Western Europe is experiencing a heat wave that has caused over 50 deaths in France alone. These unprecedented high temperatures, which can affect human, animal and plant health, as well as several industries, are due to a weather phenomenon known as an omega block.

What is an omega block?

An omega block is reminiscent of the shape of the Greek letter Ω, with a “bulge of warmer, settled high pressure held between two cooler low-pressure systems,” said Reuters. The high-pressure warmth is essentially “blocked” by the low-pressure systems surrounding it. As a result, “hot, still air gets lodged over the same area,” and “conditions become hot and dry.” The high pressure also “suppresses cloud formation, resulting in clear, sunny skies that allow temperatures to climb.” Omega blocks usually last between three ​and ten days, but can go on for longer.

With the current omega block, a “surge of hot, dry air from North Africa has become trapped in the atmosphere over parts of Europe,” said Time. France “recorded its hottest day since records began nearly 80 years ago, when temperatures peaked” at 111.74 Fahrenheit in the “southwestern town of Pissos,” said CBC. In Paris this week, temperatures hit a June record of 105.62 F.

The U.K., Spain, Germany, Italy and several other countries are also experiencing temperatures much hotter than normal. Across most of Western Europe, June is “warming faster than any other month,” said an analysis by World Weather Attribution (WWA). “Extreme heat is already reaching the limits of our societies’ ability to cope.”

How will heat affect the future?

Scientists have “not yet agreed upon how climate change is affecting the frequency of blocking events,” said Reuters. But the “consensus is ⁠clear that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of heat waves.”

Climate change is responsible for driving up temperatures all over the world, but “particularly in Europe,” said the BBC. Europe is the “fastest warming continent, heating up twice as fast as the global average.” The current heat wave is also the “most severe and widespread” to have “ever affected this large a region” on the continent, said Theodore Keeping, an extreme weather research associate at Imperial College London who worked on the WWA analysis, to The Guardian.

Extreme heat, especially when mixed with high humidity, poses “risks for public health and infrastructure, as well as transport, energy and water supply,” said Time. Many industries, including tourism, have also been affected. During the recent heat wave, the “Eiffel Tower and the Louvre announced early closing times, and the Changing of the Guard outside Buckingham Palace was scaled back, without the usual ceremony of soldiers in scarlet tunics and heavy bearskin hats,” said CBC.

When it comes to health, everyone can be affected by heat, but certain groups are more at risk for heat-related illness, including babies, children and older adults. “Heat exposure and dehydration during pregnancy have also been linked to complications including premature birth, low birthweight and an increased risk of stillbirth,” said Time. Experts recommend remaining inside with the curtains closed during the hottest parts of the day and staying hydrated.

Reports of President Donald Trump’s total capture of the Republican Party may be premature. Faced with plummeting popularity and whack-a-mole crises, the president has clashed with some of the most powerful members of his own coalition: Senate Republicans.

Whether this conservative revolt becomes a logjam for the White House remains to be seen. As Republicans face midterm headwinds to keep their congressional majorities, is the nascent push for senatorial independence for real, or will Republicans once more adopt the MAGA party line?

‘Relationship appears to be fraying’

Trump has “enjoyed unbending loyalty” from GOP lawmakers for years, said NPR. But the “strength of that relationship appears to be fraying,” particularly as some “departing members feel more uninhibited to push back” and others begin to imagine a post-Trump Washington.

Senators whom Trump had “written off, alienated or even helped defeat” are now opting to support “Senate traditions over his political demands,” said Axios. And the president’s decision this week to cancel the planned signing of bipartisan housing legislation “further inflamed weeks of tumult” that have marked an “increasingly bitter relationship between” him and high-profile Republican senators, said The New York Times. While “lawmakers from both parties were shocked by the president’s decision,” many of them saw Trump’s canceled signing as an effort to “undermine the efforts of his own party to protect its congressional majorities” before the midterms.

Trump’s push for harsh voting restrictions, which he demanded as a prerequisite before signing the housing bill, is “colliding with a newly defiant Republican Senate” and sets up a “multifront battle” ahead of the midterms, said The Wall Street Journal. GOP lawmakers “have been deferential to the president to a point,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R - Texas), to the outlet. But that deference “doesn’t seem to have done any good.” Simply having endorsed Trump’s point of view in the past “doesn’t mean he’s going to support you,” added Cornyn, whose own reelection bid was scuttled by a Trump-backed challenger.

During a closed-door lunch on Wednesday, which Republican senators hoped would “clear the air” between them and Trump, the president instead “vented his frustrations with the senators for more than an hour, leaving them no closer to detente,” said Politico. Trump “said something negative about me,” in an attempt to “bully me from asking a question that I think the American people need to know,” said outgoing Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy to the outlet, after reports of an intense argument between him and the president during the meeting. “I’m not going to be bullied.”

Sacrificing principles at the ‘altar of Trump’

Senate Republicans that same day “proved yet again that their spines are made of pudding,” said The New Republic, after both Cassidy and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul bowed to White House pressure and flipped previous votes to kill a resolution limiting Trump’s Iran war powers. The waffling shows conservative lawmakers who “claim to have principles” will “gladly sacrifice them at the altar of Trump.”

It is unclear whether the vote will be “enough to appease Trump,” said The Associated Press. But blocking efforts to restrict the president’s war powers “was a clear signal” to Trump from senators who “still want to placate him.”

The dollar has long been the world’s primary currency, giving the U.S. unusual sway over international affairs. But China’s yuan is emerging as a small-but-growing competitor, with consequences for American power and influence.

What did the commentators say?

China is building an “alternative financial system” designed to weaken the United States’ “power to dictate world affairs,” said The Wall Street Journal. The dollar is still used in 80% of international trade, and that dominance has given U.S. governments a “big advantage in policing global business.” But transactions conducted using Chinese currency allow some businesses and rival countries to evade the U.S. banking system. That is how Iran earned up to $43 billion in oil revenue in 2024 despite restrictive American sanctions. And such examples are growing in number: The yuan’s share of global finance has “tripled over the past five years,” still well behind the dollar but ahead of the euro.

The yuan is emerging as a “more important part of the global financial system,” Robin Harding said at the Financial Times. But it does not yet threaten the dollar’s dominance, in part because “China’s economic model depends on its own relentless accumulation of dollar assets.” Beijing “wants to buy oil in its own currency,” but it also wants to maintain its “massive trade surpluses” with the rest of the world, and those transactions are conducted in dollars. There is “little sign of the dollar losing control of the global financial system.”

Beijing “cannot decree demand” for the yuan, Agathe Demarais said at Foreign Policy. While China has “made genuine progress in building alternative financial channels” to U.S.-dominated systems, it “cannot translate its rising global trade footprint into greater use of its currency.” That is because China puts strict controls on the use of the yuan outside the country, making it “costly and impractical” for foreign firms to use. Absent a “massive shock,” it is unlikely the world will “embrace Chinese financial channels.”

Beijing “doesn’t need to displace the dollar” to weaken U.S. dominance over global finance, said The New York Times. But having an alternative “could expand China’s influence in a financial crisis.” And some countries will welcome that alternative. “There is a desperate desire in the world to escape the clutches” of the America-dominated system, Cornell University’s Eswar Prasad said to the outlet.

What next?

The dollar is still the “dominant currency” for loans to “developing economies,” said Reuters, but there are signs of change. Kenya last year agreed to convert its debt to China (for loans to construct a railway) from dollars into yuan to “cut borrowing costs.” Now countries like Ethiopia, Indonesia, Mozambique, Pakistan and Zambia that have taken loans from China Eximbank are considering similar restructuring, and the bank is “encouraging — and in some cases requiring” national borrowers to “borrow in yuan rather than dollars.”

What happened

The International Maritime Organization on Thursday paused a nascent effort to evacuate ships stranded in the Persian Gulf after Iran struck a cargo vessel, causing damage but no casualties, according to the ship’s owner. The IMO, a United Nations body, earlier this week began shepherding ships through the Strait of Hormuz along a route hugging Oman’s coast. Hundreds of ships and more than 11,000 seafarers have been stranded in the Gulf since the Iran war broke out, and Iran’s drone strike demonstrated its “continued ability to restrict the critical waterway, despite the agreement reached last week with the United States,” CNN said.

Who said what

The attacked vessel did “not transit under IMO’s evacuation framework,” IMO chief Arsenio Dominguez said in a press release, but “the evacuation plan will be paused until further clarity is obtained” on “necessary safety guarantees.” Hours before the strike, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned that transiting the strait outside routes “authorized” by Iran was “unacceptable and completely dangerous.” The opening of an alternate passage “would relieve pressure on the world economy,” The Associated Press said, but also “remove Iran’s main source of leverage in ongoing peace talks.”

What next?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday during a “visit to the Gulf to reassure American allies” that “Washington was committed to the new route” and free passage through the strait, the AP said.

What happened

Acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez on Friday morning raised the official death toll from Wednesday’s powerful back-to-back earthquakes to 589, with at least 4,300 injured and hundreds more missing or trapped under collapsed buildings. With international aid beginning to arrive, “rescue crews and residents dug through rubble in an increasingly desperate search for survivors,” The New York Times said. The “first 48 to 72 hours after a quake are widely regarded as the ‘golden’ window to reach people buried alive,” CNN said.

Who said what

The magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes “hit a country already weakened by years of economic turmoil” that “left much of its infrastructure fragile and complicated rescue efforts as aftershocks rattled the capital and surrounding coastal areas,” Reuters said. “Affected residents have nowhere to go,” CNN said, and many Venezuelans “are enduring a second night out on the streets” near damaged and collapsed apartment buildings. “They’ve pulled out a lot of dead people,” La Guaira resident Yorliana Colmenares told the Times. “Injured people, children, animals.”

What next?

The “number of dead and injured” is “virtually certain to rise,” the Times said. A website created to track the missing “listed more than 46,000 people as unaccounted for” on Thursday night, Reuters said.

What happened

The Supreme Court, in a pair of 6-3 decisions written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, ruled Thursday that President Donald Trump has judicially unreviewable power to end temporary humanitarian protections for more than a million legal immigrants and can bar migrants from crossing into the U.S. from Mexico to request asylum. “Taken together,” the “two rulings expand Trump’s authority to implement his crackdown on immigration,” The Wall Street Journal said.

Who said what

The first decision cleared the way for Trump to end Temporary Protected Status for about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, many of whom “have lived and worked in the United States for decades and have American children,” The Associated Press said. The ruling is “expected to reverberate beyond those two communities, affecting approximately 1.3 million immigrants from 17 countries” who also hold TPS status, The Washington Post said.

Alito said the relevant 1990 law barred the courts from reviewing an administration’s decisions to revoke TPS, and he dismissed arguments that Trump’s many racially derogatory statements illegally tainted the decision. “Notably, Alito did not say what Trump’s statements were,” CNN said, an “omission liberal Justice Elena Kagan was quick to point out in her dissent.” Trump’s comments, including that Haitians eat dogs and cats, come from a “shithole” country and “probably have AIDS,” are “so repellent and racially inflected,” she wrote, “that the majority declines to put them in print.”

What next?

The justices have “one other signature Trump policy on immigration” to rule on this term, the Journal said: his “bid to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants.” That’s likely to come down next week.

A “dark money lobbying network” bankrolled by a major donor to Reform UK has been associated with “open advocates of far-right remigration”, said Byline Times.

Aerospace tycoon Richard Smith “owns 55 Tufton Street, the Westminster townhouse that houses a cluster of opaquely funded right-wing lobby groups”. One of these, the New Culture Forum, has platformed speakers who call for “mass deportations of ethnic minority British citizens”.

“A lot of the people who have come here legally, especially over the last 30 years, and those who have been born here, they don’t belong here,” Restore Britain campaign director Charlie Downes told the forum’s podcast, “Deprogrammed”, in August 2025.

As seen in the Makerfield by-election, Reform UK is being challenged on its right by Restore, which has advocated for “reverse mass migration”. Once a fringe, far-right concept, remigration is gaining traction not only in Britain but across the world.

What is remigration?

In general terms, it describes the process of an immigrant voluntarily returning to their country of origin, said Al Jazeera. However, in a far-right context, remigration has been appropriated as a “method of ethnic cleansing”, where “all non-white people are forcibly removed from traditionally white countries”.

