Ruth Dawson

Liam Ramos is still in a Texas prison. It's been 5 days

Jenrick - lawyer
Braverman - lawyer
Zahawi - owns £100m in real estate
Kruger - old Etonian

Definitely not part of the elite, though

Nothing like announcing a former academic and highly paid TV presenter as your candidate to stick it to those bastardly elites

Matt Goodwin's lies about his background have hopelessly confused Google AI 😉

The guy genuinely gave a shit.

And the empathy vampires murdered him for it.

Carney, Trump and the power of a good speech Leaders don’t need to write every word themselves, but they do need to make sure it clearly represents their vision

This is very good from @stephenkb.bsky.social about the importance of good speeches and clear coherent messaging and its role in leadership

Contrasting the clarity and direction of Carney’s speech (that he wrote himself) with Starmer’s outsourced versions

www.ft.com/content/1b23...

Screenshot of an X.com post by The Associated Press (@AP) stating that dozens of immigrant families protested for better treatment behind fences at a Texas detention facility, where a 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy and his father were sent after being detained in Minnesota. Below is a video thumbnail showing a crowd gathered outdoors along a fenced walkway; many people wear bright blue or red outerwear, and some hold signs.

After being held in two of them as a boy, I fought for decades urging America to never again build concentration camps and put human beings in them. It breaks my heart to watch this happen twice now in my own lifetime.

Scoop: Stephen Miller behind misleading claim that Alex Pretti wanted to "massacre" agents The episode illustrates the sheer power of Miller, Trump's close and longest-serving political adviser

"Noem has complained to others that she feels she's being hung out to dry over the episode and has made sure to emphasize she took direction from Miller and the president"

www.axios.com/2026/01/27/t...

Hey Border Czar Tom “Cava” Homan at @icegov.bsky.social:

You know my name. You know where I live because your agents tailed me home twice. I spent 5 hours today following them and will spend 5 hours tomorrow. Come put me on TV so I can tell the whole world what I’ve seen you do to my neighbors.

LovIng how Will Stancil has become some mix of Che Guevara, Cesar Chavez and the Scarlet Pimpernel.

If you didn't catch this segment of @maddow.bsky.social's tonight, I recommend you watch the whole thing. We're seeing both utterly sadistic mass scale horror alongside incredibly inspiring mass displays of humanity. The regime is weak. The people will win.

You're all focused on the first sentence, but I want to talk about the second sentence, featuring what might be the weakest ever constituency link.

It's such a stupid cliché. As Jack says, until the 60s it was 5% of the cohort, rising to about 25% by the 80s. It just wasn't the norm!

I also think there's an additional coda to this which is that "I was the first person in my family to go to university" isn't even that unusual, it's very much the norm until the 1980s, surely? Even today only about 40 percent of school leavers go on to do a degree.

Reform byelection candidate refuses to disown claim that people born in UK not necessarily British Matthew Goodwin, who is standing in Gorton and Denton, said UK-born people from minority ethnic backgrounds were not always British

44% of the population of Denton and Gorton are ethnic minority, the majority of them born in the UK.

Reform's candidate says those people aren't British and are liable for deportation.

It's a bold electoral strategy: vote for me and I'll throw you into the sea.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

It’s as though they get up in the morning and try their best to be fascists but at the end of the day they kill, lie, and plot for personal power like the late-Brezhnev politburo. 10/

Trump’s Turnberry mansion in Scotland was vandalized.
Red paint & graffiti were sprayed across the exterior of the Trump Turnberry estate, including buildings & entrance features on the grounds. 😁

The strongest qualification Kristi Noem had to build the kind of terror squad Trump wanted, was that she shot her own dog rather than take the time to train it.

Matt Goodwin says this is "a chance for the hardworking, law-abiding, tax-paying people," such as his boss, Nigel Farage, who doesn't do his job in parliament, lied about why he avoided constituency work, admitted to breaking 17 laws last week alone, and still faces questions about tax avoidance.

English Bull Terrier in front of a door.

It's devastating - I really do feel for you. You just learn to live with it eventually.
I hope you don't mind, this is my Archie who died two years ago, still much loved and remembered.

He's a symptom of a much wider malaise in news reporting, which we also saw in relation to Boris Johnson - the breathless excitement because he was newsworthy, good copy, and no focus on how catastrophically unsuited he was to the actual job of PM.

Yes, it’s all like this. Politics, science, climate, public policy - it’s all reported as soap opera, vox pop, sign no attempt to analyse or critique or aid the viewer’s understanding.

Obviously, a problem far wider than Mason, Farage or the BBC. Nowadays, events only have meaning when cast as good or bad news for an individual ("BoE mulls 0.001% rate rise in blow to Reeves") like the news is just a poor replica of Love Island.

This. I'm not a BBC-basher but IMO Mason is a poor political journalist. It's not that he's 'biased' per se, it's that he reports politics as a kind of giggly spectator sport and as such is preoccupied with spectacle, talking up 'exciting' events rather than analysing them. 1/2

Reform mocked by Angela Rayner over Greater Manchester by-election photo blunder MP Lee Anderson shared photos as parties are set to campaign in Gorton and Denton

Magnificent!🤣 30p Lee takes a leaf out of Orange Donny's book, and invades Angela Rayner's patch. By mistake...

Mark you, he's not the only Reform MP unsure of where a constituency is. Is he Nigel? 🤔

share.google/Wra0FuSUM00C...

“My sister in law has a cousin who’s hairdresser is a part time herbalist, but there’s also a guy who has spent a whole career in defense against chemical weapons with peer reviewed books and articles. How am I to know who to listen to?”

don't think it'll put hardened Reform voters off but might motivate Lab/Lib/Greens 1. to vote in a byelection, and 2. to think hard about who is the Not Reform candidate. It'll be an acid test of how quickly & effectively anti-Reform coalitions can form in seats where there's no real history of that

'we're the British MAGA' probably an increasingly bad look for Reform in a by-election as Brits increasingly associate that with 'the guys who shoot nurses'.

I've got a big Teesworks story in tomorrow's Teesside Lead.

It feels pretty big in a lot of ways, but for anyone who's been following the Teesworks saga it might be a case of "who could have predicted this except everybody?!".

Just a grim inevitability with each new part of this story,

The late Magnus Pyke?