Hello, and welcome to Tuesday, June 23, 2026. I'm glad you're here for our daily visit. Today is National Pecan Sandies Day and National Hydration Day, which makes sense to me; I always need a drink with shortbreads. And today is Let It Go Day — a day to release grudges and move on. Today is also the birthday of the Coast Guard Auxiliary.
Today in History:
(I always include these History segments because to know where you are, you need to remember where you've been).
1775: First rowing regatta takes place on the River Thames in London.
1819: First editions of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. by Washington Irving are released, featuring the story "Rip Van Winkle."
1868: Christopher Latham Sholes patents the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, the first commercially successful of its kind.
1926: The College Board administers the first SAT exam in the U.S.
1931: Pilot Wiley Post and Australian navigator Harold Gatty take off from Roosevelt Field in New York to circumnavigate the globe, setting a new record of 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes.
1947: President Harry Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act, restricting the power of trade unions, is overridden by Congress and becomes law.
1951: Treacherous British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean flee to the USSR.
1958: Federal judge rules that racial separation must end in two-and-a-half years in Little Rock, Ark.
1960: The first contraceptive pill is made available for purchase in the United States.
1969: Joe Frazier TKOs Jerry Quarry in seven round to retain the heavyweight boxing title.
1970: The Red Skelton Show last airs on CBS, moves to NBC.
1979: Charlie Daniels Band releases "The Devil Went Down to Georgia."
1983: The Supreme Court rules that Congress could not veto presidential decisions.
Birthdays Today Include: Édouard Michelin, French industrialist who founded the tire company that bears his name; Donald MacBride, stage and screen character actor (Topper Returns; The Seven Year Itch); Alfred Kinsey, entomologist and sexologist; Anthony Veiller, writer (Moulin Rouge); Art Modell, businessman; June Carter Cash; singer-songwriter; Don Estridge, computer engineer and father of the IBM PC; and Justice Clarence Thomas.
If it's your day also, we wish you a Happy Birthday!
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Over the past six months, I've written several pieces on Keir Starmer — most of them chronicling his exquisitely agonizing slow-motion implosion. He finally read the room yesterday and stumbled toward the exit. Which raises the obvious question: will whoever replaces him be any better? I have my doubts. Significant ones.
Grab a cup of Italian roast and have a seat. This one's going to run a bit long, I'm afraid, with so much ground to cover.
Starmer's tenure as prime minister is a 301 class in political self-destruction so thorough that it borders on performance art. He arrived, clutching what can only be a landslide majority — the kind of mandate most leaders would sell their grandmothers for — and then spent the next two years burning it to the ground.
He alienated pensioners with new taxes. He alienated farmers with new regulations and of course, Taxes. He inherited a sexual violence catastrophe and then watched it metastasize on his watch. He sat back and watched as the Housing Shortage loomed and did nothing because his party would suffer if he acted against the influx of foreign-born, many of them illegal. As I've said in previous columns, London is no longer an English City. Ask John Cleese.
If you want numbers, the ONS recorded 69,184 rape offenses the year before he took office, which then climbed past 71,000 in 2024, then hit a fresh record of 71,667 in 2024/25, the highest figure since modern records began. By the way, this doesn’t touch the depth of the problem, since the states are for England and Wales alone, not the full United Kingdom. He swore he'd stop the boats loaded with what can only be termed invaders. He swore he'd “smash the gangs”. He did neither. He fixated on headline immigration numbers, while the actual rot — failed assimilation, parallel communities, and collapsed social cohesion — festered completely unaddressed. Then, rather than fix any of it, he decided to criminalize the people complaining about the mess he'd made. Tommy Robinson, for example. One observer on X put it better than I can: "The thing about Keir Starmer was not only would he allow foreign gangs to rape your daughters, but he'd throw you in jail if you protested on Facebook."
Devastatingly accurate. And don’t even get me started on getting his buddy, Peter Mandelson, the American Ambassadorship despite his demonstrably knowing in advance what a scuzball he is. His ties to Jeffrey Epstein alone gave Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch enough ammo to fill a munitions train. You can see why the voters weren't exactly queuing up to send him thank-you notes.
So anyway, he's gone now, and good riddance. But here's the uncomfortable truth the commentariat keeps frantically dancing around: Starmer wasn't the disease. He was the symptom. I'm not the first to note this. See our own Chris Queen, for example.
Let me be very clear on this point: It is totally unfair to lay the current problems the UK faces at the feet of Starmer. Bad as Starmer is, and yes, he should be gone, and should have been some time ago. But think now; the failures of the past two years didn't happen because one man botched Labour's agenda. They happened because one man executed that agenda faithfully.
That agenda? Open borders. Tax and spend. A military bled dry while the welfare rolls fattened. Labour's backbenchers didn't despise Starmer because he betrayed their agenda — they despised him because he didn't hide it well enough. The agenda was the problem, and it's still sitting there, waiting patiently for the next poor sap to pick up the flag.
