Politics
I Found Out My Husband Was Cheating By A Credit Card Charge
I have always prided myself on having a sixth sense for deception, an ability to spot the lie buried in the casual comment or the discrepancy in a story that exposed what someone is working to hide. I figured that’s what made me a great thriller writer.
In 16 books published over 25 years, I’d been constructing elaborate plots where people led double lives and hid horrible truths with both blatant lies and simple misdirection.
My protagonists were always law enforcement – inspectors and detectives, a medical examiner – sharp-eyed women trained to see through shiny veneers to notice the small inconsistencies that eventually cracked the case.
And yet, for two and a half years, I missed the most obvious plot twist of my life: my husband was having an affair with his massage therapist.
The irony isn’t lost on me. Somedays, the irony is suffocating.
It was a Friday afternoon in December 2022 when I found out. Our kids were home from college for the holidays, and our family was preparing to head to Mexico to join my sister and her family for a week of sun, sand and margaritas.
I discovered his affair not through any brilliant investigative work nor the careful attention to detail I so prided myself on. Instead, the discovery came from a charge on a credit card statement – a session with a couples counsellor we hadn’t seen in almost a decade – that caused an uncomfortable pit in my stomach.
I sometimes wonder whether the appearance of that pit meant that suspicion had been planted before then – whether there was a part of me, deep and buried, that sensed the rot beneath the carefully maintained façade.
When I reached out to my husband, his phone was turned off. For more than two hours, the pit grew as he remained unreachable and our adult children began to sense something was wrong. When his phone finally came back online, I confronted him with the charge and asked what was going on.
“I’m almost home. Let’s talk then,” he responded. So casual. So calm.
When he arrived, he asked if we could talk without the kids.
“What’s going on?” I demanded when we were alone. “I’m not in love with you anymore,” he said in the same tone you might mention the oil light has come on in the car.
“Who are you in love with?” I asked.
Love was energy; it didn’t just dissipate into the ether. It went somewhere else.
“There’s no one else,” he told me.
Courtesy of Danielle Girard
He acted normal for the next 24 hours. In weak imitation, the kids and I tried to act normal, too, to prepare for our trip and the small Christmas celebration we planned before leaving.
The following morning, Christmas Eve, we were set to depart for our vacation when I woke at 4am with the memory of something my husband said when our friends divorced: “A man never leaves his marriage unless there’s someone waiting for him.”
I roused him at 4:04am and asked again, “Who are you in love with?” When he didn’t answer, I started to guess. I got it in two. On the first guess, he protested loudly. On the second, he went silent.
“How long?” I asked. If I’d written the scene, I like to think I’d have been more creative, but creativity evaporated in the panic of that moment.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that he lied again. It took more than three weeks to get him to admit that the relationship had been going on for almost two and a half years. Three years later, there are details that never quite squared and lies that were never ironed out.
As a thriller writer, I’ve spent countless days imagining the worst things people can do to each other. I’ve sat in coffee shops and on airplanes and at my desk and invented murders, betrayals, psychological torture.
I’ve been inside the heads of liars and manipulators and people who destroy others without remorse. That experience made me believe I understood human darkness with a clarity others lack. But understanding it for the benefit of a story and living through it are entirely different things.
Courtesy of Danielle Girard
For days after I found out, I moved through my life like a stranger. Every object felt suspicious, every memory potentially false. Had he been thinking about her when we were in Nashville for my birthday the month before? Was he texting her from our bed when I was in the kitchen and setting up the coffee machine for the next day? How many times had he said “I love you” while mentally planning his next Friday massage appointment?
“Really? Your massage therapist?” I asked once, during one of those miserable circular conversations where nothing gets resolved and everything gets worse. “A 50-year-old man and his massage therapist. It’s so cliché.”
The comment clearly stung, as if I’d insulted his creativity rather than his fidelity.
“We were friends first. She listened to me,” he said.
“I listen to you,” I said like a petulant child.
“You’re in your office, working, or you’ve got your nose in a book for the podcast.”
He wasn’t entirely wrong.
Once our kids had left for college, I’d shifted my focus to my writing and working harder than ever as my career took off. I’d stopped working on the marriage. My shiny new toy was the book; his worked out the kinks in his neck, ones put there by 30 years with me.
That December, I was neck-deep in a manuscript about a detective investigating a pregnant surrogate who goes missing. It was a book I’d been so excited about six months earlier, one I’d been confident was my darkest, most psychologically complex book yet.
After I learned my husband’s secret, I couldn’t write a word.
Every time I sat down at my desk, I’d cry or stare at the blank page, wondering why I bothered. What did these pretend murders matter? What did my clever plot twists signify when I’d missed the biggest one in my own life?
Beyond the logistical fears about my own future was another terrifying realisation: I no longer wanted to write the detective book. Overnight, I’d lost interest in stories about detectives solving crimes, justice being served through shootouts and the court system, about the bad guys getting caught and punished. Suddenly, those seemed too neat, too fake, like fairy tales and not the Grimm’s variety.
Real betrayal, I learned, doesn’t get solved in 300 pages. Real deception doesn’t wrap up with a satisfying twist where everything makes sense and the protagonist emerges stronger and wiser. Real betrayal sits there, ugly and unresolved, in the middle of your life while people take sides and you fill the garage with items you once cherished and no longer want to see.
I started thinking about the kinds of stories that had never interested me – messy ones where the protagonist doesn’t figure everything out and there are no clear villains, just people making terrible choices for complicated reasons. Stories set in the ugly places I’d never wanted to go until now.
When I found my way back to the page, I rewrote the surrogate story, cutting the point of view from the detective, and placing the biological mom at its centre with her best friend from high school as the surrogate who vanishes four days before the baby is due.
In this new version, the story focuses on these women who were friends in high school and the complications of their long, intense friendship.
Though there is a big moral question at the centre of the book, as well as a fun, juicy plot, it was the interactions between the characters themselves that allowed me to explore the messy reality of life that I was living through while writing.
My divorce was finalised at the end of 2023, a few months after I got a new agent, six months before my agent sold that book, Pinky Swear, at auction for release earlier this year. It was the hardest book I’ve ever written and the best.
Courtesy of Danielle Girard
The one I’m writing now is trickier, more complicated. It’s about a woman who discovers her husband’s long affair with a massage therapist.
My husband was married to a thriller writer for almost 30 years. This can’t come as a surprise to him. Still, this is not a memoir. There’s a murder, for starters. But there are echoes from my own experience in the details, like the secrets that begin small and seem harmless … until they’re not.
While the main character is not me, the protagonist is walking in my own, uncomfortable shoes, trying to construct a narrative to make sense of chaos, and working to find a path forward when the narrative crumbles.
Every time I drive downtown, I scan the cars, the street, the store or restaurant for my ex-husband and his girlfriend. I still haven’t seen them together, though I know that they are. I wonder what I’ll feel when I do – a fresh wallop of despair? Closure? I have run the scenario a hundred times, and I still don’t know.
What I do know is that the writing I’m doing now feels like what I should be doing. Not because detective fiction isn’t important or valuable, but because I’d been using it as a way to imagine I could manage the outcome and somehow avoid the terrible things that happen to people who I imagined weren’t as studious or as prepared.
For months, I’d been plotting elaborate lies and deceit in that first draft of Pinky Swear while missing the simple, stupid truth: that the person sleeping next to me was a stranger. That I was so good at inventing characters for mysteries, I’d forgotten to be curious about the one I’d married.
I see now what those books were really about: control. The illusion that if you’re smart enough, observant enough, careful enough, you can see the betrayal coming. You can solve the crime. You can write your way to safety.
But you can’t. Life isn’t a thriller, and there’s no genius detective who’s going to figure it all out – no satisfying final chapter where all the pieces fit. At least, not in my life. Instead, there are just little clues I recognised far too late about the person I thought I knew becoming someone I never knew at all.
The book I’m working on now – the one about the woman who discovers her husband’s two-and-a-half-year affair with his massage therapist – will be called Happy Ending.
It won’t be neat or easy, but it might be happy. I hope it will be.
Danielle Girard is the USA Today bestselling and award-winning author of several novels, including the Annabelle Schwartzman series and Pinky Swear. She is also the creator and host of the Killer Women Podcast, where she interviews the women who write today’s best crime fiction. A graduate of Cornell University, Danielle received her MFA in creative writing at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina. When she’s not traveling, Danielle lives in the mountains of Montana.
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If you’ve ever left the house only to wonder whether you turned off the stove or unplugged your curling tongs, you’re not alone. However, this uncertainty doesn’t have to be your destiny.
In Japan, railway operators use a simple but powerful technique to avoid mistakes. And this method might be exactly what you need to stay focused on everyday tasks. It’s called “shisa kanko”.
“Shisa kanko essentially means ‘pointing and calling,’ which is used to improve attentiveness and accuracy,” said Joy Gallon, a licensed therapist with Thriveworks. “It was developed as a method of ensuring safety on the Japanese railway system. Operators are trained to focus on and point at an object such as a signal or stopping point and verbally ‘call out’ the name of the object.”
