David Pegington

[David Pegington @PegingtonDavid]

@veiledleaks Definitely Yes

[dave lawrence 🐟🐟🐠 @dave43law]

Brexit snowflake Charlie Mullins said he won’t return to the UK unless Nigel Farage is PM, and the UK’s shrug was visible from Dubai https://t.co/cTs8zdcRjM

[William Peynsaert @PeynsaertBill]

SHE INVITED A HOMELESS REFUGEE FOR CHRISTMAS. HE BECAME HER SON.

In 2003, British actress Emma Thompson met a young Rwandan refugee at a Christmas party organised by the Refugee Council in London.

His name was Tindyebwa Agaba. He was 16.

He had survived the Rwandan genocide, lost members of his family and been forced to serve as a child soldier.

After escaping to Britain, he had spent nights sleeping rough near Trafalgar Square. He spoke little English and had experienced more suffering than most people encounter in a lifetime.

At the party, he approached Thompson. He didn't even know she was famous.

She and her husband, Greg Wise, invited him to spend Christmas with their family.

Then he came back. And again.

Gradually, Tindy became part of their household, joining their daughter Gaia as a member of the family.

He went on to university, graduated in 2009 and became involved in human rights advocacy. He also spoke openly about the racism he encountered in Britain.

Thompson never pretended that welcoming a traumatised teenager into a family was effortless.

But she understood something important.

"Sometimes being friends is not enough. You need family."

Their relationship was never formalised through a conventional adoption, but Tindy calls her Mum.

There is something profoundly beautiful about two people who were once strangers deciding to become family.

Not because they share blood, nationality, religion or even a language.

But because they choose to make room for each other.

One invitation to Christmas dinner. A completely different life for both of them.

[Queer Lips of Truth II 🇸🇱🇬🇧 @QLoTII]

A 77-year-old King, still in cancer treatment, flew nine days through a region that has spent the year telling him it wants to leave. He stood in a tropical downpour without an umbrella. He went to the one republic whose president had publicly told him to apologise. And he came home with 56 countries agreeing to double their trade with each other by 2030. That is soft power. Nobody else alive can do it.

The Bahamas first. He hadn’t been back in 53 years, not since he stood in for his mother at independence in 1973. He got off the plane and said “I’ve arrived, thank God!” in Bahamian dialect, and that was the tour decided. Danced at Junkanoo. Sat with a youth rally at Clifford Park. Waded about in the mangroves at Bonefish Pond talking coastal resilience with people whose homes depend on it.

Then Guyana. A republic since 1970. President Ali had said out loud that the King should apologise, and the King went anyway. Met him at State House, laid a wreath, sat with the Toshaos, the elected leaders of the Indigenous villages, 26 years after he first walked into the Iwokrama rainforest and became its patron. His Foundation is now drawing up Georgetown’s urban plan with the government. You don’t get asked to do that by a country that resents you.

Then Antigua and Barbuda. The first Head of the Commonwealth ever to set foot there. At the Independence parade the sky opened, Camilla made off under the only umbrella in the stadium and the King stood in the rain miming one until somebody found him his own, laughing. The clip went round the world and did more for the monarchy than a thousand press releases.

Then he gave the speech people said he’d dodge. He didn’t. The slave trade “still casts a shadow” over these islands, he said, and the history fills him with horror and profound personal sorrow. He said the Commonwealth is “a response to the world of today.” Then he got out of the way and let the leaders work.

And they worked. Smallest host nation in Commonwealth history. 3,000 delegates in a country of 100,000 people. $52 billion of bankable projects on the table across 28 countries. Half a billion dollars of new money. A $300 million fund to put skills into 10 million young people. A trade portal, a trade target, a debt agenda the UK will carry into its G20 presidency. And on reparations, the thing everyone said would blow it up, Britain agreed to a structured, time-bound dialogue and Gaston Browne said it would not divide the Commonwealth. It didn’t.

No treaty makes any of these countries turn up. They turn up. 56 nations, 2.7 billion people, a third of humanity, and the one thing they have in common is a man who flies in, listens, gets rained on, and asks for nothing.

