Everything is so disturbingly cheap-looking... Thin carpets, rubbish chairs, flat-pack quality furniture, flags that will crackle with static when you get within ten paces, etc.
And yet £2.6 million of OUR money was sent up in smoke chasing this particular white elephant.
You can see how desperately they've tried to copy the White House, down to the shape of the lectern.
Notice how, unlike ours, the US version hasn't been kitted out by PlasticsRUS. (Not saying it's the height of luxury, but it's several ranks above our amateur effort.)
For extra giggles, the UK arm of a Russian firm seems to have been heavily involved in the fitting out.
Dominic Raab, on increasing the number of Trident nuclear warheads: "Because it is the ultimate guarantee, the ultimate insurance policy against the worst threat from hostile states."
Except it's not, because they will only be used in circumstances where we're already dead.
Remember, they're second strike weapons. They're not meant to be fired first.
But if we're retaliating against a massive nuclear attack, almost everyone not in a cosy government bunker will be a glowing pile of ash. So there is zero protective value to having dozens more.
Plus, when you think about it, any PM who ordered their use is the biggest idiot of all time.
If we're really talking about a situation where there was a mass nuclear exchange, we need as much of the world to survive as possible so there's an eventual chance of rebuilding.
The Express is sometimes hilarious in its desperation to stick the boot into the EU in the guise of cheerleading Brexit. You can really smell the stink of fear pouring off this story.
Get this: the UK will have a direct ferry to Morocco. Yes, Morocco! Wonders will never cease.
What's interesting is the justification given is to avoid multiple awkward border crossings.
That is the exact same reason why Ireland now has DOZENS of new direct ferry links to the EU, something the Express are staying strangely silent about.
Back to the original story: it offers the prospect of making trade equivalent to 0.3% of our EU trade a little bit smoother.
Three cheers, plus another for luck.
(Of course, it involves a company that doesn't have any ferries. That would be too easy.) unitedseaways.com
The UK Government are using taxpayer money to push fake pro-Brexit propaganda claiming business success.
See this paid piece in the Independent. Except it's not only the Independent, because they've also paid for variants of it to appear in local media. independent.co.uk/news/brexit-tr…
There are hundreds of the things! They've carpet-bombed the UK with near-identical puff pieces, each disguised as "News".
(Some carry the notation "Sponsored article", others explicitly mention the UK Government, others make the paid nature even less clear.)
To be clear: I don't think the firms mentioned in the article are themselves lying.
But they are monstrously unrepresentative of the average situation facing businesses.
It's like using Usain Bolt as a "random" example to "prove" everyone can run the 100m really, really fast.
THREAD 1/ We know that hospital admissions correlate closely with COVID-19 deaths, but it's worth reminding ourselves just how much that's true...
Here's what happens when you plot admissions vs deaths for England, with deaths shifted by 14 days (people don't die immediately).
2/ Even though the two sets of data are plotted on different scales, you can see they track each other almost perfectly, with the exception of a period during the first wave in which deaths outstripped the long-term mortality ratio. (That's almost certainly due to under-testing.)
3/ Using the same data, we can get a crude estimate of the mortality rate, i.e. what percentage of people entering hospital and testing positive for COVID-19 will subsequently die in hospital.
(For comparison, influenza has a mortality rate around 5% for hospitalised cases.)
Or how about this piece in the Guardian from November 2016, warning about EXACTLY the problems musicians are facing now? theguardian.com/music/musicblo…
Ok, ok, so those examples are from after the referendum.