Reform leader of Nottinghamshire council bans all communication, including by officials, with the main local paper. Nottingham Post/Nottingham Live ban also includes BBC-funded local democracy reporters. www.nottinghampost.com/news/news-op...

Good piece on Welsh Labour: "When I asked the First Minister about how Welsh Labour had improved Wales during their 25 years in office she pointed to free prescriptions - a policy introduced 18 years ago. When your key selling point is in itself old enough to vote in the election you have a problem"

This is a very thoughtful critique of my piece on men and attraction, I got a lot from it open.substack.com/pub/noahberl...

This is a useful distinction and like most people I think it’s fine to engage in 1 and 2 but sadly we’re surrounded by tech bros and politicians who are desperate to sell us on ‘3’

Johnson is admittedly a low bar here, but his reference to “ChatGPT androids” demonstrates how ignorant most of our leaders are about the different degrees of AI. Generative AI and a sentient bot that can wipe your arse are very different degrees of programming.

This hadn’t occurred to me but it’s spot on

Generative AI is the biggest bubble for some time. It can help with certain tasks, but my experience is that it cannot do even the most basic things unsupervised and regularly fabricates its work.

I wrote about what I call "The Red Queen Fallacy" -- the toxic blend of hustle culture, checklist existences, and under-regulated capitalism that make too many people in modern life feel like they're stuck on a treadmill without an off switch:

My latest newsletter asks whether tech's managerial class is excited about generative AI because it distances them from any responsibility for their failures -- and thus, any accountability. whatwelost.substack.com/p/mediocrity...

My feature for @theobserveruk.bsky.social on global migration trends and why the battle between economic wellbeing and nationalism is only going to get more intense. observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

The "EXTREME HEAT" warning is just too perfect for this story

Wrote a short piece on the inherent problems with treating Norman Tebbit as a "political grandee" itsallstorytelling.substack.com/p/the-origin...

After the latest round of grading papers, I wrote about AI, ChatGPT, the death of the student essay, and what it means for the future of human cognition.

You’ll often hear the “well Thatcher wasn’t popular in 1975 either” defence. But even MT’s most sympathetic biographer, Charles Moore, will admit she compensated for her lack of political acumen with the humility to learn from others around her.

No, this is worse than not doing your homework. This is like setting up a class *next door* to the one your History teacher is giving and complaining that you're not learning anything.

to @stephenkb.bsky.social 's point that Kemi Badenoch doesn't do her homework: she's just done a press conference detailing what she thinks should be prioritised by the new grooming gangs national enquiry AT THE SAME TIME as Baroness Casey was giving exhaustive testimony to the H Affairs Committee.

I found my BlackBerry 9500 a surprisingly smooth smoke, although it was a bastard to light.

Curtis's films are full of this kind of shit, though usually it's more subtle and uses innuendo to imply connections rather than making an outright false claim.

AI Overviews hallucinates that Airbus, not Boeing, involved in fatal Air India crash arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/g...

Watching the video clip embedded in this article, you’re reminded how much Trump has, despite all the guff about his vigour, aged. I’ve heard it said that he’s got more energy than Biden at 79 but the same decline is notable.

It'll be two years, this Monday night. Time, at last, to write about Agnes.

While it is critical to prepare for the effects of AI on employment, these efforts should be grounded in present-day evidence rather than speculative futures, writes Natalia Luka. buff.ly/WYMovSC

Big Tech featured prominently in UK announcements at London Tech Week. The UK risks aligning too closely with a few of the world’s most powerful firms—giving them outsized policy influence and embedding their tech in public services, writes Tech Policy Press fellow Megan Kirkwood.

This is literally what they voted for.

Well we know what it's for -- cognitive automation. It is a substitution for hman cognitive effort. Memo to Leah Belsky, VP of Education for OpenAI: I am going to be a giant pain in your ass for as long as you hold your job. Because you know nothing about learning.

Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock on the party’s rightward shift in Prospect magazine:

Things which can be true at once: A) It's entertaining B) It's deeply dysfunctional which the Trump court always was/was always going to be C) This happens when a political project is about vibes/personality cults rather than actual convergent beliefs D) It's pathetic E) They could make up

your regular reminder that the Nigel Farage Party is and forever will be the Nigel Farage Party, and everyone else is basically just passing through www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Everything you need to know about the British voting public

Feel like the headline for this should read “How it feels when your dumb ass unscrupulous manager replaces you with AI” This feels adjacent to what I’ve been reading in @alexhanna.bsky.social and @emilymbender.bsky.social ‘s great new book www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

That weird Johnny Ive x Sam Altman collab video cost $3M to produce. Please give DAIR $3M, I can assure you that any "tech for humanity" product we make will actually help people... sfstandard.com/2025/05/30/o...

I mean self service checkouts themselves worked out great. No problems with understanding basic concepts like “weighing”. Absolutely no need for human supervision. No siree bob

This conversation between two thoughtful writers is worth your time. Yes, it covers AI, but so much more, including the nature of writing as human communication, the relationship between author and reader, the role of humor in building trust. Delightful from start to finish.

Why we shouldn’t listen to Nick Clegg open.substack.com/pub/itsallst...

@edzitron.com waiting with bated breath for your monologue on the collapse of Builder AI www.techmonitor.ai/digital-econ...

Oh Boris turns up, just he has an affair with your wife while you are at work and never fixes the loo.