The good thing about Notes not being a newspaper is that when I’m eight or ten months late with a news story I can shrug my shoulders and run it anyway. So here we go: shrug; run.

Back in August of 2025, the central leadership of the Reform UK Party imposed Sharon Carby on its Croydon branch as their candidate in the mayoral elections. According to the London Economic, she was accepted (or shrugged in–I wasn’t there, the article doesn’t say, and I haven’t seen the minutes) by a crowd numbering in the single figures. Possibly even in the high single figures. 

As a candidate, Carby had two things–

Let’s start that over. As a candidate, Carby had at least two things against her. One, she was from Bradford, which was and still is 241 miles away. Five days a week and that commute would kill you. Two, and more problematically, the commute didn’t stand a chance: she’d been dead for 6 months when she was nominated. 

It’s not clear how long it took the party to notice that she was no longer breathing, but once they did they made the responsible move and advertised for a replacement candidate. They must not have found one, because when I looked up the list of candidates, Reform didn’t have anyone on the list.

Still, I can’t help imagining them going through the applicants and one of them saying to the others, “We’ve got a live one here.”

So what is Reform UK? It’s a new and (you might’ve figured this part out already) chaotic right-wing party held together with tape, chewing gum, and high-profile refugees from the Conservative Party. The Conservatives are sinking as rapidly as a small island nation, hence the flow of refugees. Reform’s also–or primarily–held together by grinning photos of its cigar-wielding founder.   

Reform’s politics are anti-refugee (except for those from the Conservative Party), pro-culture wars, pro-Trump, and anti-wasteful spending, although where it’s won local elections it’s had a hard time locating the waste it vowed to cut and the savings it was going to make have been even more elusive. They’ve been known (more than once) to raise the taxes they vowed to cut. They have breakthrough moments of open racism, then remember they’re not in office yet, slosh a bit of paint over them, and go back to their core message. If they end up in government, the joke will turn sour very fast, but in the meantime they’re a gift to satirists everywhere. It’s very much a one-personality party, and people who went to school with its Prime Personality have told the press that he was known for harassing Jewish and brown students and saying things like, “Hitler was right.” A little paint, though, and you’d hardly notice. 

More recently than eight or ten months ago, Reform suspended a candidate in Scotland when he turned out to have been “struck off as a company director.” To translate that, he was caught with his hand in a cookie jar containing Covid grants. Thousands of pounds transferred themselves mysteriously into his personal account.

Other candidates have made assorted islamophobic comments and wild claims about refugees. One mayoral candidate called members of a Jewish neighborhood watch group “Islamists on horseback” and sprayed other offensive and largely incoherent comments in assorted other directions. He’s been suspended.

It’s a funny thing, but antisemitism is politically toxic at the moment, but islamophobia isn’t, so the same people who would once have told you Jews are what’s wrong with your life and country now tell you that Muslims are. 

I’m Jewish, so don’t tell me I’m antisemitic for saying that. Believe me, if they get enough power, they’ll go after Jews as well.

And no, to the best of my knowledge the neighborhood watch group wasn’t using horses.

 

Lessons on telling the living from the dead

Not everyone has trouble telling the living from the dead. A newspaper clipping from the 1938 Oregonian resurfaced recently and has been making the rounds in assorted inappropriate places. It tells the tale of Charles Keville, who “walked into a temporary morgue and looked at a body that had been identified as his.

“‘Nope,’ he said. ‘That ain’t me,’ ” and out he walked.

He did not, to the best of my knowledge, go on to run for mayor. 

I have made no effort to find out if the article’s real. If it isn’t true, I don’t want to know. 

 

Why don’t I write about Keir Starmer?

What, the current prime minister? Because he bores me. Even when he makes me want to scream or throw things at the TV–and those are regular occurrences–he’s still boring. Making jokes about him is like throwing rocks at a ghost. The two objects–rock and prime minister–operate on different metaphysical planes. 

I’m not sure what metaphysical planes are exactly, but I do know that the laws of physics (or maybe that’s the laws of science fiction, or occult studies) won’t let them intersect.

