Jim Pickard 🐋

Deputy Political Editor, Financial Times: Political Journalism team award 2019 (Corbyn’s Labour) & 2021 (Greensill Capital)

[Jim Pickard 🐋 @PickardJE]

for those who haven’t checked it out yet: Blue Sky is rapidly reaching critical mass

[Keir Mather MP @Mather_Keir]

Cheers to colleagues for arranging this for my first morning round 😂

[Jim Pickard 🐋 @PickardJE]

Burnham has just confirmed our FT scoop from 4pm about the return of Help to Buy

[Sarasaurus 🎗️🇺🇦 @sheebadigeebies]

I think Rory has become my favourite meme

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

Nick Candy and Holly Valance. Britain’s most expensive house. A £265m sale.

Usual consequence: £32m of stamp duty.

But five small flats were included in the sale. By an extraordinary happy accident, that cut the tax by £18.5m.

The curious sale of Nick Candy’s mansion

A 🧵:

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

Big news in the Washington Post. Scotland's top rate of tax lost £30bn in revenue.

An impressive feat when all of Scottish tax comes to about £20bn.

[Gabriel Pogrund @Gabriel_Pogrund]

In response to the amusing if bewildering accusation I’m a Labour stooge, please do pass this on to the following comrades:

— Keir Starmer and Waheed Alli, whose gifts of suits and spectacles to the PM was a story I broke

— Jeremy Corbyn, who furiously denounced a book I cowrote as “tittle tattle”

— Matthew Doyle, whose association with a convicted paedophile I exposed

— Tulip Siddiq, whose housing deals I examined and formed part of the inquiry leading to her resignation

— Keir Starmer (again), who said the thesis of a second book I wrote was “bollocks”

— Morgan McSweeney, whose group’s £750,000 of unlawfully undeclared donations I exposed

— Labour Together, which paid a US lobbying firm tens of thousands to investigate my work

— Ann Limb, who had her Labour peerage deferred after I revealed she made up part of her CV

— Joe Docherty, who was suspended as a Labour peer after I revealed his workplace sexting

— Angela Rayner, whose trip to New York alongside her boyfriend I revealed was funded by Waheed Alli

I recall many Reform figures vigorously agreeing about the public interest in those stories. Some have even referred to them in order to highlight the wrongdoing of the left since yesterday.

But also, it isn’t “my” story, it’s the Sunday Times investigation team, Insight’s story. It could not, would not have happened, without the whole paper, especially @ManuMidolo @venetiamenzies @GeorgeGreenwood whose revelations were indispensable and who have not to my knowledge (yet) been accused of being Labour activists.

Moreover the Sunday Times isn’t a Labour paper, or paper which exists to serve anyone or any party other than its readers and, to the best of our abilities, the public interest.

[Jim Pickard 🐋 @PickardJE]

Nigel Farage’s claim that he paid for a £1.4mn house with his fee from a reality TV show has been challenged by corporate accounts that appear to show that the income remained on his company’s balance sheet after the property purchase

https://t.co/j9EEUb5vjd

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

🚨 @PickardJE of @FT gets to the heart of Starmer’s Brexit deceit:

“Are you ruling out single market or customs union membership at the next election? Because without either, our economy is very much not at the heart of Europe.”

Starmer’s answer: more vague waffle about a “big leap forward” at the summit, turning our back on past arguments, and “looking forward together.”

You can’t be meaningfully “at the heart of Europe” while refusing the economic structures that define that relationship.

[Fraser Nelson @FraserNelson]

What's to celebrate? Harborne lives and pays his taxes in Thailand - his 'charity' involves a secret £5m (!) to Nigel Farage personally.

This degree of personal bankrolling and enrichment is unprecedented in our democracy. A scandal hiding in plain sight https://t.co/maRks88jMO

[Jim Pickard 🐋 @PickardJE]

@ConservHold this aged like fine wine

[Jim Pickard 🐋 @PickardJE]

I just asked Keir Starmer if Lord Mandelson has questions to answer on this:

“I don’t know any more than you and there’s not really much I can add to what is already out there I’m afraid”

[Jim Pickard 🐋 @PickardJE]

“The bank’s probe…..suggests that in June 2009, when he was the UK business secretary, Mandelson stayed at Epstein’s lavish townhouse in Manhattan, while the financier was in prison for soliciting prostitution from a minor.”

https://t.co/9Sox3HHrIj

[Jim Pickard 🐋 @PickardJE]

this aged brilliantly

[panface @stingraysw16]

@PickardJE Of all the questions you could have asked you chose one no one outside SW1 is interested in.

[Jim Pickard 🐋 @PickardJE]

this pours a free load of petrol over the Mandelson scandal

https://t.co/MHwumTVmAd

[Jim Pickard 🐋 @PickardJE]

Reform UK says that Farage hasn't bought £2m of Bictoin: "Stack bought the £2m...it was Stack which bought it."

[Stack BTC @stackbtc_]

BREAKING: Nigel Farage has purchased £2m of Bitcoin for Stack BTC - becoming the first sitting MP and the first UK political party leader in history to publicly buy Bitcoin.

A landmark moment for Bitcoin in British politics.

$STAK @Nigel_Farage @blockchain @kwasi_stackbtc #bitcoin

[Lucy Fisher @LOS_Fisher]

More details here about David Taylor, and the awkward questions that the three arrests today — all of former Labour advisers — raises for the party

W/ @PickardJE, @RKWinvisibleman & Sam Jones

https://t.co/2cAT5bGsNp

[Jim Pickard 🐋 @PickardJE]

@M0kujin @AaronBastani https://t.co/9Sox3HHrIj

[BBC Newsnight @BBCNewsnight]

"A lack of curiosity..."

@nicholaswatt recalls a 2024 press conference in which Keir Starmer was asked about Peter Mandelson’s association with Jeffrey Epstein, and reports concerns among female Labour MPs about the Prime Minister's judgement.

#Newsnight

[Jim Pickard 🐋 @PickardJE]

our story from Friday night: https://t.co/SPVn7XRy4Q

[Nicholas Guyatt @NicholasGuyatt]

In case you're struggling with the paywall, here's this morning's story about Starmer, Mandelson and Palantir. The FT is pretty much the only UK media source to emerge from this omniscandal with its reputation enhanced

[Ros Atkins @BBCRosAtkins]

Here's the latest edition of The Media Show. https://t.co/3HePokjjNq

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

And the early history of Global Counsel can't be separated from Jeffrey Epstein. Jim Pickard and the FT have the story: https://t.co/VRBODcWsZv

[Steven Swinford @Steven_Swinford]

Here's what we know about the Cabinet Office's propriety and ethics document on Lord Mandelson

* It's just two pages long. Someone familiar with it says it's a 'word doc that has been copied and pasted from Google. It is not sophisticated'

* It includes a @PickardJE FT scoop from 2023 about Mandelson staying in Epstein's Manhattan apartment in 2009 - crucially after Epstein's conviction

* As per @PronouncedAlva it also includes a precis of his previous scandals and a run-through of Global Counsel's Russian and Chinese interests

* Officials think it is 'insane' that it was the only vetting that was conducted before the prime minister announced his appointment

* But as cursory as it is the document is hugely damaging for the prime minister. It shows that he pushed ahead with the appointment of Mandelson despite being told about his friendship with Epstein