'ID cards, but only for chickens' is just the most perfect British policy nfuonline.com/updates-and-in…

“An emergency cabinet meeting. Always sends a nice little thrill of anticipation down the spine. Someone's in trouble. Someone's going to get it in the neck”. #Holyrood

This is a really, really good read on housing delivery, the planning system and localism.

samuelstafford.blogspot.com/2024/04/is-loc…

How Frank Field accidentally banned modern slavery, with a little help from Fraser Nelson and Theresa May (from a big sitdown we did for CapX, which was one of the best hours of my life) capx.co/free-exchange-…

Liz Truss’ book just arrived in the office. Superb bit of indexing here

Just tried biscuit tea for the first time. Tastes like someone vandalised a chai latte.

A good day to revisit my CapX interview with Frank Field - ‘a holy man in a wicked world’, as an early profile on him had it. (Apologies for audio quality but it was 2017…) play.acast.com/s/capx/frankfi…

Oh no. A lovely, lovely man.

'Public health' academics say the quiet part out loud. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37579378/

My dad once flew on Concorde. 'The flight was delayed so that fellow you like played some songs on his guitar. Paul someone. It was awful.'

Yes my dad attended an impromptu live acoustic session by Paul McCartney in an airport lounge. And he hated it.

I have always been a huge fan of the work of Arne Slot (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈɑrnə ˈslɔt]; born 17 September 1978), who is a Dutch professional football coach and former player who is the head coach of Eredivisie side Feyenoord.

The BBC needs to update its graphics software to handle UTF-8 character encoding.

Over the 2010s, the Govt raised taxes by £6bn a year - but no one noticed, because they did it via regulation. Really, really important new Centre for Policy Studies report out today by me and Tom Clougherty, setting out how it happened, and why it matters. (1/?) cps.org.uk/wp-content/upl…

‘Ben White on a hat trick’ is just banter football. (Shame I’ve got Saliba and Gabriel in FPL…)