Jeremy's Den: There Seems To Be Something Wrong With Our Bloody Party

If any sane man erects an edifice, or has great possessions, he protects them by insurance. The Navy is the insurance company of the economic unity of the Empire.

(Admiral of the Fleet David Beatty, 1st Earl Beatty, House of Lords, 1 July 1930)

Sea fighting is pure common sense. The first of all its necessities is speed, so as to be able to fight when you like, where you like, and how you like.

(Admiral of the Fleet John Fisher, letter to Winston Churchill, 16 January 1912)

110 years ago today, the Battle of Jutland ended after twelve hours of mélée between the Scotland-based British Grand Fleet and the German Hochseeflotte. It was a clear tactical defeat for the Royal Navy, losing 6,094 men, three battlecruisers, three armoured cruisers and eight destroyers. German losses were less than half that, despite being outnumbered 3-to-2 when the battle started. Some argue that it was a British strategic victory, because the overall picture of the war did not change. But you can just easily argue that it was a German strategic victory, because the overall picture of the war did not change. The British High Command gambled on changing the course of war decisively, by annihilating the German Navy, and they failed. The German High Command gambled on not changing the course of war significantly, by avoiding annihilation by the Royal Navy, and they succeeded. Adding insult to injury, the battle also demonstrated that German capital ship designs were vastly superior to the British ones. The biggest blow was that the battlecruiser concept, the brainchild of the First Sea Lord John Fisher, was deeply flawed.

The German designers had detected the flaws and turned the concept on its head, trading firepower for speed instead of trading protection for speed, and they were right. This was vividly proven by the very different fates of HMS Invincible, HMS Indefatigable and HMS Queen Mary on the British side, SMS Lützow and SMS Seydlitz on the German side, which were both hit by more and bigger shells than the British battlecruisers. No other large naval battle took place until the Armistice, which was fortunate for Germany, as they would never have won another fight after the Royal Navy was reinforced by a squadron of US Navy battleships in 1917. A planned Last Sortie in October 1918 was quashed by a massive mutiny at both major German bases, Wilhelmshaven and Kiel, which sparked the German Revolution that brought down the Second Reich and ended the war. The undefeated Hochseeflotte was surrendered to the United Kingdom under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and met an undignified end at the bottom of Scapa Flow just under three years after their one big battle, on 21 June 1919. In remembrance, today's soundtrack is by Swedish power-metal band Sabaton, with their album The War To End All Wars and some extras from their war-themed EPs and singles.

There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.
(Vice-Admiral David Beatty, 31 May 1916)

The issue of sanctions is always a very sensitive one, and there has been much discussion in the media and among politicians. We have conveyed our views on this matter to London.

(Volodymyr Zelenskyy, 20 May 2026)

Despite all the fracas in the Middle East, Ukraine is not forgotten. Trump's asinine war against Iran has had a totally unintended consequence. Ukraine has become a partner of the Arab Gulf states, offering them their drone technology that has proved so successful against Russian drones... provided by Iran. This is only one part of the formidable transformation of the Ukrainian defence industry, which has also developed long-rage missiles, able to strike targets deep into Russian territory. Volodia Zelenskyy has obviously learned all the lessons from the West's procrastination and cowardice, and Trump's betrayal. The weapons we wouldn't deliver, they are making them themselves. The targets Trump forbade, because it was bad for his future corrupt deals with the Russian Reich, they are hitting them because they don't have to ask for anyone's permission any more. This has already changed the course of the war, and even the most fanatical Russian propagandists know it. Russia is losing the war because Ukraine is destroying their one asset, the oil industry. This has also changed our perception of the war, as the sequence of YouGov polling since 2022 shows.

YouGov had not polled us about Ukraine since late February, and their last poll shows quite a shift in our view of who has the upper hand. We are not yet massively opining that Ukraine has the advantage, but Russia's lead has shrunk from 38% to 14% in three months, as Ukraine is not just obliterating refineries, but also cutting the orcs' vital supply lines to Crimea and Kherson Oblast. But the Russian population is more concerned with the humiliation of the 9 May Victory Parade being reduced to a farce, and with Ukraine's ability to strike hitherto protected regions around Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Reportedly, discontent is rising over the crumbling economy and skyrocketing inflation, and clearly targeting Putin himself, who is now as isolated and paranoid as Hitler in April 1945. This is just the moment our government chose to jump into deep shit, by easing sanctions on Russian fossil fuel. Which is of course not exactly what happened, but how the rabidly Starmerphobic mediatariat, those who never grill the Fash over their funding by the blood money of genocide, chose to narrate it. Starmer even had to reassure Ukraine about his real intentions, while our devoted pollsters YouGov and Opinium probed us about it in two significantly different ways.

YouGov kept it simple and straightforward, asking if we support or oppose loosening sanctions on Russian oil, and of course we oppose it. Opinium took the scenic route, with a wordy convoluted question that probably muddied the waters more than it clarified what is at stake. They went... take a deep breath... The government has temporarily relaxed some sanctions on Russian oil products, allowing imports of diesel and jet fuel refined from Russian oil in third countries such as India and Turkey. The government says the change is needed to help protect fuel supplies and avoid further increases in energy and travel costs following disruption in the Middle East. Critics say the move weakens pressure on Russia and risks undermining support for Ukraine. Do you think this was the right or wrong decision by the government? And we are split, with just marginally more opining that it was wrong. There is a very obvious reason for this newfound lack of solidarity with Ukraine, which YouGov were quick to identify and poll.

Aye, it's all about keeping the price of oil down amidst the shockwaves of disruption caused by the Orange Baboon's totally cretinous war on Iran. We want cheap refuels, and do not care about the consequences, but are again caught in a web of contradictions between our principles and more down-to-earth immediate concerns. This is ironically in marked contrast with our attitudes in the early months of Russia's imperialist aggression of Ukraine. Back then, multiple polls showed we were ready to endure some hardships to prove our full support of Ukraine, including rising energy and fuel prices. But four years of untamed cost of living crisis have taken their toll, so we now approve of Starmer choosing political expediency over principles, even if this brand of populist appeasement comes too late after an electoral debacle he will not recover from. Of course, the truth is that we did not actually lift any existing sanctions, but only eased and delayed the enforcement of new harsher ones. Something the Rump Tories and the Fash conveniently overlook to crucify Starmer again, not realising they are flogging a dead horse. And the nuance obviously means very little to our Ukrainian friends, who are left with a bitter sense of disappointment and feel betrayed. Again.

What can one say? The UK are treating the symptoms instead of addressing the causes. Russia will channel all the extra money it makes into the war against us.

(Vladyslav Vlasiuk, 20 May 2026)

The view that single-sex spaces should be protected for biological women only is a minority view, and quite a small minority view, actually.
(Andy Burnham, 2022)

Andy Burnham is just the last one to fuck around and find out that old statements die hard in the age of viral disclosure. Nothing ever disappears from the internet, it just lies in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to bite you in the arse. For Andy, the right moment was obviously his candidacy for the Makerfield by-election. A video, dating back to 2022, was posted on Twitter to hold him accountable for his point of view on trans issues, which was wrong then and remains wrong today. He was in denial of reality when he stated that only "quite a small minority" opposed the invasion of women's single-sex spaces by men, as polls had already discredited that claim. He is even wronger today, and we have a poll conducted by J.L. Partners on behalf of Sex Matters to prove it. It was published in March, but no similar poll has been conducted since, probably because most pollsters are unwilling to touch a "controversial" issue, so it is the people's final answer for now. And it shows overwhelming support for separate single-sex facilities in all relevant contexts, Andy definitely has to learn how to read the room, and polls.

