my FT profile of Starmer’s new spin doctor and how his PR company worked with - among others - Putin’s Russia www.ft.com/content/a0a8...
Deputy political editor, Financial Times. Also amateur iphone photographer and some-time musician.
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my FT profile of Starmer’s new spin doctor and how his PR company worked with - among others - Putin’s Russia www.ft.com/content/a0a8...
Photo passed along from a federal employee from inside the Dept of Labor building, where a giant Orwellian image of Trump's face is now draped outside. Big Brother is watching.
Prima facie, Elon Musk appears to be manipulating X platform for specific political voices he supports (as well as using his own account to amplify the far right & furthest right). In particular the platform dynamic has shifted & is helping Tommy Robinson to be amplified more than Nigel Farage.
if you want to observe LIz Truss being intellectually owned, this is worth your time via @tobyn.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/30e5...
Sir Keir Starmer on Rayner on Radio 5: "Angela's a great prime minister, I mean deputy prime minister."
Sir Keir Starmer to Matt Chorley on Radio 5: "We've got a St George's flag in our flat".
Ursula von der Leyen’s plane hit by suspected Russian GPS interference - FT scoop www.ft.com/content/3c33...
Doubts have surfaced over Kemi Badenoch’s claim to have been offered a place at a prestigious US medical school at 16, with admissions staff unable to recall the proposal and the university not providing the course. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
sunset, Devon
my favourite surfing spot in Britain, beautiful slow long right handers over and over
Absolutely bonkers personalist regime stuff www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...
Saunton Sands
one other thing I’ve noticed is that Reform councillors don’t tend to publish their phone numbers on council websites - unlike almost everyone else apple.news/AA2zUCEu-QO6...
Devon
aye was up there early afternoon
Been there most of the afternoon with old friends 🍻🍻
Croyde Bay
"CROWDS wave flags" according to the Daily Mail caption of this picture
there’s a reason this place is iconic, to be fair
Jack White is a badass.
Obviously the smears against this man are incredibly libellous - and it says a lot about access to the law that he wouldn't be able to afford to Lord McAlpine these fuckers - but at what point does the government clock that it needs to get a grip on this raging online fire of fascist hate?
view from the roof of Barcelona cathedral
this is fascinating on new Chinese tech which allows EV drivers to swap car batteries in just 3 minutes instead of waiting for the vehicle to be charged www.ft.com/content/d4e9...
On July 14, 2025, Trump declared that he would levy 100% tariffs and secondary sanctions on countries that continued to buy Russian oil if Putin failed to agree to a ceasefire within 10-12 days. Putin didn't. Trump hasn't.
It's a weird day when Jacob Rees-Mogg comes across as much more rational than the rabid bunch of Tories cluttering up the Opposition benches. Ho hum.
So - why are so many right wing commentators salivating over the idea of societal collapse, exactly...? My latest
Dolly Parton has sent my daughter a new book every month for years as she does for thousands of children. She help fund the development of the Covid vaccine. She’s not a billionaire. I think as non wealthy people it’s hard to even imagine how much billionaires *could* be doing with their money.
This sounds glib but “prominent people being mocked online and hating it” is suchhh a driver of so many things in media/politics right now!
Dubrovnik this evening
Israel, which does not allow foreign journalists into Gaza…has killed 237 journalists since the war started, according to Gaza’s government media office. The Committee to Protect Journalists said at least 186 journalists have been killed in the Gaza conflict. apple.news/At7CSM72NQWe...
Never have a group of people needed to get outside and touch grass more than the weirdo online racists.
Probably one of my top 5 sunset spots in the world
Dubrovnik from Mt Srd
Dubrovnik, Croatia
I’m afraid I don’t know but would guess 200 years plus
this is one of the most beautiful trees I’ve ever seen in England #wilderness
"Round-the-clock misery and self-recrimination combined with coyness about the biggest thing that Britain has done this century: that is modern Conservatism to a dishonest tee."
“Farage, Anderson, Goodwin and Pearson frame their interventions as warnings – do what we say to prevent this deplorable violence. “That is certainly how they would choose to frame it. But the more you read and the more you hear of what they say, it sounds instead like a threat.”
Fibonacci
symmetry
had the joy of seeing this guy perform at the weekend, a really special talent m.youtube.com/watch?v=CzpL...
Not for the first time I am begging angry people to put the phone down, walk through actual streets, go to actual pubs, stand on the touch line at local sports clubs, browse Saturday markets, chat with ramblers on footpaths and rediscover beauty & contentedness.
psychedelic chat, sounds awesome?
in case anyone is going to Latitude Festival I’ll be on stage Sunday lunchtime 💬💬💬
Imagine going into journalism to argue that not enough civilians have been killed in a war crime.
Westminster Bridge
he’s going to struggle to shake this off
is this meant to be….good? www.ft.com/content/7108...
“She is “fragile” and “frightened”. At PMQs Badenoch’s hands shake as she reads her lines from a piece of paper. Her backbenchers notice. On television, when she rouses herself to appear in the studios, Badenoch blinks…This is not someone enjoying the job.” www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...
Whitehall
I'm not convinced Allison has ever met the British Army. The officers are generally somewhere on the political spectrum between James Cleverly and Dan Jarvis. It would end up being the first ever centrist coup*.
Marco Rubio was horrified by Trump’s presidential run in 2015, calling him a “con artist” who had “spent a career sticking it to working Americans”. It was after Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 that Rubio’s views began to change. www.ft.com/content/d615...
Here’s a real one. It’s splendid. bsky.app/profile/papa...
