Keir Starmer has eased sanctions on Russian oil in a bid to soften the impact of the Iran war on jet fuel supplies and living costs. Imports of diesel and jet fuel derived from Russian crude and processed in a third country will no longer be restricted, and some sanctions on the transport of Russian liquefied natural gas have been temporarily lifted. The government is also pressing supermarkets to freeze the prices of essential goods such as eggs, bread and milk in exchange for lifting regulations on packaging and healthy food. Reform UK has chosen local “plucky plumber” Robert Kenyon as its candidate to stand against Andy Burnham in the Makerfield by-election. The 41-year-old former army reservist ran for the seat in 2024, finishing second behind Labour’s Josh Simons. Comedian Josh Widdicombe, TV presenter Emma Willis and professional dancer Johannes Radebe have been confirmed as the new hosts of Strictly Come Dancing. The show’s executive producer, Sarah James, said the new combination was “unexpected” but that “their magic was undeniable the moment they came together”.

(L-R) Widdicombe, Willis and Radebe

Burnham in his campaign video for the Makerfield by-election

Don’t be taken in by Burnham’s “northern charm”

Having enraged most of their natural voters, Labour MPs are now clambering on to a lifeboat named Andy Burnham, says Owen Jones in The Guardian. “Do the rest of us blindly hop on board?” The Greater Manchester mayor is, indisputably, Labour’s best bet. He’s the party’s most popular politician, has an “easy northern charm” and genuine progressive achievements to his name. But failure to scrutinise Burnham would “smack of fatal naivety”. If he wants support from the left, which he will need to win power at a general election, “he will have to earn it”.

First he must demonstrate that his previous contempt for the left – voting for the Iraq war, attacking the mansion tax as “spiteful”, abstaining from the 2015 Conservative vote on benefit cuts – is firmly a thing of the past. He says Britain has been “on the wrong path for 40 years” and is loudly championing “stronger public control” but is yet to offer clear explanations of either. Of particular concern is his record on housing. The developments built from his Greater Manchester Housing Investment Loans Fund mostly consist of luxury flats the average Mancunian can’t afford, and when he promised in 2024 to build at least 10,000 council homes, the first year of the scheme produced a mere 10. Why should we expect better outcomes in higher office? Then there’s his naivety. Last year, he said government had to “get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets”, causing confusion that only added to the market pressures he now faces. Burnham may well become a “sincerely committed progressive politician”, but he’ll first need to dispel concerns about the “firmness” of his ideological commitments.

Advertisement

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If your savings are in cash, inflation is a real threat. That’s why you should look to Alliance Witan. The trust now boasts around £5bn in assets. It aims to beat inflation and drive returns through capital growth and a rising dividend, while keeping costs low. Calling on the skills of between 8 and 12 top fund managers, each choosing 10-20 of their most exciting ideas, it's just delivered an increased dividend for the 59th year in a row. Invest without leaving your comfort zone, at alliancewitan.com. Investment value may rise or fall. Dividend increases not guaranteed.

Two 20th-century masters had their auction records smashed at Christie’s Rockefeller Centre salesroom on Monday night, says The New York Times. A swirling Jackson Pollock drip painting from 1948 sold for an astonishing $181.2m with fees, just minutes after a 1913 bronze head sculpture by Constantin Brancusi brought in $107.6m. The two sales were part of a $630m auction of works from the estate of the late publishing magnate S.I. Newhouse. The estate sale and a second auction the same night went for a combined $1.1bn – “the top end of the expected range”.

Humans 1, robots 0

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One of the more surprising stories in the rest of today’s newsletter is that travel agents – long written off as obsolete in the age of online reviews and AI – are having a resurgence. Our second comment piece, by New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, is about the growing backlash against AI among young Americans.

The Knowledge is researched, written and edited by humans. We’re not Luddites, and we’re experimenting all the time, but for the important stuff we’ve found that algorithms are still no substitute for the real deal: us.

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Keir Starmer has eased sanctions on Russian oil in a bid to soften the impact of the Iran war on jet fuel supplies and living costs. Imports of diesel and jet fuel derived from Russian crude and processed in a third country will no longer be restricted, and some sanctions on the transport of Russian liquefied natural gas have been temporarily lifted. The government is also pressing supermarkets to freeze the prices of essential goods such as eggs, bread and milk in exchange for lifting regulations on packaging and healthy food. Reform UK has chosen local “plucky plumber” Robert Kenyon as its candidate to stand against Andy Burnham in the Makerfield by-election. The 41-year-old former army reservist ran for the seat in 2024, finishing second behind Labour’s Josh Simons. Comedian Josh Widdicombe, TV presenter Emma Willis and professional dancer Johannes Radebe have been confirmed as the new hosts of Strictly Come Dancing. The show’s executive producer, Sarah James, said the new combination was “unexpected” but that “their magic was undeniable the moment they came together”.

(L-R) Widdicombe, Willis and Radebe

Burnham in his campaign video for the Makerfield by-election

Don’t be taken in by Burnham’s “northern charm”

Having enraged most of their natural voters, Labour MPs are now clambering on to a lifeboat named Andy Burnham, says Owen Jones in The Guardian. “Do the rest of us blindly hop on board?” The Greater Manchester mayor is, indisputably, Labour’s best bet. He’s the party’s most popular politician, has an “easy northern charm” and genuine progressive achievements to his name. But failure to scrutinise Burnham would “smack of fatal naivety”. If he wants support from the left, which he will need to win power at a general election, “he will have to earn it”.

First he must demonstrate that his previous contempt for the left – voting for the Iraq war, attacking the mansion tax as “spiteful”, abstaining from the 2015 Conservative vote on benefit cuts – is firmly a thing of the past. He says Britain has been “on the wrong path for 40 years” and is loudly championing “stronger public control” but is yet to offer clear explanations of either. Of particular concern is his record on housing. The developments built from his Greater Manchester Housing Investment Loans Fund mostly consist of luxury flats the average Mancunian can’t afford, and when he promised in 2024 to build at least 10,000 council homes, the first year of the scheme produced a mere 10. Why should we expect better outcomes in higher office? Then there’s his naivety. Last year, he said government had to “get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets”, causing confusion that only added to the market pressures he now faces. Burnham may well become a “sincerely committed progressive politician”, but he’ll first need to dispel concerns about the “firmness” of his ideological commitments.

