Lady Macbeth

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Farage’s defence appears to be that he cannot predict what candidates might say. How convenient. The allegations concern what a candidate had already said. The question is what Farage knew, when he knew it, and what he did about it. Attacking the investigation is no substitute for answering it.

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Full story by ‘Gold Digger’ online and in the latest issue: www.private-eye.co.uk/columnists You can contact Gold Digger with financial stories at: golddigger@private-eye.co.uk

Rejoining the EU isn’t a manifesto pick-and-mix. Article 49 TEU requires accession negotiations and agreement with existing members. Freedom of movement is fundamental. Labour can debate whether it wants membership; it cannot unilaterally rewrite what membership entails.

Putin started the war. Zelenskyy is fighting to keep his country. Yet Trump appears determined to make the defender pay the price for the aggressor’s crimes. History has an unflattering name for politicians who mistake capitulation for peace: appeasers.

Strip away the slogans and what’s left? A proposal to dismantle asylum protections, with human suffering treated as an administrative detail. The logistical failures are almost beside the point. Cruelty isn’t a policy framework.

The Royal Marines are not an armed immigration enforcement squad. Unlawful entry does not make someone a legitimate target for lethal force. The fact that we’re even discussing this as a serious policy proposition is chilling.

There’s something peculiarly hollow about invoking Christianity chiefly as tribal branding while dispensing with the inconvenient bits about humility, hospitality and loving your neighbour. A cross used as a boundary marker is not much of a creed.

Now look for the people in that bit of the Venn diagram who have been haranguing her for years AND have been parroting Kremlin talking points AND were keen on Brexit. That sort of person needs looking into.

Putin’s wager is that Europe will tire before Ukraine breaks. That is precisely why wavering now would be catastrophic. The answer to intimidation cannot be strategic fatigue. Support Ukraine properly, consistently, and for as long as it takes.

There is something almost touching about failed Prime Ministers spending retirement insisting the thing that failed was, in fact, the answer. Sunak has Rwanda. Truss has the mini-budget. Some people keep photographs. Others keep policy disasters.

For years Carole Cadwalladr was mocked, threatened, sued and treated as though asking inconvenient questions were the offence. Now we are told there was clear Russian interference in the Brexit vote. How terribly awkward for everyone who spent years trying to discredit the woman asking why.

So the “it would take a decade” line may be less law and more political convenience. Best for Britain’s Article 49 analysis argues that, with alignment and political will, the UK could rejoin within a single Parliament. That deserves more attention. (Best for Britain)

There is something particularly ugly about an institution polishing its own historical halo while omitting the journalists who actually did the work — especially when one of them then endured years of legal threats and abuse. Credit is not a decorative extra in journalism.

Forget the policy people. Give the entire campaign to Aldi’s social media team. Within 48 hours there’d be a cult following, three devastating memes, a middle-aisle special and somebody from Reform discovering that “ratioed by a supermarket” is now a recognised political condition.

Sir, you are currently the leader of a minor opposition party, not the East India Company. #Farage 😏

The Mariana Dam collapse in Brazil released roughly 40 to 45 million cubic meters of toxic iron ore mining waste. The toxic mudflow killed 19 people, destroyed local villages, displaced thousands, and polluted over 600–700 kms of the Doce River.

Farage proposes conducting foreign policy through economic coercion, apparently untroubled by the constraints of international trade law. The distinction between possessing political authority and merely coveting it appears to have escaped him. Demagoguery is not a substitute for statecraft.

“Screw your courage to the sticking-place,” Kemi. Although with your party polling at 18%, even Lady Macbeth might have suggested securing a few more accomplices before attempting to seize the crown. Such vaulting ambition. Such a lamentable shortage of bloody voters.

Hundreds of thousands of victims, billions at stake, and a bitter struggle over who controls the litigation. One wonders at what point the claimants became incidental to the battle between lawyers and funders. The Mariana disaster was a human catastrophe, not a commercial prize.

