Good morning, my friends, and welcome to Thursday, May 14, 2026. Today is Ascension Day, 40 days after Easter. It’s also “The Stars and Stripes Forever” Day — commemorating John Philip Sousa’s famous march, first performed on this date in 1897 in Philadelphia. It’s also National Dance Like a Chicken Day, International Chihuahua Appreciation Day, and National Brioche Day. So I guess that, depending on your inclination, today is either a solemn Christian holy day or an excellent excuse to eat a brioche while doing the chicken dance with your Chihuahua. Your call.
1607: English colonists establish the first permanent English settlement in America at Jamestown. Unknown to them, they have landed amidst the worst drought in 800 years.
1643: Louis XIV becomes King of France aged 4. Given the state of governments today, the French may have been onto something.
1787: Delegates gather in Philadelphia to draw up the Constitution of the United States.
1804: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s expedition sets out from St. Louis for the Pacific Coast, commissioned by Thomas Jefferson.
1853: Land surveyor, newspaper publisher, and inventor Gail Borden patents his process for condensed milk.
1902: Italian tenor Enrico Caruso makes his Covent Garden debut opposite Nellie Melba in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “Rigoletto” in London. Here’s a recording of him doing the same piece a few years later. It’s a remarkably high-quality recording for the time.
1938: The Adventures of Robin Hood, directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, and starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, premieres.
1948: David Ben-Gurion declares Israel independent from British administration, and Golda Meir is one of the signatories.
1976: Lowell Thomas ends 46 years as a radio network reporter.
1991: World’s Largest Burrito created at 1,126 lbs.
2019: Wikipedia confirms that China has banned all versions of its site.
Birthdays Today Include: James Flavin, actor (King Kong, In Cold Blood); “Skip” Martin, big band jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, and arranger; Richard Deacon, actor (The Dick Van Dyke Show); Bob Johnston, music producer; Bobby Darin, singer; George Lucas; Gene Cornish, rock bassist and vocalist; David Byrne, singer-songwriter; and Robert Zemeckis, film director.
If today’s also your day, enjoy it.
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This is pretty much a follow-up to my column from yesterday. The UK government is still making a mess of itself this morning, and my coffee hasn’t gone cold yet. Drip, Drip, Drip. Watching this as I’ve been for some time now, it resembles nothing so much as water torture.
Wes Streeting quit as Health Secretary while both of us were sleeping, right on cue, as I predicted yesterday. He could have at least waited until my alarm had gone off. That good-natured grumbling aside, he says he’s “lost confidence” in Starmer’s leadership, and staying in government would be “dishonorable and unprincipled.”
Yeah. Sure, Wes. Nothing at all to do with eyeing the top job. Very noble. It kinda reminds me of Thomas Massie over here — principle as a costume for ambition. But Massie’s getting plenty of coverage already, so, while I’ll say I’ll shed no tears for his political demise, I’ll leave that particular dumpster fire alone for now.
Streeting’s resignation letter delivered this gem: “It is now clear that you will not lead the Labour Party into the next general election and that Labour MPs and Labour Unions want the debate about what comes next.”
Hold on to that, because everything else flows from it. Nobody really knows what comes next. Whatever does come out of that debate, Labour will clearly take it on the chin.
Here’s the rich part: Streeting didn’t actually pull the trigger on a formal leadership challenge. Why? Because to do that, he needs 81 Labour MPs to back him — and those Labour MPs aren’t quite the idiots the voters apparently take them for. They know that calling a general election right now, with the British public in its current mood, would land most of them on the sidewalk, their walking papers in hand. The polls have Labour scraping up a mere 17% of the national vote off the bottom of the barrel. That’s not a leadership contest, that’s a firing squad, that nobody’s volunteering to stand in front of.
So Starmer survives — for now — not because anyone particularly wants him there, but because the alternative is Labour committing collective political suicide. Number 10 is sending one very clear message to the restless Labour backbenches: Back Starmer, or face the voters and thereby your own extinction. It’s a hostage situation, and irony abounds; Starmer is both the hostage and the one holding the gun. The image is Cleavon Little, holding a gun to his own head in Blazing Saddles.
Nobody knows what comes next. My instinct is, as it’s been: Starmer is probably gone eventually — a leadership challenge isn’t just likely; it’s eventual and practically written on stone tablets. The only real question is how much of Labour he drags down with him on his way out.
From this side of the drink, two things look certain: Starmer has absolutely no intention of going quietly, and the biggest winner in all of this is Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, who must be popping champagne at breakfast, with his bangers and eggs.
The recent local elections tell you everything you need to know. Labour lost control of 35 councils and nearly 1,500 councilors — roughly 60% of the seats they were defending — with a projected national vote share of 17%. (Which, by the way, is dead level with Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives.)
Those numbers are not mid-term blues. That’s a historical wipeout, and no spin doctor alive is scrubbing that from the UK’s voters’ memory anytime soon.
That said, don’t hand Reform UK the keys just yet. Labour still holds a 172-seat majority in Parliament — a massive buffer — and history offers a precedent worth remembering. Some of you will recall Tony Blair getting quietly shown the door in 2007, with Gordon Brown stepping in without a general election being called. Remember, there was no love lost between those two, and it became a rather embarrassing battle of the egos, which eventually came to a back-bencher uprising among Labour MPs. Once in office, Brown then proceeded to squander it spectacularly, but the point stands: an internal transition without going to the country is absolutely on the table.
No matter how this plays out, it’s shaping up to be the messiest leadership transition in recent memory. The recent local elections delivered one brutal, unambiguous verdict: Labour can no longer pretend the 2024 landslide was a permanent realignment of British politics. They are the only ones to blame for that; They blew it, and the voters know it.
The least catastrophic path forward is Starmer agreeing to an orderly handover rather than the protracted street brawl his current posture is telegraphing. Whether his ego allows that is another question entirely. And frankly, his ego is the central issue here.
Now, even if a general election does get called — which isn’t guaranteed — Reform UK still can’t form a government on its own. An April MRP poll puts Reform UK at 188 seats, 138 short of a majority, with the Conservatives at 159 and Labour reduced to a humbling 86. The math points to a Reform-Conservative coalition, a Farage premiership, and a working majority of 44 seats.
But here’s where the crystal ball goes cloudy. Around 30% of Labour voters say they’d hold their nose and vote Conservative just to keep Reform out — tactical voting that could scramble the arithmetic entirely. YouGov puts public support for a Reform-Conservative coalition at a thin 29%, with 56-57% opposed. And even among Conservatives, only 41% would stomach Farage as Prime Minister. Most Tories want Badenoch in Number 10; Reform voters want Farage. That’s not just a policy disagreement — that’s a personality collision waiting to detonate any coalition negotiations before they even start.
What we’re watching is the fracturing of British politics into something genuinely multi-party and permanently messy. And here’s the thing: This isn’t a blip. It’s the new normal.
But right now, today, the next move is still Starmer’s. The question is whether he makes it or whether it gets made for him.
Thought for the day: “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” —Arthur Ashe
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