Advertisement

ALLIANCE WITAN. MOVE FROM CASH TO INVESTING WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR COMFORT ZONE.
If your savings are in cash, inflation is a real threat. That’s why you should look to Alliance Witan. The trust now boasts around £5bn in assets. It aims to beat inflation and drive returns through capital growth and a rising dividend, while keeping costs low. Calling on the skills of between 8 and 12 top fund managers, each choosing 10-20 of their most exciting ideas, it's just delivered an increased dividend for the 59th year in a row. Invest without leaving your comfort zone, at alliancewitan.com. Investment value may rise or fall. Dividend increases not guaranteed.

Two 20th-century masters had their auction records smashed at Christie’s Rockefeller Centre salesroom on Monday night, says The New York Times. A swirling Jackson Pollock drip painting from 1948 sold for an astonishing $181.2m with fees, just minutes after a 1913 bronze head sculpture by Constantin Brancusi brought in $107.6m. The two sales were part of a $630m auction of works from the estate of the late publishing magnate S.I. Newhouse. The estate sale and a second auction the same night went for a combined $1.1bn – “the top end of the expected range”.

In Brazil, there’s a new craze for “whistling-only” WhatsApp groups, says Tiago Rogero in The Guardian: chats full of random people in which the only permitted communication is voice notes of whistling. The choice of tune is up to the sender – some contribute two chirps while washing up, others deliver full-blown renditions of the Pink Panther theme. The groups are now receiving as many as 600 messages a day, with the most popular performances racking up hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok.

Getty

Long written off as obsolete in the age of online reviews and ChatGPT, “the travel agent is alive and well”, says Heidi Mitchell in The Wall Street Journal. Total revenue for the industry is projected to hit $134bn this year, up 17% from 2023, while LinkedIn listed “travel adviser” as one of the 25 fastest-growing jobs of the past three years. The trend is apparently being driven by travellers wanting to avoid the busy tourist spots that everyone else goes to, and to have local intel and seamless transport, particularly for complicated trips or uber-luxe experiences.

Why young Americans are turning against AI

When Eric Schmidt, the former boss of Google, brought up AI during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona on Friday, says Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, the graduates erupted in boos. “Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done,” he told them, possibly as a promise of opportunity. “The students seemed to hear it as a threat.” It was the same a week earlier, when the real estate executive Gloria Caulfield addressed the University of Central Florida and described AI as the “next industrial revolution”. Amid the boos, someone shouted: “AI sucks!” Both speakers appeared shocked, but they shouldn’t have been. Evidence of a ferocious backlash against AI, especially among young people, is everywhere.

One recent report found that just 18% of Gen Zs feel hopeful about AI, while almost half say the risks outweigh the benefits. American politicians with a following among young folks – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left, James Fishback on the right – are calling for moratoriums on data centres. And AI is increasingly a pop culture villain: “The people who make this stuff are losers,” says Hannah Einbinder, star of the HBO hit Hacks, which has put hatred of the technology at the centre of its current season. A young man recently threw a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI boss Sam Altman. The industry’s “oligarchic leaders” are responding the only way they know how: pouring money into politics to block any attempt to regulate them. But this is a huge part of the problem. Young folks abroad believe their governments will regulate AI for public benefit: Japan helps companies use AI to complement humans, not replace them; last month, Oslo introduced self-driving public buses. Americans, quite rightly, know they will be fed to the wolves. And they’re furious.

Léa Seydoux and Daniel Craig in Spectre (2015)

I analysed every “sound event” from nearly 2,000 action movies over the past 75 years, says Stephen Follows on Substack. The car chase is clearly dying, with vehicle sounds down 16% since 2000. Explosions have nearly doubled over the same period, presumably driven by the Marvel movies and their many imitators. Gunfire is up by a whopping 43%, but the percentage of lead characters killed by gunshots has been in steady decline since the 1950s. “The only logical conclusion is that the aim of action movie villains is getting considerably worse.”

In 1919, says Jill Lepore in The New Yorker, a tank in Boston containing around 9.5 million litres of molasses burst, flooding the city with a “fearsome wave of syrup” reportedly 50ft high and travelling at 35mph. The clean-up took weeks, and for months afterwards everywhere that people had tracked molasses – underground subway platforms, and so on – remained sticky under foot. “Even years later, on hot days, the North End smelled like a gingerbread house.”

It’s the first ever chick born from an artificial egg, says Sarah Knapton in The Daily Telegraph. Colossal Biosciences, which describes itself as the “world’s first de-extinction company”, revealed yesterday that it had hatched live chicks inside a capsule which provides the growing embryo with everything it needs to develop, with a little window that allowed scientists to watch the chicks grow. The idea is – eventually – to resurrect New Zealand’s 12ft-tall South Island giant moa, which was wiped out some time in the 14th or 15th centuries by the arrival of the Maori from Polynesia, and is far too large to be borne by any living bird.

Keir Starmer has eased sanctions on Russian oil in a bid to soften the impact of the Iran war on jet fuel supplies and living costs. Imports of diesel and jet fuel derived from Russian crude and processed in a third country will no longer be restricted, and some sanctions on the transport of Russian liquefied natural gas have been temporarily lifted. The government is also pressing supermarkets to freeze the prices of essential goods such as eggs, bread and milk in exchange for lifting regulations on packaging and healthy food. Reform UK has chosen local “plucky plumber” Robert Kenyon as its candidate to stand against Andy Burnham in the Makerfield by-election. The 41-year-old former army reservist ran for the seat in 2024, finishing second behind Labour’s Josh Simons. Comedian Josh Widdicombe, TV presenter Emma Willis and professional dancer Johannes Radebe have been confirmed as the new hosts of Strictly Come Dancing. The show’s executive producer, Sarah James, said the new combination was “unexpected” but that “their magic was undeniable the moment they came together”.

(L-R) Widdicombe, Willis and Radebe

Burnham in his campaign video for the Makerfield by-election

Don’t be taken in by Burnham’s “northern charm”

Having enraged most of their natural voters, Labour MPs are now clambering on to a lifeboat named Andy Burnham, says Owen Jones in The Guardian. “Do the rest of us blindly hop on board?” The Greater Manchester mayor is, indisputably, Labour’s best bet. He’s the party’s most popular politician, has an “easy northern charm” and genuine progressive achievements to his name. But failure to scrutinise Burnham would “smack of fatal naivety”. If he wants support from the left, which he will need to win power at a general election, “he will have to earn it”.

