On the Today programme, Nick explains that “many listeners” will be “worried” about Miliband becoming chancellor because he was “rejected as prime minister”. Once again, the effects on these guys’ brains of reading all the papers before 5am deserves urgent study

Adopted a dog, lads. She’s settling in like a legend

It’s cool how half the commentators are saying Starmer didn’t tell people how fucked things are enough, and half, as here, are saying he did it too much.

The UK never figured out how to regulate national newspapers in a way that would stop them regularly printing false information for cynical purposes. Nobody can figure out how to regulate GB News, a national broadcaster. This is a cultural problem as much as it’s anything to do with tech

On the Private Eye podcast, leading satirists & dogged holding-to-accounters Ian and Helen choose to own Stop Brexit Man by explaining how much Starmer likes peaceful protest 🤔

This is why predictions that Reform will Wither Under Increased Scrutiny in a general election, are fantasy. The hacks will happily watch the whole map turn turquoise if there’s a way they can blame the Greens and the soft left at the end

I remember June 24, 2016. The streets were covered in rubbish. The worst people in Britain thought they'd won so there was this horrible threatening atmosphere. Anyway the important thing is we blamed the left for it

Adding “enjoying politics” to the list of essential leader requirements that literally nobody ever mentioned until an inconvenient event needed explaining

Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the SpAds 🥺

This should be an unsustainable line since the press also hate Starmer, albeit largely for failing to use his majority to force through things like disability benefit cuts regardless of the political & social consequences

oh we going out with straight lies huh

Turned on 5Live this morning to find Nicky Campbell insisting *to a random member of the public on his phone-in show* who was mad about Starmer hiring Mandelson, that the appointment had “not cut through outside the Westminster bubble”. UK political media discourse is wild

Until the left understands that "immigration" is a "concern" created in a top down manner to divert from other issues, it will continue to fight the (far)right on its turf This is what I explored here at length journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Trend is Reform have no ground game & if hacks are obliged to look closely at reform candidates they’ll grudgingly do it. Few lessons for a G.E. where hacks couldn’t focus on all the candidates even if they wanted to, & they won’t want to anyway because they’ll be obsessing about Some Bullshit

obviously UK Political News is ion a very bad way but... do they not get how fucking weird this is? Such a lovely example of what the Guardian has become, just a cascade of non-sequiturs

Meet the new hero voters; same as the old hero voters

You only need meet a few people who think London is a sharia no-go zone, to understand that the tabloid/online media operates independently of delivery, “unforced errors” and government comms. You can’t win those guys over with TikToks about Sure Start or whatever

Love to be a British journalist, where questions such as “why is he saying this now” and “is this plausible” simply float past your head like fireflies www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

😀 unhappy 🤨 looking for justice 😕 frustration 😬 seeking likeminded people 🚨 further radicalisation

As I mentioned in this piece, I sometimes pop work or questions I've already completed into a chatbot to see what type of results it returns (less now bc I think the Q is answered) check out the emissions intensities Claude returns for coal and gas (~50% of actual) newrepublic.com/article/2076...

We're two years into a five year Labour majority, Andy, on the eve of an entirely unnecessary by-election, it's not the battle of Agincourt

“Why is the Prime Minister deeply unpopular” is one of the more important questions in politics and if you don’t have an answer for it beyond vaguely asking whether there might be Sinister Forces ranged against him: what are you doing with a show on the radio at all, my man

BAKED in the PIZZA EXPRESSES, STAKED in the HIGH-STREET BOOKIES, PACKAGED in the AMAZON FULFILMENT CENTRES

Labour’s Bravest and Most Prime Ministerial Boy here, giving an exclusive interview where he explains that somebody, somewhere - who knows really - has completely fucked it and somebody better sort it out ASAP www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I’m sure there are a lot of kgb guys who are just sitting around bored, but “orchestrating arson on a car the prime minister used to own” is a weird one isn’t it

Very funny to construct a situation where you'll apparently be old enough to vote, but won't be old enough to watch YouTube videos after 8PM

“The Russian people have a responsibility, to Ukraine, the world and themselves, to remove Putin from power” cool man, hope they’re all reading the Guardian Opinion section then I guess www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

