Starmer should go on TV like Boris Johnson did during Covid, and tell everyone to go out and have fun, get drunk, have an affair, eat amazing food, live your best life, carpe the sodding diem, because you're not going to be able to afford to do anything even approaching that in a month or so's time.
Britain hasn't had real terms wage growth in 20 years lmao, you can't fool me
Her policy decision further entrenched the UK's 'transatlantic' fiscal bind: a) it is too expensive to offer unskilled employment (the 'European' disease); b) the median earner isn't taxed enough (the 'American' disease)
not really the time for this particular discussion, but for the record, this is a stupid idea www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...
We all believed Iraq had those weapons. We all spent too much before the 08 crash. We all backed austerity, we all just wanted to Get Brexit Done. We all value our alliance with America, we all stood shoulder to shoulder with the IDF.
Remember when the New York Times gave this guy a fawning puff piece with the full edgy photoshoot treatment
I should note that economically I’m somewhere between John McDonnell and Olof Palme and DEFINITELY not a Blairite. But I really am seeing the attraction of his eye roll attitude to trying to address policy issues via a seance with Keir Hardie
Drive less to save fuel, motorists told
This is genuinely leading the Telegraph homepage
Besides the point, but does he think Wakanda is real?
A+ nickname
Could have done with more of these critiques of austerity at the time, it has to be said
The fundamental issue for the West has been that nobody has been held accountable for anything.
Cameron and Osborne did more damage to the UK than any foreign enemy. Yet they sit there pasty faced taking no responsibility.
Tonty. Johnson. The Post Office, Hillsborough.
No one is responsible.
Well, on the bright side they made all these investments in renewable energy before cocking up the global conventional energy supp- why does my producer never stop handing me notes
"Trump is not the architect of the Iran war, only its vehicle."
On who's really in charge:
sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/the-no-wor...
It was going on one, two in the morning, and we were shooting what I felt was an important scene for me, when he makes an attempt to be quote-unquote straight, in a suit, and at the end of it he gets emotional and locks himself in the other room. And I felt like, I’m not getting what I want—I’m not happy with it. Mike was happy with it. He called me the next day and said, “I know you weren’t happy with the scene last night. Believe me, we wouldn’t have gone home if I had felt we weren’t getting it.” And then he sort of became my psychiatrist and said, “You find it difficult to be happy, don’t you? You find it difficult to enjoy things.” And I said, “Well, sometimes. Last night was about feeling too tired and not feeling I was reaching what I needed to reach for the scene.” He talked to me then about when he was making, I don’t know whether it was Virginia Woolf or The Graduate. He said, “I didn’t enjoy it for a second. I was worried about so many things.” And then he said, “You know, this is never going to happen again quite this way. You should try to allow yourself to enjoy this more. Take a minute a day, and then add a minute the next day, and another minute. Pretty soon, you’ll have hours of happiness.”
The Birdcage opened thirty years ago today, so in its honor, I want to share one of my favorite stories about Mike Nichols that didn't make it into my biography. This is from an interview I did with Nathan Lane.
I've just realised for the book chapter I'm writing that Jean-Claude Juncker's joke that "we know what to do, we just don't know how to get re-elected after doing it" is, if you substitute other career goals for re-election, an absolutely fundamental theory of management.
the tories successfully tricking labour into thinking that this is a paramount element of being seen as a serious party is easily the worst thing that has happened to uk politics after brexit in three decades
So I saw Star Wars for the first time a few months back (or was it in 2024 - I can't remember).
And, like... it's a kids' movie! It's a movie for kids! How the fuck has it had generations of grown-ass adults obsessing over it??
This is the correct and horrifying truth about Blair. It's also true (with different but related horrible true beliefs) for McSweeney and Glasman. It's why Blue Labour is far worse than the mere cynical grift that pseuds tend to frame it as
Daveed Diggs. What a very lovely noise. Man, when the piano happens... Thanks to @juliansimpson.bsky.social and his excellent Cartoon Gravity newsletter for bringing this before me. I've only heard the first song and had to tell you! Enhance your Sunday, comrades. xx
www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0-k...
Is it really a war?
Play along with Andrew Heaton's new game show.
It’s already happening. Iran attacked a desalination plant in Bahrain.
This war has to end immediately. If it turns into a water war we will be dealing with a whole different level of a humanitarian catastrophe across the region.
aje.news/64yl8m?updat...
Please help me here. Syed here says that whenever he listens to an intelligent MAGA spokesman he nods a great deal. And this is some of his reasoning. Am I the only one finding this deranged?
The death rattle of newspapers is sooo weird, a totally random PR story that someone put on a print product bought by the same number of people who live in Basingstoke, who are rapidly dying. And this will for some reason be discussed on national TV. No wonder the future is influencers.
I joke about TBI standing for the Tony Blair Institute and Traumatic Brain Injury, but they are probably the only two groups who'd think "Blair, man with a good record on military intervention in the Middle East".
Do they think people have literally no memory of past events at all?
This is why I stick up for Lebanon: a country whose regime is rubbish in so many ways but not evil, nor ever involved in invading others (surely a record in the region) yet routinely bombed and invaded while no-one gives a fuck except some brave UN peacekeepers who also routinely get bombed.
maybe sit this one out bud
Superb piece! I think “we don’t do god” was Campbell not Blair?
And you can read the whole review on Substack too.
substack.com/@rostaylor24...