The replies to all five questions are remarkably similar, proving there is no "grey area" in the public's mind. So we can take the average of these replies as a representative picture of where all the usual demographics and politics stand. Which is a massive consensus to support single-sex spaces against the nightmarish concept of "mixed-sex" facilities. Even the TikTok Generation, Londoners and Green voters, the three categories usually most likely to endorse the most ridiculous Articles of Faith of the woke doxa, are conclusively on the side of single-sex spaces. I will not even call that common sense, as the Fash have appropriated the concept of common sense to propel their own exclusionary and bigoted agenda, but that's pretty much what it is. This is just the very logical point of view that the Supreme Court ruling is right, even if the factphobic woke fanatics hate it. Sex is real, fantasised gender identities are not. Protection trumps inclusion, so men of all shapes and shades have no place in women's spaces. Simples.

It is actually quite funny that this remainder of Burnham's shady past emerged just a day before the long-delayed EHRC guidance on single-sex spaces following the landmark Supreme Court ruling that reminded the hard-of-understanding that only sex is real. It is not surprising that Minister for Women and Equalities Bridget Phillipson, a long-time affiliate of the transcult, delayed it for months, as it is a clear victory for women's rights and safety, and a defeat for the trans lobby. Clearly, the Supreme Court ruling left no option but what The Guardian labels a "blanket exclusion". Unsurprisingly, it has already triggered hyperbolic testerical reactions from the most extremist drama queens in the trans lobby, and I can't wait for Shitweasel's outraged column about the white colonialist oppression of the most overprotected and overrepresented minority in British history, the ones his friends in Gaza and Tehran throw off rooftops with their head under their arm. There remains a potential spanner in the cogs, though. Phillipson will have to enforce this guidance by a statutory instrument, which means secondary legislation using the proverbial "Henry VIII powers". But there is no deadline for that, so how can we be sure she won't again procrastinate to avoid hurting the feelings of some men-in-womanface?

I understand that a cervix is something you can have after various procedures, hormone treatment, all the rest of it.

(David Lammy, 2021)

If trans women use men’s toilets, they will be subjected to humiliation, abuse and violence. Anyone with any sense knows this. Which is why in practice trans women will not use men’s toilets, and will just increasingly be driven out of society.

(Owen Jones, 24 May 2026)

There is something to be said about Shitweasel's consistency and continuity of thought since his vociferous conversion to the Trans Revolution eleven years ago. Of course, this is continuity in hyperbole, fabrications and denial of reality, but nobody's perfect, are they? He totally doubles down on it in his most recent tweet about "trans loos", which paints a totally binary picture of the issue and conveniently ignores the third option that has been on the table for years. The provision of "gender neutral", or unisex, facilities alongside strictly single-sex facilities for men and women. You have to wonder why the trans cult has always rejected that alternative. Could it be because it never was about "just wanting to pee", but always about invading and appropriating women's spaces? This is a rare example of a movement dominated by its most fanatical extremists, because they are the ones with the biggest social media footprint, from which they hound down wrongthinkers and excommunicate dissenters. But the Sex Matters poll shows that the idea of a compromise solution involving the "third space" has gained traction with the general population.

You can hardly describe the Great British Public as fascist transphobes when a third support an alternative option that would assuage your concerns, but the real issue is that trans activists are absolutists, encouraged by the establishment media cuddling them and the cultural elite appeasing them out of cowardice. They do not seek compromise, but absolute unquestioning submission. For them it's all or nothing, and right now they've got nothing. The crosstabs, based on the average replies to the nine items about the use of facilities, clearly show that absolutist activists are really skating on quicksand, with little support in any demographic for their "we pee where we want" stance. The TikTok Generation and Londoners lean towards the "third space" option, Green voters are split. When even the grassroots of British wokeism stray away from the most radical option and towards compromise, you know you have lost. But it will surely take another decade for the most radicalised extremists to come to terms with it. Brace yourselves for more performative whining and squealing in the meantime.

To relativise and contextualise, as the woke always urge us to do, the infamous Census of 2021 found that 262,138 persons in England and Wales self-identified as a "gender identity" different from their "sex assigned at birth", to use the jargon, or 0.54% of the adult population. The Office for National Statistics then pulled this part of the Census, because the convolutedly jargonising wording of the question could be easily misunderstood, and they had to admit the number was wildly overestimated. But I downloaded the original uncensored file for later reference, which comes in very handy now. In the same time-frame, the Department for Work and Pensions estimated that 16.1 million people in the UK suffered from a disability, or 24% of the population, with half of these being mobility issues. Fifty times as many as the fashionably over-cuddled lot performative activists want our whole lives to revolve around. But have you heard Shitweasel campaigning for the rights of disabled people with just one tenth of the energy he devotes to men-in-womanface? Aye, me neither.

Claiming that only women have a cervix is something that shouldn't be said. It is not right.

(Keir Starmer, The Andrew Marr Show, September 2021)

At Jutland, Lejonet Från Norden, The Lion From The North, was HMS Lion from the Forth, Beatty's flagship

Labour’s high command gambled that a vicious smear campaign against the Greens would lower their vote. Yet Zack Polanski’s insurgents look well positioned to replace Labour in large swathes of its urban heartland.

(Owen Jones, The Guardian, 8 May 2026)

Of all the titbits of information you need to make sense of local elections in England, the ones who always surface the slowest are the number of votes cast for each competing party at Council level. Of course the votes cast in each ward are readily available on the Councils' websites over the weekend after the elections, so you can just collect the numbers from there and let Excel collate the aggregate results for each Council. I did that once, and it's tedious, time-consuming and inefficient, as you don't get the full picture until two weeks after the fact. Or you can count on the assembled forces of Wokopedia and let somebody else do the maths, so you get the full picture summat like two weeks after the fact. Not much better but, at least, it saves you a lot of grunt work. So, after a wee while, here is what Wokopedia says we have for this year's English locals. 18 million votes were cast, which does not mean that 18 million persons voted, due to the high number of multi-member wards where you have to vote twice or thrice. The actual number of persons who voted is not recorded, but plausibly around 10 million.

The BBC's numbers are different because they do not care about the actual results, but publish "projected vote shares" that are allegedly representing the results of a general election in England, if the same voting patterns as in the areas that actually voted were duplicated nationwide. Based on a secret formula that probably owes as much to Harry Potter as to John Curtice. We can also have the results by type of Council, from which I have removed the London Boroughs, as it would have shown the exact same numbers as the London Region. It also represents what happened in England outwith Greater London, an alternative and probably more accurate view of England's current mood. Remember that the very varied electoral cycles across England mean that the Greater London region was overrepresented this year, accounting for 37% of votes cast.

