But then of course there's Events ... Mandy, Trump, who-knows-what. Starmer already has a long list of self-serving one-liners to fend off the 'known unknowns' ...
That was C@W last week: and right on cue, Events have struck. Was Healey's resignation really an unknown unknown? No: for several weeks past, meejah political correspondents have been reporting that all was not well with the Defence Investment Plan and that the Cabinet was badly split on the issue.
Given that right now it looks for all the world big enough to be a Final Nail, letting it erupt like this is a capital strategic error on Team Starmer's part: it was foreseeable; they should have made sure it was covered[1]. I'm sure we've all met situations where someone, or some organisation, fatally loses sight of just how big some fairly obvious potential banana-skin really is[2] - and it's not pretty when they step on it. Not quite the same phenomenon as Nicholas Taleb's "picking up pennies in front of the steamroller", but there are some family resemblences.
So now, we must assume that Burnham will campaign even more explicitly as the anti-Starmer insurgent, however implausible. Farage, presumably, will campaign on "it's Labour that is the problem", to be reinforced in the days to come by lurid stories of toxic Cabinet proceedings that the press will be happy to furnish as they get extensively briefed by all the self-interested parties involved. And let's see what 'line' TS comes up with to fend off this one - that'd earn someone his bonus. Or is it just too late for yet another last-ditch defence?
ND
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[1] It seems they were preoccupied "wargaming Andy Burnham's next moves"
[2] In my first commercial employment, I watched in horror as a really good manager I worked for came badly unstuck in that manner. Fortunately, this life-lesson came very early in my career. It was a great relief, two employers later, to work for a firm that operated on the maxim: the bigger the (potential) issue, the better the team we deploy and the more attention we give it. It's truly crazy when a firm draw up a list of 10 issues, and commits one tenth of its resources to each with no thought to the relativities. Or worse: when it gives 30% to the squeakiest wheel, irrespective.
The phrase goes back a fair way before Taleb.
ReplyDeleteHealey : probably not a Corbynite (he seems to have backed Owen Smith, whoever he is), so possibly not enamoured of the stuff enemating from the Left right now.
'97 intake, in his mid-sixties, so unlikely to fancy the job himself (he might be still going into his 70s), one of the more experienced figures Starmer actually has (had) available.
Curious report that Miliband's budget was earmarked to take the hit for Defence.
I suspect there's another likely runner knocking about who's waiting for the by-election result to make a move. Or not.
No doubt Starmer said 'no shiny new toys, quite the opposite methinks'. Healey took umbrage - who cares.
ReplyDeleteTBH I don't see the Russians or anyone else attacking UK soil and I think we will do well to keep well away from Donald's chaos. Take a breather for a year or two. Then seeing how the Ukrainians get along the idea of spending big on tanks with crap suspension and Davy Jones-ready ships seems something to consider long and hard. The idea we can protect far away trade routes seems laughable. But we can't get rid of the dead wood among the scrambled-egg brigades - we can't afford the redundancy payouts. Let the grim reaper do his work and make sure fewer get nice cushy seats in future - up or out.
TBH I think Starmer is a lumpen lawyer with no talent - except he does look better than all the rest - Burnham, Badenoch, Farage etc. Not because Starmer is any good, but they are all dire. All our prime ministers fail and we might ask as Admiral Beatty did 'something wrong with our governments today'. My view is our governments have forgotten or are terrified of the word NO. I hope to see a lot more of it.
" My view is our governments have forgotten or are terrified of the word NO. I hope to see a lot more of it."
ReplyDeleteThat ship sailed a long time ago. Once you start giving free money to lots of people who have a vote unsurprisingly enough it gets very difficult to get them to vote to have that money removed from their pockets. Given a majority of the UK electorate are now net consumers of public funds in one way or another, good luck finding a politician who can get elected by telling them they have to earn their own living for a change.
I'm not sure an attack on the UK is entirely unlikely, I mean if Putin wanted to do an escalate-to-deescalate the UK is in a bit of a sweet spot at the moment.
ReplyDeletePop a missile in the middle of Edinburgh, what are we going to do? Start a war over one missile? We invoke Article 5, is everyone going to be willing to go full Rambo and risk a nuclear war?
