Ouch 😆 And no dear. Despite your doggedness, no.

And last night, nine weeks after he joined us in his Sittingbourne retirement villa, he finally reached that point in doggie confidence where for the first time he jumped on the bed, then blocked us from our normal sleeping positions, hoping to banish us to the floor Nice try Soldier, nice try.

Soldier, ex-racer from Sittingbourne dog track, now retired and putting up with the Parliamentary lifestyle, discovers a potential local campaign. Why is it cats get graffiti at Sittingbourne skate-park & not greyhounds? I’ve offered to give him some coaching in community campaigning 101 techniques

They also try to puff themselves up, to seem bigger and more scary, like an inflated toad trying to intimidate a predator. They are noisy and aggressive to scare opponents into silence, precisely because they know they are a minority

I think this is often driven by media class overcompensation for fear of metropolitan bias: a lack of proper engagement across geography, social class lines leads to a weird caricature of public opinion, as if the radicalised online group must be speaking up for authentic public opinion

It was odd to discover how many liberal-left, centrist, conservative right opinion formers did not know how broad the consensus on this question was when the 'can Sunak be English' debate began **18 months** ago already!

Also, he isn’t even the main Connor Tomlinson to come up on an unprimed Google search and it would be nice if he stayed that way

As for this guy, it shows a poor historical understanding for a Catholic to argue for ethnic + religious exclusions for holding public office in the UK. Most Catholics had that knowledge hammered into us as kids. I’ve always taken that as a stark warning not to repeat it for other religions today.

Exactly this And to be clear, that would be very different to immigration and small boats, which would come up. There is a whiff of overreach here trying to get as much mileage as they can to promote their extremist viewpoint as being mainstream, before boat numbers fall further and salience drops

You hang around in tamer pubs than me. It wouldn’t just be an eyebrow that was raised in many pubs these days at what in many cases would be an attack on people’s families and friends. The number of pubs you could get away with it are definitely much fewer than they were

Well I’m three-quarters Irish and only one quarter ‘Saxon’ by ancestry, but I am 100% English and honestly that’s fine by me, and of course fine by a supermajority of English people too Of course I’m conspicuously pale-skinned as well which might have a bearing for these pub bore racists? Possibly?

Not only a fringe view currently being aggressively promoted for desperate reasons, it’s not even an interesting talking point as most pub conversations settled this decades ago. Less than 16% support for the (nonsensical in the case of Englishness) race essentialist view. Boring as well as nasty

Thanks Dad

I guess it counts as a quirky historical irony that the Isle of Sheppey, the Isle of Sheep, is now one of the palest parts of the UK on this map. Or maybe the Saxons had a prototypical British sense of humour?

What you need to know about changes to the state pension 👇 The most important one: it will keep rising every single year.

For years, we've rightly focused on the military and political threat posed by Putin's Russia. But there's another cost that receives far less attention. A hidden cost paid by British taxpayers, businesses and public services. It's called the Putin Tax. 🧵