Best Of

I'd think SKS would want to withdraw for a while to lick his wounds and recover. It isn't as though he willingly made way for a successor. Expecting him to turn up at Cabinet like a former owner become a guest seems a bit of a stretch.

I did note that Burnham could keep Cooper at the Foreign Office for a bit then Starmer takes over, so it doesn't have to be immediate.

Starmer is far more likely to end up at NATO in my opinion

Dear God, no, he'd be awful. He should never be in an important job that involves people's lives. He's a lawyer. Let him go back to that. He can charge a lot of money for doing things that are checked by others, constrained by the law, overseen by a judge, and assessed by a jury. That way he will cause minimum damage.

Oh it keeps getting better. Russian central bank admits to printing 5trn roubles (£25bn or so, c.2.5% of GDP) and says more is coming. Stock market falling.

https://x.com/realjakebroe/status/2069595528351092773

That might explain the queues at the banks we saw earlier.

Add the Moscow refinery being totally shut down at least into 2027, and they’re not having the best of weeks!

Sevastopol and Kerch are on fire as well.

Never mind.

Slowly - then all at once.

The oligarchs are going to be selling the Big Issue at this rate.

I am waiting for China to make a move - buying its old far-Russian territories at a few kopecks on the rouble.

It wouldn’t be much of a surprise to see the Chinese invade the mountains towards Vladivostok and Irkutsk at this point, there’s no way Russia has anything resembling an army or air defences in the Far East.

What would be the price to Xi of feeding Moscow this winter?

Chinese vessels delivering food are unlikely to be targeted by Ukraine. Although as long as it is not to Crimea...

Xi has no need to go to war with Russia. It could all go horribly nuclear, and frankly the Chinese have no need to take any risks. The coffers in Beijing are full with money doing nothing. The Chinese might as well put it use it to secure historic lands around Vladivostok. That could be Xi's legacy, rather than the trauma of untold millions of dead taking Taiwan by force in the age of the sea drones.

Vaguely on-topic - I have just seen the following on fb from Alistair Carmichael (I've no idea why the algorithm thought I should follow him, but I'm interested nonetheless) - it may be relevant to @IanB2 :

I have written to Europcar this week on behalf of constituents who were barred from renting a car in Glasgow without a passport, being told that this was because they were from a “British island”.
They were later told that this is defined as “one who, at the time of rental, is not resident in the United Kingdom or Northern Ireland. Included in this definition are residents of the Shetland, Orkneys, Hebrides, Isle of Man, Isle of Scilly, Channel Islands and the Isle of Wight.”
This is an utterly bizarre policy on the part of Europcar. At best it is a mistake, but one which demonstrates woeful ignorance on the part of the company or their staff about the basic composition of the United Kingdom. At worst it is intentional and wholly unjustified discrimination against people from island communities.
Shetland is as much a part of the United Kingdom as anywhere else. It is unclear why residents of any UK island community – whether Shetland, Orkney or indeed the Isle of Wight – should be treated differently from residents of mainland communities when hiring a vehicle within the UK.
There is no justification for islanders to be treated less favourably or subjected to unclear and unjustified requirements when accessing services on the mainland. I shall expect a clear explanation from Europcar on these points – and an apology to my constituents – in the coming days.

I can see Starmer coming back into government to be FS at some point but I agree with @Barnesian that he's just going to be too hurt to do that right now. Plus he will have a biography to write.

My guess is that a Burnham government, events allowing, will be much more domestically focused than Starmer proved to be. I can see him leaving the position alone.

I too expect Burnham to be less focused on 'abroad' than Starmer was.

My most fervent hope is that he gets it right with the US president. By which I mean he makes no effort with him whatsoever. Ignores him to the greatest extent possible. If he calls, ok take it, but pretty much nothing else. No response (positive or negative) to tweets or media comments. No squirmy fake 'chemistry'. No outgoing calls. No trip to Washington. No PM/Prez meetings at all other than what can't be avoided at summits. No entreaties on trade. No attempts to pander or to 'manage' on foreign or defence matters. Just put that 100% monstrosity of an individual in the fridge and close the door.

