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How Badenoch forced Labour’s hand on Mandelson
What's the administration thinking here?

“Will there ever be a normal news week?” one LOTO adviser messaged yesterday. It has been quite a week in Westminster – and one in which Kemi Badenoch has succeeded in carving out the agenda.

Sir Keir Starmer, meanwhile, is on the ropes. Questions over his judgement in appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador – despite knowing of his links to the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein – have sent Labour into open turmoil. Some MPs are now privately calling for his resignation; others are opnely briefing against him. Only a handful of loyalists remain. “It feels like the end of days,” one Labour MP tells me.

And they now have the option for an unholy alliance as Badenoch yesterday – in a speech that was whipped up within 24 hours – made them an offer to join forces: “Let’s talk seriously about a vote of no confidence.”

A Tory shadow cabinet member adds: “You know things are bad when their MPs are telling me – a Conservative shadow secretary of state – just how awful it is.”

Each Conservative intervention has only made matters worse for the Prime Minister. At PMQs prep earlier this week, things felt routine enough. “We did the prep and asked the questions,” one person involved tells me. “The effect was where it all came down.” By forcing Starmer, on the third attempt, to admit that he knew Mandelson had maintained ties with Epstein after his conviction, Badenoch played a blinder.

“She did well to force Keir’s hand,” a shadow cabinet minister says. “Not only blocking his attempt to stitch up the release of documents, but also making him admit he knew about Mandelson’s Epstein connection before appointing him.”

“You could hear everyone gasp and see the Labour benches droop in despair. It was a genuinely shocking moment.”

A Tory adviser adds: “The last thing we expected was that Starmer would finally confess he’d known about Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with Epstein, at which point Kemi’s PMQs request for all documents to go to Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) became the only real option for the government.” That was despite Starmer dismissing that very option at PMQs.

Inside Tory HQ, they knew they had spotted a moment of “massive weakness” when Starmer gave in to an opposition humble address (a clever bit of Parliamentary procedure) on his own appointment – the same one he had said he had “full confidence” in when Badenoch challenged him back in September. The deliberately broad wording extends the scope well beyond Mandelson’s appointment to include electronic communications and minutes of meetings between Lord Mandelson and ministers, officials and special advisers during his tenure as ambassador.

That could include messages between the disgraced former ambassador and the Prime Minister himself, as well as his …

Trump’s Oily Attack On Venezuela
We're watching the same failure loop.

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OppArt Yesterday 8:30 am
Trump’s Oily Attack On Venezuela
Trump’s Oily Attack On Venezuela
The US Government is seizing tankers like pirates.

Glen Le Lievre

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February 5, 2026

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From Minneapolis to Venezuela, from Gaza to Washington, DC, this is a time of staggering chaos, cruelty, and violence. 

Unlike other publications that parrot the views of authoritarians, billionaires, and corporations, The Nation publishes stories that hold the powerful to account and center the communities too often denied a voice in the national media—stories like the one you’ve just read.

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Glen Le LievreGlen Le Lievre’s drawings have appeared in Melbourne’s The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Mad, Private Eye, Reader’s Digest, The New Yorker, Time, and The Wall Street Journal.

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The realities of residuals
Every delay has consequences.

When I tell people that I have enjoyed a 30-year career writing and producing television comedies, and that one of them was the long-running hit sitcom, Cheers, I know what they are thinking. They are thinking, Boy, I’ll bet that guy is just living large on those residuals.

Residuals, for those of you who are not in show business — though, to be honest, are we not all in show business, when you think about it? — are the per-episode payments a writer, actor, or director receives, pretty much forever, whenever that episode appears somewhere. Residual payments have a tight hold on the imagination of some people, and most of them assume that if you have enough episodes in rotation, you are in fat city.

I know this because many people just come right out and ask. So, how much are we talking? They will demand to know. Like, you probably never have to work again, am I right? And some people are a little more discreet — their eyes flick up and down, taking in my watch, my shoes, and the glow of my complexion, and rapidly adding up the costs of each. Nice shoes, probably in the high six to seven hundreds, plus that watch is vintage, and it’s a Patek, OK, has wrinkles, so probably no Botox, but the neck skin is fairly OK, and the general skin tone says expensive moisturizers, hard to say about residual payments, maybe he just invested smart?

