The US navy’s biggest aircraft carrier, the $13bn USS Gerald R Ford, is in literal deep shit – because it’s toilets are crap.

After participating in Trump’s war crime abduction of Venezuela’s president Maduro, the ship was ordered to sail to threaten Iran on behalf of Israel’s ambitions of regional dominance. This means it has been at sea continually for eight months instead of its usual maximum of six. Despite the vessel’s huge price tag, its toilet system simply isn’t up to it. The system needs a frequent $4m acid flush to remain functional and hasn’t been getting it, so its 650 bogs are close to complete collapse, leading to 45-minute queues outside the few that still work.

THE PLANNED U.S. ATTACK ON IRAN has a hitch: most of the missile-targeting crew are queuing for toilets on the lead vessel, the USS Gerald R Ford.

This is not a joke. A set of emails was obtained by NPR, a US public broadcasting group, revealing that toilet wars have broken out… pic.twitter.com/2rbq7d5CK2

— Nury Vittachi (@NuryVittachi) February 23, 2026

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The literal stink is reportedly causing rows and tension among the Ford’s roughly 4,500 crew. Their plight makes that of grimacing cabinet members and White House staffers, who recently had to rush reporters out of the Oval Office after Trump allegedly soiled himself, look cushy by comparison.

Oh dear. How sad. Never mind, eh.

Featured image via the Canary

Kevin McKenna MP (Credit: UK Parliament)

7 min read25 min

When Kevin McKenna speaks to his constituents about Labour’s guiding mission in government, he draws on his experience as a nurse.

“We’ve talked a lot about fixing the foundations. I’ve always seen it as more of a resuscitation effort,” says the 51-year-old MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey.

“‘Staunch the bleeding’ – I’ve often used this with constituents as the metaphor rather than ‘fix the foundations’. It’s staunching the bleeding, stabilising the patient, helping it to recover.”

After any major surgery, he adds, the process of rehabilitation can be its own ordeal. If a patient spends too long in bed, their muscles can atrophy, making it harder to regain their strength.

“When our economy has stagnated to the extent it has, it’s not surprising it’s taking so long to recover.”

McKenna, elected on a majority of 355 votes, acknowledges that the government is not in rude health itself.

“There’s no point pretending, is there? This has been a really difficult time,” he says, speaking in the week that Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar called for Keir Starmer’s resignation as Prime Minister.

“Clearly, changes need to happen in the No 10 operation. I think a lot of us now are watching to see if that sticks and does it actually change how we perform at the centre.”

Despite Starmer’s unpopularity with voters, he tells The House that the current PM is still the right man to lead Labour into the next election in 2029.

“Keir, clearly, has got this mission, so he should keep going at it… I’m not naïve to just how challenging that’s going to be – for him and for the country as a whole. He needs to keep working at it. But to make that work, there has to be a gear change in what we’re doing.”

McKenna is used to working in pressured environments, where small decisions can have major repercussions. His career as a nurse was spent in intensive care.

“You see the most extreme things. You see people whose bodies are disintegrating before your eyes.”

One of those people was the poisoned former spy Alexander Litvinenko, who he glimpsed through the window of his room at University College Hospital.

“We didn’t actually know it was polonium… but we did know it was something really scary and Porton Down were involved,” he recalls.

“We’d already got to a point where only people who had already cared for him were allowed in the room. I’ve still got a lot of anger about that, because I had good friends and colleagues who were put at a massive amount of risk by the reckless behaviour of Putin.

“I know the hell they went through. They were absolutely terrified. They were doing their job absolutely professionally.

“In that way that a lot of people in ITU, a lot of people in A&E, a lot of military people are, they shrugged it off visibly. But under it, of course people were very worried, and I’m very angry that we were put through that.”

Having left intensive care for a job at NHS England, he returned to nursing duties during the Covid pandemic. The Nightingale Hospital – at London’s vast ExCel Centre – was in need of matrons. McKenna was only there for five weeks, but says it felt like months.

“I was very worried going into it, that if we couldn’t treat people well and get them out and off the ventilators, it might be a place where we take people in and look after them, and see if we can save them… but actually the mortality rate could be very high.”

London’s Nightingale Hospital had 500 beds, with space for thousands more, but treated only 54 patients during the first wave. Almost half died, which meant its mortality rate ended up being roughly in line with the 47.7 per cent death rate seen at the time among Covid patients in hospital-based intensive care units.

McKenna, who chairs the APPG for Choice at the End of Life, has been frustrated by the assisted dying debate. The role of clinicians, he argues, has been “massively mischaracterised” – particularly when it comes to suggestions that doctors would rush to end patients’ lives without them having properly consented.

