Ed Morgan

I was alarmed when I read that and thought middle age began at 25 (been trying to resist the category at 40, which is probably wishful thinking), but I think she actually says middle class and over 25?

Down Cemetery Road, set in Oxford but very obviously filmed in Bristol, was particularly grating for this. Oxford is flat, Bristol must be one of Britain’s hilliest cities!

There was one boy at school who was so much faster than everyone else it looked like he didn’t even touch the ground as he ran the 100m, and yet he was nowhere near the level of going on to be a professional athlete.

Thinking more and more about when my old boss, Simon Walker, wrote this in the FT back in 2016.

I think I’ve accidentally convinced myself this is actually a good idea.

Surely the answer is build a new town just north of Nuneaton to house parliament and all the MPs and staff. A sort of Olympic village, if you will. Geographic centre of England (on basis that Scot, Wales, NI have their own parliaments, plus this is considerably closer to all of them than London).

Pub looked better in red though

Still looks very similar. Must be from outside the church opposite.

Yeah he’s a class act (although surely weren’t not far away from loonies saying he’s not genuine because he’s too good a communicator?)

I thought try looked pretty uncomfortable about it at the time, but maybe. It was a wild time for celeb gossip and the paparazzi.

I can see you’d get maybe more breadth of views/priorities, but would they actually get more done than the overly-professionalised inertia version? Unless doing less stuff is part of the point.

I don’t really get the alternative though? MPs who don’t work hard? Or uniformed ones who don’t do the reading?

Something like ‘Pritani’, Wikipedia suggests. Anyway, whole thing’s nonsense. I’m a Londoner, English, Irish and British to varying degrees, not much of it about some mad ideas of genetics.

Do we know what they called themselves? Or would it have been by tribe?

Was once made to wait to board an EasyJet flight at Geneva, it turned out because Geri Halliwell and Robbie Williams wanted to get on first. I still don’t understand why they did it that way - they sat at the front and the whole plane rubbernecked as we filed past.

Oh yeah, he’s not that fussed.

Going on the DLR - with an excuse to sit up front - is honestly one of best things about having a 4-year-old.

As a caretaker, or turn run again at next GE?

If you were being excessively optimistic, you could say there still seem to be some consequences for being involved with Epstein here? A Trump-style connection I think would bring down a British PM.

I always wonder if parties should not be very fussed about being consistent (not saying they necessarily are)? But I think it’s more about keeping a party together, convincing media you make sense.

That Mandelson gave Epstein the PM’s secret email (which would’ve a scandal on its own in normal times, but I agree, in context, it seems pale in comparison)?

Ha, I didn’t mean like that - more like cultural/political/economic power eg. Munich is wealthier than Berlin.

My pet theory is that it’s not a problem our second-tier (by size) cities are too small, but that we don’t have competition between two dominant cities eg. Berlin/Munich, Madrid/Barcelona, Rome/Milan (I recognise there may be holes in this theory).

I thought for a second you were talking about Spice from Dune (which really would be a transition from UK govt SpAd).

To ask what is probably an obvious question, is there any area of welfare where it isn’t the individual’s responsibility to find out their eligibility? UK govts change working-age benefit rules all the time (often crowing about doing it).

Is it astroturf, and if so, what the hell does that mean?

I’m not sure I want to know what anniversary it is…

That’s was my thought - 23yr olds engaging in fads is hardly new (plus founders can often be unusual people, it’s a self-selecting group).

Of course it can happen that things can get unfairly taken out of context, but it seems to happen to some people a lot more than others.

Fascinating the idea that it could be quite a temporary thing - AI transforms business, but in a few years the average person hardly thinks about it all.