(Getty Images)

I often have to wait a few seconds for this to die down before the conversation resumes. 

This is fine, really. I don’t mind it at all. I understand the human need to know exactly what everyone else has in the bank. But for the record, let me clarify that residual payments start out pretty high, about 90% of the original script fee a writer received, but after a few reruns and a foreign sale or two, the number starts to slide down a very long, slippery slope. Put it this way: In the final quarter of 2025, the residual payments accrued during my entire career were, roughly, zero. The quarter before that, I think they were around $30. And when I opened the envelope and saw the check for that amount, my immediate reaction was, 30 bucks! Sweet! Over the decades, I have been conditioned to expect less.

So again, for the record, if you ever meet me and do the up-and-down scan: I inherited the watch.

None of this, I hope, comes off as ingratitude. When I was working full-time in television, during the go-go 1990s and early 2000s, I fully admit that my compensation package was what economists might call irrational …

Bunny B. Goode
We're watching the same failure loop.

The primal American rock song ends in prophecy: A shack-dwelling, near-illiterate from the middle of nowhere will play for packed nightclubs instead of railroad drifters, and Johnny B. Goode, son of the evergreens and the swamps, will see his name in lights. Does the prophecy come true? We suspect it might. 

And on some level, we are obligated to believe that it will. In America, the line between nothing and everything and nowhere and somewhere — the line between, for instance, a grocery store in an obscure town in Puerto Rico and the biggest stage in all of music — is supposed to be thinner than anywhere else on Earth. That stage exists for only 15 minutes each year, during the Super Bowl halftime show.

The obscure Puerto Rican town I have in mind is Vega Baja, which is even lower on the American scale than southern Louisiana. It was there that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, son of a local truck driver and school teacher, worked checkout at an Econo supermarket while on break from the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, where he was studying communications in hopes of becoming a radio host. In 2016, by the last of his grocery-bagging days, Ocasio’s, known more widely as Bad Bunny, self-released music had scored him a record contract with San Juan tastemaker DJ Luian, and he was on his way toward a career-making joint single with the Columbian star Karol G. The 31-year-old is now the most commercially successful Spanish-language musician in history, the latest winner of the Grammy for album of the year, and by some metrics, the biggest pop star on Earth.

Bad Bunny in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in September. (Getty Images)

Those who are earnestly pissed about Bad Bunny playing the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, and there are many, are not just wasting their emotion. They have forgotten their national inheritance. Americans should be thrilled that out-of-the-way places in their country, or at least in a territory with a disquietingly ambiguous relationship to their country, still produce artists like this. The critics of this booking probably have not actually listened to the artist they are attacking, which is their own sad loss. Sadder still is the attempt to counter-program Bad Bunny, as if it’s the duty of all good American patriots to ignore him. In one of its more ill-advised moves, Turning Points USA is throwing a Kid Rock-headlined alternative halftime show, with neither the talent nor the bookers aware of how tasteless the juxtaposition with the …

‘Send Help’ and the costs of revenge
This deserves loud pushback.

Revenge stories have long made for natural movie material. But can the pursuit of payback be presented too sympathetically? Many movies,  from Old Boy to even The Princess Bride, and this is to say nothing of classical myths, have suggested that a character’s unquenchable thirst for vengeance can be a bad thing. 

Director Sam Raimi’s new desert island thriller, Send Help, seems untroubled by such questions. In the movie, Rachel McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a put-upon office worker with a very sympathetic modern problem: a smarmy, unfair, and all-around bad manager at her office job, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien). By all appearances, a conscientious, careful, and detail-oriented worker at a midlevel corporation of some sort, Liddle seeks professional advancement from management to the executive suite. She is implausibly denied such opportunities in an outrageously over-the-top fashion that would probably result in lawsuits in today’s HR-oriented work culture — yet we are asked to accept it in furtherance of the film’s agenda.

