its actually quite refreshing to have a PM whose embarrassing history involves raising money for charity, rather than burning £50 notes in front of homeless people and shagging pigs...

"I pray for everybody involved." Actor and comedian Russell Brand says his ongoing trial is an 'exploration of truth and justice' ahead of the latest day in court. He denies all charges against him. Read more updates 🔗 trib.al/XfYyWeS 📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602

"I pray for everybody involved." Actor and comedian Russell Brand says his ongoing trial is an 'exploration of truth and justice' ahead of the latest day in court. He denies all charges against him. Read more updates 🔗 trib.al/XfYyWeS 📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602

For those who don't understand statistical inference, let me help out: If ITV gets meaningful access to 10 Reform representatives and 7 of them turn out to be utter scumbags, Reform can’t reasonably defend itself by saying, ‘There are thousands of representatives and only 7 are bad.’ The relevant figure is 7 out of the 10 representatives ITV actually investigated: 70%. The size of the wider organisation doesn’t change the result of the sample.

Zacharia: They have said I only took questions from conservative outlets. However, The Daily Mail is not known to be a conservative outlet or friendly to conservatives

Obviously some really unacceptable comments in the ITV story this evening, and it's worth saying that Reform HQ have already taken action where it's needed, investigating and removing people where their comments simply are not compatible with our values. Sometimes people can make legitimate points but phrase them wrong, and on some issues people are genuinely angry about the state of the country and they say things that are crass. That happens. However, it's also true that some comments are just abhorrent and unwelcome, and in those cases Reform has acted swiftly through disciplinary processes. There's no room for those things in our party. Whilst we continue to develop an increasingly robust vetting process, nobody can vet people for things that they might say in the future. A handful of individuals have slipped through the net, and that's a huge shame because it damages us all. However, as someone who works with our senior councillors every day I want to say that our party is filled with outstanding and dedicated people who are determined to fix our country and their communities. We can't let the tiny minority of bad derail all of the good, or let it deter us from that mission. It's also worth saying that, whilst accepting that some of these comments are totally unacceptable, the practice of a journalist lying their way in to people's trust, securing a job with the party with lies and dodgy documents, and secretly filming people with a view to publicly humiliating them is also abhorrent. I've never seen ITV or anyone else stoop to that level against any other party or organisation. It is not fair and surely cannot be legal to obtain those positions of trust by deception, for this purpose. I sincerely hope that some action is taken on that front. This cannot become an acceptable journalistic practice. Tomorrow I'm on the road meeting Councillors from the South West, supporting them to deliver key local objectives and helping them represent their residents to the best of their ability. That's the focus, and it's important to not lose sight of the fact that across the country Reform-run Councils are delivering major savings, lower taxes and better services for local people. That's why I'm doing this, and that's why so many of our councillors are working so hard every day. We carry on.

