Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
Undo everything Brown did is the most attractive pitch I’ve heard from Reform.
So if they are starting from 1997, the very first they are going to do would be take control of interest rates away from the Bank of England.
Except, being Reform, they won’t call the resulting disaster Black Wednesday.
Reform UK still hold a clear lead on 25%, but this lead is six points - one point down from March. This continues a steady decline in Reform’s vote share from a high of 34% in September 2025
Labour and the Conservatives are now tied on 19%. Labour are down two points, and the Conservatives are up two points.
The Greens stay on 17% - matching their record high with Ipsos last month.
The Liberal Democrats (14%) are up 5 points from March.
Headline voting intention (Changes since March)
Reform UK continue to lead on headline voting intention. However they are down to 25% - their lowest vote share since the 2024 General Election. Labour and the Conservatives are tied in second place on 19%.
Reform 25% (-3) Labour 19% (-2) Conservative 19% (+2) Greens 17% (No change) Lib Dems 14% (+5) Others 7% (-1) Reform UK lead: +6 (down one point from March)
Satisfaction ratings (Changes since January)
Each month Ipsos ask the public whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied with how the government are running the country and how various politicians are doing their jobs; Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and various other politicians as leaders of their respective parties. Here is a summary of this month’s scores:
Government: 16% satisfied (-1 from March), 78% dissatisfied (+3). Net satisfaction -62. Keir Starmer: 18% satisfied (-1), 74% dissatisfied (+2). Net satisfaction -56. Kemi Badenoch: 25% satisfied (+4), 52% dissatisfied (-4). Net satisfaction -27. Nigel Farage: 29% satisfied (nc), 59% dissatisfied (+1). Net satisfaction -30. Ed Davey: 25% satisfied (+4), 41% dissatisfied (-2). Net -16. Zack Polanski: 28% satisfied (-2), 42% dissatisfied (+5). Net -14. Rachel Reeves: 13% satisfied (nc), 72% dissatisfied (+2). Net -59.
Big rises for the LibDems and Davey. Could that be a result of local election campaigning? When people are reminded we exist, the LibDems do better.
Even the BBC and ITV have to acknowledge their existence during an election campaign. It’s ridiculous that they ignore the party with only 44 fewer seats than the Conservatives.
Especially when the BBC in particular seem to have their head stuck up Farage's fundament!
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
It is funny how many Conservatives (and whilst not all of them that is what the bulk of senior Reform people are) are actually revolutionaries now.
Ok, that is not entirely true, but it is a consequence of their overdramatic references to tearing up 'the' system.
Which, again to be fair, is a position that has some popularity for better or worse, so a reasonable niche to seek to exploit, but I struggle to see them as the anti-establishment reformers they desperately want to be. It seems more just blundering in and believing super hard that it will all work out.
Kruger, at least, sometimes thinks more carefully about things, even if you don't agree with any of his conclusions.
"Let's rip up the system" is the slogan of a man who does not know exactly what he wants to do or achieve.
Reform UK still hold a clear lead on 25%, but this lead is six points - one point down from March. This continues a steady decline in Reform’s vote share from a high of 34% in September 2025
Labour and the Conservatives are now tied on 19%. Labour are down two points, and the Conservatives are up two points.
The Greens stay on 17% - matching their record high with Ipsos last month.
The Liberal Democrats (14%) are up 5 points from March.
Headline voting intention (Changes since March)
Reform UK continue to lead on headline voting intention. However they are down to 25% - their lowest vote share since the 2024 General Election. Labour and the Conservatives are tied in second place on 19%.
Reform 25% (-3) Labour 19% (-2) Conservative 19% (+2) Greens 17% (No change) Lib Dems 14% (+5) Others 7% (-1) Reform UK lead: +6 (down one point from March)
Satisfaction ratings (Changes since January)
Each month Ipsos ask the public whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied with how the government are running the country and how various politicians are doing their jobs; Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and various other politicians as leaders of their respective parties. Here is a summary of this month’s scores:
Government: 16% satisfied (-1 from March), 78% dissatisfied (+3). Net satisfaction -62. Keir Starmer: 18% satisfied (-1), 74% dissatisfied (+2). Net satisfaction -56. Kemi Badenoch: 25% satisfied (+4), 52% dissatisfied (-4). Net satisfaction -27. Nigel Farage: 29% satisfied (nc), 59% dissatisfied (+1). Net satisfaction -30. Ed Davey: 25% satisfied (+4), 41% dissatisfied (-2). Net -16. Zack Polanski: 28% satisfied (-2), 42% dissatisfied (+5). Net -14. Rachel Reeves: 13% satisfied (nc), 72% dissatisfied (+2). Net -59.
Big rises for the LibDems and Davey. Could that be a result of local election campaigning? When people are reminded we exist, the LibDems do better.
Even the BBC and ITV have to acknowledge their existence during an election campaign. It’s ridiculous that they ignore the party with only 44 fewer seats than the Conservatives.
Especially when the BBC in particular seem to have their head stuck up Farage's fundament!
Was it Nick Robinson who was accused of being so far up Brown’s arse he was called toenails, as that was all that could be seen of him? Maybe the nickname should be resurrected for Chris Mason, with respect to Farage.
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
Undo everything Brown did is the most attractive pitch I’ve heard from Reform.
So if they are starting from 1997, the very first they are going to do would be take control of interest rates away from the Bank of England.
That’s what Trump wants to do in the US, so of course it will be a Reform policy.
(It’s not top of my list of Brownian motions that need reversing.)
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
It is funny how many Conservatives (and whilst not all of them that is what the bulk of senior Reform people are) are actually revolutionaries now.
Ok, that is not entirely true, but it is a consequence of their overdramatic references to tearing up 'the' system.
Which, again to be fair, is a position that has some popularity for better or worse, so a reasonable niche to seek to exploit, but I struggle to see them as the anti-establishment reformers they desperately want to be. It seems more just blundering in and believing super hard that it will all work out.
Kruger, at least, sometimes thinks more carefully about things, even if you don't agree with any of his conclusions.
"Let's rip up the system" is the slogan of a man who does not know exactly what he wants to do or achieve.
Or of a man who knows exactly what he wants to do, but also that what he wants to do is unpopular, so he focuses on the ripping up the system bit rather than on the new system to come.
Ahead of its launch in 2023, Musk predicted that Tesla would be selling 250,000 Cybertrucks annually by 2025 The actual figure was just over 20,000 Cybertrucks sold last year, down from 38,965 in 2024.
(I know Tesla have been pivoting away to other interests beyond cars and rivals were going to catch up, but even so the Cybertruck is embarrasing)
There's a meme going around that claims the cybertruck design matches the optimal design in some late 80s car design computer game.
This implies that Musk has used the resources of what was once the world's leading electric car manufacturer to try and sell a vehicle as part of some obscure nerd joke. If true, Tesla shareholders should be taking him to court to clean him out of everything he has.
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
Undo everything Brown did is the most attractive pitch I’ve heard from Reform.
So if they are starting from 1997, the very first they are going to do would be take control of interest rates away from the Bank of England.
Abolish the minimum wage, restore single parent benefit, stop using private hospitals for hip replacements...
Ahead of its launch in 2023, Musk predicted that Tesla would be selling 250,000 Cybertrucks annually by 2025 The actual figure was just over 20,000 Cybertrucks sold last year, down from 38,965 in 2024.
(I know Tesla have been pivoting away to other interests beyond cars and rivals were going to catch up, but even so the Cybertruck is embarrasing)
There's a meme going around that claims the cybertruck design matches the optimal design in some late 80s car design computer game.
This implies that Musk has used the resources of what was once the world's leading electric car manufacturer to try and sell a vehicle as part of some obscure nerd joke. If true, Tesla shareholders should be taking him to court to clean him out of everything he has.
It looks ugly, it costs a fortune, the build quality is terrible and it doesn't work very well.
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
Undo everything Brown did is the most attractive pitch I’ve heard from Reform.
So if they are starting from 1997, the very first they are going to do would be take control of interest rates away from the Bank of England.
Abolish the minimum wage, restore single parent benefit, stop using private hospitals for hip replacements...
This is going to be a tricky needle to thread, noting the above words in the tweet: 'Yes it did'
Did Starmer:
Know something he should not have known and lied about it Not know something he should have known and lied about it Not know something he should not have known and lied about it and sacked the man who didn't and shouldn't have told him Know something he should have known and lied about it and sacked the man who did and should tell him.
I am sure PBers can thread that needle. At the moment I can't. Any offers?
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
Undo everything Brown did is the most attractive pitch I’ve heard from Reform.
So if they are starting from 1997, the very first they are going to do would be take control of interest rates away from the Bank of England.
Abolish the minimum wage, restore single parent benefit, stop using private hospitals for hip replacements...
Has Danny Kruger thought this through?
I would have thought a lot of Reform voting small business owners would love the minimum wage to be abolished..
This is going to be a tricky needle to thread, noting the above words in the tweet: 'Yes it did'
Did Starmer:
Know something he should not have known and lied about it Not know something he should have known and lied about it Not know something he should not have known and lied about it and sacked the man who didn't and shouldn't have told him Know something he should have known and lied about it and sacked the man who did and should tell him.
I am sure PBers can thread that needle. At the moment I can't. Any offers?
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
Undo everything Brown did is the most attractive pitch I’ve heard from Reform.
Jeremy Hunt said that he had accepted the Conservative narrative that Brown was a disaster and was astonished to find how highly he was regarded by insiders.
Ahead of its launch in 2023, Musk predicted that Tesla would be selling 250,000 Cybertrucks annually by 2025 The actual figure was just over 20,000 Cybertrucks sold last year, down from 38,965 in 2024.
(I know Tesla have been pivoting away to other interests beyond cars and rivals were going to catch up, but even so the Cybertruck is embarrasing)
There's a meme going around that claims the cybertruck design matches the optimal design in some late 80s car design computer game.
This implies that Musk has used the resources of what was once the world's leading electric car manufacturer to try and sell a vehicle as part of some obscure nerd joke. If true, Tesla shareholders should be taking him to court to clean him out of everything he has.
It looks ugly, it costs a fortune, the build quality is terrible and it doesn't work very well.
Surely nobody has that warped a sense of humour?
He's the richest man in the world, with weird personal relationships and reportedly a troubled relationship with narcotic substances.
If he didn't have a seriously warped sense of humour I would be more surprised. And, truth be told, he's rich enough that he can destroy what was once the world's most valuable car company and it wouldn't put a major dent in his wealth.
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
Undo everything Brown did is the most attractive pitch I’ve heard from Reform.
So if they are starting from 1997, the very first they are going to do would be take control of interest rates away from the Bank of England.
Abolish the minimum wage, restore single parent benefit, stop using private hospitals for hip replacements...
Has Danny Kruger thought this through?
I would have thought a lot of Reform voting small business owners would love the minimum wage to be abolished..
I would guess that more Reform voters are paid the minimum wage than are paying it.
Reform UK still hold a clear lead on 25%, but this lead is six points - one point down from March. This continues a steady decline in Reform’s vote share from a high of 34% in September 2025
Labour and the Conservatives are now tied on 19%. Labour are down two points, and the Conservatives are up two points.
The Greens stay on 17% - matching their record high with Ipsos last month.
