A wonderful concert with @AugustaLees & friends, with a floral theme - good to bring “It’s My Party and I’ll Lie If I Want To” to attention of more people too.
In line with the theme, someone chose as a bonus CD “I Don’t Beg Pardon, I’m Talking Bollocks From the Rose Garden”
My first concert of the year, where I got to do non political stuff! And sold 10 books thanks to @MikeCashman1 selling skills! Our 2023 update brings us to Boris finally getting the boot! Link below!
It happened in 2022. We need an urgent statement from the Conservative Party and the relevant Ministers at the time. It is indeed deeply worrying. Which Conservative ministers knew about this? What was their role in it? Which civil servants were involved? Why?
If you have similar political views to me then you might well also see eye to eye with @DillieKeane of Fascinating Aida - back here on TwiX out of necessity
Worth a follow because she is starting again from scratch
@CCHQPress How many years was it that Mr Short-Cummings jointly owned a “spare cottage” in Durham with no planning permission, no building regs approval, and no Council Tax paid, and he never repaid the historical deficit? #Toryhypocrisy#Cummings#Covid
Panorama edit was a serious mistake, given the reaction, #bbcaq. An apology & resignations followed. This did not cause significant damage to Trump. He & Prescott imply they wanted people to pay more attention to one "peaceful" than to many references to "fight" before & after.
Christ. This couple have no shame
M'Lady Michelle Mone & her husband Doug Barrowman have purchased a £10m home on America’s billionaire island.
Neighbours include Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
PPE Medpro still owe taxpayers £122 million.
A bloody disgrace
#BBCBreakfast#r4today
Well highlighted @vicderbyshire
It’s no good trying to turn Kings Evidence now Michelle Mone in the hope of leniency for what you did by spilling the beans on others. I think we know the whole sordid story about all of the Crony Contractors now already.
Baroness Mone hits out at @KemiBadenoch over the Tories/PPE/VIP lane:
‘your party & your people knew of my role & the role of 51 other mostly Conservative peers & MPs who introduced contracts through what became known as the VIP lane
I acted no differently than… Matt Hancock who referred 4 companies, Lord Agnew & Lord Feldman who referred 3 companies each, Lord Chadlington who was actually a director & shareholder of a parent company that won 2 contracts worth £23.9m & £26.1m respectively.
And let’s not forget Michael Gove & his referral of 4 contracts to his friend David Meller of David Meller Group Ltd’
Also says ‘once I do clear my name, I have no wish to return to the Lords as Conservative peer’
@Otto_English I posted this earlier
https://t.co/3baMGY24d7
(If you are viewing from outside London the graffiti, rioting and dragons are all hiding out of shot)
Nigel Farage backs campaigns with no plan to fulfil them #bbcqt and #Brexit is the obvious example which should have meant that nobody believed him in future.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
On #bbcqt Nigel Huddleston MP blamed the increase in debt under Tories 2010-2024 on #Covid. But out of that increase in UK national debt it’s about one third (£6k per head) that is caused by covid.
Can we see other causes? Look at Tory #Brexit and at Tory #Truss
This matters!
And @Augustalees (my co-author of “It’s My Party..”) who wrote it, sings it and plays it knows that from personal experience.
Please sign as if your life depends on it. (Some people’s lives do depend on it, & you can count on their love & thanks when you sign).
If you've even slightly missed my musical musings please please sign this petition.
I'm too unwell to parody regularly, & every hospital/scan/blood test appointment I run the gauntlet of whether I'll catch an infection that will make things worse.
https://t.co/yDbu8n8dMT
In case you wonder what we — and President Trump — are up against.
100% NEGATIVE coverage from so-call “mainstream” press in the first 100 days. PERFECT SCORE.
(Come on @RobertKennedyJr & @elonmusk , you guys can do better!)
One of Donald Trump’s most significant achievements in his first 100 days is to secure the election as prime minister of Canada of arguably his most trenchant critic, Mark Carney.
Indeed it might just turn out to be the most significant consequence of his tenure, as I will explain.
Before his inauguration, there was zero prospect of Carney’s Liberal Party escaping electoral humiliation or of the former Bank of England governor being picked to lead the party. The Conservatives, led by someone who appeared a student of Trump’s playbook and rhetoric, Pierre Polievre, were a shoo-in.
But after Trump launched a tariff war against Canada and humiliated the nation by saying it would be better off as America’s 51st state, Canadians have turned to a charming technocrat of international repute.
Carney represents the first serious fight back of putatively competent centrists - those denigrated as Centrist Dads - against the onslaught of populists, among whom Trump is the apogee.
For those wherever they reside who prefer rationality to charisma, Carney will be - unless and until he fails - a beacon.
More practically Carney wants to be a central player - perhaps with his new mandate, the leader - in what I have called the coalition of the economically willing.
This would be an alliance of democracies - from Europe to Korea and Japan - which would be a free trade bulwark in Trump’s protectionist world. They would move rapidly to reduce intra national tariffs and other frictions to commerce between them. They would be a free-trading hemisphere, while Trump’s US would be a sluggish economy on the other side of the wall. And collectively they could - when necessary - threaten retaliatory tariffs against Washington more credibly than any individual nation could do.
To be effective against Trumpian protectionism, the prospect of such solidarity simply needs to be credible. With the cooperation and goodwill of China and India too, it could accelerate the fraying of Trump’s protectionism - which we have been witnessing thanks to the way bond-market investors have punished the American president by selling dollar assets, notably US government debt - into a complete volte face.
There is a big question now for Keir Starmer about how enthusiastically he will endorse Carney’s internationalism, as a counterweight to Trump’s extreme nationalism.
The chancellor Rachel Reeves may feel she owes Carney, given that he famously - some would say notoriously - publicly endorsed her in a video at a Labour conference as a future Chancellor
But Starmer won’t be motivated by gratitude to Carney. He will need to assess rapidly whether the UK’s economic and security interests are best served by making common cause with Carney contra Trump or by sustaining his seeming appeasement of an American president who seems to lack any understanding of the collective interest of liberal democracies