Research by Japan’s Railway Technical Research Institute in 1994 found that the practice of shisa kanko reduced incidents of human error by almost 85%.
“Because the practice uses eyes, hands, mouth and ears, it actively engages the senses,” Gallon said. “Studies have shown that it increases the blood flow to the frontal lobes, which is where our reasoning, logic and ability to see future consequences of current actions lie.”
In other words, it’s a multimodal system for attention and memory.
“The brain has to see something, say something and do something, so we are using our visual system, our motor system and our auditory system,” said therapist Rachael Bloom. “This reduces error because if one ‘system’ fails, there are two backup systems that have the same information.”
This approach is important for high-stakes daily tasks such as operating a train system – as well as smaller, mundane things like using a curling iron.
“Our brains are built for survival, so we spend a lot of time operating based on habit,” said time management coach Anna Dearmon Kornick. “When we take actions based in habit, we expend less cognitive energy, which allows us to preserve energy.”
Daily routine tasks like curling your hair tend to happen in autopilot or default mode, which means you don’t tend to remember them as clearly. That’s why so many people end up with uncertainty around questions like “Did I unplug my curling iron?” or “Did I turn off the stove?”
“Introducing something that is not part of the default mode helps you remember it,” Dearmon Kornick said. “A non-default mode action could be making a weird sound, snapping your fingers, clapping your hands or singing a song, which helps you stay more conscious.”
So while it might feel silly to point and make a sound at once, the shisa kanko method can be incredibly effective by bringing greater awareness to consequential tasks.
“It requires you to make two or more physical ‘checks’ or confirmations of your actions,” said Rashelle Isip, a productivity coach at The Order Expert. “These checks shift your thoughts into the realm of physical action, which requires more effort. This might mean pointing, picking up an item or speaking aloud.”
In addition to improving safety in different industries, shisa kanko can help with personal focus or error prevention.
“I’ve used aspects of this method to help me improve my focus or anchor myself during the day while performing everyday tasks like making phone calls, exercising or getting ready for the day,” Isip said.
It’s another way to engage in mindfulness overall.
“When we are present, or mindful, we notice our surroundings better, are able to see the potential for error and course correct,” Gallon said. “Shisa kanko involves literally pointing at the object and naming it, which essentially grounds us in that moment.”
This method may be especially helpful for people with ADHD
A method like shisa kanko could be particularly helpful for people with ADHD or other forms of neurodivergence that impact focus and memory.
“When the ADHD brain finds stimulation, it also finds regulation,” said Billy Roberts, a therapist at Focused Mind ADHD Counselling. “By engaging multiple senses, the ADHD brain can become more engaged in that behaviour. Think of it as a form of active listening. If a person with ADHD repeats what was just said, the words will be encoded better due to repetition.”
Terry Matlen, a psychotherapist and ADHD consultant, noted that some of her clients with ADHD sing a short verse of a song to help them remember certain things. For example, they might take the tune of “London Bridge Is Falling Down” and sing “Need to turn the oven off, oven off, oven off ….”
“Executive function is impaired to some degree in everyone with ADHD – planning, organising, initiating, memory,” Matlen said. “So simply thinking to yourself, ‘I need to remember to turn off the stove after I finish cooking,’ just might not be enough.”
“I often talk out loud when needing to remember something – i.e., ‘call back Susan, call back Susan,’” she added. ”You can add another modality to saying things out loud, like tapping your wrist while saying it. Or in the case of traditional shisa kanko, pointing and verbalising.”
The experts who spoke to HuffPost agreed that shisa kanko helps people with ADHD by increasing conscious attention. Some noted that dopamine may play a supporting role as well, though more research is needed to fully explore that.
“Vocal stimming – like humming or singing – can increase dopamine and enhance focus for some people with ADHD,” Roberts said. “Humming and singing can be grounding when a person feels overwhelmed or anxious.”
Experts emphasised that it’s not just about making noise but what that action represents or accomplishes – for example, self-soothing.
“Self-stimulatory behaviours, including vocal stims, can release dopamine because they work with the part of the brain that deals with reward – but not simply because someone is ‘making a sound,’” Bloom noted.
In this sense, making a particular vocal expression is more about calming down your nervous system, self-regulating, self-motivating or breaking out of boredom. But a dopamine release related to shisa kanko might also simply be associated with accomplishing a task.
“Every time we knock even something small off our to-do list, we get a hit of dopamine and feel really good,” Dearmon Kornick said. “So if you decide to make a weird noise as you unplug your straightener, you might get the dopamine release of ‘Woo! I did what I said I was going to do.’”
There are many ways to incorporate shisa kanko into everyday life
There are ways to incorporate the method or even the spirit of shisa kanko into your everyday life.
“Try using this technique to reinforce the importance of information or actions in your daily routine,” Isip suggested. “Maybe you don’t want to forget your glasses before you leave for work or you don’t want to ignore an important letter on your desk. That might mean speaking aloud, picking up an object, handwriting a note, snapping your fingers or adding a reminder to a notetaking app.”
You can experiment with different approaches and find which ones work for you.
“Someone with ADHD could apply this to virtually everything they frequently forget to do – taking medication, packing what they need for the day, remembering daily tasks,” Bloom said.
“People with ADHD are most likely to forget or make mistakes on tasks that are repetitive, mundane and non-urgent, so using strategies that disrupt autopilot to ensure accuracy with this type of task makes a lot of sense.”
It can be as simple as pointing at your door handle and saying, “I’ve locked the door,” or at the light switch and saying, “I’ve turned off the lights,” as you leave the house. Or maybe you point at your keys and wallet and say “keys” and “wallet” to remember to bring them with you.
“Another option is to use it whenever you’re feeling overwhelmed, frustrated or stressed,” Isip said. “You probably already use some form of this technique in your daily life to help you refocus your attention and balance your thoughts. That might look like saying aloud, ‘Take a deep breath and relax,’ ‘You’ve got this!,’ ‘Time to get back on track,’ ‘OK, where were we?’ or ‘Let’s take it from the top.’”
Bringing mindfulness to these moments helps you regain a sense of calm, focus and agency.
“Use a meditation involving noticing and naming objects in the environment around you, combined with a reinforcing phrase and/or gesture to help manage negative thoughts and improve concentration,” Gallon said.
She noted that many therapists recommend a grounding strategy that guides you to name five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell and one thing you can hear.
“Shisa kanko has been touted as a ‘habit hack’ for fighting bad habits such as doomscrolling, which we know can be very detrimental to a person’s mental health,” Gallon added.
Of course, it takes practice and time to successfully implement any strategy to the fullest. So be patient as you explore this method.
“You can make use of elements of shisa kanko in everyday life by using it to confirm, reinforce or anchor either a habit, information or skill,” Isip said. “Try using it when starting or ending your workday, transitioning between tasks, confirming appointment details, paying for goods and services or even motivating yourself to act.”
She suggested saying phrases aloud along the lines of “Time to get to work,” “The appointment is April 16th at 10 AM” or “Let’s have a good workout session!”
Shisa kanko can be useful for avoidance-ridden behaviours, Matlen noted. People with ADHD in particular tend to struggle to start a task, stay on task and/or finish the task.
“An adult with ADHD who is facing an unpleasant task causing them angst and anxiety – say, de-cluttering their desk at work – might point to one piece of paper falling off a pile of reports and say aloud, ‘I’m going to put that page into that folder in that file cabinet.’ Then continue from there, perhaps setting a timer for 15 minutes,” she explained.
Thus, the system can help alleviate procrastination, avoidance and stress. Make sure to change things up periodically, however.
“If you start singing the same song or doing the same snaps or making the same weird sound every time, eventually that sound is going to become a part of the default experience, and you’re not going to remember if you made the sound because you always do,” Dearmon Kornick warned.
Ultimately, shisa kanko is a dynamic approach. The method might not be right for you, but it doesn’t hurt to try it out.
“Every ADHD brain is different,” Roberts noted. “What works for some might not work for others. It is critical to understand that if a skill works, keep it. But if a skill doesn’t work, then maybe you and that skill aren’t a good fit. It’s fine to leave it be and find another!”
Actor Aubrey Plaza is expecting a baby with her partner, actor Christopher Abbott, according to her representative.
But instead of sharing congratulations, many people on social media are responding with judgment about how soon Plaza should be moving forward as a grieving widow. In 2025, Plaza’s husband, Jeff Baena, died by suicide.
“She should’ve at least waited a few years,” one popular X post reads, while another commenter remarked that having a new partner one year after your previous partner dies “seems a little weird.”
This backlash is all too common. There is still an outdated idea that widows should have a long, formal mourning period, even though there is no single correct or certain timeline about how a grieving person should date or find love again.
“Society thinks you shouldn’t do anything for a year. You’re supposed to mourn a full season of cycles,” grief counsellor Jill Cohen told HuffPost. “What’s important to remember is that we never know what’s behind the story” of why people do or don’t want to have sex and find love again after loss, she said.
