Chris Wormald was appointed cabinet secretary in December 2024 (Alamy)

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For an interim period, the responsibilities of the cabinet secretary will be shared by Cabinet Office permanent secretary Catherine Little, Home Office permanent secretary Dame Antonia Romeo, and Treasury permanent secretary James Bowler.

A new cabinet secretary will be appointed “shortly”, according to the government.

Wormald was appointed as head of the civil service in December 2024, having previously served as the permanent secretary for the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Education.

In a statement on Thursday, Wormald said: “It has been an honour and a privilege to serve as a civil servant for the past 35 years, and a particular distinction to lead the Service as Cabinet Secretary.

“I want to place on record my sincere thanks to the extraordinary civil servants, public servants, ministers, and advisers I have worked with. Our country is fortunate to have such dedicated individuals devoted to public service, and I wish them every success for the future.”

Starmer said: “I am very grateful to Sir Chris for his long and distinguished career of public service, spanning more than 35 years, and for the support that he has given me over the past year. I have agreed with him that he will step down as Cabinet Secretary today. I wish him the very best for the future.”

It has been widely briefed that Starmer intends to replace Wormald with Romeo.

However, in an extraordinary intervention on Wednesday, former senior civil servant Simon McDonald said the government must carry out “more due diligence” before appointing her.

McDonald, the former permanent secretary of the Foreign Office, told Channel 4: “The due diligence needs to be thorough. If the candidate mentioned in the media is the one, in my view, the due diligence has some way still to go.”

The Home Office permanent secretary was previously investigated by the Foreign Office while serving as Consul General in New York in 2017, over allegations of bullying, harassment, discrimination and misusing expenses.

Wormald is the latest senior figure to depart the top of government in recent days.

Morgan McSweeney has resigned as Starmer’s chief of staff, and Tim Allan has stepped down as the No 10 director of communications, amid severe criticism of Starmer’s decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador despite being aware of his links to Jeffrey Epstein.

It appears that The Jerusalem Post is allowing anyone to write for them nowadays. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (a.k.a. Tommy Robinson) wrote an opinion piece for them on Wednesday 11 February entitled “Jeffrey Epstein and the system that protected him.”

After months of silence on the Files, he finally spoke out.

But there’s several issues surrounding this piece that we need to look into. first is Robinson’s dramatic shift in prose. It uses clinical, polished language that stands in contrast with his usual street-level shouting.

And many are claiming he wrote it with AI:

It seems Israel’s PR crisis has reached rock bottom. This piece by Tommy Robinson for the Jerusalem Post is almost certainly AI written.

Anyone familiar with Tommy’s posting knows he struggles with the written word, and anyone familiar with AI slop will recognise the many… https://t.co/wGOE7Kae9n

— Keith Woods (@KeithWoodsYT) February 11, 2026

We also need to ask why this prominent racist grifter is even being given a platform to spew his bile.

His use of AI isn’t the issue here

It’s certainly plausible that Tommy Robinson used AI for his article. It has all the tells, and to be honest, it would be more surprising if he had written it himself. Robinson can barely string a sentence together on Twitter, so these accusations hold a lot of weight.

But it’s not Robinson’s lack of literacy skills which are the problem here.

The problem is that, yet again, this racist, little grifter has completely fucked his own argument. By staying silent on the Epstein Files, literally the biggest white-led grooming gang of all time, all future input he has on the matter is null and void.

The Epstein Files have been out for a while. For months we have seen the censored images of women and children blasted across our screens. We have looked at thousands of redacted names of women who will never be able to come forward and tell their stories.

Why the fuck didn’t Robinson comment on this then? Why wait this long when you’re so desperate to ‘protect all women’?

The Epstein files have revealed what is probably the largest grooming-gang in the world.

And the guy running it was fucking white.

That’s why he’s been so silent. Because it doesn’t fit his ridiculously racist propaganda that he shovels down the neck of the British public. He is a hypocrite and a liar who is willing to ignore systematic abuse when the perpetrators look like him.

Oh, and the fact that he was in the files, because Epstein himself was a fan of his.

Tommy Robinson: a legacy of lies and hate

Nobody should listen to a single ‘take’ this opportunist has, whether it’s AI or not. Tommy Robinson’s history proves he is a danger to a better world.

I mean, it doesn’t really scream ‘protect all women’ when Robinson attacked a copper who was intervening in a domestic issue between himself and his partner. This cocaine soaked rat has so many convictions it’s hard to count. But they include intent to supply, harassing a literal child because he was an immigrant, leading football hooligans into a mass brawl, possessing and using a false passport, mortgage fraud, the list goes on.

Those actions alone mean that this little racist should be buried in the annals of history. But it’s made so much worse when this man does nothing but weaponise sexual violence to target migrant communities to stoke division.

