Sam Robins

Speeches and comms. Former parliamentary bag carrier. Trustee at @WWRefugees.

[Led By Donkeys @ByDonkeys]

Immigration makes Britain brilliant.

[Sorcha Eastwood MP @SorchaEastwood]

I'm one Backbench MP. As a direct result of this Leadership shambles, I've had at least one and potentially two Ministerial Meetings cancelled due to resignations and now having to pull out of a Conference on cancer next week due potential votes on Starmer next week. And I'm just one Backbench MP....Can you imagine the impact of this all across Government?

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

This is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how Burnham will try to convince the bond markets he can be trusted with the finances

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Zelensky Has Finally Stopped Pretending Trump Is Helping. Good.

For fourteen months, Volodymyr Zelensky has been forced to sit quietly while the United States demanded he surrender territory, shrink his army, and be grateful for the privilege. He smiled. He negotiated. He flew to Mar-a-Lago. He stood next to Donald Trump and said encouraging things about peace frameworks while Trump’s team privately sketched out a deal that looked, to any honest observer, like Ukraine losing the war on paper instead of on the battlefield.

That is now over.

Since the bombs started  falling on Tehran in late February, Washington has had no time for Ukraine. Peace talks are dead. US negotiators have simply moved on. And Zelensky, freed at last from the exhausting performance of American-dependent diplomacy, has started saying what he actually thinks.

He has said that Trump’s team puts more pressure on Ukraine than on Russia. He has said that the American decision to suspend sanctions on Russian oil hands the Kremlin a sense of impunity. He has pointed out, with the calm fury of a man who has been extremely polite for an extremely long time, that the United States still chooses to pressure the victim rather than the aggressor.

None of this is new. All of it is true. And twelve months ago, saying any of it out loud would have been unthinkable.

Ukraine now produces most of its own drones. Over sixty percent of Russian drones are knocked down by domestically produced interceptors. 

Ukraine has signed deals to export its drone expertise, is building new security relationships across Europe and the Middle East, and is courting allies with the focused energy of a country that has quietly concluded it cannot count on Washington anymore.

The peace talks are dead, says Harry Nedelcu of Rasmussen Global. There is no real negotiation. Russia has no incentive. Which is the entirely predictable outcome of a peace process run by a man who has spent the last year trying to acquire Greenland, bombing Iran, and repeatedly insisting that Ukraine, not Russia, started the war. 

Zelensky has stopped pretending that is helpful. It isn’t. It never was.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

If you like what you read, premium content on Substack: https://t.co/M6CNAnz656

[Anders Åslund @anders_aslund]

Vance's speech in Budapest is truly outrageous:
1. The US vice president campaigns for an enemy of the EU & NATO, but a friend of Putin & China.
2. Vance attacks the EU for pressuring Hungary, but Hungary has received net about 3% of GDP a year from the EU, but it has squandered much on corruption.
3. In effect, Vance argues that the EU should promote corruption just as the Trump administration does.
Trump and Vance fight freedom and the rule of law in favor of autocracy, kleptocracy and Russia.
US foreign policy has hit the bottom.

[Rt Hon Alistair Burt @AlistairBurtUK]

The thought that this man is connected in any way to the future of the west, NATO and the UK terrifies me.

[Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn]

The US has formally asked for Ukraine’s help to shoot down Iran’s Shahed drones, President Zelensky confirms.

The mind numbing irony.

[Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 @jurgen_nauditt]

The chaos in the world is a direct consequence of the Russian attack on Ukraine, said Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

"The explosive situation in the Middle East and drones in the skies over Cyprus are not separate conflicts, but a direct result of the destruction of international law.

It all started in Ukraine, when Russia, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, cynically violated the borders of a neighboring country and signaled to the entire world that the rules no longer apply," Meloni remarked in an interview with Tg5.