The Liberal Democrats (14%) are up 5 points from March.
Headline voting intention (Changes since March)
Reform UK continue to lead on headline voting intention. However they are down to 25% - their lowest vote share since the 2024 General Election. Labour and the Conservatives are tied in second place on 19%.
Reform 25% (-3) Labour 19% (-2) Conservative 19% (+2) Greens 17% (No change) Lib Dems 14% (+5) Others 7% (-1) Reform UK lead: +6 (down one point from March)
Satisfaction ratings (Changes since January)
Each month Ipsos ask the public whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied with how the government are running the country and how various politicians are doing their jobs; Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and various other politicians as leaders of their respective parties. Here is a summary of this month’s scores:
Government: 16% satisfied (-1 from March), 78% dissatisfied (+3). Net satisfaction -62. Keir Starmer: 18% satisfied (-1), 74% dissatisfied (+2). Net satisfaction -56. Kemi Badenoch: 25% satisfied (+4), 52% dissatisfied (-4). Net satisfaction -27. Nigel Farage: 29% satisfied (nc), 59% dissatisfied (+1). Net satisfaction -30. Ed Davey: 25% satisfied (+4), 41% dissatisfied (-2). Net -16. Zack Polanski: 28% satisfied (-2), 42% dissatisfied (+5). Net -14. Rachel Reeves: 13% satisfied (nc), 72% dissatisfied (+2). Net -59.
Big rises for the LibDems and Davey. Could that be a result of local election campaigning? When people are reminded we exist, the LibDems do better.
Even the BBC and ITV have to acknowledge their existence during an election campaign. It’s ridiculous that they ignore the party with only 44 fewer seats than the Conservatives.
Especially when the BBC in particular seem to have their head stuck up Farage's fundament!
Was it Nick Robinson who was accused of being so far up Brown’s arse he was called toenails, as that was all that could be seen of him? Maybe the nickname should be resurrected for Chris Mason, with respect to Farage.
Nick Robinson was indeed named toenails by PB Tories, at least until David Cameron tried to recruit the well-known Conservative Nick Robinson.
The Iranian regime is fundamentally different from the adversaries the U.S. has dealt with in the past. This makes it essential to reassess the cost-benefit calculus of any course of action. At present, it is far from clear that escalation serves U.S. interests, given both the risks involved and its limited utility in achieving core strategic objectives.
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
Undo everything Brown did is the most attractive pitch I’ve heard from Reform.
So if they are starting from 1997, the very first they are going to do would be take control of interest rates away from the Bank of England.
Abolish the minimum wage, restore single parent benefit, stop using private hospitals for hip replacements...
Has Danny Kruger thought this through?
I would have thought a lot of Reform voting small business owners would love the minimum wage to be abolished..
I would guess that more Reform voters are paid the minimum wage than are paying it.
Which group are Danny and co more likely to mix with?
Abolishing the minimum wage should tell people all they need to know about Reform. Capitalism on steroids and more money for their rich mates .
I'm not sure this is an effective attack line. Talking about their rich mates makes them sound like safe members of the establishment rather than dangerous extremists.
Actaully I think the real trouble is in the White House.
The problem is there are a lot of extremists on all sides who prize victory above peace, and who set out to provoke extremists on the other side into abandoning any ceasefire.
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
Undo everything Brown did is the most attractive pitch I’ve heard from Reform.
So if they are starting from 1997, the very first they are going to do would be take control of interest rates away from the Bank of England.
Abolish the minimum wage, restore single parent benefit, stop using private hospitals for hip replacements...
Has Danny Kruger thought this through?
I would have thought a lot of Reform voting small business owners would love the minimum wage to be abolished..
I would guess that more Reform voters are paid the minimum wage than are paying it.
Which group are Danny and co more likely to mix with?
I am not surprised by the declared policy for that reason, but I would expect it to hurt them in an election campaign.
Visiting the graves of Saints or even parts of Saints were tourist destinations of a sort in the Middle Ages. They were called pilgrimages but often were used to get bad 'uns out of the town before even more disruption ensued. Jonathan Sumption has written quite an extensive tome on the subject with some humorous insights.
Sweyn Godwinson was sent on a pilgrimage of the get-him-out-of-town type.
A mini series of the Godwinson family would be interesting.
The claim that nobody at the heart of government — ie close to Starmer — knew Mandelson had flunked his security vetting is unravelling at a rate of knots. Starmer’s head of comms was alerted by the media last September. Sources tell me multiple folks in the Cabinet Office (where the UK Security Vetting unit is based) had known for quite some time. Cat Little, Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, even had a copy of the UK Sec Vet January 2025 document concluding Mandelson was unfit to be US ambassador. She informed the new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo. Soon there were about a dozen lawyers and officials crawling all over it. Such matters don’t stay secret for long in the upper echelons of Whitehall. But it seems the PM was still in the dark … until last Tuesday. Mmmmmm
I thought this was supposed to be so top top top top secret, that literally nobody had access to it outside Robbins, and even then the way it has been reported they made it sound like you had to go into a deep air gapped bunker in order to read it.
The claim that nobody at the heart of government — ie close to Starmer — knew Mandelson had flunked his security vetting is unravelling at a rate of knots. Starmer’s head of comms was alerted by the media last September. Sources tell me multiple folks in the Cabinet Office (where the UK Security Vetting unit is based) had known for quite some time. Cat Little, Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, even had a copy of the UK Sec Vet January 2025 document concluding Mandelson was unfit to be US ambassador. She informed the new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo. Soon there were about a dozen lawyers and officials crawling all over it. Such matters don’t stay secret for long in the upper echelons of Whitehall. But it seems the PM was still in the dark … until last Tuesday. Mmmmmm
I thought this was supposed to be so top top top top secret, that literally nobody had access to it outside Robbins, and even then the way it has been reported they made it sound like you had to go into a deep air gapped bunker in order to read it.
So they are trying to blame the Downing Street cat.
nside the Mandelson vetting fiasco - our deep dive this weekend
* Cat Little, the permanent secretary at the cabinet office, spent weeks attempting to extract Mandelson's vetting report from the foreign office but to no avail
* Olly Robbins, who has now been sacked as perm sec of the foreign office, has been accused of obstructing the release of the document
* Little eventually obtained the document from UK Security Vetting on March 25. It was explosive. The Times has been told it was not a borderline case but an explicit recommendation that Mandelson should not be cleared
* The summary Little obtained is said to have drawn on Mandelson's interviews with vetting officers - which were deeply personal, interviews with his friends, details of his business interests and even information from his bank accounts. The recommendation was not caveated
* At this point Little informed Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary. They did two things. First, they attempted to get more clarity from Robbins as to why he had given Mandelson clearance. It was not forthcoming
The claim that nobody at the heart of government — ie close to Starmer — knew Mandelson had flunked his security vetting is unravelling at a rate of knots. Starmer’s head of comms was alerted by the media last September. Sources tell me multiple folks in the Cabinet Office (where the UK Security Vetting unit is based) had known for quite some time. Cat Little, Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, even had a copy of the UK Sec Vet January 2025 document concluding Mandelson was unfit to be US ambassador. She informed the new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo. Soon there were about a dozen lawyers and officials crawling all over it. Such matters don’t stay secret for long in the upper echelons of Whitehall. But it seems the PM was still in the dark … until last Tuesday. Mmmmmm
I thought this was supposed to be so top top top top secret, that literally nobody had access to it outside Robbins, and even then the way it has been reported they made it sound like you had to go into a deep air gapped bunker in order to read it.
So they are trying to blame the Downing Street cat.
They will be switching the blame back to the FO any moment. It's definitely all Palmerston's fault.
And as he's dead he won't be able to purrfect a response.
I bet it won't. It will be a damp squib. He will want his big pay out and nobody is going to be shocked if he plays nice he a) gets a massive one (insert Starmer / Hermer banging on process, nothing could be done, we have to give him £500k or something) and b) arise Lord Robbin in a couple of years.
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
Sounds more like they're Tories who are out to lunch.
Many of them seem to struggle with what they even are now. They sometimes talk about how the Tories have changed (presumably recently, or they'd have left sooner), suggesting they have not, but other times they are insistent they will be doing things no party has done in more than 20-30 years, so very much different to 21st century Toryism.
Abolishing the minimum wage should tell people all they need to know about Reform. Capitalism on steroids and more money for their rich mates .
I'm not sure this is an effective attack line. Talking about their rich mates makes them sound like safe members of the establishment rather than dangerous extremists.
The real problem is that we have a Schizophrenia approach to the minimum wage.
Governments put it up to become more popular. Then they turn a blind eye to massive evasion. In particular, abuse of immigrants. They are pretty much trafficked into low paid work.
When this abuse is mentioned, some clown will say “who will wipe the bottoms?”. Well, the scheme irk import immigrants to “wipe bottoms” ended in fraudulent failure. To the point the Indian government complained about abuse of its citizens.
In some areas of business, the honest employers can’t make a profit. So the criminal scum win.
The minimum wage is a promise. And the government fails to deliver.
Apologies in advance, this is very much off topic but perhaps this will give some reader a warning about Yahoo email.
Since a very recent (forced) upgrade, Yahoo email employs AI to 'help'. Yahoo has just added an extra person to a CC list unannounced, presumably because the CC list was a person with whom the other person is frequently combined. It was a private email of no concern to the added party. I only noticed after it was sent because I then had occasion to search for emails I'd sent to this second person.
Googling, it seems that this upgrade is a Beta version. I'm trying to turn AI off in Yahoo but AI's 'help' is making it very difficult.
May be best to migrate to another platform.
/whinge
Good morning, everybody.
Unfortunately, companies are forcing AI in to situations where it is annoying, unhelpful, intrusive, or all of the above, because they have spent such gargantuan sums they feel compelled to somehow get people to use it in order to justify the expense.
It's interesting that Microsoft has started walking back the forced inclusion of Copilot in Windows 11. Microsoft, like Google, has the advantage of not needing their AI efforts to pay off. Annoying users to the extent they dump Windows and move to Linux is a bigger threat to MS than Copilot not making money.
Most of this 'AI everywhere' nonsense will go away in the next year or two as it sinks in how much users hate it, and when the AI bubble pops removes a lot of the pressure to show AI is generating some kind of return on investment.
I would pay a surcharge for a totally AI free browsing experience. Maybe that will be Microsoft’s money making method.
It's called 'classic mode', and will be yours for a further $200 per annum.
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
Undo everything Brown did is the most attractive pitch I’ve heard from Reform.
nside the Mandelson vetting fiasco - our deep dive this weekend
* Cat Little, the permanent secretary at the cabinet office, spent weeks attempting to extract Mandelson's vetting report from the foreign office but to no avail
* Olly Robbins, who has now been sacked as perm sec of the foreign office, has been accused of obstructing the release of the document
* Little eventually obtained the document from UK Security Vetting on March 25. It was explosive. The Times has been told it was not a borderline case but an explicit recommendation that Mandelson should not be cleared
* The summary Little obtained is said to have drawn on Mandelson's interviews with vetting officers - which were deeply personal, interviews with his friends, details of his business interests and even information from his bank accounts. The recommendation was not caveated
* At this point Little informed Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary. They did two things. First, they attempted to get more clarity from Robbins as to why he had given Mandelson clearance. It was not forthcoming
The claim that nobody at the heart of government — ie close to Starmer — knew Mandelson had flunked his security vetting is unravelling at a rate of knots. Starmer’s head of comms was alerted by the media last September. Sources tell me multiple folks in the Cabinet Office (where the UK Security Vetting unit is based) had known for quite some time. Cat Little, Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, even had a copy of the UK Sec Vet January 2025 document concluding Mandelson was unfit to be US ambassador. She informed the new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo. Soon there were about a dozen lawyers and officials crawling all over it. Such matters don’t stay secret for long in the upper echelons of Whitehall. But it seems the PM was still in the dark … until last Tuesday. Mmmmmm
I thought this was supposed to be so top top top top secret, that literally nobody had access to it outside Robbins, and even then the way it has been reported they made it sound like you had to go into a deep air gapped bunker in order to read it.