The London-less results clearly confirm these elections were a massive debacle for Labour, but also that Kemi Badenoch's claim that the Rump Tories emerged unscathed is chemically pure bullshit. They were hit by the Fash Tsunami just as hard as Labour, and only the LibDems could reasonably argue that they suffered lesser wounds. If I had to single out the most significant result, that would certainly be the massive fall of the Labour vote in the Metropolitan Boroughs, those representing the big conurbations in the North and the West Midlands. Many were more than just Labour heartlands, they were the closest England had to one-party rule, and it has totally fallen apart now. They also illustrate the contradictory trends that combine to doom Labour in urban England, the fashionably woke middle class turning to the Greens and the socially conservative working class switching to Reform. Even Andy Burnham will have a hard time finding the recipe to counter both simultaneously.

The results of the local elections put that recent talk of the “Kemi bounce” into perspective. It just hasn’t been enough to put the party on the front foot in tangible, electoral terms.

(Henry Hill, The Guardian, 8 May 2026)

Even where local government is popular, voters view its representation on the ballot as a synecdoche for the national party and its detested leader. The consequences of this toxic association are more significant than power manoeuvres at the top of the Labour party.

(Jason Okundaye, The Guardian, 8 May 2026)

We can also dig deeper into the results of each region within the big meta-regions. In the North, what we see is pretty similar to what we get in generic voting intentions polls, including bigger vote shares for Reform in the North East and for the Greens in Yorkshire. You can decode that in two different ways. Either opine that local elections do not deliver a too distorted picture of the electorate's mood after all. Or that opinion polls are not as bad as their reputation. Of course both can be true at once and probably are. And both are a massive slap in the face with a wet fish for Labour, so the real question becomes whether taking one up the arse will wake them up or not. Honestly, it would be a fucking shame if it did not.

In the Midlands, what was once Labour territory and then transitioned into Lab-Con battlegrounds, has again morphed into fertile ground for Reform. But the results in the East Midlands should be handled with care as only two Councils held elections there this year there, both in Lincolnshire. That's just 62.000 votes cast in a region where 2.1 million were cast at the 2024 election, so can hardly be considered representative. There is no such problem in the West Midlands where 1.8 million votes were cast, so plausibly about 1 million voters, which compares favourably with the 2.4 million votes cast at the 2024 general. The results for the West Midlands are quite close to what we have seen in the North. Unsurprisingly, as the Councils that held elections mostly fall in the same category, urban areas that were ancestrally dominated by Labour. The harder they fall...

In the London-less South, that is increasingly more Midsomer England than Middle England, the contradictions abound. First, we can set aside the South West, where only 333k votes were cast due to the small number of Councils holding elections, and focus on just the South East and East Anglia, with 3 million and 2 million votes cast respectively. The actual number of humans involved is probably about half that if you consider the number of multi-member wards, which remains a really representative sample for both regions, where 4.3 million and 2.8 million people respectively voted in 2024. There are again conflicting patterns between these two regions. East Anglia is more permeated by the turquoise infestation than any part of the North, which is quite an achievement. Being on the lookout for small boats that were never there probably explains it. But the South East display more resistance, especially as the LibDems have quite successfully transmogrified into the Midsomer Party, keeping Reform at bay while quashing the Tories in the counties most representative of the traditional Leafy Blue South.

By the way, you may have noticed that I did not track Restore Britain, Advance UK, Your Party and the Workers Party separately this time. There is a reason for that. Out of 18 million votes cast, Restore Britain bagged 15,610. Advance UK 1,959, Your Party 5.753 and the Workers Party 22,211. Of course, this is mostly because they did field candidates in only a small number of wards. Which is in itself a clear sign of their insignificance and irrelevance. The largest Council in England is Birmingham with 101 seats. If you cannot find 101 persons ready to be your standard bearers in a city of 1.2 million, you should probably reconsider your career plans. But just don't forget the most existential question. Who will take care of the potholes?

The results show the Liberal Democrats have now made gains in eight successive rounds of local elections. That progress has not always grabbed the headlines, but the party accumulates year after year.

(Mark Pack, The Guardian, 8 May 2026)

This money was given to me so that I would be safe and secure for the rest of my life. Christopher is an ardent supporter who is deeply concerned for my safety.

(Nigel Farage, The Telegraph, 29 April 2026)

The very serious issue of donations to politicians and parties has been dragged into the public's attention thanks to Benito Farage and his shady relationship with Thailand-based cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne, who gifted Nigel £5m out of the goodness of his heart, and was just as surprised as you and me by Nigel's conversion to massive support of cryptocurrency. There is conclusive evidence that Nigel has lied through his teeth about this donation from day one. He gave different versions of the reason why he received the dosh, and huffed and puffed about what it was used for. Only liars do that, as people who don't lie also don't have to jump from one "truth" to the next overnight, as Nigel's role model Trump does. Of course, it had to be polled, addressing the global issue of political funding and not Benito personally, as he would have squealed and sued. Survation beat the rest of the pollstertariat to it, for our enlightenment and introspection.

It is quite flabbergasting that a fifth of us think that our current system of campaign funding is fair, and that a pollster could choose to even label it "broadly fair". Honestly, it is the second most corrupt in the allegedly democratic world after the United States, and the third most corrupt overall if you add the Russian Reich to the mix. It is riddled with loopholes and anyone with a brain, or good lawyers and accountants, can easily circumvent all the alleged safeguards against interference by hostile foreign powers and corporations. A thorough overhaul is a matter of urgency, which all political parties are reluctant to consider, because they all benefit from the current system. The Survation poll also shows that the Great British Public are not really sure what should be done.

This is really odd result, as we have a majority agreeing that the system is flawed, but we don't have one ready to seriously reform it. Sadly, this kind of replies give politicians an oven-ready excuse to sit on their hands and do jack shit. Immobilism by lack of popular pressure. It is indeed quite alarming when we know what the most damaging consequence of this corrupt system has been. Brexit, the most appalling self-inflicted catastrophe since the birth of Ed Sheeran, funded by Trumpian Christo-fascists and Putin's blood money. The millions of pounds donated by hostile foreign interests to the Vote Leave campaign should have rung alarm bells ten times the size of Big Ben, and it just didn't happen. The billionaire-owned media were under standing orders to brush the story under the rug as quickly as possible, and the politicariat maintained the omerta over events that would otherwise have implicated a Prime Minister and half his Cabinet. And that's how we find ourselves today having to endure Benito's lame denial of his £5m bribe.

This was given to me on an unconditional basis, completely unconditional basis. But frankly, it was given as a reward for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years.

(Nigel Farage, The Sun, 13 May 2026)

Both the possible motive of the giver and the use to which the gift is to be put should be considered. If there is any doubt, the benefit should be registered.

(Code of Conduct for Members of Parliament, 2023 update)

If you want evidence of the toxicity of a system based solely on donations, you just have to look at the United States, where private and corporate funding is unlimited since the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling of 2010. This year, five elections will decide the fate of the United States Senate, in Alaska, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. $158m, or £117m, have already been spent on these five elections, when the actual campaign has barely begun. Almost all that dosh was spent on just the primaries, and that's already more than our whole general election of 2024, which cost £94.5, or £102 in today's money. If you want another reference, the French Presidential election of 2022, where campaign funding is regulated in a very similar way to ours, cost €83.5m, which would be about £80m in today's money, factoring in exchange rates and inflation. But what are we willing to do to avoid the gigantic campaign spending seen in the USA, where the whole of the 2024 elections cost $14.8bn? Aye, that's billions, and would be around £12bn in 2026 money.

