James Ball
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jamesrball.com
James Ball
@jamesrball.com
55K followers 1.2K following 7.9K posts
Tech, policy, politics.
Political editor @ The New World
Opinion @ The i Paper
Fellow @ Demos
PhD researcher @ UCL Laws
newsletter @ techtris

Latest book: The Other Pandemic – How QAnon Contaminated The World. 🏳️‍🌈
https://www.jamesrball.com/
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jamesrball.com
Me: Okay Cers, we’re going for the Felix ad gig again. You’re a black and white cat, they love that. You love food, another tick.

We just need that shot of you looking adorable but also hungry as you stare at the product. This is the big one. Give us your best.

Cers:
A tuxedo cat looks towards the camera with huge eyes, looking focused but furious. More noticeably, a tongue about three times bigger than a cat’s usually is hangs out.
January 11, 2026 at 4:34 PM
jamesrball.com
Excuse me
A stern and startled looking tux cat
January 10, 2026 at 9:02 PM
jamesrball.com
And boy, do they know it.
A black cat looks *extremely* suave, right at the camera
January 10, 2026 at 7:13 PM
jamesrball.com
Not to dunk on this particular MP, but *come on*.
January 8, 2026 at 1:53 PM
jamesrball.com
Just think what a win might have done for sales of The Art Of The Deal
Maria Corina Machado’s book “CHAMPION OF VENEZUELAN DEMOCRACY” is on sale below a banner declaring her this year’s peace prize winner.
January 8, 2026 at 12:52 PM
jamesrball.com
Felt like I ought to call in on the Nobel museum before I left Stockholm.

Here’s the seat occupied by this year’s Nobel Peace prize winner (interestingly the other laureates all signed theirs, but this one is blank…)
Five black seats upside down on a table. All but one are signed in gold pen. An alternate view of the chairs The Nobel medal in the floor The outside of the Nobel Prize Museum
January 8, 2026 at 12:50 PM
jamesrball.com
You’ll be shocked to hear the “10.8 million families get their news from X” stat is…not correct!
www.thenewworld.co.uk/rats-in-a-sa...
The stat would indeed be extraordinary, because it’s nowhere close to being true. Ofcom found around 14% of Brits had used X to access news in the last month in its latest research, making it the 12th most accessed news source in the country – nowhere near the BBC, YouTube or Facebook, and only just ahead of Channel 4. Somewhere, ministers and officials had confused “a” source of news with “main” source of news, further confused “people” with “families”. The resulting impression was entirely baseless – per research firm Ipsos, for every minute Brits spend on X, they spend 35 minutes on YouTube, 35 on Facebook, 11 on Instagram and seven on TikTok.
January 7, 2026 at 7:32 AM
jamesrball.com
The government says it has to stay on X because it’s where 10.8 million British families get their news. How’s that working out?

www.thenewworld.co.uk/rats-in-a-sa...
Still, Lammy may have had it better than his successor as foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper. After a video of her giving a statement to the Commons about Greenland on Monday, a paid blue tick user asked Grok to strip Cooper down to a bikini. Musk’s malevolent AI promptly complied, producing a realistic image of Cooper, still wearing her glasses and the same necklace, and still at the dispatch box, now in a skimpy bikini.
January 7, 2026 at 7:29 AM
jamesrball.com
What’s she hiding?
does philippa islington smythe have a super injunction over her celebrity affair There is no public information or media reporting that indicates a person named "Philippa Islington Smythe" has a super injunction over a celebrity affair.
January 5, 2026 at 3:38 PM
jamesrball.com
“Who are you? Where am I? Why am I tied up? Why am I covered in blood? WHERE HAVE YOU TAKEN ME?”
We Asked 5 Chefs the Best Way to Cook Cauliflower—They All Said the Same Thing
January 4, 2026 at 1:21 PM
jamesrball.com
Veep: continuity with change
January 2, 2026 at 10:55 PM
jamesrball.com
The cat quite firmly doesn’t believe in working between Christmas and New Year’s. Turns out it’s quite hard to type through 5kg of fluffy boy.
A sombre looking black cat sits being lightly fussed in the front of shot. There is a laptop screen close behind it, which makes it apparent he must be sitting on its keyboard. Thankfully you can’t hear the resultant beeping. BUT I CAN.
December 30, 2025 at 3:40 PM
jamesrball.com
Are they putting me on a forced diet? Or just saying that half of it has to be inedible?
Enjoy 50% of food this January
December 29, 2025 at 3:20 PM
jamesrball.com
For a supposed “free speech champion”, Matt Taibbi sure does file some whiny-ass lawsuits.

This is from *page one* of the complaint:
The Book’s cover illustration (Fig. 1 below) depicts a puppeteer’s strings, suggesting the “Loudest Voices on the Left,” primarily Plaintiff and fellow award-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, are puppets to billionaires.
December 27, 2025 at 6:45 PM
jamesrball.com
@comicprintinguk.bsky.social have you been moonlighting at the old vic again
December 26, 2025 at 1:42 PM
jamesrball.com
Politics is clearly a 24/7 job. 22:45 on Xmas eve! (Glass houses, stones, I am aware)
December 24, 2025 at 10:50 PM
jamesrball.com
Absolutely A+ 5pm on Christmas Eve stuff from LinkedIn here, nice work
Hi James , I hope that you are doing well. I found your profile through mutual connections. I would love to be part of your network. Looking forward to exploring possible synergies. Cheers!
December 24, 2025 at 5:42 PM
jamesrball.com
This jumped out to me, too. The DoJ could say the document was a forgery or a hoax. So far it’s just saying that the claim it makes is untrue. Hmmm.
December 23, 2025 at 1:35 PM
jamesrball.com
I’m not sure if this counts as he’s giving off serious grinch energy here
A black cat is plotting furiously in front of a Christmas tree. Luckily Christmas is probably fine as his brain is mostly fluff.
December 20, 2025 at 10:14 PM
jamesrball.com
We need to stop talking about a “crisis of trust” as if the public are behaving irrationally. We have a crisis of *trustworthiness* in politics, and we seem deeply in denial about it.

www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-w...
But they are also used to obfuscate a much more obvious reason for a crisis of trust in politics: mainstream politicians lie, all the time. They lie so often that they seem to have stopped noticing that they do it. They certainly do it so often that it no longer seems to occur to almost any of them that people might still notice, and object.
December 20, 2025 at 12:29 PM
jamesrball.com
I mean, who knows.
December 19, 2025 at 11:00 PM
jamesrball.com
After page after page of fully redacted photos from other trips, suddenly a section of "Clinton Far East" shots that are not redacted at all. After a few pages of what could be standard tourist shots, these:
December 19, 2025 at 10:54 PM
jamesrball.com
Quite a lot of entirely redacted photos follow this cover sheet, which is a shame given "JE 50TH BD"
December 19, 2025 at 10:49 PM
jamesrball.com
A friend has sent me this photo from the website of the Sandringham Estate. That fireplace looks *remarkably* familiar, doesn't it? bsky.app/profile/jame...
December 19, 2025 at 10:41 PM
jamesrball.com
This one was at least a bit different from the others (they showed a few photos of a man, I assume Jean-Luc, and another man whose face was redacted).
December 19, 2025 at 10:37 PM