Early in his career, McKenna remembers “spending a whole night shift with a patient who just wanted me to switch off the infusion pumps” that were keeping her alive.

“She was quite delirious, actually. She wasn’t really properly competent. She couldn’t give informed consent. Clinicians deal with this all the time…

“The following night she was in a completely different stage – she was just grateful that I hadn’t done what she was begging for. That’s not unusual; we have to deal with that a lot.”

He does believe, however, that the decision to approve an assisted dying request should be taken by a panel who can provide “diversity of thought”, rather than a single judge.

McKenna was first inspired to become a nurse after making numerous visits to see friends and lovers who were sick with HIV and AIDS in the 1990s.

In a debate last year, the MP revealed he is HIV+ himself and emphasised how much better treatment has become. McKenna takes one pill a day, with no noticeable side effects.

“It’s really clear to me that there’s such a big opportunity here to stop new HIV transmissions,” he says.

England’s target is to eliminate new transmissions by 2030, and McKenna believes “stigma and fear” are some of the goal’s biggest obstacles. An interim target – to reduce transmissions by 80 per cent between 2019 and 2025 – appears almost certain to have been missed.

“We weren’t on target for it,” he says. “It’s not entirely surprising, off the back of the pandemic and so on, but also, it needs a focus, and you need to get a grip with things like opt-out testing in A&E.

“The big thing is people who have been diagnosed but then don’t come back for treatment… It’s those areas where we’ve lost track.

“These are tougher bits to crack as well. If people have been diagnosed but then don’t follow on with treatment, then obviously they can be spreading it in the community again. Identifying people is hard.

“At the same time, there are steps the government can take. I think the [2025-2030 HIV] Action Plan is good but, like anything, you can have an action plan – you’ve then got to actually follow it through.”

McKenna may no longer be an MP when the target is met or missed in 2030. If an election were held tomorrow, polls suggest Reform UK would gain his seat. But he is holding fast to his hospital training. “There are some really complex economic and social challenges in the country, let alone the global threats that are coming. I’m very wary of politicians that provide simple solutions.

“It takes it right back to intensive care. To manage people who are really sick, you’ve got to break things down into small chunks, analyse the problem and really come up with a convincing plan that addresses all of those things that are causing harm. That’s how you tackle it.

“It would be nice if complex problems could have a simple solution. But let’s face it: actually, normally, complex problems take quite a complex set of measures to address them.” 

Help and support:

Malcolm Gooderham is the founder of Elgin Advisory, and a former Conservative Party adviser.

The media profile and some polling suggest the Green Party is on the rise.

We have been here before, but this crop of Green Leaders has a more pernicious and divisive politics. Their focus is not on mainstreaming support for environmental causes, but on delegitimising the state of Israel. In doing so, they reveal their bigotry and raise broader questions about the Left’s political activism, the treatment of the Jewish community and the role of the State broadcaster.

The Green Party, like the far Left in general, has a long-standing and unhealthy obsession with Jews and the state of Israel.  While the Left indulges all sorts of gesture politics and flirts with all sorts of boycotts, they reserve their passion and ‘progressive outrage’ for Israelis. This is currently driving Green Party campaigns to pressure shopkeepers and residents not to stock or buy goods imported from Israel. The tactics and discrimination has yet to attract the opprobrium they warrant. Note we have not seen Sir Keir Starmer rush out a demand for an apology or retraction unlike his decision to single-out  Sir Jim Ratcliffe.

The Green political energy tilts towards foreign affairs and is Israel-centric or more accurately phobic. There is little ‘green space’ for campaigns to boycott goods from nations other than Israel. For instance, the CCP and China ignore prior commitments to freedom of speech in Hong Kong. Not to mention the rights of religious minorities.  Or protests about Iran where the regime constantly kills demonstrators, denies women and girls equality and violates human rights. Or African countries where Muslim militias violently persecute Christians. Or, on our own Continent where they could raise awareness about Russia’s abduction of thousands of children from Ukraine. Or much closer to home, they could focus their energies on delivering accountability for the grooming and gang-raping of teenagers across northern towns and cities. Their relative silence is woeful.

Sadly the new Green Leader Zack Polanski has been swept up in the Green tide of opposition to Israel. As a man who is not shy about his Jewish ancestry he has been on a journey, from challenging the Green Party’s unhealthy pre-occupation with Israel – which he once bemoaned as “obsessive” – to now championing their anti-Zionist causes. His politics are morphing with those of Jeremy Crobyn and a political alliance with the former Labour Leader seems inevitable.