We very conclusively agree that donations to political parties should be capped, which definitely goes in the right direction. But that's just the theory, like when you totally agree "in principle" to eat less crap and exercise more, and do neither. So this definitely deserved a follow-up question about where we would set the limit. As we all know, the Devil wears Prada in the details, and we fucking fell into that trap head on. Possibly because Survation did not offer a spontaneous reply to this, but the choice between a few pre-scripted options. This may have been a bit leading, but does not fully explain why so few of us chose the lowest cap. "In principle", we do agree to regulate things, as we always do, but we tell a very different story in practice. Politicos should not really worry about weak hints of a reforming mood. At the end of the day, we would be content with only weak reform.

So we would have summat of an acceptable compromise if donations to politicos were capped at £50k per annum per capita, which is a fucking joke. It is some 25% higher than the median full time salary, so it would not remove the power of influence from the entitled wealthy few. It would just reduce it, as the million-pound donations that make headlines are not the real problem, as they are few and far between. Mid-range donations in the region of £100k are more of a problem because more people can afford them and thusly acquire a voice in policy-making. You also have to contextualise and relativise this in relation to campaign spending rules. If a Parliament sits for its full 60-month term, the so called "long campaign" funding is currently capped at £54k per constituency. Once an election is called, "short campaign" rules take over, and the cap is roughly £22k per constituency, counting from the day after dissolution and in addition to the amounts already spent before dissolution. A £50k cap amounts to allowing one individual to fund at least two thirds of campaign expenses in one constituency, which may not sound excessive, but actually is. Obviously, we can do better than this.

If you want to have a discussion with me at some point about illegally obtained information that should not be in the public domain we can talk about it.

(Nigel Farage, LBC Radio, 8 May 2026)

It hasn’t come up on the doorstep. It is a Westminster bubble story.

(David Bull, BBC News, 6 May 2026)

Now, let's just imagine that we do have the ability to actually decide the future of political funding and seven-figure donations from half a planet away. How could we possibly do that? Some smartass politico would surely come up with the obvious oven-ready option, which Survation actually mentioned in their poll, a referendum. This thing, ye ken, that does not exist in the Realm's real constitutional order and has been used only thrice since the French Invasion... oops, sorry... the Norman Conquest. That does sound like an issue for a fucking referendum, doesn't it? Just because it would trigger insane amounts of demagoguery from whining politicos, which would be a welcome distraction from wall-to-wall fitba. If, Dog forbid, there was a referendum on campaign funding, a sizeable majority of us would vote to ban donations to political parties and candidates, if you exclude undecideds. Which is just a wee smitch extreme, and not proposed by anyone actually, not even me and the Greens, who got £326k that way last year. Why the fuck would we do that, when literally nobody anywhere in the whole wide world has done it?

Obviously, there are pros and cons to both modes of political funding, and we should explore them if we ever had to make a decision on the issue, which we will never be allowed to. This is where Survation should have come up with a list of plausible pros and cons for each option, and asked their panel to rank them. But they did not, and shrunk the investigation to just one item for each option, and specifically one that reflects negatively on it. There is actually a vague sense of consistency and continuity when half of us select wealthy donors gaming the system as their worst fear. It is a real concern, as the entitled über-rich already do just that every day with every million they have. But the opposite option, the one supposed to justify opposition to public funding, is frankly fucking ridiculous.

Rejecting a fairer system because it may benefit someone you don't like is not the most convincing excuse, so maybe we should look at the proverbial best international practice just one door down. In France, 20 miles off the Turquoise Cliffs Of Dover, donations to parties and candidates are capped at €7,500 per annum per capita, or £6,477. It works, and is consensually accepted, because they also have a robust system of public financing of political parties. Funding by taxpayers' money, of course, which cost €64m in 2025, or roughly £56m. In the UK, public funding goes only to the opposition parties, as if the government party grew magic money trees in Number Ten's back garden, and amounts to £36m for 2025-2026. The French system is arguably fairer than ours, so what have we got to lose if we try it on? Nothing, but when there is no will, there is no way. So, for the moment, we are left with watching the new episodes of The Continuing Story Of Cameo Nige, where he comes as clean as Peter Murrell about what's become of the money. Or not, it depends on how long he can stand pressure without breaking.

In the meanwhile, we have certainly not seen the last of The Curious Incident Of Nigel And The Five Million. Questions will have to be answered, now that the highest level of Government is involved, and brutally moving the whole matter into national security territory. Benito is obviously not helping his case with various statements that sound like just another floor to his ever growing House Of Lies. First there is this story about his mansion is Surrey, allegedly bought with his fee for eating kangaroo anuses on ITV. I would be extremely surprised if the terminal losers who agree to humiliate themselves on I'm A Celebrity were paid £1.4m, but who knows? Then came the cloak-and-dagger fairytale about Russian hackers leaking the evidence of his mischief, which is credible only for those who missed the episode where the Fash benefited from copious amounts of Putin's blood money. Reform's talking point that it should not be investigated because it is a private matter is fucking ridiculous, and shows how embarrassed they are, because they know Benito totally made it up and it's another fucking lie. Benito's next stop may well be a recall petition and a by-election in the constituency he never visits. If we are lucky, it will soon be never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee for the Clacton Führer. Bon débarras.

Can you confirm that none of the profits which contributed to you £5 million personal donation derived from transactions with Russian state-linked energy companies?

(John Healey MP, letter to Nigel Farage, 16 May 2026)

Governments may think and say as they like, but force cannot be eliminated, and it is the only real and unanswerable power. We are told that the pen is mightier than the sword, but I know which I would choose.

(Adrian Carton de Wiart. The Unkillable Soldier, Memoirs, 1950)

You have probably guessed it already without my help, thanks to all the recent political gesticulation, but the trend of voting intentions polls have not improved for Labour. The only consolation, in that bleak landscape where the Fash are still riding high, is that the Green vote has visibly declined since the VE-Eve elections. What looked like an irresistible ascent towards 20% of the popular vote is now back down to around 15%, which makes a fucking difference in seat projections. But it does not really make anything better for Labour eventually. Being endlessly tied with the Rump Tories is just as bad and lethal as being tied in a three-way with the Greens on top. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand the potential for disaster of the current political fragmentation, but it looks more and more like the electorate don's give a shit, or why would we confirm it poll after poll? Or do we just have a very twisted sense of priorities?

As you all know, the current narrative is that this Highway To Hell is all Keir Starmer's fault. Actually, his major flaw is not knowing how to properly handle a landslide by default. It was a situation that typically required an extra amount of boldness to turn that into real popular adhesion, which could have easily been achieved by spontaneously enforcing some measures he had to agree to later under pressure, like repealing the two-child benefit cap, or banning trail hunting without loopholes or exemptions, in the first month of the new term. Starmer is a man without ideological foundations, which many are quick to translate as "without principles", and also lacking political nous. He wouldn't even be fit for a top Civil Service job, which requires a tiny amount of the former and a big dose of the latter. Sadly, this has made him the scapegoat we love to punch, and his favourability ratings have deteriorated accordingly, without even the pretence of a honeymoon in the opening phase of his term. This has genuinely reached the point where nothing can save him anymore, even if it's a wee smitch unfair. The sentence has already been handed, and Andy Burnham will just be the executioner.