We did this yesterday.
Vetting is “Top Secret Ultra Mega Published In The Independent”
Ahead of its launch in 2023, Musk predicted that Tesla would be selling 250,000 Cybertrucks annually by 2025 The actual figure was just over 20,000 Cybertrucks sold last year, down from 38,965 in 2024.
(I know Tesla have been pivoting away to other interests beyond cars and rivals were going to catch up, but even so the Cybertruck is embarrasing)
There's a meme going around that claims the cybertruck design matches the optimal design in some late 80s car design computer game.
This implies that Musk has used the resources of what was once the world's leading electric car manufacturer to try and sell a vehicle as part of some obscure nerd joke. If true, Tesla shareholders should be taking him to court to clean him out of everything he has.
It looks ugly, it costs a fortune, the build quality is terrible and it doesn't work very well.
Surely nobody has that warped a sense of humour?
He's the richest man in the world, with weird personal relationships and reportedly a troubled relationship with narcotic substances...
Allegedly he also has a deformed penis due to a botched enlargement procedure. Although that is alleged, not proven. What is known to be true is that all except one of his children were conceived by artificial insemination.
I bet it won't. It will be a damp squib. He will want his big pay out and nobody is going to be shocked if he plays nice he a) gets a massive one (insert Starmer / Hermer banging on process, nothing could be done, we have to give him £500k or something) and b) arise Lord Robbin in a couple of years.
Not sure that's true ..sometimes just sometimes.. principle is more important than.money. I doubt he is short of a bob or two. Being given a peerage by Labour is like having to eat dogshit.
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
It is funny how many Conservatives (and whilst not all of them that is what the bulk of senior Reform people are) are actually revolutionaries now.
Ok, that is not entirely true, but it is a consequence of their overdramatic references to tearing up 'the' system.
Which, again to be fair, is a position that has some popularity for better or worse, so a reasonable niche to seek to exploit, but I struggle to see them as the anti-establishment reformers they desperately want to be. It seems more just blundering in and believing super hard that it will all work out.
Kruger, at least, sometimes thinks more carefully about things, even if you don't agree with any of his conclusions.
"Let's rip up the system" is the slogan of a man who does not know exactly what he wants to do or achieve.
Or of a man who knows exactly what he wants to do, but also that what he wants to do is unpopular, so he focuses on the ripping up the system bit rather than on the new system to come.
The surprise is that people seem to think that being able to diagnose problems and being able to implement better solutions are skills that automatically come as a pair.
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
It is funny how many Conservatives (and whilst not all of them that is what the bulk of senior Reform people are) are actually revolutionaries now.
Ok, that is not entirely true, but it is a consequence of their overdramatic references to tearing up 'the' system.
Which, again to be fair, is a position that has some popularity for better or worse, so a reasonable niche to seek to exploit, but I struggle to see them as the anti-establishment reformers they desperately want to be. It seems more just blundering in and believing super hard that it will all work out.
Kruger, at least, sometimes thinks more carefully about things, even if you don't agree with any of his conclusions.
"Let's rip up the system" is the slogan of a man who does not know exactly what he wants to do or achieve.
Or of a man who knows exactly what he wants to do, but also that what he wants to do is unpopular, so he focuses on the ripping up the system bit rather than on the new system to come.
The surprise is that people seem to think that being able to diagnose problems and being able to implement better solutions are skills that automatically come as a pair.
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
Undo everything Brown did is the most attractive pitch I’ve heard from Reform.
So if they are starting from 1997, the very first they are going to do would be take control of interest rates away from the Bank of England.
Abolish the minimum wage, restore single parent benefit, stop using private hospitals for hip replacements...
Has Danny Kruger thought this through?
If he has it will be a first.
He does think about things. That has nothing to do with whether whether he does so with any particular insight.
Ahead of its launch in 2023, Musk predicted that Tesla would be selling 250,000 Cybertrucks annually by 2025 The actual figure was just over 20,000 Cybertrucks sold last year, down from 38,965 in 2024.
(I know Tesla have been pivoting away to other interests beyond cars and rivals were going to catch up, but even so the Cybertruck is embarrasing)
There's a meme going around that claims the cybertruck design matches the optimal design in some late 80s car design computer game.
This implies that Musk has used the resources of what was once the world's leading electric car manufacturer to try and sell a vehicle as part of some obscure nerd joke. If true, Tesla shareholders should be taking him to court to clean him out of everything he has.
It looks ugly, it costs a fortune, the build quality is terrible and it doesn't work very well.
Surely nobody has that warped a sense of humour?
He's the richest man in the world, with weird personal relationships and reportedly a troubled relationship with narcotic substances...
Allegedly he also has a deformed penis due to a botched enlargement procedure. Although that is alleged, not proven. What is known to be true is that all except one of his children were conceived by artificial insemination.
If you are ever jealous of him, remember that.
The same allegation was made about Hitler, so compassion should be rather limited...
Abolishing the minimum wage should tell people all they need to know about Reform. Capitalism on steroids and more money for their rich mates .
I'm not sure this is an effective attack line. Talking about their rich mates makes them sound like safe members of the establishment rather than dangerous extremists.
The real problem is that we have a Schizophrenia approach to the minimum wage.
Governments put it up to become more popular. Then they turn a blind eye to massive evasion. In particular, abuse of immigrants. They are pretty much trafficked into low paid work.
When this abuse is mentioned, some clown will say “who will wipe the bottoms?”. Well, the scheme irk import immigrants to “wipe bottoms” ended in fraudulent failure. To the point the Indian government complained about abuse of its citizens.
In some areas of business, the honest employers can’t make a profit. So the criminal scum win.
The minimum wage is a promise. And the government fails to deliver.
Better a lower minimum wage strictly enforced and which means small businesses can hire more people than what we have now
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
It is funny how many Conservatives (and whilst not all of them that is what the bulk of senior Reform people are) are actually revolutionaries now.
Ok, that is not entirely true, but it is a consequence of their overdramatic references to tearing up 'the' system.
Which, again to be fair, is a position that has some popularity for better or worse, so a reasonable niche to seek to exploit, but I struggle to see them as the anti-establishment reformers they desperately want to be. It seems more just blundering in and believing super hard that it will all work out.
Kruger, at least, sometimes thinks more carefully about things, even if you don't agree with any of his conclusions.
"Let's rip up the system" is the slogan of a man who does not know exactly what he wants to do or achieve.
Or of a man who knows exactly what he wants to do, but also that what he wants to do is unpopular, so he focuses on the ripping up the system bit rather than on the new system to come.
The surprise is that people seem to think that being able to diagnose problems and being able to implement better solutions are skills that automatically come as a pair.
See Cummings
Partly, it's that libertarian right claim that, if you rip everything up now, a better solution will spontaneously come evolve, thanks to natural selection. We'll leave aside the details that evolution works by being a narrow path through a field of death, that it can take ages and that evolved systems often have flaws embedded in them (like humans taking in food and air through the same hole.)
But also, it's a bit generous to say that Cummings, Kruger etc are doing anything as clever as diagnosis. Between saying that there is a problem and coming up with a solution, there is the intermediate step of working out why that problem has come about. And the answers there are rarely more useful than "people unlike me were in charge".
Ahead of its launch in 2023, Musk predicted that Tesla would be selling 250,000 Cybertrucks annually by 2025 The actual figure was just over 20,000 Cybertrucks sold last year, down from 38,965 in 2024.
(I know Tesla have been pivoting away to other interests beyond cars and rivals were going to catch up, but even so the Cybertruck is embarrasing)
There's a meme going around that claims the cybertruck design matches the optimal design in some late 80s car design computer game.
This implies that Musk has used the resources of what was once the world's leading electric car manufacturer to try and sell a vehicle as part of some obscure nerd joke. If true, Tesla shareholders should be taking him to court to clean him out of everything he has.
It looks ugly, it costs a fortune, the build quality is terrible and it doesn't work very well.
Surely nobody has that warped a sense of humour?
He's the richest man in the world, with weird personal relationships and reportedly a troubled relationship with narcotic substances...
Allegedly he also has a deformed penis due to a botched enlargement procedure. Although that is alleged, not proven. What is known to be true is that all except one of his children were conceived by artificial insemination.
This is going to be a tricky needle to thread, noting the above words in the tweet: 'Yes it did'
Did Starmer:
Know something he should not have known and lied about it Not know something he should have known and lied about it Not know something he should not have known and lied about it and sacked the man who didn't and shouldn't have told him Know something he should have known and lied about it and sacked the man who did and should tell him.
I am sure PBers can thread that needle. At the moment I can't. Any offers?
It's complicated. Only three people understand it. But one is under an NDA; the second mad. I am the third and I have already forgotten the answer.
Abolishing the minimum wage should tell people all they need to know about Reform. Capitalism on steroids and more money for their rich mates .
I'm not sure this is an effective attack line. Talking about their rich mates makes them sound like safe members of the establishment rather than dangerous extremists.
The real problem is that we have a Schizophrenia approach to the minimum wage.
Governments put it up to become more popular. Then they turn a blind eye to massive evasion. In particular, abuse of immigrants. They are pretty much trafficked into low paid work.
When this abuse is mentioned, some clown will say “who will wipe the bottoms?”. Well, the scheme irk import immigrants to “wipe bottoms” ended in fraudulent failure. To the point the Indian government complained about abuse of its citizens.
In some areas of business, the honest employers can’t make a profit. So the criminal scum win.
The minimum wage is a promise. And the government fails to deliver.
Better a lower minimum wage strictly enforced and which means small businesses can hire more people than what we have now
It could be set so that 35 hours on minimum wage equals the basic state pension, and is also the level at which National Insurance contributions start to be paid.
I’ve been deep diving on St Patrick and apparently - it turns out - there is literally zero evidence he “drove all the snakes out of Ireland”. The whole thing is made up. Yet people just complacently accept it
For a start it would be relatively difficult, albeit not impossible, for one man - working alone - to charm millions of snakes simply by his religious charisma and get them to swim across the Irish Sea. There is no precedent for it
Expert herpetologists who openly pooh-pooh the story now believe it is more likely the snakes got bored
Ahead of its launch in 2023, Musk predicted that Tesla would be selling 250,000 Cybertrucks annually by 2025 The actual figure was just over 20,000 Cybertrucks sold last year, down from 38,965 in 2024.
(I know Tesla have been pivoting away to other interests beyond cars and rivals were going to catch up, but even so the Cybertruck is embarrasing)
There's a meme going around that claims the cybertruck design matches the optimal design in some late 80s car design computer game.
