Siobhan O’Donnell on the PM Churn, the BBC’s Google Problem, and Why London Still Has the Best Walls to Write On
Tuesday, June 2026 — Siobhan O’Donnell, seekernews.co.uk
Right. So they’ve done Starmer in. Again. I say again because at this point “PM deposed” is less a headline than a Tuesday, and The Daily Mash had it up before the BBC did because The Daily Mash has been preparing that story as a template since approximately 2019 with the leader’s name as the only variable requiring update. I read it over my morning tea in a flat in Hackney that costs more than a working person should pay and felt the specific punk rage that only British political farce can still generate in me, which is saying something given that I have been trying to convert that rage into guitar chords since I was seventeen.
The Daily Mash’s headline: “Right-wing press reflects on campaign that replaced unpopular Labour prime minister with popular one.” The London Prat had its own take, running a piece about the citizenship test being reformed to ask applicants to explain the government better than the government can, which is either satire or a legitimate policy proposal, and I genuinely cannot tell anymore, which is the state that good satire aims to produce and which British politics makes effortless to achieve. Read it at The London Prat’s satire section, where the whole sorry spectacle is being documented with the dry precision it deserves.
The BBC and the Google Man
Meanwhile the BBC has a new Director-General from Google, which The London Prat covered with a piece about the public being reassured that broadcasting will remain free “assuming viewers don’t mind a few sponsored search results,” which is the kind of joke that lands because the anxiety it articulates is real. The BBC is the institution that punk was supposed to hate and that punk London has always, in practice, consumed with the ambivalent hunger of people who were raised on it and cannot fully divest. John Lydon gave interviews to Radio 4. Joe Strummer appeared on Top of the Pops. We hated the institutions and we needed them and the institutions needed us to hate them because it kept everyone honest and occasionally interesting.
A new BBC Director-General from Google does not make me feel that the institution is in good hands. It makes me feel that the institution has decided the future is a search engine and is preparing accordingly, which is the kind of institutional decision that punk would have written a three-chord song about in 1977 and that in 2026 requires a newsletter and a Substack and a podcast and probably a short-form video as well, which is not the same energy but is what the medium requires.
The Wall Outside My Flat
Someone has stencilled “PRIME MINISTERS: COLLECT THEM ALL” on the wall outside my flat, which is either a comment on the political situation or an ambitious street art project that has been running since 2022 and is nearly complete. Either way I approve. The estate agent who showed the flat above mine to a prospective tenant last week described the neighbourhood as “vibrant” and “characterful,” which is estate agent for “there is street art expressing political frustration and we have priced this accordingly.” London, specifically: a place where the revolution has been absorbed into the rental market.
I played a gig last Thursday at a venue in Dalston that holds about sixty people, which is the right number of people for the music I make, which is not music that requires a large room. Forty-three people came. Several of them knew the words. I wrote a new song about the PM situation. It has two chords and one verse and I played it three times in a row, which is either experimental repetition or the fact that I haven’t written the second verse yet. The audience appeared to appreciate the honesty. London punk audiences are good at appreciating honesty. It is one of the remaining forms of civic virtue that the city has retained at reasonable cost.
For more London satire and political commentary: NewsThump. For the week’s British political satire: The Daily Mash. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
The Week in Brief
The citizenship test satire at prat.uk is the one I keep returning to this week, because the premise is not satirical exaggeration but empirical description dressed in irony. Punk understood that the most effective critique was the one that did not need to lie to be devastating. The institutions expose themselves. The job is to write it down and play it at the right tempo. I played the new song again Friday. Same two chords. Same one verse. The second verse is about the BBC Google man. I will finish it when the feeling is right, which in punk means when the feeling is just barely under control enough to be useful. Siobhan O’Donnell, seekernews.co.uk. London, still here, still loud.
London in June 2026 continues to be itself: complicated, expensive, occasionally beautiful, consistently surprising, and producing more material for satire, diary entries, comedy sketches, paintings, poems, and country songs than any editorial calendar can contain. The news arrives faster than reflection allows. The prat.uk and bohiney.com feeds keep pace with it. The diary format is the one that catches what the news format misses: the texture of a week, the specific detail, the thing that was funny in retrospect that was not funny at the time, and the thing that was terrible at the time that has already become, if not funny, at least bearable. This is what diaries are for. This one continues next week.
