Best Of

The budget is still two weeks ago and it feel like Reeves has been leaking rumours of tax grabs for months.

I am surprised there is any economy left in the UK.

The general impression is of a scandal-ridden retirement home with a country attached.

Reeves looks and sounds like a grudge-carrying HR apparatchik intent on closing down the afternoon tea service because of “colonial overtones”. Starmer appears to be essentially redundant, sequestered from reality and having outsourced his social media output to AI.

Lucy Powell appears have decided her role is essentially to speak in opposition to current leadership. Perhaps she should consider resignation!

Shall I put you down as a maybe?

Also, since everything is the Tories fault, they are actually still in power.

As for Polanski’s policy that he will “try to persuade Putin not to use nukes”, I don’t have words to fully articulate my contempt.

It’s about as plausible as Gandhi’s belief that if Jews went willingly to the gas chambers, it would represent a moral victory over Nazism.

There was an alt-history story, where the Nazis made it to India. The Nazi general listens to Ghandi, politely. Then orders him shot. In a “also, order more paper clips” kind of way.

Being meek did not save a single Jewish life, in WWII.

A distant relative got out of the camps, with his sister. Teenagers.

Somehow made it back to the family home in Poland.

The NKVD put them on a cattle car train for being “ruling class” - like the Germans the Russians wanted to decapitate Polish society to create their own ruling class.

So at the first stop, his sister distracted a Russian soldier. And then he bashed the soldiers head in with a piece of metal. And they left the train.

Ended up in America. The family has the piece of metal - broken fishplate I think.

The budget is still two weeks away and it feel like Reeves has been leaking rumours of tax grabs for months.

I am surprised there is any economy left in the UK.

The general impression is of a scandal-ridden retirement home with a country attached.

Reeves looks and sounds like a grudge-carrying HR apparatchik intent on closing down the afternoon tea service because of “colonial overtones”. Starmer appears to be essentially redundant, sequestered from reality and having outsourced his social media output to AI.

Lucy Powell appears have decided her role is essentially to speak in opposition to current leadership. Perhaps she should consider resignation!

We have had months of speculation and negative headlines which have seriously damaged sentiment and investment. We are in this mess because the budget last October really did not come close to addressing our problems. Spending, already well beyond what we can afford, was not controlled. No margins for disappointment were left. The productivity increases were no more than wishful thinking and not clearly linked to any actual policies. The cuts that were floated were not delivered because the Labour party as a group are wholly delusional and Starmer is weak, bordering on pathetic.

So, it became inevitable that rather than setting us up for the Parliament we would have to go through the same again 13 months later. And what is truly depressing is that we look like repeating the exercise with public spending continuing to rise faster than the economy can grow or throw off tax receipts. So we face the risk of another repeat next year and all the negative headlines and sentiment all over again.

We need substantial decreases in borrowing, so much that it requires both tax increases and spending cuts. Seriously difficult as NATO falls apart, the price of borrowing from the market continues to increase sharply on rolled over debt and the NHS, as usual, is falling apart. We need a Chancellor who is willing to be both honest and educational with the British people. Reeves is not that Chancellor and Starmer is not the PM to demand it.

In terms of defection watch, it is very much an insiders market. Also more likely to be some obscure back-bencher than someone like Braverman.

There may also be other defections, for example Labour to Green, or Your Party to Green, Your Party seeming to be as rancourous as Reform.

One could posit a correlation between more ideological politics and more infighting, on the basis that practical, moderate pragmatic politicians are more used to compromises with others and with the world as it actually is.

The demise of the Tory Party essentially derives from the triumph of ideology over pragmatism, the irony being that its replacement on the right looks more ideological still - and may of course finish up going the same way.

@isam posted recently about his bad bet on Starmer winning seats last year, because Starmer is so lacking in either charisma or coherence. An example perhaps of the betting corollory to the stock market aphorism "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

I think we all know that Farage will be a disaster as PM but that doesnt mean that he won't get the gig. Sensible Tories would never support him in the event of a Reform minority government. It would be the end of them.

(If you are triggered by what appears to be my catchphrase, look away now)

What the "Starmer is awful, he'll never be PM" bet missed was that someone had to win in 2024, and everyone else was clearly even worse. That was as true on the Labour benches as in the other parties.

Starmer has no fans, which is why none of his fans have tried to explain his poor polling. Heck, I don't think he expected, or particularly wanted, to be PM in 2020. It was only the multiple pileup of clown cars by the Conservatives that gave him the opportunity. And that opportunity was always a chalice with unusual skull-and-crossbones markings.

Right now, his job is to absorb as much of the toxicity heading the British government's way, and see which of the next generation of ministers is any good. They can take over in 2028, and then the game is afoot again.

Until then, we all have to wait. Unfortunate for us, and for him, but there we are.

Well, I had the bet before partygate was revealed for the second time (the first was in The Times the day after the cake, but no one cared then), so the incumbent had a great chance of winning. I ran into a black swan which allowed Starmer a walkover, but it happens

Which black swan? There was a whole flock of them surely?

The collective nouns for swans in the UK vary depending on their location: a bevy or herd for swans on the ground, a bank for those at the water's edge, and a wedge for those in flight. Other terms include a flight or game.

Not a flock.

It is a well-known fact that 99 per cent of collective nouns were made up by bored lexicographers at the OUP staff Christmas party. No-one in real life talks about a murder of crows or a gate of former prime ministers.

You need to use the correct proper noun when referring to multiple lexicographers: it's a clatter of lexicographers.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

"For the Fallen" by Laurence Binyon, 1914.

Lest we forget.

Amen to that.

As direct memories of war fade in the UK, with only 8,000 WWII veterans still alive and with more recent British wars fought only by professional armies, sadly for many of us war has been a little too close to home in the last few years.


War memorial in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. August 2025, in a city of 250,000 to the West of Kiev outside the war zone.

There’s more than 500 photographs on display, many of them younger than me, many of them young enough to be my sons, and I say a prayer for them today.

Suella might still harbour thoughts of leading the Conservative Party back into power.

She’s a Buddhist (albeit not a very good one). They’re not allowed to do drugs.

Cynics would say that Suella is following Boris's wait and see approach, his cakeism, his two articles, until it is clear whether her best chance is to replace Nige or Kemi.

Truss can be blamed for many things, but perhaps the worst is giving succour to the absolute no-marks who think they have a chance of becoming party leaders.

There are an infinite number of universes. In none of them will Suella Braverman ever lead a political party.

Although Alexander Johnson set the precedent. He kicked out all the talent (well Tories I approved of) and promoted only chaff.

If you approved of them, they weren't Tories!