Jeremy's Den

Did you see the TV? Did you see the news line? Lady Chaos working overtime

Surrounded by computers and unfriendly users, geeks and freaks and scandals and confusion

All our institutions are falling apart and it's a good year for civil disobedience

(Paul Kantner, Let Me Fly, 1998)

If Russian warships are sailing freely around Greenland, Ukraine can help. We have the expertise and weapons to ensure not one of those ships remains. They can sink near Greenland just as they do near Crimea.

(Volodymyr Zelenskyy, 22 January 2026)

There was a lot to unpack at the start of the new year, which definitely needed to be split between two articles. So here we go again, partly treading the same waters, and partly exploring different territory. The added bonus is that it allows me to offer you another batch of songs by the late great Paul Kantner. Fasten your seatbelts and enjoy. For starters, we have new polling from YouGov about Greenland, and the threat of an American "special military operation", similar to Russia's criminal invasion of Ukraine. YouGov only polled the five European Union countries included in their standard European polling poll, not the United Kingdom. Our European friends and allies are not really optimistic about Greenland's prospects, as they clearly do not believe one word the Orange Baboon has said. Which is probably wise, as he might very well say the exact opposite tomorrow and, in his scarce moments of lucidity, is as trustworthy as his BFF the Kremlin's Nosferatu.

None of YouGov's select Europeans believe that Denmark will sell Greenland to Trumpistan. Which will not happen anyway as the Danes do not have the power to dispose of Greenland without getting approval from the Greenlanders first. Which they will never get as the Greenlanders will never prostitute themselves to the highest bidder and sell their souls for the hundreds of billions of dollars Trump is reportedly ready to put on the table to satisfy his egotistic urge to enlarge the United States, if not his wee penis. YouGov's US branch also polled the locals about Trump's appetite for frozen land, and they are definitely not convinced he should actually go for it.

I guess the American public have now realised that, if Trump demanded a $500bn increase of the military budget from Congress, it was solely to spend it on the Greenland Purchase. They are probably also aware that the allegedly proposed price is roughly half the yearly spending on Medicare, what passes for social security in Trumpistan, and consider that it is not fucking worth it. The Orange Baboon has a vested interest in keeping an aggressive narrative about Greenland alive, especially to hide that he was forced to back down and give up on 100% of his demands, thanks to Europe's united response to his extortionist imperialism. Even registered Republicans' support for a purchase has gone down, and they oppose the use of brute force. Given Trump's short attention span for any serious issue, Greenland has probably faded into the background, and will probably come back only if Trump needs an urgent distraction from something else. Like the Epstein Files, the rising cost of PB&J sandwiches, failure to overthrow the Iranian regime, or Volodia Zelenskyy totally taking the piss out of him.

No problem, we have the tools and people. If we were asked, and if Ukraine were in NATO, but we are not, we would solve this problem with the Russian ships.

(Volodymyr Zelenskyy, 22 January 2026)

On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland's future.

(Mark Carney, 20 January 2026)

We obviously cannot rule out the Orange Baboon doing something terminally stupid about Greenland, as the only thing we can safely predict is that he is unpredictable. What we do not know is what exactly would trigger him. It may be something as ridiculously irrelevant as the abject failure of the Melania movie, Jeff Bezos' bribe to the Trump crime syndicate that is predicted to lose more than it cost, and the massive drubbing it is taking from critics. Trump surely wishes he could deal with that kind of lèse majesté the way Henry VIII did, and have Jeff Bezos make a snuff movie of it. He also surely wishes he could teach those pesky Europeans a lesson, after they left him out in the cold with his pants down, and just his faithful lapdog Mark Rutte making promises he has fuck all authority to make. But the Orange Baboon should not underestimate Europe, who have shown an unprecedented and unexpected capability to fire back and make Trump's plan backfire. YouGov also probed their European panelists about what their respective countries should do if Trump did attack Greenland, and the replies are unequivocal.

Obviously, Europe has been emboldened by the previous episode of the Greenland Saga, and are not ready to submit to the Orange Baboon even when he is waving a big stick. When even Italians are in favour of radical action, and Poles very close to it, you know that something is slowly changing, and not in a way that would satisfy Trump. Another poll from BMG Research has given us the British position on different options of retaliation to a US aggression of Greenland, and it looks like we are far more ready to play it real tough than our European brethren, and send troops to help the Greenlandic Resistance. But also, quite paradoxically, far less ready to consider the intermediate range of retaliation, and use tariffs as our sanctions. Of course, we know now that a tariff war is a very stupid option that would instantly backfire, so it makes sense to avoid it. So pragmatism leaves us with only the option of the gobbledygook of diplomatic impotence, or maybe sending Peter Mandelson back. Just kidding, mates. Or not.

On the other hand, a European military response to an invasion of Greenland would surely reveal some inconvenient realities on the American side. Basically, that they are not as ready and fit as they want the rest of the world to assume. The crisis with Iran has already made the whole world aware of the limitations of the USA's power projection capability, that appears to be overstretched already. The USA may brag about having eleven aircraft carriers, but the whole world now knows that they can deploy only five at any given time, and that it takes them two weeks to move a Strike Group from its standard station to a frontline position, provided it is already on station somewhere, and not at its homeport in the USA. In that case, full deployment is likely to take more like four weeks. Not really Blitzkrieg. Both polls were just a wee smitch too bold, as nobody in Europe will actually go to war with Trumpistan over Greenland, or even impose sanctions. But YouGov put another option on the table, that proved surprisingly successful.

Technically, ending the military alliance over Greenland would be Trump's fault, as his use of brute force would be the straw that broke NATO's back. It is nevertheless revealing and reassuring that so many Europeans are ready to consider that nuclear option, even a significant minority in the usually Americanophile Poland. YouGov took great care to specifically mention only the European Union, but the ricochet effect on the United Kingdom is obvious. How could we remain in a decimated NATO that would de facto become Trump's Warsaw Pact, protecting solely American interests? It is hugely significant that Trump has done in just one year what the Soviet Union and Putin's Russia failed to achieve in eighty years, convincing European public opinions that they would be better off fending for themselves without American involvement. It is even more amazing if you bear in mind that Trump could have got what he wanted, except property rights, simply by invoking the provisions of the Greenland Defence Agreement of 1951 between the USA and Denmark, But his hubris and ego needed summat more grandiloquently spectacular, and he failed.

Denying the existence of a ghost will only make it grow bigger.

(Greenlandic proverb)

Putin is unrepentant. He is ever, and will always be, the KGB agent. He is a dictator with decades of bloodshed on his hands. He's the biggest thief in the history of the world, a war criminal who should be behind bars.

(Roger Wicker, 16 January 2026)

YouGov also polled their Europeans about Ukraine, of course, but just a little bit. None of the heavy stuff here, or the continuity of their trackers. More like a snapshot of very specific angles. This time, it is very deliberately focused on what European public opinions would consider acceptable options for the use of their country's armed forces in the aftermath of a very hypothetical peace deal and ceasefire between the Russian Reich and Ukraine. We know that Putin is totally allergic to European boots on the ground in Ukraine proper, and may have convinced Trump to go along with that. So let's start with the two options that do not involve that, but just peacekeeping from a distance. Which would be totally irrelevant and inefficient with the orcs still stationed on the frontline deep into Ukrainian territory. But even these Putin-compliant options do not receive massive support, except in Spain.

But have we reached a turning point in the vatniks' imperialist rhetoric, which both the bribed fascist Trumputinists and the irresponsible woke faux pacifists will ignore? The Kremlin's Nosferatu has publicly admitted what everybody with a brain already knew, that the genocidal Russian aggression of Ukraine had nothing to do with a fabricated NATO aggression or eradicating imaginary Nazism, but was always only about enslaving a free nation that the Russian Reich considers theirs by birthright. It's just more smoke and mirrors and Vlad taking the piss, as it works so well with Trump, so we have to consider the stronger stuff. European troops actually stationed on Ukrainian soil, with the obvious follow-up option, that they would come to the rescue if the orcs ventured into another aggression. The Europeans are clearly not enthusiastic about these options either, except Spain again, who would even narrowly support direct intervention against a Russian offensive violating the peace deal. Which could very possibly be our only option two or three years from now, mark my words.

The background to this is that Nosferatu again played the Orange Baboon like a balalaika, with his pledge of a week-long ceasefire actually lasting only five days, and that he instantly broke anyway because he never intended to keep it. Or, more plausibly, Putin never made that pledge and Trump just made it up to boost his failing street cred. Now I wonder how Volodia Zelenskyy felt about the discreetly disclosed news that Trump was keeping a channel open with the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi, and had put Steve Witkoff in charge of it. I guess the Iranians felt they could rest assured that nothing nasty would happen to them, and they would get all they want, so long as they had enough money to spend on bribes. Unless the absolute need to create a distraction from the new batch of Epstein Files took precedence over any other concern, and a wee "special military operation" against the mullahs looked like the smart thing to do. But neither was the Orange Baboon's Great Matter on the last weekend of January, when he delayed the attack on Iran and his own weekly golf trip to Mar-a-Lago, so that the news cycle and the bandwidth were cleared for the premiere of Melania.

