Peter Scudamore

What a letter

SHE LEAKED THE MEMO THAT COULD HAVE STOPPED THE IRAQ WAR. In January 2003, Katharine Gun was a Mandarin translator at GCHQ, Britain's signals intelligence agency. She showed up to work one morning, opened her email, and found a memo that would destroy her career, threaten her marriage, and land her in court facing two years in prison. The email was from Frank Koza, chief of staff at the NSA's regional targets division, asking GCHQ to help spy on the private communications of six UN Security Council nations whose votes would determine whether the world approved an invasion of Iraq. The goal was to gather intelligence that would give US policymakers leverage over smaller nations. Angola. Cameroon. Chile. Guinea. Pakistan. Bulgaria. Countries with no dog in this fight, being bugged so Washington and London could fix the result. Gun printed the email, slipped it into her handbag, and eventually passed it to a journalist. In March 2003 the memo was published by The Observer, creating a media firestorm and raising serious questions about the legality of the Iraq War. Then they came for her. She was charged under Section 1 of the Official Secrets Act in November 2003. She refused to plead guilty. Her legal team decided the best defence was to prove that the war itself was illegal, and demanded the government hand over its own legal advice to Tony Blair. And here is the part that tells you everything you need to know about how power actually works. The case came to court on 25 February 2004. Within half an hour it was dropped. The prosecution offered no evidence. In May 2019 The Guardian reported the case was dropped because the prosecution realised that evidence would emerge showing that even British government lawyers believed the invasion was unlawful. The government could not prosecute the whistleblower without putting the war on trial. So they quietly walked out of court and hoped everyone would forget. Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, called Gun's action the most important and courageous leak he had ever seen. Three UK inquiries into the Iraq War never once examined her case. Sources: The Observer / The Guardian

@WolfgangRichtEU @afneil

@afneil Dear Andrew, This has been happening since Thatcher. Only logical thing now is to seize 20% of rich people's asset and adopt a 50% exit tax on those trying to leave the UK. All the best, Wolfgang

When Labour came to power July 2024 it inherited a recent OBR forecast of a £77bn deficit for 2025/26. Part of a sensible, steady downward trend in borrowing after the binge borrowing during the pandemic and the energy crisis caused by the Ukraine war. Reeves blew up that downward trend and went on yet another borrowing binge, which is why the deficit ended up £132bn in 25/26, despite a massive increase in taxes. I see no grounds for ‘warm words’ whatsoever. Her reckless fiscal policies are why we have the highest borrowing costs in the G7.

Always a pleasure to see the brilliant Corach Rambler on our stable visit to @lucindavrussell! 💛🤍

@OldGoldRacing @SeyfriedEd 😂😂

Some more brilliant pictures from the day, including one of @petescu and his long lost brother, @SeyfriedEd 😂

We're still reeling after yesterday! What a fantastic day out at @PerthRacecourse, who could not have been more hospitable for us and our army of owners. And of course full praise has to go to the stars of the show, @lucindavrussell and the whole team, @DerekFoxJockey and of course our star mare herself, Apple Away 🍎 📸 Dennis Penny

Talking about deficits isn’t a vote winner. If you tell people ‘It’s going to be tough and cuts need to be made’ they’re not going to vote for you. But if you talk about free-this and free-that, people will vote for you, and I think that’s a major flaw in democracy.

THE QUEEN IS BACK 👑 Apple Away defies the odds with a brilliant victory in the Listed Chase at @PerthRacecourse, winning the same race she won in 2024 🍎💛🤍 Incredible performance from @lucindavrussell and @DerekFoxJockey!!

The winning owners at @PerthRacecourse 🍎💛🤍

@AdvocateHalley @JohnSwinney Hating their enemies they end up hating themselves. People who are Totalitarian by their nature need somebody to hate like the The Russian communists did and and the result was a country in flames the death of millions. All because of ignorant fools and their bigotry.