First he must demonstrate that his previous contempt for the left – voting for the Iraq war, attacking the mansion tax as “spiteful”, abstaining from the 2015 Conservative vote on benefit cuts – is firmly a thing of the past. He says Britain has been “on the wrong path for 40 years” and is loudly championing “stronger public control” but is yet to offer clear explanations of either. Of particular concern is his record on housing. The developments built from his Greater Manchester Housing Investment Loans Fund mostly consist of luxury flats the average Mancunian can’t afford, and when he promised in 2024 to build at least 10,000 council homes, the first year of the scheme produced a mere 10. Why should we expect better outcomes in higher office? Then there’s his naivety. Last year, he said government had to “get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets”, causing confusion that only added to the market pressures he now faces. Burnham may well become a “sincerely committed progressive politician”, but he’ll first need to dispel concerns about the “firmness” of his ideological commitments.

Advertisement

ALLIANCE WITAN. MOVE FROM CASH TO INVESTING WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR COMFORT ZONE.
If your savings are in cash, inflation is a real threat. That’s why you should look to Alliance Witan. The trust now boasts around £5bn in assets. It aims to beat inflation and drive returns through capital growth and a rising dividend, while keeping costs low. Calling on the skills of between 8 and 12 top fund managers, each choosing 10-20 of their most exciting ideas, it's just delivered an increased dividend for the 59th year in a row. Invest without leaving your comfort zone, at alliancewitan.com. Investment value may rise or fall. Dividend increases not guaranteed.

Two 20th-century masters had their auction records smashed at Christie’s Rockefeller Centre salesroom on Monday night, says The New York Times. A swirling Jackson Pollock drip painting from 1948 sold for an astonishing $181.2m with fees, just minutes after a 1913 bronze head sculpture by Constantin Brancusi brought in $107.6m. The two sales were part of a $630m auction of works from the estate of the late publishing magnate S.I. Newhouse. The estate sale and a second auction the same night went for a combined $1.1bn – “the top end of the expected range”.

In Brazil, there’s a new craze for “whistling-only” WhatsApp groups, says Tiago Rogero in The Guardian: chats full of random people in which the only permitted communication is voice notes of whistling. The choice of tune is up to the sender – some contribute two chirps while washing up, others deliver full-blown renditions of the Pink Panther theme. The groups are now receiving as many as 600 messages a day, with the most popular performances racking up hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok.

Getty

Long written off as obsolete in the age of online reviews and ChatGPT, “the travel agent is alive and well”, says Heidi Mitchell in The Wall Street Journal. Total revenue for the industry is projected to hit $134bn this year, up 17% from 2023, while LinkedIn listed “travel adviser” as one of the 25 fastest-growing jobs of the past three years. The trend is apparently being driven by travellers wanting to avoid the busy tourist spots that everyone else goes to, and to have local intel and seamless transport, particularly for complicated trips or uber-luxe experiences.

Why young Americans are turning against AI

When Eric Schmidt, the former boss of Google, brought up AI during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona on Friday, says Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, the graduates erupted in boos. “Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done,” he told them, possibly as a promise of opportunity. “The students seemed to hear it as a threat.” It was the same a week earlier, when the real estate executive Gloria Caulfield addressed the University of Central Florida and described AI as the “next industrial revolution”. Amid the boos, someone shouted: “AI sucks!” Both speakers appeared shocked, but they shouldn’t have been. Evidence of a ferocious backlash against AI, especially among young people, is everywhere.

One recent report found that just 18% of Gen Zs feel hopeful about AI, while almost half say the risks outweigh the benefits. American politicians with a following among young folks – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left, James Fishback on the right – are calling for moratoriums on data centres. And AI is increasingly a pop culture villain: “The people who make this stuff are losers,” says Hannah Einbinder, star of the HBO hit Hacks, which has put hatred of the technology at the centre of its current season. A young man recently threw a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI boss Sam Altman. The industry’s “oligarchic leaders” are responding the only way they know how: pouring money into politics to block any attempt to regulate them. But this is a huge part of the problem. Young folks abroad believe their governments will regulate AI for public benefit: Japan helps companies use AI to complement humans, not replace them; last month, Oslo introduced self-driving public buses. Americans, quite rightly, know they will be fed to the wolves. And they’re furious.

Léa Seydoux and Daniel Craig in Spectre (2015)

I analysed every “sound event” from nearly 2,000 action movies over the past 75 years, says Stephen Follows on Substack. The car chase is clearly dying, with vehicle sounds down 16% since 2000. Explosions have nearly doubled over the same period, presumably driven by the Marvel movies and their many imitators. Gunfire is up by a whopping 43%, but the percentage of lead characters killed by gunshots has been in steady decline since the 1950s. “The only logical conclusion is that the aim of action movie villains is getting considerably worse.”

In 1919, says Jill Lepore in The New Yorker, a tank in Boston containing around 9.5 million litres of molasses burst, flooding the city with a “fearsome wave of syrup” reportedly 50ft high and travelling at 35mph. The clean-up took weeks, and for months afterwards everywhere that people had tracked molasses – underground subway platforms, and so on – remained sticky under foot. “Even years later, on hot days, the North End smelled like a gingerbread house.”

It’s the first ever chick born from an artificial egg, says Sarah Knapton in The Daily Telegraph. Colossal Biosciences, which describes itself as the “world’s first de-extinction company”, revealed yesterday that it had hatched live chicks inside a capsule which provides the growing embryo with everything it needs to develop, with a little window that allowed scientists to watch the chicks grow. The idea is – eventually – to resurrect New Zealand’s 12ft-tall South Island giant moa, which was wiped out some time in the 14th or 15th centuries by the arrival of the Maori from Polynesia, and is far too large to be borne by any living bird.

Wage growth slowed and unemployment in the UK unexpectedly rose to 5% in the three months to March, in the latest signs of the effect the Middle East conflict is having on the economy. The Office for National Statistics also said that the number of job openings has fallen to its lowest level since the depths of the 2021 Covid lockdown. A California jury has tossed out Elon Musk’s high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI and its boss Sam Altman, saying the Tesla boss waited too long to file it, meaning his claims had essentially expired. Musk accused Altman of “stealing a charity” by converting OpenAI, to which he donated millions of dollars, from a charitable venture to a for-profit company. The King met David Beckham and Alan Titchmarsh at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show yesterday, ahead of its opening to the public today. This year’s show features a rustic cottage inspired by Charles’s Highgrove house, as well as various gnomes painted by celebrities including Joanna Lumley, Mary Berry and Brian May.