For this convicted criminal, the abuse of women and girls was never the point. He only cares about sexual violence when he can turn the narrative and blame Black and Brown people.

Laundering his racist brand

Tommy Robinson is now leaning into a pro-Israel narrative to shield his racism. Hiding behind a literal genocidal state which is killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims is absolutely disgusting, but it didn’t stop Robinson going on a tour of the Zionist state. Robinson was called out by The Board of Deputies of British Jews for his trip, with them calling Robinson a “thug” and the “very worst of Britain”.

This AI slop in a shit publication shows how far Robinson has fallen. But he needs to fall further and into absolute oblivion. Robinson doesn’t give a shit about women. He only gives a shit about lining his greasy little pockets and shouting about innocent black and brown people to his legions of knuckle-dragging followers.

Rather than letting Robinson’s new grift flourished, it is time to see him for what he is. A racist little grifter who doesn’t give a shit about women and girls being raped.

He only cares about where he can get his next bag and how he can somehow turn the narrative on vulnerable marginalised groups.

Featured image via The Canary

US attorney general Pam Bondi may have walked herself into a sticky situation after declaring under oath to congress that there is:

no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime.

Pam Bondi: liar

Ted Lieu instantly called this out as a lie under oath. Lieu is vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus and a former Air Force colonel. Continuing, Lieu quoted a deeply concerning transcript from the Epstein Files. This transcript has raised urgent questions about the US President’s potential involvement in serious criminal acts. The Epstein Files have revealed a significant and highly suspicious relationship between Trump and convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett also took Bondi to task, arguing that she and the Trump administration cannot distinguish right from wrong.

Pam Bondi, “There is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime”

Ted Lieu, “You just lied under oath. There is ample evidence in the Epstein files”

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Pam Bondi, “Don’t you ever accuse me of a crime”

Ted Lieu, “You just lied under oath, and this is on video tape”

Ted… pic.twitter.com/v2Feci6P4u

— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) February 11, 2026

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‘Epstein should rot in hell, so should the men who patronised this operation’

Pam Bondi: There is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime. Everyone knows that. This has been the most transparent presidency. He’s the one that asked that those files be released.

Ted Lieu: I’m going to claim my time. I got your answer. You said there’s no evidence.

Bondi: President Trump asked that he sign the legislation.

Lieu: This is time. Time belongs to the gentleman from California. Okay. I’m going to put up another document from… a witness who called the FBI’s National Threat Operation Center because I believe you just lied under oath. There is ample evidence in the Epstein file.

Bondi: Don’t you ever accuse me of a crime.

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Lieu: I believe you just lied under oath, and this is all on videotape. You said there’s no evidence of a crime. I’m showing you. Here is a witness statement who called into the FBI’s Threat Operation Center. He drove Donald Trump around in a limo. He overheard what Donald Trump said to Jeffrey on his cell phone. He was so angry, he was going to stop the limo and hurt Donald Trump. And he met a girl who said she was raped by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

She later had her head blown off, and officers at the scene said that could not have been suicide. No one, no one at the Department of Justice interviewed this witness. You need to interview this witness immediately. Epstein should rot in hell, so should the men who patronised this operation. And as we sit here today, there are over 1,000 sex trafficking victims, and you have not held a single man accountable. Shame on you. If you had any decency, you would resign right after this hearing concludes.

You cannot shame the shameless
Impeach her finished https://t.co/BOGYZ3m3GI

— Where We Going, We Don’t Need Britches 💙💛 (@RPHutch1975) February 12, 2026

Crockett: ‘protecting paedophiles and creeps’

Lieu wasn’t the only one to challenge Pam Bondi on her ability to recognise legal wrongdoing, which is quite a feat considering she’s a qualified lawyer.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett confronted Bondi directly, dismissing her denials of serious criminal conduct by the US President:

Crockett: Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. And to be clear, I’m not going to ask any questions of this witness because this witness has revealed that she has no intentions of answering questions. But instead, I’m gonna ask some very basic questions really quickly of my colleague Becca Balint if she will answer.

Right or wrong, raping children?

Balint: Wrong.

Crockett: Right or wrong, killing random citizens?

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Balint: Definitely wrong.

Crockett: Right or wrong, enriching yourself as the sitting president of the United States?

Balint: Definitely wrong.

Crockett: Okay, thank you. Cos I probably never would have got that with our witness. Our witness who somehow is a lawyer but does not understand how it works with witnesses. I’m not really sure what law school she went to and what all kind of cases she tried. But typically when you come into a space and somebody’s a witness, then they sit there and they answer questions instead of asking questions. And then we also have this objection that we use as lawyers called non-responsive, when a witness fails to actually answer the question, but nevertheless, let me address the survivors because that’s exactly who they are. They are not victims. They are survivors.

