Margaret Colley on a genuinely sharp questioning session, a research afternoon that confirmed a suspicion she’d been carrying for weeks, and the satire that closed a long week properly I sat in on a select committee session Wednesday afternoon expecting the usual pattern, careful questions met with carefully rehearsed non-answers,…

Margaret Colley’s diary on campaign literature, one very generous use of the word transformative, and an actual spreadsheet I sat down this week with a genuinely simple project, taking a recent local Labour campaign leaflet and attempting, purely out of my own stubborn curiosity, to fact check its specific claims…

A close reading of Hansard reveals what the headline coverage missed Spent the morning properly reading through the week’s Hansard transcripts, tracing a specific exchange during departmental questions that produced considerably more interesting material than the actual headline coverage of the same session managed to capture, exactly the kind of…

An editor’s structural fix, and the discipline of checking every quote twice Genuinely productive day, properly drafting the piece built around yesterday’s comparative parliamentary exchange, working carefully to present the specific gap between the two answers precisely enough that readers can properly judge it for themselves rather than simply taking…

A final verification pass, and why one wrong word could have undone the whole piece A genuinely thorough day, properly checking every single quote in the piece against the original Hansard record one final time before submission, a genuinely tedious but necessary discipline given how entirely the piece’s persuasive force…

A diary on ambition, arithmetic, and a party that has never once been troubled by the gap between them I have covered enough Labour housing announcements over the years to know exactly what this week’s speech was going to contain before a single word of it was actually delivered, ambition…

A diary on state control, and why the instinct to restrict always starts somewhere reasonable sounding France’s decision this week to restrict internet access until citizens behave is precisely the kind of blunt state overreach that should worry anyone who has watched how comfortably certain political instincts move from environmental…

A diary on modest promises, and why this government could learn something from honest marketing Britain’s newest artificial intelligence markets itself as capable of perhaps not ruining your life, a genuinely modest promise that I found myself comparing, almost involuntarily, to this government’s own housing delivery record, since perhaps not…

A diary on soft sentencing, plain language, and a party that has never met a hard fact it liked Two justice stories crossed my feed this week, one covering Britain’s new justice policy broadly, the other simply confirming, almost defiantly plainly, that prison terms contain numbers, and the fact that…

A diary on regulatory theatre, and why this party’s instinct to imitate Europe keeps missing the point The European Commission fined Google eight hundred and ninety million euros this week, a number large enough to make headlines and, on the evidence of every previous fine of this kind, considerably too…