Now, if you want more evidence of the unfathomable incompetence and stupidity of the Starmerite clique, I give you Harriet Harman, opining that Andy Burnham should call a general election if he becomes Prime Minister, just to appease the squealing and squeaking Fash. What the fucking fuck? I don't remember anyone demanding that of Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak, but Benito would surely feel emboldened to demand it of Burnham by the incredibly complaisant environment the mediatariat has created around him. Let's just hope that Andy would tell Harriet to fuck off, kindly and respectfully. In the meanwhile, Thank Dog again for YouGov, always ready to enlighten us about the most important issue of the week, and a quintessentially British introspection that needed solving here and now. Only they got that one wrong. Tikka masala in not British. Everybody knows it's fucking Scottish, Glaswegian precisely.

Britain is in the eye of a global storm. When the world changes, we have to change. And in the two years since the general election, the world has changed fundamentally.

(David Miliband, 23 May 2026)

If we spend all our time talking about who, not what, we’re going to miss the point. The "what" questions are absolutely key.

(David Miliband, 23 May 2026)

The Realm's Big Beautiful Matter, to change the reference for once, will soon be who we really want to be the Prime Minister. If all goes according to plan, that is, as we still have to deal with that little bump on the road in Makerfield. The pollstertariat don't give a shit as they already assume Andy Burnham will clear the hurdle, ride his moral high horse straight to Downing Street and throw his gauntlet at Keir Starmer's face. Of course, this also assumes quite intrepidly that Wes Streeting will just lie down in wait for Burnham's belly rubs and a seat at the reshuffled Cabinet table. Which I have a hunch will never happen, as Burnham would rather offer that seat to Angela Rayner than to Wee Wes. Especially after Wes' latest policy statement, which you would think was tailored sur mesure to piss off anybody to the left of Ed Davey. Of course we have been polled about that, just not by YouGov but by J.L. Partners, and we do prefer Andy. No shit, mates.

Interestingly, the feeling is not consensual, and some significant demographics still prefer Keir. But these are just half of the crosstabs chosen for that poll, and the other half also delivers some interesting information. I am just not totally sure that ethnicity is relevant here, but it's in the poll, so why not display it too? But the best bits are obviously the preferences of graduates and Labour voters. Oddly, the poll does not include a breakdown by social grade, which would have been the most relevant of all here, so we will have to guess where the class divide would have taken us.

So the allegedly most educated people in the UK, even if a degree has never been a solid proof of that, lean towards keeping Starmer while the non-graduates want Burnham. It is probably simplistic to assume that this education divide also reflects the class divide, but that's all we have. Besides, working class for Andy vs middle class for Keir totally makes sense, considering the narratives that have been constructed around them. Then the most flabbergasting part is obviously Labour voters choosing to keep Keir. It's choosing to not put a safer pair of hands in the driver's seat because the lad who has already crashed your hopes into a brick wall can be trusted to to crash you future into a brick wall next time. This really sounds insane, doesn't it? I would totally understand Reform or Green voters wanting to keep Starmer, as he is now their best asset, but Labour voters? What the fuck?

Prime Minister is a job that needs preparation, a network of political allies and a close-knit team of advisers, which Keir Starmer has discovered to his cost.

(Rowena Mason, The Guardian, 23 May 2026)

Being the Messiah is a very demanding occupation. But I guess someone’s got to do it. It must be annoying, though, to have to live your life to a soundtrack of Oasis playing in the background.

(John Crace, The Guardian, 21 May 2026)

The pollstertariat love to play with hypothetical scenarios, just for the fun of it and the startled headlines they can generate. The only surprise is that nobody has yet tested what our votes at the next general would be if Wes Streeting was the Prime Minister, or if Angela Rayner was. But we already have two polls surveying what could happen, not what would, if Andy Burnham was in the driver's seat. One was fielded by Deltapoll, who must be a wee smitch rusty as they have conducted only nine generic polls in the twenty-three months since the last general. The other one was fielded by More In Common, who have been a weekly contributor to the accumulation of polls over the same period. Both predict much better results for a Burnham-led Labour, with an extra 130 seats in both cases, though we would still get a hung Parliament with even odds of Reform still emerging as the first party.

There is an intriguing similarity between the two polls. Burnham would not snatch that many votes from Reform, which should be his logical goal, but from the Liberal Democrats and Greens. Just look at the More In Common poll, the one I am inclined to consider the more reliable, all things considered. That's 2% shaved off the Fash, but 2% off the LibDems and 3% off the Greens. While I can only welcome the weakening of the Greens, reshuffling votes on the left, instead of gaining back significant numbers from the right, is definitely not the surest path to full recovery for the Labour brand. Even the current best case scenario would leave Labour dozens of seats short of a majority, with their only option being a coalition with the LibDems. Probably not the sunlit uplands we dream of. The More In Common poll also tells us where the Burnham Effect would be most effective, which is unsurprisingly the North West, Yorkshire and the West Midlands. Former Labour strongholds that have since fallen for Reform's lies and demagoguery, with just the North East oddly not following the pattern. But this is clearly not good enough if the road to recovery also includes snatching votes off the LibDems in the South, and off the Greens in London. Can things really only get better for Labour under Burnham? Not sure. Yet.

Whatever hypothetical polls say, now is the time for Andy Burnham to clarify what he really stands for. Because, since he officially became Labour's candidate in Makerfield, the King Of The North has been playing The Equivocation Game. Does anyone really know what "Manchesterism" actually means? Does Burnham himself know? What the fuck does "business-friendly socialism" mean? This is just the kind of oxymoron you come up with when you cannot define the foundations of your politics, and hope that the soundbite value will hide the total vacuousness of the concept. A perfect example of the Burnham Mirage is the much-publicised Bee Network, which is anything but public ownership of a key service. Is this the template Burnham has in mind for the criminally profiteering water companies in England? If so, it falls short by a million miles of the real solution, which is nationalisation without compensation. Burnham is acutely aware that what he must say to win in Makerfield is substantially different from what he will need to say to win a general election. How long will the Burnham Illusion stand the test of scrutiny, until the public realise that positioning himself to the left of Starmer is just a campaign stunt, and his true politics are in fact more to the right?

If it had been left to him, Andy Burnham would have started building HS2 in Manchester. Not wasting money down south on tunnels under fields to appease a Tory community.

(John Crace, The Guardian, 21 May 2026)

The true story of Milunka Savić, the most decorated woman in history

And now Andy Burnham, in his hope to replace a Prime Minister who keeps U-turning, has U-turned on his Brexit position to kind of be a friend to all sides here.

(Phil Wang, Have I Got News For You?, 22 May 2026)

Today's snapshot of voting intentions includes the last six polls published by Ipsos, J.L Partners, Opinium, YouGov, More In Common and Find Out Now between the 20th and the 27th of May. That's a super-sample of 11,458, or twice the number of votes Your Party bagged at the VE-Eve locals all across England. That was 0.03% of all votes cast, so clearly not the success story of 2026, especially as the fasher-than-fash Restore Britain got three times as many votes while standing only in Great Yarmouth. But let's not speak ill of the dead, as Your Party pretty much are now, and let's focus on Keir Starmer's Great Matter, the state in which he will leave the Realm to Andy Burnham. Well, we still have the Fash on 27%, which is an average performance by European standards. Their bandmates are doing better in France, but not as well in Germany. That's the two countries where Nigel Farage's bloodline, his current partner and his passport come from, in case you question the relevance of the reference. Two from France and one from Germany.