A word for Shirley Botchwey too. Her first CHOGM as Secretary-General. First African woman to run the Secretariat, second African after Nigeria’s own Chief Emeka Anyaoku. She promised a summit of ambition and action and then did something nobody had done in 28 of these meetings: she put investors in the room with the heads of government. Ghana should be proud of her. Africa is.

People keep asking what a monarchy is for in 2026. This week was the answer. Not power. Presence.

Well done, Antigua. God Save The King.

@RoyalFamily @commonwealthsec #CHOGM2026

[Christine in Colorado 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇨🇦 🇩🇰 @ctnyholm1]

Marco Rubio is going to resign so he can start rehabilitating his image in preparation for the 2028 presidential election. Let’s not let him forget how he turned his back on Ukraine, NATO, Greenland and all the other awful stuff he did after selling his soul to Trump .

[kerry ✊💙Dont let Farage kill our NHS @hewitson10]

Danny Kruger ex conservative now Reform MP

🗣️we can’t fix Britain with the same cast of characters that got us into this mess🤔

Hmmmmmm, 5 of the 8 Reform MPs are the cast of characters that got us into this mess

How fucking stupid do they think people are.

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

Pimlico Plumbers boss Charlie Mullins is a union-busting rightwing donor who pretended his workers were 'self-employed' so he didn't have to give sick pay or paid leave. He's just the sort of 'wealth creator' I'd be entirely happy to see leave Britain.

[dave lawrence 🐟🐟🐠 @dave43law]

Amazing
Any migrant crime he leaps on it in detail

A man is accused of 35 separate offences including 12 rapes and not a mention - despite him meeting him on numerous occasions...

[InfoGram @_InfoGram_]

Zohran Mamdani is on fire. 🔥

🇺🇸JD Vance at 6:00 PM: We lost due to the Iran war which causes household inflation for Americans

🇺🇸Zohran at 7:00 PM: "Bro you are VP of USA, not a random Twitter troll. You can't post like it's someone else's war. You started it, You can end it. Stop tweeting and crying, start acting."

Brutally Cooked 👏

[Never tory @ginovece74]

Kemi Badenoch bemoans lack of "home grown" nurses, she was in the tory government that tripled tuition fees, scrapped education maintenance grants and allowances that helped poorer students, removed bursaries from nursing students, imposed years of pay freezes on NHS staff.

[Socialist Opera Singer @OperaSocialist]

Wrong about Brexit, wrong about immigration, wrong about Liz Truss and wrong about Trump.

Why would anyone trust Farage?

[dave lawrence 🐟🐟🐠 @dave43law]

Councillor stripped of roles after conduct breaches

Leicestershire County Council's Reform group confirmed it had taken the step after two complaints against Joseph Boam - one lodged by a former senior council officer and the other by a Conservative councillor - were upheld at member conduct hearings on Friday.

The measure means Boam, a former deputy council leader, has lost his seats on the authority's children and families overview and scrutiny committee, and its corporate governance committee, until at least May.
https://t.co/JmUXNK7M53

[Labour Press @labourpress]

The charges facing George Madgwick are truly sickening.

Arrested in January. Appointed as Reform’s leader in Hampshire in May. Promoted in Reform HQ in July.

Farage must come clean on what he knew and when.

[Richard Corbett @RichardGCorbett]

I’m fed up with certain politicians saying we need to “respect” the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum.

A decision by a narrow majority 10yrs ago that turned out to be a disaster does not have to be respected.

If a democracy cannot change its mind it ceases to be a democracy.