Getty

L-R: Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and Giorgia Meloni. Jeanne Accorsini/ Pool/AFP/Getty

Rejoin the EU? Good luck with that

Ever since Keir Starmer took office in 2024, there’s been talk of a “reset” with the EU, says Lionel Laurent in Bloomberg. Now, with his premiership on the brink, any successor is expected to “hasten the rapprochement”. But who’s to say the EU wants Britain back? European diplomats still bristle at the UK’s history of “regulatory cherry-picking”. Nor is Britain’s sluggish economy the “El Dorado” it once seemed for a bloc struggling with its own stagnant growth. And good luck debating any kind of agreement while Nigel Farage is “on the march”. The local elections have only cemented to Brussels that Europe-friendly Labour will almost certainly be turfed out and potentially replaced by “Mr Brexit himself”. That’s enough to “keep everyone’s guard up”.

The question isn’t whether the EU would want us, says Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator, but why on earth we’d want them. The bloc is unable to agree on anything from Ukraine to its own budget. Frugal northern nations like Germany and Holland are fed up with the profligacy of an increasing number of southern nations. Italy is on course to surpass Greece as the most indebted country in the Eurozone; unemployment in France has risen above 8% for the first time since 2021, fuelling fears of a “long and deep” recession. Meanwhile, Spain’s decision to grant residency to half a million undocumented migrants provoked fury across the continent and marked the nation out as Europe’s “soft underbelly” – irregular crossings on the Western Mediterranean route into Spain are already up 50% this year. It’s hard to see how anyone could make the case for re-joining a bloc in such “terminal decline”.

🤖📈 Another danger of trying to rejoin is losing our competitive advantage, says Anne McElvoy in The i Paper. Many defence tech firms and top AI companies choose to operate in the UK “precisely because they don’t have to deal with the EU”. If we’re betting major growth on digital services rather than goods then we’re far better outside the bloc, where we can cut deals and innovate without all its complicated standards and constraints.

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After several close calls with avalanches, the explorer Luc Mehl set out to find a way to enjoy winter away from the mountains. What he discovered was Alaska’s “wild ice” – astonishingly clear frozen sheets of ice that form on remote rivers, alpine lakes and glacial lagoons, which are perfect for skating. To enjoy the full video, click on the image.

Eighty pence!

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Wage growth slowed and unemployment in the UK unexpectedly rose to 5% in the three months to March, in the latest signs of the effect the Middle East conflict is having on the economy. The Office for National Statistics also said that the number of job openings has fallen to its lowest level since the depths of the 2021 Covid lockdown. A California jury has tossed out Elon Musk’s high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI and its boss Sam Altman, saying the Tesla boss waited too long to file it, meaning his claims had essentially expired. Musk accused Altman of “stealing a charity” by converting OpenAI, to which he donated millions of dollars, from a charitable venture to a for-profit company. The King met David Beckham and Alan Titchmarsh at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show yesterday, ahead of its opening to the public today. This year’s show features a rustic cottage inspired by Charles’s Highgrove house, as well as various gnomes painted by celebrities including Joanna Lumley, Mary Berry and Brian May.

Getty

L-R: Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and Giorgia Meloni. Jeanne Accorsini/ Pool/AFP/Getty

Rejoin the EU? Good luck with that

Ever since Keir Starmer took office in 2024, there’s been talk of a “reset” with the EU, says Lionel Laurent in Bloomberg. Now, with his premiership on the brink, any successor is expected to “hasten the rapprochement”. But who’s to say the EU wants Britain back? European diplomats still bristle at the UK’s history of “regulatory cherry-picking”. Nor is Britain’s sluggish economy the “El Dorado” it once seemed for a bloc struggling with its own stagnant growth. And good luck debating any kind of agreement while Nigel Farage is “on the march”. The local elections have only cemented to Brussels that Europe-friendly Labour will almost certainly be turfed out and potentially replaced by “Mr Brexit himself”. That’s enough to “keep everyone’s guard up”.

The question isn’t whether the EU would want us, says Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator, but why on earth we’d want them. The bloc is unable to agree on anything from Ukraine to its own budget. Frugal northern nations like Germany and Holland are fed up with the profligacy of an increasing number of southern nations. Italy is on course to surpass Greece as the most indebted country in the Eurozone; unemployment in France has risen above 8% for the first time since 2021, fuelling fears of a “long and deep” recession. Meanwhile, Spain’s decision to grant residency to half a million undocumented migrants provoked fury across the continent and marked the nation out as Europe’s “soft underbelly” – irregular crossings on the Western Mediterranean route into Spain are already up 50% this year. It’s hard to see how anyone could make the case for re-joining a bloc in such “terminal decline”.

🤖📈 Another danger of trying to rejoin is losing our competitive advantage, says Anne McElvoy in The i Paper. Many defence tech firms and top AI companies choose to operate in the UK “precisely because they don’t have to deal with the EU”. If we’re betting major growth on digital services rather than goods then we’re far better outside the bloc, where we can cut deals and innovate without all its complicated standards and constraints.

Advertisement

Discover the easiest kitchen upgrade you’ll ever make. Home enhancements don’t need to be huge projects, fitting a Quooker boiling water tap is a quick and simple kitchen improvement. Enjoy instant 100 degrees and filtered water, all from one stylish tap. With an optional CUBE add on it will also dispense chilled and sparkling water.

Anyone who chooses Quooker will quickly find it indispensable. It transforms kitchen tasks, such as making hot drinks, preparing meals, cleaning and sterilising, helping to save you time, water and energy. Installing one is an investment in convenience and efficiency, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

You don’t need to wait until you’re having a complete kitchen re-fit, a Quooker system can usually be swapped for your old tap and installed in under two hours. It’s a small change that makes a big difference. Book a virtual appointment and see a Quooker in action for yourself. visit quooker.co.uk. And for a limited time installation is just £99!

After several close calls with avalanches, the explorer Luc Mehl set out to find a way to enjoy winter away from the mountains. What he discovered was Alaska’s “wild ice” – astonishingly clear frozen sheets of ice that form on remote rivers, alpine lakes and glacial lagoons, which are perfect for skating. To enjoy the full video, click on the image.