And Putin is a liar. When Putin smiles to American negotiators, he acts as our friend, and he acts as if we believe he's our friend. We have no reason to smile back at Putin or to trust him with anything but caution and contempt.

(Roger Wicker, 16 January 2026)

I can explain it to you. I can’t understand it for you.

(Clarence Aldo, Grantchester, 2026)

YouGov obviously had to field a British follow-up to their European poll, but they chose to take it in different directions from a common starting point. Summat like The Bridge transitioning into The Tunnel, but with looser ties to the original. The focus shifted to our feelings about British "hard power", which means brute military force in lame man's terms. Or Zack Polanski's. Some of their chosen lines of questioning were quite brutally bold, and would certainly ruffle many a feather if you submitted it to some of our political bigwigs. Interestingly, it wasn't commissioned by any of YouGov's usual partners in the media, who would probably have objected to the tone and wording of some of the questions. Yet even the most seemingly provocative ones generated quite interesting replies. It started smoothly, with the perennial question about how we see the United States after thirteen months of Trump presidency.

It is quite intriguing that almost half of us still consider Trumpistan a friend and ally, after all we have had to endure over the last thirteen months. Of course, this is boosted by the massive Americanophilia among Conservative and Reform voters, but even LibDem voters still fall for it narrowly. Amusingly, Green voters are the less delusional here, for once. It seems that too many of us still believe in the "special relationship", when we have had so many reasons to think twice about that, not least Peter Mandelson making Jeffrey Epstein a key component of it. Being aware that the United States are no longer our friend and no longer a reliable ally, which was already true under Joe Biden's weak and procrastinating presidency, means that we also must choose an alternative strategy. YouGov fortunately found that we firmly believe that this can only be rooted in a strong and independent Europe.

Of course, we are again facing the inevitable obstacle here. We may deeply believe in Europe, but the combined forces of bribed Putinists and fanatical faux patriots have driven us out of it. We now massively agree that it was our biggest error since Harold Godwinson decided to go after Harald Hardrada instead of focusing on the French invasion, but that does not change the reality of it and its catastrophic consequences. Ten years ago, we turned our backs on the prospect of making a new Entente Cordiale the backbone and pillar of a strong Europe, and there is no going back now as Europe looks at us with suspicion and Macron never misses an opportunity to revive the French-made tale of a Perfidious Albion. So, even if we philosophically favour strong ties to a strong Europe, the lack of mutual trust means that we must also explore other options at home. The only question is how far are we ready and willing to go to restore what YouGov called our "national power", a description the loopy woke Putin-appeasing far-left would surely call fascist, and the loopy Kremlin-bribed fascists approve while betraying us to the Russian Reich.

We can no longer depend on others to feed us, care for us, inform us, finance us. We cannot depend on others to defend us. In this respect, our European defence must take a new step forward.

(Emmanuel Macron, 3 March 2022)

We are entering a war economy. We must move faster, rethink the pace, ramp-ups and margins in order to more rapidly rebuild what is essential for our armed forces, our allies or those whom we want to support.

(Emmanuel Macron, 13 June 2022)

YouGov went on with a probe of our attitudes and preference between "hard power" and "soft power", big muscle and big talk. I am convinced that opposing them is a massive flaw in reasoning, as neither makes sense without the other. Remember what Clausewitz said, that war is merely the continuation of policy by other means. It is just as easy to turn it around and say that diplomacy is merely the waging of war by other means. It is even more obvious in today's rapidly morphing world, where the concept of hybrid war has blurred the boundaries between soft power and hard power. The remaining important difference, in term of domestic political debates, is that soft power requires little investment, as you would mostly repurpose existing resources. While hard power demands a fucking shitload of dosh on the table, as it is meaningless without massive visible additional resources. Interestingly, YouGov found that we are roughly equally supportive of both.

Of course, the political crosstabs also reveal that a similar average view is in fact the result of ideological preferences shifting in opposite directions. The right, those who would bring a bazooka to a debating society, support hard power more strongly and the left, those who would bring a composite motion to a pub brawl, lean more towards soft power. Amusingly, we still have more than half of Green voters considering hard power important, which will make Zack Polanski livid, as even his own voters don't buy his obsessive fixation on weakening our military, like Derek Savage in the olden days. But, once we have established that 8 Out Of 10 Brits consider hard power important, the real question is what tough choices we are ready and willing to make to strengthen it. And today's answer is... fuck all.

These replies are quite amazing because YouGov specifically asked about our priority between social spending and military spending all along the making of the Budget last year, and the last time they asked showed a shift towards prioritising the military. It is quite odd to see that the most popular option would be to bring back conscription, which is total nonsense in today's context of the military needs of an island country. The proper answer to Russian imperialism is certainly not resurrecting Dad's Army or creating a New Model British Expeditionary Force. We need more capabilities for long-range power projection, and the proper solution is a massive strengthening of the Royal Navy, when Conservatives have knowingly let it decay over their 14 years in power, and Labour has still done jack shit to reverse the trend. And we also need much stronger and efficient resources to get involved in the hybrid war, like cyber experts and improved intelligence that would not depend on the goodwill of the United States. These are definitely the times for the blood and sweat and tears, the labor and the anguish, as Theodore Roosevelt, not Winston Churchill, once put it. But none of our politicians have the baws to admit it and act on it.

After Trump's recent actions, the question of how much the UK is really willing to pay for its own protection, and what politicians are willing to sacrifice to make that happen, becomes more urgent by the day.

(Laura Kuenssberg, 10 January 2026)

To remain free, one must be feared, and to be feared, one must be powerful. To be powerful in this brutal world, we must act faster and stronger.

(Emmanuel Macron, 15 January 2026)

Quite astutely, YouGov then turned their exploration of our thoughts about hard power in the totally opposite direction to what we had been led to expect. What if the next confrontation was not with the Born Again Soviet Union, but with Trumpistan? Like in the event of an invasion of Greenland or, even better, Canada or the French Caribbean islands. My scenarios, not theirs. More astutely, YouGov did not ask if we would support an armed conflagration with the United States, but if we think we are strong enough to actually do it. And they found that we absolutely do not believe that the UK alone could stand up to Trump successfully, but that a European Collective could.

The poll also says that our chances would be better if we made "sufficient changes", which remain totally undefined, so what that actually means is anybody's guess. Unless YouGov gave us the answer in their next question, about us rejoining the EU in its present form, or rejoining a vastly improved EU with a fully integrated defence. The question is not whether or not that second option is realistic, we will come to that later, but whether or not we would be ready to be part of either incarnation of the EU. Interestingly, YouGov fielded another poll just days before that one, neutrally asking if we would support rejoining the EU, with no specifics attached. The result was 49-31 to rejoin. Here, squarely positioned within the framework of defence against foreign hostile action, it turns into a whopping 59-29 to rejoin.

Even the potentially more controversial scenario of joining a fully defence-integrated EU gets 54-to-24 support. Reform voters are even less opposed to that one than to joining the current variant of the EU, which says quite a lot. But we must not get carried away by our wildest dreams. The EU has not reached the stage where its defence transitions from Private Pike to T-1000. It is indeed quite unlikely to do so in the next seven generations, and of course I can offer evidence for this. As a side order, we also have a question from YouGov's last two pan-European polls, that shines some light on the plausibility of a unified European defence. It probed the wider issue of the balance of powers between the European Union and its member states. Oddly as it is none of out fucking business, YouGov included their British panel in it.

The results are quite merciless. There is a strong current within the EU to return powers to the member states and, if we were still part of the EU, the UK would push in that direction too. From the perspective of greater military integration, the most significant result is that French public opinion is the least supportive of delegating more powers to the EU institutions. This faithfully reflects the usual position of French politicians, and Emmanuel Macron is no exception. Deep within the French psyche, there is belief in their own exceptionalism and nostalgia of Empire past, just like in the British psyche, and military power is a remnant of those past glories, especially being the sole owner of nuclear weapons currently in the EU. Bear in mind that, in the 1950s, France sabotaged and torpedoed a nascent European Defence Community, and their basic position hasn't changed since. It's an Aye to watered-down forms of cooperation, a Nay to full integration that would involve the taboo issue of decision-sharing on the use of nukes. When the EU is not even able to agree on standardised equipment and joint procurement, and blocks the UK from being part of joint procurement of armament for Ukraine, you can easily see that a "Europe of Defence" is just a pipe dream for distant future times, despite all proclamations to the contrary.

