| Keir Starmer has pledged to "rip up the bureaucracy that blocks investment" at a major business summit in London this morning. P&O owner DP World has confirmed that its £1bn expansion of the London Gateway port will go ahead, after Downing Street distanced itself from transport secretary Louise Haigh's comments encouraging people to boycott the business. Joe Biden has announced that up to 100 US troops will be sent to Israel to defend the country against Iran. The soldiers will operate a ground-based interceptor system designed to shoot down ballistic missiles. Tehran says the US is "putting the lives of its troops at risk" by deploying them in the region. SpaceX has successfully "caught" a booster from one of its Starship rockets for the first time. Having depleted its fuel and detached from the main body of the rocket, the booster returned to the launchpad and was plucked out of the air by a set of giant mechanical "chopsticks". | | | |  | Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty |
| Why Labour should fear Badenoch | News that the final two in the Conservative leadership contest are right-wingers Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick prompted "glee" among Labour, says Sonia Sodha in The Observer. As one MP joked: "Does the Tory leadership result need to be declared as a gift?" This confidence is wildly misplaced. Badenoch, the bookies' favourite, regularly "wipes the floor with her opponents" in debate. She loves a culture war scrap and on fraught issues like sex and gender her stance is closer to the public's than that of Keir Starmer, who for years displayed "bewildering levels of prevarication". There is also a dodgy tendency on the left to view right-wing politicians of colour as a single, evil blob, wrongly lumping the nuanced thinking of Badenoch with the more cartoonish kookiness of Suella Braverman or Priti Patel. | Badenoch is "head and shoulders above the rest", says Matthew Parris in The Times. She's "interesting, original and intellectually brave". In an age of frightened politicians her philosophical courage is thrilling. Jenrick, on the other hand, is a "smooth-tongued salesman" with all the attributes of a crowd-pleaser "except the ability to please a crowd". Like the word "Blackpool" imprinted through a stick of rock, "Ambition" is "stamped through Jenrick's core". Hence his mind-boggling changes of heart. Gone is the "mildly centrist" Cameron Remainer. "Rob", as he is apparently to be known, now claims to back Donald Trump in the US election and wants to "out-Farage Farage", promising to blackball from the shadow cabinet anyone who doesn't share his aim of taking Britain out of the ECHR. "Venomous yet at the same time colourless", this man has a craving for office that would "poison the Conservative Party's bloodstream". | | | | Robb Report's list of the 50 greatest sports cars includes some surprisingly attractive models. In top spot is the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, the fastest production car of its day and progenitor of the fancy gullwing door. Other magnificent motors include: the McLaren F1, the "most fastidiously engineered car of the 20th century"; the Jaguar E-type, which even Enzo Ferrari couldn't resist calling "the most beautiful car in the world"; and the Aston Martin DB5, likely history's "most famous car" thanks to it being James Bond's vehicle of choice in Goldfinger. See the rest here. |
| | |
| | |  | A Conservative Party campaign poster from 2015 |
| Alex Salmond, who died on Saturday aged 69, has rightly been hailed as a "giant of British politics", says Simon Nixon on Substack. What few people appreciate is that he was really "the godfather of Brexit". The Scottish nationalism stirred up by the 2014 referendum provoked "an equally powerful English nationalist backlash". In the following year's general election, the Conservatives played on fears that a hung parliament would leave Ed Miliband in Salmond's pocket, making him vulnerable to SNP demands for a new referendum. That campaign proved "so successful" in England that the Tories won an unexpected majority – obliging David Cameron to follow through on his "reckless" promise to hold an EU referendum. | | | | Advertisement | | Our instantly recognisable Fair Isle jumpers are made from pure lambswool and feature intricate, traditional patterns that will liven up your seasonal festivities. | For a limited time, we are offering 50% off Fair Isle knitwear plus free UK delivery to readers of The Knowledge. Use code MATKN02 at the checkout. | Offer ends 21.10.24. | Shop now. |
| | |
| | | | Royal Mail staff have been praised for successfully delivering a letter addressed to "Mr James Holland, well known historian, Wiltshire". Holland, the co-host of the World War Two podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk, tweeted a picture of the envelope – to which sorting office workers had added "try Salisbury SP5" – with the caption: "Aren't posties brilliant?" | | | | Enjoying The Knowledge?