This implies that Musk has used the resources of what was once the world's leading electric car manufacturer to try and sell a vehicle as part of some obscure nerd joke. If true, Tesla shareholders should be taking him to court to clean him out of everything he has.
It looks ugly, it costs a fortune, the build quality is terrible and it doesn't work very well.
Surely nobody has that warped a sense of humour?
He's the richest man in the world, with weird personal relationships and reportedly a troubled relationship with narcotic substances...
Allegedly he also has a deformed penis due to a botched enlargement procedure. Although that is alleged, not proven. What is known to be true is that all except one of his children were conceived by artificial insemination.
If you are ever jealous of him, remember that.
"It looks ugly, it costs a fortune, the build quality is terrible and it doesn't work very well."
Abolishing the minimum wage should tell people all they need to know about Reform. Capitalism on steroids and more money for their rich mates .
I'm not sure this is an effective attack line. Talking about their rich mates makes them sound like safe members of the establishment rather than dangerous extremists.
The real problem is that we have a Schizophrenia approach to the minimum wage.
Governments put it up to become more popular. Then they turn a blind eye to massive evasion. In particular, abuse of immigrants. They are pretty much trafficked into low paid work.
When this abuse is mentioned, some clown will say “who will wipe the bottoms?”. Well, the scheme irk import immigrants to “wipe bottoms” ended in fraudulent failure. To the point the Indian government complained about abuse of its citizens.
In some areas of business, the honest employers can’t make a profit. So the criminal scum win.
The minimum wage is a promise. And the government fails to deliver.
Better a lower minimum wage strictly enforced and which means small businesses can hire more people than what we have now
Should put that on CV's. I was hired as I was cheap (and the company got a subsidy via Universal Credit).
I’ve been deep diving on St Patrick and apparently - it turns out - there is literally zero evidence he “drove all the snakes out of Ireland”. The whole thing is made up. Yet people just complacently accept it
For a start it would be relatively difficult, albeit not impossible, for one man - working alone - to charm millions of snakes simply by his religious charisma and get them to swim across the Irish Sea. There is no precedent for it
Expert herpetologists who openly pooh-pooh the story now believe it is more likely the snakes got bored
I have this sneaking feeling that St George slaying a dragon might not be entirely accurate....its up there with one of those Starmer stories.
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
It is funny how many Conservatives (and whilst not all of them that is what the bulk of senior Reform people are) are actually revolutionaries now.
Ok, that is not entirely true, but it is a consequence of their overdramatic references to tearing up 'the' system.
Which, again to be fair, is a position that has some popularity for better or worse, so a reasonable niche to seek to exploit, but I struggle to see them as the anti-establishment reformers they desperately want to be. It seems more just blundering in and believing super hard that it will all work out.
Kruger, at least, sometimes thinks more carefully about things, even if you don't agree with any of his conclusions.
"Let's rip up the system" is the slogan of a man who does not know exactly what he wants to do or achieve.
Or of a man who knows exactly what he wants to do, but also that what he wants to do is unpopular, so he focuses on the ripping up the system bit rather than on the new system to come.
The surprise is that people seem to think that being able to diagnose problems and being able to implement better solutions are skills that automatically come as a pair.
See Cummings
Partly, it's that libertarian right claim that, if you rip everything up now, a better solution will spontaneously come evolve, thanks to natural selection. We'll leave aside the details that evolution works by being a narrow path through a field of death, that it can take ages and that evolved systems often have flaws embedded in them (like humans taking in food and air through the same hole.)
But also, it's a bit generous to say that Cummings, Kruger etc are doing anything as clever as diagnosis. Between saying that there is a problem and coming up with a solution, there is the intermediate step of working out why that problem has come about. And the answers there are rarely more useful than "people unlike me were in charge".
Normally the evolution argument is the argument for small-c conservatism - that our systems have evolved over centuries and so if you change something recklessly there will be damaging unintended consequences.
But I suppose you could argue that there's been at least a few decades of reckless changes, and there's not much of the patient that remains undamaged.
On the upside I really like this Ulster tradition of putting out cheerful flags everywhere, to make everyone feel welcome and generally brighten up the towns and villages
Also they have this really clever idea where they encase the jails, courthouses and police stations in huge boxes of steel - to protect them from the rain. It’s neat
The claim that nobody at the heart of government — ie close to Starmer — knew Mandelson had flunked his security vetting is unravelling at a rate of knots. Starmer’s head of comms was alerted by the media last September. Sources tell me multiple folks in the Cabinet Office (where the UK Security Vetting unit is based) had known for quite some time. Cat Little, Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, even had a copy of the UK Sec Vet January 2025 document concluding Mandelson was unfit to be US ambassador. She informed the new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo. Soon there were about a dozen lawyers and officials crawling all over it. Such matters don’t stay secret for long in the upper echelons of Whitehall. But it seems the PM was still in the dark … until last Tuesday. Mmmmmm
I thought this was supposed to be so top top top top secret, that literally nobody had access to it outside Robbins, and even then the way it has been reported they made it sound like you had to go into a deep air gapped bunker in order to read it.
That is a misunderstanding.
In the normal course of events the distribution is tightly restricted, but that doesn't make it "top secret" - and more than (eg) your medical records are.
The claim that nobody at the heart of government — ie close to Starmer — knew Mandelson had flunked his security vetting is unravelling at a rate of knots. Starmer’s head of comms was alerted by the media last September. Sources tell me multiple folks in the Cabinet Office (where the UK Security Vetting unit is based) had known for quite some time. Cat Little, Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, even had a copy of the UK Sec Vet January 2025 document concluding Mandelson was unfit to be US ambassador. She informed the new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo. Soon there were about a dozen lawyers and officials crawling all over it. Such matters don’t stay secret for long in the upper echelons of Whitehall. But it seems the PM was still in the dark … until last Tuesday. Mmmmmm
I thought this was supposed to be so top top top top secret, that literally nobody had access to it outside Robbins, and even then the way it has been reported they made it sound like you had to go into a deep air gapped bunker in order to read it.
That is a misunderstanding.
In the normal course of events the distribution is tightly restricted, but that doesn't make it "top secret" - and more than (eg) your medical records are.
I am saying that is the line that has been spun by every talking head sent out by the government. They made it sound like those super-injunction where nobody is allowed to even know the existance of the super-injuction, in this case nobody is allowed to know a) he failed and b) anything about what failed him...and therefore it was no possible to tell the PM even if he asked.....but mysteriously the Indy knew.
I’ve been deep diving on St Patrick and apparently - it turns out - there is literally zero evidence he “drove all the snakes out of Ireland”. The whole thing is made up. Yet people just complacently accept it
For a start it would be relatively difficult, albeit not impossible, for one man - working alone - to charm millions of snakes simply by his religious charisma and get them to swim across the Irish Sea. There is no precedent for it
Expert herpetologists who openly pooh-pooh the story now believe it is more likely the snakes got bored
I have this sneaking feeling that St George slaying a dragon might not be entirely accurate....its up there with one of those Starmer stories.
So how many dragons have been seen in the UK since his time, pray ?
I’ve been deep diving on St Patrick and apparently - it turns out - there is literally zero evidence he “drove all the snakes out of Ireland”. The whole thing is made up. Yet people just complacently accept it
For a start it would be relatively difficult, albeit not impossible, for one man - working alone - to charm millions of snakes simply by his religious charisma and get them to swim across the Irish Sea. There is no precedent for it
Expert herpetologists who openly pooh-pooh the story now believe it is more likely the snakes got bored
I have this sneaking feeling that St George slaying a dragon might not be entirely accurate....its up there with one of those Starmer stories.
I think the stories have been confused. St George slayed a snake and St Patrick was married to a dragon.
nside the Mandelson vetting fiasco - our deep dive this weekend
* Cat Little, the permanent secretary at the cabinet office, spent weeks attempting to extract Mandelson's vetting report from the foreign office but to no avail
* Olly Robbins, who has now been sacked as perm sec of the foreign office, has been accused of obstructing the release of the document
* Little eventually obtained the document from UK Security Vetting on March 25. It was explosive. The Times has been told it was not a borderline case but an explicit recommendation that Mandelson should not be cleared
* The summary Little obtained is said to have drawn on Mandelson's interviews with vetting officers - which were deeply personal, interviews with his friends, details of his business interests and even information from his bank accounts. The recommendation was not caveated
* At this point Little informed Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary. They did two things. First, they attempted to get more clarity from Robbins as to why he had given Mandelson clearance. It was not forthcoming
All these people acting independently off their own bat with no mention to their boss.....Sounds like a sacking offence.
None of this would explain how Starmer knew this on 4th Feb:
Badenoch: ‘Did the official security vetting that he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?’ Starmer: ‘Yes, it did’
SFAICS he has lied since if he knew then, and was lying then (in the sense that he could not know this without being briefed on the vetting) if he didn't know then.
The claim that nobody at the heart of government — ie close to Starmer — knew Mandelson had flunked his security vetting is unravelling at a rate of knots. Starmer’s head of comms was alerted by the media last September. Sources tell me multiple folks in the Cabinet Office (where the UK Security Vetting unit is based) had known for quite some time. Cat Little, Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, even had a copy of the UK Sec Vet January 2025 document concluding Mandelson was unfit to be US ambassador. She informed the new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo. Soon there were about a dozen lawyers and officials crawling all over it. Such matters don’t stay secret for long in the upper echelons of Whitehall. But it seems the PM was still in the dark … until last Tuesday. Mmmmmm
I thought this was supposed to be so top top top top secret, that literally nobody had access to it outside Robbins, and even then the way it has been reported they made it sound like you had to go into a deep air gapped bunker in order to read it.
That is a misunderstanding.
In the normal course of events the distribution is tightly restricted, but that doesn't make it "top secret" - and more than (eg) your medical records are.
I am saying that is the line that has been spun by every talking head sent out by the government. They made it sound like those super-injunction where nobody is allowed to even know the existance of the super-injuction, in this case nobody is allowed to know a) he failed and b) anything about what failed him...and therefore it was no possible to tell the PM even if he asked.....but mysteriously the Indy knew.
nside the Mandelson vetting fiasco - our deep dive this weekend
* Cat Little, the permanent secretary at the cabinet office, spent weeks attempting to extract Mandelson's vetting report from the foreign office but to no avail
* Olly Robbins, who has now been sacked as perm sec of the foreign office, has been accused of obstructing the release of the document
* Little eventually obtained the document from UK Security Vetting on March 25. It was explosive. The Times has been told it was not a borderline case but an explicit recommendation that Mandelson should not be cleared
* The summary Little obtained is said to have drawn on Mandelson's interviews with vetting officers - which were deeply personal, interviews with his friends, details of his business interests and even information from his bank accounts. The recommendation was not caveated
* At this point Little informed Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary. They did two things. First, they attempted to get more clarity from Robbins as to why he had given Mandelson clearance. It was not forthcoming
All these people acting independently off their own bat with no mention to their boss.....Sounds like a sacking offence.
None of this would explain how Starmer knew this on 4th Feb:
Badenoch: ‘Did the official security vetting that he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?’ Starmer: ‘Yes, it did’
SFAICS he has lied since if he knew then, and was lying then (in the sense that he could not know this without being briefed on the vetting) if he didn't know then.
