Politics
Reform’s Cunningham complains ‘Restore’ is racist
Former Tory Laila Cunningham, now a councillor for far-right ‘Reform UK’, has told the hard-right Telegraph that she has received death threats from supporters of even more extreme-right ‘Restore Britain’. Restore supporters don’t like that she is a Muslim.
No Muslim should suffer hate for being a Muslim or for the colour of their skin. But Cunningham – also Reform’s candidate in the next London mayoral election – has pandered to white supremacy and Islamophobic race-hate as a campaign tactic. In January 2026, she said that any woman wearing a burqa should be subject to arbitrary stop-and-search, because:
It has to be assumed that if you’re hiding your face, you’re hiding it for a criminal reason.
Trumpist parrot
She has also parroted Trumpist lies that “nowhere” in London is safe and that:
If you go to parts of London, it does feel like a Muslim city. The signs are written in a different language. You’ve got burqas being sold in markets.
As if that wasn’t enough, in 2025 she said she doesn’t “blame people” for hating Muslims and opposed even a definition of Islamophobia. A cynical mind might suspect she’s trying to court Muslim residents’ votes in Makerfield, where Reform hopes to win a parliamentary by-election this Thursday, 18 June 2026.
Islamophobia is disgusting. And Cunningham might want to take a look in the mirror.
Featured image via the Canary
By Skwawkbox
If you spend hours cleaning your bathroom several times a week, put the bleach down: you’re wasting a whole lot of time according to one molecular virology expert.
Emma Harding, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, has shared that using soapy water to clean your bathroom just once a week is more than enough.
The pro told 9Honey Living: “Soapy water is very effective at killing a wide range of microbes, so your regular cleaning can be done with that.”
If stuff does start getting grottier than soapy water can handle, Harding advises using disinfectant once a month.
In terms of what needs cleaning the most, the expert says that “high-touch surfaces” such as taps and showers should be the priority.
However, there is one non-negotiable – when it comes to cleaning your bathroom, the toilet is an essential.
Harding adds that if anyone in your household is unwell it is crucial to give your entire toilet and bathroom a thorough scrub when they’ve recovered to stop anyone else catching the bug.
Want to keep bugs at bay? It’s all about how you flush the loo after you’ve done your business, according to the expert.
“The bathroom is one of the dirtiest places in the house, especially if it has the toilet in the same room,” Harding explains.
“As a general rule, always flush with the lid down to prevent particles from escaping the toilet bowl and settling elsewhere.”
When you flush the toilet with the lid open, a delightful plume of germs fly out of your loo and settle on the surfaces in your bathroom.
That plume includes nasty poo and wee particles that can carry everything from E. coli to Covid-19 – so it’s really important you shut that lid before you flush.
Reform UK has been making a lot of noise about JCB’s pothole-filling machine, and with obvious reason. Voters hate potholes, and JCB is one of the most evil companies in the UK, so of course Farage & co. would want to work with them. As it turns out, though, the magical pothole machine may not be all it’s cracked up to be. And our source on that is a Reform-run council:
This is awkward.
Michael’s own Leicestershire Council have stated the Pothole Pro is impractical:https://t.co/aEICJaRFbW pic.twitter.com/NBnVXq9AfS
— Reform Party UK Exposed
(@reformexposed) June 17, 2026
Mechanised ethnic cleansing
First things first, we should explain why we called JCB one of the most evil companies in the UK.
As we reported in September 2025, the Stop JCB campaign reported on how JCB supports “ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine, India, and Kashmir”. We added:
In Palestine, JCB operates through its sole dealer, the Israeli company Comasco. The corporation holds contracts with Israel’s Ministry of Defence for the same model of JCB machines the Zionist settler state uses in the demolitions and construction of settlements.
JCB has been at it for a long time, with photographers catching Israeli forces demolishing homes in the West Bank using their machinery as early as 2006. We also noted:
Currently, JCB is also complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese listed JCB in her July report. This was among numerous companies directly aiding and profiting from the genocide. Israel has long used armoured, unbranded JCB High Mobility Engineer Excavator (HMEE) machines, known as ‘Ami’ in Hebrew, and is now using them in Gaza.
Oh, and no points for guessing which party JCB’s billionaire owner and peer Anthony Bamford supports:
JCB owner Bamford: “You can’t get away with £60k benefit handouts.”
