The Joy of Six 1527

"In the Wigan constituency, which has always been Labour-held but where Reform picked up 24 out of 25 seats in last month’s local elections, the governing party’s by-election message is focused squarely on Burnham. It is a cartoon of his face emblazoned across leaflets and Correx boards, along with the words “ANDY FOR US”. Labour branding is limited, pretty much, to what is legally required." Sienna Rodgers takes us inside the Labour campaign in the Makerfield by-election.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley interviews Gisèle Pelicot, whose courage transformed the debate around abuse, about survival, reclaiming confidence – and shutting down the tools of sexual exploitation.

Flip Chart Fairy Tales notes the end of the right's state-shrinking dream: "Far from Brexit being the cue for the Thatcher revolution’s last phase, it may mark the end of it altogether. ... It’s no wonder the small-staters are so exercised. They have now realised that tomorrow belongs to someone else."

"When you launch a product that's designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn't that you haven't told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them." Brian Phillips nominates the 40 most rage-inducing problems in tech.

JacquiWine praises Rumer Godden's novel The Battle of the Villa Fiorita: "I loved this evocative, immersive read, a psychologically astute exploration of the impact of a woman’s adulterous affair and subsequent divorce on her two adolescent children, fourteen-year-old Hugh Clavering and his younger sister Caddie, who is almost twelve."

"Born in 1918, Denys Fisher was raised in a railway carriage in a field in Leeds in a family full of inventors, free thinkers, and social reformists with connections to women's suffrage." Eleanor Tait talks to Duncan Fisher about his father, the man who invented Spirograph.

Russian submarine found in Lake Windermere

This land sits right next to the Furness railway line - a vital transport link to both BAE Submarines in Barrow and Sellafield nuclear power station. That’s why I made representations to ministers asking whether this sale would be compliant with the UK’s sanctions against Russia.

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— Tim Farron (@timfarron.bsky.social) 24 April 2026 at 15:37

A story peeks out at me from behind the Financial Times paywall:

Russian businessman and his daughter have triggered national security concerns by seeking to buy a golf course located next to the railway that serves the UK’s main shipyard for nuclear-powered attack submarines.

As Tim Farron points out, the line also serves the nuclear site at Sellafield. You may not be surprised to hear that the deal collapsed this week after government intervention and enquiries from the FT.

My first thought on reading this was of the old joke in Whoops Apocalypse about a Soviet submarine being found in Staines reservoir.

But nothing should surprise us in a country where we have a Lord Siberia sitting in the upper house of our parliament.

The Joy of Six 1471

"Without doubt, information provided during the height of the global financial crisis by a senior Member of the British Government, will have been operationally beneficial to a hedge fund manager, international financier and broker like Jeffrey Epstein. Without doubt, Mandelson will have known this when he was sending this information." Gareth Roberts makes the case for charging Peter Mandelson with misconduct in public office.

Catherine Barnard and Denzil Davidson ask if Greenland can join the European Union: "Whether Greenlanders decide that it should be attempted, and how such an attempt would be received in Washington, will be an important question for the geopolitics of the High North and the EU’s role in it."

Laura Laker on the battles over Haringey's delivery of one of the largest simultaneous rollouts of Low Traffic Neighbourhood zones in London, and of 36 school streets covering 44 schools.

"The full origins of Epstein’s wealth remain shrouded in mystery, but what is clear, according to Forbes' review of court filings, an investigative memo and financial records, is that Epstein relied above all on two billionaire clients and a tax gimmick to build his fortune." How did Jeffrey Epstein get so rich? Giacomo Tognini and John Hyatt investigate.

John Mullan sings the praises of Dombey and Son: "Like all great Dickens novels it has really satisfying baddies. Major 'Joe' Bagstock, one of those who predates on the loftily oblivious Mr Dombey, is a sinister, blue-faced old soldier with the disconcerting habit of talking of himself in the third person to an invisible confidante. 'He's hard-hearted, Sir, is Joe – he's tough, Sir, tough, and de-vilish sly!'"

"I don’t know the Lake District very well, but back in 2015 I went to see the last Golden Eagle that lived alone on the dark crags above Haweswater Reservoir. At the time, I didn’t realise how lucky I was to watch it soar above me, because by 2016 it had gone, presumed dead somewhere in the mountains and thus ending the history of breeding Golden Eagles in England." Mary Colwell on Lee Schofield and his book Wild Fell.

DNA from big cat found on sheep's carcass in Cumbria

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Well now.

BBC Countryfile reports:

An undisclosed Cumbrian hill farm is the location for the first ever positive identification of big cat DNA taken from a carcass.

In October last year, Cumbrian resident Sharon Larkin-Snowden came across the carcass and disturbed the animal that had been feeding on it.

Larkin-Snowden told big cat expert Rick Minter’s Big Cat Conversations podcast that the carcass was clearly still fresh and that only some of the internal organs had been consumed.

“To my right, I saw something black running, and assumed it was a sheepdog,” she said. “Then I did a double take and realised it was a black cat. It ran towards a stone wall, stopped and then jumped the wall. It was big – the size of a German shepherd dog.”

Larkin-Snowden took swabs from the sheep’s nose and back and front legs, and they were sent to a laboratory at the University of Warwick which specialises in testing for big cat DNA run by Prof Robin Allaby.

Allaby told BBC Countryfile Magazine they were able to make a positive identification of DNA belonging to a cat from the Panthera genus. This includes five species – lion, leopard, tiger, jaguar and snow leopard, but only two – leopard and jaguar – that have melanistic (black) forms as seen by Larkin-Snowden. 

You can hear Sharon Larkin-Snowden interviewed in the latest edition of Rick Minter's Big Cat Conversations podcast.

This is not the first time big cat DNA has been found in the English countryside. As the Countryfile report says, in 2022 black hair found snagged on a barbed-wire fence after a sheep attack on a Gloucestershire farm was identified as belonging to a big cat. The BBC's Discover Wildlife site says it was found to be a 99.9 per cent match to the leopard Panthera Pardus.

The picture that Big Cat Conversations has painted over the years is that farmers know the big cats are out there but they don't make a fuss about it. 

This is because the cats generally take deer, the sort of species they evolved to predate, which can be a nuisance to farmers if there are too many of them. It's also because farmers don't want nutters turning up to shoot the cats or officialdom snooping round their farms.

If too much firm evidence like this Cumbrian DNA is discovered, this happy picture could be put at risk.