I've finally codified Rhubba's Three Laws of Twitter: 1. If someone's protected their tweet they know they're in the wrong. 2. If I'm getting loads of likes & retweets for a response I've made then the OP is bad. 3. The more virtuous the Twitter bio reads, the worse the person is

Even Lord Ashcroft is doing the protected tweet thing because he knows people will tell him what they think of Farage, and it won't be pleasant.

There's a lot of AI generated slop images of Farage doing practical things and very few real photos of him doing them. Reform are an AI slop party. Why are so many right wing commentators going along with their crap?

Zia reveals Reform’s strategy.

There was a moment, watching the coverage of @SuellaBraverman earlier on @GBNEWS, when I caught myself hoping she might surprise me. The Belfast attacker, a Sudanese man arrested over what witnesses described as an attempted beheading, entered the UK on 10 February 2023 and was granted a five-year visa to remain on 28 September 2023. Both dates fall inside Braverman’s time as Home Secretary, which ran from October 2022 to November 2023. This happened in her department, on her watch. So the question put to her was the obvious one. How? I know Suella does not do ownership. She prefers to blame and deflect. But the facts here are not complicated. She ran the Home Office. The decision was taken while she was in charge. Maybe, I thought, there is a grain of honesty left that the defection to Reform has not yet scraped away. I was wrong, and I should have known better. Asked to account for a case that happened on her watch, Braverman did not mention the man, the decision, or her department once. Her statement went straight to the ECHR, and to her favourite role: the lone truth teller, attacked, blocked and undermined by her own colleagues. The failure, she said, was the “greatest betrayal” by the last Conservative government, a party so treacherous it can never be trusted again. Now, I am not uninterested in structural constraints. Blair’s reforms did shift real power from ministers to courts and quangos, and a Home Secretary can hold the office without holding every lever. There may be truth in her claim that she was blocked. I can accept that as a possibility. But the hypocrisy starts where her self pity ends. Because she demands we grant her that understanding, the powerlessness, the colleagues who would not listen, while extending none of it to anyone else. @KemiBadenoch, who sat in the same Cabinet, gets no such allowance. Yet Kemi is the one who actually owned the record. As leader she said plainly that the party got immigration wrong and that she accepted responsibility for it. Braverman has never said as much about a failure that happened inside her own department. When Badenoch points out that a Home Secretary is precisely the person with the levers, Braverman calls it a puerile insult and reaches for her list of achievements. And here is the part that gives the game away. The “treacherous party” she now says can never be trusted is the same one she stood for at the 2024 election, winning her seat as a Conservative, after every failure she now condemns had already happened. She did not leave until January 2026. A member for thirty years, a candidate as recently as eighteen months ago, and a whistleblower only once it suited her. So the next time she lectures Kemi, blaming her for failures she did not run while excusing herself for one she did, I will not be thinking about the Cabinet table or the ECHR. I will be thinking about a street in north Belfast, and a man her Home Office waved through and granted five years to stay, on her watch, while she held the levers. That is what “I was blocked” looks like by the time it reaches the pavement. A Home Secretary who had every power the office carries, who now wields the word “blocked” like a shield, and who still cannot bring herself to say: I failed.

Today is the day that any notion of Reform being a right wing party died. You cannot seriously be a party of free markets, capitalism and small government, and affiliated with public sector trade unions. This is the very cosy iron triangle of corporatism that Thatcher loathed.

I've never understood Americans' penchant for using surnames as first names.

This is my design for a spider catcher. Don't use your own glass YOU DRINK OUT OF, use this instead. Place the jar over the spider and slide the integral thin piece of plastic under it and securing it in place with the catch. Then push the red button to drop the weight.

You can only unite the right around principles. What common ground do all three parties have? I've been saying this for months.

Read what Restore/Reform say about Badenoch but do it in a South African accent. Because most of her critics from the crank Right don't like her because she is "blekk".

I take a week off and when I return all the Reform/Restore takes are doubly boring.

According to the biopic she also said "fuck up, love" when she wanted to have sex with him.

It's quicker and easier to block all morons who don't understand that the king doesn't write the speech nor does he endorse it than to explain to each and every one of them how the constitution works when all they want is rage engagement instead of facts.

It is said the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.

And the people bowed and prayed To the toad like god they made.

I've never wanted to do a deal with Reform. So this post is not about that. But Zia hasn't been in politics long enough to learn the golden, unbreakable, basic rule: Be nice to everyone when you are on the way up. Because they sure as hell will remember how you behaved when you are on the way down. Which you will be, one day. And then you will bitterly regret words spoken in pride and hubris, which will come back to bite you with an extra helping of humiliation.

That’s a bit rich coming from a Party that includes ex Labour, Tories, Lib Dem, Indies, UKIP, Brexit Party. Reform have no guiding principles. It’s recipe for infighting and poor governance. Look at the Councils they’ve been running for 12 months. Chaos!

I’ve always believed that the EU was a protectionist socialist disaster, set up and for predominantly French interests paid for by Germany. People fail to understand why as a free trade person I supported Brexit. The EU has for sure a single market (in name) but we live globally. National states means something. We are all people of somewhere. Culture matters. History matters. The EU should be abolished and we should go back to a common market of friendly nation states.

RT @SarahCholwill: A lot of talk about suspicious goings on with Reform councillors. I started looking into our local councillor who has…

This is the slop you support whilst being abusive and dishonest about the Conservatives, @raelbrav

I have an innate distrust of anyone who refers to sport as "sportsball" in a disparaging tone. It's the sure sign of a wrong 'un.