HQ

[HQ @Headquarters77]

@ClarksonsFarm1 Can you drive it Jezza?

[Ed Conway @EdConwaySky]

✍️ How diesel found itself at the heart of geopolitics.
And why Donald Trump is taking a leaf out of Putin and Xi's playbook.
I wrote a simple explainer.
Some highlights👇

[HQ @Headquarters77]

@EdConwaySky Brilliant as always, keep going Ed 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

[Ed Conway @EdConwaySky]

📽️ Why, you might be wondering, is everyone quite SO obsessed with diesel?
I mean, the G7 literally just held an emergency meeting about it.
The short answer is: this is existential - both for Donald Trump and for Europe.
For the longer answer, pls watch our latest primer👇

[Caught At Silly Point @atsillypoint]

Somebody once asked Viv Richards which West Indian fast bowler he played with was the best.

Consider the shortlist. Michael Holding. Joel Garner. Andy Roberts. Colin Croft. Curtly Ambrose. Courtney Walsh.

He said Malcolm Marshall.

And the numbers agree with him in a way that is almost rude to the others. In the Tests Marshall played, he took almost a third of all the wickets that fell. Not a third of the West Indian wickets. A third of the match, while sharing a new ball with men who would have led any other attack in history.

He finished with 376 at 20.94, still the best average anybody with 300 Test wickets has ever managed.

But the thing that made him complete was never the volume. Only 17.55% of his victims were the bottom three in the order, the lowest of any great fast bowler. Wasim Akram's figure is close to 28%. Marshall did not build a record on tail-enders. He built it on the men paid to survive him.

And then Asia, where the quicks of his generation went to be humbled or simply refused to go. Lillee never toured India once. Marshall went repeatedly and took 71 wickets in 19 Tests at 23.05, and after his rookie tour, 20.17.

Now the freakish part is that none of it should have worked. He was short for a fast bowler. His action was open-chested, the exact thing every coaching manual warns against. The pace came out of his shoulder, and the bouncer skidded at your throat instead of climbing over it.

The most complete fast bowler there has ever been. Viv thinks so too.

[HQ @Headquarters77]

@MerrynSW Missing a few zeros there Merryn

[Ed Conway @EdConwaySky]

There are all sorts of misconceptions abt the North Sea. I've listed 7 below.
Lots of people who want you to believe this is simple: either don't drill or do drill. End of conversation.
In fact this is far more complex than most lobbyists on either side would have you believe...

[HQ @Headquarters77]

@CaptainCons Ross clearly has no friends - 4 hours with your mates on the golf course, a few beers after…..what’s not to love 😎

[HQ @Headquarters77]

@ryanmouquegolf 👍🏻 thanks

[HQ @Headquarters77]

@LouStagner @RoddSlaterPGA He’s literally looking right down at the ball Lou, come on already stop defending him

[HQ @Headquarters77]

@LouStagner He’s Mr YouTube golf - he courts all and every bit of publicity. He knows when he’s miles offline in a lie that no amateur will find the ball he is highly likely to have lots of cameras on him……
Stupidity doesn’t excuse it - he’s improving the lie by making his backswing viable

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Spiteful Class Warrior. Her Family's Profit. Her Government's Hypocrisy.

Bridget Phillipson told the BBC this week that she is going to get a T-shirt printed saying spiteful class warrior. She said it with pride. She said it twice. She is welcome to wear it. But she might want to check the timing before she places the order.

On the same day she was celebrating the label, it emerged that her family made a 900 percent profit on a council house purchased through right to buy. Her mother Clare bought the two-bedroom property in Washington, Tyne and Wear in 1990 for £9,600, a 38 percent discount on its market value. The family sold it in May 2023 for £99,950. The scheme that built that wealth for her family is now being dismantled by the government she serves. Discounts will be cut from 35 percent to between five and 15 percent. Sales are expected to fall by 90 percent. The council tenants who might have done what her mother did will find the door considerably harder to open.

The profit itself is not the scandal. Her mother used a scheme that was legal, available and legitimate. Right to buy was designed precisely to give working class families the opportunity to own their home and build wealth. Good for them. The scandal is the sequence. The opportunity was taken. The ladder was climbed. Now it's being taken away. And the person helping to raise it is calling it class warfare and offering to print it on clothing.

She is not alone. Angela Rayner, who introduced the legislation restricting right to buy, personally benefited from the scheme when buying her property in Stockport. Two of the most prominent working class voices in Labour have both used a policy they are now making substantially less accessible to the next generation of working class families. Neither appears to see the contradiction. Phillipson has described it as improving lives. Rayner has described it as protecting social housing stock. Both descriptions carefully avoid the word hypocrisy.