The Green wave of anti-Israeli activity is a salutary reminder of an uncomfortable political truth, those on the far Left do not see Jews as a minority worthy of their support. Instead they prefer to isolate and even intimidate them. While claiming to be inclusive they repeatedly single out one country and people for their caustic campaigns.

For the far Left opposition to Israel is a touchstone issue. Politicians that do not sign-up to an anti-Zionist agenda fall foul of a perverse purity test and are not welcome in certain movements. It is seemingly a driving force and even organising principle of politics for Leftists, like the Corbyn/ Zultana zealots or the Green brigade.

Leaving aside the BBC’s coverage of Hamas’ behaviour before, during and after the ceasefire, it is deeply disturbing that Britain’s state broadcaster is unmoved by anti-Zionism. At the chaotic launch of the breakaway Labour movement, ‘Your Party’, Zultana’s speech received its biggest cheers to her cries of anti-Zionism. The BBC team clipped and replayed this, of course, but not as an example of extremism and or even a radical agenda.

It is alarming that politicians on the far Left feel they enjoy social permission to openly say they are  “anti-Zionist”. In doing so they display bigotry, but it often goes unchecked and unremarked upon. Their fellow travellers, not least in the media, either share their agenda or fail to see it as a corrosive ideology.

In fact, anti-Zionist propagandists are probably the modern day ‘UI’, or ‘Useful Idiots’. The term the Kremlin reserved for western ciphers for their propaganda during the Cold War. The new cadre are also making fools of themselves by giving air cover to another enemy of freedom and liberty, Islamic fundamentalists, who not only want to oppress and deny Jews a homeland but want to eradicate them and Judeo-Christian people and values.

While the Left and Polanski himself may be reticent to talk about it, Jews living in Britain, like Jews the world over, are deeply worried about the march of militant Islam and its ideology of hate. This is too often buried by default or by design by politicians in Europe. It is a grim irony that Militant Islam poses a real and present danger to the very democratic values that Left-wing political classes espouse.

Yet their own extremism blinds them to the potential outcomes of their witless attacks on the state of Israel and the Jewish people.

I have a growing fascination with the homeless.

I don’t mean rough sleepers or those in temporary accommodation, though I believe we have a moral duty to help those people, whatever party you are in, especially veterans.

No, I mean the politically homeless.

My writing about the Conservative cause, might lead you to assume that those hovering in the no man’s land between Reform and Conservative – or have jumped into Reform’s forward trenches as new friends – are no concern of mine.

Not so.

I meet far too many voters, many who are friends, and most – much like Nigel Farage and his entire team who used to be Tories but aren’t now – who, nearly two years on, are still very reluctant to give the Tories a second glance, let alone chance. I don’t like it, but I get it, because it’s our problem, not theirs.

They feel let down. They feel they’ve ‘nothing to lose giving Reform a try’ – much as some did to Labour in 2024 – but many are watching and looking, even if with cynicism to see if the Tories can produce something they might feel able to get behind. Most have not quite given up on us.

The Tories musn’t give up on them.

“I’m a former Tory but I really think they are finished for me. I just don’t think they have changed. They haven’t said anything, Kemi is silent, the party is nowhere” is something I hear over and over again.

Now just for the record, because I’m paid to – and and happy to – watch, read, listen to everything the Conservatives say and do I know, for a fact this is not true.

Even Robert Jenrick did think the Tories could change, because he was determined to lead it. They have changed with him, and will now without him. There are plenty who’ll say not enough, I might even agree, but it’s not credible to say not at all.

But whatever my level of belief that doesn’t make these people’s convictions and feelings their problem. It’s the Tories’ problem.

Lord Ashcroft’s latest focus group was instructive:

“Kemi comes across really well. She’s more straight-talking. I trust her to do what she says more than I would Keir Starmer. Not that I’m going to vote for her necessarily, but I think she far exceeds Starmer;”

Like her, probably not going to vote for her. Conservative problem.

Here’s another:

“I think she speaks well but I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her. With the amount of people who are leaving the party, there’s obviously something that isn’t ringing home to them;”  or “She was in the Tory government, so if she came out and said, I’m sorry we got stuff wrong, I tried to change it… But unfortunately, I haven’t heard her apologise for the crap the country is in;” “ The Tories are still all over the shop. Kemi Badenoch aside, they are a mess, an absolute bloody mess.”

Now I know, the Conservative are hearing all that, even if some voters aren’t hearing them.

