Best Of

@George_Osborne
Hi, some personal news - I’m changing job. I recently asked myself the question: what’s the most exciting and promising company in the world right now? The answer I believe is OpenAI. So it’s a privilege to be going to work for OpenAI as managing director and head of OpenAI for countries, based here in London. In my conversations with Sam Altman, Brad Lightcap, and other senior colleagues, it’s clear they are exceptionally impressive leaders and that they care very deeply about their mission to ensure the power of artificial intelligence is developed responsibly, and the benefits are felt by all. That’s exactly what the OpenAI for Countries initiative intends to achieve, helping societies around the world share the opportunity this powerful technology brings. Am honorored to join the team.

Narrator: Last week Osborne failed to secure the chairmanship of HSBC.

Just to be clear, we used to get this man's skills and efforts for about £200k a year. Theresa May did a lot of incredibly stupid and damaging things but driving Osborne out of politics was arguably the most damaging.

Jeremy Hunt, a former Chancellor himself, commended Osborne for pinning blame for the GFC on Labour but said the politician he'd most changed his mind about was the ‘brilliant’ Gordon Brown.

NYT article: The Trump administration intervened to get Andrew Tate released from custody in Romania.

Mr. Tate and his brother, Tristan, swaggering influencers in the so-called manosphere, had been under criminal investigation in Romania since 2022, accused of coercing women into pornography. Andrew was also accused of rape and of having sex with and beating a 15-year-old. The brothers, American and British citizens, had been barred from leaving Romania while prosecutors built their case.
Now, in a Jan. 14 text message, Mr. Tate indicated that help was on the way.
“I had word from The Trump admin that theyre on top of things,” Mr. Tate wrote to someone close to him, in a message reviewed by The New York Times. “Ive been told ill be free soon but Trump needs to see me in Miami,” he added.
The next month, an extraordinary order came down from the highest levels of the Romanian government, a Times investigation found. The prosecutors were told to find a compromise with the Tates. Despite their misgivings, they lifted the travel restrictions, a move that Romania’s prime minister thought would appease the Trump administration.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/us/andrew-tate-barron-trump-romania.html

(No full article link - sorry.)

@PippaCrerar

EXCL: An agreement to rejoin Erasmus – the EU’s student exchange programme – set to be announced on Wednesday as part of UK government’s drive towards closer relations with Brussels.

https://x.com/PippaCrerar/status/2000992877443231788?s=20

Is this where we give the EU what they want and they fuck us up the ass.

SKS would pay full price for a Dominos pizza

Brexit was just a spiteful destruction of opportunity voted for by people who'd had their time and had no plan for the aftermath.
It's been left to the people who voted against it to make the best of the mess left behind, turns out that means trying to recover the benefits at greater cost as was said at the time.
Suck it up.

Standard drivel.

Brexit opened doors. Doors can allow you to leave the house, have fun, get a job, or meet the love of your life. Or you can stand at the threshold in the stiff breeze rooted to the spot, reminiscing about how great it was when the door was closed.

Now that's the standard drivel.

Back to his lawyerly brilliance:

“Every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arms-length bodies that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be"

https://x.com/politlcsuk/status/2000594550599864781

If only he was the PM with a large majority, who might be in a position to actually do something about the regulatory and bureaucratic overload?

Having a large majority doesn't free you from public law obligations around due process, consultation, taking full account of objections and so on.

Now, you could loosen some of those constraints - but that in itself is a project that detracts from your main agenda. Further, rather like the filibuster in the US, a sensible politician realises majorities come and go, and reducing friction for yourself today does so for your opponent tomorrow.

So it’s AOK for it took take multiple months to get permission to replace one (1) window and require £10,000+ to be spent on consultants to file the complex application?

Don’t expect any actual housing to be built, then.

That's a rather illogical inference. The opposite equivalent would be something like, "oh so you'd be totally fine with abolishing the civil service in favour of rule by PM diktat then, would you?"

If you are resisting change to the planning and regulation, then you are in favour of the £16,000, multi-year, window replacement.

That’s what is happening right now.

Well you'll be pleased to know I'm not. It's clearly an area in the spotlights for a shake up and rightly so. Long overdue.

Bet Norfolk agrees too but I mustn't presume.

How about we aim for just doubling the cost of the window, so around £10K and 6 months to get it done?

Or is that too much anarchism?

Just put that window in, end of. It's not rocket science. It's just basic glaziership.

So you want to install a window without a study to consider its effect on post colonial equality?

Heartless fascist.

I most certainly do want to cover the post colonial equality ramifications but let's get that off the critical path of installing the actual window. We'll be here until 2050 with this gaping hole otherwise.

We should probably wait for the details of the Erasmus deal first before jumping to sneer about it.

The old deal *was* greatly to the benefit of the EU, although the flip-side I suppose was the influx of smart, talented young Europeans into the British workforce.

We're probably going to end up paying £3bn per year or something mad like that with this lot in charge of negotiations.

