Clare Midgley

The next good idea is overdue. All the world's a stage but I'm only on here for the cat and dog accounts really.

[Clare Midgley @MidgleyClare]

@thameswater
I have a question for you:
What % of your current 16 million customers do you think would stay with you, if you didn’t have the monopoly, on the provision of an essential utility? #ThamesWater

[Clare Midgley @MidgleyClare]

@stuzi_pants Yuck.

[Clare Midgley @MidgleyClare]

It’s been a sad and difficult week. Just rinsed my brain with a cry and now I’ll spend some time with the posts for #InternationalCatDay

[Clare Midgley @MidgleyClare]

@MasterHistory23 @RadioFreeTom 😍

[Clare Midgley @MidgleyClare]

@RadioFreeTom She certainly is 😍

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

When the photographer tried to record a family of Egyptian geese living in a London park, pigeons and squirrels started photobombing.

[Justin Ng @justin_ng]

Happy International (World) Cat Day. Larry is napping inside so heres an old vid of his stretch and roll. Hope you are pampering (or serving) your feline Bosses today.

[Clare Midgley @MidgleyClare]

@SeagullRichard @docrussjackson @Paul68958640 @X Maybe he was always a
G R I F T £ R

[Clare Midgley @MidgleyClare]

#Jenrick is little more than a professional propagandist.

[GET A GRIP @docrussjackson]

The "Dodgy Barbershop" that wasn't: Jenrick's latest performative stunt.

On 6 August 2026, Robert Jenrick stood outside a barbershop in Sheerness, Kent, and posted a video and photo to @X with the caption: "Dodgy barbers, vape shops, and candy stores are ruining our towns."

The target of his outrage was Brothers & Scissors, a Turkish barbershop whose former owner, Salih Saruhan, was jailed for 7.5 years in 2023 for his part in a £1 million cocaine smuggling operation through the Port of Sheerness. Jenrick's line was pointed: "The owner of this barbershop in Kent was convicted of drug smuggling. But it's still here, claiming that it's 'open'."

Why the drama, Honest Bob? It is open. 10-seconds online confirms it. You can book a five-star-reviewed haircut if you want. And Jenrick's "but" is doing more rhetorical work than the facts support.

A basic check of Brothers & Scissors' Booksy page shows a business with a 5.0 rating across 642 reviews, an active online booking system, and business hours running to 8pm most days. The reviews aren't sparse or suspicious. They're detailed, dated, and named: customers praising specific staff by name, describing the shop as "immaculate," booking repeat appointments for skin fades and beard trims. This is not a shell. It's a functioning, apparently well-run high-street barbershop that people in Sheerness frequently use.

Crucially, the staff name attached to nearly every recent review, from March through June 2026, is "Yxng Sami," not Salih Saruhan.

Jenrick's sentence structure treats an open, trading, employing business as an anomaly requiring explanation: convicted, but still here. Set aside the politics for a moment and ask what would a "pro-business" argument normally say about a shop that survived its owner's imprisonment, kept staff employed, kept its doors open, and kept paying business rates? That's usually held up as resilience, not a scandal.

There is also no law in the UK banning someone with an unrelated criminal conviction from owning or being connected to a business.

Company director disqualification exists, but under the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986 it applies to conduct connected to how a company itself was run (fraud, insolvency misconduct), not to convictions unconnected to the business.

Being in prison doesn't automatically strip someone of the ability to own property or a company either, if someone else is left running day-to-day operations. None of this is a 'loophole'. It's simply how the law has always worked, and Jenrick, a former lawyer and housing minister who has spent his career arguing for lighter-touch regulation on business, is choosing to frame ordinary legal continuity as evidence of criminal impunity.

His tweet wasn't posted in isolation. It was posted the same day Reform UK's home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf unveiled the party's stupid "Deliveroo Law," a pledge to jail company directors who employ illegal workers. The policy was immediately ridiculed, including by Lib Dem MP Max Wilkinson, who pointed out that employer liability for illegal working already carries up to five years in prison under existing law.

Richard Tice posted a near-identical line the same day, about "the many hundreds of dodgy barber shops employing illegals & selling counterfeit goods." Jenrick's barbershop photo reads less like independent reporting on a genuine local scandal and more like a coordinated visual prop, supplying an emotive image for a policy rollout that was already struggling to justify its own novelty.

This isn't Jenrick's first brush with misleading framing dressed up as exposure. In July 2026, he was forced to delete a tweet featuring doctored audio that misrepresented immigration minister Jo White, after she published the full recording proving her actual words had been cut and rearranged. Her predecessor as Bassetlaw MP, John Mann, called Jenrick "a liar and a fraud" who "knows this is a made up doctored quote."

Across a string of tweets this year, Jenrick's pattern has been consistent: take a real image or clip, strip it of context, and let a caption do the work the evidence doesn't support.

The barbershop tweet fits the mould. A business that is legally entitled to trade, is trading successfully, employs staff who aren't the man he wants you to picture, and broke no law by remaining open, gets rebranded as proof of a national crisis requiring a policy that already exists.

It's a small story. But it's a useful one, because it shows exactly how the performance works: find a real fact, strip out the parts that complicate it, and let outrage fill the gap.

It's all they've fucking got, and it's pathetic. If we had a functioning non-partisan news media, the Reform clowns and Rupert Lowe wouldn't be anywhere near power, we'd still be in the EU, and the country would be a lot less polarised.

[memento mori. @HelpThe99ers]

@atrupar "See, when you're a President, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the portrait."

[Robert Steven @RobertJSteven]

@atrupar Every traditional privilege of the presidency is another proof that no one ever considered that one day America’s wealthiest and its most venal might join together to wantonly defile the republic by installing a sociopathic degenerate villainous imbecile in its highest office

[Kathy Lette @KathyLette]

When demeaned by Trump, all female reporters should now retort "Quiet, Wiggy....Or there'll be hell toupee." #TrumpHair

[Fuckin’ Princess @8WithaTiara]

I just learned that orcas are the only other mammals that experienced menopause

Trashing some dude’s yacht makes a lot more sense now

[Clare Midgley @MidgleyClare]

@8WithaTiara @dancingdog27 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Thank you, I need that.

[Viral Reel Addict @ViralReelAddict]

I want to upload this video to TikTok, but it keeps getting removed by TikTok's moderation team. I hope it won't be removed here as well.

[The Figen @TheFigen_]

A cat completely lost in the moment, enjoying itself on a boat. ❤️

[Clare Midgley @MidgleyClare]

@dnky27 @PaulSchleifer Yes.

[Canada Goose 🇨🇦 @CanadaGoose911]

the hair memes have been incredible

[Clare Midgley @MidgleyClare]

@NoLieWithBTC Seems like a fair result.

[Clare Midgley @MidgleyClare]

@depressionlesss Yes but I also need a little lean against my lower leg please.

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

cats will ignore you for 6 hours then randomly headbutt you like “we cool?” and somehow that’s enough.