Starmer doesn't lie he simply omits crucial information and cavaets statements in such a way that you hear one thing and he is actually saying something slightly different e.g. "formally informed".....people take that as I was told, no that is I was sat down in a formal meeting in which we went through the documentation.
His upgraded football tickets were a classic where every statement on them a lawyer down to a tee, but there the common man you what....what the f##k is he on about, is he in the private box or not....so in the end his comms team had to dig him out of it.
I’ve been deep diving on St Patrick and apparently - it turns out - there is literally zero evidence he “drove all the snakes out of Ireland”. The whole thing is made up. Yet people just complacently accept it
For a start it would be relatively difficult, albeit not impossible, for one man - working alone - to charm millions of snakes simply by his religious charisma and get them to swim across the Irish Sea. There is no precedent for it
Expert herpetologists who openly pooh-pooh the story now believe it is more likely the snakes got bored
I have this sneaking feeling that St George slaying a dragon might not be entirely accurate....its up there with one of those Starmer stories.
So how many dragons have been seen in the UK since his time, pray ?
The claim that nobody at the heart of government — ie close to Starmer — knew Mandelson had flunked his security vetting is unravelling at a rate of knots. Starmer’s head of comms was alerted by the media last September. Sources tell me multiple folks in the Cabinet Office (where the UK Security Vetting unit is based) had known for quite some time. Cat Little, Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, even had a copy of the UK Sec Vet January 2025 document concluding Mandelson was unfit to be US ambassador. She informed the new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo. Soon there were about a dozen lawyers and officials crawling all over it. Such matters don’t stay secret for long in the upper echelons of Whitehall. But it seems the PM was still in the dark … until last Tuesday. Mmmmmm
I thought this was supposed to be so top top top top secret, that literally nobody had access to it outside Robbins, and even then the way it has been reported they made it sound like you had to go into a deep air gapped bunker in order to read it.
That is a misunderstanding.
In the normal course of events the distribution is tightly restricted, but that doesn't make it "top secret" - and more than (eg) your medical records are.
I am saying that is the line that has been spun by every talking head sent out by the government. They made it sound like those super-injunction where nobody is allowed to even know the existance of the super-injuction, in this case nobody is allowed to know a) he failed and b) anything about what failed him...and therefore it was no possible to tell the PM even if he asked.....but mysteriously the Indy knew.
Half an hour of Danny Kruger on why Reform is not just Tories on holiday and how "if you want to summarize the Reform agenda in a sentence, it's undo everything Blair and Brown did".
It is funny how many Conservatives (and whilst not all of them that is what the bulk of senior Reform people are) are actually revolutionaries now.
Ok, that is not entirely true, but it is a consequence of their overdramatic references to tearing up 'the' system.
Which, again to be fair, is a position that has some popularity for better or worse, so a reasonable niche to seek to exploit, but I struggle to see them as the anti-establishment reformers they desperately want to be. It seems more just blundering in and believing super hard that it will all work out.
Kruger, at least, sometimes thinks more carefully about things, even if you don't agree with any of his conclusions.
"Let's rip up the system" is the slogan of a man who does not know exactly what he wants to do or achieve.
Or of a man who knows exactly what he wants to do, but also that what he wants to do is unpopular, so he focuses on the ripping up the system bit rather than on the new system to come.
The surprise is that people seem to think that being able to diagnose problems and being able to implement better solutions are skills that automatically come as a pair.
See Cummings
Partly, it's that libertarian right claim that, if you rip everything up now, a better solution will spontaneously come evolve, thanks to natural selection. We'll leave aside the details that evolution works by being a narrow path through a field of death, that it can take ages and that evolved systems often have flaws embedded in them (like humans taking in food and air through the same hole.)
But also, it's a bit generous to say that Cummings, Kruger etc are doing anything as clever as diagnosis. Between saying that there is a problem and coming up with a solution, there is the intermediate step of working out why that problem has come about. And the answers there are rarely more useful than "people unlike me were in charge".
Normally the evolution argument is the argument for small-c conservatism - that our systems have evolved over centuries and so if you change something recklessly there will be damaging unintended consequences.
But I suppose you could argue that there's been at least a few decades of reckless changes, and there's not much of the patient that remains undamaged.
Small-c conservatism - I am one such - relies on the idea the principal interest in evolution is on what has already occurred, not what you guess it may do next. There is also the great principle known as Chesterton's fence. Which is the principle that changes should not be made to a system, rule, or tradition until it is properly understood. Fences, physical and conceptual, often have reasons. Similarly is Burke's idea that societies and cultures are evolving organisms not manufactured objects.
A nice example, you might call Chesterton's hedge, is that since the war we have removed hundreds of thousands of miles of hedgerow. We have now started on a fifty year programme of putting them back.
I would certainly vote for a small-c conservative party if there was one. There isn't.
nside the Mandelson vetting fiasco - our deep dive this weekend
* Cat Little, the permanent secretary at the cabinet office, spent weeks attempting to extract Mandelson's vetting report from the foreign office but to no avail
* Olly Robbins, who has now been sacked as perm sec of the foreign office, has been accused of obstructing the release of the document
* Little eventually obtained the document from UK Security Vetting on March 25. It was explosive. The Times has been told it was not a borderline case but an explicit recommendation that Mandelson should not be cleared
* The summary Little obtained is said to have drawn on Mandelson's interviews with vetting officers - which were deeply personal, interviews with his friends, details of his business interests and even information from his bank accounts. The recommendation was not caveated
* At this point Little informed Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary. They did two things. First, they attempted to get more clarity from Robbins as to why he had given Mandelson clearance. It was not forthcoming
All these people acting independently off their own bat with no mention to their boss.....Sounds like a sacking offence.
None of this would explain how Starmer knew this on 4th Feb:
Badenoch: ‘Did the official security vetting that he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?’ Starmer: ‘Yes, it did’
SFAICS he has lied since if he knew then, and was lying then (in the sense that he could not know this without being briefed on the vetting) if he didn't know then.
Starmer doesn't lie he simply omits crucial information and cavaets statements in such a way that you hear one thing and he is actually saying something slightly different e.g. "formally informed".....people take that as I was told, no that is I was sat down in a formal meeting in which we went through the documentation.
His upgraded football tickets were a classic where every statement on them a lawyer down to a tee, but there the common man you what....what the f##k is he on about, is he in the private box or not....so in the end his comms team had to dig him out of it.
Yes. Look at his polling
74% disapproval. It’s extraordinarily bad
The entire country has concluded he’s a lying and hypocritical c*** and there’s no coming back from that verdict. Especially as he really is a lying etc etc and keeps proving it time and again
There is no way Labour can go into an election led by this verminous man. It would be suicidal. So then the question is: when and how does he go?
nside the Mandelson vetting fiasco - our deep dive this weekend
* Cat Little, the permanent secretary at the cabinet office, spent weeks attempting to extract Mandelson's vetting report from the foreign office but to no avail
* Olly Robbins, who has now been sacked as perm sec of the foreign office, has been accused of obstructing the release of the document
* Little eventually obtained the document from UK Security Vetting on March 25. It was explosive. The Times has been told it was not a borderline case but an explicit recommendation that Mandelson should not be cleared
* The summary Little obtained is said to have drawn on Mandelson's interviews with vetting officers - which were deeply personal, interviews with his friends, details of his business interests and even information from his bank accounts. The recommendation was not caveated
* At this point Little informed Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary. They did two things. First, they attempted to get more clarity from Robbins as to why he had given Mandelson clearance. It was not forthcoming
All these people acting independently off their own bat with no mention to their boss.....Sounds like a sacking offence.
None of this would explain how Starmer knew this on 4th Feb:
Badenoch: ‘Did the official security vetting that he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?’ Starmer: ‘Yes, it did’
SFAICS he has lied since if he knew then, and was lying then (in the sense that he could not know this without being briefed on the vetting) if he didn't know then.
Starmer doesn't lie he simply omits crucial information and cavaets statements in such a way that you hear one thing and he is actually saying something slightly different e.g. "formally informed".....people take that as I was told, no that is I was sat down in a formal meeting in which we went through the documentation.
His upgraded football tickets were a classic where every statement on them a lawyer down to a tee, but there the common man you what....what the f##k is he on about, is he in the private box or not....so in the end his comms team had to dig him out of it.
Yes. Look at his polling
74% disapproval. It’s extraordinarily bad
The entire country has concluded he’s a lying and hypocritical c*** and there’s no coming back from that verdict. Especially as he really is a lying etc etc and keeps proving it time and again
There is no way Labour can go into an election led by this verminous man. It would be suicidal. So then the question is: when and how does he go?
The problem Starmer has compared to a Blair or Boris, they managed to defy gravity for a lot longer despite having their own issues with the truth because they had some charisma (and in Blair's case a decent economy and general belief at the time times ran ok).
nside the Mandelson vetting fiasco - our deep dive this weekend
* Cat Little, the permanent secretary at the cabinet office, spent weeks attempting to extract Mandelson's vetting report from the foreign office but to no avail
* Olly Robbins, who has now been sacked as perm sec of the foreign office, has been accused of obstructing the release of the document
* Little eventually obtained the document from UK Security Vetting on March 25. It was explosive. The Times has been told it was not a borderline case but an explicit recommendation that Mandelson should not be cleared
* The summary Little obtained is said to have drawn on Mandelson's interviews with vetting officers - which were deeply personal, interviews with his friends, details of his business interests and even information from his bank accounts. The recommendation was not caveated
* At this point Little informed Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary. They did two things. First, they attempted to get more clarity from Robbins as to why he had given Mandelson clearance. It was not forthcoming
All these people acting independently off their own bat with no mention to their boss.....Sounds like a sacking offence.
None of this would explain how Starmer knew this on 4th Feb:
Badenoch: ‘Did the official security vetting that he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?’ Starmer: ‘Yes, it did’
SFAICS he has lied since if he knew then, and was lying then (in the sense that he could not know this without being briefed on the vetting) if he didn't know then.
Starmer doesn't lie he simply omits crucial information and cavaets statements in such a way that you hear one thing and he is actually saying something slightly different e.g. "formally informed".....people take that as I was told, no that is I was sat down in a formal meeting in which we went through the documentation.
His upgraded football tickets were a classic where every statement on them a lawyer down to a tee, but there the common man you what....what the f##k is he on about, is he in the private box or not....so in the end his comms team had to dig him out of it.
Yes. Look at his polling
74% disapproval. It’s extraordinarily bad
The entire country has concluded he’s a lying and hypocritical c*** and there’s no coming back from that verdict. Especially as he really is a lying etc etc and keeps proving it time and again
There is no way Labour can go into an election led by this verminous man. It would be suicidal. So then the question is: when and how does he go?
The problem Starmer has compared to a Blair or Boris, they managed to defy gravity for a lot longer despite having their own issues with the truth because they had some charisma (and in Blair's case a decent economy and general belief at the time times ran ok).
