Aaron Bell

[Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1]

The PM is lying about two-tier policing and Henry Nowak is just the latest terrible case.

Keir Starmer is the Gaslighter-In-Chief, telling us not to believe what we can see before our own eyes.

My column for @TheSun ⬇️⬇️⬇️ https://t.co/6joQ2puNos

[S. I. Rubinstein @si_rubinstein]

Even if Farage’s comments here go against the father’s wishes (which I don’t think is the case): so what? A foundational premise of our criminal law is that crimes are crimes against the crown, against the state, against US ALL; the victim’s family doesn’t have a monopoly on it.

[Colin Brazier @ColinBrazierTV]

Evading the issues raised by the Novak killing by hiding behind the family is wrong on many levels. The one Starmer would understand, as a lawyer, is that the case against Henry Novak's killer was brought by the Crown, on behalf of everyone. This isn't a private prosecution. Nobody wants to cause the Novak family additional anguish, but this case was brought to trial for the public good. The issues it raises remain in the public domain and are entirely legitimate subjects for political debate.

[Iain Mansfield @IGMansfield]

How can the Prime Minister claim there is no two-tier policing when the documents under which the police operate explicitly say they should treat different ethnicities differently?

He can't defend it - so denies it is happening.

Just gaslighting us.

[Madeline Grant @Madz_Grant]

This is not the first time Starmer has shamelessly used a young person's murder to fend off legitimate Qs from opponents. Recall his opportunism in the Chamber, when he told off Sunak for an accurate observation about Labour's muddled position on gender, because Brianna Ghey's mother was watching

[Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1]

Obviously no one should be threatening anyone or any police officer related or not related to this case.

But if @HantsPolice don't like "the significant spread of misinformation online", why did they post this and then delete it when the bodycam footage proved it was a blatant lie?

[Guido Fawkes @GuidoFawkes]

PAT MCFADDEN: EVERY MEETING I HAVE IS "WHO CAN WE TAX IN ORDER TO PAY BENEFITS TO OTHERS"

[(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges]

On 16/08/2025 Peter Mandelson messaged Pat McFadden: "I am going mad with the things Morgan is sending me. I'm trying to be constructive. But I just don't know what to say anymore".

So where are all these things Morgan was sending him. Where's just one of the things.

[Iain Martin @iainmartin1]

The more you read about the energy crisis the more you realise everyone else, every serious country, is going flat out increasing production, more oil/gas, prioritising domestic production where possible,
ripping up policy assumptions, Uniquely, one major country is pressing on in the opposite direction. It would have to be us, wouldn’t it? Banning new oil and gas exploration and fields, by law! It is quite mad. Future historians will be astonished. Like looking back on Tony Benn’s policies in government decades later and thinking how on earth was that allowed to happen?

[Paul Johnson @PJTheEconomist]

Lost for words. Never thought I’d see a British govt trying to set food prices. If there is one highly competitive sector it is food retailing.
Do we really want to live in a country where the state sets these prices?

https://t.co/yLqYOdfXNN

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

A whistleblower has revealed this month that civil servants across multiple Whitehall departments have been gaming the flexitime system to award themselves up to fifty extra days of paid holiday a year

That's about 2.5 months of full-time work lifted off the public payroll without record, on top of the CS-norm 26 days of annual leave, the eight public holidays, the contractual sick days, and of course the parental allowances that are already part of the standard package.

The methods and techniques by which this fraud has been accomplished are worth dwelling on, because the detail tells you something about the institution.

The first technique is the laptop-open-on-the-kitchen-table move. Here, the civil servant clocks off for all intents and purposes at 5pm but leaves a work laptop on, accumulating "active hours" from a home Wi-Fi connection, registering the evening as labour without performing any of it.

The second trick is the commuting-time-as-paid-hours wheeze, in which the round trip from Surbiton to Whitehall - coffee-and-podcast - is logged as part of the working day.

The third con, which the whistleblower reported as the most brazen of them all, is the straightforward falsification of office attendance against the three-days-a-week-on-site rule that this government, having promised the public a return of civil servants to civil-service buildings, has manifestly failed to enforce. The falsifications, in some cases, have been running for years.

Sit, for a moment, with the kind of person who does this and the kind of institution that permits it.

The person doing it is, in the main, a desk-bound senior official on between £55,000-130,000 a year, with access to a clocking system that runs on trust, who has decided, with the active connivance of his line manager and the silent assent of his department, that the appropriate response to that public trust is to defraud it.