The idea can be traced back to Nazi Germany of the 1930s, but it was revived by French novelist Renaud Camus’ “widely debunked” 2011 book “Le Grand Remplacement”, which advocated the Great Replacement theory.

Fifteen years later, the meaning of remigration can be “elusive”, said The Economist. The term is now “less a set of policies and more a catch-all term for a vision of Europe with its ethnic and cultural identity rid of what they call ‘Afro-Arab replacement migration’”. Proponents hope to capitalise on voters who feel “uneasy at the rapid scale of demographic change they witness around them”.

Is it becoming mainstream?

Social media is both driving and reflecting the rise in messaging around remigration policies. The idea gained “mainstream visibility” last year, said the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate. During 2025, there were 952,000 mentions of the term by 303,000 unique authors on social media – more than double the year before.

Support is also becoming more visible beyond online forums. In May, more than 500 activists and influencers congregated in Portugal for Remigration Summit 2026. “VIP guests” included former US Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino and Jared Taylor, editor of white supremacist magazine American Renaissance, said Politico.

“Several thousand” anti-immigration protesters took to the streets of Rome in mid-June in support of a citizens’ initiative bill named “Remigration and Reconquest”, said Deutsche Welle. The bill, which gathered the 50,000 signatures required for discussion in parliament, includes proposals to offer foreigners financial incentives to agree to what it calls voluntary repatriation, while incentivising Italian families to have more children.

Who is pushing for it?

Many European parties have outlined their support for remigration in their election manifestos, said the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate. These include the Austrian Freedom Party, Alternative for Germany, and Dutch parties Forum for Democracy and Conservative Liberals.

Others who have expressed interest in remigration include Flemish Interest in Belgium, Lega in Italy, Vox in Spain, Alternative for Sweden, the Finns Party in Finland, and Reconquête (Reconquest) in France.

But it has also found favour in the Trump administration. In November, the official X account for the Department of Homeland Security posted that “the stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear: Remigration now”.

Does it have support in the UK?

“Millions will have to go,” said Rupert Lowe at the official launch of Restore Britain in February. The party’s manifesto promises that a legally resident foreign national in the UK who is “unable to speak English, lives in social housing, claims benefits, refuses to work, fails to integrate, commits crime or actively hates our way of life” would be deported under a Restore government.

But whether the concept has widespread appeal with the electorate is more doubtful. A YouGov poll in August last year found that 45% of Britons approved of “an immigration scenario whereby no more new migrants were admitted, and large numbers of recent migrants were required to leave”.

However, questioned on the specifics, respondents varied wildly; while 90% of those in favour supported the deportation of asylum seekers coming via small boat crossings, only 26% supported the removal of skilled migrant workers and even fewer supported expelling healthcare workers or foreign nationals who had taken British citizenship.

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*Your subscription is protected by our full money-back guarantee. If for any reason you're not satisfied you may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on any unmailed issues within 30 days. Read our subscription terms and conditions here. Alternatively, you can request to pause your subscription for up to three months.

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“Grand Theft Auto” fans have reacted with “shock and relief” after the announcement that “GTA 6” pre-orders are now open, “all but confirming that the game won’t get delayed once more”, said IGN.

Thirteen years after the release of “Grand Theft Auto 5”, the sequel is finally set to launch on 19 November 2026. It is expected to be one of the biggest releases in entertainment history and is projected to generate $7.6 billion (£5.67 billion) in revenue in its first two months alone.

But the journey has been far from smooth. Fans have now “waited two console generations for a new ‘GTA’”, while developer Rockstar “continually pushed back its next blockbuster’s launch – again, and again”.

Quest for perfection

“GTA 6” was announced in February 2022 and originally scheduled to hit shelves in late 2025, but this was pushed back first to May 2026, then to the current release date, 19 November.

The most recent delay, according to Strauss Zelnick, CEO of game publishers Take-Two Interactive, was due to “limited circumstances where more time was required to polish a title and make sure that it was spectacular”.

For avid fans of the franchise, the reaction to the delay was one of “resignation, frustration, déjà vu”, said the BBC at the time. Rockstar is a “notoriously perfectionist” developer: “Red Dead Redemption 2”, its most recent major release, “is still widely considered a benchmark for open-world video games due to its depth and obsessive attention to detail”.

Alongside broader industry-wide shifts that have made game development “more expensive, more complex”, Rockstar also has to contend with its own hype, with each success “raising ever-higher expectations” for future games.

Speaking in May at the TD Cowen 54th Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, Zelnick stressed that “Grand Theft Auto” titles have never pushed for yearly releases. “What has driven the gap is the amount of time it takes to do something that is as good as it can possibly be for that intellectual property.”

Union-busting

The long wait and repeated delays may also be connected to with Rockstar’s decision to fire more than 30 staff who were trying to unionise, sparking a legal action against the developer.

The employees, the majority of whom were based at the gaming giant’s Edinburgh HQ, were dismissed in October 2025 for what the company called “gross misconduct”, claiming staff had discussed confidential information, including specific game features from upcoming titles, in a public forum.

The sacked workers dispute this, saying they were part of a secure union-focused Discord channel that existed to allow members to discuss unionising the company and improving working conditions. They also claim they were subject to blacklisting, a “practice in which information about workers engaged in union activity is compiled to facilitate discrimination”, said The Register.

The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain called it “the most ruthless act of union busting in the history of the games industry”. The case was raised at Prime Minister’s Questions in December, and Keir Starmer said ministers would investigate the allegations, describing the situation as “deeply concerning”.

This month, Rockstar lost a legal battle “which means fired unionised workers can continue to bring blacklisting claims against the influential games studio”, said Novara Media. The final employment tribunal trial is set to conclude in mid-October, just a month before “GTA 6” is released.

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The RS5 is Audi Sport’s first plug-in hybrid, and the most complex car in its RS division, said Top Gear Magazine. “This is not your average Audi.”

It pairs a 2.9-litre, 503bhp twin-turbo V6 with a 174bhp electric motor, powered by a 25.9kWh battery. Despite weighing a “daft” 2,370kg in Avant form, it feels relatively light thanks to clever suspension and ground-breaking rear axle technology, and it can do 0-62mph in just 3.6secs.

“Exceptionally”, “unhingedly agile” for such a big car, the RS5 is “a hoot” to drive, said Autocar. It’s fast and also “supple” and “refined”, with a “very smooth response”. The steering is “always precise” and the car shows “great body control and resistance to pitch”. It has a 50-mile electric range, and should return about 70mpg officially, but the smaller 48-litre fuel tank means stops to refill.

The RS5 comes as a saloon or an estate, and there’s plenty of space up front, with two figure-hugging sports seats and lots of storage, said What Car?. The driver gets an 11.9-inch digital display, plus there’s a 10.9-inch passenger’s touchscreen and a 14.5-inch infotainment touchscreen, with crisp, clear graphics.

However, most functions are buried in menus and there are very few physical buttons. Higher-spec trims quickly drive up the cost.

“A summer’s night, attentive groundlings, gales of laughter: when the Globe is in its element, there’s no more magical spot,” said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” kicked off the summer season in April, in an enjoyable (if frenetic) staging which will play in rep until late August.

Now it’s joined by a “Much Ado” that is “one of the most charming accounts” of the play in years.

It’s a giddy, light-filled production of Shakespeare’s “romcom”, said Matt Wolf on London Theatre. Director Chelsea Walker brings “wit, incisiveness and vigour to a play shot through with those very qualities”, plus “a generous dollop of heart”.

“Much Ado” is “rightly celebrated as a showcase for one of theatre’s most-cherished sparring partnerships”, said Donald Hutera in The Times. Here the “skirmish of wit” between the “tart-tongued proto-feminist” Beatrice, played with “mischievous vivacity” by Pippa Nixon, and Ken Nwosu’s “equally marriage-wary” Benedick is a pleasure to behold. “This pair of frenemies function like opposing magnets whose push-me-pull-you attraction, outrageously exploited and manipulated by those around them, grounds the play in rollicking and sarcastic humour.”

Yet lurking beneath the frivolous “discourse on the vagaries of love” in “Much Ado” “are darker forms of pretence and deceit”. I’d say that the production has the balance between them “just about” right.

I felt that the evening could have leaned more deeply into the play’s problematic elements, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. For instance, the scene in which Beatrice’s young cousin Hero (Assa Kanouté) is humiliated at her own wedding to Claudio contains a powerful moment – but it “does not fully swivel”, as it should, “into stark, potentially tragic territory”.

Still, in its charms the production delights. Elegant and effervescent, it has a “universally adept” cast, and “simply gorgeous” costumes, dance and music (courtesy of a live band). It is “insuppressibly crowd-pleasing, eminently worth seeing”, and surely destined to be a “summer blockbuster”.

Globe Theatre, London SE1. Until 24 October

Dorset: Plush Manor, Plush

An elegant Georgian manor house that was once the home of the celebrated pianist Alfred Brendel, and which hosted the acclaimed Plush Music Festival for 22 years. 9 beds, 5 baths, kitchen/breakfast room, 5 receps, self-contained 1-bed flat, indoor swimming pool, garden, parking. £2.95 million; Savills.

Suffolk: Reading Room Cottage, Stowlangtoft

A charming Grade II brick-and-flint cottage where King Edward VII is rumoured to have dallied with Lillie Langtry. 3 beds, 2 baths, kitchen, 2 receps, garden, garage. £735,000; Bedfords.

Scottish Borders: Aikwood Tower, Selkirk

Historic 16th-century property immortalised by Sir Walter Scott, whose ancestors owned the tower, in his poem “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”. 5 beds, 5 baths, kitchen/dining room, 3 receps, garden, parking. £1.25 million; Inigo.

Isle of Wight: Winterbourne House, Bonchurch

A handsome Victorian villa, close to the beach, in which Charles Dickens wrote part of “David Copperfield”. 6 beds, 7 baths, kitchen, 8 receps, garden, parking. £1.6 million; Spence Willard.

Essex: Otten Hall, Belchamp Otten

An important Grade II country house in an idyllic setting. The estate traces its history back to the Saxon era and during the reign of Henry II it came into the possession of the Otto family, from whom the village derives its suffix. 5 beds, 3 baths, kitchen, 4 receps, garden, outbuildings, garage. £1.5 million; David Burr.

Suffolk: Smokey House, Sudbourne

A striking example of gothic revival by the architect Frederick Barnes, commissioned by Sir Richard Wallace, who donated his father’s extraordinary collection of art and artefacts to the Wallace Collection in London. 5 beds, 4 baths, kitchen, 2 receps, 1-bed self- contained annexe, garden, parking. £1.45 million; Knight Frank.

Glasgow: Great Western Terrace, Hyndland

Spectacular A-listed townhouse by the eminent Scottish architect Alexander “Greek” Thomson. This beautifully conserved architectural jewel once belonged to the tobacco merchant James W. MacGregor. 6 beds, 4 baths, kitchen, 3 receps, garden, garage. OIEO £995,000; Rettie.

Northumberland: Bellister Castle, Haltwhistle

A magnificent Grade I castle once owned by Robert de Ros, one of the 25 barons appointed to enforce Magna Carta. 8 beds, 3 baths, kitchen, 3 receps, 2-bed lodge, garden, parking. £2 million; Knight Frank.

“If you dipped in and out of the documentary ‘Jon Snow: A Last Big Story’” (Channel 4), you might be confused as to what it was all about, said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph.

At one level, the film, in which Snow reveals his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, is a “touching tribute to a now diminished national figure”. But it also includes a “bravura piece of reportage”: while visiting Zambia with his wife, the neuroscientist Dr Precious Lunga, Snow hears about the collapse of a dam at a copper mine – a disaster that has gone largely unreported – and starts to investigate. The documentary weaves these two strands together to create a whole that is “deeply affecting”.

It’s a delight to see this veteran reporter back in his element, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian, as he and his team break the story of the worst environmental disaster in Africa for 30 years.

We also see Snow in the grip of what is “an unforgiving, relentlessly worsening condition”: he repeats himself, has to be reminded why the camera crew is there, and doesn’t know what day it is. But “his compassion and his outraged sense of justice remains undimmed”: “if this is Snow’s swan song, it is as fine a one as he could wish”.

The film is deeply moving, and makes important points about Alzheimer’s, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times; but I wish it had focused more on how the couple are coping with their everyday lives, and skipped Snow’s report, which was painful to watch, and ended up making the actual disaster look “queasily like a sideshow”.

Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive brain disorder that gradually degrades a person’s cognitive and memory functions, is the No. 1 cause of dementia. There’s currently no cure, but according to a study published in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience, a new copper-based treatment may be on the horizon.

Clearing out

Alzheimer’s is “driven by the buildup of toxic proteins called amyloid beta,” said a release about the study. These proteins are usually flushed into the bloodstream through the blood-brain barrier. However, in those with Alzheimer’s disease, the “pumps doing the heavy lifting, called P-glycoprotein (P-gp), weaken significantly, clogging the drain and trapping the toxic proteins in the brain.”

A buildup of these proteins in the brain leads to memory loss and cognitive decline. But the copper-based compound Cu(ATSM), which has “anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective properties,” can clear them from the brain, said senior study author Joseph Nicolazzo in the release. It does so by “increasing the number and activity” of the P-gp pumps, said Newsweek.

The study is the first to show that Cu(ATSM) can boost the amount of P-gp pumps “by 24.1%, effectively linking the repair of the blood-brain barrier to a reduction in toxic proteins and improved cognitive function,” said lead study author Jae Pyun in the release. “Over 56 days, the treatment reduced toxic amyloid-beta by 42% and improved spatial learning by nearly 44%.”

Not just yet

Alzheimer’s disease is the No. 1 cause of dementia, accounting for about 60% to 80% of cases, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. The condition also worsens over time. In its early stages, “memory loss is mild, but with late-stage Alzheimer’s, individuals lose the ability to carry on a conversation and respond to their environment,” said the association. “On average, a person with Alzheimer’s lives four to eight years after diagnosis but can live as long as 20 years, depending on other factors.”

Cu(ATSM) improved the long-term spatial memory of mice, showing promise for future human clinical trials. The compound has also “already progressed to clinical testing for conditions like Parkinson’s and ALS,” said Nicolazzo in the release. However, “despite its promising results in animals, a pilot comparative analysis found that Cu(ATSM) provided no significant benefit to humans with ALS,” said Science Alert.

More than 7 million Americans 65 and older are estimated to be living with Alzheimer’s. By 2050, that number is projected to rise to close to 13 million, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. A drug that could prolong cognition and lifespan would be a game changer for patients and their families.

The disease itself is still full of unknowns. Alzheimer’s “involves the biological environment of the aging brain, including membrane biology, inflammation, vascular function, lipid metabolism and cellular resilience,” said neuroscientist Dayan Goodenowe to Newsweek. “So any single mechanism still has to be validated before we know whether it produces meaningful clinical benefit.”

“If we want a strong, resilient Coastguard for the future, we must make sure that those who step forward are supported, not penalised,” said Lynsay Mackay of the GMB Union. And yet callout payments for the 3,500 highly trained volunteers who operate on Britain’s coasts have been controversially scrapped.

Coastguard rescue officers are fighting to get the payments restored, with the GMB’s help. But, in the meantime, many are thinking of leaving the service. And with temperatures soaring and tourists flocking to beaches, seaside communities fear for the strength of any emergency response.

Worker status

As volunteers, coastguard rescue officers work for free but there has been a long-standing agreement that they can claim expenses for callouts and training exercises. These amount to roughly £11 an hour, below the minimum wage. In January, a Court of Appeal judge upheld an employment tribunal ruling that they were “workers” and not “volunteers” – because the need for them to attend callouts and training constituted a contract. This would mean they are entitled to the minimum wage and other benefits.

That might sound good – and it was a success for former coastguard officer, Martin Groom, and the GMB union, who brought the case to court. But, rather than respect the rescue officers’ worker status, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency announced that it would have to “change how the service operates” and scrap the hourly payments.

The MCA said “the volunteer model” is the “best option to protect the future of the service”, and allows rescue officers “flexibility to continue to serve alongside their primary employment”. The move has “upset many within seaside communities and the coastguard service”, said The Guardian.

Justifying sacrifice

“We do a very high pressure job and undertake advanced training but now we are not going to get paid,” an anonymous rescue officer told the BBC. “It is just not right. We do not do it for the money but the money allows us to do it.” It’s also easier to “justify the sacrifices” you make, such as getting a call in the middle of the night, or “halfway through a family barbecue”. At the very least, “it shows some appreciation”.

In Scotland, 53 MSPs have written to the UK government, calling on ministers to “intervene” to encourage the Maritime and Coastguard Agency “to pause its plans”, said The Scotsman. First Minister John Swinney has also committed to writing to the UK government on the issue. MPs from Cornwall and Norfolk have raised concerns too. Coastguard rescue officers, aided by the GMB union, are due to hold a meeting with supportive MPs in Westminster on 1 July.

Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. has often seemed less welcoming to outsiders than it used to. But the World Cup is showcasing the country’s grassroots hospitality and prosperity to visitors from abroad.

What did the commentators say?

Many international soccer fans were worried about “visa access, high costs, gun violence” and other issues ahead of this year’s World Cup, said Reuters. Visiting teams and their fans have instead “flooded” social media with posts revealing a “warm welcome from Americans” as well as a “distinctive culture” awash in “free soda refills” and “chicken wings dipped in ranch dressing.”

Host cities across the United States have witnessed an “unlikely romance between everyday Americans and squads from around the world,” said The New York Times. While polls show the U.S. global reputation “has dipped in recent years,” the visitors are discovering American communities have “all kinds of estimable traits.”

“Welcome to the World Cup of U.S. hospitality,” Jack Butler said at The Wall Street Journal. There is a “long tradition” of foreign visitors being “deeply affected” by their visits to the United States. Now international soccer fans are “showing America’s greatness in real time.” They are “also amazed by America’s material abundance.” Buc-ee’s and Bass Pro Shops have been featured in viral videos and so has Chicago deep-dish pizza. America’s vastness “contains multitudes.”

U.S. residents are welcoming the world “even when their government has failed to do so,” Juliette Kayyem said at Early Warning. Events like the World Cup “represent a kind of soft power that America has been increasingly unwilling to exert” and had seemingly been lost. The world’s “dismal view of America” has been reflected in declining tourism numbers, and the damage “may not be repaired in a single summer.” There are signs of hope, however. “Americans are proving better diplomats than their administration.”

The Trump administration has been hard at work “besmirching America’s cultural attractiveness,” Daniel Drezner said at Drezner’s World. The World Cup is offering a different vision. It is the American people, not their government, who are “reminding the rest of the world that this country still has a lot of attractive values.” That may not matter to world politics in the short term, but it offers a “hopeful reminder that in just a few years America can be great again.”

What next?

The Department of Homeland Security is “easing its restrictions” on the Iranian national team, said The Associated Press. The team has been staying in Mexico and playing its matches in the U.S., with American authorities mandating the team return quickly to its home base after play is complete. Iran will now be allowed into the U.S. two days before its next match.

The team had “complained about the travel restrictions” for much of the tournament. “We are here for football, not politics,” Iran coach Amir Ghalenoei said to reporters, per the AP.

“‘Toy Story 5’ – do we need it?” asked Deborah Ross in The Spectator. It’s been 31 years since the first film came out, and “one worries for the narrative integrity of characters when an IP is thrashed to death like this”.

The latest instalment, however, does at least bring the franchise up to date by addressing one of the “pressing dilemmas of modern childhood”: screen time, and whether it will be the end of toys (“Extinction... Not again!” cries Rex, the dinosaur).

‘Delicious touches’

Our favourite toys still belong to Bonnie, but while Bonnie loves them still, all the other eight-year-olds now play in the digital world. To help her make friends, her parents grudgingly buy her a frog-themed tablet called Lilypad. It does not, however, go to plan: Bonnie not only gets hooked on Lilypad (Greta Lee), she ends up being cyberbullied via it. So the toys contact Woody (Tom Hanks), who left Bonnie’s room at the end of ‘Toy Story 4’, to ask for his help.

The film contains some “delicious” touches – Woody now has a bald spot and a paunch – and it is “superb” to look at – but it does all “feel a little generic”.

‘Loses its nerve’

The plot is “amazingly timely”, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture, and may be a bit “triggering” for some parents: this is the only Pixar cartoon that dwells on a child being “crushingly lonely”. But compared with the “peerless” first three films, it is short on good jokes, and heavy on subplots: one of them, about 50 Buzz Lightyear toys making their way across the country, could have been scrapped altogether.

The film also “loses its nerve with its own big idea”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian: the “creepy” tablet turns out to be capable of “self-sacrificial heroism”. “Really? At least Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear, the villain from ‘TS3’, had the courage of his evil convictions.”

“It’s well known that pregnancy and childbirth affect women’s brains and hormones,” said Camilla Cavendish in the Financial Times: so profound is the impact of “baby brain” that “a computer can tell a mother from a non-mother just by looking at a scan”.

How parenthood affects men is less well understood; but in her new book, Darby Saxbe, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, “fills an important gap in our understanding”.

Saxbe herself carried out one of the world’s only studies into how men’s brains are altered by having a child, and it revealed that men undergo many of the same changes as women, “though not quite as dramatically”.

In men, the “volume of grey matter shrinks”, enabling a “temporary tuning-up of the parts of the cortex that connect us to others’ emotions”. New fathers also suffer a drop in testosterone, which facilitates bonding with their infant, as well as making a “dad bod” likely.

Combining academic data with “stories about the men in her own life”, Saxbe’s book is a “refreshing” call to “bust the stereotypes of fathers as clueless or uncaring”.

Kierkegaard described becoming a father as a transition from the “aesthetic stage, which is mainly about yourself, to the ethical stage, which is mainly about other people”, said Thomas W. Hodgkinson in Literary Review. “Dad Brain” engagingly explores how such a “massive life change” manifests itself physically. The fact that it is about such an under-investigated area is both its “USP” and a weakness: Saxbe’s account of the “science of fatherhood” inevitably ends up feeling frustratingly patchy. New fathers lose 1% of their brain matter. Is that a lot to lose or a little? I’m still not clear. Still, “anyone due to become a dad” could do a lot worse than this accessible, “nicely done primer”.

Buy “Dad Brain” for £19.99 from The Week Bookshop

What happened

The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday that Michigan was not obligated to turn over confidential voter information to the Trump administration, siding with lower court judges in Michigan and eight other states where similar requests were blocked. In Boston, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper also permanently barred President Donald Trump from implementing most of an executive order seeking to overhaul how states run elections. The Constitution “does not grant the president any specific powers over elections,” she wrote in her ruling.

Who said what

Wednesday’s appellate decision was the “biggest setback yet” in the Trump administration’s effort to create its own nationwide voter roll, CNN said. That endeavor is part of a so-far unsuccessful “administration-wide push” by “Trump and his allies to find evidence of voter fraud,” The New York Times said. But they’ve run into “significant headwinds — and stern rebukes” — from “judges appointed by presidents of both parties,” including five Trump appointees.

What next?

A second election-related executive order Trump issued to create a national voter list and limit mail ballot “also faces multiple legal challenges,” The Associated Press said. Postmaster General David Steiner told a Senate panel on Wednesday that under a proposed Trump-ordered rule, the U.S. Postal Service would not deliver mail-in ballots to states that declined to turn over private voter data.

What happened

Powerful back-to-back earthquakes in Venezuela on Wednesday evening collapsed buildings in Caracas and other cities, sending people rushing out to the streets. At least 164 people are confirmed dead and nearly 1,000 more are injured, the Venezuelan government said, with hundreds more still missing.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the initial magnitude 7.2 quake was followed less than a minute later by a magnitude 7.5 temblor, the biggest to hit Venezuela since 1900. “High casualties and damage are probable,” USGS said, with the final death toll likely in the thousands.

Who said what

“We urge our population to remain calm,” Acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez said in a televised address. “We urge unity.” Simón Bolívar International Airport outside Caracas sustained heavy damage and was closed, Rodríguez said, and train, subway and residential gas services were suspended. School was also canceled for the rest of the week. Traveling through Caracas on Thursday morning, there were “neighborhoods with no lights on and streets flooded by burst water pipes,” said The New York Times correspondent María Victoria Fermín.

What next?

The U.S. was among several countries that promised aid, search-and-rescue help and rebuilding assistance. “We will be there for our new and great friends,” President Donald Trump said on social media. “Early reports are not good!!!”

