My economic anxiety!

Helena Kennedy QC made a similar very astute comment tonight on Sky News, saying “on listening to the PM’s answers to journalists questions, what struck me was his constant use of the phrase “my team” not “I” in terms of vetting, interviewing, scrutinising Mandelson’s apt“.

This is also why I’m baffled at the Al Cairns speculation. We’ve just seen what happens when you make someone with a great pre-politics CV (but little to no political experience) Prime Minister.

Absolutely brilliant column by @patrickmaguire.bsky.social: every word of it true:

One of the things I never understood about Lisan al Gaib was his obsession with the importance of Labour being “a party of the future”. Now I realise that Tony’s neophillia is the only way to push back against Labour’s hankering for a past when men were men, women were women, and Labour always lost.

This one is quite disappointing in that the actual answer in this case (“the person replying is a crashing bore”) feels like it should be an illegal move.

this, to me, is blueskyism

🔴 BREAKING: Labour Together paid controversial PR firm £30k to investigate journalists who were digging into how its undeclared funding Reporters from Sunday Times, Guardian and other outlets targetted *And* Morgan McSweeney knew about it Full story: democracyforsale.substack.com/p/exclusive-...

You have to laugh really.

Enjoyable poll finding. c25 per cent of people have an unfavourable opinion of of Keir Starmer’s performance as prime minister but think he should stay as prime minister.

Choice of books in years 7 & 8 had a big influence on my kids love of reading. Specifically it completely squashed it. I don't know who chose them, or the additional reading list the school sent, but they were all very... weepy isn't quite the right word. Heavy on loss and having a difficult time.

An Inspector Calls is absolutely tailor made for "here are Themes (tm) to discuss", but is absolutely dire. Im not sure its should necessarily be excluded from classrooms, but I cant see any reason to perform or watch it *except* for an exam.

I quite like how half the country has read that and the other half the great gatsby depending on which English class they were in

See also: Of Mice and Men

Distinguished man to Sir Thomas Beecham. ‘I believed you conducted before my brother recently.’ Beecham, who has no idea: ‘ah yes and how is your brother?’ Distinguished man: ‘oh, still King.’

Know you are not a Tennessee Williams fan anyway but if you are going to teach him, probably not Streetcar.

This is a fun game - good summary here of why while I love Much Ado About Nothing it is incredibly high up my list of 'plays that absolutely should not be taught in school'. (In English. As theatre, fine) Trying to think what the other 'god don't try and *teach* that' classics are for me.

For anyone having a bad day: have you seen the bitcoin price?

Had the same problem when I worked opposite Talkback Thames. Would pop out for lunch and only just avoid eternal embarrassment thanks to my brain intervening, at the last second, with 'no he's not someone you know. He's Jeremy Irons.'

My mum did this to David Harewood about 10 years ago and I don't think she's recovered yet

my dad was an actor & was in a TV soap for years. People would constantly come up to him like 'did we work together at eg Marks and Spencer in the 90s?' nope, you just know i look vaguely familiar and can't figure out where from.

Stared awkwardly at Alexander off the Traitors when he turned up at the Trump state visit thinking "Where have I seen this guy? Does he work for the BBC?" before realising who it was just as he passed me.

Spent ages once staring at someone in a Ryanair queue trying to figure out what they were famous from - an author? actor? maybe a niche one, in An Cailín Ciúin or something - and it turns out they were a colleague from a different department

I said a confident hello in passing to Isa from Still Game a couple of weeks ago. I do not in fact know Jane McCarry, the actor that plays her, and whom I had greeted.

I have the reverse of this, where I will spend ages trying to place where I know someone only to realise “nope, that’s a famous person”. I once asked someone if they were a friend of my partner. “No, I do the weather. It happens a lot,” she replied.

side-note - 2017 National production where Tamsin Grieg played Malvolia deadly straight (and also not straight at all in the other sense) was both sad, chilling, and entirely internally coherent with the rest of the production. Best approach I've seen.

