Maria

Investment banker, freelance photographer, Chatham House member. Sports junkie. 5 languages and counting. London/Geneve/الدوحة

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

I am officially nominating Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) for the Nobel Peace Prize.

No President in History has ended the same war so many times.

Our Dear Leader has ended the war with Iran at least 38 times by CNN’s count.

No President has ever done this before.

And he is nowhere near finished ending it.

It’s a record worthy of the Nobel committee’s recognition. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

[Maria @MariaK_81]

@DJMusgrove And I was feeling hard done by when I got into the queue at ca. 11,000

[Nicola Boden @04nbod]

There are more people in the queue to see the Bayeux tapestry than were at the Battle of Hastings

[Terrible Maps @TerribleMaps]

Instructions unclear.

[Martina Navratilova @Martina]

There was absolutely no reason to make the Iran team to do this other than spite. And it came from trump- a small, petty, vengeful man

[Hugo Rifkind @hugorifkind]

Dear Americans, I don't care about your household appliance roster even a little bit. Not even your plugs. Literally any choice you make is fine by me. Hope this helps.

[OSINTdefender @sentdefender]

Hmmm, the person on that CAC doesn’t exactly look like Vance? Someone clearly failed their Annual Cyber Awareness Training.

[Maria @MariaK_81]

@bbclysedoucet Even some of the characters are the same

[John Rentoul @JohnRentoul]

If the incoming PM goes for Ed Miliband, his government is over before it has started.

Andy Burnham has kept his thinking about who would be in his cabinet well shielded from journalists, which means that a lot of the commentary tends to repeat the assumption that Ed Miliband would be chancellor.

That assumption is built on three facts. One, Miliband is close to Burnham: they share similar soft-left politics, and Miliband has shared some of his staff and allies. Two, Miliband wants the job. And three, Burnham hasn’t said he won’t give it to him.

It would be a disastrous appointment.

Miliband’s record at the energy department ought to disqualify him. His policies have raised the cost of energy in Britain, suppressing domestic production and increasing imports from countries with cheaper energy that makes climate change worse. And he would rather import oil and gas, which Britain will continue to need regardless of the net zero target, than to create British jobs and British tax revenue from our own production.

If that is not enough, his record as leader of the opposition ought to put the tin lid on it. His attempt to divide companies into “predators” and “producers” revealed a lack of understanding of, bordering on hostility to, the private sector.

Fortunately, there are some signs that Burnham will avoid making a terrible mistake in what is almost the only decision that matters if he comes to form a government.

One is simply the weight of opinion against Miliband. The financial markets would take fright. Business leaders would be dismayed. Two of the big trade unions, Unite and the GMB, oppose his North Sea policy. And the view of the general public of him is strongly negative, a hangover from his time as leader.

Then there is the crude politics. Kemi Badenoch’s first attack would be to remind the Commons of Miliband’s 2014 Labour conference “no notes” speech, when he forgot the sections on the deficit and immigration, revealing his priorities by omission.

The internal Labour politics would be worse. The FT quotes a “senior Treasury official” – presumably a political adviser rather than a civil servant – saying that Miliband would seek to dominate No 10 if he were chancellor: “You might as well be handing your premiership to him.”

The second sign that Burnham is moving away from appointing Miliband is that he has briefed journalists that he is taking advice from Richard Hughes, the former head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, Andy Haldane, the former Bank of England chief economist, and Jim O’Neill, the Treasury minister in the Lords in David Cameron’s Conservative government.

This may have been designed primarily to try to neutralise the effect of Burnham’s loose words about being in hock to the bond markets and refusing to answer “exam questions” about Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules. But it suggests that Burnham is worried about the market reaction to fiscal indiscipline, in which case he cannot appoint Miliband.

Burnham is focused now on sticking to the fiscal rules to avoid spooking the markets. Just to remind him what the rules are: no borrowing except for investment by the third year of the forecast (currently 2029-30); and total borrowing to be lower as a share of national income in the third year than the second. They are designed to assure lenders that the national debt is sustainable, and although the rules are imperfect, the main criticism of them is that they allow chancellors too much leeway rather than too little.

The final sign that Miliband is not going to get the gig may seem trivial, but it is telling. Intelligence from Labour campaign HQ in Makerfield was that Burnham’s aides joked about the number of times Miliband was phoning and messaging the candidate – that suggests some level of irritation at his persistence, and that Miliband is essentially supplicant rather than mentor.

If not Miliband, though, who will be chancellor?

The right answer, I think, is Wes Streeting. The former health secretary gave a clever speech about “progressive capitalism” four days ago. As well as praising markets and competition, he said: “Bond markets are not Bond villains, and fiscal rules matter. Fiscal discipline matters because credibility is the precondition for an activist state. With debt approaching 100% of GDP, Britain has very little room for error.”

That is absolutely the message that Burnham needs to transmit to the markets. He could do it by keeping Reeves in post but he has made such a fetish of “change” that it would not work politically.

The other argument for Streeting is political: it would say that the Labour government is an explicit coalition of the Blairites and the soft left, a broad church led by two good communicators bringing the two wings of the party together.

The only other good option would be Shabana Mahmood, but she has not said anything about economics since she was a shadow Treasury minister 2013-15. Her fiscal toughness would have to be inferred from her resolution in defying the Labour Party’s instincts on immigration. So she may be pleased that she has managed to get herself talked about as a possible chancellor, while her allies say that she is determined to get on with the difficult job in the home office.

Anybody else would be a compromise, showing varying signs of weakness.

[John Simpson @JohnSimpsonNews]

I once asked Henry Kissinger after a press conference what a superpower should do to avoid looking weak. ‘Don’t start a war,’ he said. He meant Vietnam, but it seems particularly relevant now.

[Mike & Enda @team_daddy]

My sister on holiday with the kids, they had a few cute ‘towel animals’ left on the bed during the week but just came back to this

[Maria @MariaK_81]

@mellon_heads I had a Soviet era Russian translation of The Hobbit when I was growing up in said Soviet Union, and it had illustrations matching the first set here

[Gregg Carlstrom @glcarlstrom]

American credibility has deteriorated to the point where the president can announce a diplomatic agreement and the near-universal reaction is "let's wait for confirmation from Tasnim"

[Richard Williams @rwilliams1947]

If the Football Association want to do something useful, they might consider inviting Omar Artan, the Somali referee refused entry to the US for the World Cup after an 11-hour interrogation, to officiate at next May’s FA Cup Final.

[Maria @MariaK_81]

@atrupar The man is an insane, illiterate, dangerous ignoramus

[nhu 🇻🇳🇨🇳 @maisonlongan]

the US fucked up so bad you got footy fans on here defending a referee

[David Aaronovitch @DAaronovitch]

This man was banned because of his nationality and for no other reason. FIFA did nothing to help him, not even lodge a protest. Ugh https://t.co/6ayCu4CPd9

[Bahar | بهار @BGhandehari]

“In Iran, we didn’t want to be martyrs, nor protest heroes, nor casualties of war. We just wanted to live.”

[Maria @MariaK_81]

RT @NTarnopolsky: 💥Trump viewing Israel and Iran as equal irritants must be one of the most shattering diplomatic fails of Benjamin Netanya…

[Fraser Nelson @FraserNelson]

It's not just the exploitation of a tragedy.

JD Vance's picture of Britain - where migrants have led to a crime surge - is the opposite of the truth.

https://t.co/y5El5FUj7v