Being rock-proof and joke-proof doesn’t make Starmer politically attackproof, however. His party (Labour) might’ve replaced him by now if he hadn’t purged it so thoroughly when he became its leader. It doesn’t have a lot of prime-ministerial replacement parts on hand anymore. The most likely remaining replacement part is trapped in Manchester’s mayoral office, where he’s not eligible to lead the party. You have to be a member of parliament to do that. When he tried to leave the mayor’s office and for an open parliamentary seat, Starmer locked him in Manchester and ate the key. 

A couple of other replacement parts are available but it’s not clear that they’re a good fit. They might clash with the wallpaper at 11 Downing Street, where prime ministers live if they don’t live at number 10. Let’s not get into that. What matters is that Boris Johnson famously redecorated it when he was in office, spending an obscene amount of money (that he eventually had to pay back) on wallpaper that you couldn’t pay me to stay in a room with. After he resigned, it was painted over and finally taken down when it began to peel. Its ghost, however, haunts the halls of both residences, so the next prime minister has to be able to live with that. 

That leaves Starmer ghosting on, not quite politically alive but not politically dead. 

In fact, both established parties, Labour and Conservative, are ghostly right now. The Conservatives, having proved their incompetence when they ran the country, came out of this last election looking like wool socks after a hot wash, and Labour came out with a huge majority in Parliament, which it’s used to demonstrate that it has no idea what to do next. It’s made up for that by borrowing anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Conservatives and Reform UK, which gained them no votes but alienated past supporters. It’s also done untold damage to immigrants’ lives, but hell, they were only immigrants, right? So who cares.

That leaves two upstart parties, Reform (we did that one) and the Greens, which has a new left populist leader and just picked up an MP in an election Labour should’ve won–and might’ve if its most promising candidate hadn’t been locked in Manchester.

And of course we have the Liberal Democrats, which isn’t a new party but–

Y’know, the clearest thing anyone’s said to me about the Lib Dems is that no one knows what they stand for. But they’ve picked up votes too. We’ve reached a point where not knowing what a party stands for looks appealing. A recent voter survey showed a lot of people picking their candidates according to who they most want to keep out of office, not who they want in.

 

One lone immigrant finds a welcome

In spite of the anti-immigrant furor on both sides of the Atlantic, a 2-year-old male fox slipped onto a cargo ship in Southampton–that’s in England; you’ll find it on the south end of the map–and disembarked in New York, where t was welcomed. Four government agencies went into high gear and not only got him safely off the ship but found him a temporary home at the Bronx Zoo. When last heard of, he was settled in and doing well. A few more agency-types were searching for a permanent home.

The moral of the story seems to be that if you really, truly need to move to another country, grow fur. 

 

Meta turns to AI and . . . 

This is irrelevant, but I love a good story about artificial intelligence fucking up, and if you’ve been around a while you know irrelevance is no problem here at Notes.

An engineer at Meta couldn’t solve a problem and turned to AI for a solution. The engineer followed its instructions and–wheee–caused a two-hour security breach. 

What kind of security breach? If anybody’s saying, they’re not telling me. Meta says user data wasn’t leaked. Meta says a human could’ve made the same mistake. Meta says we should go play outside and not bother the grownups when they’re busy making us safe.

It occurs to me that we’re living at a turning point in history and you’d think that would be interesting. Or terrifying. Or, well, you know, something. Not only is artificial intelligence on the verge of changing our lives in we’re-not-sure-what way, but we’re also seeing manic right-wing parties turning their rhetorical fire hoses on immigrants while responsible middle-of-the-road parties shut immigrants out because they’re afraid they’ll be tossed out of office if they don’t match or outdo the manic right wing. We’re watching–or turning away–while Israel starves Gaza and in Lebanon targets not just civilians but medics  specifically. We’re watching a doddering old man bomb the hell out of Iran and the world economy because the people who would stop him can’t and the people who just might be able to won’t try.

And so on and merrily so forth. I’ve been around a long time, my friends, and I’ll testify that this is not the usual state of things. It’s all coming unglued.

Meanwhile, most of us plod on, doing whatever it is we do with our lives, which in my case involves talking most mornings about how the dog’s walking (he has a bad back, so the conversation kind of makes sense), and whether the cats came for breakfast. You know, all the earthshaking stuff that, taken together, makes up a life. The sun rises. The sun sets. You’d hardly know anything’s changing except that prices keep going up and everything’s coming unglued. Other than that, though–