What a liar you are @JohnSwinney Shame on you You’re not even very good at it

@CrossgateCentre Hating their enemies they end up hating themselves. People who are Totalitarian by their nature need somebody to hate like the The Russian communists did and and the result was a country in flames the death of millions. All because of ignorant fools and their bigotry.

An absolute cunt of a man. He can’t bring himself to state factually that the man who built the party he’s twice trashed was acquitted of all charges. And check the look that passes over his ferrety face when the Redact King realises he’s being asked about Sunday’s revelations.

"I'm so emotional. Magic." Lovely interview and great story to kickstart the Coral Scottish Grand National Festival as owner/breeder Ray Anderson Green sees his grandson Lucas Murphy score aboard Tuppence. Like his dad, the young rider seems a cool customer! @ayrracecourse

@ziggy6769 Afghanistan’s education minister has announced that women are permanently banned from schools.

Apparently the SNP don’t believe in reading writing and arithmetic because modern kids have calculates and the internet dear me 🤦🏼‍♂️ are you still SNP ? 🙄

19 seconds the pathetic little man gave the victims 19 seconds He started the riot And set about attacking anyone on Twitter daring to defy him. Thin skinned shit.

On This Day in 2017, One For Arthur won the Grand National! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

This is massively disingenuous. Lamb costs have soared because input costs to farmers have gone up. The number of abattoirs has significantly dropped…and supermarkets are setting prices that fleece consumers.

Keir Starmer said this in 2023: “Every day seems to bring a new existential risk to British farming. “Losing a farm is not like losing any other business, you can’t come back…you deserve better than that.” Instead, he betrayed farmers.

@newstart_2024 @Glinner “Attributing to themselves this divine ability, this transcendent wisdom—and with unshakable belief in the glowing but ever-receding future—the newly-minted Soviets tortured, thieved, imprisoned, lied and betrayed, all the while masking their great evil with virtue.”

Truth is now considered a right-wing conspiracy. That’s the chilling line from Melanie Phillips that stopped me in my tracks. She explains how we’ve reached a point where simply stating observable reality — whether it’s basic biology defining a woman or pushing back against blanket accusations that all white people are inherently bad — gets you branded as evil. Not wrong. Evil. Therefore you must be silenced, cancelled, or erased. No debate. No evidence allowed. She calls it cultural totalitarianism: a Manichean worldview where one ideology claims a monopoly on goodness, progress, and reason itself. Dissent isn’t argued with — it’s treated as a moral threat that has to be removed. The deepest irony? In an era that smugly ditched religion in the name of superior rationality, we’ve ended up rejecting reason, evidence, and open inquiry altogether. We’re so “rational” we’ve dispensed with the very tools of rationality. It doesn’t add up. Her take has me wondering how we got here — and how quickly disagreement turned into moral excommunication. Anyone else seeing this pattern play out in conversations lately? Where have you felt truth itself become off-limits?

Starmer’s catastrophic miscalculation is turning Britain into a laughing stock telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/0…

“Let’s spend £4.5 trillion on net zero over the next 25 years. Let’s increase taxes to pay for net zero. Let’s ban new oil and gas licences in the North Sea but spaff away £40billion buying North Sea oil and gas from Norway. Let’s buy coking coal shipments worth £7.2million from Japan but ban UK coal mining. Let’s plaster thousands of acres of farmland with solar panels but spend £50million on sun dimming experiments. Let’s give huge renewable energy construction contracts to China. Lets fail to improve gas storage facilities, Let’s give Drax an estimated £1.8billlion in taxpayer funded subsidies on top of the £11billion it has already received despite Drax burning an amount of wood equivalent to 300 million trees. Let’s give £1billion this year alone to wind power companies not to generate power from their wind turbines. And let’s spend £30billion of taxpayers’ money on carbon capture machines but put pensioners, farmers and the disabled into financial peril by claiming there’s a £22bn black hole.”