Also billionaire brothers Anthony Bamford and Mark Bamford: Not paying a tax bill of up to £500 million.
What greedy, Farage-supporting bastards. pic.twitter.com/KZhpzajO3I
— Politics In The U.K. (@politixintheuk) May 17, 2026
Reform are all filler
Given Farage’s connection to Bamford, it’s unsurprising he made a big deal out of promoting the Zionist pothole machine:
— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) March 28, 2025
WATCH: Nigel Farage arrives on stage at Reform UK’s local election launch on a JCB Pothole Pro pic.twitter.com/B9GKctAExO
Now, a Reform council has suggested Bamford’s hole plugger isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As reported by the BBC, a 2025 report from Leicestershire County Council (LCC) found:
After two demonstrations, officers concluded that the JCB Pothole Pro did not stack up as an economical piece of kit to repair potholes in Leicestershire
Additionally:
The JCB PP is big – it’s bigger than a normal excavator, it would not be suitable for small defect repairs – the machine is too big and would close the road, it would be inefficient to travel round repairing small potholes.
Another problem was that the quantity of potholes they had to deal with meant they couldn’t:
utilise Pothole Pro’s full potential on a daily basis – which in turn would make it very inefficient
And also:
After two demonstrations, officers concluded that the JCB Pothole Pro did not stack up as an economical piece of kit to repair potholes in Leicestershire
JCB – a company which is happy for its product to be used for ethnic cleansing – suggested that LCC weren’t using the machine correctly, and that a longer test was needed. LCC aren’t the first to criticise what the machine can do anyway:
Reform UK’s ‘right first time’ pothole repairs in @NottsCC should be called ‘shite first time’.
This repair is in Council Leader Mick Barton’s own Mansfield East division: questionable workmanship, unsealed edges, lifespan roughly that of a snowflake in July. Reform UK -… pic.twitter.com/WRBFTYqAhy
— Reform Party UK Exposed
(@reformexposed) November 16, 2025
Bunged up
Given the update, it’s no wonder people are saying things like this:
Leicestershire County Council has found that JCB's pothole machine is not economically viable. I think they will find that it becomes viable when you look at JCB's £200,000 donation to Reform rather than at the extra cost to council tax payers. pic.twitter.com/BIfD4zOigp
— Parody Nigel Farage (@Parody_PM) June 16, 2026
Personally, we don’t think any council should be working with companies that facilitate ethnic cleansing. The fact that these machines may not be all they’re cracked up to be just adds insult to injury.
If Reform should replace Labour in government, we’ve no doubt there’ll be many more questionable contracts, anyway. And the real hole left to fill will be the economic one left behind when they get kicked out.
Featured image via The Canary
By Willem Moore
In today’s world, where news cycles have shrunk to seconds and social media has become the primary source of content, the role of quality journalism has undergone fundamental changes. Digital journalism now faces an unprecedented challenge: how to maintain speed of publication without sacrificing accuracy. In the midst of global information noise, the ability to properly verify information has become a necessary condition for the survival of independent media.
The Evolution of Fact-Checking in the Digital Age
Traditional verification methods based on personal contacts and official requests are now being supplemented by complex technological processes. The problem is that fake news and misinformation spread like wildfire, often outpacing official rebuttals. Modern journalists are forced to work in a state of “constant doubt,” where every piece of data is subjected to rigorous analysis.
To maintain a high level of information accuracy, newsrooms implement strict protocols. These protocols involve checking a speaker’s words and conducting technical audits of information’s digital footprint. It’s important to understand that fact-checking is a continuous process that accompanies a story at every stage of its creation.
Methodology and Journalistic Standards
Despite all changes in technology, ethical principles and related journalistic standards endure. It is crucial to achieve as much impartiality as possible when presenting information to the reader. Therefore, you can’t observe media ethics without cross-checking all the data you use and making sure you have three or more independent sources for each bit of it.
The verification process in modern newsrooms typically looks like this:
- Primary source identification and reliability assessment.
- Technical analysis of photo and video metadata.
- Cross-referencing obtained information with public records.
- Confirming event geolocation via satellite imagery.
- Contextualizing the data by means of consulting experts.
This approach minimizes the risk of spreading false news and busts your publication’s source credibility appropriately in your readers’ minds.
