Running Dog

Journalists: anonymous abuse of politicians has toxified the public sphere, its an existential threat to our democracy 🥺 Also journalists: somebody’s called this MP a knobhead and I won’t say who 🤠

I feel like CEOs admitting they find elementary school assignments too challenging would be considered bad news for the company, once upon a time

It’s basically the same but for 3 months a year it won’t answer unless you’re wearing a poppy

Convening a focus group of 30 people who have no idea what's going on and no expertise on basically any topic and just turning them loose. "Fuck me up," I tell them. "Just give me all the dumbest stuff you've got."

Steve Richards has done a podcast episode about how difficult it’d be for Ukraine to win the war, so inevitably he’s had to do a follow-up responding to listener emails accusing him of falling for Kremlin propaganda

Could we simply avoid the part where we’re asked to pretend the prime minister would have to rely on his private stash of baked beans in the event of a crisis www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

A new what

In conclusion, the prime minister is a land of contrasts

Imagine buying so much Amol Rajan merch that paying £299 a year for a 30% discount makes financial sense

Getting a bit over your skis here lads. Is anybody seriously going to say that “thanks for doing Brexit 10 years ago here’s £5m” is some kind of contractual payment www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Love how 50% of political commentary is telling the audience how smart & well-informed they are, and the other 50% is relentlessly repeating the same handful of political quotes and concepts to them again and again as if to a small child

Hypothetically if a UK ally were operating “annihilation zones” in its occupied territories, would “what does the Green Party think about it” be the most pressing issue in national politics www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The issue here is that hacks found it useful to agree that Reform had detoxified simply by not letting Tommy Robinson in and doing well in the polls, so evidence of all the toxicity that never went away is very inconvenient and pretend-shocking.

Very funny how every episode of Goalhanger’s The Rest is Entertainment, hosted by the UK’s uh savviest culture vultures, has ads for “Bear Hunt”, Goalhanger’s first and stupidest venture into drama.

Worked at a Ladbrokes for about 5 days, 20 years ago. My manager was being investigated for unspecified activities, which meant I was left unsupervised and mostly untrained while he was questioned in a back room. He’d occasionally offer me life advice like “don’t trust anybody in this game, boy” 🧐

Strikes me that when the hacks all went to Reform conferences and declared it very professional and detoxified, either the UK’s largest grouping of pub uncles somehow maintained best behaviour for a whole weekend, or the UK’s finest political journalists just weren’t very observant

Good work by Rooney - and Faber - for sticking with it to create this absurd situation www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

The thing is, the press really will get rid of Polanski eventually, just by all screaming in unison until everyone gets sick of it and just wants the hate and bullshit to end. They are exercising their veto and they know they only need to stick at it until it finally works.

At first I thought something weird was going on but then I realised No, it’s simply planes based in Oxfordshire going off to fight a war that the UK is not involved in, so I went back to sleep www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

On a scarcely believable episode of Political Thinking, Tom Watson explains that noted surveillance company Palantir doesn’t match his definition of “surveillance capitalism” and has the UK’s best interests at heart. His greatest ethical regret, he explains at length is having worked with Corbyn.

Okay so he meant to say Iran *cannot* nuke LA but said “could” instead, and everyone including the crowd assumed he meant “might as well”. Like literally what are we supposed to make of this incident www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

The reason I'm so skeptical of the AI industry's latest breakthroughs is they are operating with infinite money and pretending that doesn't matter. So many things become easier when you have infinite money to throw at a problem. The Infinite Money Trick davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/the-infini...