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Let me say thank you for having more courage and moral clarity in your pinky fingers than the entire Department of Justice. We are currently the laughing stock of the world partially because of the failed leadership within the DOJ as we see kings and queens fallen everywhere around the world. But we don’t know the basics of right and wrong in this country because it’s not about partisanship.

And that’s why I applaud Thomas Massie because he’s the only person on the Republican side that has a backbone and knows how to stand up to corruption. But nevertheless, let me keep going. My Democratic colleagues have been attacked this entire committee hearing. They have been lied on. And frankly, the American people weren’t looking for that. They were looking for answers about the corruption that they see coming from this administration. In the written testimony of this witness, of this particular witness, she stated that when she took office, she had two main goals.

The first was to end the weaponisation of justice and second to return the department to its core mission. Not only have you lied about both, you’ve intentionally done the exact opposite. You’re spending more taxpayer resources arresting journalists than you are prosecuting paedophiles and creeps.

Crockett went on to say:

But let’s circle back to you protecting paedophiles and creeps because I want to talk about the president and his possible involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. Now, I don’t know what the president might have done with Jeffrey Epstein, but unlike this administration, I believe that facts matter. So, let’s talk about the facts. Fact number one, Donald Trump is one of the most named people in the Epstein files. At least 5,000 files contains more than 38,000 references to Trump, his wife, or Mara Lago.

Fact number two, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell made young girls available to Trump on multiple occasions. For example, according to this file, Ghislaine Maxwell presented a young girl to President Trump, who spent more than 20 minutes apparently flirting with her.

Here’s another example. This shows notes from FBI investigators that describe Jeffrey Epstein transporting a victim to Mara Lago to meet with President Trump where he bragged to Trump that quote, “This is a good one.” Now, I’m not saying that the president is a paedophile, but there is a lot of evidence in these files that suggests that he’s very close friends with a lot of men who are paedophiles. What’s crazy about all of this is just that this is a big cover up and this administration is engaged in it. In fact, this administration is complicit.  Or how your agency is ready to give the president a $230 million day payday, which is unconstitutional. The Constitution is clear. The president shall not receive any payment except his salary while in office. The fact of the matter is that you will be remembered as one of the worst attorney generals in history. An attorney general who has prioritized obstruction over justice, corruption over the law, fielty to the president over loyalty to the constitution. And Mr. Chairman, I will yield.

For more on the Epstein Files, please read:

Featured image via the Canary

In an era of state repression and mass murder backed by the most powerful nations on earth, it takes something special to speak truth to power. Nine Belfast Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) activists from have done just that. This February they face the full power of the genocide-complicit British state.

The Canary understands three of those charged will go on trial on 13 February. Another will be in court on 16 February and a fifth will face British ‘justice’ on 20 February.

The charges stem from two road blockades carried out on July and October 2025. In a powerful statement, the group made it clear that the real criminals are those who support Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestine.

Active genocide participants

BDS Belfast pulled no punches in their statement:

Stormont and Westminster have been active participants in the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Yet, it is 9 Belfast activists, from across multiple solidarity groups, who participated in peaceful civil disobedience, who the police are attempting to criminalise.

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They added:

The only thing that we are guilty of is standing for the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.

We will not be deterred

The original protests were focused on the role of the so-called ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation‘ and the Global Sumud Flotilla respectively and, more broadly, Stormont and Westminster’s support for Israel.

The Canary understands the charges will range from “obstructive sitting” and “unauthorised procession”. So peaceful protest then….

The nine plan to plead not guilty to all charges.

The British state would suppress every trace of human solidarity with Palestinians if it could. And it will do this at any cost to basic freedoms and rights. These activists are heroic figures. The Canary will keep you updated in the case as it progresses.

Featured image via the Canary

Philip Stephenson-Oliver is the current Association Chairman of the Queen’s Park and Maida Vale Conservatives (formerly Westminster North). He serves as a soldier in the Honourable Artillery Company and has worked in the wine trade for over ten years.

As I drove up to Norfolk for Christmas, I was struck by how relentlessly the countryside has been consumed by new housing estates. Through Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, and into Norfolk, the same developments appeared again and again: vast tracts of identikit homes, thrown up at speed, devoid of character, and rooted in the cheapest possible design philosophy.

This is housing as a numbers exercise, not as a place to live. Indeed, one of Angela Rayner’s first acts as Secretary of State for Housing was to remove any notion of a ‘right to beauty’ as a guiding principle in housing development.

These estates are the very definition of lazy architecture. They are built to satisfy short-term targets rather than long-term communities. And as the late Donald Rumsfeld observed, there are ‘known-unknowns”. One such known-unknown is this: somewhere within many of these developments lies a poorly built, over-regulated design flaw that will reveal itself in twenty or thirty years. When it does, these houses will not merely lose value; they will become prisons for their owners, costly to maintain, difficult to sell, and politically toxic to repair.