Digital Investigation Tools and OSINT
Amidst all the new additions to journalistic workflows, the incorporation of open-source intelligence (OSINT) definitely stands out. It is no longer possible to imagine investigative journalism without the comprehensive all-round analysis of assorted public information, such as social networks, CCTV footage, or open data records.
It is, of course, worth noting that in-depth digital research requires special sets of tools. Some data should really only be accessed anonymously for safety reasons, for example if the article you’re writing requires mining so-called darknet websites for information. Then there is all the data that is region-locked. Any professional should be familiar with the technical solutions that aid in these cases. For example, when confidentiality is needed to analyze foreign databases or avoid blocks, researchers prefer to buy SOCKS5 proxy, which provides a stable and secure connection when working with sensitive information.
Digital investigations today are impossible without mastery of reverse image search tools and social graph analysis. Journalists examine the digital footprint of every online source to ensure an account isn’t a bot or created specifically to spread disinformation.
Verifying Visual Content
When everyone with a smartphone camera is a potential witness and everyone with an AI video generation app is a potential disrupter, you have to be very careful with visual evidence. The methods used in modern news verification are rather varied, and many of them only a decade ago would have looked like something out of a sci-fi show.
Journalists analyze shadows in photos to determine the time of day. They also check weather conditions for a given day using archived meteorological data and match landscapes in videos with terrain maps. The information verification process includes checking whether an image has been edited or created using artificial intelligence. Understanding how image-processing algorithms work has become a mandatory requirement for those involved in news reporting.
Working with Public Records and Data
Access to public records has become the foundation of quality investigations. Journalists analyze financial reports, court archives, and corporate documents. This allows them to uncover hidden connections and conflicts of interest that cannot be found through simple interviews.
Effective information verification requires a systematic approach:
- Tracing asset ownership history through government databases.
- Analyzing official declarations and comparing them with actual expenditures.
- Monitoring government procurement for corrupt schemes.
- Using specialized software to process large datasets.
A proper approach ensures that reporting is based on facts, not speculation. This is critically important for maintaining an independent media outlet’s reputation.
Community-Sourced Fact-Checking
Recent years saw the rise of communities and official organizations who deal in fact-checking as a trade. These are the people who establish lines of communication with the newsroom, have their own databases of sources, and are the first to chase every important leak. The cooperation between these groups, journalists, and OSINTers helps strengthen industry-wide standards when it comes to ethical, objective, trustworthy reporting.
Verification is a collective responsibility. When journalists share methods and tools, it raises overall media literacy in society. It’s important that readers understand how information made it to a publication’s pages and what steps were taken to confirm it.
Psychological Aspects and Cognitive Biases
Working on information verification is both a technical and a psychological process. Journalists must be aware of their own cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias — where a person subconsciously seeks out facts that support their viewpoint while actively ignoring contradictory data.
Professional discipline requires setting aside emotions and approaching every source with the same level of skepticism. This is especially important when covering conflicts or political crises, where manipulating public opinion becomes a primary goal for many participants.
The Future of Verification in Media
Deepfake technologies have been with us for some time, but the recent rise in AI development has truly empowered the people behind them. Now, the web is teeming with videos that look very real despite being created with nothing but clever prompts, often in a matter of minutes. That presents extra fact-checking challenges that the industry is currently seeking solutions for.
In the nearest future, we can expect to see the emergence of automated credibility monitoring systems for digital journalism to rely on. However, even with those on hand, we’ll still need real people with their inquisitive minds and moral compasses. Critical thinking and the ability to ask the right questions is more critical than ever in the current tumultuous landscape.
Conclusion
In the modern digital age, the fight against misinformation continues to be an uphill battle. However, a lot of the tools available today also enable daring OSINT escapades to a previously unthinkable degree. Armed with rigid ethical standards and flexible digital tools, a journalist can expose the truth and deliver it to their readers.
This week, the government announced a social-media ban for under-16s in the UK. It is set to come into effect by spring next year.
While UK prime minister Keir Starmer insists nine out of 10 parents support it, the ban has not met with unanimous praise. Ian Russell, whose daughter Mollie took her own life in 2017 after viewing suicide content online, has accused Starmer of ‘political opportunism’.
