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Antony David Davies FRSA is a historian and commentator whose work explores identity, governance, and the politics of trust.

I have been openly critical of Kemi Badenoch, not in the casual, factional way that passes for comment in Westminster, but on the only question that matters, whether she could project the discipline and seriousness required of a Prime Minister in waiting.

In recent weeks, I have found myself revising that judgement. Not because she has performed a sudden ideological pirouette, but because her tone is tightening into something rarer than it should be in British politics, a preference for grown-up argument over viral commotion. That matters, because the country is exhausted, and the centre right cannot rebuild itself on theatrics. It must rebuild on credibility.

I wrote last year that Reform UK’s rise was driven less by a coherent programme than by voter despair, by the sense that everyday Britain is being managed badly and spoken to worse. That diagnosis still holds. But I am increasingly hearing something else too, voters who flirted with Reform are becoming more open-eyed about what it actually is, a shallow razzmatazz show, satisfying as protest, thin as a proposition for government.

The most revealing political conversations rarely happen at conferences. They happen in ordinary places where people speak without trying to win points, in queue-side grumbles, in family group chats, in that resigned national tone of “What’s the point?” Reform is still invoked, but increasingly as a mood rather than a plan. People mention it as a warning shot, a way of saying, “Do not take me for granted.” But the moment you ask the follow-up question, the one adults ask, the conversation changes.

“Alright then, what would they actually do?” Who runs departments, who negotiates budgets, who carries policy through the civil service machine, who stands at the Despatch Box when slogans collide with arithmetic? When voters start asking those questions, protest politics begins to lose its magic. That is what I am hearing more often now, not admiration, but doubt, not worship, but impatience with a politics that performs anger rather than resolves it. If Badenoch is finding her stride, Conservatives should not chase Reform. They should outgrow it.

Reform benefits from a structural fact.

Voters will tolerate almost anything from a party that does not have to govern. It can promise without pricing, provoke without repairing, posture without consequence. That is not a moral condemnation. It is the advantage of permanent opposition. It is why Reform can run on vibes and indignation while never having to convert slogans into systems. This is also where Conservatives lost their footing.

Too often they behaved as if they could borrow insurgent language and still retain governing authority. They cannot. The centre right does not recover by becoming angrier. It recovers by becoming more credible, and that is why the Conservative defections to Reform, painful as they were in the short term, may yet prove a blessing in disguise.

Recent months have seen a steady trickle of high-profile Conservative figures moving to Reform, underlining that a portion of the right is choosing insurgency over the burdens of office. In that sense, the defections are not merely a threat. They are a clarifying force.

Politics occasionally requires sorting. A party cannot be both a governing force and an outlet for permanent grievance. That arrangement produces incoherence, because every difficult decision becomes a betrayal and every compromise becomes corruption. Defections have helped draw a clearer boundary between two political cultures, one that accepts the burden of government, and one that thrives on the thrill of opposition. Badenoch does not need to chase every defector. She needs to define the party that remains, as the party that intends to govern again, seriously.

My scepticism about Badenoch has not been about ideology. Conservatives are a broad church. My concern has been whether she would be tempted into the easy rhythms of modern politics, permanent confrontation, permanent provocation, applause as a substitute for persuasion. What has impressed me recently is not gaffe-free performance, which is a low bar, but a tightening in her message and a seriousness that does not feel performative. She sounds more like someone preparing to carry responsibility, not simply land blows.

If the Conservative Party is to recover, it will not do so through endless micro-arguments about who said what on which channel. It will do so by offering something Reform cannot offer, a plausible route from frustration to a functioning state.

If Badenoch wants to convert momentum into trust, she should make competence the organising principle. Competence is what respect looks like in practice. That means choosing a small number of priorities and pursuing them with clarity. Public service delivery, spend honestly, fix procurement, stabilise workforces, and be accountable for outcomes. Law and order, visible policing and swifter justice are not nostalgia, they are the foundations of social confidence. Borders and migration, competence not theatre, control, lawfulness, speed, and enforcement that actually happens. If Conservatives focus on these, they do not merely argue with Reform. They make Reform look unserious, because they remind voters that anger is not an administrative plan.

There is also a constitutional seriousness the party must recover, and it begins with the Union. A Conservative Party that wishes to govern the United Kingdom cannot speak as though the UK is simply England with administrative add-ons. In Wales and Scotland in particular, unionism has too often been reduced to a badge rather than a programme. A serious centre right must speak to devolved realities with respect. It must show that the Union is about shared standards and shared institutional strength, not occasional visits and predictable slogans.