Click to share | | |
| | |
| | |  | Jemal Countess/Getty |
| Kamala Harris is failing to close the deal | By some measures, Kamala Harris is running a brilliant campaign, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack. She has raised $1bn in less than three months, "roughly what Joe Biden raised in the entirety of 2020". She had an excellent convention and nailed the TV debate. "Yet she's obviously struggling to close the sale." Her national poll lead is just 2.6%, around a quarter of Biden's advantage at this point in 2020. Same with the swing states: in all-important Pennsylvania, she is "barely +1" whereas Biden was +7. So why is Harris coming up short? Simple: she still hasn't given voters any sense of why she wants to be president or how she would change the country. | "These are not hard questions." But whenever an interviewer tries to get a direct answer, she responds with some vapid word salad "as if she is revealing some profound and previously unheard-of truths". Here's what she said about Israel, for example: "We are not gonna stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end." Eh? On mass illegal immigration: "It's a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions." Sorry, what? This is the problem with Harris. The more you see of her vacuousness, "the less conceivable she becomes as a president". Now, I dearly hope she wins because Donald Trump remains unfit for office. But she desperately needs to change the dynamic of this race. "And she has around three weeks to do it." | 🤑🚍 Elon Musk is throwing himself into the US election "in a manner unparalleled in modern history", says The New York Times. The billionaire talks to Donald Trump "multiple times a week", and has effectively relocated to the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. He relentlessly promotes Trump's candidacy to his 201 million followers on X. And above all, he is "personally steering" a fundraising group geared towards turning out the vote for Trump, which he has given tens of millions of dollars. "He has even proposed taking a campaign bus tour across Pennsylvania and knocking on doors himself." | | |  | Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium. Kevin Mazur/Getty |
| I'm not quite sure why Keir Starmer is running the country, says Camilla Long in The Sunday Times, "and not Taylor Swift's mother, Andrea". Back in August, after the pop star cancelled concerts in Austria because of a terrorist threat, Andrea convinced the British government to give her daughter a full police escort for her London tour dates – a £150,000 privilege that not even Prince Harry could secure after spending a fortune in lawyers' fees. Maybe it's just a coincidence that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who apparently "pressed" for the blue-lights treatment, had received free tickets from Swift's record label. Or that Starmer himself had gone to one of her earlier concerts in London – for free, of course – as part of some "desperate, terminal search for a personality". If the PM can get outmanoeuvred by a pop star's mum, "how will he cope with something that really matters?" | | | Film buffs have long played the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, where you have to connect any given actor to the once-ubiquitous Kevin Bacon through a chain of co-stars in no more than six movies. Take Carrie Fisher, for example: she was in Star Wars with Harrison Ford, who was in The Fugitive with Tommy Lee Jones, who was in JFK with Kevin Bacon. But I've crunched the data, says Daniel Parris on Substack, and Bacon isn't the "nucleus of Hollywood" at all. The actor for whom it would be easiest to play the "X degrees of" game is in fact Samuel L Jackson, followed by Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Bruce Willis. Bacon is ranked a lowly 64th. | | | | | | | | It's Cambridge's new "magic roundabout" – a simple four-way crossing that locals are calling "Blackpool Illuminations" after the council added no fewer than 36 sets of traffic lights. There never used to be queues, says Cambridge resident Laurence Sleator in The Times, but now each approach road hosts a long line of furious drivers. Cyclists have dedicated traffic lights, but the journey is stop-start, so unsurprisingly many swing into the bus lane or mount the kerb. Parents walking their kids to school say they find the crossing easier and safer to navigate. But surely the wages of a humble lollipop lady would be better value than the £32m consultants managed to screw out of the taxpayer? | | | "The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."
Alfred Hitchcock |
| | |
| |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment