There’s one story that has dominated the last week – politicalbetting.com
There’s one story that has dominated the last week – politicalbetting.com
What news story do Britons say they heard the most about last week? (fieldwork 19-20 April 2026)US-Iran war: 57% -General: 39% -Closure of Strait of Hormuz: 10% -Increase in fuel prices: 5% -Ceasefire talks: 3%Peter Mandelson vetting scandal: 18%yougov.com/en-gb/articl…
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(Pinched from wiki)
Labour have never had less than 40% of the seats and are usually closer to 50%. YouGov are predicting a tremendous drop from 44 seats to 12 or 12.5% of the total.
Disagreeing about politics is the DNA of this site but hate should have no part in it
First, it’s not legible. You can’t explain the Mandelson story in a single clean sentence without disappearing into procedural detail.
Second, it doesn’t touch daily life. Most voters are focused on prices, mortgages and whatever the current global crisis happens to be.
Curtice’s “floor” point is relevant here as well. If Labour/Starmer ratings are already close to rock bottom, there’s limited further downside. You can’t meaningfully damage numbers that are already baked in.
So even if this dominates PB and the lobby, it doesn’t follow that it shifts votes.
It is a drip drip story that must have labour mps in despair
https://news.sky.com/liveblog-webview/politics-latest-keir-starmer-peter-mandelson-vetting-commons-iran-war-olly-robbins-12593360
What though counts against this is he wasn’t popular before the fiasco and not wanting to flog a dead horse but everything began to unravel after the winter fuel allowance announcement .
It’s this that made me realize both Starmer and Reeves were politically clueless.
I’ve since partly forgiven Reeves for her ineptitude as she’s one of the cabinet members most enthusiastic about much closer ties with the EU and she did seem to be steadying the ship before Trumps imbecilic war in Iran .
It looks like we have seen the back of Brixian, so one down several to go.
Maybe Starmer is already a lost cause in the public's view
And Trump at 6% is really astonishingly low
Artemis moon mission at 1% !!!!
Week beginning on April 12, 2026: 429.80 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 430.16 ppm
Very rare the weekly value is below the previous year's CO2.
The rest don't strike me as particularly Tory, though. Labour (still), LibDem, some trending Green.
Can't recall any Reformers but you have to be able to use a keyboard to post here!
They should go after Badenoch and Farage on their support for the US action .
They both supported a war which is now screwing you on the cost of living .
https://youtu.be/iXijcySC0ZU?t=297
Why Starmer gives Farage airtime is a mystery to me
Bf 70 next PM and 50 next Lab leader. Too big surely?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/apr/22/olly-robbins-starmer-sacking-ministers-cabinet-meeting
Cabinet ministers have expressed concern about Keir’s Starmer’s decision to sack Olly Robbins as the Foreign Office’s top official over the Peter Mandelson vetting scandal as they warned him not to alienate the civil service, sources have told the Guardian.
Those who intervened included the deputy prime minister, David Lammy, who warned against creating a “them and us” mentality between ministers and officials, as Whitehall reels in the fallout from the vetting scandal.
The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is understood to have questioned whether it was justifiable to sack Robbins for his failure to tell Starmer that Mandelson had failed vetting, and then to praise him as an outstanding civil servant.
Three others, including the health secretary, Wes Streeting, and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, warned the prime minister not to pick fights with officials and instead to keep them “on side” – a position with which Starmer said he agreed.
Sorted.
You two are so desperate to be victims; it’s weird..
Huge amounts of time...
Hating non-conformist posters is all part of the fun.
Anyone know how he is these days? Wish him well.
I still haven't decided how I will vote at the locals. Rationally, Labour, as the local representative of continuity LabCon against any potential GrnRef candidate. But it's going to be the party leaders who carry the can for the score, and I feel like giving Kemi a vote of confidence.
It seems hard to believe my local result will be anything but Lab, but I do buy the projections of Lab losing 75% of their councillors and there's going to be a lot of people thinking their local result is still nailed on Lab who end up surprised.
That last bit added to really trigger some people
Although Reform are challenging them now; sometimes I wish I was still involved in politics there. It would be an 'interesting' experience.
Fine as a barb but most voters aren’t following the detail and aren’t especially interested in it. It doesn’t affect their day-to-day, so it gets filed under “politics being politics”.
It's background noise confirming what people already think - if his approval ratings are accurate.
https://bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yjlgm2gejo
Roger is Manchester Jewish. You are making the same mistake, but from a different vantage point, as BJO did earlier of confusing Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gvir with Jewish people going about their business in the South of France but who disagree vehemently with the regime.
I doubt Brixian was a staffer. Anyway he's gone now, so no harm done.
https://x.com/pippacrerar/status/2046952999809933463
It's background noise confirming what people already think - if his approval ratings are accurate.
Boris eating a birthday cake didn’t “affect their daily life” either. But look what happened there.
This is about morals, judgement and integrity. Do you not think voters care about those?
The Times - Reform UK candidate said Nazis were ‘real visionaries’
Partygate cut through because it was instantly legible (“they made rules and broke them”) and it did connect to daily life. People couldn’t see family, attend funerals, etc. That wasn’t abstract.
Johnson was not sanctioned by Parliament for eating a birthday cake.
This is about morals, judgement and integrity. Do you not think voters care about those?
The cake myth has done a lot of heavy lifting . This wasn’t what brought Johnson down . The final straw was the Pincher affair . Starmer for all his faults isn’t in the same league as Johnson.
"Your position is that Olly Robbins followed the correct process, but the correct process turns out to be flawed?"
On #PoliticsLive @hzeffman questions Chief Secretary to the Treasury James Murray over the Peter Mandelson vetting process
But it doesn’t have the same weight or clarity as Partygate.