Given how shallow and performative Starmer’s justification for the ban has been, it’s hard to disagree with Russell. The prime minister’s claim that social-media platforms stop ‘children doing their homework, reading, playing with their friends outside, [and] going to bed at a decent hour’ betrays a profound ignorance of just how much childhood has changed in recent decades, long before the surge of social-media use in the 2010s.
In truth, much of the harm to children, from their retreat indoors to their isolation, now being attributed to social media, began with the rise of safetyist culture during the 1990s. The state was happy to sanction the portrayal of the outside world as a dangerous, risky place. The rise of ‘stranger danger’ awareness campaigns made parents reluctant to allow their children to play outside long before TikTok. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue in The Coddling of the American Mind, social-media sites are only one side of the coin. Yes, young people today are more risk-averse and, as a result, less resilient than previous generations. But society has done just as much to confine children to their bedrooms as social media.
When I was a teenager in the late 2010s, social media could indeed be a ‘Wild West’ of strange and often unwanted content. But social-media sites also gave teenagers access to things that adult society wasn’t offering. They gave a platform for children to be free, to explore new communities and outlets, to seek out others with the same interests and passions. And they did so when physical spaces were often cut off or heavily supervised. This was particularly important during the Covid lockdowns, when the same politicians now railing against social media’s impact on the young did everything they could to keep a generation of children locked in their homes.
A social-media ban will only exacerbate young teens’ frustration over their lack of independence. It will be experienced as a loss of control they felt they had over an area of their own lives. The freedom and the space to make mistakes in real life, just as much as the online world, are important for young people. Without it, they can’t learn life lessons, be held responsible or make amends. To become independent, they need to be given the space to make decisions that have consequences in the world around them – to learn that they are part of something bigger than themselves.
That isn’t to say we need to romanticise social media. For some young people, the algorithmic echo chambers can lead to spirals of insecurity. In many ways, social-media platforms have reinforced the worst aspects of modern childhood: pressures of educational achievement and expectations of conformity lead to early adultification, while opportunities, responsibilities and freedoms in the outside world decline.
But the crux of the issue for young people growing up online is not the social-media platforms themselves. Rather, it is the prevailing culture of moral relativism and weakened adult authority. Young people lack the framework, which once would have been provided by older generations, to make sense of the intensely globalised, politicised and polarised content online.
What this speaks to is not so much the dangerous power of Big Tech, but the loss of intergenerational knowledge and communication between parents and children. Parental authority has been outsourced to so-called experts, and community experience and values have been eroded by the preoccupation with cosmopolitan norms. Parents and trusted adults have been warned against giving guidance and teaching lessons to their kids due to their allegedly outdated understanding of the world and the prejudices they may have. No wonder, then, that children have become prisoners to everything they see and hear online.
For a political class bereft of principle, social-media platforms have become a convenient bogeyman. We witnessed this in April’s Clapham unrest, when hundreds of young people wreaked havoc on the streets. This was clear evidence of a profound breakdown in parenting and policing – yet social-media platforms, particularly TikTok, were blamed as the source of the problem. Young people may have wilfully broken the rules, but the bigger issue is that the adults in the room rarely try to enforce them.
Starmer’s desire to get children back to reading, sleeping and playing outside cannot be mandated. Children’s behaviour ought to be the responsibility of parents, not No10. The social-media ban will only further erode parents’ authority. After all, if the government doesn’t trust parents, why should their children?
What we need is not a ban on social media, but a conversation about how we strengthen the lives of young people. Further weakening the authority of adults is not the way to go about this.
Like everything Keir Starmer does, his social-media ban is pointless and self-defeating. Children need a strong society to help them flourish as adults – not a stronger nanny state.
Emma Gilland is event coordinator for the Academy of Ideas and author of The Corona Generation: Coming of Age in a Crisis, written with Jennie Bristow and published by Zero Books.
Donald Trump has signalled that he is looking to increase sanctions on Russia again as the US is on the cusp of an agreement with Iran.
The US president was speaking shortly after a face-to-face conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the G7 summit in France.
Trump put a waiver on countries buying sanctioned Russian oil earlier this year when global energy supplies were put under strain by the US and Israeli war in Iran.
The controversial move – which undermined years of co-ordinated efforts to punish Russia from Ukraine’s allies – came after Iran effectively shut down the major oil shipping lane, the Strait of Hormuz, in the wake of US-Israeli strikes on Tehran.