We need a deep and collective cultural shift toward simplification, agility, and boldness.

(Emmanuel Chiva, March 2023)

This country has gone to the dogs. You know why? We don’t know who we are any more. Used to be we were God-fearing, rule-abiding, dignified. Doomed to hellfire for all eternity, that’s how we are.

(Reginald Wait, Grantchester, 2026)

This polling about hard and soft power also sheds a different light on an earlier poll, when YouGov surveyed our feelings about the current state of Britain. Not in practical terms like our assessment of child poverty, NHS waiting times and unplugged potholes, but more in philosophical terms between the extremes of flamboyant British exceptionalism and the narrative of continuous decline. It is not really about ideological preferences, though they do influence our vision of the true State of the Union. It is more of a call to profound introspection, and which stage of grief we have reached about the Fall Of The British Empire, and the demise of Civilisation As Stanley Baldwin Knew It. This time, the whole of YouGov's crosstabs are worth visualising.

There is some degree of ideological determinism here, as Reform voters have a massive sense of doom, fueled by nostalgia of a Britannia they never knew and probably never existed in this century and even the previous one. Then even Green voters opine that the Realm is in a pretty shite state, though probably for very different reasons. There is also definitely a generational gap, but just between the TikTok Generation and all the rest of us. Guess we can blame TikTok here, for not having videos of cute kittens teaching pre-pubescent serial wankers British History. The second half of the crosstabs confirms that there is quite a consensus about the current state of Great Britain, a very visibly shared gloomy mood.

The odd ones out are Londoners, quite interestingly much less likely to endorse the narrative of decline. Haven't they heard Nigel Farage testifying that Sadiq Khan has turned the Imperial Capital into a lawless war zone worse than the Colombian jungle? Or summat he nicked off one of Elon Muck's "citizen journalists" who had been binge watching the second series of The Night Manager. Maybe we should infer from the geographical differences that London is actually a better place to live, under an unapologetically woke Labour administration, than Lincolnshire or Kent, under a crassly incompetent and vacillating Reform administration. Then there is an ontological question behind this. How do we define the state of Britain as being good, bad or broken? Compared to what allegedly ideal state? I guess nobody really knows, especially not the professional declinists. So maybe, just maybe, we should not take all that stuff too seriously.

Taking the piss, laughing, playing about is the best antidote to the all-consuming, humourless dread that immobilises us.

(Suzanne Moore)

In battle, everything is clear. Black and white. Life is simple. You’re alive or you’re dead. Nothing else matters.

(Harold Godwinson, King & Conqueror, 2025)

Kemi Badenoch probably thought she had let out a bombshell among the pigeons when she sacked Vigilante Bob Jenrick from his position as Shadow David Lammy, but I totally fail to see how this could cure the massive outflux of opportunists who are ready to migrate where the grass is turquoiser. If anything, this can only encourage more to jump ship, whining they are oppressed and marginalised within the Rump Tory Party, and only Elon Muck's and Vladimir Putin's flying monkeys can preserve their unalienable right to free hate speech. Which is just what Vigilante Bob did, less than a day after Badenoch had all his privileges revoked. So much for her show of authority. Little did we know that none of it would matter, and everybody would have forgotten about it, within a fortnight thanks to Peter Mandelson. As a result, voting intentions have been shaken and stirred in various directions, again delivering puzzling trendlines.

Weathering the storm without heavy losses looks like an impossible task for the current Labour Top Dogs. Keir Starmer has bought himself more time by performing the very necessary McSweeneyctomy, but the time will come for tough choices after disastrous election results in May. Uprooting one bad apple may not be enough, so who's left to be next? Wes Streeting is damaged goods now, thanks to his close association with Peter Mandelson, who mentored him when he was just a rookie MP and not yet a rising star. Wes' defence of Mandy, just two days before he was sacked from his ambassadorship, has definitely come back already to bite him in the arse. Will Angela Rayner thusly become the next in line, almost by default because nobody else will want to stand amidst this chronicle of a disaster foretold? Meanwhile, individual data from our three main resident pollsters do not really help making sense of the actual impact of recent events on the electorate. Is Reform going up again after going down for a while? Is Labour going down again after going up for a while? Are the Greens still in a position to derail Labour's efforts to salvage a damaged brand?

There is a definite sense here that we are getting confusing signals from a confused electorate. Who wouldn't be when we don't know whom we will be at war with next week, who will be Prime Minister at Whitsun, and how many MPs the Conservative Party will still have when Commons rise for their next Magaluf Break? Even the Gorton and Denton by-election is unlikely to dissipate the confusion, as the only lesson from it will be that voters have fallen out of love with Labour, and this we already know. The Holyrood and Senedd elections are pretty much irrelevant too, as neither is likely to have any meaningful impact on the SW1 bubble. Even the English locals will not natter much, as we already broadly anticipate what they will spawn, unless the mediatariat grants them a very disproportionate significance to further boost their fascist darlings, so none of this will make us any the wiser. There's too many men, too many people, making too many problems. Can't you see this is a land of confusion?

I might disagree with Mandelson on his politics, but he's a very intelligent man and would be a good choice for Ambassador.

(Nigel Farage, December 2024)

Power is like a fire. It will warm you and protect you, but if it burns unchecked, it will destroy everything in its path.

(Godwin of Wessex, King & Conqueror, 2025)

Keir Starmer is a very unlucky man indeed. He does not have Boris Johnson's uncanny talent to emerge of all storms clean like a Teflon duck. He doesn't have a world-wide pandemic, a world-wide financial crash or a war with a fascist regime over an distant island to make himself shine brighter than Churchill Reincarnate. Though the latter may well come sooner than we expect, when you think of it. Then YouGov decided to be totally unfair to poor Keir, and asked us how we feel about Keir's reaction to the Orange Baboon's dementia-riddled statements about Greenland. That's unfair because the litmus test of statesmanship is not how you react to words, but to actions. But YouGov scored their goal here, that was obviously to make Sly Keir look bad.

OK, we collectively opine that Keir has handled Trump's explosive ramblings badly, but what the fuck? Shouldn't YouGov be polling our feeling about Kemi Badenoch's abject hypocrisy, when she is seen at PMQs jubilating about the Orange Baboon insulting us over a deal his own State Department emphatically praised six months ago? I don't recall her congratulating Starmer when President Trump expressed his support for this monumental achievement. The State Department's words, not mine. Or about Nigel Farage, the man who would have travelled to Berchtesgaden for an endorsement in 1938 with the same glee as when he travels to Mar-a-Lago today, acquiescing to Trump's plan to invade and annex the territory of an ally? Back then Nigel would have argued that Germany did need the Sudetenland for reasons of national security, to protect itself against the Soviet Union. Fortunately for Starmer, nobody has polled his handling of the Mandelson situation. Yet. But his standing in the now standard three-way polling for Preferred Prime Minister was already damaged before that.

Neither of the three plausible contenders for Number Ten has massive popular support. The prophets of declinism would certainly see evidence in there that the UK has really gone to the pigs, when no potential Prime Minister is supported by more than a quarter of the electorate. Then we have had an Ipsos poll that pretty much summed up our unsolvable dilemma. Starmer and Reeves are shit at their job, but neither Badenoch nor Farage are ready to be Prime Minister. Labour do not deserve a second term, but neither the Conservatives nor Reform are ready to be in government. They didn't bother asking about Polanski and the Greens, as they did not want their respondents to choke on their pink gin laughing, and then sue them for reckless endangerment of life. Because that's what happens in a Broken Britain where Che Polanski has killed all the fun just by pretending he hasn't.

Keir Starmer is full-on globalist, hanging out with his mates at the World Economic Forum.

(Nigel Farage, 2025)

I will be having some words with the US administration on Wednesday when I am in Davos.

(Nigel Farage, 2026)

We have also had another poll from Lord Ashcroft, including a quite amusing take on the three most prominent party leaders. According to Mikey, we think that Keir Starmer is out of his depth, out of touch, weak and indecisive, which is probably also how Andy Burnham sees him. Kemi Badenoch is out of her depth, confident, determined and out of touch, and that is bound to be an explosive mix soon enough. Finally, we consider Nigel Farage arrogant, smug and dishonest, vastly ahead of any other descriptor. But it was up to the combined energies of YouGov and Ipsos to settle the accounts once and for all for this month, with parallel polls of our preferences for Prime Minister in an array of duels. For once, let's start with the Pretender, the Cardboard Cutout Führer from Clacton.