This snapshot also predicts a massive meltdown for Labour, though you have to wonder how many seats would be handed on a silver platter to the Fash by the Greenies' vanity candidacies. I have done a precise headcount only for London, and we will burn that bridge when we come to it, and my educated guess is about 80 to 100 GB-wide. No thanks Dog for the loopy loonies. Again, we see the LibDems showing extraordinary resilience against the Fash's surge, even gaining seats on their already exceptional performance of 2024. Methinks there is a very simple reason for that. We The People have a thousand reasons to hate and loathe the Conservatives, a thousand reasons to hate and loathe Labour, but no reason whatsoever to hold a grudge against Mister Ed's Band. So they have hit the motherlode, after years of trying in vain. The middle-aged rural bourgeoisie from the Midsomer Universe, who think the Conservatives are terribly passé, but the Greens are too osé for them. And this lot are here to stay for a long long time, which guarantees the LibDems a clean buffer of votes for a half-dozen general elections to come. In the end, ye ken, it's always the quiet ones...

The thing about U-turns is, I mean, it's always portrayed as, "Ah, you've changed your mind". But that's a good thing, isn't it? Sometimes, you know, as reality changes. Otherwise, you know, we'd still be appeasing Hitler.

(Paul Merton, Have I Got News For You?, 22 May 2026)

To be deceived and let down by a husband I loved and trusted has caused me acute pain. Why he acted as he did is, and always will be, beyond my comprehension.

(Nicola Sturgeon, 25 May 2026)

Scotland has a long history of a truly special relationship with the Royal Navy, predating the establishment of HMNB Clyde at Faslane by half a century. Permanent Royal Navy bases in Scotland were considered as early as 1904, with Rosyth and Invergordon making the final shortlist. The naval base at Invergordon opened in 1912, but Scapa Flow became the main base of the Grand Fleet when war broke out, because it was larger and more remote. Two squadrons of battleships remained permanently based on Cromarty Firth, where 8 out of 28 British battleships present at Jutland came from. Then came the Royal Naval Dockyard Rosyth, which opened for business in March 1916, though the base itself had been used by the Battle Cruiser Fleet since February 1915. Scapa Flow fell into disuse after 1919 due to hazards created by the scuttled Hochseeflotte and priority given to clearing the wrecks, which precluded fleet operations, but was again selected as the main base of the Home Fleet in 1939. The Navy stuck to their choice even after the shocking sinking of HMS Royal Oak, just six weeks into the Second World War. In the interwar years, Invergordon became the main Royal Navy base on the North Sea, and was the site of the Mutiny Of 1931, the one and only true working class rebellion in the history of the Navy. Today, only the now privatised Rosyth Dockyard remains, as the assembly shed and repair shop for leaky aircraft carriers.

Enough history for now, as it takes us far away from Scotland's Great Matter, which is obviously the two incoming by-elections for Commons seats in Aberdeen South and Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, left vacant by Stephen Flynn and Stephen Gethins after their election to the Scottish Parliament. Neither has been polled so far, as the mediatariat and pollstertariat must feel that it would be a fucking waste of good money. It's hard to imagine how the SNP could lose either, and both my model and Electoral Calculus concur, though with different numbers. My projection is based on the actual candidates standing in both constituencies, as known at the time of writing.

It is of course a wee smitch shocking that the SNP are using the Aberdeen South by-election as summat of a repêchage for a former MP who was defeated in his own constituency at the last general election. But I suppose that's how all Old Boys' Clubs work, even in the hub of progressivism. The selection of a woman as the SNP candidate in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry does not actually contradict this, as she is a party insider currently working as a spad for their Commons group. We haven't had any Full Scottish since the VE-Eve election, but the last quartet published before it show the SNP remaining the dominant force in Scottish politics. Cracks appear in the mirror every now and then, though, which is not surprising when you consider that winning an unprecedented fifth term concealed a really lacklustre performance in both votes and seats. It is therefore not really surprising that the very last poll shows a loss of steam, while confirming the massive serendipity effect associated with first-past-the-post in a very fragmented political landscape.

The next question is how the Scottish public will react to Peter Murrell's guilty plea for the embezzlement of £400,310.65 during his tenure as the SNP's Chief Executive. You just have to love the clinical precision of our Courts on this matter, but they probably have a legal obligation to leave no penny unturned. John Swinney may be gutted and feel a "level of personal horror, betrayal, that is difficult to properly convey", but the SNP never had a genuine aggiornamento or any sort of critical assessment of the Sturgeon years, specifically the less stellar final years after the 2017 general election debacle and the appropriation of the party's power centre by a small clique of radicalised woke extremists, that was perpetuated during the atrocious and mercifully short Yousaf years. Those were the years that turned a social-democratic pro-Independence party into a woke-liberal devolutionist party, and all those who were complicit in it still occupy the top rungs of the party. My best educated guess, though, is that there will be no consequences. Operation Branchform started almost five years ago and folded last year, so that's lots of bad blood under the bridge. I am quite sure nobody wants to bathe in Schadenfreude over Murrell's fate like a golden retriever in a pool of pig shit, and I am not even sure anyone really cares about the sentence he gets. But Sturgeon pleading blissful ignorance and cosplaying victim on the BBC will surely not help mend the SNP's image, and they kind of deserve it.

Peter Murrell has shown utter contempt for the high public trust placed in him. He abused his privileged position with access to Scottish National Party funds to divert cash into his own accounts and bankroll the lavish lifestyle he craved but could not afford.

(Stuart Houston, Assistant Chief Constable in charge of Operation Branchform, 25 May 2026)

This is a change byelection. British politics needs to change its tired old script and the people of Makerfield are helping us write one.

(Andy Burnham, 22 May 2026)

The Green Party Of England and Wales really are the fucking gift that keeps on giving. They had a candidate for the Makerfield by-election. Then, nine hours later, they didn't. First, they used the well-oiled "family reasons" excuse, then had to admit the real reason after first-hand evidence accumulated. He was sacked for being an anti-Semite, with such compelling evidence that even the Green-cuddling Scottish Pravda could not avoid mentioning it. This incident only highlights one more similarity between the Greens and Reform. They both fucking suck at vetting. There is actually another and more embarrassing one. The Greenies are just as likely as the Fash to have anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists in their ranks and tolerate it until public exposure makes it untenable. The Waterloo Day by-election will be a make-or-break event for Andy Burnham, who must feel more confident after the release of the first sur mesure poll, fielded by Survation. It predicts that Andy would vastly outperform the Labour candidates at the Council elections, and snatch the seat off Reform's claws by a hare's breadth. Amusingly, the bloke who posted the poll on Wokopedia wasn't paying attention and used the wrong table of results. Those below are the actual ones.