Also, they had basic political sense. They didn’t make endless unforced errors like Starmer does. He is utterly inept at politics. He doesn’t understand human nature because he’s so weird
And then, the voice
Oh dear. It feels almost cruel constantly attacking him but the fact is he shouldn’t be prime minister. He’s not up to the job. And that is really bad for everyone in the UK
nside the Mandelson vetting fiasco - our deep dive this weekend
* Cat Little, the permanent secretary at the cabinet office, spent weeks attempting to extract Mandelson's vetting report from the foreign office but to no avail
* Olly Robbins, who has now been sacked as perm sec of the foreign office, has been accused of obstructing the release of the document
* Little eventually obtained the document from UK Security Vetting on March 25. It was explosive. The Times has been told it was not a borderline case but an explicit recommendation that Mandelson should not be cleared
* The summary Little obtained is said to have drawn on Mandelson's interviews with vetting officers - which were deeply personal, interviews with his friends, details of his business interests and even information from his bank accounts. The recommendation was not caveated
* At this point Little informed Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary. They did two things. First, they attempted to get more clarity from Robbins as to why he had given Mandelson clearance. It was not forthcoming
All these people acting independently off their own bat with no mention to their boss.....Sounds like a sacking offence.
None of this would explain how Starmer knew this on 4th Feb:
Badenoch: ‘Did the official security vetting that he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?’ Starmer: ‘Yes, it did’
SFAICS he has lied since if he knew then, and was lying then (in the sense that he could not know this without being briefed on the vetting) if he didn't know then.
Starmer doesn't lie he simply omits crucial information and cavaets statements in such a way that you hear one thing and he is actually saying something slightly different e.g. "formally informed".....people take that as I was told, no that is I was sat down in a formal meeting in which we went through the documentation.
His upgraded football tickets were a classic where every statement on them a lawyer down to a tee, but there the common man you what....what the f##k is he on about, is he in the private box or not....so in the end his comms team had to dig him out of it.
Yes. Look at his polling
74% disapproval. It’s extraordinarily bad
The entire country has concluded he’s a lying and hypocritical c*** and there’s no coming back from that verdict. Especially as he really is a lying etc etc and keeps proving it time and again
There is no way Labour can go into an election led by this verminous man. It would be suicidal. So then the question is: when and how does he go?
The problem Starmer has compared to a Blair or Boris, they managed to defy gravity for a lot longer despite having their own issues with the truth because they had some charisma (and in Blair's case a decent economy and general belief at the time times ran ok).
Also, they had basic political sense. They didn’t make endless unforced errors like Starmer does. He is utterly inept at politics. He doesn’t understand human nature because he’s so weird
And then, the voice
Oh dear. It feels almost cruel constantly attacking him but the fact is he shouldn’t be prime minister. He’s not up to the job. And that is really bad for everyone in the UK
As well as no political sense, I think its the lawyer mindset, if you can't prove my client did it beyond reasonable doubt, well you must vote to acquit.....except politics and the public opinion of politics doesn't work like that. Its a bit like all the MPs during expenses saying well all mine were within the rules or I didn't actually claim for that duck house it was sent in among a big list of other gardening expenses and I asked for the authorities to tell me what was ok....to which the public went you what, we pay for your massive garden and it might even be possible to your duck house paid for, fuck off...
I’ve been deep diving on St Patrick and apparently - it turns out - there is literally zero evidence he “drove all the snakes out of Ireland”. The whole thing is made up. Yet people just complacently accept it
For a start it would be relatively difficult, albeit not impossible, for one man - working alone - to charm millions of snakes simply by his religious charisma and get them to swim across the Irish Sea. There is no precedent for it
Expert herpetologists who openly pooh-pooh the story now believe it is more likely the snakes got bored
I have this sneaking feeling that St George slaying a dragon might not be entirely accurate....its up there with one of those Starmer stories.
I think the stories have been confused. St George slayed a snake and St Patrick was married to a dragon.
I was once told by a fantastic lady who was one of the country's leading authorities on early medieval Christian mythology, sadly can't remember her name that Dragons and Serpents were the same thing. This creature tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden (now of course part of Westmorland and Furness). For this God decreed that it was to be punished by having its legs removed and so it had to slither and slide across the land. Thus the Dragon was the Serpent from before the fall.
Another fact little understood was that the Dragon with which Saint George was involved was a Lady Dragon, not a Boy Dragon. This can be seen in medievel depictions where her "lady parts are clearly visible". Her need for the damsels was to feed her baby dragons and as such deemed excusable.
Hopefully Badenoch will now do the decent thing. Anyone who heard her interview on Ch4 News calling the Prime Minister a liar in the terms she did must know she's less suitable for high office than even an ignoramus like Trump
You really do not get politics do you
Starmer was all over Johnson and made a promise to the electorate he would be differernt
On Monday all the opposition leaders and mps are going to make the case he is also not fit to remain in office
There are unparliamentary words that most politicians would avoid using, "lying" being one of them. In Parliament such language would be admonished by the speaker. Outside Parliament because of litigious jeopardy politicians do not use that particular word, except for Badenoch who throws it around freely.
Whether we think she has a point or not is not the issue. Only a foolish politician makes such accusations about an opponent on, albeit strong, supposition without concrete evidence.
Pete continues to show why he’s one of the finest posters on this board.
Abolishing the minimum wage should tell people all they need to know about Reform. Capitalism on steroids and more money for their rich mates .
I'm not sure this is an effective attack line. Talking about their rich mates makes them sound like safe members of the establishment rather than dangerous extremists.
The real problem is that we have a Schizophrenia approach to the minimum wage.
Governments put it up to become more popular. Then they turn a blind eye to massive evasion. In particular, abuse of immigrants. They are pretty much trafficked into low paid work.
When this abuse is mentioned, some clown will say “who will wipe the bottoms?”. Well, the scheme irk import immigrants to “wipe bottoms” ended in fraudulent failure. To the point the Indian government complained about abuse of its citizens.
In some areas of business, the honest employers can’t make a profit. So the criminal scum win.
The minimum wage is a promise. And the government fails to deliver.
Better a lower minimum wage strictly enforced and which means small businesses can hire more people than what we have now
There should not be a minimum wage at all as it distorts the labour market and disincentivises those most in need of additional skills from acquiring them.
It's basically disguised social spending by the government, which dumps the cost directly on business, rather than having to raise taxes and hand over the cash itself. If government must subsidise the lazy and unproductive, it should do so directly, and suffer the political consequences of raising taxes, so that we can have an open debate about whether the subsidies are justified.
There's also the added absurdity of having the same minimum nationwide, except I think London, even though the cost of living varies widely between regions.
But doing it in a concealed way through the already struggling private sector is a disaster. We should copy Denmark, which the Left usually loves so much, and have no national minimum wage.
I’ve been deep diving on St Patrick and apparently - it turns out - there is literally zero evidence he “drove all the snakes out of Ireland”. The whole thing is made up. Yet people just complacently accept it
For a start it would be relatively difficult, albeit not impossible, for one man - working alone - to charm millions of snakes simply by his religious charisma and get them to swim across the Irish Sea. There is no precedent for it
Expert herpetologists who openly pooh-pooh the story now believe it is more likely the snakes got bored
People accept things all the time, particularly with faith. I'd assume that even most Irish Catholics think that's just a myth, but it does make for a nice story, which is the important thing I guess.
The claim that nobody at the heart of government — ie close to Starmer — knew Mandelson had flunked his security vetting is unravelling at a rate of knots. Starmer’s head of comms was alerted by the media last September. Sources tell me multiple folks in the Cabinet Office (where the UK Security Vetting unit is based) had known for quite some time. Cat Little, Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, even had a copy of the UK Sec Vet January 2025 document concluding Mandelson was unfit to be US ambassador. She informed the new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo. Soon there were about a dozen lawyers and officials crawling all over it. Such matters don’t stay secret for long in the upper echelons of Whitehall. But it seems the PM was still in the dark … until last Tuesday. Mmmmmm
I thought this was supposed to be so top top top top secret, that literally nobody had access to it outside Robbins, and even then the way it has been reported they made it sound like you had to go into a deep air gapped bunker in order to read it.
That is a misunderstanding.
In the normal course of events the distribution is tightly restricted, but that doesn't make it "top secret" - and more than (eg) your medical records are.
I am saying that is the line that has been spun by every talking head sent out by the government. They made it sound like those super-injunction where nobody is allowed to even know the existance of the super-injuction, in this case nobody is allowed to know a) he failed and b) anything about what failed him...and therefore it was no possible to tell the PM even if he asked.....but mysteriously the Indy knew.
What has happened to all the good grown up comedy? Thick of It was the last one.
I get a lot of clips online of a show called Utopia, which seems like an Australian Thick of It but with cleaner language, which seems to be pretty funny in spoofing the absurdities of government.
nside the Mandelson vetting fiasco - our deep dive this weekend
* Cat Little, the permanent secretary at the cabinet office, spent weeks attempting to extract Mandelson's vetting report from the foreign office but to no avail
* Olly Robbins, who has now been sacked as perm sec of the foreign office, has been accused of obstructing the release of the document
* Little eventually obtained the document from UK Security Vetting on March 25. It was explosive. The Times has been told it was not a borderline case but an explicit recommendation that Mandelson should not be cleared
* The summary Little obtained is said to have drawn on Mandelson's interviews with vetting officers - which were deeply personal, interviews with his friends, details of his business interests and even information from his bank accounts. The recommendation was not caveated
* At this point Little informed Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary. They did two things. First, they attempted to get more clarity from Robbins as to why he had given Mandelson clearance. It was not forthcoming
All these people acting independently off their own bat with no mention to their boss.....Sounds like a sacking offence.
None of this would explain how Starmer knew this on 4th Feb:
Badenoch: ‘Did the official security vetting that he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?’ Starmer: ‘Yes, it did’
SFAICS he has lied since if he knew then, and was lying then (in the sense that he could not know this without being briefed on the vetting) if he didn't know then.
Starmer doesn't lie he simply omits crucial information and cavaets statements in such a way that you hear one thing and he is actually saying something slightly different e.g. "formally informed".....people take that as I was told, no that is I was sat down in a formal meeting in which we went through the documentation.
His upgraded football tickets were a classic where every statement on them a lawyer down to a tee, but there the common man you what....what the f##k is he on about, is he in the private box or not....so in the end his comms team had to dig him out of it.
Yes. Look at his polling
74% disapproval. It’s extraordinarily bad
The entire country has concluded he’s a lying and hypocritical c*** and there’s no coming back from that verdict. Especially as he really is a lying etc etc and keeps proving it time and again
There is no way Labour can go into an election led by this verminous man. It would be suicidal. So then the question is: when and how does he go?
The problem Starmer has compared to a Blair or Boris, they managed to defy gravity for a lot longer despite having their own issues with the truth because they had some charisma (and in Blair's case a decent economy and general belief at the time times ran ok).
Also, they had basic political sense. They didn’t make endless unforced errors like Starmer does. He is utterly inept at politics. He doesn’t understand human nature because he’s so weird
And then, the voice
Oh dear. It feels almost cruel constantly attacking him but the fact is he shouldn’t be prime minister. He’s not up to the job. And that is really bad for everyone in the UK
I said all this six years ago, bet that he wouldn't be PM at the next GE on the back of it... and lost.
He is a complete shyster, speaks fluent legalese, but that impresses fellow legal types; lying but being able to logically talk your way out of it is seen as an attribute today, unfortunately
Abolishing the minimum wage should tell people all they need to know about Reform. Capitalism on steroids and more money for their rich mates .
