Tom Peck

Chancellor John Healey DOWNS a pint just hours after his Budget

🚨 NEW: Andy Burnham has announced people on buses who vape, play loud music, litter or threaten others will face £100 fines from today

Excl w/ @daisyeastlake: Pro-Palestinian activists ran an organised campaign inside the Green Party to recruit members, secure influential party positions and reshape its policies from within, The Times can reveal. More than five and a half hours of recordings of weekly Greens for Palestine meetings showed members speaking of “using the party” and attempting to ensure those supportive of their position gained key party roles. In the meetings Animah Kosai, one of the co-chairs, said: “I don’t believe in serving the Green Party, and I think some people are going to hate me for this. I actually believe in using the party in order to reach certain goals. And in this case, for Palestine, for anti-imperialism.” Lubna Speitan, one of the proposers of the “Zionism is racism” motion passed at the party’s conference on Sunday, said: “I’m going to knock on every door and just talk about Palestine […] It’s about the quality of membership and who we want to bring into this party.” Shahrar Ali, a former deputy leader who is suspended from the party, accused the organisers of “internal political manipulation with scant regard for the integrity of democratic process”. He claimed it was “naked entryism that is corrupting the party beyond recognition”. Another longstanding party member said there was “clear evidence” of “a highly organised campaign by a small number of infiltrators to take over the party’s key votes and committees”. thetimes.com/article/0db0686…

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I watched the F1 film with Brad Pitt the other day, and there’s a moment where his character asks to add something to the car that isn’t really in the rules. The FIA punishes it, but the team can still race with the earlier car. It made me think. In F1, the best teams live at the edge of the regulations. Sometimes the FIA allows what they’ve found, and sometimes it says that goes too far. Occasionally the rules are rewritten afterwards. Now, City. I’m not defending them. A commission found they entered into sham agreements and broke the spending limits. A sham is an arrangement that isn’t what it claims to be, so that’s a different thing from using a gap nobody had spotted. City deny it and will appeal. But I find it useful to ask/reflect on how people inside the club see it. From their point of view, PERHAPS they believe they were doing what elite competitors do: looking at the rules, finding the limits, challenging interpretations and moving faster than the regulatory system. From the outside, you might look at that and say, “That’s cheating.” From inside the organisation, they might say, “We found something nobody had thought of.” If you believe you’ve found a way to bring money in, more or less within the rules (and the commission said it was not in the rules and it was cheating), you might tell yourself you’re just being a sharp competitor. We are all asking “did City cheat?”. But I find this question interesting too: “how did City come to believe they weren’t?” And understanding a mindset, or trying to, isn’t excusing it.