The right to buy story sits alongside two others that complete the picture. Keir Starmer attended Reigate Grammar School on a bursary funded by charitable status, the same charitable status Phillipson has now removed from independent schools, closing over 100 of them and displacing over 43,000 pupils. The opportunity that helped form him has been taxed out of reach for the families who needed it most. And Phillipson holds the title Secretary of State for Women and Equalities while sitting on the EHRC code of practice that would implement a unanimous Supreme Court ruling on biological sex, a delay her own predecessor at the EHRC has publicly described as political.

Three policies. Three ladders. Three ministers who climbed them. Three ladders raised.

Phillipson's spokesman described the right to buy story as a vile smear campaign. That response does not address the substance. Nobody is smearing her mother for using right to buy. The question being asked is why the minister who benefited from that scheme, who benefited from charitable school status through a Prime Minister educated on a bursary, who holds the title Secretary of State for Women and Equalities while withholding women's legal protections, is celebrating the label spiteful class warrior rather than answering for the record.

The T-shirt idea is revealing because it signals that she regards the spite as the point rather than a regrettable byproduct. Not I am fighting for working class children despite appearing spiteful. But I am spiteful and proud of it. That is not class politics. It is class performance. And the working class families who cannot now access right to buy, who cannot now afford the independent schools that have closed, who cannot now trust that women-only wards mean what they say, are the ones paying for the performance.

"Phillipson has described it as improving lives. Rayner has described it as protecting social housing stock. Both descriptions carefully avoid the word hypocrisy."

[HQ @Headquarters77]

@ryanmouquegolf Ben Crenshaw……..

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Exactly right. The Peter Principle has rarely had a more fitting subject.

For those who don't know: the principle states that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their level of incompetence. Burnham managed a regional transport network that remains twenty two years behind London. He presided over a housing fund that delivered less than five percent affordable homes. He broke a homelessness pledge within a year of making it. He scrapped a flagship clean air scheme after burning through £115 million. He left a flooding problem unresolved for a decade. And he is now seeking to implement that record nationally.

The country is not being offered a competent administrator with a proven track record. It is being offered the same administrator whose track record is documented above, rebranded as a Prime Minister in waiting, on the basis that he is not Keir Starmer.

Not Starmer is not a qualification. It is an absence of one.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Manchester Model. What It Actually Looks Like Up Close.

Andy Burnham is asking the country to trust him with Downing Street on the strength of what he calls the Manchester Model. Eight years of integrated public services and progressive governance that he says Britain should adopt nationally. Before the country decides, it should know what that model actually produced.

Start with the money.

£578 million in public money was lent by Burnham's Greater Manchester Combined Authority to a single developer, Daren Whitaker of Renaker. A tribunal found that GMCA failed to obtain a statement of assets and liabilities from Whitaker before lending, exposing taxpayers to a risk the tribunal described as potentially wiping out the public funds. A meeting between a senior GMCA officer and Whitaker at which loan terms appear to have been agreed produced no minutes or notes. Court papers allege Renaker presented high profit figures to the GMCA when seeking loans and low profit figures to Manchester City Council when seeking exemption from affordable homes requirements. The Court of Appeal is considering judgment on whether the loans were lawful.

Out of 11,000 homes built with that public money, 503 are classed as affordable. Less than five percent. Whitaker's personal fortune grew from £140 million to £698 million during Burnham's mayoralty. The luxury towers were marketed to Chinese buy to let investors through Hong Kong estate agents. Hundreds of flats have been sold to Asian investors according to Telegraph analysis of Companies House filings.

Now the transparency.

In April 2026 the Information Commissioner issued a practice recommendation to the GMCA for failing to publish Freedom of Information compliance statistics. Greater Manchester Police, under Burnham's authority as Police and Crime Commissioner, was separately issued with an ICO enforcement notice for 850 overdue FOI requests, more than 800 over six months old. The oldest had been waiting two and a half years.

Now the transport flagship.

The Bee Network has absorbed a £30 council tax precept increase in two years to subsidise its operation. The £115 million Clean Air Zone was scrapped after £211 million in public funds was received and only £22.5 million returned. Burnham's own transport commissioner acknowledged the network remains twenty two years behind London. The board of Be.EV, the company holding the Bee Network's public EV charging contract, includes Burnham's wife, who joined the company six years into his mayoralty and was appointed to the board as his Westminster ambitions became increasingly visible.

Now the promises.

Burnham pledged to end rough sleeping by 2020. Rough sleeping rose. Today 18,000 people across Greater Manchester have no permanent address. He promised Platt Bridge a flood solution by 2018. The area flooded in 2015, 2021 and on New Year's Day 2025. The projected solution is now 2028. When asked on Question Time why he would not apologise, he said it was before his time. He became Mayor in 2017. The promise was made in 2018.

