Jason Payne-James

On this day in 1957, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands signed the Treaty of Rome. They laid the foundations for today’s European Union. United in diversity, then and now 🇪🇺

MAR-A-LAGO IS IN PALMS BEACH COUNTY. THE MOST REPUBLICAN SPOT IN THE UNIVERSE. TRUMP ENDORSED A REPUBLICAN, JON MAPLES, WHO REPRESENTED THAT REPUBLICAN OASIS. AND HE STILL LOST! DONALD TRUMP IS NOW REPRESENTED BY A DEMOCRAT. GOD BLESS AMERICA.

"Men need to be perp-walked in handcuffs to the jail, and until we see that here in this country... we don't have a system of justice that's working." Republican Congressman Thomas Massie on whether survivors of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein will see justice done. #Newsnight

They think we have no memory. It was her government that rolled back face to face assessments! Shameless doesn’t quite capture the cynicism.

Coates family will be proud of your testimony today. Your father will be looking down upon you and be proud of his sons 🙏

Wow. No wonder policing is in crisis. "In my opinion - looking through the lens of a senior police officer who has 30 years policing experience working in the areas that I do - I think it is inaccurate to describe that incident as serious violence."

Treating us as fools…

Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

Robert Mueller was an American hero, whose distinguished service to our country spanned a lifetime. Marine officer and decorated combat veteran; revered prosecutor and arguably the greatest FBI director in history. A model of integrity. RIP nytimes.com/2026/03/21/us/… via @NYTimes

Juilliard Pre-College student Freya just became the first person in the US to perform on Mozart’s childhood violin! 🎻 The violin is part of the @MorganLibrary exhibition, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Treasures from the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg, on view through May 31.

There are so many unknowns coming to light. As Wes Streeting has said to us, light is the best disinfectant. So what does one do with all these new facts.We look to the @ukhomeoffice @ShabanaMahmood @attorneygeneral to have a second look at this ever evolving case that is pointing out so many gaps in investigation and case preparation.

It would be a terrible irony if Canada joined the EU and Britain still can’t make up its mind.

Brexiteers, never knowingly right👇

Left: Me and my goats in Afghanistan. Right: Me after my PhD from one of the UK's top universities. Conclusion: Farage is an ignorant coward who thrives on hate mongering and racial stereotypes.

A couple of years ago my life was saved by a very special man. His name is Hanny Anwar. He’s a surgeon at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital. He removed the cancer from the base of my spine. Along with a lot of bone. But he did so much more than that. Surgeons have a reputation for being cocky, arrogant and cursed with poor people skills. Hanny isn't like that. As well as being exceptionally gifted, he's also a very thoughtful and spiritual man. Once he'd diagnosed my cancer as chordoma, he explained to me that it has a very high recurrence rate. On average, there's a 60% chance that chordomas return. I was trying to get my head around this. That I was going to put myself through brutal surgery with a long recovery, losing bladder bowel and sexual function... to emerge with the odds against me. Hanny said something to me that I'll never forget. He reassured me that if the cancer did return that it could be treated with radiotherapy or further surgery. He told me that the hospital treats patients with recurrent cancer that live for decades. 'So if it comes back, it's not necessarily a death sentence?', I asked. 'No more than life is', he replied. Wow. It was such a great answer, I burst out laughing. In that moment I knew that I completely trusted him. I felt immensely privileged to be his patient. Along with his colleague who also operated on me, John Afolayan, he is currently trekking ONE HUNDRED KILOMETRES across THE SAHARA DESERT. It will take them five days. Yes, they're insane. But they’re doing it to raise money for the @thernohcharity.    All the money raised goes back into NHS services at the hospital to help more patients in the future. The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital is our only national orthopaedic hospital. It treats patients from all over the country, including injured service personnel and people like me who suffer from rare bone cancer. Anything you can give will make a massive difference. Surely they deserve it. Thank you. justgiving.com/campaign/rnohs…

They say a picture can say a 1000 words. Bravo The Economist. They have summed it up perfectly.

The President of the United States said I insulted Jesus. You want to know what insults Jesus? Kicking the sick off their healthcare. Bombing schoolchildren in Iran. Deporting moms and babies. Covering up the Epstein files.

🇬🇧🇯🇵stand together

Imagine if Biden or Obama sent mass emails to donors promising to let them in national security briefings in exchange for cash. How the fuck is this traitorous psychopath still president? 😳👇

BREAKING: Trump attacks Texas Democrat James Talarico — and gets a FIERY sermon in response that he won’t forget Donald Trump thought he could score cheap political points by calling James Talarico an “insult to Jesus” because the Texas Democratic Senate candidate is “beyond woke” and believes that God does not discriminate on the basis of gender. Unfortunately for Dementia Don, he picked the wrong person. Standing in a Black church in Texas, Talarico didn’t just clap back — he delivered a moral reckoning. “The president of the United States just said that I insulted Jesus,” Talarico began. “You want to know what insults Jesus? Kicking the sick off their health care while cutting taxes for billionaires.” And that was only just the start. “You know what insults Jesus?” he continued. “Deporting the stranger and separating babies from their mothers.” Then he went even further — taking aim at war, corruption, and hypocrisy. “You know what insults Jesus? Bombing innocent school children in Iran and sending our brave men and women off to die in another forever war… Covering up the Epstein files and then refusing to prosecute a single person in them.” This wasn’t politics as usual. This was a full-on moral indictment. Talarico — who has been attacked by Trump for supporting transgender Americans and saying “trans children are God’s children” — flipped the script entirely. Instead of backing down, he grounded his message in the very teachings Trump tried to weaponize. “I am not a perfect Christian,” he said. “There’s only been one perfect Christian and he was crucified on a cross 2,000 years ago.” And then came the line that hit hardest: “Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves… Can we imagine war in heaven? Can we imagine bigotry in heaven? Can we imagine poverty in heaven? Then why do we tolerate these things on earth?” That’s how you respond. Not with insults. Not with fear. But with clarity — and conviction. Trump tried to smear him. Instead, Talarico delivered a sermon that’s now echoing far beyond that church. Please like and share James Talarico’s inspiring words!