James Leach

The Corrections his best no?

I found the Tory belief you could “fix” Johnson fascinating. It really was like listening to a long suffering wife defend her husband’s gambling addiction. Especially the belief that they just needed to resurrect “Mayor of London” Boris and it would all work out.

every single tech idea is like “soon our robots will be capable of playing catch with your kid, freeing you up to spend more time working on your employers’ spreadsheets”

The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder comes the closest but he just focuses on Putin and America. It’s good to see all the European threads weaved together

I suspect I'm late to conclude this, but the long list of Freeview channels after the first handful are just a load of tat, aren't they.

It's never the comms. Labour's comms is grey because in the absence of a clear strategy for what the government wants to achieve, no-one can defend or articulate what the government says in an interesting or exciting way.

Farage doesn’t give speeches; he puts on shows.
“Send them to El Salvador.” “Operation Restoring Justice.”
None of it has to work. It just has to dominate airtime.
If everyone’s talking about your nonsense, you’ve already won.

Every Farage campaign boils down to: whose side are you on?
Criminals or victims? Britain or Brussels? People or elites?
There’s never a grey area.
He doesn’t debate, he corners. That’s how he wins attention.

Nigel Farage: the master storyteller What narrative techniques enable the leader of Reform to so effectively dominate the UK's political discourse?

Latest post

In a summer when Westminster went quiet, Nigel Farage filled the silence.

While others holidayed, he ran a one-man campaign about “lawless Britain” turning unworkable ideas into viral stories.

He isn’t winning on policy. He’s winning on narrative.

open.substack.com/pub/itsallst...

Nigel Farage: the master storyteller What narrative techniques enable the leader of Reform to so effectively dominate the UK's political discourse?

The latest from me: what makes Nigel Farage a master political storyteller for our age?

open.substack.com/pub/itsallst...

For me, it’s the endless contrarianism of Badenoch. And contrarianism works for you if you tap into something that other people want disrupted (Corbyn and austerity, Trump and the traditional Republican platform)

Badenoch’s appears to be “sandwiches suck folks, am I right?”

Which episode is that? Conventional wisdom has it as the “Skinner isn’t Skinner” episode…

It was great. I was 16 and it got me reading some more classics at a time when GCSEs really burn you out

Can someone ask Farage or Zia Yusuf why, if they're so concerned about incitement to violence, they had Lucy Connolly as a guest star at their conference?

I think the critics back in 2006 had a point. But the privacy boat sailed a long time ago.

Seriously, you’ll have a go at the government using your data, but you are ok with giving it to Mark fucking Zuckerberg?

I’m enjoying both left wing and right wing critics of ID cards posting their objections on….checks notes….social media.

Why yes Laura, I’m slowly boiling like a frog, funny you ask.

I thought the question about how much trouble he was in was one of the silliest openers to an interview I’ve ever heard.

“Alex, your podcasts are soporific shit, aren’t they?”

Why not? Genuine question

Ed Zitron sitting on a chair with a game console staring very normally

Ed Zitron staring with a shadow on his face

I chatted with the @financialtimes.com about my writing, the podcast, tech criticism, and being myself.

archive.is/2025.09.25-0...

@samfr.bsky.social I meant to ask in the last Q&A, how far in advance do you plan your posts? And how do you prioritise what to write and research in a given month.

He’s also one of those journalists who swallows everything he’s told about AI. Not the theme of this thread I know, but I think it points to a deeper inability to do truly radical thinking, or actually challenge certain orthodoxies

As someone who once had to pull together a piece like this while nursing a really severe eye infection, can I just say “well done” and “hope you are feeling better soon”

Lessons was beautiful, but I think that’s got something to do with the fact that it’s him mining his own biography.

Yes that’s a good point. It’s babytalk wrapped in opaque jokes about warm white wine. If you’re going to write basic explanatory columns then write basic explanatory columns.

Free speech news

Haha yeah, agreed

You may disagree but I think Starmer has also left plenty of space for a centre right policy platform. Badenoch could step forward tomorrow and just reclaim the mantle of being pro business and pro enterprise for instance?