The war in Europe is already underway, and to consider these events "distant" is a dangerous illusion. Without restoring the rule of law, which has been destroyed in Ukraine, the chaos will only worsen, she added.
Ukraine Now

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

Twenty million barrels of oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz yesterday.

Today the number may be zero.

Not because Iran mined the water. Not because a tanker was hit. Because Lloyd’s of London picked up the phone.

War risk underwriters began canceling policies for strait transits hours after Operation Epic Fury launched. The Financial Times confirmed premiums surging 50 percent. Baseline war risk sits at 0.25 percent of hull value. For a hundred million dollar tanker that is 250,000 dollars per voyage. At peak escalation rates, one million per transit. Vessels linked to American or Israeli interests are becoming uninsurable entirely. No price. No policy. No passage.

The KHK Empress was loaded with Omani crude heading for Basra when it executed a U-turn mid-strait and redirected to India. The Eagle Veracruz halted at the western approach carrying two million barrels of Saudi crude bound for China. The Front Shanghai stopped off Sharjah with Iraqi crude destined for Rotterdam. Nippon Yusen ordered its entire fleet to avoid Hormuz. Greece told its merchant armada to reassess passage. Hapag-Lloyd suspended all transits.

None of them were fired upon. Every one of them got the same call.

More than fifty million years ago the Arabian plate collided with the Eurasian plate and compressed the Persian Gulf into a basin that drains through a single geological bottleneck twenty one miles wide. Twenty one percent of global petroleum. Twenty percent of all seaborne LNG. One fifth of industrial civilization’s energy supply forced through a tectonic accident narrower than the English Channel, bordered on one side by the country whose supreme leader was killed yesterday morning.

The USS Abraham Lincoln carries enough Tomahawks to sink every IRGC patrol boat in 48 hours. Operation Praying Mantis crippled Iran’s operational naval forces in eight hours in 1988. The Fifth Fleet has rehearsed this scenario for decades.

None of that matters. Aircraft carriers cannot force an underwriter to rewrite a policy. Tomahawks cannot lower a premium. The most powerful navy in human history cannot make a Lloyd’s syndicate decide that a VLCC transiting Iranian coastal waters represents an acceptable risk on a Saturday afternoon when missiles are landing in Dubai.

Goldman Sachs estimates Brent could peak at 110 dollars per barrel. JP Morgan projects 120 to 130. At those levels every airline bleeds cash. Every central bank watches three years of inflation fighting reignite overnight. Bypass pipelines from Saudi Arabia and the UAE handle roughly three million barrels. Hormuz handles twenty million. The math does not close.

Iran figured out something the Pentagon still has not.

You do not need to close a strait. You just need to make it uninsurable.

https://t.co/BrzGRrU3VW

[Peter Frankopan @peterfrankopan]

Not impossible that Iran is forced to a settlement. If that happens, Iranian oil returns to global markets - which means more supply. That has implications for Russia. 4/5

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Truly fascinating to contrast this with Macron's response when he too came back from his latest China trip. Really two completely opposite visions of Europe.

Macron immediately called for tariffs and protectionism on Chinese imports, whereas Merz immediately calls for Germans to wake up and work harder.

In other words, they both saw the same reality in China but they draw diametrically opposite conclusions: Merz concludes "the problem is us" whilst Macron concludes "the problem is them."

One of these responses is of course politically convenient: much easier to hear (and say, as a politician) that someone else is to blame rather than yourself. It's also cowardly and ineffective: you can't change others, the only one you can change is yourself. Macron is, as per his habit, being a politician as opposed to a statesman.

It's also deeply ironic. Macron styles himself as some sort of modernizer for Europe, yet his reaction couldn't be more conservative in the worst sense of the term: he wants to shield Europe from competition rather than make it competitive.

Merz, on the other hand, who is literally a CDU conservative, is the one delivering the reformist message...

Now of course I'm not going to lionize Merz who I'm sure is also much more of a politician than a statesman. And "working harder" in and of itself is no panacea: Greece and Romania are the countries in the EU with the longest working hours (https://t.co/Qz7Twb68x9) and that's not exactly working out to be a recipe for prosperity for them...