Anita Coyle, a widow and co-host of the Widow We Do Now? podcast, said young widows are especially damned if they date, damned if they don’t.
“People want to make it a litmus about the kind of relationship you had with your late partner. If you date too early, then it must mean that you didn’t love them. And then if you don’t date soon enough, then you’re ‘stuck’ in your grief,” Coyle said. “No matter what you do, people who aren’t in your situation are going to judge you.”
Coyle knows this firsthand. Coyle’s husband died in 2019, and she has not dated since. Coyle said she got the opposite reaction from what Plaza is experiencing, such as questions like “Are you stuck? Are you not moving on?”
In response to judgment, “I think a lot of widows probably just want to yell at the people, like, ‘It’s none of your business,’” Coyle said.
Dia Dipasupil via Getty Images
PSA: How Widows Move Forward Is Not Up To Us
How one’s partner dies also adds to the kind of judgment the surviving partner faces going forward.
Plaza and Baena had been separated for four months before Baena died by suicide, according to a report from the Los Angeles County medical examiner.
Elishia Durrett Johnson, a widow and licensed clinical counselor who specializes in grief, said people whose partners die a stigmatized death like suicide face unfair judgment about how they should move forward because their partner’s death is “not considered natural.”
“Anytime during that, I extend grace and I implore others to be quiet,” Durrett Johnson said. “You don’t know what life is going to afford you later. The very thing that you’re complaining or criticizing one person about, you have no idea how you would handle that.”
People policing other people’s grief “is the awfulness” of mourning, she added: “That’s the thing that we should not do.”
Widows also face more stigma than widowers for dating and repartnering after their partner dies. “Men get a little bit more leeway in moving forward quickly,” Coyle said. People give men more grace if they find a new partner soon after their loss because they believe “he needs a wife,” Cohen said.
But the truth is, grief is hard on everyone. “We normalize men moving forward with other women,” Durrett Johnson said. But for both widows and widowers, “it is just as hard as finding your forward.”
That’s why widows say the best answer to hearing about a grieving person falling in love again is to congratulate them. In Plaza’s case, “she’s experienced this horrendous thing in her life, and she deserves to have a next chapter that makes her happy, and whatever that looks like for her and for everybody is up to them to determine,” Coyle said.
Plaza has shared that the “awfulness” of her grief over Baena is “always there.”
“There’s, like, a giant ocean of just awfulness that’s like right there, and I can, like, see it,” she said on former co-star Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast last August. “Sometimes, I just want to just dive into it and just, like, be in it. And then sometimes, I just look at it, and then sometimes, I just try to get away from it. But it’s always there.”
Durett Johnson said Plaza’s metaphor of an ocean of awfulness is apt and is why it’s remarkable when grieving widows and widowers find new love.
“If you find someone that is going to help you in that move forward, that understands that awful ocean that you’re dealing with, that’s powerful,” Durrett Johnson said about why she congratulates Plaza on finding a partner again. “That’s just as rare as finding the love of your life.”
Are you hydrating enough?
There are now so many ways to get and track your fluids – from customisable Stanley tumblers to in-home IV services to apps that remind you to chug a few extra ounces every hour – that it’s easy to worry you’re not getting enough.
But is it possible to be too hydrated? And what happens if you are?
That’s what Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, hosts of HuffPost’s Am I Doing It Wrong? podcast, asked Colleen Muñoz, director and co-founder of Hydration Health Center at the University of Hartford.
“[Drinking too much water] is a real thing,” Muñoz, who is also an associate professor of health sciences at University of Hartford, said. “[It doesn’t happen] as often as you would think, relative to somebody who is underhydrated – that’s definitely a more common scenario – but it’s something we need to pay attention to.”
The main issue with ingesting too much water or other fluids is that it can dilute the electrolyte content of our blood. Electrolytes (in this case we’re mostly talking about sodium, but also potassium, magnesium, chloride and calcium) must remain “in balance in order to maintain healthy blood, heart rhythm, muscle function and other important functions.”
When these electrolytes “get out of whack,” it can cause nausea, vomiting, headaches, muscle cramps and even death.
“If they get too dilute, we start to have some pretty severe ramifications, largely related to our nervous system … [including] brain swelling, coma, [and then] death … and pretty quick,” Muñoz warned.
This happened to a woman in Los Angeles in 2007.
“It was pretty soon after the first Nintendo Wii came out and one of the radio stations had some competition – I think it was called like ‘Pee for a Wii’ or ‘Wee for a Wii’ – and unfortunately they didn’t consult anybody before they did this,” Muñoz said. “Whoever could drink the most amount of water in one day won the Nintendo Wii and a woman died.”
However, Muñoz noted that overhydration is less common in the general population and typically more worrisome for athletes.
“[It’s happened to some athletes and] it’s scary. It happens quickly and it’s not always easily detectable. So, a lot of times, unfortunately, they keep drinking water thinking that they collapsed due to dehydration,” she said.
It’s also a risk for recreational exercisers, like marathon or triathlon participants.
“[These people] might not actually be working out as intensely as they might suspect, and they haven’t really done a lot of homework into an individualised hydration plan, so they just assume, like, the more water the better,” Muñoz said.
“They’re actually not sweating that much, you know, or they’re not losing as much salt as they think, so they start chugging water and that’s a lot of times when this happens, unfortunately.”
So how much should we be drinking to reach a hydration sweet spot?
Muñoz said that most people need between 2 and 4 litres of water a day depending on body size, activity level, and other personal factors, like how much someone sweats, but checking in with your doctor or a medical professional about your specific needs is always a good idea.
She also noted that it’s possible to achieve proper hydration by drinking fluids other than plain water – including coffee, tea, sports drinks, juice and seltzer – and through the foods we eat.
One good way to tell if you’re properly hydrated is easy and free: take a look at the colour of your urine.
“I’m not saying that that’s a perfect marker, but it’s a very easily accessible one and it actually gives us a lot of good information,” Muñoz said. “We’re normally looking for, like, a light yellow colour – like lemonade or a straw kind of colour.”
Despite what you might think, completely clear urine is not necessarily a good thing because it can mean you’re overhydrated.
“That’s one of those things that I still have a lot of people tell me,” she said. “People who are well educated in biology will tell me, like, ‘My urine was clear today, so that’s good, right?’ I’m like, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ You know, there is such a thing as drinking too much water.”
For lots more hydration tips and tricks, listen to the full episode here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Have a question or need some help with something you’ve been doing wrong? Email us at AmIDoingItWrong@HuffPost.com, and we might investigate the topic in an upcoming episode.
9 min read
Andy Burnham remains a likely candidate to replace Keir Starmer if the Prime Minister leaves office before the next election. Tom Scotson goes in search of the people, ideas and forces shaping what would be his third leadership campaign
Last October, Andy Burnham was a badly damaged figure. A series of high-profile interventions in the run-up to and during Labour’s conference – widely interpreted as a soft coup – had misfired.
Keir Starmer’s allies mocked the so-called ‘King of the North’ as a presumptuous, vainglorious blowhard, a risk to the UK’s financial credibility and a political dead-end for Labour.
At this low point, an old friend offered some comradely advice to the Greater Manchester mayor. “Remember what Lenin said in 1917 as he waited for a train in Switzerland,” David Blunkett recalls telling Burnham. “Timing is everything in politics.”
The timing – six months on – looks rather different. Labour is braced for heavy losses in elections in Scotland, Wales and England’s local councils. And while the Iran conflict is dampening speculation around Starmer for the moment, it is likely to reignite soon enough.
And while Angela Rayner has ensured she remains part of that conversation in recent weeks, many MPs believe that only one figure can save them. As one ally puts it, “It’s Andy Burnham or bust.”
Supporters believe he continues to hone his strengths (communication), jettison past mistakes (support for the Iraq war), and is building a coherent political philosophy (Manchesterism).
Quitting Westminster for the mayoralty is cited as the best move Burnham made to rebuild his profile. It is now, ironically, a major obstacle between him and the job of prime minister.
Ahead of the Gorton and Denton by-election, Burnham put his hat in the ring to stand as a candidate but was rejected by the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) officers by eight votes to one, with only deputy leader Lucy Powell on side. The House understands that, despite boldly resolving to apply to stand, Burnham made little to no effort ahead of the vote to lobby any of the NEC officers who declined to back him.
Polling by Britain Elects suggests Burnham would have won the parliamentary seat comfortably.
Insiders working on the campaign say internal figures were even more positive, with one believing he would win with almost 60 per cent of the vote, as voters saw him as the obvious ‘Stop Reform’ candidate.
It is a thesis now safe from contact with reality. But Gorton is unlikely to be the last Labour-held seat to become free this Parliament.
To find out whether the twice-failed leadership hopeful has what it takes to return and topple a sitting Prime Minister, The House spoke to a wide range of Labour sources, Burnham allies and close friends.