And it's not even ambitious or spectacular. At least with a major fraud, you have a level of vision and nerve you have to admire even as you despise the motivating corruption. No, here, it's done through a series of small, deniable engineered manoeuvres that together transfer large sums of public money into undeserving pockets.

No honour among thieves, but some thieves are even less honourable than others.

The institution that permits it is the British Civil Service, an organisation whose senior cadre has spent the last decade in a state of escalating public-facing self-pity about its working conditions while the country it is paid to run has visibly fallen apart underneath it.

These are the same people who inherited the mandate of Brexit and, because the idea ran against the Metropolitan class bromides by which they orient their lives, hashed it up on purpose to punish the electorate whom they are duty-bound to serve.

And it's the same civil service that could not, in the end, manage a single COVID procurement contract without losing about £30 billion out of the back of the warehouse.

In light of this general disposition, a flexitime fraud is its small, daily, individual expression.

And the cost is not abstract. The Civil Service pay bill runs to roughly £15 billion a year. Headcount has grown by approximately a hundred and fifty thousand since 2016, with the deepest expansion in the policy and "leadership non-teacher" desk grades, the exact cohort the whistleblower says is gaming hardest.

Every 50-day phantom holiday, on a senior salary, is around £20k of public money paid for nothing. The country has been told for years, under successive governments, that there is no fiscal room for the things the country actually wants, like policing, prosecutions, courts that sit, borders, doctors, dentists, because the public finances are too tight.

Bollocks are they. You've got a whole parallel economy of piss-artist leave-taking running in Whitehall, and there'll be plenty more cash coming in to keep its subsidy even given this whistleblower's report. I don't for a second believe that no one senior saw it or knew about it, just as I don't believe that the rampant inequities in our police departments go unnoticed by whole legions of bystanders.

But the bystanders are not arsed.

That's why I say "Hooray for the whistleblower." Their life is going to be hell. They will be hugely unpopular. They will be described as bitter, disloyal, mentally ill, motivated by personal grievance, and unrepresentative of the dedicated public servants who go above and beyond.

That is what these institutions always say when one of their own breaks ranks. It is what they said to Maggie Oliver about Rotherham, to Alan Bates about Horizon, to the survivors of the Letby ward, the Cumberlege report, and the Sussex maternity unit. The smothering of internal dissent is now part of what the British civil service does for a living. The actual public service is something it has subcontracted to itself, badly, in stolen office hours, from the kitchen table.

I was the Civil Service comprehensively remade in this country, the only way such things are ever made, which is by changing the people and all the incentives under which they operate.

These people have been on the public payroll for fifteen years and have produced nothing for which the public can be grateful.

It's time to find out where the hours went, and dispense with those who are wasting them, along with our money.

[Aaron Bell @AaronBell80]

@RishiSunak @thetimes Alas, you can't win a policy mandate for the *country* from *party members*. As Liz Truss found out.

Both parties should change leadership elections when in government to be MPs-only (or let members pick a shortlist for the MPs to vote on, which would probably come to the same).

[John Rentoul @JohnRentoul]

Pitch for Labour members by insulting millions of the wider electorate

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

My goodness, this speaks to the PM's lack of understanding of politics. Once you've lost the voters so badly, no minister 'owes' you anything. Ministers' responsibility is to the voters and to the country, not propping up a failing PM not up to the job.

[(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges]

Supporters of Keir Starmer complaining about Makerfield. He's been told by the voters to go. And by his Cabinet. And by his Ministers. And by his MPs. And by the unions. And he's refused to listen. So this is the only way now. It's on him.

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

This is the best piece on Starmer you will read today, perhaps this year

[Luke Tryl @LukeTryl]

Burnham another for my theory that looking like you enjoy/even relish public life is a pre-requisite for connecting with public.
Starmer, May, Sunak, Reeves, Brown always look slightly pained.
Johnson, Burnham, Farage, Polanski -even back to Blair/Cameron look like they relish it

[Mike Bird @Birdyword]

The real problem to me doesn't seem to be the changes, which make sense in the system, it's that you have these bizarre processes in which a few hundred thousand political ultras pick the new PM. Either let the MPs do it themselves, or hold an election.

[(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges]

Huge - and pretty vicious - briefing operation from No.10 against Wes Streeting. But reality is he didn't "bottle it". He told Starmer to his face to go, then backed it up by resigning. And was mature enough to move in behind Burnham and back a unifying timetable.

[Aaron Bell @AaronBell80]

Three Prime Ministers have lost the confidence of their parliamentary parties in the last few years - and the one who understood and took it with most dignity was actually Liz Truss...