But the instinct is the right one: it's a cop-out and a massive disservice to make people believe that Europe's decline is something being done to it rather than something it is doing to itself.

[Lewis Goodall @lewis_goodall]

We have a student loans system which, on a *massive scale* actively embeds injustice and inequality both between and within generations. And the government apparently has no interest in reforming it.

[Faisal Islam @faisalislam]

Incredible… the story is actually not a parody.

just had confirmed live on BBC Breakfast, from here in Davos, that yes, President Trump sent THAT note to the Norwegian PM saying that because they hadn’t given the Nobel Peace Prize, he could now justify owning Greenland.

[Alex Wickham @alexwickham]

***EXCLUSIVE*** with @AlbertoNardelli

Donald Trump has told countries that want to serve on his Board of Peace they will have to ***pay $1 billion*** to be permanent members

Bloomberg has obtained the draft charter. It appears to suggest ***Trump himself would control the money***, sources say

The charter would be considered unacceptable to most countries who could have potentially joined the board, sources say

Netanyahu has rejected the terms

Several nations strongly oppose the draft of Trump’s charter and are working on collectively pushing back against the proposals, sources said

They are concerned Trump is trying to build a rival to the United Nations that’s about more than Gaza and that he would totally control

It means that despite Trump’s advertising of the Board of Peace, in fact it does not have the support of key regional or global players

https://t.co/aUrq0nrOCp

[Robert Pszczel @RobertPszczel]

This will be a somewhat emotional thread on @NATO After many years working for the Alliance I feel an imperative to share some thoughts. So: 1) pretending that we are not dealing with an existential crisis for NATO is no longer possible nor desirable. Action is required now. 1/n

[Simon Fraser @SimonFraser00]

Europeans must stand together on Greenland. A deal with US on security and resources has always been on offer, but not total transfer of sovereignty under duress from a supposed ally.

[Times Radio @TimesRadio]

“If you were to remove ambition from the core of Robert Jenrick, he would collapse like a boneless chicken.”

If Jenrick was intending to jump ship to Reform, he would be an “asset” but will make Farage’s party look like a “ragbag” of ex-Tories, says The Times's Matthew Parris.

@hugorifkind

[Stefan Boscia @Stefan_Boscia]

Fantastic use of sic

[Orla Joelsen @OJoelsen]

Statement from the Premier of Greenland.

January 6, 2026

“Yesterday, I made it very clear that in Greenland we have intensified our diplomatic and political efforts in our struggle to affirm that Greenland is our country and our territory. Our country is not something that can be annexed or taken over simply because someone wishes to do so. I am pleased that already today I can note that the relationships we have built over the past year, and our increased diplomatic efforts in recent times, are of great significance.

The French President, the German Federal Chancellor, the Italian Prime Minister, the Polish Prime Minister, the Spanish Prime Minister, the British Prime Minister, and the Danish Prime Minister have today issued a joint statement that unequivocally supports us in Greenland and our shared territorial integrity. This support is important at a time when fundamental international principles are being challenged. For this support, I wish to express my deepest gratitude.

At a time when the President of the United States has once again stated that the United States is very serious about Greenland, this support from our allies in NATO is both important and unequivocal.

I once again call on the United States to seek a respectful dialogue through the appropriate diplomatic and political channels, and through the use of existing forums based on agreements that already exist with the United States. Such dialogue must take place with respect for the fact that Greenland’s status is grounded in international law and the principle of territorial integrity.

In this context, the support from our European allies in NATO means a great deal. It is a clear signal that territorial integrity, sovereignty, and international rules continue to apply and are respected.”

[Joakim 🌹🇳🇴🇪🇺 @joakial_]

Norway’s Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide: "International law is universal and binding for all states. The American intervention in Venezuela is not in accordance with international law."