Voting in this month’s local elections wasn’t as “logical and considered” as you might have thought, say Jim Waterson and Polly Smythe in London Centric. Voters can typically put a cross beside the names of multiple candidates, who are listed in alphabetical order. This leads to the so-called “ballot order effect” – those with surnames beginning with A or B doing better than those further down the alphabet. Analysis of results in three councils – Bexley, Westminster, and Hammersmith and Fulham – found that in 82% of cases, the candidate whose name appeared highest on the ballot outperformed his or her party colleagues lower down the list.

TikTok/@Londonmasons

Gen Z “brethren” are giving the Freemasons an image update, says Charlotte Lytton in The Standard. On TikTok, young members of the secret society are unpacking some of the mystery behind it, performing on-trend dance routines and producing their own grime music, with lyrics such as “faith, hope, charity; man walk the walk”. Stuffy dinners are being swapped out for trips to Nando’s, and some Freemason groups are centred on modern pursuits such as Formula 1 and rum. But some things never change: what goes on at the meetings remains “opaque”.

Putin delivering a speech at this month’s Victory Day parade. Pavel Bednyakov/Pool/AFP/Getty

Is Putin living in a dream world?

The mood around the Ukraine war has palpably shifted, says Lawrence Freedman on Substack. Russia’s economy is struggling and Ukraine’s long-range drones are striking ever deeper, hitting the Moscow Oil Refinery, a chemical plant producing nitric acid for shells, and Gazprom’s Astrakhan facility. The symbolism was hard to miss at this year’s Victory Day parade in Moscow: a truncated, paranoid affair shorn of the advanced weaponry that once intimidated the West. Russian forces are now losing as many as 20,000 men – dead – per month, “buying less ground at higher cost than at any point this year”. Even Marco Rubio has begun echoing Kyiv’s line, calling it “a bad war” for Russia.

Yet there are still reasons for caution. Ukraine’s recruitment process is flawed, desertion is rife and its forces are spread thinly across a front line over 1,000 km long. A corruption scandal has reached President Zelensky’s inner circle, with the former chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, now charged. Russia is still producing drones in vast quantities, and the firmer ground of spring will help its grinding push towards the so-called “fortress cities” of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Perhaps most important, Vladimir Putin shows no sign at all of giving up. He depends on a General Staff that has been “relentlessly optimistic and boastful”, and they have convinced him his forces can capture the entire Donbas region by autumn. In actual fact, at their current rate it would take three decades. Whatever’s happening on the battlefield, this war will only end when “Putin’s perceptions catch up with reality”.

Instagram/@Vagabondwines

Many of today’s most “playful, experimental” new wines are coming from an unexpected source, says Victoria Daskal in the FT: London. The city’s urban wineries buy grapes from Oxfordshire, Kent, Sussex and Essex (and occasionally further afield) and blend them in special facilities in old warehouses, railway arches and industrial estates. Fulham’s London Cru produces English sparkling wine, as well as Chardonnay and Pinot Noir; Vagabond Wines in Canada Water produces 100,000 bottles a year in more than 100 different styles. Also helpful: England’s relatively cool climate produces light, fresh, less boozy wines – “exactly where modern demand is heading”.

The late peeress Lena Jeger once told her fellow diners in the House of Lords dining room that all the people she had slept with were now dead, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. Someone at the table piped up: “What about me?” Jeger gave her fellow peer a look, and replied: “You were dead at the time.”

It’s an exclusive new pocket watch, say Kathryn Armstrong and Vicky Wong on BBC News, which has sparked a frenzy that has forced stores to close around the world and police to deal with unruly shoppers. The Royal Pop collection – a collaboration between the Swiss watchmakers Swatch and Audemars Piguet – drew huge “mob-like” crowds in cities across the UK and elsewhere when it launched on Saturday, as people rushed the doors after queuing, in some cases, for days. Sales were restricted to one £335 watch per person, which one buyer claims to have resold online for more than £1,000.

Wage growth slowed and unemployment in the UK unexpectedly rose to 5% in the three months to March, in the latest signs of the effect the Middle East conflict is having on the economy. The Office for National Statistics also said that the number of job openings has fallen to its lowest level since the depths of the 2021 Covid lockdown. A California jury has tossed out Elon Musk’s high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI and its boss Sam Altman, saying the Tesla boss waited too long to file it, meaning his claims had essentially expired. Musk accused Altman of “stealing a charity” by converting OpenAI, to which he donated millions of dollars, from a charitable venture to a for-profit company. The King met David Beckham and Alan Titchmarsh at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show yesterday, ahead of its opening to the public today. This year’s show features a rustic cottage inspired by Charles’s Highgrove house, as well as various gnomes painted by celebrities including Joanna Lumley, Mary Berry and Brian May.

Getty

L-R: Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and Giorgia Meloni. Jeanne Accorsini/ Pool/AFP/Getty

Rejoin the EU? Good luck with that

Ever since Keir Starmer took office in 2024, there’s been talk of a “reset” with the EU, says Lionel Laurent in Bloomberg. Now, with his premiership on the brink, any successor is expected to “hasten the rapprochement”. But who’s to say the EU wants Britain back? European diplomats still bristle at the UK’s history of “regulatory cherry-picking”. Nor is Britain’s sluggish economy the “El Dorado” it once seemed for a bloc struggling with its own stagnant growth. And good luck debating any kind of agreement while Nigel Farage is “on the march”. The local elections have only cemented to Brussels that Europe-friendly Labour will almost certainly be turfed out and potentially replaced by “Mr Brexit himself”. That’s enough to “keep everyone’s guard up”.

The question isn’t whether the EU would want us, says Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator, but why on earth we’d want them. The bloc is unable to agree on anything from Ukraine to its own budget. Frugal northern nations like Germany and Holland are fed up with the profligacy of an increasing number of southern nations. Italy is on course to surpass Greece as the most indebted country in the Eurozone; unemployment in France has risen above 8% for the first time since 2021, fuelling fears of a “long and deep” recession. Meanwhile, Spain’s decision to grant residency to half a million undocumented migrants provoked fury across the continent and marked the nation out as Europe’s “soft underbelly” – irregular crossings on the Western Mediterranean route into Spain are already up 50% this year. It’s hard to see how anyone could make the case for re-joining a bloc in such “terminal decline”.