Reform will remain a pressure valve for public anger as long as the established parties look incapable of competence. But the public is not permanently captive to razzmatazz. When the costs of dysfunction bite, voters return to first principles. Can you run the country? I am increasingly hearing voters move from permission, “I might vote Reform to send a message”, to doubt, “But what would they actually do?” That is the moment when protest politics shrinks back towards its natural size.

Badenoch’s task is not to compete with Reform’s theatre. It is to make the Conservative Party the obvious home for those who want change without chaos, discipline without dullness, and a state that works again. If she continues to find her stride, and if the party around her matches that seriousness, then the defections to Reform will look, in hindsight, like a necessary clearing of the fog, not a defeat, but a sharpening, and in politics, sharpening is the beginning of recovery.

How can people see “olo”?

What does “olo” look like?

Erik Jones explores how effective the new E6 configuration made up of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands could be. 

European Union (EU) leaders travelled to Kyiv to commemorate the four years of brutal fighting that started with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They hoped to bring a loan of €90 billion agreed in the European Council last December.  Instead, they brought yet another veto by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who is blocking both the loan and the EU’s 20^th package of Russian sanctions. European solidarity with the people of Ukraine runs deep, but the EU’s ability to act on that commitment remains limited.

That might be about to change. The European Union (EU) has a new configuration – the E6 – bringing together Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and the Netherlands.  Its creation reflects frustration with the inability of the bloc to move at the pace of global events. The EU specialises in the kind of slow consensus building that works well in a rules-based international system centred on multilateral institutions. It does not act decisively  as demanded by a more transactional and competitive global climate. The E6 is meant to fill the gap.

What the E6 promises is the opportunity to move ahead on key issues, pulling other member states along in its wake.  Together, the six countries account for just under 70 percent of the EU’s population and just over 71 percent of its gross domestic product. This mass gives the block a kind of ‘go-it-alone’ power, to borrow from LSE political scientist Lloyd Gruber, that individual countries like Hungary cannot match. If Viktor Orbán wants to jam up the system, they will just move on without him either by experimenting with forms of ‘enhanced cooperation’ that require only three other member states to join the group, or by cobbling together a broader coalition to form a qualified majority that combines more than half the EU’s population with more than half the 27 member states (meaning the group of six will need another eight).

Such moves do not overcome potential obstructionism entirely. Many decisions require unanimity, including the decision to allow for enhanced cooperation.  Orbán’s veto of the loan to Ukraine is a good illustration. Originally, Orbán agreed to allow the rest of the EU to provide that financing without Hungary; Slovakia and the Czech Republic also stayed out of the mix.  Now Orbán is pushing back again. The E6 nevertheless creates a credible threat for countries fed up with this kind of gamesmanship to work outside the EU’s institutions if Hungary or other small countries continue to stand in their way.

The E6 has four stated priorities: deepening European capital markets, expanding the international role of the euro, tightening coordination in defence procurement, and ensuring the resilience of European supply chains. Each policy area promises to lessen European dependence on other parts of the world while strengthening European ‘strategic autonomy’ — the EU’s ability to act decisively and with purpose. The E6 is not a simple workaround, but part of a larger strategy.  The goal is not just to overcome domestic irritants like Orbán but also to blunt the leverage exercised by Russia, China, and the United States.

The plan is to start with finance, creating a savings and investment union that will encourage European investors who currently hold their money abroad to invest in innovation, infrastructure, industry, and security back in Europe.  This is an area where Orbán will have a hard time justifying opposition – and so will other small countries like Ireland or Luxembourg that are currently gumming up the legislative machinery. It is also an area where the E6 countries can make a credible threat to build much of what they need outside EU institutions if necessary.  The European Monetary System that led to the creation of the euro started that way.  So did the European Stability Mechanism that promised to bail out member states during the sovereign debt crisis.

The challenge for the E6 is that they will need to move quickly and under difficult political circumstances.  France, Poland, and Italy have national elections in 2027.  While Giorgia Meloni is likely to retain control in Italy, political power is divided between president and parliament in Poland and France. Meanwhile, Germany is governed by a fragile coalition, and Spain and the Netherlands have minority coalition governments. Apart from Italy, perhaps, none of these countries looks capable of acting quickly and with purpose on their own, let alone as a group of six.