There is quite a contrast between YouGov and Ipsos here. Per YouGov, Farage loses to everyone including Che Polanski. Per Ipsos, he wins against everyone except Starmer, pre-Mandelson Files. Ipsos even pulled some unexpected rabbits from their hat, a trio who may or may not be Leader of the Labour Party in some variant of the space-time continuum, to hammer home that Nigel Is Da Man. This may have to be fact-checked and verified, though, as the duels involving Starmer show him prevailing over everyone but Davey and Burnham. This is nevertheless not all roses and honey for Starmer, as his ratings are quite low, and his margin over the chosen contenders often quite thin. Ipsos also finds much bigger shares of Neither and No Difference than in the duels involving the Bargain Bin Duce, so you get a distinct feeling that we rate Starmer pretty much as the Prime Minister by default, because most of the competitors are so bland, weak and unconvincing.

All in all, the aggregate of what we have this time is pretty dismal polling for Keir Starmer, and it has gone worse every week for some time. He seems to have triggered an Anything But Starmer United Front against him, a Coalition Of The Whining straddling the width of the political spectrum from the loopy far-left to the deranged far-right, including supporters of the Burnham Ultimatum within the Parliamentary Labour Party, who fancy Andy as the perfect Replacement PM Service. From where I'm sat, this is neither fair nor balanced, even if Starmer has done shitloads of fucking awful stuff in his nineteen months in office. He obviously needs to grow balls and a personality, but at the end of the day, he's just a soul whose intentions are good, Oh Lord, please don't let him be misunderstood. Or it might be all in vain, if all the discontent coalesces around the Mandelson Files and the final blow that sinks him comes from that most unlikely corner of karma.

Sometimes things go so badly you just have to laugh.

(Christopher Pike, Star Trek: Strange Hew Worlds, 2022)

Ozymandias © Paul Kantner, Craig Chaquico, John Barbata, David Freiberg, Grace Slick, Pete Sears, 1976

Don't Let It Rain © Paul Kantner, China Wing Kantner, 1976

Robert Jenrick says the Tories broke Britain. Now he wants to do the same again with Farage's Reform.

(Labour Party press release, 16 January 2026)

The Great British Public may love The Traitors, but we do not like traitors. So there will be a price to pay for Vigilante Bob Jenrick completing his transition and offering the New Model British Union of Fascists their sixth MP. Then the hitherto-unknown Andrew Rosindell became their seventh, and Sue-Ellen Braverman their eighth, against Benito Farage's will, as he did not want to rehome too many stray Tories before the May elections. Technically Sue-Ellen was Reform's tenth but they managed to lose two of the original five along the way. Of course, Vigilante Bob's popularity was not really high even before that, and I have a subset of the last Freshwater Strategy poll to prove it. They tested six British parties, seventeen British political celebrities and six miscellaneous entities, and very few of them get top marks. Not the Conservatives anyway. The fun part is that, despite Vigilante Bob's endless efforts to drag the spotlight on himself, a quarter of us have no fucking idea who he is. And the absolutely fucking hilarious part is that he's got pretty much the same ratings as Zack Polanski. No love for traitors, no love for loonies.

Vigilante Bob was still a Tory when that poll was fielded, so that's why he's on the shelf next to Kemi Badenoch, who is pretty unpopular too, though less than Keir Starmer. The fun part in that totally forgettable story is that both More In Common and Opinium felt that they had a public service duty to poll us about Jenrick jumping ship and how Badenoch handled it. Polls I will not showcase as I basically don't give a frying duck about Vigilante Bob's future, or lack of it. Opinium even dedicated one of their rare comments on their own polls to pollsplain us what a big event it was, when it was basically a total non-story for anyone not punditificating from inside the SW1 bubble. How we feel about the Labour party and their main performers is far more relevant, even if Labour will find no reason to rejoice in those ratings.

Here we go again. Keir Starmer is less popular than the Labour Party collectively, and Andy Burnham is more popular than either. Which is quite irrelevant anyway as a Labour leadership election is not Love Island, we don't get to pick the winner. Andy Burnham may well be barred from standing, unless he isn't. The next best contenders would be Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband and Wes Streeting. The Freshwater poll says that Wes Streeting is the most popular of the trio with Labour voters, and he has prophesied himself that he would be Prime Minister by 2028. But that was several years before Labour won a general election, and you may wonder if he still has it in him today to challenge Keir Starmer before the next. Finally Freshwater probed us about the party that self-destructed before taking off, and an assorted array of other people. Note that the farmers are more popular than Not-My-King, probably because they are actually doing something useful. And that the European Union is more popular than Johnson and Farage, which is quite reassuring and shows we haven't yet lost all our marbles, just some.

I find it extremely entertaining that Jeremy Clarkson emerges victorious from the War Of The Jezzes, vastly more popular than Jeremy Corbyn. Despite all his atrocious shenanigans, I am not a Clarksophobe. He is brilliant as host of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? I am even thinking of lobbying ITV to give us back the real Millionaire, instead of the current lame substitutes Celebrity Millionaire and Hot Seat Millionaire. No shit, mates, I want Clarkson at his best in his real habitat. It is also quite amusing that Corbyn's ratings are just a wee smitch better than Elon Muck's, the second most hated of the miscellaneous after Donald Trump. That bit should be summat of a small mercy for Labour, as they know they could exploit that against Nigel Farage, if Elmo insists on interfering in our elections on behalf of the New Model British Union of Fascists. Surely we have it in us to tell Muck he can't buy an election for the Clacton Führer like he bought one for the Orange Baboon.

Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values, or traditions.

(Steve Bannon, UnHerd, 18 February 2024)

Labour MPs have just about had enough of a leadership with a seemingly unerring instinct for the wrong move. They could sense the mood of the nation.

(John Crace, The Guardian, 4 February 2026)

There is a major problem ahead when the majority of us consider any and all politicians as popular as gonorrhoea in a nunnery. Compounded by the government party shooting themselves in both feet and both hands when they shafted the most popular in their ranks, actually the only popular one, and barred him from being the miracle cure in the incoming force 17 earthquake. Because we have a brand new YouGov speed poll that says that, if we held a referendum on Starmer, it would be Instant Keirxit, and by a bigger margin than Brexit. You ask, "who still loves Keir?", and we answer, "not many". Which does not mean his fate his sealed already. This a more of a Winter-of-2022-Johnson situation than a Truss situation. For now. Starmer may be running on fumes, but they can possibly propel him another few miles down the road, like until summer, when a leadership contest can be held while nobody is looking.

We do see quite a consensus that Starmer should go. But don't think Epstein and Mandelson have anything to do with it. It was there long before that. Shitweasel Owen Jones even started calling for Starmer to resign the day after he was appointed, for fuck's sake. The fun part, which should actually bother all Labour grandees, is that LibDem voters are marginally more likely to want to keep Starmer than Labour voters. Stranger things have happened, but not this year. Yet. But, other than these, there are very few Friends Of Keir left anywhere. Even Londoners are leaning towards wanting him out, though the profile of the ones keenest on that would be like a working class pensioner from the Midlands. Which is also quite close to the profile of the most likely Reform voter, not coincidentally. Keir would have better odds with middle-class Southern students, if those had not already jumped ship to the Greens. But he still has a possibly job-saving option left, do what Jonathan Freedland, with whom I agree for once, advises him to do in The Hipstershire Gazette. Beam back the revelations at the oppositions, like you kill a basilisk with its own reflection in a mirror.

Of course, the Rump Tories and the New Model British Union of Fascists should be the last to rejoice at this turn of events. Especially as the Epstein Files and the Mandelson Revelations have only exacerbated a pre-existing trend. When the dust settles, public opinion will also remember that the oppositions too have some serious explaining to do. The Tories did congratulate Starmer for his inspired choice when he sent Mandelson to suck the Orange Baboon's dick in our name. Michael Gove even called it a brilliant appointment. Then Benito Farage should be careful what he wishes for. He is mentioned in the Epstein Files too, when Starmer is not, and we will surely hear very soon about the gory details of his connection to the paedophile ringmaster, who was acting as Putin's spy among the American establishment, many of whom are also pals with Benito. Being associated with a mole helping the FSB gather material for kompromats is not the best position to be in, when you are already under scrutiny for suspicion of Russian bribes. If Starmer falls, there is no reason why others, more guilty than him, should not. If there is some justice left in this world, Benito will go first. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.

This time there’s the sense of a tipping point being reached. No more second chances. No praying for a miracle that will never come in the May elections. A quantum shift of collective despair.

(John Crace, The Guardian, 5 February 2026)

Politics is definitely farcical. I would say more farcical than comedy, to be honest.

(Grace Campbell)

There is a very strange taboo in British politics, against openly discussing possible coalitions before a general election. Some even pretend that pre-election deals are illegal, which is of course total bullshit. Discussing coalitions only after the elections totally makes sense if you have proportional representation, but clearly not if you have a majority system and a fragmented political offer. This is the case not just in the current variant of the United Kingdom, but also in the country of my birth, where coalitions have never been taboo. They have been common practice for generations, on the left and on the right, and were even encouraged by the electoral law, with a provision for seat bonuses, in the 1950s when France still had proportional representation. Pre-election coalitions definitely make sense here and now, when Reform UK could bag a majority of seats on 30% of the popular vote, and polls say that the total of left-wing votes vastly outnumbers them. But what do We, The People make of that? Thank Dog again for YouGov, who always have the answers.