I'm not sure this is an effective attack line. Talking about their rich mates makes them sound like safe members of the establishment rather than dangerous extremists.
The real problem is that we have a Schizophrenia approach to the minimum wage.
Governments put it up to become more popular. Then they turn a blind eye to massive evasion. In particular, abuse of immigrants. They are pretty much trafficked into low paid work.
When this abuse is mentioned, some clown will say “who will wipe the bottoms?”. Well, the scheme irk import immigrants to “wipe bottoms” ended in fraudulent failure. To the point the Indian government complained about abuse of its citizens.
In some areas of business, the honest employers can’t make a profit. So the criminal scum win.
The minimum wage is a promise. And the government fails to deliver.
Better a lower minimum wage strictly enforced and which means small businesses can hire more people than what we have now
There should not be a minimum wage at all as it distorts the labour market and disincentivises those most in need of additional skills from acquiring them.
It's basically disguised social spending by the government, which dumps the cost directly on business, rather than having to raise taxes and hand over the cash itself. If government must subsidise the lazy and unproductive, it should do so directly, and suffer the political consequences of raising taxes, so that we can have an open debate about whether the subsidies are justified.
There's also the added absurdity of having the same minimum nationwide, except I think London, even though the cost of living varies widely between regions.
But doing it in a concealed way through the already struggling private sector is a disaster. We should copy Denmark, which the Left usually loves so much, and have no national minimum wage.
Denmark doesn't need a minimum wage because their unionisation rate is 67% versus 23% here. In effect our minimum wage represents what a powerful industry-wide union would have delivered for workers.
You make a good point that I agree with in principle. But you miss both this and the fact employers are also subsidised via UC for working households. Given we don't have widespread unemployment, I'm not convinced the minimum wage has that much of an effect either way, though I agree that having a national one must be distorting the economy and creating inefficiencies.
nside the Mandelson vetting fiasco - our deep dive this weekend
* Cat Little, the permanent secretary at the cabinet office, spent weeks attempting to extract Mandelson's vetting report from the foreign office but to no avail
* Olly Robbins, who has now been sacked as perm sec of the foreign office, has been accused of obstructing the release of the document
* Little eventually obtained the document from UK Security Vetting on March 25. It was explosive. The Times has been told it was not a borderline case but an explicit recommendation that Mandelson should not be cleared
* The summary Little obtained is said to have drawn on Mandelson's interviews with vetting officers - which were deeply personal, interviews with his friends, details of his business interests and even information from his bank accounts. The recommendation was not caveated
* At this point Little informed Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary. They did two things. First, they attempted to get more clarity from Robbins as to why he had given Mandelson clearance. It was not forthcoming
All these people acting independently off their own bat with no mention to their boss.....Sounds like a sacking offence.
None of this would explain how Starmer knew this on 4th Feb:
Badenoch: ‘Did the official security vetting that he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?’ Starmer: ‘Yes, it did’
SFAICS he has lied since if he knew then, and was lying then (in the sense that he could not know this without being briefed on the vetting) if he didn't know then.
Starmer doesn't lie he simply omits crucial information and cavaets statements in such a way that you hear one thing and he is actually saying something slightly different e.g. "formally informed".....people take that as I was told, no that is I was sat down in a formal meeting in which we went through the documentation.
His upgraded football tickets were a classic where every statement on them a lawyer down to a tee, but there the common man you what....what the f##k is he on about, is he in the private box or not....so in the end his comms team had to dig him out of it.
Yes. Look at his polling
74% disapproval. It’s extraordinarily bad
The entire country has concluded he’s a lying and hypocritical c*** and there’s no coming back from that verdict. Especially as he really is a lying etc etc and keeps proving it time and again
There is no way Labour can go into an election led by this verminous man. It would be suicidal. So then the question is: when and how does he go?
The problem Starmer has compared to a Blair or Boris, they managed to defy gravity for a lot longer despite having their own issues with the truth because they had some charisma (and in Blair's case a decent economy and general belief at the time times ran ok).
Also, they had basic political sense. They didn’t make endless unforced errors like Starmer does. He is utterly inept at politics. He doesn’t understand human nature because he’s so weird
And then, the voice
Oh dear. It feels almost cruel constantly attacking him but the fact is he shouldn’t be prime minister. He’s not up to the job. And that is really bad for everyone in the UK
I said all this six years ago, bet that he wouldn't be PM at the next GE on the back of it... and lost.
He is a complete shyster, speaks fluent legalese, but that impresses fellow legal types; lying but being able to logically talk your way out of it is seen as an attribute today, unfortunately
He's far more capable of the job than than the last 4 incumbent and not as capable as Cameron or Blair
a) "Mandelson was fully vetted like all Ambassadors" b) "Actually, he had a different process because he was a political appointee" c) "Er...he failed vetting. But no-one knew" d) "OK we knew. But only on Tuesday" e) "Actually people knew on Friday" f) "OK, some knew weeks ago"
nside the Mandelson vetting fiasco - our deep dive this weekend
* Cat Little, the permanent secretary at the cabinet office, spent weeks attempting to extract Mandelson's vetting report from the foreign office but to no avail
* Olly Robbins, who has now been sacked as perm sec of the foreign office, has been accused of obstructing the release of the document
* Little eventually obtained the document from UK Security Vetting on March 25. It was explosive. The Times has been told it was not a borderline case but an explicit recommendation that Mandelson should not be cleared
* The summary Little obtained is said to have drawn on Mandelson's interviews with vetting officers - which were deeply personal, interviews with his friends, details of his business interests and even information from his bank accounts. The recommendation was not caveated
* At this point Little informed Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary. They did two things. First, they attempted to get more clarity from Robbins as to why he had given Mandelson clearance. It was not forthcoming
All these people acting independently off their own bat with no mention to their boss.....Sounds like a sacking offence.
None of this would explain how Starmer knew this on 4th Feb:
Badenoch: ‘Did the official security vetting that he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?’ Starmer: ‘Yes, it did’
SFAICS he has lied since if he knew then, and was lying then (in the sense that he could not know this without being briefed on the vetting) if he didn't know then.
Starmer doesn't lie he simply omits crucial information and cavaets statements in such a way that you hear one thing and he is actually saying something slightly different e.g. "formally informed".....people take that as I was told, no that is I was sat down in a formal meeting in which we went through the documentation.
His upgraded football tickets were a classic where every statement on them a lawyer down to a tee, but there the common man you what....what the f##k is he on about, is he in the private box or not....so in the end his comms team had to dig him out of it.
Yes. Look at his polling
74% disapproval. It’s extraordinarily bad
The entire country has concluded he’s a lying and hypocritical c*** and there’s no coming back from that verdict. Especially as he really is a lying etc etc and keeps proving it time and again
There is no way Labour can go into an election led by this verminous man. It would be suicidal. So then the question is: when and how does he go?
The problem Starmer has compared to a Blair or Boris, they managed to defy gravity for a lot longer despite having their own issues with the truth because they had some charisma (and in Blair's case a decent economy and general belief at the time times ran ok).
Also, they had basic political sense. They didn’t make endless unforced errors like Starmer does. He is utterly inept at politics. He doesn’t understand human nature because he’s so weird
And then, the voice
Oh dear. It feels almost cruel constantly attacking him but the fact is he shouldn’t be prime minister. He’s not up to the job. And that is really bad for everyone in the UK
I said all this six years ago, bet that he wouldn't be PM at the next GE on the back of it... and lost.
He is a complete shyster, speaks fluent legalese, but that impresses fellow legal types; lying but being able to logically talk your way out of it is seen as an attribute today, unfortunately
He's far more capable of the job than than the last 4 incumbent and not as capable as Cameron or Blair
Thats the problem
Name better credible options?
That is always a fair question, but it does run out of roads eventually. And as someone might be a decent minister but a terrible PM, or might flourish in the latter and show new skills, at a point you have to take a gamble.
It's what the public do every GE, since there's no real equivalent to doing the job, so our judgement is based on vibes.
The claim that nobody at the heart of government — ie close to Starmer — knew Mandelson had flunked his security vetting is unravelling at a rate of knots. Starmer’s head of comms was alerted by the media last September. Sources tell me multiple folks in the Cabinet Office (where the UK Security Vetting unit is based) had known for quite some time. Cat Little, Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, even had a copy of the UK Sec Vet January 2025 document concluding Mandelson was unfit to be US ambassador. She informed the new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo. Soon there were about a dozen lawyers and officials crawling all over it. Such matters don’t stay secret for long in the upper echelons of Whitehall. But it seems the PM was still in the dark … until last Tuesday. Mmmmmm
I thought this was supposed to be so top top top top secret, that literally nobody had access to it outside Robbins, and even then the way it has been reported they made it sound like you had to go into a deep air gapped bunker in order to read it.
That is a misunderstanding.
In the normal course of events the distribution is tightly restricted, but that doesn't make it "top secret" - and more than (eg) your medical records are.
I am saying that is the line that has been spun by every talking head sent out by the government. They made it sound like those super-injunction where nobody is allowed to even know the existance of the super-injuction, in this case nobody is allowed to know a) he failed and b) anything about what failed him...and therefore it was no possible to tell the PM even if he asked.....but mysteriously the Indy knew.
What has happened to all the good grown up comedy? Thick of It was the last one.
I get a lot of clips online of a show called Utopia, which seems like an Australian Thick of It but with cleaner language, which seems to be pretty funny in spoofing the absurdities of government.
Utopia is set in a fictional quango, and is very good.
The same lead actor appeared in Hollowmen, which was a direct Thick of It parallel. Set in Government featuring spin doctors, civil servants, spads, ministers and press secretaries, and a PM whose face we never see. It is superb. It was on Youtube for a bit before being taken down for copyright reasons so I bought the DVDs on Ebay
Abolishing the minimum wage should tell people all they need to know about Reform. Capitalism on steroids and more money for their rich mates .
I'm not sure this is an effective attack line. Talking about their rich mates makes them sound like safe members of the establishment rather than dangerous extremists.
The real problem is that we have a Schizophrenia approach to the minimum wage.
Governments put it up to become more popular. Then they turn a blind eye to massive evasion. In particular, abuse of immigrants. They are pretty much trafficked into low paid work.
When this abuse is mentioned, some clown will say “who will wipe the bottoms?”. Well, the scheme irk import immigrants to “wipe bottoms” ended in fraudulent failure. To the point the Indian government complained about abuse of its citizens.
In some areas of business, the honest employers can’t make a profit. So the criminal scum win.
The minimum wage is a promise. And the government fails to deliver.
Better a lower minimum wage strictly enforced and which means small businesses can hire more people than what we have now
There should not be a minimum wage at all as it distorts the labour market and disincentivises those most in need of additional skills from acquiring them.
It's basically disguised social spending by the government, which dumps the cost directly on business, rather than having to raise taxes and hand over the cash itself. If government must subsidise the lazy and unproductive, it should do so directly, and suffer the political consequences of raising taxes, so that we can have an open debate about whether the subsidies are justified.
There's also the added absurdity of having the same minimum nationwide, except I think London, even though the cost of living varies widely between regions.
But doing it in a concealed way through the already struggling private sector is a disaster. We should copy Denmark, which the Left usually loves so much, and have no national minimum wage.
