Ben Dunnell

People who think the Mail’s “gone woke”.

It’s certainly sharpened my ability to call people like you utter fucking wrong-uns who shouldn’t be allowed near a position of responsibility.

Everyone in politics knows this is illegal. They also know there are never any consequences.

Show-jumping on ice.

Yeah. It’s also quite slow with a lot of pregnant pauses.

This is all very reminiscent of how he used friends at the BBC to stop (admittedly prurient) discussion of his private life in 1998, albeit very much more serious.

Everyone has their breaking point, I guess!

(A rather spectacular goof from The Spectator...)

Ha. I can get that. I know I have an exceptionally unfavourable opinion of her.

She polls really badly and is still the subject of an HMRC investigation. I think she would be a disaster as leader. Returning to a failed past leader would be pretty much as bad. Unfortunately the talent pool is non-existent.

And so far it’s worked, hasn’t it? But as those new MPs run out of patience, things will get *really* bad.

“This definitely won’t look desperate.”

Once again, my overriding emotion is, “What if these people actually spent their time and energy doing something useful for the country?”

“Oh no! What has happened!” Never, “Oh no! What have I done?”

I think it could be seen as a classic symptom of the right-wing addiction to high-stakes gambling.

That’s a very fair way of looking at it, and I would tend to agree.

Starmer is just such an irredeemably weird, weird man. He always acts as if a passive bystander to events, and then can’t understand why things go wrong.

Except he knew of those links when he appointed Mandelson. Why let him get away with this fucking absurd sob story?

Doesn’t this depend on one’s definition of competence, though? Deciding to hold the Brexit referendum wholly undermines any sense of competent governing there may have been about Cameron, for example.

What Trump posted would get just about everyone fired if you did that at your job.

I’ll never get over that we have lower standards of conduct for the Presidency than any other job

There's no reason to accept this as normal, though. Much of Starmer and Labour's unpopularity is not misfortune but his own doing. Mandelson was a choice. Consistently pursuing policy positions designed to appeal to people who will not vote for you - and alienating core supporters - is a choice.

Buy back the QEII cruise ship and have a floating parliament travelling to ports around the country.

Totally impractical and very expensive -- so a perfect analogy for the current situation.

A big part of this: ending up with policy positions that hardly please anybody.

Yet this is a government with three years left to run and an enormous Commons majority. For all the problems, there is an enormous opportunity there for someone with the political nous to take it and use it.

There is hardly enough vomit in the world for this.

That time I recreated the Simpsons intro using only stock footage.

About more than just YouTube tutorials, of course.

Make this a standard announcement across the whole rail network.

a man is sitting on a couch smoking a cigarette and drinking a glass of wine . Alt: a man is sitting on a couch genuflecting with the caption amen to that

Several people in the train carriage I am on agreeing loudly with the conductor's announcement that 'noone sitting near you wants to hear the YouTube tutorial you are watching, so wear earphones please'

What I also like about this is that he genuinely enjoys it.