It does not have to be this way.

If planners, officials, and ministers were serious about solving the housing crisis properly — not just hitting annual completion figures — they would look to a tried and tested model of urban development. They should look at Maida Vale in West London.

For the past eight years, I have been happy to call Maida Vale home. It is a near-perfect example of Victorian urban planning at its finest. Across the ward stand rows of handsome red-brick mansion blocks, typically seven or eight storeys high, elegantly proportioned and thoughtfully laid out. While individual flats are not always large by modern standards, they benefit from high ceilings and generous windows, creating a genuine sense of light and space that modern developments consistently fail to replicate.

But Maida Vale’s real secret is this: it is one of the most densely populated areas not just in London, but in the entire country — and you would never know it.

On paper, the ward has a population density of around 18,000 people per square kilometre. Yet that figure understates the reality. Nearly a third of the area is taken up by Paddington Recreation Ground, a large and much-loved public park. Remove that from the calculation, and the true density rises to something closer to 25,000 people per square kilometre. To put this into perspective, the City of London has a population density of around 5,000 people per square kilometre, Marylebone around 10,000, and Vauxhall just under 17,000.

And yet Maida Vale does not feel crowded, oppressive, or hostile. It feels calm, orderly, and beautiful. This is density done properly.

That beauty matters more than many planners are willing to admit. Medium- to high-density urban living is where the majority of people now wish to live, and it is the obvious solution to our housing pressures. Yet it has been rendered deeply off-putting by decades of poor design: from the unforgiving brutalism of the 1960s, through the plasticised PVC architecture of the 1980s, to the soulless, cladding-wrapped developments of the 2000s.

As for much of today’s so-called architecture, the less said, the better. Even the most ideologically committed, pearl-clutching Liberal Democrat NIMBY would struggle to object to the development of this kind we see in Maida Vale. The lesson is obvious: people will accept density when it is done well.

This matters because housing — its availability, affordability, and quality — is one of the most important issues facing my generation and those below it. In my view, it is also a major contributor to Britain’s alarmingly low birth rate. When people cannot afford space, stability, or permanence, they do not start families. It is as simple as that.

I have just entered my thirties, and the vast majority of my friends either do not have children or do not plan on doing so. For aspirational middle-class families, the decision not to have children is often driven by cost. Britain’s housing system has become a generational Ponzi scheme: those lucky enough to buy early have grown wealthy on paper, while their children and grandchildren are trapped in high rents and obscene house prices.

There are only a limited number of ways this can change. One is a serious reduction in immigration — something that may finally be starting to happen as visa numbers fall and post-pandemic schemes unwind. But immigration policy alone will not solve the problem.

What we also need is a fundamental rethink of how and what we build.

I am not arguing that Maida Vale is a museum piece. I am arguing that it is a model. The cheap, modernist estates spreading across the country today will not be standing in a hundred years. Many will be demolished and replaced by something just as ugly and just as disposable. The Victorian mansion blocks of Maida Vale, by contrast, will still be there — a permanent legacy of beauty, density, and intelligent urban design.

If we want to build homes that last, communities that endure, and cities that people are proud to live in, we already know how to do it. We simply need the courage to copy what works.

Pollard seemingly absolved Peter Mandelson’s links to Palantir from playing any role in the government awarding a contract worth £240 million to Palantir, signed in December 2025. Pollard maintained, repeatedly, that the £240 million deal was merely an extension of the 2022 agreement signed by the previous Conservative Government.

 And again:

I have been clear in my answers today that the decision to extend the 2022 contract signed under the previous Government was made by the Secretary of State alone. It was his decision to do so.

Bookies have slashed the odds on the Green Party winning the Gorton and Denton by-election after a flurry of big-money bets.

HuffPost UK has been told that £90,000 was wagered on the party’s candidate, Hannah Spencer, winning the crunch contest on February 26.

In response, Ladbrokes have installed the Greens as heavy odds-on favourites at 1/3, with Reform UK next on 3/1 and Labour the rank outsiders at 10/1.

In a post on X, the bookmakers said it had been “a volatile day in the betting markets for Gorton and Denton”.

A Green Party source told HuffPost UK: “Word on the ground is that Green support is growing and we’re seeing it in our canvassing. So no surprise that people are putting on bets too.

“But we take absolutely nothing for granted. We’re fully focussed on knocking on doors and raising awareness of our incredible candidate, Hannah Spencer.

“Labour’s vote is in freefall and this looks to have worsened further in recent days.”

The by-election was called after the resignation of sitting MP Andrew Gwynne, who retained the seat for Labour in 2024 with a majority of nearly 13,500.

If the party was to lose it, pressure would once again be piled on Keir Starmer, who survived an coup attempt earlier this week when Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar called on him to resign.