Stephen Bush

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Another thing I love about the present moment - Musk regularly goes 'don't worry, we are going to change THAT' whenever Grok produces an answer that doesn't align with his priors, yet the British Labour government thinks that they are going to be able to land an argument on there in 2029.

What's the most stupid movie reference you have to stop yourself saying regularly? Mine is not replying to "Can I be frank?" with "Okay, Frank. Can I be Bullwinkle".

The core problem for Starmer is that what made him Labour leader and prime minister was his ability to judge what the audience in front of him wanted to hear - to work out which narrative would get him to the next step on the board. But you can't run a country on storytelling.

What are the policy implications of any of this?

It helps if you start from the perspective that actually saying 'due to this war, things will get worse' is more helpful than making unduly optimistic claims.

Today's newsletter on the British political implications and policy consequences of Donald Trump's war with Iran. This will surprise you but they are not good!

It's fascinating how Starmer talks about hard choices, not offering the politics of easy answers, will shroud-wave when it is *not* true, but is clearly incapable of delivering a serious 'so, the global backdrop has got much much worse' speech.

Won't someone think of the people writing politics newsletters in middle powers, where all you can sensibly write is 'energy price shock bad for incumbent governments. Energy price shock not really in the hands of incumbent governments'. www.ft.com/tryinsidepolitics

A lot of people in politics get into it because they're inspired by a particular politician or a particular injustice at a particular time, and IMV part of being a good politician is ignoring that voice and governing for the times that you are actually in.

The British general election of 2029, in which we are *really* going to stress test 'the governing bloc has, through both forces inside and outside its control, presided over a *really* miserable time for the country' versus 'the opposition bloc just can't stop itself picking up unpopular stances'.

There's a lot of really interesting and intelligent centre-right commentary on LinkedIn now, I'm just...not convinced that it makes a congruent Shadow Cabinet if you are also using 'performance on Twitter and Facebook' as a metric.

She had a rant about 'Rachel from customer complaints' just delivering the spring statement as if the world hadn't changed. She argued for Rishi Sunak, who did the same thing in his first budget, to be prime minister *three times*: !

Kemi's current fallback position as of yesterday was that nobody is being gungho and rushing to bomb but that Keir Starmer took too long, and also should have joined the initial attack.