[first day as a shepherd] boss: where are you going? me: [pointing] star boss: what? why me: [shrugging] baby

Rare footage of St Paul’s Cathedral testing its giant flamethrower

Agree. He comes across as another smarmy politician (albeit a far more skilled one than Starmer). At this point I think Andy Burnham is the only one with any hope of success. His ambition is obvious but he does also have a cause.

My response to anything over the next two weeks

I’m cheered that Queer female culture is having a moment in music, moving to the mainstream. That’s a start. But I’m desperate to work out how you draw a mainstream audience to a Queer-girl romance in tv when the mainstream viewer - almost always straight women - want cute boys to fancy.

When 97% is 'no clear consensus', and 52% is 'the will of the people', it's time to face facts that Governments do what Governments want to do regardless of what their people actually want.

🚨 The UK government just published a breakdown of the responses to its consultation on AI & copyright: - 95% of respondents want AI companies to pay for their training data (made up of 88% saying strengthen copyright law, & 7% saying leave it as is) 🧵 1/2

Well, it’s a message.

Columnists! People who make videos of their own heads! Do you know nothing about autism & its complexity? Never read a word about it, but seen something about SEND reform and what Badenoch/Tice said the other day? Top tip: Just sound off about "overdiagnosis" and get another week's beer money

Badenoch says the Conservatives would want fewer “low value degrees” and many more apprenticeships. As ever with such announcements I will perhaps take it more seriously when the kids of government ministers and MPs are routinely doing apprenticeships and not degrees.

My ADHD diagnosis made me more employable. I can now focus on my work thanks to my meds. Very tired of this scaremongering

My @politicshome.bsky.social story from the summer about the AI-generated "I rise to speak" phenomenon in Parliament has made it into @nytimes.com 🇺🇸 (sadly, without credit)

the modern internet in a nutshell:

70% of the additional spending from removing the two-child limit will go to families who are in work. This is targeting support for low-income working households who are being priced out of a decent standard of living despite doing everything asked of them.

🚨And I wrote one of them. So come on and support new narrative comedy. Where else are you getting SIX brand new sitcoms?👇 www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/c...

Doing the Guardian budget calculator as a freelancer: First question: what is your annual income? OK I give up

The OBR says the rise in claims was linked to the cost of living crisis The way disabled people have been vilified over PIP, as if they were trying to play the system, was disgusting & shameful Hacks & commentators that engaged in the grotesque demonisation of disabled people should be ashamed.

Said with love but there is a tone deafness in the "just write your spec!" advice that seems to be totally ignored in the current climate. It works if you're repped. If reps are taking new clients. If places are buying A LOT. If rooms are staffing unknowns/lower levels. If not? It's a platitude.

Grand opening, grand closing. X quietly disabled a new feature that showed which country an account was posting from when it revealed that lots of popular right wing MAGA accounts were being run from foreign countries like India and Nigeria.

He’s surrounded by such wormy little losers at the White House that I think he was like wow a cool guy

Remember: the only way to save New York City from Donald Trump’s wrath is electing Andrew Cuomo.

I will say this for Bluesky's failings (and boy does it have them): they are at least in the main the result of humans seeing what humans are saying.

if Paddy McGuinness didn't exist, and I wrote something where someone was called "Paddy McGuinness", I would be tried in the Hague

FIlm adapting the weaker half of Wicked is weaker than film adapting the other half of Wicked, say critics. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

My phone calling my car an accessory when I plug it in is a power move

Printers and computers treat each other like they broke up the night before and you’re they’re mutual friend

Well, it's a little clearer now why billionaires are so invested in technology that produces better written emails.

TV conspiracies: we’ve hacked their computers but they’ve perfectly cleaned up the evidence! Real conspiracies: To: conspirator From: famous person Attachment: evidence.png

Starmer’s a disaster but I don’t see any good coming from replacing him like this. Needs to be someone with a completely different approach - a proper reckoning - not just shuffling the deckchairs with another doomed cabinet minister.

strange but true: in the late 20th century and even the early 21st, UK prime ministers would usually stay in office for as long as 2 or 3 years. often longer!

Once every 20 years or so, the director-general of the BBC is forced to resign for being insufficiently rightwing. Alastair Milne in 1987. Greg Dyke in 2004. Tim Davie in 2025. The great irony is that the BBC was in all cases profoundly biased towards established power. But just not biased enough …

Unless my theory bears out - that something big is coming down the tracks - this is more proof how terminally online our media and authority figures are, and how it’s rot their sense of perspective to the core.

These resignations (regardless of the individuals involved) are so dumb. No-one normal cares about a clip from Panorama that aired 4 years ago. This is a completely made-up scandal by the Telegraph. The pandering is maddening.

This might be the first spy who appears to be literally wearing one of those 'spy disguises' you could pick up in a joke shop in Newquay in 1993.

Glad that someone has finally taken responsibility for the appalling assault on democracy that was the Jan. 6 insurrection. Slightly confused that it's the Director-General of the BBC, but what do I know?

A great day for the golden rule of political analysis: when the right wins it is a resounding ideological victory that humiliates the left and when the left wins it is a precarious fluke that will surely end up humiliating the left. Conservatives are power’s landlords and the left merely tenants

big, multicultural cities - they're good!

Christ, he is supernaturally good at this.

I can’t stress this enough: you cannot understand politics without reading this paragraph about why there’s no such thing as a 1/3rd pound hamburger

"We have shown not only for the Netherlands but also for the world that it is possible to beat populist and extreme-right movements" - as.ft.com/r/72ac90f0-8...

This such a perfect patriotic 🇬🇧 Fleet Street cock-up. It's one thing for a news outlet to be duped by a competent hoaxer. Excruciating, yes, but there's a fairly long history of such fuck ups. But to put out a statement SAYING you'd been hoaxed but you'd actually just emailed the wrong guy?

Kinda says it all. @weisenthal.bsky.social $UPS

Apropos of doing some history research, my very petty wish is that we call the 1400s the 14th century, not the 15th (and so on)! Might be confusing for the 1st century but that was ages ago anyway

I know nothing about Dr Who, but, for Londoners, the phrase "Going For Dinner With Billie Piper" is the absolute best way to remember the order of the vertical streets running east to west in Soho (Greek, Frith, Dean, Wardour, Berwick, Poland) and has saved many a late night out

An embarrassingly obvious point, but... This. Is. Illegal. If anything like the rule of law were in force, Trump couldn't arbitrarily increase a tariff because he is annoyed. In important and increasing ways, the rule of law in the US no longer exists. www.cnn.com/2025/10/25/b...

The 1% - "don't be lazy, get a job" The 99% - "can I have a job?" The 1% -"no, AI will do your job"

Stephen Bush on the extraordinary draft legislation which Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, Matt Vickers, Katie Lam and backbench colleagues have proposed in parliament It is a proposal that would seek to deport around 5% of the resident population, including over a quarter of a million with ILR