Naive belief’ is doing a lot of work there. God forbid somebody from the wrong school, wrong family or wrong age gets another crack at education.

Serious people. Serious spreadsheet. Serious £500bn oopsi

British social care: chronically underfunded when it comes to residents and staff, suddenly a £1.1bn investment opportunity when there’s a 7%+ yield attached. Funny how quickly the money appears once frailty becomes an asset class…

Nothing says ‘online safety’ quite like picking a fight with Wikipedia while the actual sewage carries on flowing.

Former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson now says “mob rule” mustn’t interfere with Palantir’s contracts, and he’d work with a Reform government on immigration crackdowns. Quite the ideological journey. Turns out the red line was simply whoever signs the purchase order.

Number crunching: “the poorest in our society” From the new Private Eye, out now.

Reform by name. In need of remedial English by nature. The administrative revolution will commence just as soon as someone locates a dictionary. 😏

And one thing I'd genuinely like to know: would Watson agree to an independent assessment of Palantir's claimed NHS benefits, with the underlying methodology available for scrutiny? That would tell us rather more than another exchange of carefully polished letters.

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Starmer deserves credit for reopening doors. Burnham is right to question why we remain outside them. But diplomatic niceties are no substitute for political courage. Treating a decade-old referendum as sacred writ is intellectual cowardice. Democracy is not a hereditary curse.

A barrister with reported longstanding ties to Farage conducts Reform’s internal inquiry and delivers a reassuring verdict. One trusts the potential conflicts were examined with rather more rigour than the allegations. Independence requires more than a wig and a favourable conclusion.

The French are holding the door open while Britain continues to insist that walking out was an act of extraordinary courage. There’s a fine line between national pride and looking like a complete fucking idiot. Brexit crossed it years ago.

Well, that’s settled then. Although someone might wish to inform the Metropolitan Police that the defendants have marked their own homework.

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A speech on defending press freedom, delivered while journalists from Byline Times were excluded from the conference. You’d think someone might have spotted the irony before Private Eye did. Apparently not.

Once again institutions like the police are failing women facing abuse. We need to come together to stop perpetrators getting away with abuse in all its forms - and demand better from the institutions that are supposed to protect us. Help us hold them all to account ⬇️ https://goodlaw.social/ouzo

Andrew. Still not fucking sweating.

Kemi Badenoch fighting for the soul of the nation is rather like an undertaker fighting for the health of the deceased.

Archer’s resignation from the London mayoral race after it was revealed he lied in court was the thing that got Paul Foot up from his sickbed and contributing again, having first started chronicling Archer’s lies and misdemeanours in 1969. From the Private Eye archive. Issue 992, December 1999.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, but to their courage, victims of far-right figures arguing they are “protecting women and girls” from unknown and unseen particular threat from migrants are coming forward to tell their story of sexual and domestic abuse

Knowing how highly Kemi Badenoch prizes her lack of gaffes, she might wish to correct the softening effect of her chosen words: ‘We wanted him to be our mayoral candidate.’ Jeffrey Archer WAS the Tories’ mayoral candidate, endorsed by Margaret Thatcher and John Major, until his crimes were exposed.

Kemi Badenoch continues: ‘I can see why so many people were very fond of Jeffrey Archer. You know, we wanted him to be our mayoral candidate, and then yet another thing happened.’ Happened? He didn’t sit on a box of chocolates. He was sent to prison for perjury and perverting the course of justice.

‘He was someone that people liked so much that even after he’d been in tricky situations, he kept being given further chances.’ - Kemi Badenoch on Today, openly acknowledging that Jeffrey Archer’s life was very different from that of, for example, Monica Coghlan, who was destroyed by Archer’s lies.

It’s almost as though the Black Report and forty-odd years of evidence on poverty and health inequalities never existed. And while we’re at it, perhaps we could discuss the poverty premium: there’s an extraordinary amount of money to be made from people having the least.

£100,000? Thoughts and prayers at this difficult time. There’s quite a lot of daylight between “not as rich as you imagined” and “needs state support”.