Drop everything. The FT has done it. It’s outdone the Guardian.
Two of their finest have discovered that an NHS official once owned under £100 of Palantir shares.
Let that sink in. One hundred pounds. The FT charges its readers more than that just to read about it.
It gets worse. the NHS official sold the shares in 2021, two years before Palantir won its £330m NHS contract. The FT has exposed a conflict of interest that ended before the interest began.
The forensic journalism behind this triumph? Reading a public register of interests. Next week: the FT infiltrates Companies House.
But the best bit: the FT article debunks itself: paragraph three admits every declaration was "in line with NHS England's rules."
Even their own subscribers are struggling to take this one seriously…
It has taken Gatwick Airport almost 10 years to move a runway that it already owns 12 metres.
It's part of a scheme to shift the existing standby northern strip 12 metres north so that 2 aircraft can use the airfield at once instead of 1. The land is Gatwick's. The tarmac is already down. The £2.2bn is private.
Almost 10 years.
On Tuesday the Court of Appeal threw out the last challenge. Lord Justice Holgate and Lord Justice Dove found the grounds unarguable, with no real prospect of success, which is judicial for get the eff-n-jeff out of my court. That failed appeal was itself the final stage of a process that began before the pandemic, before Brexit had been implemented, before 4 of the 7 prime ministers we have had in a decade had taken office.
The project has moved at the rate of a metre and a half a year. A tortoise does a metre and a half in an afternoon and does not usually require senior counsel to do so.
Heathrow Terminal 5 took 8 years to get planning permission. That delay was regarded as a national embarrassment so acute that Parliament built an entire new regime to prevent it happening again: the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects system, designed to produce a decision within 12 to 17 months.
As you'd expect from a department with a name that'd make a penguin cringe, it hasn't worked. Gatwick has just taken 8 years under the system created to stop projects taking 8 years. The machinery designed to fix the problem reproduced the problem exactly, to the year, and nobody in Whitehall appears to have noticed or minded.
58% of decisions under that regime are now judicially reviewed. The success rate of those reviews is 3.9% for ordinary developments and 10.2% for significant ones. They add 1.4 years to a project on average and up to £121 million in costs on a major road scheme.
Roughly 9 in 10 challenges fail, and they work anyway, because delay is the point and defeat costs the challenger almost nothing. An objection does not have to be right. It only has to be filed.
We built a legal system in which anybody can impose years of delay and 8-figure costs on a national asset, lose, and walk away whistling. A peculiarly contemporary form of looting.
Progress will end it inside the first year. Under our planning programme there is a binding statutory maximum of 12 months from acceptance of an application to the Secretary of State's decision on any nationally significant project, with no exceptions: 4 months for examination, 3 months for the minister, and deemed consent if the state misses its own deadline. Judicial review of planning decisions gets restricted to genuine points of law, with hard cost consequences for those who bring hopeless challenges and hard timetables for the courts that hear them.
On the other side of those 8 years: 100,000 additional flights a year. Passenger capacity rising from 43 million to 80 million. 14,000 jobs across Sussex and Surrey. Every penny of it privately financed, requiring nothing from the Treasury but permission.
All of it available in 2019.
A country that cannot move a runway 12 metres in less than 8 years is not going to build the reservoirs, the reactors, the labs or the houses. Everything else we argue about downstream of this is conditional on fixing it.
And we intend to fix it. If you would rather live in a country that can move 12 metres in under a decade, come and join us. It's time to get to work.
We’re changing the rules.
When applying for a contract from the government there will now be one simple test: are you creating British jobs? And are you giving young people the skills they need for the future?
These new rules will ensure the £90 billion that is spent each year through government contracts supports British jobs, skills and people in every postcode.
"Why don't our towns look like this any more?"
Because the local authorities that pay for this municipal planting have seen their incomes slashed since 2010,
And they now have to spend 60%+ of that on statutory social care costs.
And those social care costs are going to private care providers, many owned by offshore private equity, which pay their staff poverty wages. Public money funnelled straight into private sector profits.
We won't see towns looking like this again until that's fixed.
This UK startup came out of stealth yesterday.
> It's raised $300m at a $2.4bn valuation
> Signed a $10bn strategic partnership with Anthropic
> Building an AI Factory in Europe, generating approximately $1.7 billion of annual revenue
Backed by some of the GOATS: @RaghuRaghuram@shangdaxu@jaminball
The UK is cooking
🚨 NEW: Andy Burnham has scrapped many procurement rules for Government contracts
Businesses will no longer need to prove they are tackling issues like net zero and domestic abuse, only that they create jobs, develop skills and offer young people placements
We're excited to share an update on our Northern Runway Project, following a Court of Appeal decision to reject the legal challenges to our planning permission. Pierre-Hugues Schmit, Chief Executive of London Gatwick said:
"Today’s Court of Appeal decision to comprehensively reject the legal challenges brought by the two campaign groups opposing London Gatwick’s Northern Runway Project, confirms, yet again, that the September 2025 decision by the Secretary of State for Transport to approve the Northern Runway Project was taken properly and lawfully.
We are also very pleased that this ruling, from senior Court of Appeal Judges, brings to an end an eight-year planning and legal process which has carefully tested and scrutinised every aspect of our expansion plans on multiple occasions.
The Northern Runway project will deliver significant business, tourism and trade benefits for the UK, including 14,000 new jobs, a £1bn boost to the economy every year and a comprehensive education, skills and business strategy designed to bring maximum benefits to local people and the Gatwick region.
This final ruling means that we can now press on with the important job of bringing this exciting project to life and move forward into the design and delivery phase.
We would like to thank everyone who has supported our planning application through the various stages and will announce further details in due course."
Breaking: President Trump's account bought Amazon and Apple before he cut China tariffs and then his administration paid both companies billions in refunds
On May 5th, Trump's account bought $5M of Apple and $5M of Amazon
The next day, Treasury Secretary Bessent told Congress the US had "not engaged in negotiations with China as of yet"
9 days later, he cut tariffs from 145% to 30%
Both stocks have since surged:
• $AAPL is up 7.5%
• $AMZN is up 4.5%
His account is now sitting on up to ~$600K in unrealized gains
And recently, Apple disclosed $2.2B in tariff refunds and Amazon disclosed $600M
…BEHOLD! The route from Milton Keynes to Cambridge.
Cambridge, to London, then on to Milton Keynes.
There is NO direct rail link. There MUST be.
Their combined GDP is over £20 BILLION.
GET IT BUILT, NOW.
Would you like this to be your commute?