Burnham, a local journalist for a short while, sees policy through the lens of how it will land in the press. “It is all media,” says a senior former aide, who helped run one of his failed leadership campaigns.
They added: “He was always very good at ‘the story’: where can I go, or what can I go and do, so that I get noticed?”
Burnham read English literature at the University of Cambridge after devouring the collective works of Philip Larkin and Shakespeare. Despite this, his friends are unsure if he continues to read for pleasure anymore.
“I can’t see Andy reading Jane Austen,” says a long-standing ally and Labour MP. “It would be interesting to know why he did English. Usually, lads would do history or PPE at Oxford. Maybe it would be the Morrissey type thing, the Oscar Wilde’s, that more romantic side of things.”
A minister adds dryly: “He travels lightly: both intellectually and politically.”
Nonetheless, he has a deep love for romantic poetry and Irish history. Steve Rotheram, Burnham’s best friend in politics, recalls the Manchester mayor chatting away with Michael D Higgins – the former Irish President and poet – about poets and ancient philosophers.
Burnham is a Roman Catholic. His Irish ancestry has been researched by Liverpool Central Library. “He does feel firmly attached,” says Rotheram of his Irish genealogy, “but he’s also one of those people who… is very patriotic as well.
“Andy’s always nailed his colours firmly to the mast. I think he’s a royalist, he loves the country.”
Burnham begins his mornings running regularly while listening to music on a predictably ‘Madchester’ playlist featuring The Stone Roses – his favourite band – as well as Joy Division, Oasis and New Order.
He works on his box over breakfast while preparing for a full day of meetings and events, which stretch into the afternoon and evening. Accompanied by his political aide Kevin Lee, Burnham drives around Greater Manchester in a run-down Volkswagen usually littered with disposable coffee cups.
You won’t find many of these speeches published because most of them are written and delivered from a set of notes that he’s made – they are his thoughts
Working late makes family life more difficult, but friends say he and his Dutch wife Marie-France van Heel remain close. The couple, who first met at university, live with their children and dog Axel in Leigh. Even at home, however, Burnham is said to chase colleagues and advisers over the weekend with questions arising from new academic reports and what he is reading in the papers. This is in contrast to the disengaged attitude the Prime Minister is accused of adopting.
Burnham has long traded on being a lifelong Evertonian. “You’d always see him in animated conversation with the doorkeepers, and then when you eavesdropped, it was always about football,” says an MP. He had a season ticket at Goodison Park in the Gwladys Street end and renewed his ticket when the club moved to the Hill Dickinson stadium at the start of the season.
The mayor of Manchester is also a real ale enthusiast. Another MP friend reports that, although “not a piss artist”, Burnham does enjoy a drink: “You could see him drink eight or 10 pints without appearing to be pissed.”
Outside of his day-to-day schedule, his inner circle, like all metro mayors, remains small. Lee, Burnham’s political secretary, is a Manchester United season ticket holder who has been working for him for 16 years.
Amy Davies now runs his office and his diary. Kate Green, Greater Manchester’s deputy mayor for policing and crime, is also a close associate of Burnham’s, having left Parliament in 2022 to join ‘Team Andy’.
The list of those in Burnham’s orbit but outside the inner circle makes for more interesting reading. It includes around 14 experts working on policy to flesh out his own political offer.
A close confidant of his remains Neal Lawson, director of centre-left pressure group Compass, who continues to introduce the Manchester mayor to more left-wing voices. Lawson and Burnham first met playing for the Labour football team Demon Eyes; the Compass director was goalie, Burnham up front.
Other influential voices close to Team Andy include Mathew Lawrence of Common Wealth, Zoë Billingham from IPPR North and Andrew Carter, CEO of Centre for Cities.
Lawrence has recently been tasked, alongside the Mainstream group, with fleshing out Manchesterism. His phrase “the Privatisation Premium” was used in a recent speech of Burnham’s – which the mayor continues to write himself, often in bullet point form.
“You won’t find many of these speeches published because most of them are written and delivered from a set of notes that he’s made – they are his thoughts,” Lawson says.
Lawrence is in the middle of writing a separate upcoming paper, which will flesh out Manchesterism in more detail. It will attempt to connect the affordability crisis and related pressure on public spending to the structural retreat of investment in energy, housing and water.
A sympathetic minister tells The House: “What we are building is a movement, so it doesn’t matter about the individual, it’s who can drive it.”
Aides of Burnham say civil servants attend his events and snoop at his press conferences as he critiques Whitehall and lays the foundations of his political position.
Critics of Manchesterism – which, paradoxically, were once associated with free trade and laissez-faire economics – believe it lacks any meaning apart from nationalisation.
His supporters contend that the framework is meaningful while reflecting his pragmatism and keen eye for the most useful political fights. Capping bus fares across Greater Manchester to £2 is a perfect example, they say, as it brings in a visible change to the daily lives of so many.
“‘Transport is number one, transport is key,’ he would say as the gamechanger for Greater Manchester,” another former long-serving aide of Burnham tells The House.
He surrounded himself with a bunch of yes people, which is a challenge in itself
But there are long-running criticisms of Burnham, including from allies. The most notable is his tendency to be indecisive at key moments. Former colleagues point to his failed leadership campaigns as evidence.
During the 2010 leadership race, Burnham’s campaign was split over whether to take money from Unite, then run by Len McCluskey. One person who was working on Burnham’s campaign recalls: “We had a very, very polite but nonetheless heated discussion. He believed the right-wing press during the leadership camp would assert the fact that they’re in the pocket of [Unite]. My contention was I couldn’t give a monkey’s – the membership of the Labour Party [is] what matters.”
In the run-up to the 2015 leadership election, there was still considerable discontent despite being a leading contender.
“He surrounded himself with a bunch of yes people, which is a challenge in itself,” one former aide tells The House. A crucial downfall of the campaign was when he could not decide whether to rebel after the then-acting leader Harriet Harman urged colleagues to abstain on a controversial welfare bill.
Jeremy Corbyn was one of the 48 rebels who voted against the bill, which is commonly thought to be a major factor in his subsequent victory. The former aide says: “Classic Andy, he found a reasoned amendment which didn’t mean anything to anyone, while Corbyn was explicitly against it.”
Allies acknowledge he has made mistakes yet believe he is now more comfortable in his own skin.
“He doesn’t have to think about slicing and dicing for particular audiences in particular ways,” Lawson says. “I don’t think it’s enormously calculated. I think it’s quite authentic and quite genuine.”
Nonetheless, Burnham still faces one problem which could be insurmountable: returning to Westminster.
It’s time to dust off your biggest and comfiest pants, cook up some blue soup and warm up your pipes for a Céline Dion sing-a-long because a very special anniversary is just around the corner.
This month marks 25 years since Bridget Jones made her big screen debut, diary in hand, introducing the world to one of 21st century British cinema’s most iconic and beloved characters.
Bridget Jones’s Diary has gone on to become one of the most enduring and game-changing romantic comedies of its time, going on to gross hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office, spawn three sequels and even earn its leading lady Renée Zellweger her first Oscar nominations (she’s since gone on to win two, as it goes).
A quarter-century later, you might think you know Bridget inside and out (and love her “just as she is”), but we bet there’s still plenty about the enduring movie classic that you still don’t know.
To commemorate its 25th anniversary, here are 25 behind-the-scenes facts you probably never knew about how Bridget Jones’s Diary was made…
Alright, we’re starting with a pretty obvious one here, but for those who didn’t know, both the original novel Bridget Jones’s Diary and the movie were inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice
Bridget Jones creator Helen Fielding said back in 2001: “Jane Austen’s plots are very good and have been market researched over a number of centuries so I decided simply to steal one of them.”
“I thought she wouldn’t mind,” Helen quipped. “And anyway, she’s dead.”
Because of the book’s ties to Pride And Prejudice, the Bridget Jones team were always adamant that Mark Darcy should be played by Colin Firth, who previously appeared in the BBC’s much-loved adaptation of the Jane Austen book
“Colin always had to be Mark Darcy,” producer Eric Fellner put it around the film’s release. “As the story unfolds, and the audience comes to understand Mark Darcy, he transforms from a seemingly snobby and cold intellectual into a thoughtful and sensitive man.”
There is another Pride & Prejudice reference hidden in Bridget Jones’s Diary that we’re only clocking now 25 years later
The publishing house where Bridget Jones works is called Pemberley Press, a subtle nod to Mr Darcy’s estate in the Austen classic.
When Bridget walks in on the woman that Daniel Cleaver has been cheating on her with, she’s covering herself with a Pemberley Press portfolio, sporting an image of a stately home not unlike Darcy’s.
When it came to casting the role of Bridget Jones, Renée Zellweger wasn’t actually the first choice
In fact, the role first went to Toni Collette, who turned it down because she was appearing in a Broadway play at the time filming was due to get underway.
She told Watch What Happens Live in 2023: “I have no regrets – life happens as it’s meant to.”
The casting process apparently took around two years before producers found their Bridget in Renée Zellweger.