More likely some negotiations after a short amount of pants-shitting, and when the dust has settled a new grievance for the SNP - "you'd have gone to war over London! We're second class! Independence now!"
Not that I think Putin would take that risk now, as maybe Trump wouldn't be as detached as he claims, but we're not in a position to war-war, and we're a global name.
Trump's mother is a Scot...
Deletebut unless the UK seriously prod The Bear even more than they are currently doing, Russia can wait us out while more factories close, social cohesion declines etc etc - same thing China is doing with the US.
(Russia of course has its own social cohesion issues, but they've been multiethnic a lot longer than we have)
Do you have a timeline for that?
DeleteThe reason I ask is that I have heard exactly the same prognostications for forty years or more and I suspect they were even bring said before that.
OT - Tulsi Gabbard spills beans on US biowarfare labs
ReplyDeletehttps://www.odni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-releases-2026/4163-pr-10-26
https://www.dni.gov/files/BIOLAB_Slides.pdf
Simon Jenkins on the vultures circling over TTK
ReplyDelete"At this point, the British constitution goes from eccentric to deceptive. Starmer’s “landslide” Commons majority of 174 might have ranked in size only with Tony Blair’s win in 1997, but Labour got just 33% of the popular vote in 2024. In terms of number of votes cast, it was fewer than the election in 2019, when the party, led by his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, lost. Labour’s 411 MPs should have slunk into Westminster with their tails between their legs and a silent nod of thanks to Reform UK’s Nigel Farage as their seats were gained not by a swing to the left but by the split of the vote on the right."
A "conservative" government which handed out three million visas in a couple of years isn't a party of "the right". I knew I was never going to vote Tory again. They made Blair look like an immigration hard-liner.
How Benji conned Trump (obviously not in those words):
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-war.html?unlocked_article_code=1.plA.PFkk.kqUBSrd6U9Dx&smid=url-share
The intelligence officials had deep expertise in U.S. military capabilities, and they knew the Iranian system and its players inside out. They had broken down Mr. Netanyahu’s presentation into four parts. First was decapitation — killing the ayatollah. Second was crippling Iran’s capacity to project power and threaten its neighbors. Third was a popular uprising inside Iran. And fourth was regime change, with a secular leader installed to govern the country. The U.S. officials assessed that the first two objectives were achievable with American intelligence and military power. They assessed that the third and fourth parts of Mr. Netanyahu’s pitch, which included the possibility of the Kurds mounting a ground invasion of Iran, were detached from reality. When Mr. Trump joined the meeting, Mr. Ratcliffe briefed him on the assessment. The C.I.A. director used one word to describe the Israeli prime minister’s regime change scenarios: “farcical.”
General Caine differed in almost every way from a prior chairman, Gen. Mark A. Milley, who had argued vociferously with Mr. Trump during his first administration and who saw his role as stopping the president from taking dangerous or reckless actions... At no point during the deliberations did the chairman directly tell the president that war with Iran was a terrible idea — though some of General Caine’s colleagues believed that was exactly what he thought.
In front of his colleagues, Mr. Vance warned Mr. Trump that a war against Iran could cause regional chaos and untold numbers of casualties. It could also break apart Mr. Trump’s political coalition and would be seen as a betrayal by many voters who had bought into the promise of no new wars. Mr. Vance raised other concerns, too. As vice president, he was aware of the scope of America’s munitions problem. A war against a regime with enormous will for survival could leave the United States in a far worse position to fight conflicts for some years. The vice president told associates that no amount of military insight could truly gauge what Iran would do in retaliation when survival of the regime was at stake. A war could easily go in unpredictable directions. Moreover, he thought there seemed to be little chance of building a peaceful Iran in the aftermath. Beyond all of this was perhaps the biggest risk of all: Iran held the advantage when it came to the Strait of Hormuz. If this narrow waterway carrying vast quantities of oil and natural gas was choked off, the domestic consequences in the United States would be severe, starting with higher gasoline prices.
Tucker Carlson, the commentator who had emerged as another prominent skeptic of intervention on the right, had come to the Oval Office several times over the previous year to warn Mr. Trump that a war with Iran would destroy his presidency.
OTOH you have to remember that this IS the NYT, and they are not exactly Trump fans.
ReplyDelete