We first have a trio of plausibly likely options in a hung Parliament. Two variants of a Progressive Alliance, though there should have been a third Lab-Lib-Green option, and the British variant of the ancestral German practice of a Grand Coalition between irreconcilable adversaries. But we want none of that shit. Even the left-leaning combinations have less support that their current voting intentions, and that says a lot about how allergic to coalitions we still are. The only coalition most of us have known in our lifetime is the disastrous Con-Lib Pact of 2010, that nearly relegated the LibDems to the abyss of oblivion. Surely very few remember the Lab-Lib Pact of 1977, which was not even a proper coalition, and don't even think of the National Government of 1931. It doesn't get better if we swap seats like contestants on House Of Games, and specify Labour as the junior coalition partner.

There is nevertheless a fun side here, that a Davey-led coalition and a Badenoch-led coalition are more popular than the same aggregate led by Starmer. That's how much we dislike Starmer now. But it goes the other way if we hypothesise a Polanski-led Green-Lab Pact, as we would prefer the Starmer-led variant of that. It says a lot that we like and trust Che even less than Keir, despite all of his zealots' efforts to convince us that Putin-appeasing wokeism is the best antidote to Putin-enabling fascism. Good to see that there is still some basic common sense remaining among us, despite the mediatariat's relentless efforts to turn us into fucking eejits.

And politics in my lifetime, as I’ve observed, I think has become more of a joke than comedy itself.

(Grace Campbell)

So it’s kind of hard to satirise things that are happening cause they’re writing themselves.

(Grace Campbell)

Now there is another side to this vision, however laughably implausible it sounds, and that would be coalitions involving the Rump Conservative Party in a position to claim that custody of Larry The Cat is theirs by birthright. YouGov also thought they had to offer an even number of options for more coverage of all possible futures, so they also added the totally unbelievable pact between Labour and Reform. The good part is that all of this stuff is less popular that the first sextet of options. The bad part is that a quarter of us would see nothing wrong with a Tory government including Reform ministers. Which, I know and we know and they know will never happen anyway. But the crosstabs by political preference reveal that two thirds of Conservative voters agree with that, and that is really fucked.

There are some interesting changes when the top spot is swapped in these combinations too. Mister Ed is more popular than Kemi to lead a similar coalition and, more significantly, the Bargain Bin Führer is also a preferred option to both Badenoch and Starmer. Crosstabs show that Reform voters are expectedly the most supportive of any option putting the Clacton Goebbels at Number Ten, overwhelmingly if it involves being strutted by the Rump Tories, and less convincingly if it requires teaming with Labour. Generally, there is a strong scent of coalitiophobia among the Great British Public, and I certainly will not go against the dominant feeling. Though you could argue that big tent parties are de facto coalitions of warring factions, lots of evidence of which has been provided through the ages by Labour and the Conservatives, and even by the SNP and the Greens, despite being smaller tents. So we will probably have another one-party government in 2029, the only problem being that we may well choose the wrongest ones for the part.

The billionaire-owned mediatariat obviously want Starmer gone and Labour discredited for the next seven generations, and they have contaminated the BBC. Fair and balanced coverage would be switching the spotlights away from Mandelson, and towards the ties between Farage and Epstein, but we will not get that, obviously. Emmanuel Macron was right to warn against a Reactionary Internationale, that is at work everywhere in Europe and even benefits from United Stares funding here in the UK. Oddly, The Guardian did not find that newsworthy enough to mention, but The National did, for once targeting the real enemy instead of obsessively fixating on Anas Sarwar's every blunder. The Trumpian Christo-fascists have "a real soft spot" for the UK as they see it, quite rightly since the Brexit catastrophe was successfully rammed down our throats, as the weak link in the European Resistance against imported authoritarianism. Is it too late to prove them wrong?

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

(Henry David Thoreau)

There’s no such thing as being safe. That’s not how it works, is it? Things are always going to change and this could all be gone in a moment.

(Steven Neill, Blue Lights, 2025)

Has the time actually come for some sort of coalition? Kind of a prenup between Reform and the Conservatives, or maybe we should craft a new term for that, like a preelec. To nobody's surprise, YouGov has found that Reform voters are far less fond of proportional representation than they once were. They may be slow on the uptake, but they still got it that the time-honoured first-past-the-post is the only way they can get a majority of seats on fewer votes than Labour got in 2024. This is again evidenced by the current snapshot of voting intentions and projected seats. This time, we have an exceptionally big Poll'O'Polls of seven polls, conducted by Survation, BMG Research, Freshwater Strategy, Moire in Common, YouGov, Find Out Now and Opinium between the Twenty-Eighth of the First and the Sixth of the Second. 28 January and 6 February for the non-toffs. That's a super-sample of 12,355 or roughly the deep load displacement in long tons of HMS Frobisher at the end of her active career.

Faced with such apocalyptic prospects, you may wonder if Labour have not avoided a worse PR disaster when their National Executive Committee denied Andy Burnham the right to stand at the incoming by-election in Gorton and Denton. Its predecessors Manchester Gorton and Denton and Reddish, were in Labour's hands since 1935 and its creation in 1983 respectively. The now-retired Andrew Gwynne was MP for Denton and Reddish from 2005 to 2024, then inherited the recarved constituency at the last general. Gwynne's own electoral history in both seats, and the current projections from Electoral Calculus and me, illustrate how a Labour success story could easily become their worst nightmare at this year's by-election, even if Burnham thought he could win it on his personal prestige and acquired aura as Mayor of Greater Manchester. But maybe we're in for some surprises in the run-up to that by-election, now that Reform UK have been caught red-handed sending fake "concerned neighbour" letters to everyone with a pulse in the constituency. Which certainly deserves better than a police investigation that will linger on for eons. I'm thinking in terms of declaring the by-election null and void and banning Reform from standing in the rematch on grounds of election fraud.

Gwynne bagged an outright majority of the popular vote in Denton and Reddish at five successive general elections. Then the recarving ahead of the 2024 general made Gorton and Denton even more Labour-heavy, a truly safe seat bordering on sinkhole. The 2024 election result must therefore have come as quite a shocker. Gwynne still bagged an outright majority, but 15% down on his notional 2019 result, and badly shaken by the Greens and a "Gaza candidate", costumed here as one of Catman Galloway's Wankers Party. Predictions for the next election say it was just the beginning. Electoral Calculus and my model may disagree on the exact numbers, but not massively, and we agree that it is now a three-way marginal between Labour, Reform UK and the Greens. Zack Polanski had surely seen that sort of prediction when he leaked that he could be considering standing there against Burnham. With Burnham out, the Waitrose Che has now reconsidered and will stay at home in Camden Town, where he is less at risk of meeting real working class people who know that there are only two sexes. And, come Election Day and the seat turns any colour but red, Burnham will be relieved he has not just saved taxpayers the £500k a mayoral by-election would have cost, but also saved himself a potentially career-ending humiliation.

If you’re gonna try to kill the king, you can’t miss.

(Jack McCoy, Law And Order, 2022)

You get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow. This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo.

(Marshall Mathers, Lose Yourself, 2022)

Now the most hilarious thing has happened. That Burnham situation has really sent a tsunami of shockwaves rolling through the Labour Party, as it is a golden opportunity to vent discontent about Keir Starmer. It was especially funny to see Momentum and some MPs from the hard left channeling the inner Burnham Identity as if he was one of their own, when he is from the party's soft left , stood against Corbyn at the 2015 leadership election, and did support Starmer at the 2020 leadership election. Of course, we have seen unholiest dalliances before, especially in the ranks of the loopy woke left. Then the ripples of earthquakes had to be polled, and Find Out Now went first, with a poll of residents of Greater Manchester. Which is pretty much inviting the narrative to write itself. YouGov then polled GB-wide with the same question about the NEC being right or wrong to block Burnham from standing.

Note that Find Out Now polled before the decision was announced, and YouGov after it was, and that doesn't change the general message. 1,000 random Mancunians and 5,367 random Brits see eye to eye on this. It was a fucking bad idea. But it would soon have drifted off the news cycle and been buried with the rest of the skeletons if the metropolitan mediatariat did not have a vested interest in keeping it alive. They love nothing more than pouring salt and vinegar on the self-inflicted wounds of Labour's internecine feuds. And the Great British Public love nothing more than those clichéd rehashed soaps where two brothers fight over the attention of the same girl, two BFFs over the ownership of the same pub, or a divorce gets sour over who will get guardianship of the dog. It gets even better if we can suspect one of the protagonists of having dark ulterior motives, which is just what 1,000 random Mancunians think about Labour, if we are to believe the Find Out Now poll.