Of course, the decision to cast an American actor as such an iconic Londoner wasn’t exactly met with unanimous praise, but Renée pulled it out of the bag and won over her detractors in the end.
To help perfect her British twang to play Bridget Jones, Renée Zellweger worked with the famous dialect coach Barbara Berkery
Right before Renée worked with Barbar Berkery, the dialect coach had helped Gwyneth Paltrow on her way to winning an Oscar for Shakespeare In Love.
Before that, she’d also coached Gwynnie while she was playing a Londoner in the 90s classic Sliding Doors.
It’s fair to say that Hugh Grant wasn’t initially convinced by Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones accent…
“She came in, doing quite a good British accent, but it was Princess Margaret,” Hugh recalled in the 2020 documentary Becoming Bridget Jones. “That was a little startling.”
After the suggestion that she “loosen it up a bit”, Hugh claimed that Renée’s next attempt was more “Princess Margaret having a stroke – but a week later, it was bang on”.
Alex Bailey/Miramax/Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock
To help retain her accent, Renée Zellweger continued speaking in Bridget Jones’ voice even between takes
Sally Phillips once told Lorraine: “I’d made quite good friends with her during the filming [but] I realised towards the end, when she suddenly lost a stone in the last week, and started talking in a Texan accent at the wrap party, I’d made friends with Bridget, not Renée.”
It’s well-documented that Renée Zellweger intentionally gained weight to help her play Bridget Jones, which she did by increasing her food intake and not exercising
For the second Bridget Jones film, Renée opted for prosthetics rather than gaining the weight back, and by the third and fourth films, it was decided that the actor and her on-screen counterpart should be the same size.
As well as her accent and weight gain, Renée Zellweger also got into the Bridget Jones mindset by working a brief internship at a publishing house
Paul Chedlow/Miramax/Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock
“A young work experience woman came into the office and introduced herself as Bridget and we were all a bit bemused by the fact that Bridget seemed to have really nice clothes (not smart, just a lot better than our outfits) and a transatlantic accent,” Mary Mount – who was working as an editorial assistant at Picador at the time – recalled last year. “I thought she looked vaguely familiar but in that way that you can’t really place.”
One of the future Oscar winner’s tasks was cutting out any press clippings about Picardo at the time.
Unfortunately, the big story surrounding Picador at the time was the fact that a Bridget Jones movie was in the works, meaning “her job was literally to cut out nasty articles about herself”.
“She kept her cool,” said Camilla Elworthy, who oversaw Renée during her work experience. “But [she] did scribble ‘rubbish’ in the margins of one piece.”
As for the rest of the Bridget Jones’s Diary cast, Hugh Grant actually turned down the part of Daniel Cleaver on several occasions
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“The only reason for that was because I didn’t feel they had the script quite right for a long time,” he admitted in the lead-up to its release. “And I kept saying, it’s not working. Just get Richard Curtis to come in and help rewrite it.”
Hugh had already worked with Richard Curtis on Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting Hill, with the two later reuniting on Love Actually and the second Bridget Jones movie.
“As soon as Richard came on board, I signed on the dotted line,” the Bafta winner added. “So, that’s all it was.”
Bridget Jones’s Diary was filmmaker Sharon Maguire’s feature-length directing debut, although she did already have a connection to the source material
Sharon was close friends with Helen Fielding, and was heavily rumoured to be have been the inspiration for “Shazzer”, the character played on screen by Sally Phillips.
“I’m delighted to be in the book, especially as Shazzer is so much wittier than me,” Sharon once told The Telegraph. “The only thing is that you go to parties and you worry that people will expect you to be funnier than you really are.”
“Helen was just writing about our lives – hilariously,” she later told the LA Times in 2016, adding: “Thirtysomethings had come out of long relationships in their 20s and realised they hadn’t ended up married or with children. We were in our 30s, behaving like we were 17-year-olds and having a great time but still floundering around asking questions about relationships, careers, biological clocks.”
Miramax/Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock
Salman Rushdie’s Bridget Jones’s Diary cameo came about he, too, was a friend of Helen Fielding
“For me, it was very simple,” he told Texas Monthly in 2001. “Helen Fielding, the author of the book, is an old pal of mine, and she asked if I’d come along and make a fool of myself, and I said, ‘Why not?’.”
As for sharing the screen with the movie’s leading lady, the author added: “Renée was wonderful, I thought, and at the premiere we had a little joke. I told her that my performance is what held the film together – and she agreed. She thought it was a pivotal role.”
The exterior of Bridget Jones’ flat was a pub just off Borough market
The Globe Tavern, to be exact, which was already notable as it’s rumoured to be the location where the Great Train Robbery of 1963 was planned.
All those wintery scenes at Bridget Jones’ parents’ home were actually shot at the height of summer
Because of this, several locations in Snowshill, Worcestershire had to be covered in fake snow to make the setting more believable.
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As a result – Colin Firth didn’t exactly have the best time filming in his infamous Bridget Jones reindeer jumper…
Colin told Entertainment Weekly in 2020: “The set was lit at about 140 degrees Fahrenheit; it melted candles and desiccated the turkey curry. I almost tore the jumper to pieces pulling it off between takes – I probably lost about 15 pounds. I had little love for it by the end.”
…not that it actually is a reindeer, mind you
“We sent out the knitting challenge to approximately 20 or 30 knitters,” Sharon Morgan also told Entertainment Weekly for the same piece. “At first, none of the designs worked. They were lovely, but they just weren’t funny. So eventually we decided it had to be a moose, not a reindeer.”
“I never noticed it was a moose,” Colin added.
Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy’s fight sequence is one of Bridget Jones’s Diary’s stand-out scenes – but it could have looked very different
“There had been an earlier idea to make the fight look sexy,” Colin told the LA Times. “We were going to be buff and our shirts were going to be ripped off.
“I looked at myself and said, ‘You’re certainly never going to get that type with me’.”
Colin Firth and Hugh Grant decided between them to keep their Bridget Jones fight a little more… well… British
Alex Bailey/Miramax/Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock
“We both realised that the last time we fought was when we were 10. A playground fight,” Colin quipped. “So, we made a decision largely based on logic and common sense to make it more playful.”
He pointed out the characters are “two very ineffectual, frightened, angry yuppies going at each other – pulling hair and wanting to run away at the same time”, which needed to come across on screen.
During a video interview with Vanity Fair, Hugh later claimed: “The big fight was to stop stuntmen getting involved. They always want to come in and choreograph the whole thing and say, ‘mate, it’d be great if you swing a right hook and his head’ll go back’.
“I just thought, ‘yeah, in action films, cowboy films, whatever, that’s great, but these are two middle-class Englishmen, and they don’t fight like that’. I’ve seen them fight, and it’s shit.
“So, we managed to ban the stuntman. I think the last thing he contributed was probably the dustbin lid, and after that, it’s just me and Colin messing about.”
Stuntmen were used for one crucial part of the fight, though
That’d be the bit where Mark and Daniel fly through the front window of a Greek restaurant, which they thought they’d better leave to the pros.
By contrast, Bridget Jones’ infamous fireman’s pole scene was meticulously planned to ensure Renée Zellweger’s safety
“Renée did it on wires – it was her backside that came down,” stunt performer Dani Biernet told Time Out in 2017. “But I did all the lining up and the wide shots without a wire.”
Another of Bridget Jones’ more surprising physical moments required a stunt double, too
Dani also had to step in to play Bridget during the moment when she drunkenly tumbles out of a black cab.
“When I first did it they were all like, ‘Bloody hell, did that hurt?’. But as a stunt person, you learn how to fall,” she said.
“I remember doing it about six times and, to be fair, by take five you’re a bit bruised. But that’s part of the job.”
No, Renée Zellweger didn’t really have to smoke all those cigarettes on the set of Bridget Jones’s Diary
While it was once commented that Bridget “smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish and dresses like her mother”, fortunately Renée didn’t quite need to copy her character’s habits.
Instead, the cigarettes she was supplied to play Bridget were herbal, rather than tobacco-based.
You might not realise it but Bridget Jones’s Diary has a different ending depending on where in the world you’re watching
Alex Bailey/Miramax/Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock
Here in the UK, after Bridget and Mark’s big kiss, the credits roll and we’re treated to scenes of different characters being interviewed about their love story, while Robbie Williams’ rendition of Have You Met Miss Jones? plays.
Across the pond, though, the credits are interspersed with “home video footage” of Bridget and Mark as kids, recreating the paddling pool scene we hear so much about over the course of the film.
As for the fate of Bridget Jones’ iconic ‘big pants’…
“I heard some rumour that Hugh Grant kept the pants – the big pants,” Renée Zellweger told British Vogue while promoting the fourth Bridget Jones movie in 2024.
“But I don’t know if that’s true,” she quickly clarified. “We’ll have to ask him.”
Bridget Jones’s Diary is currently available to stream on Now.
Six years after the much-loved Schitt’s Creek finale, Dan Levy is returning to the TV world with his new Netflix series.
