Running Dog

@runningdog

In the early days of our movement, it was mandatory that all members smoke cigarettes and refrain from speaking, but we realized those traditions were stupid. He/him/his/bark

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Running Dog@runningdog· 11d

In my experience you need to work quite hard not to notice somebody drinking as much as Coyle says he was on a regular basis. Yet we’re encouraged to believe MPs and hacks saw nothing amiss until he racially abused a journalist.

Those are the findings of a survey of 190 MPs and their staff which shows that Westminster's drinking culture endures, despite rising concern and a string of incidents, including an MP's researcher allegedly having had her drink spiked in Strangers' bar in parliament and the revelation that the Labour MP Neil Coyle was at one time drinking up to 200 units of alcohol a week - the equivalent of 10 pints a night. The spiking led to a police investigation and the temporary closure of Strangers' bar.

Running Dog@runningdog· 12d

Here Sky News’s savviest scoop-getter captures the whole phenomenon - promising nice things after decades of shit, then immediately admitting the only things on offer are just as bad & probably even worse shit actually. The verdict: probably quite disappointing

And the reason I say that is, on the one hand, he said to the country, we're going to have a decade of renewal. We're going to bring change and then their lives didn't improve that much.
And actually, when he got in, he went, everything's much, much worse than we thought it was, and it's going to be really painful. So there was a pre-election message and a post-election message that would have been quite disappointing for voters. He then had

Running Dog@runningdog· 12d

Intensely distilled political commentary this week, as Beth and Harriet first spend 10 minutes fretting that The Good Man Keir Starmer’s fall shows the uk is literally impossible to govern, then another 10 sighing that he was shit at politics and also didn’t do anything to make people like him

Electoral Dysfunction podcast: “Immensely Unpopular”

Running Dog@runningdog· 26d

Guardian infographic showing a cautious cabinet

Pam from the office: “they’re the same picture”

Running Dog@runningdog· 26d

Testing the outer boundaries of radical government by having the same people, but some of them in different jobs

Guardian infographic: “a bold radical cabinet”

Running Dog@runningdog· 27d

Very funny sequence of quotes.

One board member at a large UK bank said: "No one knows anything about her economic, fiscal or financial positions other than in the generality that she is right-of-centre which would point to a [Rachel] Reeves continuity, which is the best we could hope for.”

While Mahmood is "more socially conservative" on policy areas such as migration and justice, when it comes to the economy she is in favour of "big change" and "a radical platform", Powell, who is also expected to enter cabinet, added.

Running Dog@runningdog· Jul 10

Look I know the hacks are all on crack right now, but it isn’t a giant bin, is it. It’s a man in a silly costume

To some, Nigel Farage appears to be in a trap of his own making, fighting for re-election in single combat with a giant bin before potentially having to do it all again against the other political parties. But inside Reform UK, the mood is upbeat. As one insider said of the prospect of a double byelection: "Bring it on."

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 27

Adopted a dog, lads. She’s settling in like a legend

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 25

It’s not the only example in the podcast.

Right, so the classic thing is you go to say a Gaza protest and you say something like, you know, how do you define sexually? And they go, I'm gay.
And they go, how do you think that would go on in Gaza?
And they go like, ooh, because they haven't really thought of it. And it's an amazing gotcha clip. Rack up the views.
Everybody goes home for tea and money from TikTok.

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 25

Helen explains that Burnham should simply put up income tax immediately. A panel of the UK’s finest scrutineers agree that yes, “if we don’t do this, Russia will invade the UK” is a very compelling argument

Keir Starmer didn't meet those defence targets that they wanted. All the other parties are arguing for it. It's a fairly unarguable one, isn't it?
We got to put up income tax to stop being invaded by Russia. So both politically and nationally, he's got the opportunity if that's what he wanted to do.

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 25

Ian is annoyed that Starmer’s being forced out just when things are starting to go great, such as net migration falling - an achievement with presumably no downsides

Can we have his list of achievements, though? Because my other feeling, apart from pleasure at the timing, sadness at the going, was just if any other prime minister had had his current crop of good news to boast about, he'd still be in. Keir's going, oh, well, yes, the boats, they really are, they are down.
Net migration figures are down.
Fifty percent cut since last year. I mean, yeah, which reflects two things, doesn't it? It reflects the Ukrainian scheme and the Hong Kong scheme working their way through and the kind of what's so called Boris wave, where Boris Johnson's government just lost control of visa allocation, like they lost control of everything else.

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 25

On the Private Eye podcast, leading satirists & dogged holding-to-accounters Ian and Helen choose to own Stop Brexit Man by explaining how much Starmer likes peaceful protest 🤔

Can we get back to how annoying Steve
Bray is?
Yes. It's sort of irony, right? Which is that his right to do that is probably protected by some human rights legislation of the kind in which Keir Starmer is in favour very strongly and the right to kind of peaceful protest.

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 23

Imagine, right at the end, still insisting that “work+competence” in a management job and 3 ways of saying “making people do things” are completely different sets of skills

You have to cajole, persuade, convince and inspire. That, ultimately, is what Labour MPs have judged him unable to do. Starmer treated politics as a science- (work + competence=success) when it is, in reality, the deepest of the arts.

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 23

Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the SpAds 🥺

Tim Shipman
@ShippersUnbound
X.com
The thing I hate about these moments most, that good, loyal, talented people take a fall for the failures of their bosses. If you want to understand the govt give them a job. They are older and much wiser than when you last interviewed them...
Jimmy McLoughlin
@jimmym•1d
A number of SpAds will lose their jobs today.
One minute, you are among the busiest and best-informed people in Britain....
12:37 • 22/06/2026 • 68K Views
9
L7 13
146
21

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 23

“People want…tax loopholes” is a fun new one. Did Big Farmer spoil an otherwise flawless growth strategy

Matthew Syed • @matthewsy... •22h
X
Starmer was hated. Says far more about the electorate than the man. Impossible to govern when people want welfare, triple lock, tax loopholes, NIMBYist vetoes, while also hating the low growth, high debt economy this entails. Starmer was a good man leading an ungovernable country

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 20

Trend is Reform have no ground game & if hacks are obliged to look closely at reform candidates they’ll grudgingly do it. Few lessons for a G.E. where hacks couldn’t focus on all the candidates even if they wanted to, & they won’t want to anyway because they’ll be obsessing about Some Bullshit

He carries the magic shield of not being from Westminster - though that won't last, obviously - plus the easy warmth with people that Keir Starmer lacks, and the rare ability to generate excitement in politics. Reform is beatable, and the sun shines brighter for knowing that. A third successive defeat for Nigel Farage in a winnable byelection, after losing Caerphilly to Plaid Cymru and Gorton and Denton to the Greens, suggests a trend, not a fluke.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/20/andy-burnham-britain-makerfield-mp?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 19

Meet the new hero voters; same as the old hero voters

"A Makerfield test at the heart of British politics will make sure that the places Westminster has neglected will now get fairness."

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 12

Not to be all “start guillotining newspaper editors and don’t stop til the situation improves”, but like, there’s a powerful narrative that welfare is exclusively for scroungers. It might be naive, but believing the media is not deliberately lying to you, is how society is supposed to work

Ben Dunnell @bendunnell.bsky.social • 2m
Increasingly, how do you pitch to anything, given how thick an awful lot of voters are?
Pete Fraser @petefrasermu... • 40m
Just heard a vox pop from makerfield and a guy said "I want less money going to welfare and more money going into the pockets of people who want to work' and if I want a
demonstration of how confused people are about reality, that seems to sum it up for me. How do you pitch to that?

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 11

Ukraine shares a long border with a Russia so they’re fighting with drones on the ground. The first question about the UK investing in drones to fight “a future Ukraine-style war” is: what the fuck are you talking about

On Monday, No 10 finally told Healey how much more money it was prepared to give the Ministry of Defence to fund major projects as part of the defence investment plan (Dip).
Its programmes include the £41bn
Dreadnought submarine replacement for Trident - and a mooted investment in drones, ready for a future Ukraine-style war.

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 11

Very funny how the plain-speaking great white hopes of Labour manage to communicate absolutely nothing in a way that appeals to nobody

In his resignation letter, Al Carns called for a change in government.
11 If my resignation accelerates the transition towards resolution, then the impact will far outweigh the act. We need a new way of governing and we need it now.

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 11

Let’s be serious. What politician *anywhere* is going out saying “time to tighten our belts lads, because [unspecified future war]”. Literally who is going to do that. If a “strategic defence review” says “two year national conversation” does that suggest they know what the fuck they’re doing.

Helene von Bismarck @helenebisma... • 8h Since John Healey mentioned the Strategic Review: It is worth repeating that this study warned that the post-war order was desintegrating, &that Britain needed a
"whole-of-society approach to defence"
In a normal world this would have triggered a national debate led by the PM.
But Starmer didn't.
Gaby Hinsliff @gabyhinsliff.bsky... • 36m
More than that, the review soe finally asked for a two year national conversation about resilience and readiness for war.
Which didn't happen. Without it how can you make a public case for money?

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 5

You can tell MPs are confident about their definitely-real plans when they’re announcing them to Matt Forde on a semi-exclusive basis

Powell made her comments in an article for Babelfish, as well as an interview with the comedian Matt Forde. Her intervention comes as MPs are pushing for tighter regulation of misinformation in the forthcoming elections legislation, known as the representation of the people bill.

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 4

LOL when did free market liberals *start* apologising

Resisting Gen-Z socialism is therefore an urgent task. The first step is for free-market liberals to stop apologising. A series of popular criticisms of capitalism, each containing a grain of truth, has in aggregate obscured the fundamental wisdom that private enterprise is at the root of human prosperity. Yes, people aren't always rational, as behavioural economics shows. True, inequality matters and growth is better when broad-based. Free trade and globalisation create losers as well as winners. But this is the best time in human history to be born, given record real incomes, high life expectancy and low rates of extreme poverty. A punchier defence of capitalism would work better in the social-media age than hand-wringing by uncharismatic centrists like Sir Keir Starmer.

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 4

[me and all the other Economist guys shaking our damn heads at our incredibly serious analysis] the fuckin’ kids these days are all me-me-me, they don’t even want to seize the means of production

Forget weighty collectivist ideals or seizing the means of production. Gen-Z socialism is a me-first doctrine. Climate change and race, preoccupations of the 2010s and early 2020S, are now much more peripheral concerns. So are social issues, barring Gaza. Angst about inflation, housing and artificial intelligence have replaced all that with something cruder.
"This country is awash in wealth," says Avi Lewis, freshly elected leader of the New Democratic Party in Canada, a country where productivity has been all but flat for a decade.
"We can have nice things." Saying that prices should be capped to keep your bills down while someone else pays for your public services is a seductive, shareable message.

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 3

Mate you’re the political editor of Sky News. According to the Sky website you have a team of 8 correspondents and a deputy. If you’re doing your politics homework on the bus because theres too much politics going on, that is very much a you problem.

Rigby said she had not been able to start properly researching the king's speech - the government's official agenda - until the night before it took place, because of the "rolling leadership crisis"
"We're not confecting the news; we're not making it up," she said. "It's what is happening and we report it. If there wasn't a rolling crisis, we wouldn't be reporting a crisis.
"It's not my desire to create drama ... I spent a couple of weekends in a row phoning dozens of people just to make sure that in a really uncertain environment, at least I understand to the best of my ability, to inform the viewer in a way that's not hyperventilating, it's not highly speculative."

Running Dog@runningdog· Jun 3

Idk man, “there are 500 political hacks now and they’re texting MPs all day” is not the defence against “the media is creating chaos” you may think it is

One veteran political journalist said structural factors were also at play. While social media had sped up the news cycle, he said the sheer volume of outlets - as well as the ease with which MPs could now be reached via WhatsApp - had made it impossible for parties to control the narrative.
"Hacks have always liked drama," he said.
"That's not a new trait and I don't think we caused it ... Given the huge reader bias in favour of process stories, I think we do OK at bringing stuff back to policy where possible."

Running Dog@runningdog· May 29

Do the voters like it, Jonathan. Is that what the uh analytically useful data shows

What's more, the text is clear, accessible and analytically useful. There are memorable images, including the depiction of heads of government as bus drivers. When
conventional leaders reach a brick wall, they stop and debate for a few hours how to get around it. The likes of Donald Trump accelerate and slam right through it: "Yes, there are bits flying off the bus ... the passengers feel mildly nauseous," writes Blair, but the US president has shown
"efficacy" - and voters like it.

Running Dog@runningdog· May 29

Come on man, the lobby hacks would skip through a field of land mines if somebody said there was a Rare Intervention from Tony Blair press release on the other side. Let’s not fuck around here

Give the triple election-winner further credit.
This is a political professional who still knows how to command the news cycle. Cannily timing the release of his nearly 6,000-word essay on the future of Britain, and the failings of Labour, to coincide with the parliamentary recess, he secured for himself massive coverage across all platforms over several days.

Running Dog@runningdog· May 29

Hearing Burnham has been convinced that he had to run for this seat to prove a point, and contesting this seat means shredding anything he might actually like or believe in or know is popular. Another tremendous win for the Labour Right, the UK’s most Sensible & Winning-est Faction

Jennifer Williams
@jenwilliamsft.b... • 3h
I hadn't realised Andy Burnham had done a Tik Tok about not building on fields. He is mayor of Makerfield and his own policy prescribes building on fields, because it isn't possible to hit housing targets any other way
8
¿ 65
› 148
Jennifer Williams •
@jenwilliamsft.b... • 3h
Clearly, if he was PM he could try to change housing targets. But that would then conflict with all the messages from literally a week ago about housing costs being the key example of broken Britain

Running Dog@runningdog· May 29

Idk man, does “companies would rather just hire a receptionist than try to Frankenstein it with AI” prove anything at all. Like presumably it doesn’t take account of all the companies who replaced receptionists with a voice menu and a sign 20-30 years ago