Ollie Robbins thrown under a bus, reversed over, then his remains hitched to the back bumper and dragged down the road for good measure.
Starmer accuses Robbins of obstructing truth about Mandelson vetting
The argument that you can’t get rid of the Prime Minister during a time of international instability when you got rid of the FCDO perm sec during a time of international instability because he knew more about what was going on than the PM.
Okay, so with a 15m wing-pack (trust me, this is painful to wear and unwieldy), I have to get up to 30 km/h before I’m toes over the water. I can do this with a tow. And, folks, 75 metres across the dock in ground effect is extraordinary! But I can’t do this from a cold start, even if I lose weight.
Crucial Track for 18 April 2026
"Alech Taadi" by Khaled
There are many reasons to love the movie the Fifth Element. This song is one of them.
Maybe Keir Starmer wasn’t told either that in fact he himself had failed vetting, which is why no one is telling him anything.
Keir Starmer says it is unforgivable he was not told Mandelson failed vetting
The prime minister said he was “furious” about what had happened, as he insisted he had not known that security officials had initially recommended that Mandelson be denied clearance.
I think the great political divide of our times is between the complacent class who think that everything’s more or less okay, and the rest of us who know it isn’t.
Crucial Track for 03 April 2026
"Listen to the Fog" by DJ F
20 years ago now, before tech got fully evil, I was in a record store in San Francisco, and someone pushed a CD into my hand: "my partner recorded this".
Interesting piece in the Guardian today on Danish politics from Rune Lykkeberg. It nails elite populism. There are lessons here for Labour’s centre-right leadership here in the UK.
Denmark’s unique political model is in crisis – I blame the boomerang effect
What they were doing was populism for the elites that substituted the legitimate ideological conflict between left and right with an imagined picture of reasonable grownups in the centre and the ridiculous children on the extremes
Crucial Track for 28 March 2026
"Arrival" by ABBA
When they drop you into the timeline, they don't tell you the toilet seats are half a centimetre lower and Arrival wasn't ABBA's first dark album.
For my run across the Royal Docks, I’ve been studying the coots.