Peter Briffa

@OldRoberts953 If you’ve been affected by any of the issues raised in this programme, please…

I see another celebrity sex abuse TV drama is about to air. I swear if modern British TV remade ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ it would be dedicated ‘to the victims who helped us tell their stories.’

@GeorgieHeath27 Aaron Rodgers for the Packers.

IMAGINE THIS: You can bring back one retired player (playing as if at the height of their powers) into your sports team... Who are you bringing in and what is your team?

@izzywestbury Also, when people demand someone be sacked, there really does have to be someone waiting in the wings who would either be better or do things differently. This can be seen in many walks of life.

More pertinent question to be asking is: why was such a lucrative contract offered which somehow ran for 2 yrs beyond the series which the ECB - and presumably McCullum (he ain’t stupid) - knew he would be judged on? Good gig if you can get it.

In this essay I will explain why the ECB have decided not to sack McCullum & co.: 1. Avoid a payout /Ends/

@IrkthePurists Napalm in the morning.

The sound and smell of things gradually getting better

@andrew_lilico Auberon Waugh’s main defence of the EU was that its politicians were better than ours, IIRC.

The best argument that Brexit was a mistake is the claim that it's turned out that the British political & governing class is too rubbish to run Britain properly without the EU's help. The counter-hope would be that that's only temporary, & they'll improve as they get used to it.

@spucprolife @HCH_Hill Another scenario, what if the woman claims her lover smothered it?

"The body of an almost full-term newborn baby is found in a skip, and the mother is traced. After the Crime and Policing Bill gets royal assent later this year, an investigation would take two courses. If she is believed to have, say, smothered the child after birth, she may be charged with infanticide, an offence which, taking into account postpartum mental illness and distress, is tried (if at all) as manslaughter not murder. But if the mother claims the child died in utero, because she took abortifacient drugs, the case will close. Whatever her reasons for doing this, the baby’s death is not a crime. Indeed, thanks to Clause 208 of the bill, which removed women who end their own pregnancies from the criminal code, it isn’t even a baby. It is nothing at all." @VictoriaPeckham sets out the chilling new reality

@editaurus The Slade

The Can. The Pink Floyd. The Soft Machine. The Boredoms. Which other bands began with a definite article in front of their names and then eventually lost it?

@ObserverUK Funny how, when things are tricky, people always want to shift to their own political terrain. It would be more impressive if Collins argued for a Tory Reform coalition, or a Green Lab one.

Britain’s only way out of this mess is a shift to the centre, writes Philip Collins Voting intentions are split five ways, so politicians must plan for a coalition. Can anyone make space between the left and right? bit.ly/4bE9ElD

@EdConwaySky Fat lady isn’t singing.

So... it's over?

@DamCou Was not most of Phil Collins phobia because he’d been in Genesis? People would have been much more indulgent if he’d been the drummer for, the Bay City Rollers, say.

For Americans getting angry in the replies, when I wrote this nothing tweet, before it inexplicably took off, I was talking about UK critics, who tended to despise both music and TV that were popular in the US at the time. As a child, I was not reading the *Detroit Free Press*.

If you were alive at the time, you might remember that the then-fashionable critical consensus was that both *Miami Vice* and Phil Collins were the essence of empty, soulless, consumerist corporate pop-culture product. As ever, The Cool Kids Were Wrong.

@AnnieChave Do football fans feel this, being as the season is so long, and not so seasonally adjusted, as it were?

Best time of the year the start of the new county season. CANNOT WAIT!

@skenklok @andrew_lilico Exactly. Plenty of lessons learned, just mostly the wrong ones.

@andrew_lilico I'm afraid I suspect the vast majority feel that "we should have closed earlier, longer and tighter"

Six years since the first Lockdown. And we still appear to have collectively learned nothing.

@responsiblerob It’s Mikey and Nicky. Great film.

no matter how many movies i watch, no matter how much i expand my knowledge, this remains the greatest acting and the greatest writing i have ever seen. it’s been 7 years since i first saw this movie and still i think about it every day

@SteveArchibald8 @stephenpollard Hard to have team spirit when you’re losing.

No matter what you think of the Board, Manager, coaches or players that you feel have let you down, now is not the time for fragmentation, now its vital to give full support to the team, priority over anything else is staying up ! COYS full support Blame game later, not now !

@timothy_stanley “1984 is a novel, not a manual.” Politicians are not only the dullest people but they also have the dullest grasp of language.

“Handmaid’s Tale is around the corner” is the liberal’s version of “Iran is days from a nuclear bomb.”

@udit_buch I wonder if there will still be tweaks to the rules. Not impossible that one T20 league comes along that goes against this trend. Has big grounds, fewer sixes, all run threes and 150 is a competitive score. Might catch on,

@ChillingOutProd Unfortunately no. Because everyone have accepted that this is what T20 is all about and there are other formats that exist if we want to watch game in favour of bowlers

T20s around 2009-10 were such fun. Your team needs 50 off 30 and you think it'll be a heist if you pull it off. Now even if you chase down 100 off 30 you think it was always coming

@NovoSeculum33 @LiamHalligan Cutting them might make them bigger problems, then. Might, not necessarily will.

@ChillingOutProd @LiamHalligan Which of these isn't already a problem?

So the UK's 10-year gilt yield - the cost of government borrowing - is now up at 2008 levels. An 18-year high The difference is that, back then, UK national debt was 48pc of GDP, and now it's the best part of 100pc. So the debt service costs are much MUCH heavier. Of the £14.3bn the UK government borrowed in February alone, no less than £13bn of that was spent on interest on existing debts - a situation which is not only unsustainable, but very close to provoking a disastrous financial collapse. Yet still, our national discourse is all about more spending, more borrowing, more "state intervention". When is the Labour party – and much of the listless, unthinking rump of the UK's political and media class – going to start acknowledging reality? WHEN ....?

@sambillings @ErikaMorris79 Well quite. Suppose a keyboard player for Depeche Mode said he actually preferred listening to Bach that doesn’t make him a hypocrite.

@ErikaMorris79 Erika, yes I did. And I stand by those decisions at the time. I was a lot closer to playing / was involved in white ball squads. Hence my decision / actively encouraged to do so to further my international career.

Says the man who : As captain, missed the first 6-8 weeks of the Kent season to play for KKR in 2022 As captain, missed the first Month of the Kent season to play for CSK in 2018 I’m all for the sentiment and meaning behind the statement he has made, but lets not forget you chose the IPL 💰💰over your county commitments more than once.

@NovoSeculum33 @LiamHalligan Are there no personal advantages for you for some bits of public spending? Roads, prisons, police etc.? It doesn’t all go on DEI.

@ChillingOutProd @LiamHalligan Like what?

@NovoSeculum33 @LiamHalligan You’d probably see a problem with some of it.

@LiamHalligan Let them go bankrupt. They will have to massively cut back on all spending. I can't see a problem with that. They won't be able to raise taxes without causing such internal strife we haven't seen in centuries.