Ranting and whining about Labour's factionalism is so totally passé, but it still sells. My father heard the same stories about Benn and Kinnock, My grandfather heard them too about Bevan and Gaitskell. I guess that's just one of the hazards of self-identifying as a big tent party, and all the stories generated by that are more exciting than anything from River City. So the metropolitan punditariat could only welcome a poll showing that 1,000 random Mancunians feel that Starmer is getting petty and personal on Burnham. A very handy finding to boost their usual Starmerphobic storytelling. In addition, Find Out Now polled 501 Labour Party members the day before the NEC's ruling. 66% said that the NEC should allow Burnham to stand, and only 15% that he should be barred. Totally uncoincidentally, 48% of that same sample said they would vote for Burnham at a leadership election, against only 26% for Starmer. Which is definitely adding insult to injury, but we should definitely believe it. 501 might sound like a very wee sample but, relative to the rapidly shrinking membership of the Labour Party, it's like having a sample of 90,000 for a generic voting intentions poll across Great Britain.

He’s been handed everything on a plate for his whole career. He’s now angry because people won’t make way for his second coming. It’s typical Andy.

(Anonymous Labour source, The Times, 30 January 2026)

Have you ever tried to talk reason to a Northerner? It’s like juggling mud.

(Sweyn Godwinson, King & Conqueror, 2025)

To shed more light on where the various contenders stand, More In Common also specifically surveyed the popularity of an assorted array of Labour bigwigs, including of course Starmer and Burnham, but also others who may or may not have plans to stand one day for the party leadership slot. Or, more accurately, Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner vs four randomly-selected others who have no leadership ambition and would lose anyway if they had any. The key part here is to compare how these Labour Grandees are seen by the general population, compared to how they are seen by Labour voters, and not all is what you surely expect.

Keir Starmer has lost his street cred with the general population, but Labour voters still really like him, even if a third don't, as they are probably painfully aware that Starmer's damaged public image is taking the whole party down. Interestingly, Burnham's image with the general population is quite a mixed bag here, probably because being "just" Mayor of Greater Manchester has not put him in the spotlight very often. And, when he has been put under the light by the media, he may not have projected as positive an image as his supporters believe. Burnham is also not as massively popular with Labour voters here as other polls have found, and surely some of them simply don't know what to make of him. What actually drives him is still summat shrouded in mystery. Genuine ambition for the country, or just standard lust for power? More In Common tried to clarify this with a question about what Burnham should have done, in the alternative reality where the NEC did not block him, and it actually does not clarify anything,

A plurality of us claim they don't know what Burnham should have done, which I strongly suspect is the usual cover option for saying that we don't give a flying fuck. Even Labour voters support Burnham standing for Parliament quite reluctantly, and it is definitely not a clear success across the nations of the Realm and the regions of England. Unsurprisingly, Burnham standing gets its highest level of support in the North West of England. But, far less intuitively, it also gets higher than average support in London, in Keir Starmer's back garden. Nevertheless, I would not interpret that as a vote of no confidence in the Lider Maximo, but more as the consequence of the Imperial Capital's political leanings, which tend to grant disproportionate space to the hard left of Labour and the loopy woke Greens. By the way, did you know that Andy Burnham is not a native Mancunian, but a Scouser, born in the hometown of the Grand National, just six miles from Liverpool's city centre? And just three miles from the birthplace of Paul McCartney, which was also nominally part of Lancashire at the time.

“May you live in interesting times” is a curse indeed. Either things are changing and changing fast, or we have been in denial about what was already happening.

(Suzanne Moore)

I wouldn't say we're back to nowhere. I'd say we're nowhere adjacent.

(Jalen Shaw, Law & Order, 2023)

The interesting part of the Gorton and Denton by-election is that the pollstertariat don't seem to know how to handle it, so nobody has polled it when it is just 17 days away. Not actually nobody, as Find Out Now did poll it, albeit in a haphazardly discombobulated way. It started with their infamous poll of 1,000 Mancunians, who were obviously asked whom they would vote for if a general election happened next week. Generically first, and then if Andy Burnham stood in their constituency, Which is a bit osé, as Andy can obviously not stand in all constituencies around Greater Manchester. Mind you, it would have been totally legal before 1885. shrouded in the uncertainty of neither being explicitly allowed nor explicitly banned between 1885 and 1948, and totally and explicitly illegal only since 1948. Those were the days. Now, if we suspend disbelief and stipulate than Andy could stand in all 27 Manchester seats, Find Out Now's findings nevertheless remain quite flabbergasting.

I find these numbers bordering on the incredibly unbelievable. Who really thinks that the magic aura of the Burnham Legacy alone is enough to double the Labour vote, and cut the Greens and LibDems in half? Unless Andy has proposed something extraordinary that hasn't registered on my radar, like the nationalisation of all vet practices to tackle the spiraling costs of healthcare for non-human animals, that has become highway robbery 2.0, especially if you're owned by an 11yr-old dog. Then Find Out Now attempted to redeem themselves with a genuine poll of Gorton and Denton, or what looked like one until you read the fine print, and they fucked it up. Digest the results first, again with a now impossible alternative option, and I will tell you why this one too should not be taken seriously.

Should we really believe this rushed poll when Find Out Now admitted that the wee sample of 143 meant that the margin of error will be larger than regular voting intentions poll. Which is the Very English Way of telling us that they know it is fucking unreliable, and we have no fucking evidence that the Burnham Supremacy on his hone turf is even real. Between you and me, I would love nothing more than this poll being real, even in the version where Reform nick the seat off Labour, because it would be a fucking slap in the face with a wet fish for Zack Polanski. But we still need a really serious poll of that fucking by-election, something better than Shitweasel's "citizen journalism", to tell us more reliably which way the tiles are going to fall. Then Burnham will still have to decide what is his best strategy. Greater Manchester's next mayoral election is to be held in 2028, so he could just stand down then and pick a relatively safe constituency for the 2029 general. In the meanwhile, he has to prove he can do better than being the Handy Burnham of all those, on Labour's hard left and beyond, who hold a grudge against Starmer. He just has to affirm and validate what he genuinely self-identifies as, and thusly be his whole true self. The name is Burnham. Andy Burnham.

What though the field be lost? All is not lost, the unconquerable will and study of revenge, immortal hate

And courage never to submit or yield. And what is else not to be overcome?

(John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667)

Even those who don’t watch the news or aren’t interested in politics get the vibe. And it’s dark, man, it’s dark. So many people say they don’t want to know.

(Suzanne Moore)

Even if Labour manage to not lose Gorton and Denton, they still have a long way to go and many hills to climb to repaint the North red. Ancestral party loyalty may have worked magic against decaying Tories in 2024, but it may not work right now against Reform, who still have plenty of fair winds in their sails. It is a tricky situation for Labour, as general election polls do create a mood and a narrative that will work against them at the English locals in May. And a second drubbing, on top of last year's locals, will feed a mood and narrative that will work against Labour at next year's locals. Lather, rinse, repeat, and you create the perfect mood and narrative in 2029 to make the mediatariat's self-fulfilling prophecy of an inevitable Reform victory self-fulfill. And the current snapshot of voting intentions across the nations and regions of the Realm is perfect fuel for that.

Now we have to wonder what the Northern voters will make of the latest revelations about their former imported MP Baron Guacamole of Foy and Hartlepool. Not that there are actually any revelations in the latest batch of the redacted Epstein Files. Everybody already knew that Mandelson is evil, rotten and corrupt to the core, attracted to the scent of money like a sniffer dog to fox shit, and to everything bright and shiny like the Thieving Magpie. No wonder he felt so at home with Donald Trump, sharing the same criminal acquaintances and garbage parvenu tastes. Obviously Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Keir Starmer knew, as they had access to his MI5 and MI6 files. The huge embarrassment for Labour is that, on top of the rest, Mandelson leaked confidential information to the leader of a paedophile ring used by Russia to collect dirt on the Orange Baboon, against a bribe, and actively worked against the interests of the UK and Australia. No way this will make Labour's electoral fortunes any better, as the current seat projections remain fucking awful for them.

Labour's only strategy is obviously to go ballistic on Reform collectively and Farage personally, to totally discredit his narrative as a "man of the people", which he never was. They don't even have to make stuff up, as Farage always does when he feels cornered. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is more than enough. You just have to rely on direct testimony of a man who sat in the European Parliament in the same parliamentary group as the Clacton Mussolini, and knows him really well. Or peruse the Epstein Files, a treasure trove of revelations, and just mention Nick Candy and his close relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell. Or Steve Bannon, the brains behind Brexit blood money and Trumpian Christo-fascism. Ed Davey is coming for Farage with all guns blazing all the time, and seat projections testify that it is doing the LibDems a lot of good. Labour now must take their cues from Mister Ed, and stop being terrified of losing a seat on Barnsley Council because they hurt the fragile feelings of some overage Brexiteers. For the jugular is the way to go, Starmer.