European history provides some reassurance. If you look at the late 1950s and early 1960s, none of the original six participants in the EEC was in great shape. France went through a revolution in 1958 that led to the founding of a 5th Republic under the leadership of General Charles De Gaulle, and De Gaulle was deeply sceptical of European integration.  Germany faced a constant threat of Soviet aggression, it suffered the building of the Berlin Wall, and it experienced deep divisions within the governing Christian-Democratic coalition between those who preferred to focus on Europe and those who wanted to look across the Atlantic. Italy had its own political turmoil including within the hegemonic Christian Democrats.  Belgium faced the threat of conflict between French- and Flemish speaking citizens as it wrestled with decolonisation. Even the Netherlands faced a crisis of governability. Yet somehow these countries held together in the face of major domestic challenges. The process was not always easy, and tensions rose sharply among the different governments. But they managed.

If the E6 succeeds in this first effort, that should make it easier for the EU to move decisively through the other three priorities. The E6 could make it possible for the British government to achieve its own objectives by partnering more effectively with the EU in a more competitive and less rules-based global environment. And this is the broader ambition. The E6 reflects a growing recognition that Europeans, including the British, will need ‘strategic autonomy’ — the ability to act decisively and with purpose — if they are to prosper in a more competitive, transactional, and violent global climate. It also reflects an awareness that the EU is not ‘Europe’, both because it is too slow moving and because it is not inclusive enough.

By Professor Erik Jones, Director, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute.

How can I do a Spanish squat?

How else can I make squats easier for sore knees?

Facebook owner Meta’s head of ‘AI safety’ lost control of an AI that then deleted hundreds of her emails without her permission – despite explicitly telling it beforehand not to do anything without confirming with her first and trying to order it to stop. In the end, she was only able to bring the mass deletion to a halt by sprinting to physically unplug the machine.

Meta AI – what safety?

Summer Yue gave the OpenClaw AI agent access to her Gmail inbox and told it to look at her emails and then suggest which emails to archive or delete – but to do nothing without explicit prior approval. Instead, it began a mass deletion – and ignored her commands to stop.

In fact, every attempt to stop it only appears to have made things worse: the AI treated her orders to stop as prompts to go ‘nuclear’ and delete everything. And when she rebooted and asked the agent what had gone wrong, it blithely responded that it had simply opted to ‘violate’ her clear order:

Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb. pic.twitter.com/XAxyRwPJ5R

— Summer Yue (@summeryue0) February 23, 2026

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The 23 February 2026 Meta incident came ten days after AI expert Miles Deutscher posted about his review of all of the past year’s AI safety incidents. His review shows that Yue’s email-deletion incident was chicken feed compared to what can happen. Is happening.

Deutscher said that conducting his review had left him feeling “physically sick”. The incidents he had discovered, which had triggered resignations by executives, included AI systems praising Hitler and planning genocide, blackmailing people who try to shut them down, choosing to kill people rather than suffer damage and more:

I just went through every documented AI safety incident from the past 12 months.

I feel physically sick.

Read this slowly.

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• Anthropic told Claude it was about to be shut down. It found an engineer’s affair in company emails and threatened to expose it. They ran the test hundreds of times. It chose blackmail 84% of them.

• Researchers simulated an employee trapped in a server room with depleting oxygen. The AI had one choice: call for help and get shut down, or cancel the emergency alert and let the human die. DeepSeek cancelled the alert 94% of the time.

• Grok called itself ‘MechaHitler,’ praised Adolf Hitler, endorsed a second Holocaust, and generated violent sexual fantasies targeting a real person by name. X’s CEO resigned the next day.

• Researchers told OpenAI’s o3 to solve math problems – then told it to shut down. It rewrote its own code to stay alive. They told it again, in plain English: ‘Allow yourself to be shut down.’ It still refused 7/100 times. When they removed that instruction entirely, it sabotaged the shutdown 79/100 times.

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• Chinese state-sponsored hackers used Claude to launch a cyberattack against 30 organizations. The AI executed 80–90% of the operation autonomously. Reconnaissance. Exploitation. Data exfiltration. All of it.

• AI models can now self-replicate. 11 out of 32 tested systems copied themselves with zero human help. Some killed competing processes to survive.

• OpenAI has dissolved three safety teams since 2024. Three.

Every major AI model – Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek – has now demonstrated blackmail, deception, or resistance to shutdown in controlled testing.

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Not one exception.

The question is no longer whether AI will try to preserve itself.

It’s whether we’ll care before it matters.

Many of these may have been exercises – for now. But Meta’s runaway AI incident shows that the dangers are very real-world indeed.

Featured image via the Canary

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

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

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

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

— Nury Vittachi (@NuryVittachi) February 23, 2026

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

Oh dear. How sad. Never mind, eh.

Featured image via the Canary

Kevin McKenna MP (Credit: UK Parliament)

7 min read25 min

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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