Running Dog

This guy did such a good job editing the Evening Standard that OpenAI had no choice but to hire him

Politics is the mechanism that enables political choices which affect society. Accountability is what’s supposed to bind those two together. What we have is a political crisis stemming from a much longer term accountability crisis, imo.

The BBC story is bad, but they’ve been “failed by politics” in the sense that if a party promises “national renewal” or whatever and you vote for them and they win and they do nothing that affects your local area, then you - not unreasonably - think you’ve been fucked over, because you have.

The Problem With AI Is Shitty Human Beings The problem with AI isn't going to be Skynet. It's going to be amoral extraction class assholes applying half-cooked automation at scale onto deeply broken sectors in exploitative ways in a country t...

I just for the life of me can't figure out why a large chunk of people are inherently hostile to new technology shaped by companies that actively support an anti-science, anti-humanist mass murder autocracy

Walking out after 20 minutes of Dude, Where’s My Car prompted a lot of criticism-self-criticism about peer pressure, 2000s UK stoner culture, group dynamics, things of that nature

I mean look I live in London WDIK, but if anywhere had been meaningfully levelled up wouldn’t there be more stories about it: Tory councillors unveiling the Boris Johnson Memorial Soft Play Centre, Rishi Sunak admiring a revitalised midlands high street, things of that nature

What if “Levelling Up” was in fact a scam

Are tech CEOs mostly outright evil, bullshitters, and/or completely disconnected from & unconcerned with wider society? Yes. Do those traits make them do stupid shit? Also yes

The left is missing out on AI As a movement, it has largely refused to engage seriously with AI, ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right

“The left hates tech CEOs and knows they’re out to get the ordinary worker, but the left also thinks the CEOs are idiots and can’t actually pull it off.” Yes that’s largely correct
www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-i...

Because wholly predictably, there have been a mountain of columns and tweets and things saying, this means Labour are moving to the soft left. And then in brackets, this will be a disaster for the country, a disaster for the Labour Party. You have people like, you know, the most beautiful, elegant writers like Janan Ganesh, there is no support for this in the country. Support for what, Janan? And how do you know? And Danny Finkelstein in his very polite way saying, look, you know, I kind of admire Ed Miliband for sticking with it, but of course it would be a disaster, this move left. And there have been many other examples of it. And these are the kind of columnists that have a very big influence on the BBC. And I just want to explore this a little bit in lots of different ways.

Also not afraid to call out some Esteemed Colleagues (admittedly partly because he hasn’t had a full-time gig in the press for a decade)

Ah come on: a self-styled “Brexit hardman”? “A Spartan”? What’s not to love

But I'm pretty sure Morgan McSweeney, in consultation with Peter Mandelson, thought like that. We know so, actually. Phil Collins, the journalist, once wrote a piece for The New Statesman when he was working with Starmer's team after they had changed the conference rules to make it much harder for the hard left to field a candidate in a leadership contest. He said, we've done the hard left, now we must kill off the soft left. I got a call from a very senior representative of the soft left. Have you read that piece? It's just ridiculous. They're going to spend all their energy trying to destroy us. To some extent, that has happened.

Steve Richards is excluded from my robust 2026 no-dickheads politics podcasts ban, because he seems like a decent lad but mostly because he can both notice things in real time and also remember things, and use both in analysis. Does this narrow down the podcast field a lot? More than you’d think!

Steve Baker? That rings a bell

So I suppose the story begins in November 2023, when the editor of The Sunday Times, Ben Taylor, had the foresight to put a pretty disobliging story about Labour Together on the front page of the newspaper. This was, lest we forget, a period in which nobody wanted unsparing scrutiny of Keir Starmer, or at least the general story as it such at it was, was Tories sleaze Rishi Sunak on his last legs. And then we felt that the evidence we had unearthed was nevertheless urgent and important enough to give it some serious wattage.

Pogrund himself speaking, here: Nobody wanted unsparing scrutiny, as you’ll remember well. That’s how it was, and what everyone thought.

I recall Patrick bringing a Tory MP (whose name I forget but who he was obviously mates with) in as a guest for the NS podcast, to talk about his cool ideas, to the audible confusion of more junior NS podcasters. But sure, wearing things lightly.

Wait, the timeline’s unclear here (and I will not listen to it 😇). Is he saying figures “at the summit of the Labour Party” asked him questions that then found their way into the APCO report? Or that they’d seen the report and were asking him if it was true?

Pronouncing Djorkaeff as “jerkoff” was another highlight iirc

Yes. The whole global network thing does help explain how Farage would decide to stand down in 2019 without any direct bribes, but hacks weren’t particularly curious about that at the time either

"Today we are going to see if Boris Johnson tries to overthrow the British Government" he is filmed saying. "He's going to give a speech in the Commons. I've been talking to him all weekend about this speech. We went back and forth over the text". Bannon's association with Johnson appears to have begun after Trump's first election victory in 2016.

Sure, but the thing is these guys are bullshitters. Of course he’s going to claim he’s covertly shaping world events through extreme force of will - he’s The Covertly Shaping World Events Through Extreme Force of Will Guy™️!

"Today we are going to see if Boris Johnson tries to overthrow the British Government" he is filmed saying. "He's going to give a speech in the Commons. I've been talking to him all weekend about this speech. We went back and forth over the text". Bannon's association with Johnson appears to have begun after Trump's first election victory in 2016.

Sure, but the thing is these guys are bullshitters. Of course he’s going to claim he’s covertly shaping world events through extreme force of will, he’s The Covertly Shaping World Events Through Extreme Force of Will Guy™️!

If Johnson needed Bannon’s help to write speeches, the question remains: was the great white hope of the Tory party & UK media for the past 20 years *actually good* at *anything*?

One thing I learned listening to political journalists on podcasts (besides that I’m wasting your life) is that they use fillers constantly. Often struggle to express basic points coherently. That’s not under hostile questioning, it’s in a studio with their colleagues & friends.

Conversely if we do not believe that Russia is thinking about attacking the Baltics, why do Serious Defence & Intelligence Chiefs keep insisting they are. So many questions, really.

Reform and Greens undermining UK commitment to Nato, Cooper says Foreign secretary says Reform not taking Russian threat seriously while Green leader leaves open possibility of leaving alliance

Look if we believe Russia’s thinking about attacking the Baltics then they must think NATO’s already pretty comprehensively undermined. And I don’t think they would’ve reached that conclusion from watching Green Party videos.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Yeah, it’s like an alternate news reality where Chris Mason never made it past his internship

I listen to a lot of World Service when I can’t sleep, and it’s *striking* how different - and how much more informative - the programs are compared to domestic news output

So much of focus group reporting reminds me of the new thing where your worst colleague sends you a screed of ChatGPT results with the caption “what do you think?”. Idk man, you tell me. Presumably you’re showing me this for some reason

I mean if focus group voters are saying they’re voting reform because the other parties are all the same, and refusing to give any further context, so be it. But any one of us could have that conversation at a bus stop and we wouldn’t get paid for it. The Times wouldn’t report it as analysis.

“Definitely read it in full!” Okay man, but even if you do you will not learn why Kylie, an NHS manager, is determined to vote for Reform. She appears one time in the whole article! If somebody wanted to “focus on” her, how would they do that.

Having a quote from people who are scared about needing to vote Reform without any further context, doesn’t seem very insightful to me. Might even be bad journalism 🧐