You don’t beat Reform by trying to ape it. Reform is a rather nasty, populist view of the country, which would actually further demolish our reputation in the world and damage our economy.

(Chris Patten, 28 January 2026)

Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole.

(Martin Heidegger)

This time, we have four new Full Scottish, from Survation, YouGov, Norstat and Moire In Common, all fielded over a period of just twenty-six days from 8 January to 3 February. So it is totally natural and expected that they deliver different results. And this is just the beginning of the pre-election polling frenzy, as we haven't heard yet from Opinium, and can surely trust Find Out Now to sell one poll a week to the highest bidder. It will soon be like British light cruisers around 1900. Shipyards started building one on speculation, with no actual order received, because they knew they would have a foreign buyer or two instantly, as soon as news spread that a brand new British-built cruiser would soon be available. I expect the same for Full Scottish polls until we choke on a TMI situation, as I don't expect anything but the continuation of the currently pretty stable trends.

It does not mean that all pollsters deliver the exact same findings, and it would be fucking disappointing if they did. Nevertheless, all agree on a distinctively lacklustre performance for the SNP and fucking chaos on the Unionist side, with only the LibDems oddly emerging unscathed and very probably even strengthened. It would be really odd if Scottish voters thought along the same lines as English voters, that the LibDems are the best line of defence against Reform UK, pretty much by default because of the decaying state of both Labour and the Conservatives. That would be so fucking ironic, given the totally deranged direction taken by the Scottish LibDems under Wanker Cole-Hamilton, the only man North of the Eyemouth Layby who makes you miss Willie Rennie.

Once properly processed, these four polls spawn different seat projections. But do the variations in numbers really matter? Honestly, who does give a flying fuck if Paddy Harvie again fails to nick Glasgow Kelvin off the SNP, or if his third time is a charm? Who gives a fucking shit how loudly The Scottish Pravda yelp about a strong pro-independence majority, when independence is but a blurry blob on the event horizon? We all see the same numbers, and they shout only one conclusion. That First Minister Stephen Flynn would be as fucking deranged as Donald Trump if he went to bed with the Greenies, when he has a much better option, extending an olive branch to a bruised Labour and rehoming them as the junior partner in a management-oriented nominally progressive coalition.

Our four pollsters also polled our voting intentions for the next general, but their signal was soon lost in all the noise of the GB-wide generic polls, and the ruckus from the Mandelson Tumult trickling down into them. It made that batch differ significantly from the picture earlier Full Scottish had painted, with the English Nationalist Party that call themselves Reform predicted to surge back up past the threshold that allows them to nick some Scottish seats. Six this time. One off the SNP (Aberdeenshire North and Moray East), one off the Conservatives (Dumfries and Galloway), and a painful four off Labour (Alloa and Grangemouth, Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock, Ayrshire Central, Bathgate and Linlithgow). But, thanks to the fragmentation of the oppositions, the SNP are predicted to bag more seats than in 2017 on a lower share of the popular vote than in 2024. What's not to love with first-past-the-post after all, mates?

If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day.

(John Wheeler)

The revolution will be televised, but it will be edited.

(Nabil Abdulrashid)

Now, let's assume for a wee while, or pretend, that Independence is still Scotland's Great Matter, despite our ruling elite leaning towards making the best of devolution instead. Because we have four more polls proving that We, The People still believe in it. Big Eck was right, the dream shall never die. Of course, polls tend to be contradictory, but the latest batch are more promising, as we have three out of four predicting a Yes victory, when earlier batches were split 50-50. Of course, the trendlines of voting intentions look pleasantly more favourable, but they have often looked better in the past, and we are still very far from the end of the line.

But the potential Yes vote has not reached critical mass yet. If we single out just the last four polls, it's still a tie. That's just basic maths, as the No lead in No-leaning polls is bigger than the Yes lead in Yes-leaning polls, that also have smaller samples. YouGov also tested two alternative options. What would constitute a mandate for holding a second Independence Referendum? An outright SNP majority in the next Scottish Parliament? Or a combined pro-Independence majority? And our collective answers are unequivocal. Neither. Nothing to see here. Just fuck off. SNP voters may support both options massively, it doesn't fucking matter one fucking bit when they represent just one third of our electorate.

Of course, YouGov's line of questioning is deliberately naive. We all know that even the SNP bagging 75 seats at the next Holyrood election and Yes on 60% in fifty consecutive polls wouldn't make a fucking difference. Now, just like last year and next year, only one vote matters. Keir Starmer's. Or Angela Rayner's, or whoseever has temporary custody of Larry The Cat. And the SNP does not have the firepower to strongarm them into a transfer of constitutional powers to Holyrood, as Alex Salmond did in 2012 with David Cameron. It was actually more a matter of willpower, as the SNP had only six MPs at the time, not the massive number that could have seriously disrupted proceedings in Commons. Salmond bluffed and Cameron blinked, as Salmond knew he would, and the rest is history. And history won't repeat itself with John Swinney at the helm, not even with Stephen Flynn taking over next May.

Who knew "give them some turnips" was a euphemism for "fuck off"?

(Sam Bradley, After The Flood, 2026)

You’re missing the point. This is not about politics. This is about playing the hand you have, not the hand you wish you had. If you think you can win, go ahead.

(Jack McCoy, Law And Order, 2022)

This last batch of Full Scottish added some elements of contextualisation to the broth, what you could call the present landscape of Scottish moods. Some of these may explain why we are ready to grant the SNP an unprecedented fifth term at the helm, a feat no English party has achieved since Lord Salisbury's Conservatives at the end of the 19th century, while letting the English Nationalists at Reform UK gain a strong foothold on Scottish soil. YouGov found that there is massive discontent with the achievements of both the UK Government and the Scottish Government, but with a significant difference. Scottish Labour voters are not happy bunnies with their own government, the one they propelled to power on tactical voting to oust the Tories, and now we have a quarter of us ready to defy logic and give fash a chance. On the other hand, SNP voters are massively supportive of our Government, and that's quite enough to deliver another election victory.

Norstat went one step beyond and surveyed six measures that are going to be part of the Scottish Budget for 2026-2027. All but one are supported by a majority of the Scottish electorate. There is even an interesting side story in the poll's crosstabs by political preference. Labour voters support the new Council Tax bands, the increase in the child payment, the departure tax for private jets, the roll-out of walk-in GP clinics, and the increase in the lower income tax bands' thresholds. They just oppose the increase in the international development fund, which only SNP voters support. Five out of six ain't bad, and that definitely supports my pet theory, which is also Stu Campbell's, that there is a solid basis for an SNP-Labour coalition as our next government, on an array of practical progressive policies that can be readily appropriated by the people, instead of the Greens' ideologically-motivated student politics.

International aid is not the most popular area of government spending when we are facing multiple crises at home and abroad. Many people feel that we are already doing enough for Ukraine, so should slash aid to other countries, though the two are obviously unrelated. Then the recent realisation, when Starmer decided to cut the UK's international aid by half, that some of it was going to China, Belarus, Venezuela, India or Brazil certainly did not help make the concept popular again. Of course Scotland cannot compensate for the massive decrease of the UK's aid, that would consume our whole budget, but showing that we care is certainly the right message from the SNP's perspective. Especially as it can't be called opportunistic, since it is unlikely to boost the First Minister's popularity, which is not very high according to the YouGov poll.

John Swinney may be the most popular, or least unpopular, Scottish politician, but the crosstabs show that even 16% of SNP voters are dissatisfied with him, and only the 16-24 age bracket see him favourably. It is also amusing that most of the other politicians tested by YouGov avoid a massively negative rating only because a huge amount of people don't know what to make of them, even the native ones. It's never a good sign when you have so little name recognition that people don't even have an opinion of you. The two notable exceptions are Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage, which was obviously to be expected, No way these two will leave us indifferent. And it totally amazes me that Farage gets better ratings than Starmer, when everything he says and does it totally antipodean to the core Scottish values embedded at the heart of Alex Salmond's conception of our civic nationalism. Of course we know Farage's support among Scots is mostly rooted in the rejection of the current Labour government at Whitehall, and this is another stain on Starmer's record. And his legacy too, if he still has one.

Even though the facts are confusing, we need to be aware of the optics. Find some way to level the playing field.

(Jack McCoy, Law And Order, 2022)

You’ve lost control. In my experience, when it’s gone, it’s gone.