Senior Tories will list – and it’s a big list – all the the new policies they’ve announced, costed and can deliver – and if they hadn’t done so much Reform wouldn’t had speeches last week – they list all the changes internally, the money coming in, the new candidate structures. Almost in a frustrated tone, saying:

“If this doesn’t look very different to the offer in 2024, then someone is just deliberately being obtuse.”

That was actually said to me a week ago. I pointed out there needed to be much more coming, more radical, still Conservative and if that’s unpopular truths, so be it. I also noted some of our natural voters are still in “la,la,la not listening” mode.

It was Iain Duncan Smith on election night 2024, when the scale of the debacle was clear who gave the party its best bit of starting advice; “They have to earn the right to be heard again“. When Badenoch became leader with that firmly in her mind, she warned it would take ‘at least two years.’

My former colleague Henry Hill had a rule of thumb for gauging whether the Tories were being heard by how much was in the papers about them. Not enough is the answer – and if it’s getting slightly better it’s still a Conservative problem.

So what do you if people simply won’t listen?

You take a lesson from my driving instructor: ‘Take space to make space.’

This week Kemi did.

She was on TV talking about a new policy offer to younger voters – on top of the abolition of stamp duty – around Student loans and Plan 2 interest payments. So far so old school normal.

She was sat on the Good Morning Britain sofa with Susanna Reid, and the former Labour MP, and Gordon Brown SpAd Ed Balls.

Quick detour. I still don’t get how ITV think it’s appropriate for the spouse of a Labour Cabinet Minister, with his background to be asking questions of the leaders of rival parties, or those whose jobs his wife was hoping to take. Or indeed the final apex of inappropriateness his actual wife. I’ve complained before. I still think it’s really bad optics.

Kemi then gets ambushed.

Money Saving – and lots of money-making – expert Martin Lewis pops up unannounced and starts telling her she’s wrong and pretty much talking over her. Now he apologised later, and Balls did on air, but here’s the key; she took space to make space, and apart from the egregiously biased Bev Turner, most people think she did a great job.

She wasn’t being heard, so she pointed out two men were shouting her down. She didn’t get angry, but made her case – a case she was fully across because the policy was thought through, and she had the details. She stayed calm, and delivered. That’s how you make yourself heard.

She then wrote a classy online response to Lewis:

“…honestly, don’t worry. I do love a feisty debate! It helps people understand what the real issues are. You and I agree on the principle: student loans have become a scam.

Whatever the Coalition government brought in back in 2012, it’s clearly not working for the world of 2026. So I’d genuinely love to come on your show and debate my plan vs yours. I’m putting student loans on the political agenda because we’ve got to do more for young people. It’s just one part of our New Deal For Young People. As the opposition, Conservatives may not be able to change the law right now, certainly not without cross-party support, but we can set the agenda especially while the government seems distracted by all sorts of other things.”

Martin Lewis would be mad not to invite her on. Labour crowed how she was attacking a Conservative policy for no longer working. She could remind his listeners that that’s the logic for every Labour U-turn – and those who say the Conservatives haven’t changed now have a clear example of change.

Will this win an election? No, not even close. Nobody’s saying that. But she’s repeatedly showing how it’s done.

I’ve banged on about the fact she can’t do this alone. Carving out the space to be heard must be done by every MP, Councillor, and volunteer – in the House, on the streets and on the doorstep. It is the only option, and it can be done. It’s not about ‘turning up the volume’ but amplifying the quality of the message, the sense and values in the policy – and selling hope.

I’ve talked recently about a slight wobble in confidence that momentum had dipped. I had evidence, but I also got messages from Tories insisting how much they’re up for the fight. They’re finding that fire from Kemi’s lead but also being fed up with the broken record of those vowing to ‘destroy’ them or insist they’re ‘finished’ – the same folk who’d foolishly assumed the Tories were already dead.

Still alive, still kicking.

Do I want to see more, and better? Yes. But the art of being heard by people who don’t want to listen takes determined calm not frustration. It requires a tactical swallow of humility and then to “KBO” consistently stating your case.

Again, and again, and again. Until you win.

Scarlett Maguire is a pollster, and founder of Merlin Strategy.

Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election promising improvements to ordinary American’s cost of living and tough action on the border.

Even with public opinion split aggressively on partisan lines, there was still relative optimism about what he could achieve on those two key issues for the American public, and he began his second term in the White House with positive approval ratings on both issues.

However, American voters’ attitudes towards the controversial president have cooled significantly since then, and he has found himself going from positive territory to 12 points underwater on the issue of immigration, with some pollsters recording a net 29 negative swing. 