What happened

President Donald Trump on Wednesday abruptly scrapped a signing ceremony for a newly passed bipartisan housing bill, citing the Senate’s failure to clear the “desperately needed” SAVE America Act voting overhaul. His announcement on social media “caught lawmakers and some staff by surprise,” said The Washington Post. Republican leaders were “touting the housing bill at a news conference” and a flag-festooned stage was ready for him in the Capitol. Trump later fumed about the stalled voting bill during a contentious lunch with Senate Republicans.

Who said what

Trump was supposed to “spike the football,” but “instead, he fumbled,” Politico said. The signing ceremony “would have been a boon to Republicans desperate for campaign trail affordability wins,” and even “his own staff spent the morning taking a very public victory lap.” Trump is fixated on the voting bill, but rarely has one of his “late curveballs seemed as ill-advised,” said CNN.

It “makes no sense” that Trump would hold the housing bill “hostage” for legislation that “will never pass in this Congress,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters. But “there is a huge group of people who really appreciate what the president’s doing right now, and it’s the Democrat Party.”

What next?

Trump “does not need to sign” the housing bill, which will “become law” 10 days after he officially receives it unless he issues a veto, Politico said. But such low-key enactment would “deny Republicans a chance to crow at a signing ceremony.”

For years, philosophy graduates have been the “butt of jokes about unemployable degrees”, said Thibault Spirlet in Business Insider. Now, they can earn six-figure salaries as the “world’s most powerful AI companies” try to “shape how machines think and behave”.

High-profile philosophers are already “embedded” in top AI firms. Amanda Askell is resident philosopher at Anthropic, and Iason Gabriel and Henry Shevlin work at Google DeepMind. OpenAI’s Sam Altman also claimed that the company employed “hundreds of moral philosophers” when designing rules for ChatGPT. But there is rising suspicion that there are ulterior motives at play.

‘Arc of redemption’

“Unemployed coders take note,” said The Economist: “there seems to be no shortage of work for philosophers of AI.” There are “thorny problems” in the developing field – “a philosopher’s favourite sort”.

Some “ancient” philosophical considerations are at the core of the contemporary tech industry. The idea of “Socratic ignorance” – that wisdom is an individual realising the extent of what they do not know – is a major principle in AI development used to avoid “sycophancy”.

Deliberating whether a system should follow deontological aims (“strict rules” against “lying, coercion and treating people as a means rather than an end”), or consequentialist ones (which weigh “costs against benefits”) is also a common dilemma for developers.

Philosophy is key to safety practices, too. Implementing the concept of “AI constitutionalism” – where legally or morally authoritative texts are used as a base of “scaffolding” to direct the system – aims to prevent “ominous behaviour” from the models.

Anthropic revealed earlier this year that its Claude constitution included sources as “diverse as Immanuel Kant, Apple’s terms of service and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. This has been nicknamed the company’s “soul doc”.

A rise in demand for philosophers has also coincided with a decline in admissions for computer science students, said Lance Eliot in Forbes. Arguably, computer science has become a “dead-end endeavour”, creating “automation that replaces the humans who made it all possible”. AI programming once held the “promise of big bucks and a stellar career”. This may just be a minor “course correction”, as no doubt degrees that directly relate to AI will remain important, but nonetheless, philosophy is experiencing an “amazing arc of redemption”.

But influence goes both ways and is “not limited to Silicon Valley”, said Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly on Observer. Philosophy is impacting tech, but the demands of the AI industry are reshaping the “long-standing” landscape of philosophical thought. Academia is “rapidly adapting” as foundational questions regarding consciousness, morality, minds and computation have taken on a “new urgency”.

Suspicion and ‘ethics-washing’

The two disciplines of computer science and philosophy have “never been quite as entangled” nor as “fraught” as they are now, said Lila Shroff in The Atlantic. In a fundamental sense, the “careful thought” of philosophy is “at odds with the frenetic pace of AI”. In turn, some experts are concerned that “misaligned incentives” will encourage a “rush of low-quality work”.

There is a “degree of suspicion” in the academic world about philosophers migrating to AI firms, said Joel Khalili in Wired. The whole industry poses significant ethical risks. These programmes could be used to “develop new weapons of mass destruction, undermine democracy, or entrench existing social iniquities”.

But the greatest fear is of “ethics-washing”. Hiring philosophers to train systems not only demonstrates to the public that these models are so advanced that they warrant the attention of “serious people”, but also shows that companies are “outwardly performing a commitment to AI safety”.

In a broader sense, there are growing fears that philosophical research is becoming an “extension of the marketing function” of labs. And even if philosophers are given “free rein” in tech companies, ultimately, they are “accountable to investors and shareholders”. Essentially, “if a for-profit AI company signs your pay cheque, might that compromise your research?”

“You can kill children in this country,” said doctor and grieving father Jack Hawkins in The Times last year. “As long as you do it in an NHS institution, you can go back to work the next day.”

His words are felt all the more keenly now, after an official review has found that hundreds of mothers and babies died or suffered potentially avoidable harm because of “long-standing and deeply embedded systemic failures” at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. On publication of the Ockenden Report yesterday, Hawkins, whose daughter Harriet died just before birth at Nottingham City Hospital in 2016, said its findings “must be treated with the utmost seriousness”.

What does the Ockenden Report say?

As she conducted her review of the NHS trust’s maternity and neonatal services, senior midwife Donna Ockenden heard from 2,500 families and more than 800 current and former members of staff. “She found that more than 500 babies and mothers might have avoided death or serious injury if their care had not been so abysmally inadequate”, said Poppy Koronka, health correspondent at The Times.

Ockenden uncovered a “toxic” and “bullying” environment, in which women were subjected to cruelty and brutality, while misgivings about their baby’s safety were ignored. Maternity wards were dominated by a “small minority of powerful leaders who had been allowed on ‘infect‘ the unit” and bully patients and staff. She described labouring mothers-to-be being “coerced” into inductions or interventions or told to stay at home “potentially longer than it was safe to do so”.

Nearly 30 pages of the 400-page report describe Harriet Hawkins’ case because, Ockenden said, her parents’ experience bore so many “hallmarks” of the way other families were consistently “cruelly” treated. An external review in 2018, commissioned after Jack and Sarah Hawkins challenged the hospital’s internal review, found that doctors and midwives had missed 13 opportunities to save Harriet’s life.

Ockenden also found evidence of “recurring examples of failure to protect the dignity” of women and children who had died. Bodies, including that of Harriet Hawkins, were allowed to decompose badly or were “disposed of as clinical waste”. One mother was told that her premature baby, who had died in 2020, was a boy but, five months later, received post-mortem results showing her child was actually a girl. The mother had “already buried the baby as a boy in a blue coffin”, said the report, and “given the baby a boy’s name, which she had tattooed on her body”.

How could this happen?

There was rarely a single issue or a particular failing, concluded the report. Instead there were multiple factors, including failure to monitor unwell babies, incorrect analyses of foetal heart monitoring, poor training, a lack of oversight, poor escalation procedures and a failure to recognise when a baby was in distress during labour.

Pregnant and labouring women repeatedly described feeling unheard, inadequately informed and unsupported, particularly when they were reporting reduced foetal movements or other medical complications. The Trust’s board and leaders were aware of failing maternity services for more than a decade but “sidelined or ignored” them, regarding the issues as “too difficult” or “of insufficient priority” to address.

The Trust’s chair and CEO have now issued an open letter, addressed to “the people and communities of Nottinghamshire”, in which they apologise “unreservedly to the women and families who have suffered harm, loss, trauma or distress while receiving care in our services”.

What can be done?

Ockenden has called for a series of “immediate and essential” measures to “directly address the failings” her team has identified, including urgent improvements to risk management and monitoring, plus strengthening of escalation protocols, communication and safe transfer of care.

She also recommended strengthening neonatal care with better training on spotting the signs of serious illness, and improving post-death care and bereavement processes.

Health Secretary James Murray has apologised on behalf of the NHS and said “no options are off the table” in terms of next steps. He did indicate, however, that the government might wait until the end of the year to develop any action plan. Ockenden has urged ministers to act sooner, saying: “How much more harm may happen in this country? We don’t have the luxury of six months.”

Andy Burnham may be on course to take over as prime minister in less than a month, but he “could wreck his administration before it begins with a poor choice of chancellor”, said The Times. If Labour hopes to drastically improve the economy, and curb borrowing and higher spending, it “must change course”. And “that criterion should immediately disqualify” the long-presumed frontrunner for the job, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.

The prospect of Miliband in the Treasury is already angering the unions and spooking the financial markets, so attention is turning to former health secretary Wes Streeting. He surprised many in Westminster by backing Burnham this week, sparking rumours that he’s struck a deal in exchange for not contesting the leadership.

‘Divisive choices’

There are “good reasons” why Streeting “would be a shrewd choice”, said Gordon Rayner in The Telegraph. Unlike Miliband, Streeting is “part of Labour’s future rather than its past, and is someone whom the City feels it could do business with”. He is also “without doubt one of Labour’s best communicators” and has the skills to construct a Budget telling the story of “how Labour intends to improve lives”. He would prepare the country for what’s to come, rather than “pulling economic policies out of thin air” or conjuring up “supposed budgetary black holes to justify them”.

Both Streeting and Miliband “would, in their own ways, be divisive choices”, said The Independent. Streeting is “deeply distrusted by the left of the party” while Miliband’s “hard line on net zero policies have made him a controversial figure”. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood could “emerge as the compromise candidate”, with the added benefit of providing the new PM with an opportunity to “get her out of the Home Office so he could tweak the immigration policy”.

‘Bulging in-tray’

Whoever enters No. 11 “will have a bulging in-tray”, said City A.M. A new chancellor will have to battle “calls for greater spending on defence”, as well as “manage expectations” on easing employment taxes. The triple lock on pensions is also high on the agenda, while calls for new wealth taxes “risk infuriating investors”. On top of that are potential nationalisation plans for “major utility firms” like Thames Water, and, of course, the “continuing fallout” from the Iran war.

Wild swimming is an exhilarating experience. But lidos offer “all the joy of an al fresco dip without quite so much wondering what might be brushing past your legs beneath the surface”, said Helen Daly in Country Living. And they’re often accompanied by the creature comforts you crave after a swim: a café, a hot shower, and a sunny terrace.

Here’s our pick of the best lido spots around the UK: some freshwater, some saltwater, some heated, some unheated; all little pools of paradise.

Tinside Lido and Devil’s Point, Devon

This saltwater lido is “a crown jewel in the UK’s lido line-up”, said Freya Bromley in The Times. Built in 1935 in the “fashionable Art Deco style”, the grade II-listed pool is in a “prime” spot on the Plymouth seafront and a “joy” to swim in. As an extra treat, you can also go a little “wilder” at Devil’s Point nearby. It’s a small tidal pool at Firestone Bay that got a “welcome revamp in 2024 to strengthen it against the elements”.
Open for swimming until 13 September; tinsidelido.co.uk

Parliament Hill Lido, London

“Hampstead Heath surely has the highest concentration of outdoor swimming places in London,” said Charlotte McCaughan-Hawes and Antonia Bentel in House & Garden. The lido is a short stroll from the famous ponds, and its “sparkling blue water” is perhaps a more attractive alternative to their “slightly muddy” water. It’s a popular spot all year round, with a dedicated band of all-weather morning swimmers, as well as sunshine-only summer splashers. Built in the 1930s amid the boom in lido popularity, the water is unheated and there are “lovely modernist” changing rooms.
Open all year round; parliamenthilllido.org

Stonehaven Open Air Pool, Aberdeenshire

In Stonehaven, the lido is “at the heart of the community”, said Rosee Woodland and Carys Matthews on BBC Countryfile. The Olympic-size pool is open to all ages and abilities, with a paddling pool for children, a café, and classes such as AquaZumba during the summer months. The seawater is heated to a “cosy 29C, making it beautifully warm”, despite it being the “most northerly outdoor pool in the British Isles”. Every year, it hosts an Aqua Ceilidh during the Stonehaven Folk Festival.
Open until early September; stonehavenopenairpool.co.uk

Ilkley Pool and Lido, West Yorkshire

“Anchored in another era”, this “wonderful” Yorkshire pool takes you back in time, said Christopher Beanland in The Telegraph. Opened in 1935 as part of the Silver Jubilee celebrations for George V, the lido celebrated its 90th birthday last year. The “curious mushroom-shaped pool is surrounded by mature woodlands and hills” begging to be explored. Since Leeds and Bradford lidos have both shut, this is the place to to spend a hot summer’s day up Yorkshire way.
Open until September; bradford.gov.uk

Andy Burnham is preparing his bid for No. 10 after returning to Parliament as a Labour MP.

Burnham is “widely considered a frontrunner”, said The Independent, but now that Keir Starmer has announced his resignation, there are still a couple more weeks for other leadership candidates to throw their hats in the ring.

Some voters, though, are “terrified”, said The Sun, at what a perceived “hard-left Burnham government will do to their bank balances”.

Tax

Labour’s manifesto promise not to increase the rates of income tax, VAT or employee national insurance contributions “will stay”, said The Times, but Burnham has suggested he would raise the £12,570 tax-free personal income allowance for workers.

The former Greater Manchester mayor told the BBC’s Question Time that the personal allowance had been a topic raised “on so many doorsteps” and that, as a result, he would be willing to “have a proper look at this” to develop policy.

Inheritance tax changes “could also be a possibility”, said MoneyWeek, highlighting that, as health secretary in 2009, Burnham suggested a flat 10% charge applied to all estates, “with the money being used to fund social care for all”.

And, in a move that will “terrify middle England”, said The Sun, he has floated reintroducing the “hated” 50p top rate of tax.

Property taxes

Burnham has also “shown enthusiasm for taxing wealth more heavily”, said IFA Magazine.

Writing for The Guardian in 2010, Burnham proposed a land value tax on the market rental value of land. He argued this would “allow for the abolition of stamp duty”.

Such a move would “discourage land hoarding and encourage productive development”, said Tembo Money, but it could raise “legitimate concerns about fairness” for “asset-rich, income-poor homeowners” who might find it difficult to meet higher annual bills.

Mortgages

The credibility of Burnham in the markets, said Sky News, “will matter most for our borrowing costs”.

Burnham has sought to reassure bond investors that he will stick to the government’s existing fiscal rules. But if doubts were to emerge in markets, “mortgage borrowers could be among those to feel the consequences”, said the Financial Times.

Any massive spending plans outlined by Burnham could “trigger a bond market meltdown”, said The Sun, which would push fixed mortgage rates up.

Pensions

In good news for pensioners, Burnham has “reaffirmed the government’s commitment to the triple lock”, said Morningstar, despite “intense scrutiny” of the policy.

But he could use changes to pension tax relief or reductions in the pension tax-free lump sum as a “means of targeting wealth, and raising revenue, without deploying headline wealth taxes”.

The importance of the chancellor 

The “choice of chancellor” will also influence how bond markets react, said The Independent. Currently, Rachel Reeves is seen “as stable, consistent and predictable – all things the market likes”.

A chancellor with a “reputation for fiscal discipline” might “reassure markets”, said MoneyWeek, but a “less disciplined” candidate “could have the opposite effect”.

Production of a film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel “Northanger Abbey” has collapsed, leaving crew members owed “potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds”, said Deadline.

The project began as an ambitious reimagining of Austen’s gothic novel but it fell apart before cameras could roll. Some of the “hardest hit” workers have even been “left having to borrow petrol money to return home”, said The Times.

‘Uniquely vulnerable’

“A lack of money is at the root of many of the issues”, as funding “proved catastrophic” for the independent company behind the adaptation of the 19th-century book.

The £7 million production, “mounted in the UK by a team of inexperienced US producers”, got under way in Bath and Bristol but “fell apart during advanced prep” early last year, said Deadline. The company has collapsed and “failed to deliver on its promises to pay workers what they are owed”, so a “handful” of crew are taking legal action.

It’s thought that around 50 freelancers could be owed up to £200,000 after signing contracts with the independent business Northanger Limited. In a leaked recording, David Alan Ruben, the company’s chief who is also credited as the film’s writer, director and producer, said that its investors had failed to provide funding. “It has been the most brutal, horrible experience, and I’m just so sorry,” he told staff in February last year.

The UK has “no rules” around putting crew cash in an escrow account, so freelancers here are “uniquely vulnerable” when films run into financing issues, said Deadline.

Philippa Childs, head of the broadcasting union Bectu, said that “this kind of thing happens all too often” when production companies commission work without “secure funding for the project in place”.

Austen’s ‘most nuanced’ works

Austen is “one of the most adapted authors of all time” with her life and novels dramatised for film and TV from “every angle imaginable”, said Amy Wilcockson, from Queen Mary University of London, on The Conversation.

But when it comes to “Northanger Abbey” and “Mansfield Park” filmmakers seem “happy to leave these stories be”. “Northanger Abbey” offers a “harsh criticism of the conventions of marriage, wealth and social status faced by young women”, while “Mansfield Park” shows that Austen was “interested in questions of slavery and race”.

Perhaps this “serious and timely subject matter”, which is “unlike the usual” Austen narrative, “puts off filmmakers”, but they’re her “most nuanced works”, which focus “not just on romance” but on society’s “wider issues”. They “deserve their time in the limelight”.

Credit is a decisive factor in your financial life. The three-digit number influences everything, from whether you are approved for a loan to whether you can rent an apartment or even get hired for some jobs.

With the stakes that high, it’s important to be clear-eyed about what does and does not influence your credit score. The problem: There are a number of credit-related myths floating around that commonly trip people up. Here are some big ones to watch out for.

Myth #1: It boosts your score to carry a balance.

“Nearly 6 in 10 cardholders (59%) say carrying a small balance on their cards will improve their score,” said LendingTree, based on a recent survey it conducted. But this is broadly not true. “In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true.” Carrying a balance from month to month will not only lead you to pay interest on that amount, but it can also drive up your credit utilization rate, which, when high, negatively impacts your credit score.

Myth #2: Checking your credit score can lower it.

When you check your credit score — a good financial habit to have, actually — it does not affect your score. The misunderstanding here is likely due to a lack of clarity around soft credit pulls and hard credit pulls. “Checking your credit score is considered a ‘soft pull,’ which doesn’t affect your credit score,” said CNBC Select. Instead, it is “actions, such as applying for a credit card,” that involve a hard pull, which is what “temporarily dings your credit score.”

Myth #3: Closing an account will improve your score.

Paying off an account in full and then closing it, or doing the same for an account you no longer use, may seem like good credit hygiene. But in actuality, it can have the opposite effect on your score. That is because when you do so, “your score may take a hit if your credit utilization ratio drops,” said Bankrate. Additionally, the “length of your credit history may change, which could also negatively affect your score,” especially if the account you closed was one of your older ones.

Myth #4: Your income affects your credit score.

When lenders are reviewing your application for a credit card or a loan, they will likely take into consideration your income, as that influences your ability to repay the amount borrowed. Your income does not, however, have a bearing on your credit score. Put simply, “your salary and income are considered measurements of your capacity to pay bills, not your potential credit risk,” said CNBC Select.

Factors that do influence your score include your payment history, credit utilization rate, length of credit history, mix of account types and applications for new credit.

Gone are the days of working a grueling nine-to-five. Employees have started microshifting, a practice that involves completing duties in short, productive bursts. This allows workers to make their own schedules and save time for other obligations and hobbies.

Flexibility in the workplace has become increasingly common and sometimes even expected of hybrid and remote jobs. There may also be some benefits for business in allowing workers a freer schedule.

‘A little bit of autonomy’

Approximately 65% of workers are interested in microshifting, according to an analysis by Owl Labs. The practice, though not labeled at the time, took off during the pandemic at the height of remote work. Covid-19’s “work-from-home requirement demonstrated that employees can work successfully from anywhere, without a boss watching over them all of the time,” said The Wall Street Journal. Now, “flexibility increasingly means giving employees more control over when they work, not just where.”

Microshifting is most common in “industries where flexible work arrangements are already common, such as IT, financial services and professional and technical services,” said the Journal. People with “caregiving responsibilities at home — for children or other relatives — are more likely to try microshifting than noncaregivers.”

Over time, management and leadership have become more “adept at giving a little bit of autonomy,” Kevin Rockmann, a professor of management at George Mason University’s Costello College of Business, said to The Associated Press. Employees have also gained the “motivation and almost the license to ask for this.”

‘It’s good to take breaks’

Microshifting can have benefits for both employers and employees. Breaking the workday into shorter chunks allows employees to “squeeze in some personal business as well,” giving them “more time to relax and enjoy” days off “rather than spend them running errands,” said Moneywise. As a result, they work when they are “most focused and productive,” and “companies get the most” out of time with them. More than half of employees (59%) “schedule personal appointments during typical work hours, and 38% take up to an hour each day for personal time,” said the analysis by Owl Labs.

“From a creativity standpoint, it’s good to take breaks,” Rockmann said to the AP. “When you stop thinking about a task is when your best ideas come to you.” Microshifting can also improve relationships, allowing more time with friends and family, all while reducing burnout. “Taking walks or attending a child’s school function can be reinvigorating for people who get drained from sitting at a desk or looking at a computer screen,” said the AP.

‘Tremendous amount of discipline’

Microshifting also has its risks. A lack of a clear schedule “can gradually weaken our ability to commit to longer stretches of uninterrupted work,” Aytekin Tank, the founder and CEO of Jotform, said at Forbes. It could also lead to a less collaborative work environment. Employees “have to be more aware of the preferred work hours of colleagues,” and if their microshifts don’t coincide, it “can lead to periods of inactivity that might ultimately slow things down,” said Moneywise.

Without structure, employees may also “fall behind on deadlines and actually wind up working round-the-clock,” said the Journal. Microshifting “requires a tremendous amount of self-discipline,” said Moneywise. If someone is “not a motivated worker (or are someone who is easily distracted), getting things done in those work blocks could be challenging.”

There will soon be a changing of the guard in the United Kingdom, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced his resignation. But his likely replacement, Makerfield MP Andy Burnham, probably won’t have an easier time than Starmer did courting President Donald Trump. Burnham, a popular figure in the U.K.’s center-left Labour Party, has previously chided Trump and his administration. If he becomes prime minister, it could mark a turning point for American-British relations.

What did the commentators say?

When it comes to the White House’s view on Burnham, there has been no “immediate condemnation from the current administration,” said The Times. But “even if Burnham does benefit from a grace period with the president, his interventions on American politics are unlikely to endear him to Trump for long.” Similarly, the relationship between Starmer and Trump devolved soon after Starmer became prime minister.

Burnham has widely criticized Trump and right-wing U.S. politics. After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol, he “was scathing about British politicians who held their tongue to appease Trump,” said The Times. “Any U.K. politician who gave Trump the time of day should be ashamed right now,” Burnham said on X at the time. To “combat the rise” of the U.K.’s far-right Reform U.K. party, a Burnham premiership “may be tempted to more openly criticize Trump” with the “knowledge that the U.S. president is reviled by much of the British electorate,” said The Times.

Burnham will also have to reckon with a U.S. president who has “undermined British confidence by deriding British military sacrifices in Afghanistan,” said the Washington Examiner. Trump’s leaking of the announcement that Starmer “would resign and his simultaneously classless (if broadly accurate) criticism of Starmer’s policies further degrades U.S.-U.K. trust.” Burnham, or whoever the next prime minister is, must “be cautious,” as the U.K. is “heavily reliant on the intelligence, military and economic benefits provided by its American alliance.”

Overall, the “mood swings of Mr. Trump may be less of an issue for Mr. Burnham” than they were for Starmer due to the “timeline in America,” said The Independent. By the time a Burnham premiership gets fully settled, the 2026 midterms may have passed, and he will be dealing with a White House “entering the traditional ‘lame duck’ stage where power quickly ebbs away, not least because he cannot run again.”

What next?

Burnham could potentially enter office as prime minister by mid-July, but if there’s a contest for the position, the “election would likely drag on into September,” said The Associated Press. Either way, the U.K.’s likely next prime minister has urged caution against his country moving to be like the United States. “Politics is getting more polarized. And the path we’re on, if we are not careful, is a path toward the politics of the United States of America,” Burnham said during an event in the final days of his parliamentary campaign.

Burnham has also expressed dissent about the similarities between Trump and former Prime Minister Liz Truss, as well as Trump’s 2024 election victory. “The instability that Liz Truss brought to Britain, I think Trump is bringing to the U.S. and the world,” he told The London Economic last year. “Open your eyes to what could be really challenging and difficult issues and things that could polarize people further.”

What happened

The Senate on Tuesday voted 50-48 to adopt a resolution instructing President Donald Trump to end the Iran war or obtain congressional authorization. Four Republicans joined all but one Democrat to pass the resolution, and two Republicans were absent. The House approved the measure 215-208 on June 3, and Trump cannot veto it.

Who said what

The resolution’s adoption is a “significant rebuke” to Trump, CNN said. It reflects “growing concerns” among GOP lawmakers “over both the war and the deal Trump struck with Iran to end it,” The Associated Press said. Trump called the vote “poorly timed and meaningless.”

This is the “first time since the enactment of the War Powers Resolution of 1973” that both chambers “approved a concurrent resolution directing a president to end a military conflict,” The New York Times said. Whether it’s legally binding without a president’s signature “has never been definitively tested before the Supreme Court.”

What next?

The White House is expected to request $80 billion this week to pay for the war. Trump will “meet with restless GOP senators” on Wednesday on Capitol Hill, where his preference that lawmakers just “pony up, and don’t ask too many questions” about the war, is “grating on many congressional Republicans,” Politico said.

What happened

Two federal judges in Texas on Tuesday sentenced seven anti-ICE protesters to 50 to 100 years in prison over a demonstration last July outside the Prairieland Detention Center during which one of the defendants, Benjamin Song, shot and wounded a police officer. Prosecutors won terrorism convictions after portraying the group as part of antifa, the decentralized movement of antifascist activists. An eighth defendant who wasn’t at the protest received 30 years behind bars.

Who said what

Prosecutors “described the case as the first domestic terrorism trial” that convicted “alleged antifa cell members,” the Fort Worth Star-Telegram said. “The defendants denied having connections to antifa.” President Donald Trump last year “issued an executive order declaring antifa a ‘domestic terrorist organization’ — a designation that does not actually exist under U.S. law,” The New York Times said. The “remarkably stiff penalties” handed down by the “staunchly conservative” judges signaled that, at least “in Texas, the courts would deal aggressively with ICE protesters,” especially those accused of antifa ties.

What next?

Lawyers for the eight defendants said they would appeal the sentences, as critics warned the convictions “could have wide-reaching impact on protests and First Amendment free-speech rights,” The Associated Press said. Eight other Prairieland defendants will be sentenced July 1.

What happened

All three leftist congressional candidates backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their New York City primaries on Tuesday, with two unseating incumbents. More moderate Democrats won elsewhere: Army veteran Cait Conley in New York’s competitive 17th District, former Rep. Ben McAdams in Utah’s newly redrawn 1st District and state legislator Adrian Boafo in retiring Rep. Steny Hoyer’s 5th District seat in Maryland.

President Donald Trump’s candidates won in two upstate New York Republican primaries. In South Carolina’s GOP gubernatorial runoff, his original pick, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, lost to Attorney General Alan Wilson, who Trump co-endorsed last week.

Who said what

Mamdani “made a big bet and emerged victorious,” becoming an “undeniable power broker in New York politics,” The New York Times said. Doctoral student Darializa Avila Chevalier toppled Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th District, while another democratic socialist, state assembly member Claire Valdez, trounced outgoing Rep. Nydia Velázquez’s pick to succeed her in the 7th District. In the 10th District, Brad Lander unseated Rep. Dan Goldman.

In two of Tuesday’s most expensive races, Micah Lasher defeated fellow state assembly member Alex Bores, Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg and anti-Trump pundit George Conway to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler (D) in New York’s 12th District, and millionaire Rep. April McClain Delaney (D) beat billionaire former Rep. David Trone (D) to represent Maryland’s 6th District.

What next?

The doubling of democratic socialists in the House, to four, will likely push the Democratic caucus to the left, the Times said, also “creating headaches” for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) as he seeks to become House speaker.

The new beginning for the old US Embassy on Mayfair’s Grosvenor Square was one of the most eagerly anticipated openings in recent memory. The years spent walking past the hoarding, dodging the street closures, and watching as the iconic façade changed but also remained the same, tantalised locals and visitors alike. In the few months since guests have finally been welcomed inside, those of us who have had the privilege of a stay have not been disappointed.

The Chancery Rosewood is an all-suite property, positioned as a new standard in global luxury hospitality. The sheer size of the building allows for space to be the baseline for all its aspects, from the huge rooms to an utterly gargantuan fitness space. This is a place for casual drop-ins, with the coffee house at street level already popular with Londoners, as well as overnight visits. Stays of an hour or a week are equally welcome.

Why stay here?

First, the add-ons are generous. Perks like airport transfers, usually chargeable or only with a few room classes, are included with any booking. Use of the house cars, a fleet of lavish Bentley Bentaygas, is available to any guest who needs to travel within two miles and doesn’t fancy the Tube. From the heart of Mayfair, that covers the majority of central London. Check-in and departure are flexible to your schedule. These little touches make an enormous difference.

Inside, the design is soft and considered. The centre of the building is one huge atrium, giving a breathtaking sense of scale to the lobby. Rooms are impeccably furnished, with sumptuous soft touches contrasting the dark woods of the flooring and resplendent marble of the bathrooms. Views look across the Mayfair rooftops or the square itself, depending on your position within the building.

The Asaya Spa is easily accessible from street level at the exterior or via a private lift from your suite floor. The gym is truly exceptional, catering to a growing demand among travellers who refuse to compromise their fitness routine while travelling. Blonde wood and sand-coloured Technogym equipment give an airy aesthetic, which makes up for the lack of natural light. Sauna, steam and snow shower are found next to the 25-metre pool to aid recovery.

Eating and drinking

The word ‘iconic’ is woefully overused these days but is fairly applied to the giant gold eagle remaining on the roof from the building’s US Embassy days. The terrace at the Eagle Bar provides a panorama worthy of a visit on its own. Breakfast at Serra is as light and airy as the room itself, with an open kitchen to watch exquisite plates being assembled as well as a particularly delicious porridge; GSQ is a neighbourhood café with alfresco seating for an alternative start to the day and some excellent pastries. Afternoon tea is served in Jacqueline, hidden behind the reception area, and comes with chamber music on weekends. At Japanese fine dining restaurant Tobi Masa, chef Masayoshi Takayama presents seasonal Omakase at a small 12-cover counter or à la carte sushi throughout the rest of the dining room.

Things to do

You have two options: everything and nothing. Those who have selected The Chancery Rosewood as a London base will find all of London on their doorstep, be it the shops and galleries of Mayfair, the greenery of Hyde Park, or the museums of Kensington. It’s worth noting that the London address of Carbone, the buzzy New York Italian kitchen currently one of the hottest names in global hospitality, is also in The Chancery Rosewood, and there are plenty of other restaurants and bars and clubs around if you want to get into London life.

Equally, those who search for indulgent respite will find it here as well. Moving from your suite to a meal to a pampering in the spa can easily take up a full day, and there’s no reason for tomorrow not to look similar. This is a property very well suited to a reset rather than an energetic city break, and we all need that sometimes.

The verdict

The stakes were high for this hotel when it opened, such was the potential of the site and the expectation and demand of the market. It has delivered on its promise. The beauty of the surroundings, the attentiveness of the service, and the inventive ways the existing building has been reimagined to create a welcoming, soothing environment out of a bureaucratic and utilitarian frame are genuinely exceptional. The bar has been raised for hotels that aspire to this level worldwide.

Nick was a guest at The Chancery Rosewood; rosewoodhotels.com

Another prime minister resigning from office adds to the “unprecedented instability in the modern history” of Britain, said an editorial in Le Monde.

Following his announcement on Monday, Starmer will still “seek to make his final mark on the world stage as a lame-duck prime minister”, said Politico. But a planned EU-UK summit on 22 July has been postponed amid indecision over Britain’s intentions regarding the continent.

With Starmer’s imminent departure, and many of the policies of his likely successor Andy Burnham as yet unknown, Britain’s instability is having tangible consequences on the world stage.

How was Starmer viewed?

“God save the king and this desolate land of the United Kingdom,” said Antonello Guerrera in La Repubblica. Since Starmer was elected in 2024, he has appeared a “robotic and insipid leader” on the domestic front. He has “always been a Hamlet: paralysed by indecision, doubt, and sunk by tragic ineptitude”. And on Monday, “the curtain fell”.

But, aside from being “humiliated” by Donald Trump on social media, many world leaders thanked Starmer for his service, including his “staunch ally” Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his “comrade” Emmanuel Macron, and Giorgia Meloni. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, paid tribute, saying: “It can take many leaders years to grow into the statesman you became in just two years.”

“Pragmatic, cool and rational”, Starmer embodied a strain of “anti-politics” and could get the job done without a fuss, said Enrico Franceschini in La Republicca. But these qualities were eroded by a “lack of charisma, the inability to communicate, and the limited political vision of a prime minister animated by good intentions but unable to implement them”.

Where did it go wrong?

“Beleaguered” Starmer’s tenure was “troubled” from the outset, said Euronews. From failing to declare gifts in the first few months of his premiership, to appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador, to numerous policy U-turns on “welfare reform, introducing digital IDs and scrapping winter fuel payments”: his time in office was “littered with controversy”.

Starmer was also “undone by economic stagnation” and “underspending on defence”, said Quentin Letts in The Washington Post. But perhaps the reason he stayed in power so long was that there was “no obvious answer” as to who could replace him.

Fundamentally, Starmer “broke his promise of stability” and “orchestrated constant changes of strategy”, said Claudi Pérez in El País. In his defence, he inherited a “poisoned chalice” of “stagnant” growth, but overall, like “bad tennis players”, he made “too many unforced errors”.

Is Britain an isolated case?

Since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016, No. 10 has become a “hot seat”, said Deutsche Welle. Whoever succeeds Starmer will be the seventh leader in that period, and will be “grappling with profound political, economic, and social problems”.

Before Starmer, according to Der Spiegel, the UK had “gambler” David Cameron, someone who tried to “pick up the pieces” in Theresa May, the “scandals”-ridden Boris Johnson, a “zigzag” six-week tenure from Liz Truss, and a leader of “negative momentum” in Rishi Sunak. Downing Street has become a “transit station”.

But the rest of Europe is equally fractured, said Pérez in El País. Since the financial crisis in 2008, there has been a “collapse” of centrist parties in Europe. France has had seven prime ministers in the past eight years, and in Germany, Friedrich Merz’s popularity is “plummeting” and the “grand coalition is falling apart”. Further afield, the US’ “politics are a mess”.

Is the future brighter with Burnham?

The “charismatic” Burnham is a “rising star”, with “decades of experience in national and regional politics”, said DW. And he is perhaps the “last hope to counter the rising right-wing populists of Reform UK”.

The new MP for Makerfield provides a “glimmer of hope” for the UK, said Pérez in El País, not least because he is in favour of “resetting the relationship with the EU”. That is the “greatest reform this country needs”. It has been “plagued by a nauseating post-imperial nostalgia, an epidemic of fear, and a mediocre political class that has been hitting rock bottom for almost 20 years”.

Burnham “may well prove a more skilled rider”, said The Washington Post. But each of the last six prime ministers “arrived promising to be the exception to the merry-go-round of predecessors and unquenchable voter rage”. And he “won’t have much time to figure it out”.

The question of whether Keir Starmer would resign in the wake of Andy Burnham’s victory in Makerfield has been answered. But the “slower-burning question”, said David Aaronovitch in The Independent, is whether Nigel Farage’s grin can really “grace the doorstep of No. 10” after four by-election defeats in a row.

The “solidity of the anti-Reform tactical vote” in last week’s by-election has shown that people “don’t want” him as prime minister. Reform UK appears to be “on a downward slope”, and the expected arrival of a “doe-eyed” Andy Burnham in Downing Street could make life trickier yet for Farage.

What did the commentators say?

This latest by-election “exposed many of Reform’s weaknesses”, several of which “stem from serious flaws in Farage’s character”, said veteran by-election reporter Michael Crick in The Times. He runs the party “as a personal dictatorship”; he alone picked the out-of-depth Robert Kenyon as Reform’s candidate. “No serious democratic party” can be run that way.

In Makerfield, as in Gorton & Denton, there are those who so “detest him”, they were “breaking habits of a lifetime” to vote “ABF – Anyone But Farage”. He looked “fed up and exhausted” after it was over, and “it wouldn’t surprise me if he quits” before the general election, “perhaps claiming illness”.

He was also “beaten at his own game” by “Reform’s yet more evil twin”, Restore Britain, said Jonn Elledge in The New Statesman. Farage “now faces the same dilemma he once posed to the Tories: stand firm and lose votes” to the right, or “move right and alienate those closer to the centre”. Watching him “flail” is “extremely funny”.

Rupert Lowe’s “ultra-right splinter group” succeeded in mobilising “disaffected white working-class people” in a constituency where there was “support for the British National Party” 20 years ago, said Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper. Their “desire to give the Establishment – which now apparently includes Farage – a kicking seemingly knows no bounds”.

If Restore’s current polling holds up, “it could cost Farage victory in other constituencies” in a general election, political scientist Rob Ford told Politics Home. Reform would “really would like to be able to say X and Y seats are in the bag” but now there’s “this additional element of uncertainty”.

Makerfield was clearly “a setback” for Farage’s “ambitions of winning power”, said Nick Gutteridge in The Telegraph. But “there is no sign” within Reform’s ranks that “fatalism has set in”. One party source told me it’s like “the scene in the movie that comes just before the end, when it looks like the bad guy is resurgent and the hero has taken a knock” but “you’re actually just before the glorious victory”.

What next?

The morning after Reform’s Makerfield defeat, Farage appealed directly to those who switched from his party to Restore: “What do you want? We are the challenger party to the left in this country, and I would urge you to think again.”

But a new threat could emerge from within his own party ranks, said Aaronovitch in The Independent. If Farage’s waning popularity and “diminishing energy” mean he’s no longer up to “making a serious bid for power”, then “that quintessence of pushiness”, Robert Jenrick, will “have to do something about it”.

“Breathe a fiery sigh of relief,” said Jack Seale in The Guardian. After two “forgettable” series, “House of the Dragon” has finally “found its focus”.

Set centuries before “Game of Thrones”, the new season of the spin-off sees a “power vacuum” emerge in Westeros, into which various rulers and royals “seek to step”. The third instalment kicks off with the bloody Battle of the Gullet at sea: an “orgy of CGI carnage” with “underwater punch-ups and dragonly intervention”.

But the “explosive” sequences early on thankfully don’t “come at the cost of nuanced character drama and thoughtful quasi-historical themes”, said Caroline Siede in Empire. In one “tremendous” episode, Emma D’Arcy (Queen Rhaenyra) is put at the centre of the action as we’re given a “high-wire day-in-the-life-style story about what it actually means to be a queen”.

Until now, the prequel had lacked an “over-the-top anti-hero”, said Ed Power in The Telegraph. The “long wait is at an end”, however, as “top telly totty” James Norton has been brought in to play the “love-to-hate” Lord Ormund Hightower. He goes “full fantasy panto” with his “absurdly OTT” performance, accelerating from “calmly psychotic to full-fledged loony” in one memorable scene. The “reliably charismatic” Matt Smith returns as Rhaenyra’s “power-mad husband” Daemon Targaryen. He is a “devilish delight”.

However, the “increasing prominence” of Mysaria only further highlights how “wretched” Sonoya Mizuno’s performance is, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. And the many “portentous conversations” in shadowy rooms lack the “earthy wisdom” and “wit” that made “Game of Thrones” so compelling.

The show at times “stretches itself thin” moving between so many characters on an “increasingly crowded board”, said Siede in Empire. But the “upside” is a “welcome sense of unpredictability” about what will come next, in a series that’s packed with plot twists. “More action-packed but as thoughtful as ever”, season three might just be the show’s “best offering yet”.

More than 1,000 schools across England and Wales are closing or finishing the day early this week to protect students against extreme heat.

Teachers and pupils are struggling to cope in school buildings never designed for sky-high temperatures fuelled by global warming.

Twelve school days a year could be lost

With the UK experiencing increasingly extreme weather, temperatures in schools have become a “major concern”, said The i Paper.

Modelling by the Met Office and University College London for the Department for Education published last year found some schools may already have one or two days a year when indoor temperatures hit 35C and learning becomes “very difficult”.

But “without the implementation of any adaptation measures, students could potentially lose up to 12 days of learning per year on average, as a result of generally warmer temperatures and not just from extreme heat”.

There is evidence that children struggle to sleep at night when temperatures remain above 20C. So government guidance warns teachers and school leaders to look out for the symptoms of “heat stress”, including discomfort, irritability and signs of dehydration.

“The kids can’t cope,” said Nottingham junior school teacher Radhika Sanghani in The Independent. “One of the kids didn’t sleep well because of the heat, so he was falling asleep at his desk, literally dozing. They’re only seven to nine years old. It’s a lot to expect them to study in that heat. They’re tired, they’re red-faced, they’re finding it all horrendous.”

Extreme heat is already forcing schools to postpone sports days and cancel trips, while some primaries are having to resort to “hot play”, where children are kept indoors because it is simply too hot to go outside.

Air conditioning ‘only real solution’

The problem is that most schools are not built to cope with temperatures that regularly hit 35C.

“Many schools don’t have any ventilation systems other than opening and closing windows,” said Tim Fulford, a teacher and National Education Union health and safety representative. In some of the newer Blair-era private finance initiative (PFI) schools “you can’t even do that”.

Last month, a landmark report from the government’s Climate Change Committee warned the UK is “built for a climate that no longer exists today and will be increasingly distant in years to come”.

Among its many recommendations was a call for air conditioning to be installed in all schools within 25 years.

This is the “only real solution”, said Sanghani, “but they’re never going to fit out all schools with AC. The cost would be astronomical.”

In the meantime, the CCC has said exams should be held at cooler times of the year. It cited research that showed taking a test on a 32C day reduces a pupil’s chance of passing by around 10% compared with a 22C day.

The UK Health Security Agency has gone further, advising that schools should “consider rearranging school start, finish and play times to avoid teaching during very hot conditions”. This happens in countries like France, which have longer summer holidays and have earlier start and finish times on very hot days.

“That would still be an inconvenience for parents to have to find childcare solutions, but it’s the best solution I can think of,” said Sanghani. “I’d personally be very happy to start the teaching day earlier when it’s cooler and head home by the time it gets unbearable.”

What began as a photo opportunity between two world leaders has spiraled into geopolitical acrimony. An escalating war of words between President Donald Trump and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni over who asked whom to pose for a photograph at the recent G7 conference now threatens to impact material relations between the Trump administration and Italy’s right-wing government. As Trump rages on social media over the photo flap, Meloni returns to Italy with an eye toward next year’s national elections — and the benefits of being seen standing up to an increasingly unpopular American president.

‘Developing rift’ with origins in the Iran war

Meloni is “clearly irked” at Trump’s “suggestion that she ‘begged’ him for a photo” at the recent G7 summit, said NBC News. While the prime minister “didn’t respond publicly” to other Trump barbs this spring, the “most recent clash, by contrast, quickly escalated.”

Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani “abruptly cancelled a planned trip” to the U.S. after calling Trump’s comments “serious and offensive” to the whole of Italy, said The Associated Press. “Italy and I never beg,” said Meloni in a video response posted to social media over the weekend.

The “continuing exchange” between the two leaders has “highlighted a developing rift between the two countries” stemming from Trump’s war on Iran, said the BBC. Trump and Meloni once enjoyed a “close political relationship,” with Meloni the “sole European leader” to have attended Trump’s second inauguration.

The binational relationship has “grown strained in recent months over the war in Iran,” said Axios, particularly after Italy “denied U.S. aircraft permission to land at its bases” in March. Trump’s relationship with Europe more broadly “had long been fraying” over the war with Iran, his trade policies and threats to annex Greenland, said the Los Angeles Times.

Still, while Trump took a “warmer tone toward other European leaders” at the G7 meeting as they “aligned behind his interim agreement” to pause fighting in Iran, “tensions again were expected to be on full display” at next month’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. Meloni’s pushback on Trump’s photograph claim is a “punctuation mark” on a growing trend among European leaders to speak against the Trump administration, said CNN.

Electoral opportunity ‘deftly utilized’

Meloni had been trying to “preserve some harmony” between herself and Trump “until this week,” said The New York Times. She has “sought some distance” from the president now, as their “friendship became a political liability among Italian voters.” Meloni is “doing poorly in Italy with her level of popularity,” said Trump on Truth Social. Now that the U.S. has allegedly “defeated Iran militarily,” he continued, “she wants to be friends again in order to get her ‘numbers up.’ No thanks!!!"

Trump may be correct that Meloni’s furthering of this feud is being done with an eye toward domestic Italian politics, said Fox News. The prime minister “must have calculated” that a “public row” with Trump “yields no tangible consequences other than an increase in her domestic and international standing,” said Mattia Diletti, a political science lecturer at Sapienza University of Rome, to the outlet.

Trump’s story is nevertheless “very difficult to believe,” said MS NOW. Not only has he “peddled similar absurdities before,” but “he’s not at all popular in Italy,” leaving Meloni “no political incentive to be seen with him.” Meloni’s pushback to Trump comes as the premier “gears up for a reelection battle,” in which her “close relationship” with Trump has become an “increasing political liability,” said the Financial Times.

Meloni faced a “setback in her grip on power in Italy” in March, after her government lost a battle over justice reform, said Time. Critics saw that defeat as a “barometer of how Italians perceived her closeness" with Trump, and how they have been “troubled by Trump’s globally destabilizing actions.”

Meloni “deftly utilized the opportunity” presented by the president in his photography blame-game to “distance herself from Trump,” said the Financial Times. Italian diplomats are “now working in overdrive,” hoping to “limit the fallout or deter Trump from retaliating against Italy.” Meloni’s “international policy is in tatters,” said former Italian NATO Ambassador Stefano Stefanini to the outlet. In reimagining Italian foreign policy moving forward, she “has to be careful not to appear to flip-flop.” Italians will “remember her closeness to Trump, so she has to tread this very carefully.”

What happened

Former Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham has emerged as the likely successor to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who announced his resignation Monday amid a revolt inside his Labour Party triggered by falling poll numbers and substantial losses in local elections last month. Burnham, who won a seat in Parliament in a special election last week, announced he would run for Labour leader before being sworn in.

Who said what

Starmer’s resignation “could have triggered a divisive leadership contest, but several Labour lawmakers said they now expected more of a coronation,” Reuters said. Burnham, 56, quickly “won the support of another potential leadership rival,” ​former Health Minister Wes Streeting, and no other potential candidates stepped forward. Following an “extraordinary month of deft political maneuvering,” Burnham “was treated like a celebrity” when he arrived at Parliament, with “television crews filming his arrival from helicopters,” The New York Times said.

What next?

Starmer will stay on as caretaker prime minister until Labour picks a new leader, a process starting with nominations opening July 9. If there’s a contest, the “election would likely drag on into September,” The Associated Press said. If it’s a “coronation,” Reuters said, Burnham could “enter office by mid-July.”

What happened

U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz, in a ruling unsealed Monday, threw out six federal subpoenas targeting Minnesota Democratic officials, including Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison. There’s “overwhelming evidence” that the “dominant purpose” of the subpoenas was to “coerce Minnesota officials into assisting” the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis and “to harass and retaliate against them for failing to do so,” Schlitz, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in his June 17 ruling. That’s a “blatantly unlawful and unethical use of the grand jury process.”

Who said what

The subpoenas were issued in January “amid a bitter political battle between the Trump administration and state officials” following the shooting death of Renee Good, The Washington Post said. The Justice Department has “struggled — without success — to identify a single plausible investigatory justification for the subpoenas,” Schiltz wrote. But they fit President Donald Trump’s “well-established history of using criminal investigations to retaliate against” his “political and personal adversaries.”

What next?

Schlitz’s ruling is the “latest rebuke by the federal judiciary of Justice Department efforts to aggressively implement” Trump’s agenda and improperly “target” his opponents, The Associated Press said. It also “raises questions about similar immigration-related investigations elsewhere,” Axios said.

What happened

The Senate on Monday approved legislation intended to lower the cost of housing by increasing supply, cutting regulations and limiting the number of single-family homes owned by large institutional investors. The bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed 85-5 and is expected to clear the House as soon as Tuesday.

It’s the “biggest housing bill in more than 30 years,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the Banking Committee. Committee Chair Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said the legislation will “help more Americans achieve the dream of homeownership.”

Who said what

The vote was a “rare bipartisan legislative achievement” as “lawmakers in both parties try to address housing costs in an election year,” The Associated Press said. The “final bill has received widespread support in the housing community,” both from landlords and “groups that advocate for tenants and low-income renters.” But “housing economists and researchers” expect it to have “little impact when it comes to bringing housing prices down,” The Washington Post said, though some provisions should “make meaningful progress toward improving supply and affordability.”

“There is no magic wand that will fix this crisis overnight,” David Dworkin, chief executive of the National Housing Conference, told the AP. “But this bill is a significant down payment on a long-term effort to make housing more affordable for all Americans.”

What next?

Senate approval is “expected to set the legislation on a glide path to President Donald Trump’s desk for signature as soon as this week,” Politico said.

The US military will include Australia in a global pre-positioning programme for weapons, ammunition and vehicles for the first time, according to reports.

There is a “growing US footprint in Australia”, said Defence Minister Richard Marles, which is “important in terms of building our own military capability” but critics have asked if Australia is “acting like America’s 51st state”.

Rotating force

Although Australia does not permit foreign military bases on its soil, it hosts US Marines for exercises for six months of the year in the northern city of Darwin, and a “rotating force” of US-commanded submarines will arrive in Western Australia next year, reported France 24.

If the US and China “come to blows over Taiwan”, the naval base in Western Australia “offers a berth” that would bring American nuclear-powered submarines “close to the fight” – and provide a “haven if things go wrong”, said The Wall Street Journal.

In 2023, as part of a trial of pre-positioning US military equipment, the US Army left trucks at Bandiana, Victoria, after war games with Australia, which are held every two years. A separate US Marines storage facility in Australia is expected to reach full capacity by 2028, with a global defence contractor employing around 110 engineers and specialists.

The US Navy has allocated $30 million (£23 million) to build warehouses and offices in the state of Victoria in 2027. The “hugely significant American presence” in the Asia-Pacific is a counterbalance to China’s “very significant military build-up”, said Marles.

Trump whirlwind

Experts are divided over whether Australia should respond to Beijing this way. A report from the Lowy Institute warned that China has the capability to strike northern Australia with “ballistic missiles deployed to its South China Sea outposts”.

The think tank’s director of international security, Sam Roggeveen, told Agence France-Presse that this was a “relevant consideration” in locating a stockpile in Australia’s southeast because “once these facilities are operational, they would be obvious targets for China”.

There is “little political appetite” for a “massive increase in Australian defence expenditure”, said Australian National University professor of international security John Blaxland, so “facilitating greater US investment in Australian real estate is widely considered to be the most prudent approach to take”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s “wholehearted embrace” of an “enhanced strategic relationship” with Japan “surely” confirms that Labor has “signed up totally to the United States and its regional policy in the teeth of the Trump whirlwind”, wrote international affairs expert James Curran in the Financial Review last month.

There is a growing “acceptance” that Aukus, the security partnership between Australia, the UK and the US, is “cannibalising the defence budget”, yet ministers “believe the problem only needs to be managed, not addressed”. There are “precedents” for close US allies withdrawing permission for US access to jointly operated military bases and airspace.

Spain “point-blank denied” Washington the use of two of its critical bases for Iran-related missions, while Saudi Arabia and Kuwait appeared to restrict Washington’s use of joint facilities that were critical to Trump’s mission in the Strait of Hormuz.

So Australia “could, if it so chose, do the same” – but is the country “even considering this might be an option in the future”?

Today marks 10 years since Britain voted to leave the EU. And ever since, “Westminster has been in a state of almost constant upheaval”, said Tom McTague in The Times. Six different prime ministers have struggled to deal with the realities of Brexit, in what has been “quite comfortably, the worst period of governance in Britain’s modern democratic history”.

Public opinion has decidedly shifted in the past decade. In 2016, we voted 52% to 48% in favour of Brexit, but now 57% of Britons think the UK was wrong to vote to leave the EU, according to a YouGov poll this month. And that includes 23% of Leave voters. A majority (59%) support a closer relationship with the EU but opinions are divided about exactly what that should mean.

What did the commentators say?

“Life in Brexit Britain is simply harder,” said The Economist. Since leaving the EU, we have “mostly failed to pursue the radical deregulation that small-state Brexiteers promised”. Many European rules have “stayed on the books”, including restrictions on Britons’ working hours and a fair few animal-welfare protections. Some estimates put the GDP-per-person “damage from Brexit” as high as 8% but “it would be churlish” to say leaving “has hurt everyone” when “puffins and lobsters are among the winners”.

A decent proportion of Starmer’s “nugatory” achievements in office “simply would not have been possible if we had stayed in the EU”, said Brexit campaigner Michael Gove in The Spectator. A steel tariff package, a cut in tariffs on “more than 100 foodstuffs”, trade deals with the US and India – not to mention gaining a “decisive edge in AI” outside of the EU’s Digital Markets Act – were all secured by “our Brexit freedoms”. People say Brexit is “tawdry and compromised” or even a “self-inflicted wound that makes seppuku look like keyhole surgery” but “we have taken back control”.

The referendum result “sent shockwaves across the world”, said Laëtitia Langlois, a French lecturer in British political studies, on The Conversation. But, rather than delivering greater social or economic prosperity, it triggered a “major recomposition” of the UK’s political landscape. It has “normalised and mainstreamed populist discourse” and contributed to “the erosion of the two traditional parties”. Divisions exposed by the referendum “created the conditions for culture wars” that map less easily onto conventional party politics and “continue to tear British society apart”.

“Little that most people care about has improved since 2016, while much has got worse,” said McTague in The Times. This past decade “has exposed a political class that appears unable to govern, sitting atop a state no longer fit for purpose”. We voted to regain control and “discovered our leaders couldn’t handle it”.

What next?

The UK “needs to move on from Brexit”, said the Financial Times’ editorial board. But that does not mean we should “ignore its consequences”. The best way to proceed is to move closer to the EU, stopping “short of rejoining”, through an “evolving, bespoke arrangement”. We cannot “rewind the clock” but we “can, and should, seek to regain more” of what we have lost.

The balance of opinion has certainly “shifted” against Leave since 2016, said Sunder Katwala in The Independent. But Britain faces “years of negotiation about how to have a closer relationship” with the EU again. I hope we can find “common ground”, instead of gearing up for “another uncivil war between our new post-Brexit tribes”.

Three decades after Frank Skinner, David Baddiel and the Lightning Seeds first sang that football was “coming home”, the lyrics are being belted out again during the World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico.

In the Radio Times, Baddiel, one of the song’s co-writers, said that English people “feel, with this game, that essentially: it’s our ball” and that “football is ours. We codified it. We gave it to the world.” But critics say it is “mistaken” to claim that England is the home of football, said Sky News.

Scottish professors

The Dutch football legend Ruud Gullit has dismissed the “Three Lions (Football's Coming Home)” song as “arrogant”, saying England does not “own football”.

That chimes with the fact that the “English football public has a certain reputation globally”, said The Athletic. “There is an assumption of arrogance, of high expectations, of going into every major tournament presuming their team will win it.”

It’s also wrong to claim that England is the home of football, Hamish Husband, from the Scottish football magazine Tartan Army, told Sky News, because a group of footballers in the 19th century, known as the “Scotch professors”, were pioneers of the modern passing game.

Their new tactics were adopted by Scotland before spreading across Europe and other continents. “It was the travellers that worked the factories of the UK that took football to the world – not England”, he said.

A letter written by Reverend Samuel Rutherford in the 1600s, “holds the key to Scotland’s claim”, wrote Tom Burrows on BBC Newsround. He complained about people who gathered to play football on Sunday afternoons near Anwoth Kirk, his church. The site can “reasonably claim to be the earliest” game of football, said William Wyeth, a curator of history at English Heritage.

To bolster Scotland’s claim, archaeologists doing building works at Stirling Castle found a football behind a wood panel built in the 1540s. It was “made of pieces of leather sewn together, more like football that we know today”. Also, the first modern football club that’s “widely recognised as such” was founded in Edinburgh in 1824.

Footeball or football?

But the roots of the beautiful game may stretch back much further. More than 2,500 years ago, the Chinese played “tsu chu”, or “kickball”. The earliest reference to organised ball games in England comes in around 1174, said Simon Inglis on English Heritage.

But “we can’t be sure” whether these games in England involved “kicking, as well as handling, the ball”. A woodcut from 1612, which refers to “country swaines at footeball”, shows the players “using hands” as in volleyball. So was it called “footeball” because the “players played on foot, rather than because they played it exclusively with their feet”?

However, football’s “global spread” couldn’t have happened without the “evangelical efforts of British entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, soldiers and sailors, who took the sport to Europe, South America and all corners of the Empire”.

On the charge of arrogance, yes, it’s true that people hear the song as a statement that England “view winning as the rightful outcome, and that anyone else winning is somehow wrong”, said The Athletic. But England fans themselves “simply do not see the song that way”. “The whole point of it is looking back on past glories and melancholy,” one fan told the outlet. “It’s not a triumphant song at all.” But “if English is your second language, I get why people would misunderstand it.”

Another long-standing England fan told the outlet she found the controversy entertaining. “I find it quite funny that people get upset about it,” she said. “I actually enjoy using the phrase just to wind up international colleagues!”

Andy Burnham appears to be heading to No. 10 unopposed after Keir Starmer resigned on Monday and his main leadership rival rowed in behind him.

With the new PM set to be in place by the time Parliament returns from summer recess at the start of September, attention is already turning to who the key players could be in a Burnham government, and what their appointment says for its likely direction.

Ed Miliband

The energy secretary and former Labour leader has long coveted the role of chancellor and had been widely seen as the frontrunner to replace Rachel Reeves. He has been a “key champion of Burnham with the parliamentary party and shares the same desire for Labour to enact more radical change, from tax overhaul to public control of utilities”, said The Guardian.

Yet Miliband’s opposition to further North Sea oil and gas licences and strict adherence to net zero commitments, even as energy bills have rocketed, has made him increasingly unpopular with the trade unions and wider public.

Burnham “may have cooled on the idea” of appointing Miliband to the Treasury, said The i Paper, but expect him to get another big position in government even if he misses out on his dream job.

Wes Streeting

Another name being touted as a potential chancellor is one-time PM leadership rival Wes Streeting. The former health secretary, who resigned from Cabinet last month, has withdrawn from the leadership contest and decided to back Burnham, saying on X that the new MP for Makerfield is “committed to building an inclusive party that draws on the best of our political traditions”.

One of Labour’s best communicators, with a compelling personal story, but hailing from the right of the party, his appointment as chancellor or to another top Cabinet job could “align the competing wings of the party” and “show – or at least give the impression – that Labour is more united than voters think”, said Mauricio Alencar, politics and economics reporter for City A.M.

Louise Haigh

The former transport secretary was forced to quit just months after Labour took office in 2024 over a prior fraud conviction, but has now emerged as a “crucial power broker” on the backbenches for the party’s “soft left”, said BBC chief political correspondent Henry Zeffman.

She was “at the heart of the huge rebellion which scuppered the government’s welfare cuts in 2025”, led Burnham’s Makerfield by-election campaign, and is “in line for a big cabinet job”.

Miatta Fahnbulleh

The MP for Peckham has been one of Burnham’s most vocal supporters in Parliament. A former civil servant who ran the left-wing New Economics Foundation think tank, Fahnbulleh resigned as a junior minister for communities in the aftermath of the May local elections.

Hailing from the Labour left, she has “thrown her weight behind a number of highly controversial economic policies including imposing a wealth tax, nationalising several public companies across water and transport, rolling out further green financing and taxing other streams of income more”, said Alencar. Understood to be helping Burnham work on policy, she is a “rising star” in the party and has even been touted as a dark-horse bet for chancellor, in what would be a “radical break from Starmer’s premiership”.

Anneliese Midgley

Relatively unknown outside Labour circles, Midgley was elected MP for Knowsley, near Makerfield, only in 2024 but has been an “influential force in the Labour movement for much longer than that”, said Zeffman. She worked for both Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn in opposition and before that at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and Unite.

She is seen as a “plausible candidate” for chief whip or even political secretary in Downing Street, “not a job usually held by an elected politician”.