The Emmy winner has teamed up with Bottoms and I Love LA writer Rachel Sennott to create Big Mistakes, an exciting eight-part series that’s part comedy, part heist, part caper and part gritty crime drama.
As well as co-creating Big Mistakes and writing select episodes, Dan also takes the lead as a priest who lands both himself and his sister in hot water when some petty thievery grabs the attention of a criminal organisation.
He’s joined by an impressive cast of recognisable faces in Big Mistakes, many of whom you’re sure to recognise from their TV, movie and stage careers.
For those who’ve already been enjoying the new show, here’s your quick guide to where you’ve seen the cast before…
Dan Levy
CBC/ITV/Kobal/Shutterstock
As mentioned above, Dan Levy was a co-creator and star of the beloved sitcom Schitt’s Creek, in which he starred as David Rose alongside his famous dad, Eugene Levy.
The Canadian star initially got his start in TV presenting rather than acting, working on the likes of MTV Live, The Hills’ “after show”, the Canadian version of Great British Bake Off and the cooking show Dismantled.
Since Schitt’s Creek, his acting work has included Modern Family, Sex Education, The Idol and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
He’s also acted in films like Disney’s Haunted Mansion, the Christmas comedy Happiest Season and the dark comedy Good Grief, the first offering to come from Dan’s deal with Netflix.
Taylor Ortega
Dan’s on-screen sister in Big Mistakes is played by Taylor Ortega, who Succession fans might remember for her one-episode stint as Greta, before she was cast in the US remake of the British comedy Ghosts.
You could have also seen her in Love Life, Welcome To Flatch or Netflix’s The Four Seasons, as well as films like Another Simple Favour or Wine Club.
Meanwhile, if you were a Kim Possible fan back in the day, you might be interested to hear that she played Shego in Disney’s 2019 live-action movie based on the classic cartoon.
Laurie Metcalf
Universal Pictures/Kobal/Shutterstock
Laurie Metcalf won three Emmys for her work in the sitcom Roseanne, but you might also recognise her for her Oscar-nominated performance as the mum character in Lady Bird.
Over the years, she’s also made memorable appearances as a murderous supermarket shopper in the iconic Desperate Housewives episode Bang, Sheldon’s mother in The Big Bang Theory, Augusta Gein in Monster and exhausted tour manager Weed in Hacks (for which she won her fourth Emmy).
Her film work includes everything from Uncle Buck, Toy Story and Leaving Las Vegas to Scream 2 and Runaway Bride.
We’d be remiss not to mention her stage career, too, as Laurie is a six-time Tony nominee (and two-time winner), treading the boards as everyone from Misery’s Annie Wilkes (opposite Bruce Willis’ Paul Sheldon), A Doll House’s Nora Helmer and Hillary Clinton.
Elizabeth Perkins
Monty Brinton/Showtime/Kobal/Shutterstock
With a screen career spanning 40 years, it’s tough to know exactly where to start with Elizabeth Perkins.
Over the decades, she’s appeared in films like The Flintstones, Miracle On 34th Street, Finding Nemo and, more recently, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse and The Housemaid.
She’s perhaps best known for her TV work, though, which includes playing Celia in Weeds, Janet Malone in This Is Us, Birdie in Glow and Jackie O’Neill in Sharp Objects, which earned her a Critics’ Choice Award nomination.
Abby Quinn
Horror fans might be familiar with Abby’s performances in the likes of Knock At The Cabin, I’m Thinking Of Ending Things or Hell Of A Summer.
Abby has also had minor roles in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women adaptation, the sinister Black Mirror episode Arkangel, the Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul and the 21st century revival of the sitcom Mad About You.
Mark Ivanir
Between 2015 and 2018, Mark Ivanir had a recurring role in the thriller Homeland, playing Ivan Krupin, an SVR agent.
His other notable TV roles have included the Netflix political drama Zero Day, the dark comedy Barry and Amazon Prime’s original series Transparent.
As for his film work, he has appeared in Schindler’s List, The Terminal and the critically-panned musical Emilia Perez.
Jack Innanen
A comedian as well as an actor, Jack Innanen rose to prominence in the early 2020s thanks to his viral TikTok videos, landing him roles in the Canadian series The Dessert and The Office Movers.
Since then, he’s appeared in the main cast of the sitcom Adults, and recently hinted at a possible role in the next season of Heated Rivalry.
Boran Kuzum
Originally hailing from Turkey, Boran Kuzum’s work primarily consists of shows and films in his home country including Wounded Love, Bihter: A Forbidden Passion and Magnificent Century: Kösem.
Before being cast in Big Mistakes, he also played a pivotal role in another Netflix series, Kimler Geldi, Kimler Geçti (known in English-speaking territories as Thank You, Next).
Joe Barbara
Joe Barbara’s career began in the late 1990s, with roles in US soaps like Another World (which he appeared in over a four-year period) and All My Children.
More recently, he’s acted in FBI, Blue Bloods and lent his voice to the Grand Theft Auto games series, playing crime boss Ray Boccino.
Josh Fadem
Comedian, writer and actor Josh Fadem’s stand-out work has included playing Phil Busby in the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks, Pat Stanley in On Becoming A God In Central Florida, Simon Barrons in 30 Rock and Joey Dixon in Better Call Saul.
He also repeatedly portrayed Sean Penn in the sketch comedy series The Midnight Show and Adolf Hitler in The Crossroads Of History, in addition to roles in Reservation Dogs, Tulsa King, Minx and Adventure Time.
Jacob Gutierrez
Playing Tareq in Big Mistakes is definitely Jacob Guttierez’s biggest TV role to date, but he has appeared in the TV series A Crime To Remember, Bull and Dear Edward in recent years.
He’s also acted in short films, including A Night Off and It’s Not You, It’s Her.
Big Mistakes is now streaming on Netflix.
A child psychiatrist has opened up about a pattern she sees routinely where a neurodivergent child will struggle at school, and the adults around them mistake their symptoms for poor behaviour or a bad attitude.
Dr Anya Ciobanca, consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at The ADHD Centre, says children who appear disengaged, inconsistent or emotionally volatile at school may be experiencing something far more complex than just a bad attitude.
“Behaviour is never the whole story,” she says. “When we approach a child with curiosity rather than judgement, everything changes.”
Conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can go undiagnosed for years because there are often misunderstandings over symptoms. For example, people might think kids who have it are just hyperactive, but there are also more subtle signs that can show up, like day-dreaming or emotional dysregulation.
Girls in particular are likely to remain undiagnosed until later life. Reviews suggest ADHD is identified more often in boys in childhood at a ratio of 3:1 (males to females), while the ratio appears to even out in adulthood at 1:1.
Experts previously told HuffPost UK this happens largely because there’s a gender divide in how ADHD symptoms are expressed (girls tend to demonstrate more inattentive symptoms), and social expectations on girls can lead to them keeping quiet, carrying on, and developing sophisticated masking strategies (sometimes at detriment to their mental health).
“There is a version of ADHD that looks, from the outside, like daydreaming or simply not caring,” says Dr Ciobanca. “But internally, that child may be working extraordinarily hard just to keep up. The effort of masking is immense, and it has a cost.”
In classrooms, children are often doing the best they can with a nervous system that’s working against them, but there are certain signs they might be fighting a hidden battle and need more support.
5 signs a child may be struggling with ADHD at school
- Avoidance of school or specific lessons – this might look like persistent reluctance or distress around certain subjects or transitions.
- Difficulty starting or completing work – this is often mistaken for laziness, says Dr Ciobanca, but rooted in overwhelm or difficulties with executive function.
- Emotional outbursts or withdrawal – this can look like frustration, tears or shutting down, particularly after school (also known as after-school restraint collapse).
- Chronic tiredness or physical complaints of headaches, which can be linked to anxiety or sensory overload.
- Low self-esteem, negative self-talk, and appearing to cope at school (masking) while falling apart at home.
One child Dr Chiobanca worked with had been labelled by her school as inconsistent and difficult to motivate. But in reality, she was overwhelmed and had developed a profound sense of shame around her difficulties.
Girls with undiagnosed ADHD are “more likely to blame themselves, turning their anger and pain inward”, according to the Child Mind Institute, which noted they’re also more likely to experience depression, anxiety and eating disorders than those without ADHD.
“Once we understood the underlying picture – the interaction between her ADHD, her anxiety and her environment – we could make meaningful changes,” says the psychiatrist. “She no longer had to spend every day just fighting to survive it. That freed up an enormous amount of energy for actually learning.”
With one in 20 children thought to have ADHD, Dr Ciobanca wants to see earlier intervention, more flexible teaching, and emotional wellbeing placed at the centre of education rather than its margins.
“Too much support comes too late. We cannot expect children to learn well when they do not feel safe,” she adds.
Advice for parents
If you think your child might be neurodivergent (research suggests around 15-20% of people are), it’s worth exploring this subtly with your child. Dr Chiobanca advises parents to ask their children: “What’s the hardest part of your day?” as this can reveal more than questions about effort or behaviour.