[David Smith @digidavey]

BREAKING: E Jean Carroll publicly humiliates Donald Trump by revealing that his disgusting body odour and bizarre behaviour "mesmerised" the jury during the trial that resulted in her $83 million defamation win.
These details are hilarious as they are gross...
“I don’t understand how people can be afraid of a fat, elderly man who wears apricot makeup, his hair done up like Tippi Hedren in The Birds, and sits in a courtroom and moans and groans and complains and snorts,” Caroll told The Daily Beast podcast.
“They were mesmerised. You have never seen anything like it,” she said of the jury. “He never sat still, and he talked the entire time within earshot of the jury. He belittled Alina Habba, his own attorney. He would spit as he was talking. He didn’t smell so good.”
She recounted how her attorney Roberta "Robbie" Kaplan really got under Trump's skin...
"He stood up with steam coming off his back and hot air blowing out his ears because Robbie Kaplan was giving the final argument, and she was asking the jury how much it would take to make him stop," said Carroll.
“She drove him so crazy, he stood up in the courtroom and left,” she explained. "When a man is innocent, he doesn’t storm out of a courtroom; he stays and fights. He turned tail and stormed out of the courtroom. He lost right at that second. He couldn’t have looked more guilty."
Caroll credibly accused Trump of raping her and he was ultimately found civilly liable for sexually assaulting her. She was awarded $5 million but then Trump continued defaming her in public and denying her story, eventually resulting in her massive $83.3 million victory.
“When the jury heard the evidence, it wasn’t very hard,” Kaplan told the Daily Beast.
“The clerk opens it up, reads it, frowns, shakes his head, folds it back up, and then hands it to Judge Kaplan,” said Caroll. “And Judge Kaplan opens it up, and his eyebrows rise up towards his hairline, and he frowns, and he says, ‘Madame forewoman, what does the M stand for?’”
The forewoman explained that "m" stood for "million.
“That was a moment,” said Carroll. “I left my body. As I say, I felt like Peter Pan who flies around the ceilings. And quite frankly, I’ve never come down from that. That win was so enormous and so powerful, not for me, not for Robbie, but for everybody in the country who had sort of lost hope that he could ever be beaten.”
“We’re still feeling the good victory of that. It’s happened. And we’ve proved—Robbie proved, and I proved—that Trump can be beaten,” Carroll continued. “He can be beaten.”
E. Jean Caroll is right. Trump shouldn't be feared. He can be defeated. All it takes is the courage to fight back.
Please like and share!

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

Last night Trump said he could have won Vietnam in a week. His plan was “going after Ho Chi Minh City.”

Ho Chi Minh City was Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. Our ally. The enemy’s capital was Hanoi. We bombed it.

He called the presidents who fought that war stupid, then explained how he’d have won it by attacking our own side.

58,220 Americans died in that war. Trump got five deferments. Now he’s telling the rest of us how easy it would have been.

He’s had more than fifty years to learn which side we were on. He still hasn’t. That alone should disqualify him from sending anybody else’s kids to war.

Instead, he’s weighing more strikes on Iran after Tuesday. His administration has reportedly considered using the “mother of all bombs,” the one he calls “like a tiny nuclear bomb.”

The man who thinks we should have bombed our ally’s capital gets to choose the targets.

[The London Economic @LondonEconomic]

Of the £10bn spent on substandard PPE equipment, £1.7bn of that went to firms who were granted access to the VIP lane – and around £1bn of these funds was squandered on items deemed ‘unfit for use’.

Blood boiling.

[Thomas Standfield @TStandfield1789]

What a bunch of traitors!
Reform MPs have taken part in just 30% of parliamentary debates on defence.
While Farage has only bothered his arse to attend 5%.
These people are not fit to be in Parliament.
@Nigel_Farage @TiceRichard @RobertJenrick @reformparty_uk @SuellaBraverman

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Laura Kuenssberg, "The midterm polls suggest that President Trump might get a thumping"

Nicola Sturgeon, "He's destabilised not just the global economy, and the interactions between world leaders"

"Trump takes loyalty and friendship as a sign of weakness so he ends up punishing his friends, much more than punishing his enemies"

My view:

This is what happens when a president mistakes bullying for strength and treats diplomacy as a loyalty test.

Trump doesn’t just alienate opponents; he punishes allies who have stood beside the US, then expects them to keep showing loyalty.

That damages trust, destabilises relationships and makes America a less reliable partner.

If the midterms deliver the thumping the polls suggest, it may be a clear message from voters that they’re tired of the chaos too.