Liddle is made the butt of jokes for her appearance, including her sloppy table manners when munching on a tuna-fish sandwich at work. She is said to be the subject of complaints for her odor, and she is cruelly excluded from the staff karaoke night. She is denied credit for a report she labored over by a colleague. Preston treats Liddle with undisguised condescension and scorn. He declines to promote her, is seen shamelessly interviewing a blonde bombshell, and ultimately settles on a former fraternity brother and golfing partner for the role that should be hers.

Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien in “Send Help.” (20th Century Studios)

Of course, these slights propel the movie forward: the more shabbily Liddle is treated, the more justifiable are her subsequent reprisals. It should matter that she comes across as the target of credible workplace discrimination, not the absurd victim of a wholly unrealistic vendetta. But if Raimi had not made her treatment outlandishly unfair, nothing in the film that follows would make any sense.

Raimi, whose previous hits include the Evil Dead series and the Tobey Maguire iteration of the Spider-Man franchise, is a specialist in wildly exaggerated, cartoonish action singularly unsuited for an earnest message movie. Therefore, the filmmaker participates in the uncharitable denigration of Liddle in his film. He clearly regards her as a version of a childless cat lady when he shows her breathlessly …

Newslinks for Friday 6th February 2026
Be honest—this is ridiculous.

PM labelled ‘gullible and weak’ over Mandelson

“Sir Keir Starmer looks “weak, naive and gullible” after apologising for accepting Lord Mandelson’s claim — before he was appointed ambassador to the US — that he “barely knew” the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, Baroness Harman, a former deputy Labour leader, has said. The prime minister said on Thursday that he had “no reason” to believe that Mandelson was telling him “anything but the truth”, despite being presented with evidence that he and Epstein were close friends. Starmer’s explanation was described as “not credible” by one minister, who said that “no one has faith or trust in him”. Some Labour MPs called on Starmer to go, describing his position as “untenable”. Harman warned that the scandal would “finish” Starmer unless he changed course with a “real reset” of his No 10 team and returned to his pledge to clean up politics… On Wednesday Starmer was forced to commit himself to disclosing all “electronic communications and minutes of meetings” involving Mandelson from the seven months he served as ambassador, after a revolt by Labour MPs. Officials said that gathering the information would be a “huge” exercise that was likely to take months, and had the potential to be politically explosive. Mandelson was close to most senior figures in Starmer’s government.” – The Times

Kemi Badenoch makes extraordinary offer to Labour MPs over Keir Starmer resignation – Daily Express

The Mandelson evidence that skewers Starmer’s defence – Daily Telegraph

No 10 defies calls to sack Morgan McSweeney over Mandelson appointment – The Guardian

What could the Mandelson files tell us — and which may be blocked? – The Times

‘If someone had pulled the trigger’: MPs rue lack of challenger to oust Starmer – The Guardian

Comment:

My offer to Labour MPs to help them get rid of calamity Keir Starmer – Kemi Badenoch, Daily Express

Keir Starmer’s hollowness is clear for all to see – Patrick Maguire, The Times

He’s been a disaster, but I still believe he’s a decent man. And this is how Starmer’s time in No 10 will end, most likely within days – Dan Hodges, Daily Mail

This pathetic attempt to shift the blame has to be the end of Starmer – Janet Daley, Daily Telegraph

In Broken Britain, sorry is the default word while victims are left to pick up the pieces – Julia Hartley-Brewer, The Sun

It’s tragic that a decent PM will be brought down by Mandelson’s sleaze – but it’s a matter of when, not if – Polly Toynbee, The Guardian

> Today:

How Badenoch forced Labour’s hand on Mandelson

> Yesterday:

Badenoch says Britain is not being governed and calls for Labour MPs to discuss a vote of no confidence in the PM

Don’t let the particulars of the Starmer crisis distract from its deeper causes

Rayner: I’m ready to go

“Angela …

Melania Trump understands the assignment
Transparency shouldn't be controversial.

When you watch Melania and her Manolos on the big screen, you will likely feel poor, ugly, and, if you’re also six months pregnant, a little fat. But unlike her husband, who perfected his persona as the everyman’s perception of a rich man into populism, Melania Trump is not accessible. She does not try to be. She does not kick off her stilettos to pretend she loves to live in a palatial kitchen, a la Meghan Markle, nor does she brandish a Princeton degree or freelance as a professor like her predecessors as first lady.

