Londoner's Diary
When the polls are bad, who do you call? Elon Musk, apparently. This week some disgruntled Tories have been lobbying the billionaire boss of Twitter — now X — for help, claiming the site’s community notes feature is biased in favour of Labour.
Community notes, which appear below tweets, allow users to fact-check potentially misleading posts. A number of notes have started popping up underneath the Prime Minister’s tweets, pooh-poohing his sketchy claims about how fabulously well everything is going in a whole range of areas from tax to immigration. The Tory magazine Conservative Post has even launched an appeal to Musk — who met Sunak at an AI summit in November last year — to make it stop.
“Dear @elonmusk, Please help! The UK’s Labour Party are getting community notes published in their favour,” they complain. “We’ve an election this year. What do you advise we do?” Musk is yet to respond, but amusingly the tweet has received its own community note. “Community notes are not being written by the Labour Party, instead by community notes contributors who are selected to have different points of view,” it reads.
What the …! Capaldi won’t revive Tucker
Sad news for fans of beloved political satire The Thick of It — the show’s star says he doesn’t want it to return. Peter Capaldi, who played potty-mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker, says “we’re in the middle of a time when we can’t trust the Government” and that by bringing the series back “I think it would be letting them off in some way”.
The Thick of It ran from 2005 to 2012, satirising the New Labour and coalition governments. “The reason I’m not terribly keen on it is because I think it’s beyond a joke,” said Capaldi, inset. “And joking about it just in some way, takes the spotlight away from the problems. And I think the problems are profound.”
Political nerds still binge-watch the show— and memes circulate through Westminster at times of political crisis.
Keir "Kama Sutra" Starmer?
The Tories are planning to play dirty at the next election in an effort to stop Labour taking power — and they’re talking dirty, too. At a drinks event for the One Nation group of moderate Tory MPs last night, minister Tom Tugendhat said Sir Keir Starmer “has adopted more positions than the Kama Sutra, but never held any of them longer than a teenager on prom night.” Crikey. Tugendhat claimed his risqué joke had been pre-approved by gaffe-prone Home Secretary James Cleverly, who recently got into trouble for joking about drugging his wife with “a little bit of Rohypnol in her drink every night” because it is “not really illegal if it’s only a little bit”. Cleverly later apologised and said: “I am absolutely committed… to the protection of women and girls.”
Bowie pal rues Rue David Bowie
At long last, David Bowie has had a street named after him. Unfortunately the Rue David Bowie is in Paris, a city where he didn’t spend a great deal of time, rather than his native London. “It’s a disgrace that London didn’t do it first,” says Barry Joule, an artist and confidant of Francis Bacon, with whom Bowie worked on a number of installations. Joule told us that the singer, right, was a fan of celebrity street names and wanted there to be an Elvis Square or Presley Street in the world’s major cities because Elvis changed music beyond recognition. The same could be said for Bowie. Step up, Brixton?
