Ollie Wright

Andrew O’Hagan · Stay Classy: Mummy’s Favourite The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the...

‘As a couple, Andrew and Sarah Ferguson have always been too stupid to understand the vulnerability of the institution that supports them, and they began wrecking it from the inside as soon as they met.’

Andrew O’Hagan on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, in the next issue.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

during the oil/gas crisis caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraime it was striking how some right-wingers tried to gaslight the public into believing the *biggest* problem with their soaring bills (at the time) was green levies rather than the oil/gas price going through the roof

Public service announcement:

‘Magic of the cup’ does not and can not apply to Wrexham.

“We bombed a school and killed all 100+ students inside because an AI chatbot said it was a military facility” is yet another true thing you can’t say to offline normies without sounding like a crazy person

It's impossible for me to express how important the music of David Byrne and Talking Heads has been to me, throughout my life. To see him play such a generous set tonight is something I'll never forget. One of the all-time greats.

YouGov has the Greens in second place for the first time

Good lord. What an abject failure the Blue Labour strategy has been.

Starmer's Downing St and others reportedly unconvinced that splashing the Daily Telegraph with No Compromise messages on immigration was the best first response to the Green win. (Observer)

I think the logical and likely response is that bourgeois supporters (who make up most Labour MPs, members and voters) will sacrifice Mahmood over migration.

Derby County 3 Blackburn Rovers 1 | The Derby County Blog Get more from The Derby County Blog on Patreon

That second half was a lot of fun. #dcfc weren't great in the first half, admittedly, but they turned it around and then some. Great goals, great contribution from Derry Murkin, positive vibes all round.

A report from me is here (and free to read for all #dcfcfans)

www.patreon.com/posts/derby-...

As journalists working today many of us are taught to recognise disinformation when we see it and fight back against it.

Unfortunately there are some who willingly seek it out and put it on their front pages. A disgrace to the profession.

Labour must stop channelling Reform and unite with progressives. That’s the lesson from Gorton and Denton | Sadiq Khan The threat to the party in some parts of our country is now existential. But we can progress, as we have in London, by being bold and strong in our core beliefs, says London mayor Sadiq Khan

Labour must stop channelling Reform and unite with progressives. That’s the lesson from Gorton and Denton | Sadiq Khan

This is not a reasoned political response. Labour has spent two years making all the voting groups who backed the Greens feel unwelcome and unheard, and now attacks them for daring to back someone else. They believe Labour isn’t listening and Starmer seems determined to prove them right

Insulting his constituents, Matt Goodwin does the most Matt Goodwin thing. Blaming others for failing to see his brilliance. Academics first, now voters. This sentiment is driving his radicalisation. Maybe even people at Reform will realise that it‘s a very bad quality for a politician to have.

Gorton and Denton first thoughts - incredible result for the Greens who won the long battle to be the best placed anti-Reform candidate - helped by being the obvious anti-Labour candidate for disappointed progressives. As I noted in the Observer last month, a Revolt on the Left is growing

Reform source: "We have had over 1,000 activists out in the seat today, and we have done all we can in our 440th target seat"

Fwiw - the vibe from people there is that the Greens have won but we won't know for a while.

Every cat owner on Bluesky

"my cat is a complete dickhead, she never lets me work / eat / sleep in peace and she'd leave me for a neighbour if they offered her enough Dreamies"

- maybe you should get a do...

"HOW DARE YOU GEMMIMAFLUFFYKINS IS MY LIFE MY LOVE MY SOUL AND I'D TAKE A BULLET FOR HER"

Powerful moment in the Commons as Starmer calls on Farage to apologise for the Reform councillor who shared a post calling for Labour MP Natalie Fleet to be shot, pointing out that when Farage faced death threats Starmer condemned them. Farage totally ignores that & asks about the Chago Islands.

OK JD but how do we get them off you exactly?

Someone's told him that writing

In single lines

Like this

Is authoritative

But if you do it all the time

It's incredibly annoying

And comes across like a racist haiku

If Starmer 2.0 means nothing else, perhaps it can mean this…

REVEALED: The top 10 future-proof jobs economists say AI will NEVER do:

1. Raconteur
2. Man-about-town
3. Bon vivant,

Screenshot of article containing paragraph “My dad listened to rock, and my sister loves [Foo Fighters singer Dave Grohl's former band] Nirvana, so I started listening and it spiralled from there."

Gen X dying inside at the need to explain Nirvana

"It’s About Time We Brought Art In, Innit?" Talk Talk's The Colour Of Spring at 40 | The Quietus Wyndham Wallace pinpoints the moment Talk Talk emerged from their synth pop chrysalis, on third album The Colour Of Spring.

Great piece here by Wyndham Wallace on Talk Talk's third album, The Colour Of Spring. It's a genuinely groundbreaking, innovative, and most importantly, Really Good album that deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock thequietus.com/opinion-and-... 1/2

Stoneygate (Leicester) Council By-Election Result:

🌍 GRN: 30.4% (+22.9)
🌹 LAB: 27.7% (-12.8)
🏘️ OL: 16.2% (New)
🙋 Ind: 11.5% (New)
🌳 CON: 8.3% (-15.3)
➡️ RFM: 2.7% (New)
🔶 LDM: 1.6% (-5.9)
🙋 Ind: 1.6% (New)

No Ind (-21.0) as previous.

Green GAIN from Labour.
Changes w/ 2023.

Reform’s reality check in town halls across the country [FREE TO READ] Plus, green jobs risk derailing insurgent party’s national message

More from me in the coming days on Reform’s first forays into managing public finances

But my general takeaway so far is: they’re saying one thing nationally and doing another thing locally, and that may work for a while yet

as.ft.com/r/49c1548c-1...

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

Kingfishers give credence to the clearwater revival.

Meanwhile, in the Manchester Evening News, 28 years ago…