 Labour's win in battalion spend was a surprise and a relief to Keir Starmer. However, in the aftermath of the result, some of Britain's leading political journalists got a little bit carried away. Alex Wickham in the Politico Morning email wrote, Labour has held the West Yorkshire seat of battalion spend in a nail-biting race which should put to bed talk of a leadership challenge to Keir Starmer, at least for now. Kim Ledby to one out over Tory hopeful Ryan Stevenson by just 323 votes after a bundle recount despite George Galloway picking up more than 8,000 votes. It's Labour's first by-election victory since Corby in 2012 and the Conservative second concurrent loss after the Cheshire and Amisham one. Now the standout thing there is it's Labour's first by-election victory since Corby in 2012. Now that would be a big deal. That would seem like quite an exceptional event. The problem, it's not remotely true. So in fact, Labour have won 12 by-elections since 2012. Nine of those were under Jeremy Corbyn. Alex Wickham's morning email, that gets sent out basically to lots of Westminster insiders. That's what it positions itself as. It tells you what's going to be in the news today. I read it. I don't necessarily take it as gospel, but I do read it. Some people do take it as gospel though it seems, because that untruth was repeated by the Financial Times Whitehall correspondent Sebastian Payne on Twitter. Labour should rightly celebrate a campaign victory. It's first by-election victory in nine years, but battalion spend was ultimately about Kim Ledbetter, etc. So you see there the claim. It's first by-election in nine years, as I say, completely untrue. They've actually won 12 by-elections in that period of time, nine under Jeremy Corbyn. Now because this is Twitter, people can reply. Sebastian Payne is called out by Abby Wilkinson, who's a left-wing journalist. I don't understand what you mean by first by-election victory in nine years, she says. It's won lots of by-elections over the last nine years, including another one in battalion spend in 2016. Sebastian Payne in response says, sorry, it was a mistake, have corrected, meant first by-election gain. Now you might say that, look, he's made a mistake, he's admitted his mistake. The problem is, in his admission of his mistake, he's made another mistake, which he said this is the first by-election gain since 2012. Now that would be true if Labour had gained the seat, but Labour didn't gain battalion spend because Labour already held battalion spend. So you've got two examples here of people really, I suppose, twisting the truth intentionally or otherwise to make this seem like a bigger achievement for Keir Starmer than it actually was. Payne did, in the end, delete his tweet and issue a correction. There was, though, no such humility from the independence John Rental for him. If the facts didn't fit his narrative, he would just change the facts. He tweeted that battalion spend was, in effect, a Tory seat in brackets would have been Tory in 2019, if not for pro Brexit independent, with Galloway, a Labour vote splitter. Now, Aaron, this is quite remarkable, isn't it? It's a senior political journalist saying this seat which was held by Labour was actually a Tory seat, and saying so to, I suppose, emphasise or exaggerate the achievement of Keir Starmer. It's a very strange style of political journalism where you can just twist the truth and change the facts to make your argument stronger, even though everyone can see this. This wasn't in effect a Tory seat. It was a levy seat. The British media is marked by something called bandwagon bias. They just all agree. Once there's a certain line, they all agree with it. They all just listen to each other and then repeat what they heard, whether that's Brexit, whether that was opposition to Corbyn, whether that was the Trump thing. I mean, it's not obviously not just limited to Britain. It's a cognitive bias. We're all capable of doing it, but I think the British media is uniquely bad at this. Probably because they're all in the same place in London. They all know each other, wants the same universities, same schools, but still, despite all that, you would hope that, you know, he would have the wisdom to just say, yeah, you're right. My mistake. My apologies. I'll delete that. And then just post another tweet saying, sorry, brain freeze happens to everybody, right? And I think anybody admonishing somebody else on Twitter for getting something wrong knows that. So it just seems very strange. I think to me, it sort of illustrates the two things, the inability to accept they were wrong. And secondly, just, you know, their hot take is actually the hot take of somebody else, kind of reminiscent of all Oscar Wilde's quotes about how most, and I don't agree with this quote, but I'd say it's probably true for many British political pundits, their lives or an imitation and impression of somebody else. I think that applies to their political views. You know, Sebastian Payne has a book out on Labour's Troubles in the Red Wall. He doesn't know how many by elections, Labour have won in the last few years. It would suggest he's probably not the best person to write that book.