The Telegraph is now having to publish so many corrections to articles where it attempts to find *any angle whatsoever* to attack net-zero polices that it makes sense to start tracking them here. These are the ones published since Labour won the election. "We are happy to correct the record."
Whitehall
General Pinochet has entered the chat:
When you’ve lost the daily express
nothing's too good for the workers.... www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
He's one of Britain's richest men. So why does Asif Aziz's property company keep leasing London gift shops to overseas students based in abandoned offices or flytipped car parks — before vanishing without paying millions of pounds in taxes? www.londoncentric.media/p/asf-aziz-l...
the government and Sizewell denied our scoop about the project hitting nearly £40bn in January - today it's finally confirmed www.ft.com/content/0b48...
and yet he’s always cited as evidence of the “tragedy” of rich people leaving the uk
our explanation of the Cunliffe water review - and whether it will resolve the problems in Britain’s water industry with @bondhack.ft.com www.ft.com/content/f721...
aah sorry I was already back in SW1 by then
Great Inside Politics by @pickardje.bsky.social:
Kingfisher Wharf, Fulham
here are the details of the water review which ministers will use as pretext to announce plans to scrap Ofwat later today www.ft.com/content/6246...
I wish you could see the zillions of untouched blackberries on Ham Common even after our session
he’s also going to London
I’m a big fan of this, hopefully he’ll see the vast gulf between actual England and how England is depicted by malign social media trolls
there’s something objectively amusing about MAGA people noticing Trump’s friendship with Epstein about a decade after everyone else
believe me there are tens of thousands more coming through
yesterday’s blackberry-picking haul in the pouring rain
fascinating scoop from Sunday Times today via Gabriel Pogrund
in this week’s FT Political Fix podcast our Whitehall editor @lucyfisher.ft.com explains how she was one of the journalists to find out about the Afghan files, only to get hit with the government’s unprecedented super-injunction www.ft.com/content/46bf...
Apparently the BBC were able to spread COVID propaganda because they'd already rotted our minds by showing Scooby Doo in the 70s and 80s. It's amazing that these people can chew gum let alone put up posters
Fantastic. The disclosure is going to be amazing.
It’s 3:1 debt to equity
when the FT revealed in January that the cost of building the Sizewell C nuclear plant had risen to around £40bn they all denied it now we can reveal the actual price tag - to be announced this week - and it is £38bn www.ft.com/content/d431...
Remember: The internet is written in indelible ink.
under-fire water regulator Ofwat is on the chopping block www.ft.com/content/14c2...
BREAKING The WSJ has reviewed a book put together for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, as part of that book a letter was submitted by Donald Trump. Trump’s letter features a drawing of a naked woman and this text which imagines a conversation between Trump and Epstein. Full Story: bit.ly/45bmsxO
that’s lovely, thanks for sharing
@pickardje.bsky.social The magic political ratio
A report from the UK think-tank Royal United Services Institute has found that Russian hackers were actively exploring ways of injecting propaganda or biased material into the training data of generative AI models to skew their output. www.ft.com/content/2712...
The US justice department has fired Maurene Comey, a prosecutor who worked on high-profile cases including those against the late convicted paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein and socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, according to three people familiar with the matter. www.ft.com/content/4b7d...
Note that this is the Sun, who until a few years ago were happy to put topless 16 year old girls on Page 3.
My suspicion is that loudly and blatantly ideologically coming out against renewable energy like Tice and Reform did yesterday sets their vote share ceiling in stone. They would have done better to stick to focusing on Net Zero rather than “wind farms are actually bad”.
Tedious to point this out, but: - When a tongue-tied Biden said "President of Mexico" instead of "Prez of Egypt," it was a several day story. -Hours after Trump says whoever appointed J Powell made a big mistake (it was him), the episode appears not to merit a story on any national-media sites.
America’s trading partners have largely failed to retaliate against Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, allowing a president taunted for “always chickening out” to raise nearly $50bn in extra customs revenues at little cost www.ft.com/content/82e3...
superb explainer of the Afghanistan screw-up by my brilliant colleague @lucyfisher.ft.com who was a handful of journalists subjected to the super-injunction for ages www.ft.com/content/ac73...
“ministers in Rishi Sunak’s former Conservative government instituted a secret scheme to bring Afghans to the UK. The plan as recently as February this year, under Starmer’s current Labour administration, was to relocate 25,000 people at a potential cost of £7bn according to a government estimate”
this is such an extraordinary story: The UK government set up a secret multibillion-pound scheme to relocate thousands of Afghans to Britain after a data leak put them at risk of reprisals from the Taliban — and gagged the media with a super-injunction www.ft.com/content/f6b4...
Donald Trump has privately encouraged Ukraine to step up deep strikes on Russian territory, even asking Volodymyr Zelenskyy whether he could strike Moscow if the US provided long-range weapons, according to people briefed on the discussions www.ft.com/content/b66f...
In an unexpected move, the new Reform leader of Kent County Council has teamed up with the Liberal Democrats to ask the Home Secretary to remain more open to recruitment of foreign workers into social care www.kentonline.co.uk/kent/news/re...
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Every British person on the internet is complaining about you
Ternfortheworse 
Dan McCrum ![Cohere’s Frosst warned that even the term hallucination was misleading. “It sounds too much like [the model] working the way a human brain works, and it does not,” he said. “It works in a completely different way.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:33ancrnqhgzlwahes2gx4gjn/bafkreihjn62desawmek3lwgj5yxw5zhmmxeqzbqoh6nisxzhbey673ewti@jpeg "Click to view full size")