But America and Iran have now agreed to hash out a new deal in the next 60 days, and the president has suggested oil transportation will resume.
Trump told reporters at the G7: “Soon we’ll be able to do [reapply penalties against Russia] because the oil is now flowing.
“So we took sanctions off because obviously we’re not looking to impede the US, so we’re in a position to do that soon.”
Senate Democrats told Kyiv Independent in April that Russia earned an additional $150 million per day due to the waiver.
Trump’s shocking decision to ease those penalties came after more than year of yo-yoing from the US president over the Ukraine war, which he once pledged to end within the first 24 hours of his second term.
He has repeatedly rolled out the red carpet for Russia and tried to push Ukraine to give up more land in the name of peace.
But Trump’s remarks from the G7 summit could signal a wider pivot back to support for Kyiv from the White House.
Vladimir Putin is thought to be on the back foot right now in the Ukraine war, more than four years after he first started his illegal land grab.
The economic cost of the conflict, the staggering number of casualties and Kyiv’s recent strikes into the heart of Russia mean Putin is at a disadvantage.
Zelenskyy said ahead of the G7 summit that he was ready to meet his Russian counterpart in the French Alps for face-to-face negotiations, but claimed Putin was not ready to talk.
The Kremlin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov hit back, saying: “There are currently no official channels between Kyiv and Moscow.”
He repeated Putin’s previous claims that Zelenskyy could go to Russia if he wanted to talk.
Zelenskyy also sent an open letter to the Russian leader earlier this month calling for them to meet for further negotiations.
But Putin described the missive as “rude,” and rejected it almost immediately.
Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
Kemi Badenoch has been told she is “not fit to be prime minister” after comparing a cabinet minister to a Nazi.
The Tory leader said education secretary Bridget Phillipson “has acted like a Gestapo officer” by ending a tax break for private schools.
Badenoch made the remark in an interview with The Spectator.
Responding on X, Phillipson said: “The Gestapo marched hundreds of thousands of innocent people to their deaths. I’ve ended private schools’ tax breaks to invest in state schools.
“No responsible leader makes vile comparisons like this. Kemi Badenoch is not fit to be Prime Minister.”
Labour MP Phil Brickell, secretary of the all party parliamentary group on Germany, called on Badenoch to apologise.
He said: “Kemi Badenoch’s characterisation of Bridget Phillipson as having ‘acted like a Gestapo officer’ over private school VAT fees are contemptible, unbecoming of any parliamentarian and demonstrate – yet again – that Badenoch is completely unfit for public office.
“Her remarks serve no purpose but to undermine the UK-Germany relationship and sow unnecessary division. Ad hominem attacks such as this inexplicable reference to Nazi-era officials should not be tolerated in our public discourse.
“I had hoped that language such as this was a thing of the past. Kemi Badenoch should withdraw her comments immediately and unreservedly apologise.”
A spokesman for Badenoch said: “Bridget Phillipson has pursued a class war on independent schools, forcing many treasured schools to shut, upending the lives of young people across the country, and sending hundreds of children into already overcrowded state schools.
“Worse still, the money from her vindictive tax raid was supposed to fund new teachers, and even the Department for Education’s own website says teacher numbers are lower than under the Conservatives.
“Instead of getting self-righteous, Phillipson should focus on her job. Or even better – stand aside for someone who isn’t out to ruin the lives of people who don’t vote Labour.”
Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
Soon after a 35°C May record-breaker, the Met Office said more heatwaves are likely in the UK this summer.
And it turns out they may be just days away from being proven right in London.
As of the time of writing (17 June), temperatures between 28°C and 30°C are expected in the capital this weekend.
Here’s what you need to know about: when that could happen, what it would take to count as an official heatwave, and why hot spells can be so insufferable in the city.
When could there be a heatwave in London this June?
The Met Office predicts our current miserable weather will take a sunnier turn on Friday, 19 June.
At that point, temperatures will rise to 29°C.
From then on, per the Met Office, Londoners can expect:
- Friday 19 June: 29°C
- Saturday 20 June: 28°C
- Sunday 21 June: 30°C.
Even if the highest of those temperatures come to pass, however, an official heatwave may still not have taken place.