Melania, the documentary, is about the wife of the former and future president, who understands that her sole job is to be the wife of the former and future president, and she does it very well. It is a time capsule of one of the most unique moments of a unique woman’s life — Donald Trump’s reelection marked the second time in American history that a president won a second non-consecutive presidential term, and Melania Trump is the first naturalized American citizen to become first lady of the United States — but it is also an almost academic analysis of one of the highest profile and oddly thankless jobs in history.

Melania’s production and reception have proven much more polarizing than its content. Purchased by Amazon for $40 million and netting Mrs. Trump a cool $28 million in profit, Melania has grossed nearly $10 million in its first week, shattering expectations and breaking the decadelong record for a non-concert documentary. It also boasts a sky-high 99% rating among general audiences on Rotten Tomatoes and a truly dismal 5% among critics. Slate summed up the chattering class’s grievance that the film “contains nothing: no ideas, no point of view, no tension beyond whether the tailors will be able to properly alter her inauguration turtleneck.” In a New York Times roundtable lambasting the film, Nadja Spiegelman declares the “notable thing about this film is how boring it is.”

First Lady Melania Trump arrives for the premiere of her movie “Melania” on Jan. 29 in Washington, D.C. (Allison Robbert/AP)

“The only setup for narrative tension is whether the hem of her dress will be perfect by the time the inauguration happens,” says Spiegelman. “And even that setup — which is the setup of so many reality wedding shows, like, Will the invitations be printed on time? — gives us no narrative tension.”

The real grievance, methinks, is not with Melania, the person, but with the first lady as a job.

From the role’s inception, the job of …

Billy Bob’s boomtown: Taylor Sheridan’s ‘Landman’ and the triumph of traditional values
Who's accountable for the results?

Now that football season is over and we, at least those of us who religiously follow the NFL, have more time to watch other things, the question is, “Well, what should we watch?” For me, the answer is clear: Landman! It’s my favorite current show — it’s basically like what would happen if one of those dysfunctional White Lotus families were transplanted onto a Texas oil field. (Which, for me, means I can’t watch it without a drink — dry January be damned.)

For those of you who may have not seen it yet, it stars Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris, a grizzled crisis manager in the Permian Basin who juggles oil rigs, cartel threats, a crabby but wise old father (Sam Elliott, starting in the second season), a wild but loving wife who’s still technically his ex-wife (a terrific Ali Larter), and enough roughneck banter to make you feel like you’re getting immersion lessons in Texas-speak.

The show, created by Taylor Sheridan, the same guy behind Yellowstone, dropped on Paramount+ in late 2024 and has already powered through two seasons, with a third on the way. In addition to the high-stakes plotlines and Thornton’s pitch-perfect drawl, Landman also packs a punch that hits home for conservatives. It’s a rare Hollywood production that doesn’t just tolerate red-state values — it celebrates them with the kind of unfiltered authenticity that’s been missing from screens for years. If you’re a conservative who’s tired of being force-fed progressive lectures, or even if you’re on the fence, this show might just win you over. Here’s why.

The oil patch as America’s backbone

Step into the world of Landman, and you’re immediately immersed in the raw, unforgiving reality of West Texas oil country. Thornton’s Tommy isn’t some corporate suit sipping lattes in a boardroom — he’s out there in the field fixing blowouts, negotiating with landowners, and staring down dangers that could end a man’s life in an instant. The series doesn’t shy away from showing the oil industry as a vital engine of American prosperity, where hard work and ingenuity pull black gold from the earth and fuel the nation.

(Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images)

One episode opens with a rig explosion that sends workers scrambling, highlighting the peril and precision required in this line of work. Tommy arrives on scene barking orders and piecing together the chaos, all while delivering lines like “getting oil out of the ground is the most dangerous job in the world. We don’t do it ’cause …

Catherine O’Hara, 1954–2026
This isn't complicated—it's willpower.

It is a testament to the hilarious strangeness of actress and comedian Catherine O’Hara that she could plausibly portray a suburban mother who, upon embarking on a transcontinental trip, neglects to bring her young son along with the rest of the family.