Now the politics.

Labour's candidate to replace Burnham as Mayor is Bev Craig, leader of Manchester City Council, the body that accepted Renaker's low profit figures and granted the affordable homes exemption. The mayoral by-election on 30 July will be fought under the supplementary vote system rushed through the Lords two days before Burnham's Makerfield victory, designed to consolidate left of centre second preferences and lock out Reform.

108 Labour councillors lost their seats in Greater Manchester in May's local elections. The region Burnham governed for eight years delivered the most devastating local election result in Labour's history.

This is the Manchester Model. These are its documented facts. The country is being asked to implement it nationally. It should read the small print first.

Bev Craig. Labour's candidate to replace Burnham. Leader of the council that granted Renaker's affordable homes exemption.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Mayor. The Contract. The Wife. The Questions Andy Burnham Has Never Been Asked.

Andy Burnham spent eight years as Mayor of Greater Manchester championing the Bee Network, his flagship public transport project combining buses, trams and electric vehicle infrastructure under a single integrated system. He has described it repeatedly as the model for how Britain should run its public services. He is now seeking to become Prime Minister and implement that model nationally.

His wife sits on the board of the company that holds the public contract at the heart of it.

Marie-France van Heel, known as Frankie, is a director of Be.EV, the Manchester based electric vehicle charging network backed by Octopus Energy Generation. Be.EV holds a contract with Transport for Greater Manchester, the body that delivers Burnham's transport policies, to operate and maintain TfGM's public EV charging network. That contract was awarded in 2019. The terms of the arrangement are not secret. Burnham declares his wife's role in his register of mayoral interests. He formally steps back from decisions relating to her firm. Those are the facts of compliance. They are not the end of the story.

It is worth noting what the Bee Network actually delivers in practice. Bus patronage is up and fares have been simplified. But passenger reviews consistently describe ghost buses, unreliable timetables and school services that were horrifically late following the January 2025 rollout. Burnham's own transport commissioner acknowledged the network remains an estimated twenty two years behind London. The model he is proposing to implement nationally still needs years of improvement to reach the standard he has promised.

But the timeline is where the questions begin. Frankie joined Be.EV as chief marketing officer in July 2023, six years into Burnham's mayoralty and with the Bee Network already his flagship policy achievement. She became chief customer officer in July 2024 and was appointed to the board of directors in September 2024, as Burnham's mayoralty entered its final phase and his Westminster ambitions became increasingly visible. She did not join a company that happened to hold a public contract. She joined a company whose entire commercial proposition in Greater Manchester rested on a contract with the authority her husband chaired, in a policy area he had personally championed for six years. Her role deepened as his power grew. That is the timeline. Draw your own conclusions.

This sits alongside a pattern documented across multiple stories. £578 million in public money lent to developer Daren Whitaker of Renaker, whose personal fortune grew from £140 million to £698 million during Burnham's mayoralty. A tribunal finding that adequate due diligence was not conducted before that lending. Luxury towers built with public money marketed to Chinese investors in Hong Kong. A confidential bilingual letter praising China's Covid response sent to the Mayor of Tianjin. A Court of Appeal hearing on £140 million of those loans with judgment reserved. And now a board directorship held by Burnham's wife at a company whose public contract flows from the transport authority he chaired.

Each element has an explanation. Interests are declared. Processes are followed. Steps are taken back. That is the language of compliance. It is not the language of scrutiny. And it is scrutiny, not compliance, that the office of Prime Minister demands.

Burnham is no longer Mayor. He is an MP and a declared leadership challenger seeking the highest office in the land. The question is not whether he followed the rules. The question is whether the full picture of his eight year mayoralty, who benefited, and under what circumstances, has ever been examined with the rigour that entails.

It has not. It should be. The public deserves to know before he reaches Downing Street, not after.

"[Burnham's] wife sits on the board of the company that holds the public contract at the heart of it."

[Kate Ferguson @kateferguson4]

We are getting our 7th PM in 10 years.

It’s 30C outside.

And we are playing well in a World Cup.

We have become Italy…

[MarshFamilySongs @MarshSongs]

Here's a parody of the Looking Glass 1972 belter "Brandy" that we've adapted to fit today's headlines with whoever was home to sing about #Starmer and #Burnham - calling it "Andy (You're a Fine Mayor!)"

[OSINTtechnical @Osinttechnical]

New footage confirms that an errant Russian surface to air missile was responsible for the tank roof toss at the Moscow Oil Refinery this morning.