When is it officially a heatwave in London?
A heatwave is defined as three back-to-back days at or above an area’s maximum temperature threshold.
Because some parts of the UK are usually hotter than others, that upper limit changes depending on location.
As you head further North or West, that threshold is set a little lower than the warmer South-East – around 25°C and 26°C.
But in London, the threshold is 28°C.
That means that it’d need to reach at least 28°C on Tuesday after the predicted Sunday and Monday temperatures to officially count (or Saturday would have to be a degree hotter than currently anticipated).
Why does London feel so hot on sunny days?
As we mentioned before, London is already in the warmer South-East. Then, there’s the infrastructure to consider.
Speaking to HuffPost UK previously, Richard Millard, senior sustainability consultant at Building Energy Experts, said that built-up areas can make already brutal UK heatwaves even more unbearable.
“Our towns and cities have a large urban heat island effect due to the amount of concrete, asphalt and such that absorbs heat and releases it slowly, making cities and towns feel hotter,” he shared.
2026′s two consecutive record-breaking May temperatures were recorded in London’s Kew Gardens this year (34.8°C and 35.1°C, respectively).
David Lammy told the Conservatives’ deputy chairman he should be “ashamed of himself” after he mocked the arson attacks targeting Keir Starmer.
Two Ukrainians set alight to the prime minister’s family home and his car in 2025 after being recruited online by a Russian-speaking Telegram user “El Money”.
Roman Lavrynovych, and Ukrainian-born Romanian national Stanislav Carpiuc were convicted of conspiracy to carry out arson attacks on Monday.
But on Tuesday, Matt Vickers joined Talk’s Peter Kyle in laughing at the incident.
The Tory MP joked about the far-right conspiracy theory that the two Ukrainian nationals found guilty of conspiring to carry out the attacks on Starmer’s property and car were “rent boys”.
So when Vickers stood up to ask about the high rates of unemployment during deputy prime minister’s questions, Lammy hit back by pointing out the MP had been “laughing and joking” about the arson attacks against Starmer only yesterday.
Standing in for Starmer, Lammy said: “I must say to this Tory deputy chairman, yesterday he was on television laughing and joking about the arson attack on the prime minister’s home.
“Laughing about a firebomb targeting the prime minister and his family.
“Not only that, he joined with promoting conspiracies about the attack and laughed along to demeaning, homophobic remarks.
“He should be ashamed of himself.
“My advice to him is to grow up, apologise, and do considerably better.”
Vickers just shook his head from the Commons’ opposition benches.
Labour chair Anna Turley later said: “It is frankly sickening that anyone would seek to laugh and joke about an appalling attack on a fellow politician’s family home.
“To do so on the same day as we stood in unity to mark the anniversary of our dear friend and much missed colleague Jo Cox, is beyond the pale.
“Matt Vickers is not fit to be an MP and if Kemi Badenoch had an ounce of integrity or respect for the safety of those who seek to serve the public, she would do the right thing and sack him today.
“Just two days ago, Kemi Badenoch rightly called out the perpetrators of the vile attack against the Prime Minister. Some issues go beyond the rough and tumble of Party politics. If she fails to act now, her words clearly will have meant nothing.”
When asked for his take on the story on Talk on Tuesday, Vickers did begin his interview by acknowledging the serious concerns around Russian influence in the UK and the subsequent impact on security.
However, he soon added: “The idea that there some secret Russian effort to destabilise the country via the prime minister… I mean, you’d leave him in office!”
Kyle laughed loudly while Vickers continued: “Let him destroy the country! Don’t distract him, because he’s doing a pretty canny job of blowing himself up.”
Referring to the false rumour spread by Russia around the attacks, Kyle asked: “Were they rent boys?”
“I’m not familiar with them,” the MP replied, smiling.
Kyle said: “His front door was firebombed wasn’t it? Why are you laughing? It wasn’t his back door, it was his front door.”
The presenter then turned to the backlash to the PM’s attempts to introduce a social media ban for under-16s, adding: “He’s trying to bring a social media ban in through the back door quite quickly, isn’t he?”
Vickers struggled to stop his laughter.
A Tory Party spokesperson said: “If you’ve got an issue with the content of the programme, I suggest taking that up with Jeremy Kyle.”
