Running Dog

Yeah, it’s interesting in that one how much Goodall raises his game when he’s not addressing an imagined lowest common denominator audience and/or Jon Sopel

Suddenly imagining half a dozen journalists taking Jeremy Corbyn to court because they don’t believe he’s read Ulysses

Tim Walker, a former Telegraph diarist, contrasted its current guise with the staid, establishment-friendly paper overseen by the editor Bill Deedes in the 1970s and 80s. "The Telegraph is now less interested in news and more interested in comment," he said. "It's become a very shouty paper. Perhaps Dacre, as a news man, might change that."

Oh no the Telegraph’s gone mad. Perhaps uh *Paul Dacre* will make it nicer 🤠
www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

“Disagreeing agreeably” has absolutely permeated media political debate. It’s instructive in that the agreeable disagreers will still lose their shit at the mention of a wealth tax or literally anything about Trident, but it’s poison for public understanding of the actual stakes for people’s lives.

Political Thinking’s a category error here because the point of the show isn’t debate or understanding, it’s for Robinson to tell the MP they’re very clever and very brave for doing such a jolly important job, while making clear he’s temporarily withholding his uh forensic interrogation skills.

There’s been several podcasts which said they were aiming to do this (minus figures from the arts world tbf), and every one of them almost immediately devolved into the panelists honking received wisdom at one another in a Very Measured Tone

Today on the News Agents, Jon’s had a day to consider and explains that it was like a Labour budget from the 70s “or 80s”(?), “far away from Blair economics”. Lewis cautiously notes that Gordon Brown likes some of it, but mostly stays quiet. The lads have lost the run of themselves.

On the News Agents, Jon explains today shows Labour & Reform love unaffordable welfare spending, which opens up space for the Tories to “reinvent as a Thatcherite party”. ☠️

Poor guy just wants to fix the NHS but things keep getting in the way, such as doctors, nurses and becoming prime minister without needing anyone to vote for him

I couldn't have come up with this in my wildest parodies of Labour.

Greyhound lying on a duvet

Having another good lad to stay 😇

Twenty people allege he has a racist past. He denies it. Who’s telling the truth about Farage’s schooldays? Reform UK’s leader refuses to answer questions about his abusive behaviour, claiming there’s ‘no evidence’. We talk to victims and witnesses

On the one hand, dozens of people testify he was very racist. On the other hand, 90% of lobby hacks enjoy going for beers with him, so it’s impossible to say whether it’s bad or not
www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I once knew a Federal bank examiner, and one time someone asked him why we had to KEEP inspecting banks over and over. He basically said every new batch of business school grads invents bank fraud from first principles.

I thought publishing would be a way to work with interesting people on interesting projects, and tbf with some notable exceptions I was wrong

Yeah, the problem like so much with Farage (and with Johnson before) is that the press never really bit at the time all this stuff first came up years ago, so he’s free to say this is old news

On the News Agents, special guest Michael Crick explains he was doing “Farage was very racist at school” before it was cool, before explaining that he personally doesn’t think Enoch Powell was racist and he is pretty rightwing on immigration. Quite an insight into news values here

Genuinely a ridiculous state of affairs for a country with an extant social care crisis, aging population, and that pretends to care about integration.

Mate if you’re so underestimated how come all the commentators incorrectly predicted you were going to be awesome

“The CEO of Ladbrokes has called you a Marxist in an interview with the Times ur dead now”

Budget game 2025: surplus £29bn, markets status: ok, polls status: ok

Cool how you can get a flawless victory on the Guardian’s “budget game” simply by soaking the rich. Has anyone told the politics desk

One of the skills he used to become PM was convincing commentators he had the skills to be PM, and given his failure to convince anyone of anything ever since, that can’t have been very difficult. Which seems like a wider problem for everyone tbh.

On the News Agents, Jon explains Labour is ungovernable because too many MPs are crybaby do-gooders who’re afraid to be cruel to refugees in case they need to slink back to the charity sector when they lose their seats 🤔

The range is remarkable. A real life story through an extraordinary era

Lee Miller | Tate Britain

A tremendous exhibition of an extraordinarily talented person, well worth a visit if you can make it

Remembering when Osborne was hired as Standard editor with zero experience in journalism and an obvious partisan agenda, and the hacks were correctly outraged for 5 minutes before realising a word out of place might affect their careers. How times change.

Ok the FT politics podcast, George Parker explains that the next director general of the BBC should be George Osborne, on account of he “took editing the [now basically defunct] Evening Standard quite seriously” and “would be harder for the Tory right to criticise”. Unbelievable scenes really

Railing against populists at this point in British politics is a revealing choice in itself, isn't it? And by no means the choice of someone living up to the complexity of the present.

Starmer was never meant to be Labour’s prime minister – his leadership was doomed from the start | Neal Lawson His alliance with the party’s anti-Corbyn faction was a shotgun marriage that totally lacked vision. Now Labour is paying the price, says Neal Lawson of the cross-party campaign organisation Compass

It’s a fun dynamic to have Neal and Zoe spelling out what’s been plain to see for ages in the opinion pages, while the Guardian politics team are obliged by a combination of cluelessness, lobby omertà and complicity, explain that it’s all a baffling mystery.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Pretty amazing to choose Starmer as the example of a politician who tells the truth but looks like he’s lying. Even the tame political hacks are constantly saying he doesn’t believe or even comprehend what he’s saying half the time. He’s famous for it!

“The advisor has become the story” is such a funny rule of politics. Like we’ve seen many times that being the story is fine if the story is “giant politics brain is awesome”. The problem is when the story becomes “everyone hates this calamity-prone monster”, and that’s true of really any role.