There is a really ironic side to this poll. That Rupert Lowe's fasher-than-fash Restore Britain fielding a candidate may actually help Burnham defeat Reform. Benito Farage is understandably livid about that, but Reform clearly don't know how to handle the situation and fight back. Especially as their own candidate is already self-combusting for being a sexist pig, plus some thoughts about Brexit that must have gone down like a lead balloon in a barrel of shit with his bandmates. Benito painting Rupert Lowe as Elon Muck's spiteful lapdog may sound smart, but it won't work as it can only convince Muck to pour more dosh into Restore Britain's campaign. The legal cap on campaign expenses in the UK means that single-handedly paying for the whole of Restore's campaign would be just pocket change for the bloke who spent hundreds of millions on buying Donald Trump the Presidency. To make it more fun, Muck should also fund an Advance UK candidate to nick more votes off the Establishment Fash. And now, the Greenies have a candidate again, but they will not even campaign for her because Polanski knows they would not survive handing the seat to the Fash. Of course, current generic polling all across the North is definitely not as good for Labour as the Makerfield polling, far from it.

I still think that Reform's surge after the English locals is artificial, based mostly on renewed social contagion, and will not last. But we have to live with it for now, quite significantly in the North. The interesting part of going back to 2019 and 2024 is that Reform were already there, as the Brexit Party in 2019. and did better in the North than their GB-wide average. Labour probably thought that some wishful thinking, and making Brexit the Voldemort of British politics, would just make the Fash go away. But it didn't work, the wolf at the door crashed the party and savaged Goldilocks and her Nan. It obviously translates into a fucking huge number of seats for the Fash, and not that many for the Greenies despite their appetite for Northern votes.

What can Labour do about it now? Honestly? Fuck all. Time is standing still now and the clocks won't start moving again until the wee hours of the 19th. If Burnham wins in Makerfield, the tables turn and the deck is reshuffled. Labour lives to fight another day. If he loses, Labour will either act fucking dumb and keep Starmer, or act fucking dumber and anoint Wes Streeting. In either case, whatever the UK Government does until the next general becomes as irrelevant as Owen Jones' latest rant in The Hipstershire Gazette. Unless they do us all a favour and call a snap general election just to put themselves out of their misery. So, whatever we think of Burnham, we have to wish he wins. His campaign pledges will probably prove to be just smoke and mirrors, as were Starmer's pledges during his leadership campaign in 2020, but who really cares? To put it bluntly, anything but Farage and Polanski is the right choice, so let's give Andy a chance.

Andy Burnham may not deliver the comedy value that losing that by-election would entail.

(Ian Hislop, Have I Got News For You?, 22 May 2026)

If Starmer’s Labour refuses to concede more powers to Plaid Cymru, the triumphant independence party, it will only accelerate its own decline.

(Will Hayward, The Guardian, 11 May 2026)

Wales are now in the same kind of political limbo as Scotland between 2007 and 2015. They have chosen a Plaid Cymru minority government, but are still reluctant to send a majority of Plaid Cymru MPs to the House of Commons. The similarity ends here, though, as Scotland remained faithful to Labour at the 2010 general, but Wales has shaken off Labour's domination in their Westminster voting intentions too and switched to the English Nationalist Party, whose local leader wasn't even registered to vote in Wales until nine months before the Senedd election. The trends of Welsh voting intentions for Commons, going back to the 2019 general, clearly show Labour's fall from grace and the demise of the Conservatives, but still point to a tie between Plaid Cymru and Reform. With Plaid up and Reform down recently, which is definitely a good sign for the next general.

Plaid Cymru are already poised to increase their number of Commons seats at the next general, something the SNP failed to achieve in 2010, three years into their first term as the Scottish Government. But Plaid also face a very similar challenge, making their Westminster vote align with their Senedd vote. The SNP got their Commons vote aligned with their Holyrood vote in 2015, and it has stayed pretty much that way ever since, so it shouldn't be too difficult for Plaid Cymru to go down the same road, plausibly earlier than two general elections later. If Westminster 2029 duplicated the voting patterns of Senedd 2026, that would be quite a spectacular reshuffling of Welsh representation in Commons.

To achieve this, Plaid Cymru need to replace Labour as the dominant party in Cardiff, which they did at the Senedd election. They also need to fully reclaim the post-industrial Valleys from Reform, who are still doing well there just as they do in the post-industrial North of England. This shouldn't be too difficult either, as Plaid Cymru have done just that at the Senedd election too. The end result is unlikely to be as spectacular as the SNP landslide of 2015, but it would still be enough to firmly establish Plaid Cymru as the party of the left in a deconstructed and reconstructed Welsh political landscape. It could even boost the likelihood of an Independence referendum some time during the next parliamentary term, if Rhun ap Iorwerth feels emboldened enough to channel his inner Alex Salmond and bluff the next tenant of Number Ten into it.

You don’t clean the windows if you’re going to knock the house down.

(Barry Clarke, Death Valley, 2026)

Someone rather brilliant pointed out the total cost of getting the Artemis crew to go to the moon and back is cheaper than HS2. Than going to Birmingham.

(Ian Hislop, Have I Got News For You?, 22 May 2026)

In another devastating blow to the Midlands, after Birmingham City Council being taken over by a rainbow of misfits, the government has had to confess that HS2 will cost £100bn, be operational in 2036, and go no further than Birmingham. That's thrice the original tab and ten years late to cover half the distance planned in the original blueprint, at half the projected speed for most of the trip. More conclusive evidence that, if anything can be more of a fucking disaster than Brexit, English project management always wins hands down. Everyone with a working brain knows that the whole fucking thing should have been cancelled years ago. But both Conservatives and Labour were adamant on throwing more good money after bad until the whole fucking fiasco cost more than Liz Truss' mercifully short Premiership. Not to appear obsessed by the Royal Navy, but the cost of this abject lunacy would pay for sixty Type 26 frigates, adjusted to 2026 money. Or, if you prefer, cover the running costs of the NHS in England for seven months. No wonder Midlands voters are still enamoured with the Fash, after being so badly let down by the two traditional parties they favoured alternatively.

Actually, you really have to wonder why Midlands voters are still enamoured with the Fash, when they have a massive record of crass incompetence in the Councils they run, like Lincolnshire or Worcestershire. Just like in the North, the writing was on the wall already in 2019, but Labour were too cocky and complacent to pay attention. I guess the lot of them failed to assess the 2024 landslide for what it was, a victory by default, despite a thousand voices telling them just that, including mine. A victory that was resting on thin ice with its foundations in quicksand. And now they're paying the price, having also blanked out how easily and strongly the Midlands swung from them to the Conservatives back in 2010, when they lost 40% of their seats there. Of course, the predicted woodchipping by Reform would be worse by several orders of magnitude.

Birmingham, the cursed city that voters have chosen to make totally ungovernable for the next four years, deserves a bespoke focus. There are nine seats there, eight held by Labour and one snatched off them in 2024 by a "Gaza independent" who later joined Your Party despite being opposed to wokeism. In today's snapshot, five would switch to the Greens, two to Reform, and Labour would hold just two. Jess Philips and Shabana Mahmood would both be unseated by the Greens. Sorry for Jess, who had the baws to denounce an ideologically lenient criminal justice system that protects the criminals more than the victims, especially when the victims are women. Coventry and Wolverhampton also deserve a mention, as both elected three Labour MPs in 2024, before Zarah Sultana defected to Your Party. Coventry would switch to two Reform and one Green MP, who would unseat Zarah, quite amusingly. But why go for the failed ersatz when you can have the thriving original? Seeing the look on Zarah's face when the returning officer reads the results would surely qualify for the Best Bits compilation of Election Night. In Wolverhampton, Labour would hold one seat and lose the other two to Reform. So poor Pat McFadden, Starmer's ever faithful foot soldier, would have to seek unemployment benefits from his former department. But at least he would go down without the stain of having betrayed Starmer, as so many did at the first hint of the storm.