He said party leader Kemi Badenoch had outright condemned the arson attacks on Tuesday.
The spokesperson said: “If you listen to what he actually says, the content of his words isn’t actually saying anything wrong. He laughed on that part, he was purely polite to the host of a radio programme.”
Watch the Talk interview here:
Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
Peter Capaldi, who was the 12th Doctor on BBC hit Doctor Who, has spoken out about his exit from the show.
The Thick Of It Star left the franchise in 2017. In a recent appearance on YouTube series 100 Questions with John Simmons, he claimed that he decided to leave the role because “I just wasn’t sure that it was going to go in the direction that I… everybody was leaving that I’d worked with.”
He added, “Everybody was leaving. Jenna [presumably Jenna Louise-Coleman, who played the Doctor’s companion Clara Oswald] had gone, and Steven [probably former head writer Steven Moffat, who also left in 2017] was going, and Brian [likely Brian Minchin], the producer, was going, and those are the people that make it work for you.
“We’d had some talks about the direction. I wasn’t sure that that was where I wanted to go with the show. And I also thought, I’m not sure I could come up with anything new.”
Peter continued to say that while his regeneration, which saw the actor replaced by Jodie Whittaker, was “very sad”, he thinks that the biological process the Doctor uses to survive serious damage has become “diminished”.
Calling the concept “a very, very powerful death motif,” he said, “To be perfectly honest, I think there are too many regenerations.
“I love all the Doctors, but I’ve lost count now of how many of them there are, so the weight of this kind of regeneration is diminished. Whereas when I grew up as a kid, the first time it happened it was: ‘What just happened there?’ It was mysterious and strange. It holds the mystery of the show, the regeneration.”
It’s not the first time he’s expressed his feelings about the show, of which he was a super-fan in his youth.
On the Half Of The Picture podcast this year, he claimed: “The show became very, very big. And it was never like that when I loved it. So it became a different thing.
“I think the show is a little bit of a victim of its success. You know, the show that I loved was a tiny thing, a little small thing that survived. It just survived, but nobody knew that it was warming its way into the culture in such a deep way. And I think that’s what I have an affinity with.”
In the ’70s, the Doctor Who fan club received so much correspondence from a young Capaldi that then-president of the group, Keith Miller, said he felt “haunted” by the Doctor-to-be.
In a new interview with Sky’s Beth Rigby, Keir Starmer has said he wants Andy Burnham to “have a big role in government” if he wins the Makerfield by-election. What Starmer means is he wants Burnham to be a top level minister. The irony is Burnham will likely be the highest level minister possible – i.e. the prime minister:
— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) June 17, 2026
BREAKING: Keir Starmer says he wants Andy Burnham to have a “big role in Government” if he wins the Makerfield by-election
Burnham returns
Beth Rigby has described her interview with Starmer as “deeply personal”. It’s unclear what personal stuff they got into, as everything she’s highlighted so far was a work thing.
It’s also unclear why we should care about him personally. We’re not employing him to be a person; we’re employing him to be the prime minister. If a colleague at your work repeatedly f*cked everything up, the last thing you’d want to hear about was how the endless mistakes were making them feel.
Here’s what Rigby highlighted anyway:
“After the weekend” is interesting given that the by-election is on Thursday. Presumably this means Burnham will be busy for a few days (and we expect he will be, because he’ll be plotting to bring down Starmer).
The acknowledgement that he “may not lead Labour into the next election” is interesting given his expressed intent to fight off Burnham. If he can read the writing on the wall, why not just go now?
Of course, he could be saying this because Burnham might not win in Makerfield. And should that happen, Starmer may be able to fend off Wes Streeting and stumble on for a few more years. And that really is the most optimistic scenario for him.
Musical chairs
Regarding Burnham potentially returning to the cabinet, Dan Hodges had this to say:
If Keir Starmer is going to offer Andy Burnham a “big role” in his cabinet, which of his existing senior ministers is he prepared to sacrifice in order to try and save himself.
If Burnham returns to parliament only to fall in line behind Starmer, the question shouldn’t be ‘who gets the sack?‘; it should be ‘who even wants to remain in this dysfunctional Labour government?‘. It probably won’t be, obviously, because the sycophants Starmer has surrounded himself would endure any level of humiliation to retain their grip on power.
Featured image via the Canary
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