Anyone who knows American politics, who is paying attention, will notice the family resemblance immediately. The Labour playbook that has failed the UK’s people so spectacularly and the American Democratic Party playbook read like they both rolled off the same printer.
Different accents, identical destination, equal wreckage. And you’re about to see that pattern very clearly here in the ‘states, as Democrats in the run-up to the midterm elections try to tell everyone they’re centrists.
Joe Biden’s handlers did that the whole time he was hiding in the basement. Remember? Once they managed to drag the corpse into the White House, they used his name and the autopen to facilitate the largest lean to the left in American history. The people now running for seats in the midterms are all making those same noises. The similarities between there in England and here in the States are enough to raise the question of whether there isn’t some central planning going on here, devising and implementing the utter destruction of both great countries.
Anyway, Starmer’s gone from Number 10. What’s next for what used to be Great Britain? Well, yet another Prime minister, for openers, and probably more than one. Since 2016 alone, Number 10 has seen six people: David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Keir Starmer cycle through the door at a pace that would embarrass a revolving restaurant.
The mental picture here is one of a spinning top, which is slowing down and losing its balance just before it falls over. But as Jerry Lee Lewis used to sing, “Who Will The Next Fool Be?”
For context on just how chaotic that is: mainstream reporting and historical lists note that this pace is unusual by modern British standards, with some post-war PMs serving for a decade or more. The UK has now burned through six of them in roughly the time it takes most countries to get through two. Absent a different vision of the role of government, it’ll be PM number eight before the echo dies.
At the moment, the most likely "next fool" fool is Andy Burnham, whom Labour members backed over Starmer at a rate of 62% in polling during the 2025 party conference — which tells you something extraordinary about the Labour membership's judgment, and none of it good.
Burnham, who is currently the Mayor of Birmingham, identifies politically as a socialist, a label he wears openly without shame or apparent irony. His grand prescription for stopping Nigel Farage and Reform UK (whom I will get to in a minute, here)? Deliver local services so aggressively that voters simply accept Labour. He's making the argument with a completely straight face.
The problem — and it's a problem visible from orbit — is that his platform calls for "a greater degree of public control," meaning government control, over housing, energy, water, and transport, which amounts to nationalizing everything that isn't nailed down and several things that are. The costs involved will doom his plan before the echo dies. And don't get me started about the lack of freedom he openly embraces.
Add to that, he wants to abolish the upper House in the British parliamentary system, the House of Lords, overhaul the voting system, nationalize Thames Water, and rejoin the economically struggling EU, all while somehow insisting he's the man to steady the ship. Yeah, we’ve all seen this play out before.
CNN breathlessly calls Burnham a "charismatic outsider," glossing over the minor detail that he became a parliamentary researcher at 24, a special adviser at 28, and an MP at 31 — a career trajectory that makes him about as much of an outsider as a fish is an outsider to water. (Gee, another playbook similarity… isn’t that what CNN called Obama?)
The new leader, regardless of who it ends up being, won't fix this mess. Not unless they're willing to torch the Labour playbook entirely — and Labour doesn't torch playbooks. Labour laminates them and hands them to the next true believer. What was Franklin’s definition of insanity, again? Oh, yes. They keep running the same play and hoping this time it’ll work out differently.
Speaking of torching the Labour playbook, here’s where Nigel Farage and his Reform party enter the discussion.
First, note what Farage says about the messaging. Obviously, Burnham is leaning toward the center prior to taking office, but as I've indicated, his long record tells us which way that's going to go. And the voters are already reacting.
As for the Reform Party, I regard it as an open question how much traction Farage's call will gain. Normally, I wouldn't suggest he had any chance at all, but the overwhelming victory of the most recent by-elections, as he mentions, gives the Reform Party a real shot at making it happen.
For context, the PollCheck 7-poll moving average shows Reform UK leading on 27.1%, ahead of Labour on 19.3% and Conservatives on 19.3%, with the Greens on 12.9% and the Liberal Democrats on 12.4%. Labour held a 33% figure going into the General in July of 2024. The trend here is Reform moving up continuously for the last two years. I suggest these trends add up to Reform gaining Number 10, were the election to be held today. Britpolls concurs saying only 18% of people say their household is better off under Labour, and cost of living remains the number one issue. Only 12% believe Labour will solve the housing crisis, with renters turning to Reform.
I'm running a bit long here, so I'll close on this:
There will be no shortage of things to write about in UK politics for the foreseeable future. Larry the Cat, the resident feline at Number 10, will have more keepers to get used to, and may even stand for election himself, at some point. He'd probably do better in office than any of the Labour party.
Thought for the day: We’re talking about people who burn down cities, key and burn down Teslas and take potshots at the president and whoever supports him. And yet you're still shocked they’d vandalize the Reflecting Pool?
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Take care of yourselves today. I'll see you here tomorrow.
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