tenebrisnox

Social media like this is a double-edged sword. Look at how many big Hollywood stars and pop musicians have been forced to adopt an "Insta" media lifestyle. On the one hand it broadens exposure but on the other hand it diminishes their mystique. You want to think that your favourite star is doing something cool like attending a party with other famous cool people rather than microwaving leftover food on a Saturday night, painting their nails and watching tv. The Royal Family know this and struggle to find the right spot where they lift the curtain a little - but just not enough to reveal that they're just bumbling old Oscar Diggs behind (or in their case behind the wonderful "Windsors" Instagram feed is a creepy little Saxe-Coburg and Gotha pressing buttons and pulling levers). The danger for Burnham is the same: there's a point when familiarity breeds contempt and the "he's just like us" becomes "who does he think he is? someone special?".

So THAT'S what happened to SG-4. I always had my suspicions.

I'm in "pure paranoid conspiracy mode" here and wearing a tin foil hat... but there's something of a synchronicity about Farage trying to use his personal safety as a justification for the £millions he's been gifted. The media's interest in that has certainly diminished since Widdecomb's death. But, like I say, I'm in zany nut case mode and in a rational world of decent men and women stuff like this never happens.

Or the British security services have finally learned from the Americans how to groom mentally ill people, give them a weapon or a bomb and point them towards someone or someplace. Oven-ready terrorist.

Is it still the case that people with a swimming pool in their back garden can get a note for their GP which can be used to apply for an exemption from the ban?

I was going to make a snarky comment about the MP, Ian Lavery, who said this and checked his voting record. He seems to be on the better end of the Labour Party. So wont.

https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/24963/ian_lavery/blyth_and_ashington/votes

Starmer II: The Burnham Boogaloo.

...and with that Sir Keir walked across the chamber and sat with the Tories, Reform and Ulster Unionists and, at last, felt he had found a home.

bUt YoU'vE gOt tO pAy FoR tOp TaLeNt, HaVeN't YoU?

Don't forget that it was Mandelson and his firm who lobbied government for Palantir. There is a literal coup of Western governments taking place by the Epstein class - and Palantir is one of the tools they're using.

Maybe it's not the party but Westminster government that's the thing that needs real change. Even Green MPs have to swear an oath of allegiance to the Monarchy. And even Reform for all their whining about elites and The Establishment are more than willing to bend the knee.

Bond wasn't British until Connery played the role. In the novels he was English and had an incipid racist dislike of the Scots and Welsh. He was also a misogynist and a homohobe. He was also pretty much a cowardly assassin. He was supposed to look like the American songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. Initially the tv series Danger Man was going to be an Ian Fleming-weitten Bond TV series at the end of the 1950s with Patrick McGoohan as Bond until McGoohan seemed to politically object to playing the character. Bond's characterisation has always altered. (A good book to read about all this is John Higgs' excellent Love and Let Die.)

Today Bond has the ability to be reshaped by the current dominant culture to try and reflect how the UK sees itself. There's no surprise that because we struggle to define what British is, defining a contemporary Bond is equally difficult. Becomes part of the culture wars.

A solution (possibly cop-out) I'd like to see is for a new Bond movie (or TV series) to be set immediately after World War Two and present him in much the way he's depicted in the Casino Royale and Live and Let Die novels: late thirties, scar across his cheek, cruel mouth, skin grafts and all. I thought the recent Ripley adaptation was good and they way I'd like to see Bond go.