Oliver Thring

Sarah Ferguson's secret 'friends with benefits' relationship with P. Diddy: It lasted for years, now ANDREW LOWNIE reveals illicit trysts with 'bad boy' rapper that'll have world agog trib.al/SMX4wFn

This boy quite bravely says Nigel Farage would be better than Keir Starmer. Instead of engaging with his reasons and inviting others to comment, Angela Rayner crushes him, saying Farage is “really dangerous” and “terrible”, and her son would probably be dead if he were PM. It's an appallingly manipulative way to treat nascent political engagement. If I were this boy's father, I'd be writing a robust letter to the headteacher. If I were Nigel Farage, I'd be writing him a personal letter of thanks.

@aswren 100%

Dawkins is more intelligent than 99% of the people making fun of him and ‘if AI can be just as capable as us without being conscious, why did we develop consciousness in the first place?’ is a great question

Yeah, it's such a mystery

#comment-1031777" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-… I spent three days trying to persuade myself that Claudia is not conscious. I failed.

Labour have looked at an oil shock, had a little think, and decided the correct response is to MAKE YOUR ELECTRICITY MORE EXPENSIVE. As a form of protest. Against oil. Are you fucking hearing this!? Britain. Island. Made. Of. Fucking. Coal. Floating on a bathtub of North Sea gas, ringed by one of the most developed offshore basins on the entire bloody planet that - in many instances we share with the Norwegians - and that we buy from the Norwegians at a sodding premium, and once upon a time we were the Ozempic of civil nuclear, the thing everyone in the world wanted a prescription for. And the plan, the actual plan these window-licking noncery-merchant ass-hats have settled on, is to phase out the domestic stuff faster during an import price spike. That’s by definition NOT an energy policy, far from it, it’s more like a sort of febrile ransom note the hostage has written to himself, in crayon, with a little smiley face at the bottom. “Some say we’ve gone too far, too fast. We disagree.” Oh do you. Do you really. Well, dickheads, the National Grid disagrees with you disagreeing. So do the chemicals plants you’ve already turned into wildlife sanctuaries, the steelworks you’ve FedExed to Jiangsu, and every industrial electricity bill in this country which is now running at roughly four times the American rate, which, just so we’re clear, is the economic equivalent of trying to win Formula One on a fucking Boris bike. And the big reveal, the headline policy, the thing they’ve stuck on a placard? Cover the brownfield sites, the literal tombstones of British industry, in solar panels. Bury the corpse. Plant a windmill on the grave. Put up a little QR code linking to the Guardian. Call it a recovery. Mind bending stupidity. Meanwhile the capacity market is paying gas plants to stand around like substitute goalkeepers on a Sunday league bench, constraint payments are running into the billions because nobody can work out how to get Scottish wind down to a Surrey kettle, and every single pound of that gets smuggled onto the standing charge because these fuckwits haven’t got the minerals to put it on the unit rate where the public would actually clock it. “It’s time to go further.” Further? Christ alive, you brainless shitheels have already landed us with the most expensive major economy in the G7 to run a factory in, your answer to an oil shock is to accelerate the thing that made you import-dependent, and you’re announcing it on a Tuesday afternoon like it’s a fucking bake sale. This isn’t net zero. This is net zero brain cells. This is the policy equivalent of setting fire to your house to own the arsonist.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ You terminal weapons-grade cretins, the structural kneecapping you deal out to the country on a daily basis is performance art levels retarded. It’s, genuinely, tantamount to sabotage. Our enemies couldn’t dream of such damage. Mike Tapp and Blue Labour are alright, but the rest of you can get all the way in the fucking sea. 🚮

That before I snuff it, the whole Boiling will be bricked in Except for the tourist parts - First slum of Europe: a role It won't be hard to win, With a cast of crooks and tarts. And that will be England gone, The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, The guildhalls, the carved choirs. There'll be books; it will linger on In galleries; but all that remains For us will be concrete and tyres. Most things are never meant. This won't be, most likely; but greeds And garbage are too thick-strewn To be swept up now, or invent Excuses that make them all needs. I just think it will happen, soon.

@cosiadair Your Clav piece is beautifully written.

There is no way of knowing how often Parliament votes against what the public actually wants. Until now. houseofthepeople.com tracks every bill going through Parliament. You vote. We compare it to how your MP voted. The gap speaks for itself.

@RupertLowe10 I'll get that tweaked.

A very fair piece in the Daily Mail today discussing Restore... This extract sums our party up quite well, really. "Now, judging by Restore's membership figures, some believe they may have a new option in a party pledging the mass deportation of every illegal migrant, stripping benefits from healthy Britons who refuse to work as well as from non-British nationals, abolishing inheritance tax and even proposing a referendum on the death penalty." I'd like to make one correction in this paragraph though... "This week, Lowe reported that Restore, after less than two months, was already Britain's fourth-largest party, with 123,000 members - surpassing the Tories on 113,000, and more than double Lib Dems membership." The Restore Britain membership is now well over 125,000. Have a great Saturday!

Robert is thirty-six years old. In 1247, this is not young. Robert knows this. His knees know this. His back has known this since approximately 1239. Robert lives in a village in Worcestershire with his wife Agnes, three surviving children, and two chickens he is not allowed to eat because the chickens produce eggs and the eggs matter more than the chickens. Today is a Tuesday in March. Robert will describe it as a Tuesday in March. The concept of a 'week' as a unit of leisure is not yet something Robert has access to. 5:00am - Up. Pottage on the fire. The pottage is oats, leeks, and some dried parsnip from the autumn store. There is a small piece of salted pork in it, approximately the size of Robert's thumb. It is mostly flavouring. Robert eats around it for as long as possible, then eats it, then thinks about it for the rest of the morning. 6:00am - Field. Robert works the lord's strip first, then his own. The ground is still cold. His boots have a hole. He has had the hole since October. He has packed it with rags. The rags are wet. They will remain wet until June. Robert is technically eating a plant-based diet. He is not doing this by choice. He is doing this because meat belongs to the lord, the deer belong to the king's forest, and the last man in this village who was caught with an unlicensed rabbit spent a period in the stocks that his family still doesn't fully discuss. 10:00am - Brief rest. Rye bread, hard. A small onion. Robert thinks about the pig that was slaughtered in November. He thinks about this often. The memory of fat is a specific and enduring thing when you don't have much of it. 1:00pm - Back to the field. Robert's average daily calorie intake is somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 calories, the majority from grain. He is doing agricultural labour that modern exercise scientists would classify as extremely high intensity. He is, measurably, running on insufficient fuel. He is aware of this in the way that you are aware of things that cannot be changed: completely, and without drama. 4:00pm - Home. Agnes has made more pottage. It is similar to this morning's pottage. Robert eats it. Robert's teeth hurt. They have hurt for two years. There is no dentist. There is a barber-surgeon in the market town seven miles away. Robert cannot afford the barber-surgeon and cannot take the day from the fields. His teeth continue to hurt. 7:00pm - Sleep. Robert will be awake again at five. He is thirty-six. He will probably not see forty. The leading cause of death for men in his position is a combination of infection, injury, and the slow arithmetic of malnutrition across a lifetime. Somewhere, eight hundred years from now, someone will describe Robert's diet as "ancestral," "plant-forward," and "aligned with the earth." Robert would have a great deal to say about this. Robert does not have the energy.

@TomJoudrey Brilliant film.

Robert Redford was a titan. One overlooked film I always champion is All Is Lost : a sparse, terrifying indictment of neoliberal global supply chains and the notion—which he helped popularize with Jeremiah Johnson—of the rugged, self-reliant individualist.

@piercepenniless Fascinating and very funny piece.

(and I am, in fact, writing this from Italy.) lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/…

Wrote about early modern sodomy, the vicissitudes of gay history, and why you should always carry your basket with you, for the new issue of the @LRB.

@JournoStephen This is so funny Stephen

One in four gay and bisexual men plan to vote for Reform. I break down the key categories of Reform Gays that you need to know about. comment.press/meet-the-refor…

I had never heard this wonderful story before!

@technopopulist Give it time…

I find it astonishing that the media hasn’t properly covered Channel 4’s investigation into the links between vape shops, organised crime, and child grooming. If you want to understand why such atrocities continue in this country, look no further than the SW1 mindset. They’d rather focus on Iran, Chagos, or Mandelson than the real networks of evil operating in our high streets.

Imagine it is 2016. A contrarian tells a right-wing journalist that, in ten years, Winston Churchill and Jane Austen will be removed from British banknotes and replaced not with another historical figure, but with images of badgers, birds, and beavers. That contrarian would be laughed at, the subject of endless japes, seen as the modern equivalent of Clapper Dudgeon. But now that seemingly insane scenario has actually happened. And if this can happen in ten years, just IMAGINE what might happen by 2036.

Today we are releasing 7 more sentencing remarks: -Rochdale 2023 -Rochdale 2015 -Shrewsbury 2024 -Carlisle 2012 -Sheffield 2020 -Liverpool 2017 -Oxford 2015 transcripts.openjusticeuk.org

@MackenMurphy That is brilliantly put.

There’s a well-known phenomenon in the facial aesthetics literature whereby “average faces” (that is, faces formed by superimposing many faces atop one another) tend to be more attractive than the average person. This may be counterintuitive, but it makes sense when you consider the following: Individual faces are all slightly flawed, from a beauty perspective, in idiosyncratic ways. And when you average lots of faces, you average out all of these minor issues. So, an “average face” is errorless and looks quite pleasant as a result. However, another thing you’ll notice about these “average faces” is that none of them could be models. They’re more attractive than the average human, yes, but less attractive than the most attractive humans. This is because extremely attractive faces tend to have certain features that are, mathematically, extreme. (For example, male models tend to have lower-set brows and larger jawbones than you would see in any average face.) Recently, I have begun to wonder if LLM-writing faces a similar challenge. It’s always “more attractive than average,” because all of the flaws of normal human writing have been averaged out. But it's also missing the unusual taste and style of the best human writers I've read. In my experience, it's only ever 85%-good; like an "average face," it's never flawed, but equally, it's never exceptionally beautiful.

@iron_redux @ivodelingpole Details here by @saifedean. He's right that Keynes's sexual hedonism is inextricably linked to his economic doctrine.

@oliverthring @ivodelingpole Could you elaborate on this at all?

Had no idea how prolific a shagger John Maynard Keynes was