My view on the Briefing Room 5 weeks ago was:
If the Strait reopens in the next week, we have economic disruption but it’s manageable.
Closed for another 4-8 weeks & we have high energy prices throughout the year.
Closed for few months & all bets are off and we’re in a really grim economic world.

good, productive feminism explains that gender isn't innate and the patriarchy can be deconstructed; essentially telling young women that all men are creeps and predators and will never change is actually just weirdly reactionary and purposeless

i think it's just my algorithms since i interact w feminist content and this stuff often cloaks itself in that philosophy, but the fatalistic gender essentialism being fed to young women on social media rn is SO bleak

i think a lot of this would be solved if people learned how to have normal friendships with people of the opposite sex but unfortunately i dont think the people buying into this stuff have any friends at all

Mad fact... 42% of Labour Prime Ministers have had to fire Peter Mandelson.

Little known fact: if nobody will pay £850,000 for your house, it's not worth £850,000.

Liverpool highlights a key issue for UK cities.

Some of the post-war neighbourhoods with the best accessibility are also the least dense.

These are the places policy needs to target for densification.

Join our launch event to find out how👇
buff.ly/JgzmjBt

You can actually see the moment Ed Miliband thinks, what's the point burning through whatever political credibility I've got left energetically defending a man who's going to be gone in a matter of weeks.

I think @hern.bsky.social was exactly right that it has been a truly astonishing bit of brand destruction by Google to bundle a free, bad version of their AI into their once incredibly useful search engine. It makes people think Google's AI is much worse than it actually is per its peers!

These are a really good set of reforms - and carries on the Govts outstanding record on clean power - and will get virtual no coversge because of everything else.

Ffs

Resolution has applied my model to data up to 2025. As the chart shows, we can be less confident as time goes on. But firm-level evidence from Bloom et al shows a 6% loss. I think it's time to retire the OBR's 4%, which was a simple average of pre-Brexit forecasts.

Also they have social media in Canada and Carney's doing fine.

They have it in Spain and Sanchez has been PM since 2018.

And in France where Macron's been President since 2017.

IMO the fetishisation of local communities and placing their views/benefits about the national (or even regional) interest is one of our biggest challenges as a country.

You need a balance and broadly ours is swung way out atm

The big bad signal for the PM is that no MPs are speaking up for him. No loyal backbenchers giving him a break, use up time and some cover.

It's just a constant attack from every side of the house.

Ukraine’s top drone commander wants to bleed Russia’s army dry “Madyar” Brovdi has pioneered unmanned warfare methods NATO is yet to learn

Meanwhile the guy providing the actual hard power edge is a former Ukrainian grain trader who says things like “we should be swapping plastic… for dead Russians”.
economist.com/europe/2026/...

me when things are going well

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/. https://www.ft.com/content/034361bc-641b-4a73-a3d1-3ee76c4ed573?syn-25a6b1a6=1 One Labour official who knows Starmer well said that while McSweeney, a protégé of Mandelson’s, wanted to send him to Washington, Starmer was never that close to him. “Keir didn’t even really like Mandy, and suspended his judgment as he does so often,” the person said. “At that point, the machine took it [Mandelson’s appointment] as his intention and does what the British state does, which is bend the process to the signal it thinks is being broadcast from the principal.”

An all-time classic entry in the hall of fame 'does the person saying this realise how damning it is?' quotes:

SEN. @ossoff.senate.gov : “The faithless president depicts himself as Christ while he plunges the nation into wars of choice… Remember — While you pay more for everything, the First Family’s wealth is growing by billions. Because they’re crooks, and everybody knows it.”

Reminded of Miliband's best line

may write about it at some point but god I loooooved working at the Evening Standard in the mid 2010's, it wasn't a perfect paper but we had such a good time, still feels so sad and stupid that London doesn't have its own newspaper anymore, for no obvious reason beside "greed and stupidity"

how is this literally happening in real life

Browsing this company's website and the only way I can describe what I'm seeing is imagine a school shooter was a management consultant

I can’t tell if this will lead to the death of open source software or the death of commercial software. Seems like bad news for the GPL specifically.

The UK CEO of Palantir is Louis Mosley, the grandson of British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley.

I really hate the - honestly very right wing - framing that it is somehow good to constantly be shocked and offended. This is simply not how the real world works *or should be expected to work*

So much for the theory. Iran should allow fertiliser to pass through the Strait of Hormuz; America should not blockade urea shipments from Iran. Tragically, neither shows any inclination to do so. High petrol prices make biofuel more attractive to farmers, not less. And rich countries are in a selfish mood. Failure to act thus looks baked in. In the face of an avoidable disaster, that is shameful.

Fair but depressing conclusion from @economist.com - we could avoid some of the worst of the hunger, but we won’t
economist.com/leaders/2026...

Very funny that Mr Beast's name is Jimmy Donaldson. The biggest Gen Z star on the planet, the most successful YouTuber of all time, and he has the name of a 55yo loyalist councillor who's made the news for trying to ban yoga in Lurgan and calling left handed children satanic.

When Angela Rayner underpaid £40,000 in stamp duty, Richard Tice said it was "morally completely indefensible” and she should resign if she had “any moral decency”.

Now we learn he set up four shell companies that let him avoid paying £100,000 he owed in tax and to then transfer the cash to Reform

Maddening article from a business paper. It’s a starry-eyed recitation of all of the waves of growth in Milan, starting with 19th century case di ringhiera and ending with the Memphis Group in the 1980s. Then complaints about how expensive it’s gotten since, and no reflection on that coincidence.