Tom Hamilton Profile picture
Pirouetting around our fractured values
May 28 5 tweets 2 min read
Does… does this man know how old 18-year-olds are and how old they were four years ago?
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People are asking me if this is real. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume I have made it up and I don’t mind at all that people are sceptical, but it is in fact real: telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/2…
Sep 4, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
I’ve seen the Joe Lycett bit on the Kuenssberg show and I - quite genuinely - don’t understand what he’s supposed to have done wrong, or what they expected him to do, or why it was damaging for the programme. It was fine. Instead of saying “I think thing is bad” he said “I think thing is good” in a sarcastic way, in the context of everyone knowing that he is a comedian being asked to talk about thing. That’s… fine.
May 23, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
Oh no everyone is reading my “Boris Johnson should resign but not for this” thread as if it’s a “Boris Johnson shouldn’t resign and in fact he is brilliant” thread. Love to die on a hill I’m not even on.
May 23, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
Boris Johnson’s defence against misleading the House here is that the “No” relates to the “Can the PM tell us?” bit of the question rather than to the “Was there a party?” bit of the question. I - genuinely - believe this defence, but I suspect I am in a minority. A couple of people have responded to this that it's still a lie, because he *did* know whether there was a party on that date, because he was there. But that doesn't mean he knew it off the top of his head in response to a question he didn't know was coming.
May 20, 2020 11 tweets 3 min read
THREAD: The tendency to cover PMQs as a straight who won/who lost contest is understandable, but it can understate its strategic value. Keir Starmer has done a decent job on the win/loss front in his first weeks, but he’s also been able to *use* PMQs effectively. That’s partly using it to demonstrate that he can ask the right questions and respond well and look like he’s in command of his brief and all that, which is useful in establishing himself as a leader. But PMQs can push politics and policy along too, because of what’s said there.
Feb 27, 2019 11 tweets 3 min read
This thread from @berniekeavy is worth reading. I have my own story of being a Labour staffer witnessing a Ken Livingstone scandal unfolding, which might serve as an instructive contrast (another thread, I’m afraid, sorry). I was with Corbyn and some other advisers (it must have been a PMQs prep session) in late 2015 when the news emerged that Ken Livingstone had said that shadow minister Kevan Jones, who had criticised him, needed “psychiatric help”. More on that here: bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-po…
Dec 24, 2018 13 tweets 3 min read
It’s important, every Christmas, to take a moment to think about how completely bonkers this method of conducting a census is. Look at the state of it: every man travels, with his immediate family, to his ancestral home, to be registered. This. Is. Mad. It gives you almost no useful data on which to base public policy, while also creating infrastructure chaos.