That cut through because it combined rule-breaking by those making the rules with direct personal impact and a very simple narrative. This is more procedural and second-order.
So it may “smell” a bit similar to people already inclined that way, but it’s not the same kind of issue politically, which is why it’s not landing in the same way.
Not banished to ConHome, I hope. He was bad, but that would be extreme.
Today at PMQs, Keir Starmer selectively quoted Olly Robbins’ evidence at the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
Starmer said on Mandelson’s vetting: "no pressure existed whatsoever in relation to this case".
But Robbins’ own written evidence to the Committee talks of an “atmosphere of pressure" from No10.
On Monday, Robbins told the Committee: "Throughout January, honestly, my office and the Foreign Secretary’s office were under constant pressure. There was an atmosphere of constant chasing".
Starmer was therefore wrong to say that "no pressure existed whatsoever".
He must correct the record immediately.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/04/21/shabana-mahmood-home-secretary-tells-white-liberals-f-off/
She was heckled for being Reform-lite. So she said she wanted to taser and then deport Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, Zack Polanski and Sir Ed Davey. She said claims if being Reform-lite were “just a way of delegitimising the point of view that I bring to the table”, which includes the "perfectly valid, legitimate views of millions of people in this country, including ethnic minorities in this country".
Well, that told them.
CO2’s sawtooth curve peaks in boreal winter and then falls in boreal summer as the continents and oceans go green and absorb more from the atmosphere. In April there can be very pronounced year on year differences in seasonal progression in Eurasia and North America, so the speed of reduction varies. So your stat suggests we’ve had an earlier NH spring than last year.
Still, would take a lot of interannual variation to wipe out the usual 2-3 ppm annual increase.
ETA: ENSO can also have an effect but both last year and this have La Niña patterns (so far) so seems unlikely to have had much impact.
* Sacking Robbins.
It’s reasonable to hate on SeanT, since he’s an ignorant racist trolling twat, but otherwise, this site is an exemplar of what people hoped for from the internet, before it all started to go bandy a decade or so back.
Peter Fortune
(Bromley and Biggin Hill) (Con)
Today, vigils are being held across Westminster for the 22 women who are diagnosed with lobular breast cancer every day, and I think we are privileged to say that some of those extraordinarily brave women are in the Gallery this afternoon. When I raised this issue with the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, she promised to take action and not just commit words, so will the Prime Minister today commit to the Lobular Moon Shot Project’s plan to fund lobular breast cancer?
The Prime Minister
I thank the hon. Gentleman for drawing the attention of the House to the vigils and the campaign, and I acknowledge those who are here in the Gallery today. I will make sure that this is looked at to see what further we can do, and that any relevant meetings are set up.
Hope he returns. Ignoring the tedious partisan shite his other stuff on Brum and the like was great.
One of Reform’s candidates is Ben Rowe, who is standing in the Ham ward of Plymouth. He urged protesters throwing bricks at police defending a mosque to “get rid of that filthy building” during the 2024 Southport riots.
Commenting beneath a YouTube video in February, Rowe accused “the Jews” of “creating division by forcing other races on our societies”. He elsewhere described immigrants to the UK “breeding like rats”, posted blackface memes and labelled Islam “a cancer”.
Nathaniel Menday, standing for Reform in Woodhouse, Sheffield, has called himself an “ethno-nationalist” and encouraged the use of white supremacist symbols. Last October, he asked a fellow Sheffield United fan to add a sonnenrad “sun wheel” emblem to a flag — a symbol widely used by neo-Nazis.
In January 2024, he shared a picture of Berlin’s Olympiastadion and wrote: “Whichever group of people built this must have been real visionaries!” The stadium was built by Nazi Germany to host the 1936 Olympics and designed by Albert Speer, the munitions minister who was convicted at the Nuremberg trials of crimes against humanity.
In 2023, Menday suggested “Jewish people in the West” were responsible for the antisemitism they were suffering because they “overwhelmingly favour open borders”. He added: “Sow the wind reap the whirlwind.”...
...Reform candidates have also shared conspiracy theories about the Covid pandemic and American politics.
Rowe reposted content that suggested Covid had a “Hebrew” source, while Axel Tye, standing for Reform in Penshaw & Shiney Row, Sunderland, said: “Stop covid in it’s [sic] tracks in two simple steps. 1. Delete the app. 2. Stop getting tested.”
Trevor Jones, a Reform candidate for Bolton North East, said he was “not buying another convenient virus just before Christmas” in November 2021.
He also shared posts calling the former US president Joe Biden “Bin Biden”, accusing him of having “rigged elections” and urging a suspension in the rollout of 5G.
Bev Watkins, standing in Wakefield for Reform, shared hoax content which warned against taking a “new” paracetamol which “contains ‘Machupo’ virus, considered one of the most dangerous viruses in the world, with a high mortality rate”.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/reform-uk-local-election-candidates-vetting-sjq0g0lj5
Starmer contradicted Robbins testimony to Thornberry
Most sensible people don't consume very much news.
I once saw it suggested that Political Operative Bootcamp should include a week of only getting news from the bulletins on a mainstream music station. You're up to date in two minutes, of which a third is an Ofcom-mandated local story and a third is showbiz.
There's a good reason that a lot of stories fail to cut through.
If it had stayed British the 1941-45 Pacific War might not have happened.
Of course the Americans would then have stayed neutral in the Anti-Nazi War of 1939-45.
MOT
“This situation is going to really damage trust between officials and ministers”
Ex-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reacts to the Government’s handing of the Peter Mandelson vetting row: “We need our government to govern and when it’s dealing with this, that’s what it’s not doing.”