American voters now see Trump’s handling of immigration more negatively than positively, despite the fact that in many senses he has delivered on his election promises of ‘mass deportations’ and tighter control on the Southern Border. Border crossings are at historic lows, with the U.S. Border Patrol recorded roughly 86,000 attempted illegal crossings at the Southern border from February 2025-2026, compared to 956,000 the previous year.

ICE under Trump has deported far fewer than the 3 million people deported under Barack Obama, and there is no doubt that ordinary Americans wanted to see firm and decisive action when it came to tackling immigration and the Southern border, with 66 per cent supporting deportations of illegal immigrants at the beginning of 2025. However, a majority (53 per cent) now think that the Trump administration is doing ‘too much’ on deportations, compared to 10 per cent who say too little and 36 per cent who say the right amount. Democrats overwhelmingly feel that there has been too much (86 per cent) but in a more worrying sign for the administration 20 per cent of Republicans feel the same way, with Hispanic Republicans (a crucial part of Trump’s 2024 coalition) much more likely to agree (47 per cent).

Whilst this unease in public opinion may not be unsurprising after the fatal shooting of two US citizens during conflicts between protesters and law enforcement officers,  it does seem to be having significant political impact. Trump himself has even begun an uncharacteristic climb-down, agreeing to wind down the ICE operations in Minnesota and pledged an end to unwanted ICE surges.

Despite all this, it would be a mistake for Democrats to interpret these changes in public opinion as signs of an appetite for a dramatically more progressive immigration system. Republicans are still more trusted on the issue overall, and just 17 per cent of voters oppose deportations full stop. Many Americans have responded badly to an appearance and tone from the administration more than they have substantially changed their views on illegal migration.

What does this mean for politicians in the UK wishing to draw lessons from the US?

In this country, immigration regularly tops voters’ most important issues, jostling with the cost of living for top spot in the public’s priorities, especially amongst Conservative and Reform voters. Views of the British public towards immigration are actually harsher than those across the Atlantic. They are more likely to support deportations and less likely to think that diversity strengthens the society. Brits support deporting those who are here illegally by more than a 3-1 margin, and by a nearly 2-1 margin support a large decrease in the number of new migrants allowed to the country (this includes both legal and illegal), and more than twice as many think that immigration in the past 10 years has been bad for the country than good.

That being said, as we have seen in America, the British public are very sensitive to the tone and rhetoric of the debate. Whilst the median voter may now be in favour of deportations and hostile to the idea of increased migration, they are also wary of tone that appears too inflammatory and divisive.

At the end of last year, I conducted 20 hours of focus groups with members of the public about a wide range of issues, including immigration. Voters across the left and right are unhappy with the current migration system, however swing voters drawn from the centre and conservatives also respond badly to language on the subject that feels too ‘right-wing’ or ‘anti-immigration’ at the same time as supporting drastic changes to the migration system and huge reductions to numbers of both legal and illegal migrants. Many expressed concerns that the current levels of migration are felt to be unsustainable and feel that politicians have been unfairly prioritising concerns of migrants over British Citizens. However, many of these same voters also wanted to go out of their way to praise migrants who do contribute as ‘hard workers’ often in contrast to parts of the British population they feel are ‘too lazy’ to get a job. Many voters still up for grabs at the next election are looking for politicians to sound fair as well as tough.

Trump has had a talent for causing the world’s attention economy to revolve around his axis, and his second term in power has been no different. Voters, especially those on social media, frequently say they remember seeing more stories from the US than stories from home. As a consequence, Trump has an outsized importance on British voters’ psyche, and as the past 14 months have progressed much of the public appear increasingly wary of anything that seems to too closely mimic Trump’s America (although he still garners praise from many of his critics for ‘getting things done’.) Many considering Reform, especially women, are in fact alienated by a perception that they may be too close to MAGA, “I think he cosies up to Trump” “I think he and his party are starting to speak a lot of sense and attack areas that are of concern to the country. But then there is a little bit of nervousness at the same time, because he is a little bit intense… just a bit Trump-esque”.

As such, promises of an ‘ICE-style’ deportation agency in the UK risks landing badly with voters, who may respond well to the substance at the same time as poorly to the style.

However, it would be wrong for more liberally minded politicians to interpret voters’ concerns about optics and rhetoric as an indication of more progressive views.

There is, if anything, a stronger desire amongst the British electorate for significant changes to the migration system than there is in the US (which is a large part of the reason for Reform’s overwhelming lead when it comes to which party would be best to handle it), at the same time as significantly less appetite for an approach that appears too inflammatory for the sake of it.