In the 1990 John Hughes-scripted megahit Home Alone, Macaulay Culkin was the featured attraction as the child who fails to join his family on vacation and causes a ruckus on the homestead. At the time, Culkin garnered all the attention, but it was O’Hara who gave the movie much of its humor and all of its heart. By then a well-known comic performer, O’Hara was so believably off-kilter, so plausibly distracted, that the moviegoing public could imagine her neglecting to pack her rambunctious, obnoxious son along with the rest of her possessions. We forgive O’Hara for her lapse in parental oversight in a way we might not a more grounded, naturally maternal actress. A degree of delirium was part of the O’Hara signature.

O’Hara, who died on Jan. 30 at age 71, enlivened numerous films and TV shows through her distinctive sense of humor. She seemed unique among her contemporaries in her capacity to authentically channel the weirder sides of human nature. It is difficult to imagine another actress who could bring gravitas to both the part of an ice cream truck proprietress with vigilante instincts in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) and that of a supercilious urbanite sculptress in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988). Is it any wonder she could not be trusted to keep Culkin from being left home alone?

Catherine O’Hara in 2024. (Scott A Garfitt/Invision/AP)

Like Bill Murray, O’Hara offered convincing evidence that to spring from a large family may be a recipe for future comic greatness. Born in Toronto, O’Hara was one of a septet of children, and she was the only one who made comedy her life’s work. Sizing up the opportunities in her home country, she charted a course to the Toronto offshoot of Second City. The comedy troupe soon publicized her antics to the wider public by hiring her to appear on its television iteration, the legendary SCTV, on which she induced laughter from the mid-1970s through the early 80s.

Around that time, Hollywood started to seize on her manifold talents. Following a handful of undistinguished Canadian productions, Scorsese cast her in his first real comedy, After Hours, in which Griffin Dunne stars as a mundane worker bee plucked from his natural habitat and dumped into 80s-era …

‘The Night Manager’ is back on duty
This deserves loud pushback.

It is the rare literary adaptation that replicates not only an author’s characters but the psychological experience of reading him. Such is the achievement of The Night Manager, the second season of which is now streaming on Prime Video after a 10-year hiatus. Watching the 12-episode series, one is alternately charmed, compelled, frustrated, and hopelessly confused. Why’d he do that? How’d they find him there? As with the show, so with John le Carré’s novels. If one isn’t at least slightly perplexed most of the time, one isn’t paying enough attention.

The Night Manager tells the story of Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), a British soldier-turned-hotel clerk thrust into a game of global intrigue. In the first season, set largely in Egypt and Majorca, Pine embedded himself in the coterie of Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), an international arms dealer of suave malevolence. The latest episodes transplant Pine to Colombia, where awaits a plot so circuitous that many viewers will simply throw up their hands and enjoy the scenery.

The basic outline is this: Set up by his Foreign Office handlers in a surveillance unit, Pine happens upon talk that “Richard Roper’s true disciple” is operating in sunny Cartagena. Unable to help himself, Pine ditches his desk job and sets out for the Caribbean coast, determined once again to talk his way into a criminal’s inner circle. His target this time is Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), a man whose villainy extends far beyond running guns. A Colombian Supreme Court justice, an electromagnetic pulse bomb, even regime change: Only our hero can stop the geopolitical disaster that Dos Santos threatens to unleash.

Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie in “The Night Manager.” (Des Willie/Prime)

Were The Night Manager’s formula any less winning, one might object to the shamelessness with which it has been recycled. As the first season did, the show’s new episodes feature a protagonist so smooth that his entrée into the underworld is the work of minutes. Here, a single set of clay-court tennis does the trick. Like before, Pine’s task is made easier by his adversary’s disloyal girlfriend (Camila Morrone, filling in for the first season’s Elizabeth Debicki). Most pointedly, both seasons place a traitor in the ranks of MI6, the security service frequently at odds with Pine’s International Enforcement Agency (Olivia Colman returns to play the IEA’s no-nonsense head). Le Carré didn’t invent these elements — he merely perfected them. At its best, The …