🤖📈 Another danger of trying to rejoin is losing our competitive advantage, says Anne McElvoy in The i Paper. Many defence tech firms and top AI companies choose to operate in the UK “precisely because they don’t have to deal with the EU”. If we’re betting major growth on digital services rather than goods then we’re far better outside the bloc, where we can cut deals and innovate without all its complicated standards and constraints.

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After several close calls with avalanches, the explorer Luc Mehl set out to find a way to enjoy winter away from the mountains. What he discovered was Alaska’s “wild ice” – astonishingly clear frozen sheets of ice that form on remote rivers, alpine lakes and glacial lagoons, which are perfect for skating. To enjoy the full video, click on the image.

Voting in this month’s local elections wasn’t as “logical and considered” as you might have thought, say Jim Waterson and Polly Smythe in London Centric. Voters can typically put a cross beside the names of multiple candidates, who are listed in alphabetical order. This leads to the so-called “ballot order effect” – those with surnames beginning with A or B doing better than those further down the alphabet. Analysis of results in three councils – Bexley, Westminster, and Hammersmith and Fulham – found that in 82% of cases, the candidate whose name appeared highest on the ballot outperformed his or her party colleagues lower down the list.

TikTok/@Londonmasons

Gen Z “brethren” are giving the Freemasons an image update, says Charlotte Lytton in The Standard. On TikTok, young members of the secret society are unpacking some of the mystery behind it, performing on-trend dance routines and producing their own grime music, with lyrics such as “faith, hope, charity; man walk the walk”. Stuffy dinners are being swapped out for trips to Nando’s, and some Freemason groups are centred on modern pursuits such as Formula 1 and rum. But some things never change: what goes on at the meetings remains “opaque”.

Putin delivering a speech at this month’s Victory Day parade. Pavel Bednyakov/Pool/AFP/Getty

Is Putin living in a dream world?

The mood around the Ukraine war has palpably shifted, says Lawrence Freedman on Substack. Russia’s economy is struggling and Ukraine’s long-range drones are striking ever deeper, hitting the Moscow Oil Refinery, a chemical plant producing nitric acid for shells, and Gazprom’s Astrakhan facility. The symbolism was hard to miss at this year’s Victory Day parade in Moscow: a truncated, paranoid affair shorn of the advanced weaponry that once intimidated the West. Russian forces are now losing as many as 20,000 men – dead – per month, “buying less ground at higher cost than at any point this year”. Even Marco Rubio has begun echoing Kyiv’s line, calling it “a bad war” for Russia.

Yet there are still reasons for caution. Ukraine’s recruitment process is flawed, desertion is rife and its forces are spread thinly across a front line over 1,000 km long. A corruption scandal has reached President Zelensky’s inner circle, with the former chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, now charged. Russia is still producing drones in vast quantities, and the firmer ground of spring will help its grinding push towards the so-called “fortress cities” of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Perhaps most important, Vladimir Putin shows no sign at all of giving up. He depends on a General Staff that has been “relentlessly optimistic and boastful”, and they have convinced him his forces can capture the entire Donbas region by autumn. In actual fact, at their current rate it would take three decades. Whatever’s happening on the battlefield, this war will only end when “Putin’s perceptions catch up with reality”.

Instagram/@Vagabondwines

Many of today’s most “playful, experimental” new wines are coming from an unexpected source, says Victoria Daskal in the FT: London. The city’s urban wineries buy grapes from Oxfordshire, Kent, Sussex and Essex (and occasionally further afield) and blend them in special facilities in old warehouses, railway arches and industrial estates. Fulham’s London Cru produces English sparkling wine, as well as Chardonnay and Pinot Noir; Vagabond Wines in Canada Water produces 100,000 bottles a year in more than 100 different styles. Also helpful: England’s relatively cool climate produces light, fresh, less boozy wines – “exactly where modern demand is heading”.

The late peeress Lena Jeger once told her fellow diners in the House of Lords dining room that all the people she had slept with were now dead, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. Someone at the table piped up: “What about me?” Jeger gave her fellow peer a look, and replied: “You were dead at the time.”

It’s an exclusive new pocket watch, say Kathryn Armstrong and Vicky Wong on BBC News, which has sparked a frenzy that has forced stores to close around the world and police to deal with unruly shoppers. The Royal Pop collection – a collaboration between the Swiss watchmakers Swatch and Audemars Piguet – drew huge “mob-like” crowds in cities across the UK and elsewhere when it launched on Saturday, as people rushed the doors after queuing, in some cases, for days. Sales were restricted to one £335 watch per person, which one buyer claims to have resold online for more than £1,000.

Andy Burnham has played down suggestions that he wants the UK to quickly rejoin the EU, after his rival for the Labour leadership, Wes Streeting, plunged the party into a debate about reversing Brexit by calling it a “catastrophic mistake”. The Greater Manchester mayor said there was a case for rejoining the EU in the long-term, but that he is “not advocating that” in the forthcoming Makerfield by-election. The terror group thought to be behind a series of attacks on the Jewish community in London has been officially outed as a proxy of the Iranian state. The US Department of Justice says that Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya, which claimed responsibility for the Golders Green stabbing as well as the arson attacks on Jewish ambulances and several synagogues in London, is run by a senior Iranian operative. Aaron Rai has become the first Englishman to win the US PGA Championship since 1919, sinking a whopping 68ft putt on the penultimate hole (below). Ranked 44th in the world, the Wolverhampton-born 31-year-old fended off heavyweights including Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm to secure the Wanamaker Trophy.

Starmer and Larry outside No 10. Dan Kitwood/Getty

Our political “bloodlust” makes governing impossible

The Italian newspaper Il Sore 24 Ore noted last week that Larry the No 10 cat would soon be “serving” his seventh prime minister, says Fraser Nelson in The Times. When the Italians are mocking you for democratic instability, you know you have a problem. Over the past decade the UK has had the highest leadership turnover in the Western world, above even Argentina. The irony is that our PMs are being toppled for issues – the economy, housing, welfare – that stem from the revolving door at No 10. “Changing leaders has become the disease of which it purports to be the cure.”

