An email went out to all staff at UCL, on whose campus Starmer delivered his AI speech this morning, last Friday at 4 p.m:
“Dear all,
We’ve just been contacted to host a high-profile visit on Monday morning. It requires producing a significant number of bums on seats for a speech.
If any of you are able and available to be at UCL East from around 10am on Monday to 12.30pm please reply [only to me] with you phone number and we’ll let you know over the weekend whether you need to be in UCL East on Monday.
Best wishes
REDACTED
t: REDACTED| e: REDACTED
UCL | London’s Global University
Please don’t feel obliged to reply to this email outside of your normal working hours.”
Those curious enough to show up must have got quite bored seeing as Starmer only started talking at 11:37 a.m. Adding insult to injury the WiFi wasn’t even working properly at the venue…
Guido hopes the faculty who did put their bums on the seats for two hours weren’t disappointed by the final result. At least they got to see the PM decline to guarantee Reeves’s political future…
Speaking on Times Radio, former Home Secretary David Blunkett spoke about overdiagnosis of mental problems:
“Let’s distinguish those who are really severely mentally ill, diagnosed with things that require prolonged medical and diagnostic treatment. My wife and I talk about this a lot, because she’s a retired GP, about the fact that you can be sad without being ill. You can be momentarily depressed because your boyfriend or girlfriend’s just thrown you and you’re not mentally ill. You can even have mild issues, which can be dealt with with the right kind of support, but it doesn’t make you mentally ill. So we’ve got a real task, I think, to get the psychology, if you like, of this over. But there are things where you definitely need medical intervention, and there are other things where you need good friends, you need good connectivity, and you need a job.”