It’s also worth speaking to your child’s school – specifically their class teacher or SENCO (a special educational needs coordinator) – if you notice a pattern of distress or avoidance. Months of avoidance or emotional dysregulation are a signal worth acting on, she notes.
The psychiatrist also urges parents to separate the behaviour from the child, as “struggling children often already feel like failures; they need to know you’re on their side”.
While NHS waiting times for diagnosis can stretch for months, it might also be worth considering a professional assessment. “ADHD and anxiety remain significantly underdiagnosed, particularly in girls,” says Dr Ciobanca.
Yet when children feel safe and understood, “they are far more able to learn and grow,” she adds. “That is the kind of education system worth working towards.”
‘This election is between the Green Party and the Reform Party’, said a smug Zack Polanski in south-east London this week. ‘It is a straight-up battle between hope and hate.’
The Green leader was launching his party’s local-elections campaign in Deptford. Naturally, he wasn’t even two minutes into his speech before Lebanon came up.
Forget council tax and bin collections, there he was waffling about the need for Britain to cut off our trade ties with Israel, over its ongoing war on the jihadist scum of Hezbollah.
We all know why. This monomaniacal obsession with the Jewish State reminds us that if any party is the party of hate here, it isn’t Reform UK – it is Zack Polanski’s Greens.
Yes, you can oppose the actions of the State of Israel without being an anti-Semitic bigot – though why you’d want to chide a nation for trying to defeat a Jew-killing terror army just over its northern border is beyond me.
Still, if you think this new and insurgent Green Party is merely ‘critical’ of Israel, you haven’t been paying attention.
The Greens’ by-election victory in Gorton and Denton was a foul taste of things to come. When Hannah Spencer wasn’t accusing Reform of ‘dividing people’, she was pushing leaflets through letterboxes railing against Israel in Urdu.
Since then, the Greens – against their best intentions, I’m sure – have further cemented their position as the go-to party for the nation’s cranks, sectarians and anti-Semites.
Green activists have been caught on WhatsApp groups calling Jewish people ‘an abomination’, and insisting that the alleged anti-Semitic firebombing of Jewish-operated ambulances in Golders Green was an inside job.
The party is still mulling over a policy that would declare ‘Zionism is racism’ – Jews, it seems, being the only people on Earth who aren’t entitled to their own homeland. (A vote on it has been delayed, following outcry from Jewish and even anti-Zionist Greens who see it as too extreme.)
This is not normal. And yet it is now baked into much of the commentary that this ‘progressive’ party – like Corbyn’s Labour before it – has become a magnet for anti-Semites.
When Channel 4 News interviewed Polanski this week, you could see this is all now just taken as a given. ‘You’ve got a load of new candidates, are you sure they haven’t been making anti-Semitic comments or doing anything absurd or illegal?’, asked Krishnan Guru-Murthy, rather breezily.
Depressingly, the Greens have plenty of form on this front. At the last General Election, long before our Zack hypnotised the membership and became party leader, 20 Green candidates were exposed for making despicable comments about Jews and Israel, from calling October 7 a ‘false flag’ operation to praising a ‘pro-Palestine’ demo that disrupted a Holocaust remembrance march… at Auschwitz.
A few bad apples? Well, if so, those rotten Granny Smiths include co-deputy leader, Mothin Ali. On 8 October 2023, the day after Hamas barbarians murdered and raped their way through southern Israel, he made a video saying ‘Palestinians have the right to resist occupying forces’.
Ali also led a smear campaign against Zecharia Deutsch – a Jewish chaplain at Leeds University who was called up to serve in the Israel Defence Forces after October 7. Ali called him an ‘animal’, falsely claiming he had deliberately tried to kill women and children in Gaza. Deutsch’s family was bombarded with death threats and forced into hiding.
Tell me who the hateful ones are here, Zack? Reform MPs have been hit with confected race rows and demands for sackings simply for clumsily suggesting there might be too much ‘diversity’ in adverts, or allegedly saying something puerile at school 50 years ago. Meanwhile, Ali’s exploits have provoked only cursory coverage and commentary.
Even less known is that Ali’s wife wears a full niqab – you know, those medieval garments that cage Muslim women so as to protect their ‘modesty’ and men from their urges. Remember when Jacob Rees-Mogg was hauled over the coals because he, as a Catholic, is opposed to abortion? How backward and anti-women, the media cried. At least his wife is able to go out with more than her eyes on show.
The Greens are as dumb as they are dangerous, combining a platitudinous ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ progressivism with an alarmingly chilled-out attitude to ethno-religious bigotry. Meanwhile, their madcap policies seem almost designed to inflame the very tensions in society they claim to oppose.
They want to ‘see a world without borders’, for one thing. That’s not some right-wing hack’s fever-dreamed summary, it’s a direct quote from Green policy documents. The party would abolish immigration detention, allow even failed asylum seekers to stay, treat all migrants as citizens instantly, including giving them the vote. Migrants would be able to get visas upon arrival, while all existing language and income requirements would be removed. According to Marley Morris, from the centre-left IPPR think-tank, a Polanski premiership would ‘radically increase migration to Britain… there would basically be no restrictions at all’.
Migration is already at unprecedented levels, turning a long-curdling crisis of integration into a veritable tinder box. But the Greens have memed themselves into believing that it is ‘hateful’ to notice the siloed communities, the strained public services, the knackered economy propped up by cheap imported labour. All of this is just an elaborate fiction, cooked up to keep our eyes off those dastardly billionaires.
For all the talk of Polanski’s ‘populism’, all this puts his party on a collision course with the public. Mass and illegal migration is often talked about as if it’s a 50-50 issue, cleaving society in two. In truth, the public are all but united in horror at our broken borders. Around 70 per cent say immigration is too high, including more than half of ethnic minorities. If you ask about specific numbers, only 15 per cent of voters support net migration being over 100,000 a year, and it hasn’t been that low since 1998 (with the exception of 2020, the year the world locked down).
So who is being hateful and divisive? The party that wants to bring migration policy in line with the demands of the democratic majority, escape the Balkanisation of state multiculturalism and take a firm line on the Islamists and sectarians who are menacing Jews? Or the party that will seemingly tolerate Jew-haters in its coalition, so long as they help to usher in its demented post-borders utopia?
The Greens may still be enjoying the warm bath of media adulation, but the public can see right through them.
Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.
On 8 April, 2026, the Israel killed another three journalists. It has now murdered at least 260 since October 2023, more than any other country in the world.
254 dead in just one day as Israel targets Lebanese civilians, including two journalists
Wednesday was the deadliest day of “Israeli” attacks on Lebanon, so far. Israeli occupation forces (IOF) killed more than 300, and wounded 1150, after launching a massive wave of airstrikes. More than 100 homes and apartments in 21 towns were targeted, in just 10 minutes, while rescue services worked to remove debris. They continue to search for the many missing civilians stlll buried under the rubble.
Among the dead were two Lebanese journalists. Suzan Khalil, was presenter on al Manar TV, and al Nour Radio. Ghada Dayekh worked for Sawt al Farah Radio. She was killed when an airstrike targeted her apartment in Tyre, Lebanon, with no prior warning.
The Lebanese Red Cross transported more than 80 units of blood to hospitals in Beirut and Sidon as an initial response. But calls were later put out for more blood donations, due to a shortage.
Palestinian journalist Mohammed Wishah also killed after intentional targeting of his vehicle in Gaza
On the same day, Al-Jazeera Mubasher correspondent Mohammed Wishah was also assassinated by the IOF. His vehicle burst into flames after being targeted by an Israeli airstrike in Sheikh Ajleen, West of Gaza city.
In a statement, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) said:
The racist occupation entity repeatedly demonstrates its complete disregard for international laws and the laws of war, and its persistent threat to regional and international peace and security.
Hamas added that a “firm stance” was needed from the international community to “hold it accountable and ensure it does not enjoy impunity.”
Israel’s special treatment on the international stage by its many allies continues to ensure there is no accountability. Countries such as the UK claim their support for the terrorist state remains “unshakeable“.
Gaza is the deadliest place in the world to be a journalist, as the Israeli occupation has a systematic policy of intentionally targeting and silencing the truth about its war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Featured image via the Canary
IT’S ZO TIME: Mayor Zohran Mamdani crisscrossed the city on his 100th day in office, relishing a milestone in a mayoralty that for much of last year seemed like an impossibility.
He started the day in Queens at a graduation ceremony for Department of Correction recruits, hopped over to the Bronx to celebrate trash cleanup efforts with a youth cheerleading squad and a garbage-can mascot, and then scooted to Harlem to perform home lead inspections.
But Day 100 was also marked by a budding scandal. POLITICO reported today that Mamdani’s Department of Probation commissioner allegedly had a prior romantic relationship with the agency’s general counsel, and the chief investigator who reported it to the city’s watchdog says she was fired the next day for blowing the whistle, according to court documents.