I'll be judging our new Labour PM on this more than anything. If he does it as above I'll be impressed and delighted. If he doesn't, if it's the same old same old, I'll be sad and disappointed.

That you hate his guts, doesn’t make him go away. Trump is still the 800lb gorilla in the room.

“He doesn’t even want to meet me, so if he doesn’t drop his country’s gratuitous attacks on American tech companies he can expect tariffs on British imports to rise from 5% to 50% next month. Sorry about all of those fancy cars and the Scotch whisky industry, where the US is the largest export market by far.”

Duplicate and in using vf

Yeah it’s still doing that. Says error but posts anyway, often 404s when refreshing on vf.pb.com.

Looks like the Vanilla/Cloudflare interface is screwed, perhaps a failed server in the pool that doesn’t show as actually failed.

I'm thinking about dumping Vanilla, and just going full self hosted.

Brave but it shouldn't be that difficult nowadays..

When PB was first started, we used standard Wordpress comments.

As the site got more popular, though, it became unusable. In particular, it was very slow, and the site was absolutely spammed with adverts for certain pharmaceuticals that I know no PBer would ever need.

So, we changed first to Disqus (until the great threading disaster of 2011), and then Vanilla.

Candidly, Vanilla is expensive, and fragile. It does not work well with Cloudflare, and we've been getting duplicated posts.

And PB is now on a fairly high performance server in Finland. I suspect that it would be easily capable of handling comments on Wordpress. And I'm equally sure that spam management, etc is all much better.

So... when I next get a day off, I will almost certainly transition us over.

And that post, posted twice!

I know, that made me laugh too.

Duplicate and in using vf

Yeah it’s still doing that. Says error but posts anyway, often 404s when refreshing on vf.pb.com.

Looks like the Vanilla/Cloudflare interface is screwed, perhaps a failed server in the pool that doesn’t show as actually failed.

I'm thinking about dumping Vanilla, and just going full self hosted.

Brave but it shouldn't be that difficult nowadays..

When PB was first started, we used standard Wordpress comments.

As the site got more popular, though, it became unusable. In particular, it was very slow, and the site was absolutely spammed with adverts for certain pharmaceuticals that I know no PBer would ever need.

So, we changed first to Disqus (until the great threading disaster of 2011), and then Vanilla.

Candidly, Vanilla is expensive, and fragile. It does not work well with Cloudflare, and we've been getting duplicated posts.

And PB is now on a fairly high performance server in Finland. I suspect that it would be easily capable of handling comments on Wordpress. And I'm equally sure that spam management, etc is all much better.

So... when I next get a day off, I will almost certainly transition us over.

Duplicate and in using vf

Yeah it’s still doing that. Says error but posts anyway, often 404s when refreshing on vf.pb.com.

Looks like the Vanilla/Cloudflare interface is screwed, perhaps a failed server in the pool that doesn’t show as actually failed.

I'm thinking about dumping Vanilla, and just going full self hosted.

Brave but it shouldn't be that difficult nowadays..

When PB was first started, we used standard Wordpress comments.

As the site got more popular, though, it became unusable. In particular, it was very slow, and the site was absolutely spammed with adverts for certain pharmaceuticals that I know no PBer would ever need.

So, we changed first to Disqus (until the great threading disaster of 2011), and then Vanilla.

Candidly, Vanilla is expensive, and fragile. It does not work well with Cloudflare, and we've been getting duplicated posts.

And PB is now on a fairly high performance server in Finland. I suspect that it would be easily capable of handling comments on Wordpress. And I'm equally sure that spam management, etc is all much better.

So... when I next get a day off, I will almost certainly transition us over.

What duplicates?

Seriously, your efforts are much appreciated - if you need a call for funds just let us know*

(*Malc's minted, I believe ;-) )