Denmark doesn't need a minimum wage because their unionisation rate is 67% versus 23% here. In effect our minimum wage represents what a powerful industry-wide union would have delivered for workers.
You make a good point that I agree with in principle. But you miss both this and the fact employers are also subsidised via UC for working households. Given we don't have widespread unemployment, I'm not convinced the minimum wage has that much of an effect either way, though I agree that having a national one must be distorting the economy and creating inefficiencies.
e.g. the 90:10 ratio in Denmark is 2, in the UK 4. They don't need a minimum wage because the lowest paid people are paid 2x as much in relative terms (v the highest paid) as they are in the UK.
I think Iran and US can't agree terms that are acceptable to both parties and both parties would prefer to delay than accept a compromise, even though the delay damages both parties.
The claim that nobody at the heart of government — ie close to Starmer — knew Mandelson had flunked his security vetting is unravelling at a rate of knots. Starmer’s head of comms was alerted by the media last September. Sources tell me multiple folks in the Cabinet Office (where the UK Security Vetting unit is based) had known for quite some time. Cat Little, Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, even had a copy of the UK Sec Vet January 2025 document concluding Mandelson was unfit to be US ambassador. She informed the new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo. Soon there were about a dozen lawyers and officials crawling all over it. Such matters don’t stay secret for long in the upper echelons of Whitehall. But it seems the PM was still in the dark … until last Tuesday. Mmmmmm
I thought this was supposed to be so top top top top secret, that literally nobody had access to it outside Robbins, and even then the way it has been reported they made it sound like you had to go into a deep air gapped bunker in order to read it.
This draws it closer to Starmer because, if dozens of lawyers are involved, then it is inconceivable the Attorney General was not involved
The claim that nobody at the heart of government — ie close to Starmer — knew Mandelson had flunked his security vetting is unravelling at a rate of knots. Starmer’s head of comms was alerted by the media last September. Sources tell me multiple folks in the Cabinet Office (where the UK Security Vetting unit is based) had known for quite some time. Cat Little, Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, even had a copy of the UK Sec Vet January 2025 document concluding Mandelson was unfit to be US ambassador. She informed the new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo. Soon there were about a dozen lawyers and officials crawling all over it. Such matters don’t stay secret for long in the upper echelons of Whitehall. But it seems the PM was still in the dark … until last Tuesday. Mmmmmm
I thought this was supposed to be so top top top top secret, that literally nobody had access to it outside Robbins, and even then the way it has been reported they made it sound like you had to go into a deep air gapped bunker in order to read it.
This draws it closer to Starmer because, if dozens of lawyers are involved, then it is inconceivable the Attorney General was not involved
One Richard Hermer, Starmer's close ally
I think the line is now, yes they had it, it was super sensitive, they then had to keep it secret until the lawyers said it was ok otherwise something something something...that's today's line anyway.
It is strange how a civil servant off their own bat decides to go and spent months trying to get this classified report that everybody had previously said showed no issues. What would drive a civil servant unprompted by their political bosses to do that? They aren't exactly known for doing such things.
Comments
(It’s not top of my list of Brownian motions that need reversing.)
This implies that Musk has used the resources of what was once the world's leading electric car manufacturer to try and sell a vehicle as part of some obscure nerd joke. If true, Tesla shareholders should be taking him to court to clean him out of everything he has.
Has Danny Kruger thought this through?
Surely nobody has that warped a sense of humour?
Did Starmer:
Know something he should not have known and lied about it
Not know something he should have known and lied about it
Not know something he should not have known and lied about it and sacked the man who didn't and shouldn't have told him
Know something he should have known and lied about it and sacked the man who did and should tell him.
I am sure PBers can thread that needle. At the moment I can't. Any offers?
Roy Brown Jr.
If he didn't have a seriously warped sense of humour I would be more surprised. And, truth be told, he's rich enough that he can destroy what was once the world's most valuable car company and it wouldn't put a major dent in his wealth.
As usual
A mini series of the Godwinson family would be interesting.
Starmer’s head of comms was alerted by the media last September.
Sources tell me multiple folks in the Cabinet Office (where the UK Security Vetting unit is based) had known for quite some time.
Cat Little, Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, even had a copy of the UK Sec Vet January 2025 document concluding Mandelson was unfit to be US ambassador.
She informed the new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo.
Soon there were about a dozen lawyers and officials crawling all over it.
Such matters don’t stay secret for long in the upper echelons of Whitehall.
But it seems the PM was still in the dark … until last Tuesday.
Mmmmmm
https://x.com/afneil/status/2045458264645660906?s=20
I thought this was supposed to be so top top top top secret, that literally nobody had access to it outside Robbins, and even then the way it has been reported they made it sound like you had to go into a deep air gapped bunker in order to read it.
https://x.com/mike_fabricant/status/2045451818100994418?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
* Cat Little, the permanent secretary at the cabinet office, spent weeks attempting to extract Mandelson's vetting report from the foreign office but to no avail
* Olly Robbins, who has now been sacked as perm sec of the foreign office, has been accused of obstructing the release of the document
* Little eventually obtained the document from UK Security Vetting on March 25. It was explosive. The Times has been told it was not a borderline case but an explicit recommendation that Mandelson should not be cleared
* The summary Little obtained is said to have drawn on Mandelson's interviews with vetting officers - which were deeply personal, interviews with his friends, details of his business interests and even information from his bank accounts. The recommendation was not caveated
* At this point Little informed Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary. They did two things. First, they attempted to get more clarity from Robbins as to why he had given Mandelson clearance. It was not forthcoming
https://x.com/Steven_Swinford/status/2045469210780807471?s=20
All these people acting independently off their own bat with no mention to their boss.....Sounds like a sacking offence.
And as he's dead he won't be able to purrfect a response.
Governments put it up to become more popular. Then they turn a blind eye to massive evasion. In particular, abuse of immigrants. They are pretty much trafficked into low paid work.
When this abuse is mentioned, some clown will say “who will wipe the bottoms?”. Well, the scheme irk import immigrants to “wipe bottoms” ended in fraudulent failure. To the point the Indian government complained about abuse of its citizens.
In some areas of business, the honest employers can’t make a profit. So the criminal scum win.
The minimum wage is a promise. And the government fails to deliver.
Vetting is “Top Secret Ultra Mega Published In The Independent”
If you are ever jealous of him, remember that.
But also, it's a bit generous to say that Cummings, Kruger etc are doing anything as clever as diagnosis. Between saying that there is a problem and coming up with a solution, there is the intermediate step of working out why that problem has come about. And the answers there are rarely more useful than "people unlike me were in charge".
Only three people understand it. But one is under an NDA; the second mad. I am the third and I have already forgotten the answer.
For a start it would be relatively difficult, albeit not impossible, for one man - working alone - to charm millions of snakes simply by his religious charisma and get them to swim across the Irish Sea. There is no precedent for it
Expert herpetologists who openly pooh-pooh the story now believe it is more likely the snakes got bored
There, the cybertruck explained.
But I suppose you could argue that there's been at least a few decades of reckless changes, and there's not much of the patient that remains undamaged.
Also they have this really clever idea where they encase the jails, courthouses and police stations in huge boxes of steel - to protect them from the rain. It’s neat
In the normal course of events the distribution is tightly restricted, but that doesn't make it "top secret" - and more than (eg) your medical records are.
Case closed.
Badenoch:
‘Did the official security vetting that he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?’
Starmer:
‘Yes, it did’
SFAICS he has lied since if he knew then, and was lying then (in the sense that he could not know this without being briefed on the vetting) if he didn't know then.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bE6lpKkcFQY
His upgraded football tickets were a classic where every statement on them a lawyer down to a tee, but there the common man you what....what the f##k is he on about, is he in the private box or not....so in the end his comms team had to dig him out of it.
A nice example, you might call Chesterton's hedge, is that since the war we have removed hundreds of thousands of miles of hedgerow. We have now started on a fifty year programme of putting them back.
I would certainly vote for a small-c conservative party if there was one. There isn't.
74% disapproval. It’s extraordinarily bad
The entire country has concluded he’s a lying and hypocritical c*** and there’s no coming back from that verdict. Especially as he really is a lying etc etc and keeps proving it time and again
There is no way Labour can go into an election led by this verminous man. It would be suicidal. So then the question is: when and how does he go?
And then, the voice
Oh dear. It feels almost cruel constantly attacking him but the fact is he shouldn’t be prime minister. He’s not up to the job. And that is really bad for everyone in the UK
I'm now trying to work out which featured Roman Emperor is Trump closest to?
Another fact little understood was that the Dragon with which Saint George was involved was a Lady Dragon, not a Boy Dragon. This can be seen in medievel depictions where her "lady parts are clearly visible". Her need for the damsels was to feed her baby dragons and as such deemed excusable.
"Is there a gap? There's always a gap".
It's basically disguised social spending by the government, which dumps the cost directly on business, rather than having to raise taxes and hand over the cash itself. If government must subsidise the lazy and unproductive, it should do so directly, and suffer the political consequences of raising taxes, so that we can have an open debate about whether the subsidies are justified.
There's also the added absurdity of having the same minimum nationwide, except I think London, even though the cost of living varies widely between regions.
But doing it in a concealed way through the already struggling private sector is a disaster. We should copy Denmark, which the Left usually loves so much, and have no national minimum wage.
Starmer is either Incompetent, gullible or a liar
Just kidding, Trump is far too old and his degenerate tastes may be in other directions.
We should never have left the EU.
He is a complete shyster, speaks fluent legalese, but that impresses fellow legal types; lying but being able to logically talk your way out of it is seen as an attribute today, unfortunately
People in glass houses should not throw stones as Starmer is learning and Badenoch and Farage would be engulfed by to a greater extent.
Although I do think Stephen Flynn is one of the very few charismatic Orators left in the Hoc
JD Vance: "People don’t have any idea how bad the corruption is in Washington DC"
https://x.com/factpostnews/status/2044191565434814803
Is JD a secret whistleblower ?
You make a good point that I agree with in principle. But you miss both this and the fact employers are also subsidised via UC for working households. Given we don't have widespread unemployment, I'm not convinced the minimum wage has that much of an effect either way, though I agree that having a national one must be distorting the economy and creating inefficiencies.
Thats the problem
Name better credible options?
a) "Mandelson was fully vetted like all Ambassadors"
b) "Actually, he had a different process because he was a political appointee"
c) "Er...he failed vetting. But no-one knew"
d) "OK we knew. But only on Tuesday"
e) "Actually people knew on Friday"
f) "OK, some knew weeks ago"
https://x.com/DPJHodges/status/2045498907279380528?s=20
It's what the public do every GE, since there's no real equivalent to doing the job, so our judgement is based on vibes.
And there is at least some sort of ceasefire both in the gulf and in Lebanon.
The market might well change its mind next week.
The same lead actor appeared in Hollowmen, which was a direct Thick of It parallel. Set in Government featuring spin doctors, civil servants, spads, ministers and press secretaries, and a PM whose face we never see. It is superb. It was on Youtube for a bit before being taken down for copyright reasons so I bought the DVDs on Ebay
One Richard Hermer, Starmer's close ally
It is strange how a civil servant off their own bat decides to go and spent months trying to get this classified report that everybody had previously said showed no issues. What would drive a civil servant unprompted by their political bosses to do that? They aren't exactly known for doing such things.