Whoever replaces Keir Starmer will inherit a country “drowning in debt and dysfunction”. Our national debt has risen to 96% of GDP, up from 37% in 2007. We spend £110bn a year servicing that debt, and the so-called “moron premium” – how much more interest we are charged compared to the next-worst country – is above Liz Truss levels. Every new PM follows the same “dispiriting arc”: bold targets are announced, orders are given, nothing happens. A big part of the problem is that Britain’s cabinet ministers serve an average of just over two years, among the shortest tenures of any developed country. We have had nine education secretaries in the past decade and 25 junior housing ministers since 1997. When ministers don’t expect to last more than 12 months, they think: why take the political hit to tackle long-term problems? That leaves No 10 “full of cans kicked further down the road”. The good news is that this cycle can be broken: in recent years both the Italians and the Australians have curbed their political “bloodlust”. Until something similar happens here, the UK will remain “a global laughing stock”.

🤝🕊️ Counterintuitively, the coalition years were relatively stable. Cabinet reshuffles were tricky because David Cameron was terrified of the arrangement falling apart and the Lib Dems jealously guarded their balance of power. The resulting stability was what allowed Michael Gove (education) and Iain Duncan Smith (welfare) to stay in place long enough to “make a difference”.

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Stifler’s mum (Jennifer Coolidge) with Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) in American Pie (1999)

Prepare yourselves, says Zoe Williams in The Guardian, for “hot divorcee summer”. An unvarnished, “devil-may-care” spirit seems to have captured the cultural moment. But it’s also “high glam” – think wide-brimmed hats, full-length skirts, obsessive skincare and matching two-pieces just to pop to the shops. There’s a hefty focus on hot sex, too. Rather than immediately finding a new boyfriend, channel the Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons: “Do it, or not, with as many men as you like, as often as you like, in as many different ways as you like.”

Don’t worry, be happy

NASA/WireImage/Getty

Reading the news can be a gloomy business – we should know, we do it all day for a living. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Here at The Knowledge we believe deeply that the world is a terrific place and we should all count ourselves lucky to live here. Remember: the universe is almost entirely dead – cold rock, plasma, void. All the stuff you’re made of was forged in the cores of stars that exploded billions of years ago and spent most of the universe’s 13-or-so-billion-year history drifting silently through the icy darkness, going nowhere and doing nothing. But here you are, on a reasonably bright day, reading this. And an Englishman’s just won the US PGA championship.

Before you know it you’ll disperse back into the cosmic squish and none of this will have mattered at all. But while you’re here, you might as well enjoy it, which you will all the more if you subscribe to The Knowledge.

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Andy Burnham has played down suggestions that he wants the UK to quickly rejoin the EU, after his rival for the Labour leadership, Wes Streeting, plunged the party into a debate about reversing Brexit by calling it a “catastrophic mistake”. The Greater Manchester mayor said there was a case for rejoining the EU in the long-term, but that he is “not advocating that” in the forthcoming Makerfield by-election. The terror group thought to be behind a series of attacks on the Jewish community in London has been officially outed as a proxy of the Iranian state. The US Department of Justice says that Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya, which claimed responsibility for the Golders Green stabbing as well as the arson attacks on Jewish ambulances and several synagogues in London, is run by a senior Iranian operative. Aaron Rai has become the first Englishman to win the US PGA Championship since 1919, sinking a whopping 68ft putt on the penultimate hole (below). Ranked 44th in the world, the Wolverhampton-born 31-year-old fended off heavyweights including Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm to secure the Wanamaker Trophy.

Starmer and Larry outside No 10. Dan Kitwood/Getty

Our political “bloodlust” makes governing impossible

The Italian newspaper Il Sore 24 Ore noted last week that Larry the No 10 cat would soon be “serving” his seventh prime minister, says Fraser Nelson in The Times. When the Italians are mocking you for democratic instability, you know you have a problem. Over the past decade the UK has had the highest leadership turnover in the Western world, above even Argentina. The irony is that our PMs are being toppled for issues – the economy, housing, welfare – that stem from the revolving door at No 10. “Changing leaders has become the disease of which it purports to be the cure.”

Whoever replaces Keir Starmer will inherit a country “drowning in debt and dysfunction”. Our national debt has risen to 96% of GDP, up from 37% in 2007. We spend £110bn a year servicing that debt, and the so-called “moron premium” – how much more interest we are charged compared to the next-worst country – is above Liz Truss levels. Every new PM follows the same “dispiriting arc”: bold targets are announced, orders are given, nothing happens. A big part of the problem is that Britain’s cabinet ministers serve an average of just over two years, among the shortest tenures of any developed country. We have had nine education secretaries in the past decade and 25 junior housing ministers since 1997. When ministers don’t expect to last more than 12 months, they think: why take the political hit to tackle long-term problems? That leaves No 10 “full of cans kicked further down the road”. The good news is that this cycle can be broken: in recent years both the Italians and the Australians have curbed their political “bloodlust”. Until something similar happens here, the UK will remain “a global laughing stock”.

🤝🕊️ Counterintuitively, the coalition years were relatively stable. Cabinet reshuffles were tricky because David Cameron was terrified of the arrangement falling apart and the Lib Dems jealously guarded their balance of power. The resulting stability was what allowed Michael Gove (education) and Iain Duncan Smith (welfare) to stay in place long enough to “make a difference”.

Advertisement

Shrinking stock markets: how can you get access to private equity? Free guide

When so many ambitious companies don’t reach the stock market, how can you make sure your portfolio still includes today’s private-company growth stories? What about investing in the “picks and shovels” of the AI boom – where could you find such opportunities?

Private markets have been the preserve of wealthy investors for years, allowing them access to investments often not available through mainstream funds and shares. But the doors to these opportunities are now opening up.

This free guide from Wealth Club tells you what you need to know about a new class of Private Equity funds – how they work, what are the risks, and how high net worth and sophisticated investors could invest from just £10,000. Download it here.

Stifler’s mum (Jennifer Coolidge) with Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) in American Pie (1999)

Prepare yourselves, says Zoe Williams in The Guardian, for “hot divorcee summer”. An unvarnished, “devil-may-care” spirit seems to have captured the cultural moment. But it’s also “high glam” – think wide-brimmed hats, full-length skirts, obsessive skincare and matching two-pieces just to pop to the shops. There’s a hefty focus on hot sex, too. Rather than immediately finding a new boyfriend, channel the Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons: “Do it, or not, with as many men as you like, as often as you like, in as many different ways as you like.”