Tell me, is it in the politician job description, having to lie your arse off?

(Janie Mallowan, Death Valley, 2026)

I have lived in London for more than twenty years. As soon as a by-election comes up in London, I would definitely consider it.

(Zack Polanski, Financial Times, 27 February 2026)

In the neverending series of Green bloopers and fuckups, Zack Polanski is now under investigation by the London Assembly for Council tax fraud. Alleged. There is some hilarious karma at work here as the defrauded Council, allegedly, is Waltham Forest, that switched from a Labour majority to a Green majority overday on the infamous 7th of the 5th. Now the investigation launched by the London Assembly, under Section 106 of the Local Government Finance Act 1992, has forced the Council to also investigate the matter. Which is fucking awkward when Green Party Central is in full denial and DARVO, blaming malevolent intent from both Labour and the Conservatives for the accusations against their Lider Maximo. But let's not relish in Schadenfreude here. Let's play a little game instead, I think you know the game I mean. "What if?" politics in an alternative reality. What would become of London's MPs if the votes at the next general simply duplicated the votes at the VE-Eve Council elections? Which won't happen, but what the fuck? This little game is fun to do, so let's start with the summary of the popular vote in the five sub-regions of London, which fully illustrates how bad a day it was for Labour in comparison to their 2024 performance.

Of course, this alternative scenario is a fucking disaster for London Labour, much worse than current generic polls predict, but with some plot twists. Interestingly, the duplication of the Council elections' results would make Wes Streeting safer in Ilford North, unless the Greens decided to sit it out and campaign for the single-issue Gaza candidates of the Redbridge Independents, which I wouldn't put past them. Jeremy Corbyn's seat in Islington North would switch to the Greens. which local resident Owen Jones would celebrate with a double dose of organic champagne. After all, Jezza is older than Vladimir Putin, though admittedly in better shape, so retirement in 2029 would be a very legitimate choice. Besides, he would certainly love that his legacy would be the Greens snatching the seat off Labour, even if it means handing it to those who have killed Your Party by outloopying them from the left. But the real shockers, on those numbers, would be the Greens unseating Diane Abbott in Hackney North, David Lammy in Tottenham and Stella Creasy in Walthamstow, in the wake of their massive gains on Hackney, Haringey and Waltham Forest Councils. Then there is the fun part, which is the LibDems nicking Ealing Central and Acton on just 25% because Labour and the Greens nuke each other on 22% each. That used to be a safe Labour seat, but look who's laughing now.

Another noticeable change is the huge number of marginal seats, sometimes three-way or four-way marginals, where the Green vote would be massively higher than the margin by which Labour would lose the seat to the Conservatives or Reform. That's nine seats here (Battersea, Chipping Barnet, Croydon East, Dagenham and Rainham, Edmonton and Winchmore Hill, Enfield North, Finchley and Golders Green, Hendon, Putney). This is typically the kind of situation where the local Greenies would have tough choices to make. To stand or not to stand, that is the question. Echoes from Makerfield prove that there is a vociferous faction within the Greens, much stronger than a fringe, who will stand and fight whatever the context, even if it ends up handing a seat to the Fash on a silver platter. Because they are not motivated by a sense of duty to the people or service to the local community, but by a rabid hatred of Labour on grounds of ideological purity. The Khmer Vert. Zack Polanski has opened the door to this kind of fanatical attitude when he stated that his aim was to destroy and replace Labour, so he has painted himself into a corner between a rock and a hard rock. He doesn't want to be the one accused of giving away seats to the Fash, but he has to appease the radicalised extremists because he owes them his position at the helm of the party. The total hypocrisy of the choice he made in Makerfield, standing without campaigning, is clear evidence he is fully aware of the extreme awkwardness of such situations. After all, green is just a few shades away from turquoise, and I'm not talking horseshoe theory here. Green is also one of the core components of turquoise, innit?

Look, if you find yourself in a hole, the best thing to do is stop digging. You know what I mean?

(Nick Stokes, CSI, 2002)

According to The I paper, HS2 Limited have spent £100m on a 100 metre bat tunnel being built in Buckinghamshire. It would work out at £340,000 per bat.

(Alexander Armstrong, Have I Got News For You?, 22 May 2026)

Two years ago, the Blue Wall the Conservatives had built around their motte-and-baileys in the English South crumbled to dust, fell apart and tumbled down, contributing to the redemption, rehabilitation and resurrection of the Liberal Democrats. Remember, kids, always three words to hammer your point home. Nine years after their worst electoral debacle since the birth of the party, their only one actually if you discount the real results of the 1983 election, they were forgiven for their participation in the calamitous Coalition. Mister Ed's record was expunged of his stint as junior minister for the Post Office when the biggest miscarriage of justice of the 21st century started to unfold. The South was much more inclined to switch their votes to the LibDems than to Labour to kick the Tories out back then. And now it looks like it has chosen to erect an Orange Wall against the Turquoise Flood instead of reconstructing the defunct Blue Wall.

In 2024, the Liberal Democrats jumped overday from 3 to 53 seats in the South. The South alone accounted for 82% of their gains at that fateful election, when We The People chose to sanction hordes of Tory MPs just for being Tories. Right now, polls predict the South would not just double down on this, but amplify it. Today's seat projection credits the LibDems with 57 Southern seats, the same number they held in the whole of the UK before Nick Clegg collected his thirty pieces of silver, trading honour for ministerial cars. They are not doing too well in the South West, losing Newton Abbot and Torbay to Reform. But they more than make up for that in the South East, unseating four of the Rump Tories including Jeremy Hunt and Caroline Nokes, and in East Anglia, nicking one each off the Conservatives and Labour and thusly affirming and validating their credentials as an equal opportunity party.

Restore UK are also predicted to do well in East Anglia, in a relative way, probably thanks to Rupert Lowe being on a 24/7 watch to repeal the next incursion of German battlecruisers off Great Yarmouth. Can somebody send him a copy of The Tartar Steppe? Interestingly, this overview of the South minus London shows again that the Imperial Capital is a bubble within the South, within England actually, living outwith the standard laws of politics. It's quite amazing that the Conservatives are steadily predicted to gain seats in the Greater London region, albeit through the mysterious ways of opportunistic serendipity, when they would be decimated by the rise of the Fash everywhere else. Somebody should ask the London Labour establishment grandees, from Wes Streeting to Sadiq Khan, what they make of that. I would really love to hear what they have to say. Wouldn't you?

Three: years ago, I followed Nigel Farage around Thanet. The men there knew: “He is a bastard. But he is our bastard”. The women were not so sure.

(Susan Moore, 23 May 2026)

Jeremy's Den

01/06/2026

There Seems To Be Something Wrong With Our Bloody Party

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There Seems To Be Something Wrong With Our Bloody Party