“I take any allegations of misconduct incredibly seriously,” Mamdani said this morning, with cheerleaders behind him. “New Yorkers should rest assured that there is an investigation.”
In April 2025, New Yorkers were still confused whether the “ZM” they intended to vote for went by Zellnor or Zohran: “A woman came up to me at a forum and said she was so excited to vote for me, and then referred to me as Zellnor Mamdani,” Mamdani told Playbook last year. (The other ZM in question is past mayoral hopeful and current state Sen. Zellnor Myrie.)
Now in City Hall, the festival of 100 days is in full swing. The mayor has been on a media tour of sorts leading up to today, doling out interviews to the The New York Times, POLITICO, City & State, THE CITY — and even a 20-minute sit-down with Al Jazeera — as he reflects on the milestone.
“The first feeling is that of gratitude that I get to have 100 days as mayor,” Mamdani told us. “This is truly the dream of a lifetime, to have this position and to be trusted by New Yorkers to deliver on it.”
The ritual significance of 100 Days — highlighted by Mamdani’s advance team, which places a flippable day-counter in the background of his press conferences — has also led to some blunt evaluations.
The New York Post — which seemingly was not given an interview — marked the day with a laundry list of ways the mayor has backtracked on the lefty (and lofty) promises he made on the trail. The tabloid even got the president to weigh in on Mamdani’s milestone: “Gotta lower taxes or everyone’s leaving. It’s very simple,” President Donald Trump said.
The New York Times more soberly analyzed the status of Mamdani’s campaign promises: free buses? (stalled); rent freeze? (TBD); free child care? (on track); Department of Community Safety? (try Office of Community Safety); city-owned grocery stores? (unstarted); taxing the rich? (stalled); fighting for an expanded rental assistance program? (reversed). We’re also tacking on one more to the list: relinquishing mayoral control of city schools (abandoned).
But, according to his own accounting, the mayor still has lots of time to fulfill his biggest promises — frozen rent, free buses and free child care — possibly even until 2034. Earlier this week, we asked him if he thinks he has one or two terms to complete those three goals.
“Inshallah, it’s two terms,” he said. — Jason Beeferman
From the Capitol
LETTER TO CMS: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services admitted Friday that its analysis of fraud in New York’s Medicaid program included errors, according to reports from the Associated Press.
The admission comes in response to a 78-page letter Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration sent to the federal agency criticizing its miscalculation of state Medicaid data.
State officials rejected claims from CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz that the state’s $124 billion Medicaid program is riddled with fraud, waste, and abuse. In a lengthy response shared with Playbook last night, the state Department of Health accused the federal government of conflating increasing Medicaid costs as proof of foul play.
The dispute reflects a broader tension over how aggressively the federal government should police state Medicaid programs as costs rise. CMS has flagged several high-cost areas — including personal care, behavioral health and transportation — as particularly susceptible to fraud. But the agency’s glaring miscalculation in New York represents a hit to the Trump administration’s “fraud-busting” campaign.
“CMS wildly overstates utilization in areas like personal care. CMS also appears to conflate critical investments with fraud, misconstruing New York’s historic commitment to expanding access to behavioral health,” state Health Department spokesperson Cadence Acquaviva said in a statement to Playbook.
READ MORE from POLITICO Pro’s Katelyn Cordero here.
100-FOOT RULE REPEAL: Hochul is signing a chapter amendment today to delay implementation of the so-called 100-foot rule repeal for a year.
For decades, New York required ratepayers to subsidize gas hookups for new residential buildings. If a new building was within 100 feet of a gas main line, utilities would connect the building and pass the cost onto other consumers.
In 2021, extending gas service to new residential customers cost ratepayers about $500 million, according to an analysis by the Public Utility Law Project of New York.
“I have made affordability a top priority and doing away with this 40-year-old subsidy that has outlived its purpose will help with that,” Hochul said in a statement last December when she signed the legislation.
Repealing the 100-foot rule was a priority for environmental advocates last session. The provision was originally included in the NY HEAT Act, legislation that aimed to transition the state off of gas infrastructure. That bill would have amended gas utilities’ “obligation to service” and put a 6 percent income cap on utility bills for low-income customers. But when it became clear the bill would not become law, advocates spun out the 100-foot rule provision as a standalone bill that had the support to make it across the finish line. — Mona Zhang
FROM CITY HALL
MORE DOIMAGE CONTROL: Mamdani is scrambling to shore up support for a key appointment whose fate rests with the New York City Council — another twist in the mounting tensions between the mayor and the body of lawmakers meant to be a check on his power, POLITICO Pro reports this afternoon.
Mamdani’s team has been working behind the scenes to set up one-on-one meetings between Council members and his pick to lead the Department of Investigation, Nadia Shihata, according to four people with knowledge of the outreach granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.
The hope is the meetings will assuage lawmakers’ concerns about her past political support for the mayor and a longstanding social relationship with Mamdani’s top legal adviser.
The administration’s overtures — which come just days before lawmakers are set to vote on the nomination next week — indicated to at least one Council member that the mayor and his staff are worried about Shihata’s path to confirmation for the DOI commissioner post.
“Otherwise they don’t call,” said Council member Gale Brewer, who was among at least four lawmakers who received offers to meet with Shihata.
The sudden obstacle for Shihata’s nomination lands in Mamdani’s lap amid a broader and increasingly pitched budget feud between Mamdani and Council Speaker Julie Menin, as the mayor grapples with a $5.4 billion funding gap with few palatable options to close it.
The revelations about the tug-of-war over Shihata also come as POLITICO’s scoop about the DOI probe into Mamdani’s Department of Probation commissioner put a damper over what the mayor had hoped would be a celebratory weekend to mark his 100th day in office.
Read the story from Chris Sommerfeldt and Joe Anuta in POLITICO Pro.
FROM THE BALKANS
THE ADAMS OF ALBANIA: Former Mayor Eric Adams is now a citizen of Albania.
His spokesperson Todd Shapiro confirmed the former mayor received an “honorary Albanian citizenship” and said the mayor thanks the country’s prime minister, Edi Rama, for the distinction.
“The decision by the Republic of Albania to grant Mayor Adams citizenship reflects that enduring relationship and mutual respect,” Shapiro said. “Leaders around the world — including mayors and presidents — have historically been recognized with honorary or dual citizenships as a symbol of international partnership and shared values.”
Adams was indicted on foreign bribery charges — which he denies — during his time as mayor, but the charges were dismissed after Trump’s Department of Justice intervened.
In an interview with Fox News that aired last week, Adams reflected on his life as a private citizen and said there’s “a great world out there waiting for me.”
“Because of my time as mayor, I spent a lot of time inviting foreign dignitaries to the city,” he said. “Now all of that has turned into some good communications and relationships.” — Jason Beeferman
FROM THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND IN ME: Rev. Al Sharpton isn’t ruling out an endorsement for Jack Schlossberg in the crowded Democratic primary for NY-12.
Schlossberg and Sharpton met for breakfast last week where they talked about the Kennedy family, politics and faith — but not an endorsement, Page Six reported.
“I told him that what Trump is doing is trying to overturn everything his grandfather, President John Kennedy started in the early 1960s,” Sharpton wrote on social media. “It’s in Jack’s blood to fight this backlash.”
Playbook caught up briefly yesterday with Sharpton on the second day of his National Action Network conference, where he reemphasized that Schlossberg didn’t ask for an endorsement in the race and their meeting was to get to know each other.
When asked if he would endorse Schlossberg, Sharpton said it isn’t off the table.
“I like guys that show up,” Sharpton said. “None of his opponents have.”
Schlossberg spoke at the conference Wednesday, with Sharpton introducing him as a “new friend.”
“You are doing so much more than anyone that I know to advance the cause of civil rights,” Schlossberg said as he stood on stage next to the reverend. “You’ve been doing it my whole lifetime. You did it a whole lifetime before I was born, and you’re still doing it. It just gives us all — young people especially — someone to look up to, an example to learn from.”
A Sharpton endorsement would be a prominent boost for Schlossberg, who already has former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s backing — and could help further legitimize his candidacy beyond his celebrity. Some have criticized his lack of political experience compared to opponents like state Assemblymembers Micah Lasher and Alex Bores. Despite that, sparse polling has shown Schlossberg with a lead. — Madison Fernandez
IN OTHER NEWS
— LANDER SAYS NO TO ISRAELI AID: Congressional candidate Brad Lander now says he opposes all aid to Israel, including for its missile defense system, as he seeks to represent NY-10. (The Forward)
— GREEN COSTS BITE: New York City business leaders are urging the state to scale back parts of its climate law, saying compliance costs are becoming unsustainable. (CBS News)
— ICE COLD: A Poughkeepsie landlord is facing charges after threatening tenants with immigration enforcement officials. (Times Union)
— REP. ENGEL PASSES: Eliot Engel, who represented areas of the Bronx and Westchester in Congress for over 30 years, has passed away at age 79. (LoHud)
Missed this morning’s New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.
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