To be fair his eyesight was so bad he probably didn't realise who he'd picked the fight with

Cummings also thinks Johnson was his hire, but is clear it was anything but a merit-based one

Without DEI, we would only make merit-based hires, like the genius strategist who decided to pick a fight with his boss’s new young wife.

For those who aren't keeping up, Mamdani is a Zionist now (for condeming swastika graffiti on a yeshiva)

“Don’t put up income tax, NI or VAT”…in the same interview “spend more money”. While I think the Labour leadership should have thought more intelligently (read: at all) about how to get out of their tax pledges, can see why they made them!

It’s because some people, inexplicably, don’t read @chinadigitaltimes.net.

👇 I don’t get why this is so poorly understood. If you live in a wealthy country, in the event that dictatorship comes to your country, your smart fridge’s manufacturer is not going to say “we couldn’t possibly hand *that* over”.

I even get annoyed at satnavs warning drivers of the position of speedcams... "...break the law...break the law...break the law...BEEP... *I AM A LAW-ABIDING CITIZEN* ...break the law...break the law...break the law..."

That battle was lost when we decided speed cameras should be painted yellow. Like arguing flying squad can only break up an armed robbery if wearing hi-viz and shouting nee-naw.

They're all driving, cycling, and walking about with GPS trackers in their pockets, which can most certainly already be used in evidence against them. That whole thread is bonkers, best exemplified by scare quotes around "terrorists"!

I’m actually very intrigued by Gremlins 3, as “Chris Columbus, after having his film roundly mocked in Gremlins 2, writes a third Gremlins film” is, well, interesting. Probably not *good* but interesting.

Seems like a thing the government *should* maybe consider stepping in to address - not to bail out the company but to support the pipeline by protecting frontline workers - given how close this is to a key priority

“I couldn’t take a cruise. The thought of being shut in there, it makes me feel claustrophobic,” he said, observing an ocean liner that has been in port for both of the two days he has spent on a sun lounger reading novels or playing Switch games.

Not entirely unrelated: the poster (and therefore the thumbnail on Prime) for the film Companion completely undermines the twist. Again, why?

Whenever I give people the very attractive Everyman copy of The Portrait Of A Lady (more often than you'd think) I am forced to cut off part of the inner fold of the dust cover. James actually cared about the plot on this one!!!

This is not uncommon. I often find that blurbs, esp on hardbacks (which are typically written by the author themselves!), cover more than half the plot of the book.

Re-reading my favourite St John Mandel - The Glass Hotel - and just realised that the blurb on the paperback completely ruins most of the plot. Why?

For as many years as anyone been counting two or more inmates been mistakenly released from British prisons most weeks. Record does not make it acceptable. System needs to be fixed. It does leave me asking why BBC now gripped by end-of-civilisation hysteria heard on Radio 4 Today programme.

must-read analysis of how Musk's twitter is drenching new users with right-wing propaganda news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

Well, I think I'd start with: those things for which you need a permit from the state to use and where limits are put on the extent and manner of their use at all times are ones where an acceptance that the state controls the access to their use is a given and thereby permits monitoring and control.

It's maddening when technology CAN'T be used. Ask anyone who has had a GPS tracked device stolen the police refuse to collect.

Monumental hubris, every detail is jaw dropping. ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-l...

Everyone's favorite not-a-striker striker got nominated for player of the week in the UCL! dailycannon.com/2025/11/meri...

Mobile phone data is routinely used in police cases now. The biggest constraints on it are the ability of them to process all the phones they are investigating. The Met has 5 specialised centres around London for this.

I mean why shouldn't it be used in evidence? It's a lot hard to hack that data feed to say I was somewhere I wasn't than it is to find a police officer who takes a relaxed attitude to committing perjury.

One thing that's totally under-appreciated is that new cars share incredible amounts of data with the car companies (who can then sell that data for analysis). They know how far you've driven, where you've driven, how many times you've rolled down your windows...

There's a great long read somewhere about Disney's struggles with this. Version 1: Wristbands and tech that took $bns and years to implement. Version 2: An app on your phone.

Basically if someone with the powers of the state wants to answer the question 'where was Adam on [date]' there are so many resources to pull on between Amex, Vodafone, Apple, LNER etc. etc. They can already do this. Maybe that's bad, but let's not pretend it's new!

I mean so long as you're carrying a mobile phone around with you, that data is basically already there right? It feels like we're spending the 2020s litigating privacy fights that were lost in the 1990s.

Until I die, I will never understand why so many motorists think that “having a car” should give you special protections from doing crimes.

So many lovely lines and phrases in this - I think “fractal cowardice”, to describe the interplay between leftwing thinktanks and the government at the moment, is my favourite:

Road pricing is so easy. We already take mileage at every MOT. Don't overthink it/

I am stealing that sentence below for whenever someone brings up GB Energy, or if I were to ever meet anyone who works for GB Energy.

To return to a common theme, it comes back to “the most useless crop of politicians are Remainers who chose to stay in frontline Conservative politics”, because so many of them will just say *anything*, not even in a calculated way, just in a “I have checked out from seriousness” way.

Insurance companies (e.g. 'By Miles') do this routinely already. A voluntary approach right now would be to give drivers a fuel rebate (e.g. VAT refunded or fuel tax refunded) for opting in. Drivers would then have the incentive to change their behaviour without anybody being forced to spend more.

Mileage recorded at MOT/sale is surely easiest option? Could there not also be a trade off here in reducing fuel duty and moving all cars to this scheme?

“What problems are you actually interested in solving?” - a question that I’m not sure most of our current crop of politicians could answer.

I worked at a landscape architects that did some work on it & it was without doubt the most bonkers and bizarre projects I've ever seen, any time any render was on a screen I just thought 'this is a weird fairytale, not reality'. Also the staggering naivety re migrating animals flying into a mirror.

This piece on how physics and finance scuppered the Line is terrific fun, though I confess it also made me feel a little sad: ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-l...

Terrific (and gutsy) Inside Politics by David today:

I was going to say that @roberthutton.co.uk has a great anecdote about this that he can’t share, but then I realised that anecdote has been blown out of the window by, as @colinelves.bsky.social notes in the replies, the sitting leader of the opposition and the culture secretary.

If you’re in the UK, you can get lovely goat meat delivered to your door courtesy of Cabrito!

...and the latter has typically been the desperate plea of a dying government. Call me radical, but doing all you can to create the conditions for the former seems a better use of your time in office. It even has some non-electoral benefits.

Indeed. Part of being a responsible government is making an argument for your policy choices and not just feeding this, as Neil rightly says, deeply corrosive “everything is about elections and voting”.

Also it is just so deeply corrosive not least because it exists in such an already corroded body politic. Not doing anything about that, in fact deepening it, is a choice a Government with a huge majority just doesn't have to make.

In addition to everything Dylan says in this thread, it’s just a bit tragic for *a government four years from an election* to be saying “they hate him more than us“. That just shouldn’t be your focus four years out!

Desperately want the candid making of this show. Why did the casting go from (whatever you think of the wisdom of some or all od these casting choices) Lithgow, Essiedu, McTeer to “Hagrid, but his buttons are a different shape”?

Voters really don't like inflation, and frankly everything else is secondary to that.

Spending my holiday as God intended - drinking strawberry daiquiris and reading the curriculum review:

Absolutely mad yet profoundly unsurprising to anyone who interacts with what passes for the UK's justice system.