Also residents of the Isle of Wight need to pay attention. They could end up being in France before they know it.

I thought you were in favour of small boat returns?

Nope. I am in favour of abolishing the right to asylum. We can then give asylum to anyone we choose, such as Ukrainians or Hong Kong Chinese but are under no obligation to accept anyone who has been unlucky enough to be born in some hell hole or thinks they can have a better life here. It needs to become our choice and when it does nearly all of the current chaos of never ending applications, appeals and lack of enforcement of hard won decisions comes to an end.

a

So the BBC is going to fight - fight like hell - and I'll be there with them. They should crowdfund the cost of the case. Allow people to contribute if they are so inclined. Put me down for £500. I'll give up nuts for a year. It's a no brainer.

There was some stuff from Newsmax on the BBC this morning saying both that the BBC couldn't afford to fight the case (£50m plus) versus settling (maybe £10-15m) .. and that they would be embarrassed by the discovery process.

I'm with you in saying bollocks to that.
The BBC's own right to discovery is likely to be very interesting in what it might turn up. And I'm happy to help pay to defend such a transparently nonsense lawsuit.

It's important, I think. People talk a lot about "British values" and if not giving in to extortion by malevolent foreigners isn't one of them it jolly well should be. I also like the calculus of it. IMO the potential damage to Donald Trump of having this litigated in open court in the US is greater than that to the BBC.

I'm on the side of freedom of speech here, and in that case that means I'm 100% behind the BBC in this case.

US law should be on their side here too - far more than if the case was going to be heard in the libel capital of the world, London...

They should not settle, Trump has an extraordinarily high bar to pass in the US court system. And any halfway competent attorney ought to be able to defend them quite honestly.

Newsmax guy agreed that it was a weak case, but seemed to think we'd just settle on pragmatic (ie monetary) grounds, since a successful defence might still cost £50m plus.
I guess someone working for Newmax places very little value on journalistic independence, so he might even have been commenting honestly.

BBC v Trump

Like Neil Hamilton v Al Fayed.

Can’t they both lose ?

However anything that undermines the license fee is all well and good.

Just for you.

https://x.com/EdwardJDavey/status/2000850649064546505
Keir Starmer needs to stand up for the BBC against Trump's outrageous $5bn lawsuit and protect licence fee payers from being hit in the pocket.

Trump wants to interfere in our democracy and undermine our national broadcaster. We cannot let him.

So Ed Davey has no comment to make on the actual merits of the case, he just reflexively says BBCGood and OrangeManBad.

What merits of the case could Trump possibly have? I mean Davey really doesn't have to go into analysis mode on this

He said to march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically”, but the BBC said that he said march to the Capitol “and fight like Hell”.

Given that there was actually a disturbance at the Capitol after the event at which he spoke, a reputable journalist might want to make sure that his words were accurately reported.

The actual quote is

I said something's wrong here, something is really wrong, can have happened.

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.

Trump used the word fight twenty times. Is it plausible he wasn't inciting the mob?

The problem is getting the two facts to be admitted

- Trump incited the Jan 6 riot and attempted to steal the Presidency by pushing the VP to not validate the result.
- The BBC fucked up in editing the speech

Bit like Alison Rose and Coutts losing a truth telling competition with Nigel Fucking Farage. As a result of which they had to make Farage rich enough to have a Coutts account again.

Wronging a Wong'un Doesn't Make A Right.

I think the BBC should fight the Trump suit, by the way.

I think the BBC has said as much itself.
Senior directors have resigned, and it has apologised.

That ought to be the end of the matter, since the edit was bad journalism, not libel.

Paying damages would be admitting something which is not true, and would be as bad if not worse than the original mistake.

a

Just had the interesting experience of being present for a rare political discussion among a couple of my older relatives, which gave me a different peception on things. Key details included:

• The government is deliberately trying to destroy the NHS (reasons unclear)
  
• Politicians don't care about old people (that's news to me)
  
• Older people should not have to pay tax (naturally)
  
• Colonel Gaddafi did a lot of good actually (ok, that was a surprising inclusion)
  
• Roads used to be better (might be true for all I know)
  

Interesting indeed. I'm old and I wouldn't agree with any of those (except to say I know little of Col. Gaddafi and for all I know he may have been a genial chap to his friends).

After Gaddafi rather a lot of Libyans migrated to the U.K…

Wasn't Stalin supposed to be a doting uncle or similar?

Stalin became Uncle Joe as soon as Hitler invaded and the USSR became our besties.

Ah, I'd forgotten the 'Uncle Joe' title, but I thought I'd read he was genuinely fond of children, or animals, or something very touchy-feely; which somehow made up for all the mass slaughter.

Stalin was ladykiller when young, and a complete party animal.

Calling a man who sexually assaulted 13 year old girls 'a ladykiller' is pushing it a bit.

He killed lots of ladies, so there's that.