Too many tweets – politicalbetting.com
Too many tweets – politicalbetting.com
No doubt Zahawi a big name for Reform & helps with momentum. But his resignation was on what the public see as a clear ‘one rule for them’ type scandal they hate – so a risk this, more than previous switches, could blunt Reform’s appeal as ‘different to usual political class’.
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He's the best passer I've ever seen.
She'd be a better fit in dodgy Reform.
It can genuinely be odd, as many politicians are very bright, and sometimes they will make the calculation that they can get away with some hypocrisy and be right, but other times they can seem totally blindsided by very obvious things.
I'm pretty sure she feels that she needs Starmer's wisdom too. They don't agree, perhaps never will, but their working together is currently in both their interests (and will be for a while).
Erasing tax issues is even trickier to do of course (as opposed to erasing tax, which is apparently pretty easy if you know the right accountants).
See Blair and Prescott.
You probably aren’t saying it now either, but I am!
Are you looking forward to a RefCon love-in/bunfight?
And how the Dickens did you get Wordle in two? With a starting word of "adieu" I got it in three, which is my best for a while.
Vote Reform - get recycled Tory failures.
As Sun Tzu said 'never interrupt your enemies when they are making a mistake'
Trickle of defections will become a flood
Nadhim Zahawi will not be the last former cabinet minister to defect to Reform. As long as Nigel Farage looks as if he might be prime minister, I think the trickle of Conservative defections will become a flood.
The Tories are responding in the only way they can, branding Zahawi a “has-been”, but he was the future once – he was a good communicator as vaccines minister – and now he will have an afterlife advising Reform candidates on how to run a government.
Zahawi wasn’t a great communicator at his news conference, telling Tony Diver of the Telegraph he had asked a “really stupid question” when it was a pertinent inquiry about Reform’s embrace of vaccine conspiracy theories.
But if has-beens of Zahawi’s status see Reform as a rehabilitation of offenders scheme, rising stars will see it, rather than the Tory party, as the path to high office.
Matters of high principle are pretty low on the list.
RFM: 33% (+2)
LAB: 19% (=)
CON: 19% (=)
GRN: 12% (=)
LDM: 11% (-4)
Via @tweetfreshwater, 9-11 Jan.
Changes w/ 28-30 Nov.
https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/2010764575877026127?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
The UK will bring into force a law which will make it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images, following widespread concerns over Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot.
The Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said the government would also seek to make it illegal for companies to supply the tools designed to create such images.
Speaking to the Commons, Kendall said AI-generated pictures of women and children in states of undress, created without a person's consent, were not "harmless images" but "weapons of abuse".
...
It is currently illegal to share deepfakes of adults in the UK, but until now legislation which would make it a criminal offence to create or request them has not been enforced, despite passing in June 2025.
Kendall said she would also make it a "priority offence" in the Online Safety Act.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq845glnvl1o
* This is I think normal. There are provisions from the Equality Act 2010 which are still not in force in England, unlike Wales and Scotland.
Doesn't Reform still work on the 'one man, one vote, and that man's name is Nigel' basis?
But that is a thing in various ways with all parties, I think. I still occasionally get a members' mail from the Tories several years down the road.
If Reform win hundreds of seats a group of untested true believers and proven defectors may be hard for him to handle though, given prior personnel issues.
And as Boris and Keir could tell him, winning big does not prevent internal troubles entirely.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1jPn8psjkr0
But anyway, I see Starmer as Labour's 2nd greatest ever PM. Apart from him making a dog's dinner of everything, I think his heart is in the right (Tory) place.
Nah...
Secondly because it supports a narrative of movement to Reform when it has currently plateaued, albeit high plateau.
I think the "Tory retreads" argument is overstated. Most people in Reform including supporters are Tory retreads themselves. It also doesn't help the Conservatives by association, unless accompanied by a cleaning of the stables, which clearly isn't happening under Badenoch. It just reminds people, "Ah yes, Zahawi, he was the Tory CoE who fiddled his tax."
Having said all that, I don't think it will make a big difference in the scheme of things either.
We are now into the world of local text-to-video "AI". Some can run on your computer. Some will automatically buy compute time on the cloud (Amazon etc). More and more, they are being made easy to setup - I saw a test app (for mobile) that just needs you to setup a cloud account with Amazon, and it does the rest.
So they are going to fall down the rabbit hole of chasing freeware on the internet. See the War On Encryption and the nascent War On VPNs.
There is no clear answer here - stopping this technology is now nearly impossible. Too put meaningful speed bumps out there would require intrusion on a scale that would make the Chinese State giggle - we are talking about the state having full, continuous, access to your devices.
Just define X as a publisher and hold them liable.
This is a formal parliamentary procedure for members to express strong disapproval or concern about the Chagos treaty without actually stopping it from becoming law.
It sounds like peers have NOT tabled a kill motion which would have stopped the treaty stone dead. This would have been very rare in Parliamentary terms.
Rumour is the Conservatives did not want a kill motion. Speculation that they may not have wanted to set a precedent for if/when they get back into power. More on @GBNEWS.
https://x.com/christopherhope/status/2010769929440518459
https://x.com/nadhimzahawi/status/583738777169952768
They do, however, have a very difficult set of local election results this year to navigate. If they can manage that, and if Kemi and co can continue to be heard (unlike six months ago), then it is far from impossible they could continue their resurgence.
But it's good news for Reform that the traffic continues one way and keeps them in the news.
In the same way, I think that smartphones have had the side effect of making teenagers behave better, by acting as a kind of maiden aunt.
The perfect analog for the Fukkers is the 'The Party of the Average Man' in Nabokov's Bend Sinister. The party leader, Paduk, is even nicknamed the 'The Toad' and Farage has distinctly batrachian features.
He'd have loved it.
The longer it's been since the Tories left office (the radioactive material in this analogy), the less toxic they become.
And thus the higher the proportion of the Tory-Reform vote they get in the polls.
Wired, for example, report that Grok is far more lax.
Nige has gotta keep up the momentum!