Just been talking to @theJeremyVine on @BBCRadio2 about the chaos that surrounds the administration of civil service pensions

if you want to get a vignette of how the mass media has changed over the past decades: here is Armando Iannucci, in his regular op-ed Telegraph column, urging Telegraph readers like himself to join Stop the War's monster demo on 15 Feb 2003 against the impending assault on Iraq.

Loved this. Reliable rule of reading fiction is that every time you pick up a book by a mid twentieth century British woman novelist it will turn out to be a banger. I think that era is of the under-appreciated peaks of the history of the novel.

RIP Giles

just been talking to @EddieNestorMBE on @BBCRadioLondon about a @benandjerrysUK promotion, why people aren't saving enough for retirement and the number of people who travel abroad without insurance

Just been talking to @TheOfficialJVS on @BBC3CR about pensions and why people are not saving enough for their retirement

Unless you’re AIP-maxxing you’re going to get property-mogged

It’s a vastly under reported scandal.

Wot she said ⤵️ 👏

THE MAN THEY JAILED TO SAVE THE BANKS Tom Hayes @robilypj spent five and a half years in prison. He lost his marriage, his career, and a decade of his life. The Serious Fraud Office called him the ringmaster of a global conspiracy. The judge gave him 14 years to send a signal to the City. The signal the City received was: make sure it's a trader who goes down, not a bank. Libor is the interest rate that banks used to report daily, forming a benchmark that underpinned roughly 350 trillion dollars worth of loans and financial products globally. Hayes, a derivatives trader at UBS and Citigroup, was convicted in 2015 of nudging his bank's Libor submissions in directions that benefited his trading positions. His own bosses knew. Senior bank officials were doing the same thing at a far larger scale. The Bank of England was implicated in secret recordings. None of that made it into the jury's deliberations in any meaningful way. In July 2025 the UK Supreme Court unanimously quashed his conviction. The jury had been misdirected by the trial judge, the court found. Hayes had been denied a fair trial. The SFO said it would not seek a retrial. That last part is doing a lot of work. Because a retrial would require actually prosecuting the case properly. Which would mean the jury hearing about the senior bank executives. And the central bank. And the regulators who looked away. And that is apparently not in the public interest. BBC journalist Andy Verity @andyverity spent years documenting exactly this. His 2022 Radio 4 podcast The Lowball Tapes and his 2023 book Rigged laid out the evidence that the direction to push rates down was coming from the top of the financial system, not from one trader in Tokyo. The Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Hayes's case back to appeal shortly after publication. Journalism, doing the job regulators refused to do. Hayes has since sued UBS for 400 million dollars, alleging the bank deliberately fed false information to prosecutors and used him as a scapegoat to protect senior executives and reduce its own regulatory penalties. UBS declined to comment. One trader jailed. Fourteen billion dollars in fines distributed across the global banking system. Zero senior executives prosecuted. One BBC journalist who read the documents everyone else ignored. That is the complete ledger of accountability for the biggest interest rate fraud in financial history. Sources: Bloomberg @Bloomberg, BBC @BBC (Andy Verity @andyverity), Guardian @guardian, CNN @CNN, Fortune @FortuneMagazine, Fox Business @FoxBusiness and many others

It’s becoming an issue

Just been talking to @TheOfficialJVS on @BBC3CR about Tony Blair's proposals for the state pension

The menu ( in Welsh ) of Caffi Spam at Colwyn Bay for the unveiling of the Terry Jones statue this afternoon. #montypython

Big news - we've decided to follow the latest 2004 tech trends and set up a Facebook page. Please tell all your friends/grandparents facebook.com/taxpolicyassoci… Currently zero followers - hoping to make it to seven by end today.

So very sad.

Wot she says ⤵️

OMG just been talking to @EddieNestorMBE on @BBCRadioLondon for 25 minutes - they are going to charge me rent at this rate!!! 😲

Just been talking to @theJeremyVine on @BBCRadio2 about the cost of living effect in UK of the Iran war. Absolute obeisance to the fantastic @Frencheconomics of @PanmureLiberum for brilliant explanation of the economic situation