(Dana Morgan, Blue Lights, 2025)

YouGov has just delivered a new Full Welsh, that will definitely send shockwaves of frenzied panic all across the Welsh politicariat. For the first time since the last general, they have found Plaid Cymru topping Westminster voting intentions. And they have found Plaid Cymru with an unprecedented double-digit lead over Reform UK in Senedd voting intentions. This is just how the punditariat's self-fulfilling prophecy, that Welsh Labour's downfall would propel the English Nationalists to power in Cardiff, will not self-fulfill. Which I find extremely significant, as it means their other self-fulfilling bullshit might also never self-fulfill, if the people's true voice makes itself heard. The trendlines of Welsh Westminster voting intentions since the 2019 general definitely show that Plaid Cymru has managed to snatch lots of votes off Labour, but so has Reform. I will give you my updated seat projection below the fold, but it shows that the Plaid surge is still not big enough to avoid a Reform majority of Commons seats in 2029.

Of course, the trends of Senedd voting intentions are more important, and of bigger immediate significance. With less, or fewer, than a hundred days left before the election, Plaid Cymru are facing the biggest challenge of their whole existence. Can they sustain their current momentum until Election Day, and turn it into their Golden Ticket to government? Probably yes, as there is little chance that events, dear boy, events could throw a spanner in their cogs. It's definitely much more likely for Labour, who are fucking cursed, and also for Reform, who seem to do all they can to attract bad PR. So Plaid have every reason to look at the Senedd trendlines with reasoned optimism. Ironically, Wales' soon-to-be former First Minister Eluned Morgan has totally understood where the main threat lies, and will probably soon tell us she does not even know Keir Starmer, just like Nigel Farage wanted us to believe he didn't even know Nathan Gill.

With Plaid on 37% and Reform on 23% per YouGov, the seat projection is quite spectacular, much more so than what we got from previous polls.This is probably the closest any party can come to a majority of seats under the current electoral law and the current fragmentation of the Welsh political offer. Such a result, if it came true, would also make life considerably easier for First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth. He would not have to cajole two other parties into a government coalition, but just one. Given the direction taken by the Green Party of England and Wales under Che Polanski, the obvious common sense choice is to solicit Labour for a social-democratic coalition devoid of leanings towards extremist student politics. You may be about to end Labour's Hundred Years' Rule, but you still need them to get things done.

Again, the practical workings of the new electoral law mean that the allocation of seats in not proportional to the national vote shares. Which will surprise and offend only those who never bothered to test it on theoretical results like those from a voting intentions poll. Actually, an allegedly proportional system delivering unproportional results is not a surprise at all, or unheard of. In Germany, which has full national proportionality but with a 5% threshold, you can get a majority of seats on 42% of the popular vote. In Wales, without a threshold but with only six seats to allocate per constituency and eight parties plus independents competing, they who get 35% of the vote get three out of six seats, and they who get 45% of the vote get four out of six seats. This is the inescapable way the highest averages method works. Basic maths, nothing more.

You handed this town over to them on a plate. I just hope someday soon you don’t regret that.

(Aodhan McAllister, Blue Lights, 2025)

Feedback is the breakfast of champions. We love to hear it and if people think we’re getting it wrong, and we think that they’re right, far better to do the right thing rather than to spare one’s political blushes.

(Wes Streeting, 13 January 2026)

Finally, we also got Wave 4 of Savanta's Polling London, which included surveys of the next Mayoral and Assembly elections. Next, not incoming, as they will be held in 2028, but it's never too early to get a feeling of the shape of things to come. These elections may well be high-risk for Labour, as Sadiq Khan will be seeking a fourth term, while the two previous Mayors served only two each. Likewise, Labour have been the dominant party in the London Assembly since 2012, though never with a majority. Which does not really matter, as the Assembly is just summat of a watchdog, and the real powers are split between the Mayor and the Boroughs. The overall sequence of polls, which are few and far between, does not look really good for Labour and their dominance of the Imperial Capital's politics.

The first awkward element is that Mayoral voting intentions for Khan have sunk deeper than Assembly voting intentions for the collective Labour brand. It is actually quite amusing that the ultra-woke Khan is leaking a shitload of votes from both ends, to his LibDem and Green competitors in wokeness, while the generic Labour brand is far more resilient. It won't drive Khan into the ground anyway, thanks to Bozo Johnson who got first-past-the-post reinstated for the Mayoral election, so Khan will not have to beg for second preferences from his oppositions. The seat projection for the Assembly sheds an ironic light on the effects of the supposedly fairer Additional Members System. Thanks to the Conservatives's collapse, Labour would actually gain one constituency as Reform is not competitive enough yet for massive gains. Then the expected corrective effect of the London-wide list vote would be fairly minimal, allowing Labour to keep their dominant position.

The Mayoral and Assembly elections are two years away, but another deadline is just 87 days away. That's when the 32 London Borough Councils will be up in their entirety. There is no doubt Reform UK and their buddies in the billionaire-owned fishwraptariat will try and paint these locals as summat like midterms for Sadiq Khan. Which would be chronologically accurate, though politically nonsensical, but why wouldn't they try? The last time the 32 Borough Councils were up, Labour bagged 40% of the popular vote to the Conservatives' 25%, the LibDems' 15% and the Greens' 11%, and Reform UK was non-existent. If the Council votes reflect the findings of the Mayor and Assembly polls, which would be totally plausible, Labour could suffer crippling losses to Reform in the East, and to the Greens in Central London's Hipstershire. It is highly unlikely that either could actually gain control of a Borough, but they could push half a dozen Labour-controlled Boroughs into the dreaded 'no overall control' category, which would be symbolically just as damaging.

The head’s heavy. It’s the heaviest part of your body. So it sinks. And there’s nothing in there that will make it buoyant. I’m sure there’s a lot of heads lying at the bottom of the Thames.

(Dr Marie Cassidy, Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club, 2026)

Everyone has a right to express their opinions. However base and ignorant those opinions may be.

(Alphy Kottaram, Grantchester, 2026)

To inject some comic relief, probably, into the doomy and gloomy mood of the times, More In Common decided they had nothing better to do than probing us about who we think are British national treasures. I have a hunch they based their investigation on a pre-scripted closed list, to avoid people nominating Billie Eilish or Owen Jones. Though, to be bluntly honest, some of the picks are just as ridiculous. I guess this is because there is no official working definition of "national treasure", though I can easily imagine Bridget Phillipson working on one. There are some very obvious nominations in that poll, of course Attenborough tops it, but there are some odd choices who, in my world, qualify as national disgraces or national laughing stock. But that's just me.

Of course, the winner is not a surprise, But what is is that only seven people qualify as national treasures with the support of a majority of us. The way the positive rating fall very quickly, even already between Attenborough and Dench, is also quite amazing. We really fucking love the guy, don't we? And he has certainly earned it too. Then I guess it's also logical to have Sir Elton and Sir Paul pretty much tied. After all, both had their glory days two generations ago, and have released the same amount of utter crap since. But it's the glory days that count, innit? There are some interesting twists too in the second third of the list.

Who'd have thunk that French and Saunders would be more treasured than Grant, despite our yearly dose of the puke-inducing Love Actually? Then I find it fucking hilarious that Ed Sheeran, the bloke who never wrote more than three notes and two words in any of his shite corporate songs, is pretty much tied with Jeremy Clarkson, the new herald of the faux rural right from SW1. Just between you and me, I actually like Jezza a lot more than the ginger goblin but, again, that's just me. And Robbie Williams too, if you absolutely have to know. Just don't hold it against me. Then the real fun is in the bottom third of the list, and how some fail miserably despite having a high opinion of themselves.

It is really fucking fun that Romesh, Rylan and Stormzy get ratings that are mirror images of Attenborough's, and fully deservedly too. I am nevertheless surprised and disappointed by the low ratings for Danny Dyer and Bob Mortimer. Danny is more of a working class hero than Owen Jones and Zack Polanski will ever be, and Bob deserves a permanent seat on the Fourth Plinth for Would I Lie To You? alone. And both would have been a better Doctor Who than four of the six who starred in the 21st century revival. No shit, mates, you should have expected me to surprise you. Now, of course, we could philosophically debate the very notion of "national treasure", for days on end probably. Then I can't help wondering how some of the missing names would have fared. Would Brian Eno have done better than Ed Sheeran? Andy Murray than Gary Lineker? Victoria Coren-Mitchell than Ant and Dec? Or, if we draw from the shallow end of the gene pool, would James Acaster have done worse than Romesh? More In Common will need a longer list next year.

Why do we remember the past and not the future? What's inside a black hole? What is the nature of the universe?

How does it work? Which way is West in space? Is there sex in Heaven? Is it the best?

(Paul Kantner, The Light, 1998)

Paul Lorin Kantner

(San Francisco, 17 March 1941 - San Francisco, 28 January 2016)

Jeremy's Den

09/02/2026

The Sky Is No Limit

The Sky Is No Limit