Jules 🌸

@bbcnickrobinson @LizWebsterSBF And you know this how ?

There is a far simpler explanation for the appointment of Mandelson. The Foreign Office knew the Prime Minister wanted it to happen despite concerns raised directly with him about Epstein & business links with China and Russia so they delivered what the boss wanted.

The case being made for the defence of @Keir_Starmer this morning appears to be that neither the Prime Minister nor any other minister knew how vetting works & no official pointed this out to them. No wonder @darrenpjones told @BBCr4today it was “quite frankly flabbergasting”.

@DHSCgovuk @wesstreeting What is the performance indicator for time to report when have had a MRI scan please?

The NHS is finally moving in the right direction. From A&E to cancer, @WesStreeting takes us through the detail.

@RebeccaCNReid It’s not a new problem. In fact it’s much less of a problem in recent years with employees able to work from home.

Breakfast clubs are not about breakfast, they're largely about pre-school care because it's impossible for two working parents to commute to their desks at 9AM if schools start at 8.40.

I do wish people would understand this. If a person is working full time and still needs universal credit, the benefit scrounger is the employer.

@LauraTrottMP Hey Laura - the Conservatives introduced Plan 2 🤯Your party is responsible 😳🤷‍♀️

Not good enough. Labour are tinkering around the edges without a serious plan, while graduates will still be ripped off paying interest above inflation. Our New Deal for Young People will scrap real interest on Plan 2 student loans, double apprenticeships & stop dead-end degrees.

@theipaper Bring back a compulsory retirement age if you want to be fairer to the younger generation. Older people hanging on to the jobs for longer are blocking creation of new vacancies at the lower end

Opinion | 'The triple lock may be viewed as quietly corrosive to the social contract between generations' 🖋️ Simon Kelner Read more: trib.al/LU21t3t

@DanielJHannan Yet this is the first time he has bothered to ask a question? Seems like he won’t be much of a loss 🤷‍♀️

One of the hereditary peers being kicked out by Labour, in flagrant defiance of the bargain it made in 1998, is the Earl of Leicester. He just raised a question about the proposed ban on trail hunting, which will waste parliamentary time and police resources to no purpose whatever. His question was thoughtful, measured and informed, and Labour peers began to interrupt him, claiming that he was talking for too long. He politely responded that, as this was his first and last oral question in the chamber, he intended to ask it properly. He is one of the 92 diligent and service-driven peers being thanklessly and gracelessly removed to make room for more placemen. It is perhaps especially poignant in his case as an earlier Earl of Leicester was Simon de Montfort, who called the first English Parliament, and whose image adorns the US Congress; and also because he is descended from Sir Edward Coke, the Elizabethan and Jacobean jurist who, as much as anyone, encoded our modern understanding of parliamentary supremacy and freedom under the law. This is what snapping the thread of history looks like.

It is so difficult to understand why Trump launched his Iran operation - an op so clearly damaging to US national interests, the global economy, Ukraine and the US’ closest allies in Europe and the Gulf. Then there is this….

I cannot understand why @TravelodgeUK CEO has cancelled the scheduled MP meeting to discuss this today. I’m pleased the PM just raised this at PMQs. Women need to know they are safe when they sleep. Travelodge should have no issue providing this assurance as a minimum.

@AlisonMoyet Put retirement age back to 65 and let the younger generations have a chance to build careers

I see the proposal that retirent age should be raised to 75. My question is - Where are these jobs going to come from? Given that the young and mid-lifers alike are struggling to find work.

I couldn’t care less about you taking me off a banknote but I’m furious about you proposing to remove the UK from the ECHR: the achievement of which I am most proud.

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history. Yale University, 1969. Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program. Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?" The faculty answered firmly: No. Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit. Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them. So she started looking. She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont. There were names. There were credentials. There were careers. The professors had been wrong. But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing. Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams. But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased. It wasn't random. It was systematic. Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less. Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries. Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside. She needed a name for what she was documenting. In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870. In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect. The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere. Her dissertation became a lifelong mission. For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded. Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating. Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions. Eventually, the evidence became undeniable. Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased: Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick. Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize. Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed. And countless others whose names had nearly vanished. Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out. The Matilda Effect became standard terminology. Scholars used it to examine how credit is assigned, how authors are listed, who receives awards, who gets left out.

@implausibleblog @rebeccafa77 Should the question not have been, should any of the men who appear in the Epstein files resign? But no, the MSM in the U.K. want a man who never appeared in any of the files, and didn’t even know the monster to resign.

Nick Clegg has launched a stinging rebuke of the "deeply unfair" student loans system, and if he's angry now, wait 'til he finds out about the bozos who introduced it

Another study conducted at Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge showed that air filters worked their magic & removed almost all trace of airborne SARS-CoV-2 virus… …even on a Covid ward where the air would have been thick with infectious viral particles. cuh.nhs.uk/news/air-filte…

@bestofdynevor @sallydynevor Just gorgeous ❤️❤️

Phoebe Dynevor and Hattie Dynevor at the Louis Vuitton fashion show in Paris!

👏 @AndyBurnhamGM is right to call this out. The King’s estate can inherit land when someone dies without heirs. But when that land becomes an illegal dump, taxpayers are expected to foot the clean-up bill. That’s not how responsibility should work.

Seriously @TravelodgeUK - how can any woman feel safe staying at one of your hotels with this level of response? And to offer £30? How deplorable. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

I don't think you will see this clipped up by LBC because it shows Ferrari handed his arse by someone who knows what they are talking about. In this case by Sir Richard Dalton a former senior member of the British Diplomatic Service. The question and response at 3'20" is a personal favourite - Ferrari's head nearly explodes when he's told 'What a daft question?'. Enjoy.

The govt's Student Loan Plan 2 repayment freeze in April 2027 must be reversed. It isn't moral. I'm concerned that my debate with Kemi Badenoch this morning distracts from the most immediate problem. In April 2027 Rachel Reeves will freeze the Plan 2 student loan threshold until 2030 which by then will increase graduate repayments by £300/yr more. This is effectively a unilateral negative breach of the student loan contract. Students were told the threshold would rise with average earnings. No commercial lender would be allowed to do this. The govt shouldn't do it either. Changing the terms of future students loans is a political decision - people may not like it but it is transparent. Negatively changing the terms of contracts already signed, and long in place, is a breach of natural justice.