Oh fuck off. Honest Bob Jenrick's claim that "4 in 5 new jobs were taken by migrants" is misleading. Jenrick's claim rests on a calculation by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), the right-wing think tank founded and chaired by Iain Duncan Smith, which funding-transparency site Who Funds You? gave a D grade, the second-lowest transparency rating, in September 2023. It was then amplified by the Telegraph. While the basic arithmetic roughly holds, at each step the claim drifts further from what the data shows. 1. They are not "new jobs". The figure compares HMRC payroll counts in December 2014 and December 2025. That is a net change, not a count of jobs created. Millions of jobs open and close every year, and most are filled by UK nationals. In fact, people who were non-UK citizens when they registered for National Insurance held 20% of employee jobs in December 2025, up from 12% in 2014. Four in five payroll jobs are still held by UK nationals. 2. The numbers don't relate to individual people. The data counts payrolled employments, so one person with two jobs is counted twice. The Telegraph's own chart says as much. 3. Many of the "migrants" are British. HMRC records nationality once, when someone first registers for National Insurance, and naturalisation is not recorded. Someone who arrived in 2015 and became a British citizen in 2021 is still a "migrant" in this data. HMRC itself says this makes non-UK figures higher than the true counts. 4. "Taken" implies displacement the data cannot show. The CSJ says jobs "went to" non-UK nationals. Jenrick says they were "taken". The figures show who holds jobs, not whether anyone lost out. The Migration Advisory Committee found that, across all immigrants over the full period studied, there was no statistically significant impact of migration on employment. 5. The time frame drives the result. By the Telegraph's own chart, UK nationals accounted for roughly half the payroll growth between 2014 and 2019. The "one in five" figure depends on the 2021 to 2023 visa surge, which happened under the Conservative government in which Jenrick himself was Immigration Minister. 6. Self-employment is excluded. PAYE data leaves out roughly four million self-employed people, so it does not measure all work. In short, a narrow payroll statistic, which counts employments rather than people and permanently labels naturalised Britons as migrants, has become a claim about "new jobs" being "taken". The underlying data supports neither word. This fits a familiar Reform pattern: take a statistic, often from an opaquely funded right-wing think tank, strip away its caveats, and recast it as proof that migrants are taking something from “the British people”. Whatever the intent, the effect is the same: a narrow, heavily qualified finding becomes a story of grievance and resentment. It's wrong, divisive, misleading and pathetic.

I may have simply lost my final marble, but there is a whole oven rack missing. There should be two wire shelves and a solid tray at the bottom. There is only one wire shelf. I've barely used the oven since I became an airfryer wanker, but WHERE IS IT?

President Kagame responds to those who say: "Formula 1 is too big for a small country like Rwanda." I tell those people to take a deep breath and calm down, and wait to see what is coming. First, we are people, like the people of other parts of the world. There is nothing, no event, nothing that is bigger than people. So, we are a small country, but we are a people. Formula One is big indeed, but it is not a goal just in itself. In fact, Formula One is part of the big picture of what Rwanda has to do. We made progress as a country, as a people, but also for this particular Formula One, as a sport for Africa. We are not looking at just Rwanda alone. We are looking at Rwanda in the context of the continent, and we have indeed ambitions to bring in other African brothers and sisters to participate. It is Rwandan, it is African, and it is a big deal that we are very happy to be associated with.

Wife minding her own business walking our Doberman through Northenden this morning. Approaching Muslim lady in a Burqa asks the Wife to cross the Road immediately with the Dog and walk on the other side. The audacity. This is what UK has come to the privilege is off the scale

It’s AI you utter morons

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good. I know. I know. I think about it on the tram. We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle. It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species. Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate. 287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself. We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it. Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name. A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog. And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters. People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all. So who did we give it to? An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us. She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown. The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him. Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept. It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall. But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for. That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it. We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was. He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him. Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

Exclusive: Nigel Farage will tomorrow pledge to shut down the UK asylum system, imposing a five-year ban on migrants being granted asylum and deporting 90,000 applicants immediately. In his most stringent border policy to date, the Reform UK leader will declare a “national security emergency” and announce a suspension of all asylum tribunals, legal refugee routes and resettlement schemes. The policy, which Farage will announce on Monday, would mean tens of thousands of applicants would be immediately deported and any refugees granted asylum in the last five years would have their cases reviewed by the Home Office. It would stop any new refugees settling in Britain and end grants of humanitarian protection – a legal status given to asylum seekers who do not qualify as refugees but cannot return to their home countries for safety reasons. Legal resettlement routes, including the Homes for Ukraine scheme, will be abolished, although Ukrainians who have arrived in the UK since it launched in 2022 will be allowed to stay. telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…

Ah yes, he's done terribly

Zack Polanski arrived as a confection of eggy foam and trapped warm air. He has now fallen flat The Green party leader’s ambitions have been dashed by a byelection defeat and his fatal misjudgments ✍️ @andrewrawnsley bit.ly/4rXvl8f