EXC: I can reveal the contents of a memo by Labour peer Lord Maurice Glasman in January 2025 warning Number 10 it was making a mistake to hire Mandelson - sent to Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. www.ft.com/content/584a...

Saw a student/youth theatre (I can’t recall: it was £2.50 to see a play in London) version of Merchant of Venice that used this at the end, which I think is still the best attempt to make that play “work” I’ve seen.

A shadowy cabal of abusers is just made up of individual bad men. This is literally refusing to see the wood for the trees.

Also one of the ways you can avoid being the main focus of the epstein shitstorm is not to make yourself the main person epstein befriended in the UK. Alternatively a government can also not hire such a person when it's a known moral failure.

But it’s not. Essentially everywhere in Europe there are people being sacked and facing prosecution because of their appearance in the Epstein files, and rightly so!

Also the premise is just wrong, because they didn’t really weather the previous storms, they were hugely damaging, and it’s incredible they don’t get that. If a storm doesn’t actually sink your boat but critically damages so much that it’s effectively useless, you didn’t really “weather” the storm

It’s funny how at the same time as No 10 is doing a “no, it’s not true that Morgan urged that they could weather it and keep Mandelson”, all the evidence is that Morgan is again going “it is fine, we can weather it”.

This is Curtis Yarvin's entire oeuvre of hundreds of thousands of words. Could have literally saved his and everyone's time with a three word sentence.

EXCLUSIVE: Peter Mandelson sought advice from Jeffrey Epstein on setting up his advisory firm, Global Counsel, including how to target potential new clients such as the Chinese government. www.ft.com/content/13d2...

There was a point in September where the government’s line was the bizarre one of “we didn’t know Mandelson thought Epstein was innocent” - surely the only circumstance in which it *would* be acceptable for someone to remain friends with a convicted child sex offender?

Exactly this. Starmer’s position is so bad because, even with his defence of being lied to, the question ‘what is the only acceptable degree of past intimacy with Epstein in a potential ambassador?’ demanded the answer ‘zero’.

Isn’t the point that you shouldn’t be mates with a convicted child sex offender anyway? Like the depth and the money should be add-ons

The thing with everyone having a substack is not just that the market couldn’t work but you don’t want everything to be personality driven. You want a space for reporters not to be the story. Like how is the pipeline for expert commentators going to grow anyway?

This is why 21st century racism is a guaranteed way to make yourself stupider, the 'need' to make an ancient prejudice stack up is the reverse of a performance-enhancing drug.

feels like Labour is stuck in the seventh circle of leadership contest hell, ie pingponging endlessly between 'he should go!' and 'but not be replaced by any of the people available in this actual life'

"The essential point is that money will always find weaknesses to exploit. This is what the Epsteins of this world understand." - fantastic column by @robertshrimsley.bsky.social:

Enemy Making A Mistake? Don't! Interrupt.

As regular as clockwork, Kemi Badenoch has a good (actually a great day yesterday) and starts listening to her own instincts again (a terrible move). Why is she giving a speech at the same time as the prime minister? Indeed, why is she giving a speech today *at all*?

If any other subscribers, like me, didn't get @stephenkb.bsky.social's excellent newsletter in their inbox as per today, it's here. Spot-on on Starmer - and Marty Supreme!

One reason why leaders should write the first draft of their own speeches is that it makes them less likely to say things where you go 'what does this actually mean?'

I think @stephenkb.bsky.social dubbed it “convenientism” - what’s the most immediately convenient thing to do to make a problem go away.

The only way Labour can win the next election is by governing well. That might not be enough, but it’s the bare minimum. The questions to be asking about any potential new PM are “what is their agenda and can they achieve it?” Not “do they currently poll well?” Or “can they handle a media round?”

here’s our 2,000 word report from June 2023: www.ft.com/content/0723...

Today's newsletter: I haven't seen this much anger from the PLP since the summer of 2016, when they tried to get rid of their leader as a result. Same positiion now, but impossible to tell if Starmer's fall will be short or long: