Author of 'Minority Rule'. Contributing Editor @novaramedia. Views my own. Literature bore. Muslim. THFC. Kebab aficionado. Luxury communism now!
London
Joined June 2012
- Tweets65K
- Following2.8K
- Followers403K
- Likes26.8K
Pinned Tweet
Political volatility shows no sign of abating. And we need a media capable of cutting through the noise, unshackled from corporate interests, telling stories which really matter.
Help us grow. Go to novara.media/support!
Said this about Russell Brand earlier this year, and feel even more strongly about it now about the David Walliams allegations: there should be a staggered age of consent.
Someone in their thirties has no business having sex with a teenager, even if they're 'legal'!
Turns out, putting Israeli interests above domestic affordability is a massive vote-loser. Who could have foreseen?
I said the motion was bad strategy - which I still believe, but hey, it's done now! - but that Zionism is racist both in theory and practice. You could have included that instead of lying; but I guess you'd build up less of a following if you stopped trying to turn the left against each other. Doing the CIA's job for free!
It's a busy news day, but this from Haringey is outrageous.
Today the Regulator of Social Housing published an inspection, and it turns out the previous Labour council seemingly misled them about thousands of fire-safety issues in local council housing.
In 2023, the Regulator found that Haringey’s Labour-run council had “put thousands of tenants at potential risk by failing to meet health and safety requirements for fire and electrical safety”. In November 2025, the council informed the Regulator that it had resolved all outstanding high-risk fire safety issues.
Great work, right? Except it's turned out not to be true.
People who know these things: how necessary is it to use scrim tape if you're filling in a crack? Can I get away with just digging it out, coating with some peel stop, and then chucking the filler on top of that?
This is actually a much more interesting question than @IainDale gives it credit for! Like every goth-curious teenager who read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, I loved going to the Hunterian museum. All those organs in jars! The bones of Charles Byrne! But...
'To be, or not to be' has been repeated through the centuries to the point of becoming noise. We're at risk, as audiences, of receiving it as a pastiche of itself: grand, posturing, giving-it-Shakespeare.
Andrew Scott's delivery brings it back to something simple, direct, and human. This is a young man letting you into his suicidal ideation.
Andrew Scott delivers this speech too slowly; I know some viewers will hate the way he breaks up the verse. AND YET even in spite of that I think this is the best delivery of this soliloquy I’ve ever seen.
He makes it sound like it’s not a portentous speech everyone already knows but a morally serious real-time deliberation, by a highly intelligent person in extreme pain, considering what it would mean to end his own life.
Gone live with @michaeljswalker and @AaronBastani! Tune in.
@AyoCaesar, @AaronBastani and @MichaelJSWalker will be live-streaming a Holborn & St Pancras byelection special from 9.45pm tonight.
Will Zack Polanski take Keir Starmer's old seat, in what would be the Green party's biggest challenge to Labour yet? Or will Labour's Sagal Abdi-Wali, the Camden council leader and a Starmer ally, crush the Greens' hopes of electoral success?
Tune in for analysis, special guests and news from the count: youtube.com/watch?v=9UeH93ny…
Journalists aren't allowed into any of the plenary sessions – including on uncontroversial topics. Fair enough to want to be allowed in (so did I!), or to make the argument that it's good for transparency. But it's not just this vote that press were barred from attending.
Pro-Israel protestors outside the Green Party make up for what they lack in numbers with a certain terrier-like tenacity. One gentleman caught my eye and barked "Do you want a fight? Is that what you want!?".
I mean no, not really!
I'll be turning up like a bad penny on this week's Question Time.
To the good people of Cambridge: I'm sorry.
This week, join Question Time in Cambridge
On the panel: Jonathan Reynolds, Helen Whately, Josh Babarinde, Andrew Neil, and Ash Sarkar
Thurs 24th, 9pm on @BBCiPlayer, @BBCSounds, and the @BBCNews channel, 10:40pm on @BBCOne
Apply now: eu.castitreach.com/ag/mentor…
#bbcqt
All social media platforms subtly, and not-so-subtly, have personality warping effects. But none are as bad as this one. The more time spent on X, the more aggressive, paranoid, and reactive you become.
And increasingly, I don't see the point in using the platform anymore.
I'll say this for Rishi Sunak and Theresa May: they still served their communities from the backbenches. So was Jeremy Corbyn, for that matter. It's just Sir Public Servant KC who finds himself in the company of David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
