They didn't, but I'm going to scan the one from this morning's show - they might be doing a different party each day?

Conclusive proof. 🙂

Is he basically decent and honorable? Not too much evidence from his actions of that.

Don't share your view on that. It actually seems strikingly obvious that they thought Mandelson had things in common with Trump, not least, the friendship with Trump's former best mate for many years. It was a deeply cynical deployment, which is why they also weren't bothered about the vetting.

It's actually the main media who've been leading the charge, but Starmer and his mates have given them plenty to work with.

The crucial bit was Robbins saying that the vetting report "leant in the direction of" being negative and was not a direct fail. Questioning from the committee to seek further clarification on that was weak. Robbins appears to have come in late to the process. It smacks of a deliberate evasion.

Of course he did.

I was 48.

That's been my experience.

It seems to me that it's both - they thought that knowing what Mandelson was like, he would gel with the President and they also saw him as one of them. The question of screening was purely academic to them I'm sure, they didn't care what the security services thought.

But surely the point is that they appointed him not because they thought he was a moral decent chap but because they knew he was the sort Trump would be likely to get along with, given their shared history with Jeffrey. That's not any kind of 'mistake', it's amoral calculus.

The zero effective tax rate for the biggest corporations is a primary cause of our global chaos right now.

Yep, when they use it free of charge, unlike everybody else.

Yes, it's one of those errors that took a lot of planning.

Shocking abuse by the BBC, barefaced pumping of Reform. They followed this with a 20 minute solo interview with the Reform spokesman, with very low key gentle questioning.

Although to answer my own speculation, no other party logo was displayed on the show throughout, I just ran right through. They are going to reply to complaints saying it was an error. An error they reinforced with a 20 min interview with the Reform spokesman shortly afterwards.

OK, it is there - 06:06. I assume this is a decal they are going to display whenever reading out a party's policies before the election, eg, a different one for each party? Although noteworthy that they read out what Reform were saying first. They are continuing to prioritise the current poll lead.

OK, I'll take a look, thanks.

Not sure this is true - not currently reported anywhere else afaict.

That explanation to some extent lets Starmer off the hook - he's just a helpless victim of scheming advisers, a clueless cipher to be manipulated. That's not what's going on - 99% of this came from Starmer and was his will being enacted.

That's exactly why they did appoint him, they figured he would make a good Trump-whisperer. Actually, that was true, he did. At least, if you consider sharing a completely amoral, degenerate past and close mutual friendship with one of the worst men in modern American history useful. It clearly was.

Exactly. The decision to place him as DC ambassador was taken knowingly, they were fully aware of his past and his many 'interesting' antics - the motive was presumably that he and the Donald could share stories about their mutual pal Jeffrey. The rest was to be dealt with, ignored, overlooked, etc.

That headline's misleading, they didn't admit it.

She got what she wanted. Not sure how useful any of it is. A serious and well planned question within the rules designed to entrap sometimes works better in the Commons, but it's all pretty farcical playing to the gallery.

They're pretty useless at it, but the format allows the leader to slither away multiple times, as it does at Commons committees which are sometimes even worse. This kind of thing is why Congressional committees in the US deploy hardened lawyers to conduct serious questioning.

I share the severe doubts that Starmer's telling the truth and nothing but the truth, but most of the evidence in that article of his serial lying is based on broken manifesto promises (both national and in his leadership campaign), which I've not yet seen any party in government not do repeatedly.

Evidently Johnson's regular doses of racist chitchat and stereotyping weren't enough to impress this loon.

Note how much all these die hard extreme libertarians want to suckle at the teat of taxpayer funds.

A hit is not joy, but yes, lots of people 'enjoy' it, unfortunately though, it also wrecks countless families and renders sane people destitute who are vulnerable to the scientifically planned addictive methods deployed to rip them off by a deeply cynical billionaire industry targeting the poor.

It's just turning the clock back to the 50s, 60s and 70s, when the US always supported the most disgusting and evil dictatorships globally. All they had to say was they were anti communist. Now they just offer to line the Trump family's pockets.