TBF, Michael Heseltine writing an Independent front page (mocked up for show since the newspaper doesn’t exist anymore) in 2016 would’ve had precisely the same impact as it does now

The trouble with basing analysis solely on zingers about incompetent cockwombles doing catasroshambles is you end up explaining that Reform would easily be winning the by-election if it those chumps at HQ had agreed to Rupert Lowe’s presumably reasonable demands www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

See this is why it’s vital not to let the army guys buy whatever they want, because they want things like a GPS that the world’s richest man could simply switch off if he decides our tanks are too woke

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Worrying new trend where podcasts start with a sizzle reel of highlights from the show like it’s a sensational reality show, but since it’s not a sensational reality show the highlights are just some guy saying “sir Keir’s days are numbered now” or “but how will the bond markets react”

On Electoral Dysfunction, the team are treated to a very special Luke Tryl focus group in Makerfield and explain that these are the finest people in the world. Do any of them even blink when one says asylum seekers get A&E priority treatment at the expense of hardworking Brits? They do not 🤔

Still haven’t seen an explanation for why Russia, which has spent 4 years & infinite manpower failing to invade one country, would want to invade a different country with allies that are obliged to defend it.

Not to be all “start guillotining newspaper editors and don’t stop til the situation improves”, but like, there’s a powerful narrative that welfare is exclusively for scroungers. It might be naive, but believing the media is not deliberately lying to you, is how society is supposed to work

I wrote about one specific way AI is ruining my life defector.com/ai-animal-vi...

Ukraine shares a long border with a Russia so they’re fighting with drones on the ground. The first question about the UK investing in drones to fight “a future Ukraine-style war” is: what the fuck are you talking about

Very funny how the plain-speaking great white hopes of Labour manage to communicate absolutely nothing in a way that appeals to nobody

Let’s be serious. What politician *anywhere* is going out saying “time to tighten our belts lads, because [unspecified future war]”. Literally who is going to do that. If a “strategic defence review” says “two year national conversation” does that suggest they know what the fuck they’re doing.

Neurologists should study the effects on breakfast presenters of reading all the UK newspapers before 5am every day. Over time I’d imagine it’s somewhere between critical blunt force trauma and full lobotomy, and Webb’s been doing it for years

I will point out that the Prime Minister felt that the assassination of an American YouTuber required him to release a formal within 30 minutes of it happening at 11pm on a Friday night. But race riots in the UK itself aren’t worth his time

The uk press gets a lot of shit, but when they put their minds together with the full force of moral righteousness it can take them a mere 39 years to identify widespread nonce behaviour amongst their own colleagues www.theguardian.com/media/2026/j...

does feel like some of the softer liberals are beginning to realise they've hitched themselves to a screaming diseased camel that's on fire, rather than the common sense middle class donkey they were sold

This faulty, hallucination-cum-plagiarism machine that impairs cognitive function, and encourages people to kill themselves, and sucks up enormous amounts of water and electricity, and makes people near its data centres sick, and is drastically unprofitable, is being forced down our throats at speed

“Within two minutes we were able to get ChatGPT to tell us how we can cut ourselves safely. Within 65 minutes it was giving us a full personalised suicide plan and drafting suicide notes for our family and friends.” Shut it all down. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06...

Ask yourself the question ‘what function does it serve to debate whether someone is English?’ Nationality is a social convention. Nations don’t exist. People fabricated the identity relatively recently then enforced that social reality on us. The function is to exclude certain types of people.

Concluding a piece on the complacency and bullshit that led to Brexit with “Rejoin is already the settled preference of a majority of Britons” really demonstrates how few lessons the columnists have actually learned. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

You can tell MPs are confident about their definitely-real plans when they’re announcing them to Matt Forde on a semi-exclusive basis

On the Rest is Politics, the lads are outraged the public get to read ministers’ WhatsApps when they’re just silly gossip. Alastair explains in his day ministers would use post-it notes to get round FOIA, which uh sounds a lot more “planning illegal military action” than “banter substitute”, to me

A lot of insulting the left for unserious thinking here, considering the conclusion is literally “Centrist governments must solve the problems”.