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@Steven_Swinford
Exclusive:

I'm told that Lord Mandelson used his private BT internet email address to correspond **directly** with the most senior people in government, including Gordon Brown

We initially thought he forwarded government emails to his BT internet account then passed them on to Epstein

In fact two senior government sources say he was corresponding with ministers and officials using his BT internet account. The messages went directly to his Blackberry, and he sent them straight on to Epstein

That email address is now defunct and the Cabinet Office has no was of retrieving the messages on it

It sounds like a pretty extraordinary security breach, with fundamental implications for government record-keeping

It inherently limits the extent of any investigation by the Cabinet Secretary

For example, the Cabinet Office has today told police that the emails in the Epstein cache show evidence that market-sensitive information being passed to Epstein.

But without the Epstein files, it would have no evidence of its own

Convenient.

It's amazing how despite the great expense on IT our politicians are always getting their Twitter accounts hacked, losing their phones, data being deleted, and coincidentally this seems to happen most often when they are in trouble.

Also interesting that the powers that be love this idea of inserting backdoors into private messaging and id card systems, but obviously it will only be for use against the plebs, sorry terrorists.

@Steven_Swinford
BREAKING:

Sir Keir Starmer has now asked officials to draft legislation to remove Lord Mandelson's peerage

On Monday the government argued that legislation was too complex, highlighting the fact it does not have a majority in the Lords. It suggested the approach would be too complex

Starmer has now changed that position and is asking his officials to move 'at pace'. His spokesman said he is 'appalled' by the latest revelations

Always behind the curve.

Starmer's no good at politics.

To be fair they only took 1 day this time, rather than a week / month claiming can't be done, all too hard, if only, then to U-turn.

If anyone wants a political news feed that doesn’t mention Mandelson at all today, may I recommend Southam Observer’s BlueSky account

Gosh - Southam Observer! Haven't heard from him for years - what;s his particular angle these days?

His angle is “being completely ignored by everyone, because he’s on Bluesky, which is a desolate bleakscape for a few stupid midwit lefties, who flounced off X and then realised no one was going to follow them, because they are boring wankers. But some of them are too proud to shamefully return, even tho they left behind 20,000 followers on X and now have 48 annoying followers on Bluesky”

X remains a hub for specific niches like sports betting and politics but is slowly dying and is a bit of a cess pit.
Bluesky is growing rapidly and is noted for having higher engagement in specialised communities, particularly within scientific research and academia.

X average IQ 80?
Bluesky average IQ 125?
Chacun à son goût

There was an article last month that Threads now has more DAU on mobile than Twitter/X, presumably it has caught on due to the link to Instagram.

Your point about the niches is correct, a lot of the most interesting people (for me at least) have abandoned Twitter. I think the whole social media microblogging space has become a lot more fragmented, there's no clear winner, and Twitter is less relevant than it used to be for a lot of people.

No, Its because once you have joined you can't leave and Instagram pesters you to join, and it will auto repost to Threads. So loads of people just leave it set like that. I have seen loads of people who have their Instagram set on private not realising they are auto posting to a public Threads account. Have had to tell a number of people of this as they were unaware as they never actually use Threads.

Sure DAU is a crude metric, so I'm not even arguing that Threads is really bigger, just that by one measure at least it might have already caught up with Twitter.

10% of all global threads traffic is here in Taiwan. Sometimes things just take off.

Another example of this phenomenon, from the early 2000s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut

Yeah people who say "I don't know anyone who uses..." are generally wrong when they draw the conclusion that therefore nobody uses whatever. It's like Americans who don't get that WhatsApp is by far the largest and most used messaging service, because they are mainly using iMessage by default within their circles.

Peter Mandelson is utterly disgraced, could end up in prison and breathtaking revelations are damaging Labour and a PM who made him our man in Washington. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and ex-wife Sarah Ferguson could bring down the monarchy.

https://x.com/Kevin_Maguire/status/2018629239185035729?s=20

Now remind me again Kev about McBride and attending those meetings planning to set up a fake news website to smear Osborne and alike. The brass neck of these people.

I don’t think it will bring down the monarchy but I do think the monarchy more now than at any time relies very heavily on the next generation of William, Kate and their family and for their accession to be seen as a significant renewal and page turn.

If they’re not already thinking about Crown revenues, how the Duchies operate, who is/isn’t a working royal, how the titles get dished out and who is on the payroll, they need to be.

Charles has been doing that for over three years.

The Queen's idea was you had lots of royals, most of them fairly part-time, making them highly visible and in all parts of national life, and spread the money thinly to make it work.

Charles' idea is to have just a few senior working royals, and use the money to raise their profile and really show an impact. That's one reason he had a big falling out with Harry (and quite possibly another reason why he fell out with Andy, although it doesn't seem they ever got on well). He's pruned the family to essentially himself, Camilla, William and Katherine, Anne and Edward (who seems to have a special role with the DofE award).

His approach is logical and has given a convenient pretext to chop out some very dead wood, but comes with drawbacks. When he and Catherine both had cancer an awful lot of the burden of keeping things going fell on Camilla and Anne, neither of whom are spring chickens. And when in the next few years they either snuff it or retire a huge amount will fall on William and his family.

I think that’s true, but Charles is simply by virtue of his age and upbringing more closely connected to the monarchy as his mother knew it (never complain, never explain, keep doing things as you have been and don’t rock the boat too much unless you absolutely must). I think that approach is dying in an age of much less deference and with the huge personal respect people bore for QEII no longer in play. Charles can play a role in that transition, but he simply cannot be seen as a new broom.

Every financial institution in the UK has been spending the last few days checking to see if they’ve had any emails to/from Lord Mandelson and Mr Epstein.

Er...they've only thought to check for emails from Epstein *in the last few days?*

Seriously?

It’s more of a recheck and the fact that some new email addresses have come to light.

I'm very pleased to hear it.

I would hate to think my opinion of bankers' morals could go lower.

You sweet innocent child, next you’ll be saying bankers also have ethics.

I thought they mostly hung out in Middlesex?

So this is a modern day Bill of Attainder against Lord Mandelson, who is yet to be convicted, let alone charged.

A good defence team were it come to trial could argue this is so prejudicial against their client that he couldn’t get a fair trial.


Kemi Badenoch is right to oppose such legislation.

If specific legislation is fine for Keir Starmer's pension then it's fine for removing Mandelson's peerage.

Badenoch according to the Guardian is refusing to back general non specific legislation for all

That is why Starmer is going down this route to avoid delay by Tories in HoL

General non specific legislation for all would amount to a power grab by Number 10. Badenoch is right to force them into dealing with Mandelson specifically.

@Steven_Swinford
Exclusive:

I'm told that Lord Mandelson used his private BT internet email address to correspond **directly** with the most senior people in government, including Gordon Brown

We initially thought he forwarded government emails to his BT internet account then passed them on to Epstein

In fact two senior government sources say he was corresponding with ministers and officials using his BT internet account. The messages went directly to his Blackberry, and he sent them straight on to Epstein

That email address is now defunct and the Cabinet Office has no was of retrieving the messages on it

It sounds like a pretty extraordinary security breach, with fundamental implications for government record-keeping

It inherently limits the extent of any investigation by the Cabinet Secretary

For example, the Cabinet Office has today told police that the emails in the Epstein cache show evidence that market-sensitive information being passed to Epstein.

But without the Epstein files, it would have no evidence of its own

Emails are postcards sent through the ether that every server in the path can read.

I'd be surprised if there wasn't another copy somewhere in an old backup.

At least some of the orgs who have copies of those messages won't want to admit they have copies of those messages.