The way in which middle powers are reacting to the current geopolitical storm offers a reason for “quiet optimism”, says Karishma Vaswani in Bloomberg. Singapore and New Zealand recently signed a pioneering “supply-chain resilience pact” to maintain the flow of essentials from food to fuel, healthcare products and construction materials. Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has struck deals on energy security, defence and critical minerals during visits to Vietnam and Australia; India, Indonesia and Japan are deepening their maritime co-ordination; and Australia and South Korea are strengthening ties on energy resilience.

TikTok/@ton618creative

TikTok is awash with “Scientology speedrunners”, says Dani Di Placido in Forbes: content creators sprinting into Scientology buildings and seeing how far they can get, and what they can uncover about the mysterious and controversial church, before security inevitably chucks them out. Most find safety in numbers, running in groups, but others tackle it solo, aiming to make it further into or higher within the building than others have before they’re caught. One facility in Hollywood got so fed up with the intruders that they removed their door handles.

Donald Trump with Xi Jinping last week. Brendan Smialowski/Pool/Getty

America’s “imperial privilege” leaves China in the dust

Last week’s summit in Beijing reignited talk of “imperial twilight”, says Ruchir Sharma in the FT: the idea that America is “ceding its superpower crown” to China. Financially speaking, “the opposite is true”. Never has the gap in financial power between the world’s two largest economies been this wide. Just look at history: normally, when an empire is gaining economic might, its currency takes an increasing share of reserves held by foreign central banks, and the rest of the world does more of its trade in that currency, even if the imperial power isn’t in on the transaction. Britain at its peak accounted for 40% of world trade, but 60% of trade payments were in sterling. China has a leading 15% of global trade, but just 2% of trade bills are invoiced in renminbi.

China will remain an “incomplete superpower” until it can match America’s financial muscle. But it has long held itself back by sealing off its financial system from outside investors, and using currency controls to stop Chinese investors from taking their money abroad. Its home market is “something of a local prison” – Beijing has fuelled growth with “heavy infusions of government money”, which sloshes around inside the walled economy, much of it in domestic real estate lending which has been hammered lately by a vast property bust. Meanwhile, the dollar’s omnipresence allows America to run the show: permanently high demand for dollars keeps US borrowing costs down, and can be weaponised by Washington as a threat to cut foreign powers off from the dollar-dominated financial system. No other nation enjoys this “imperial privilege” and the geopolitical influence it buys. Least of all China.

Getty

When you’re next lying awake in the middle of the night desperate to get back to sleep, says Caroline Kee on NBC’s Today, don’t reach for your phone to check the time or catch up on emails. Instead, try this: repeatedly count down from eight to one, while taking deep breaths. The process should help calm your nervous system, allowing you to fall back asleep.

To The Times:

In these dark times, may we shine a little light? Our small but thriving charity, Salaam Shalom Kitchen, is a joint Jewish-Muslim partnership that has been quietly and lovingly providing hot meals and friendship to vulnerable people of all faiths and none in a deprived inner-city area of Nottingham for more than 10 years. This collaboration goes to the heart of the deep charitable precepts of both religions, and it is the shared experience of our wonderful staff and volunteers that working together to prepare, cook and serve food to people in need is one of the most effective ways to break down perceived barriers and to foster mutual understanding and respect.

David Bogod and Ferzana Shan
Co-chairs, Salaam Shalom Kitchen, Nottingham

It’s a Lego model of Minas Tirith, the capital of Gondor from JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, says Michael McWhertor in Polygon. The 8,278-piece set is one of the biggest ever – more than the Star Wars Millennium Falcon (7,541 pieces) but slightly shy of the Death Star (9,023) – and features figurines of characters including Gandalf, Aragorn and the hobbit Pippin. It doesn’t come cheap: the kit, which comes out on 1 June for “Lego Insiders” and 4 June for everyone else, costs an eye-watering £579.99.

Fly-fishing in Italy. Getty

The priceless solitude of fly-fishing

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THE MILL HOUSE This Grade II-listed former water corn mill in Sebergham, Cumbria, has been restored over 50 years by a retired architect and a garden designer, says The Guardian, and retains its original water wheel, timber miller’s screen and mill machinery. On the ground floor is an open-plan kitchen and family room with a dark blue Aga, oak beams and granite worktops, along with two bedrooms, a garden room, a bathroom and a utility. Upstairs is a sitting room with a vaulted ceiling with an original sack hoist, plus three further bedrooms and a bathroom. Outside, more than four acres of south-facing gardens include a wildflower meadow, a potager, a pond, a gravel beach and river frontage on the Caldew. Carlisle is an 11-mile drive. £950,000.

Putin at the Victory Day military parade in Red Square last week. Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Getty

Putin’s paranoia

Vladimir Putin’s “sheen of invincibility” has well and truly worn off, says Simon Nixon on Substack. At the weekend, he made a rare trip out of the bunker he now hides in to show his face at Russia’s “dramatically scaled back” Victory Day parade. Usually the highlight of the Russian state’s calendar, this year’s event lasted a brief 45 minutes, showcased no tanks, missiles or fighting vehicles and was attended by fewer foreign leaders than usual. Snipers and soldiers with anti-drone weaponry were stationed around Red Square, while ordinary people were put on high alert and prevented from entering the city centre. So nervous were Russian officials that Putin had even gone begging to Donald Trump, asking him to persuade Volodymyr Zelensky to grant a one-day ceasefire – a deal that required Putin to agree a 1,000 prisoner swap.

What’s becoming increasingly clear, says Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic, is that the de facto deal Putin struck with his business elites four years ago – “support my war in Ukraine and in exchange you won’t have to think about it” – has been broken. Security measures now regularly render phone signal coverage in the capital and across Russia non-existent and the state has cut access not just to Western social media but to the Russian-built Telegram and most VPNs too, hampering oligarchs’ ability to do business and making necessary public services such as ATMs and ride-hailing apps redundant. These inconveniences come on top of high inflation and soaring interest rates that have for months weighed on rich Muscovites, who have already been stripped of personal wealth to boost the Kremlin’s war coffers. Putin’s reign isn’t over yet, but a “vacuum has opened” and sooner or later, something, or someone, else will fill it.

🇷🇺🪖 I’ve attended many Victory Day parades on Red Square, says Steve Rosenberg on BBC News, and this year’s was markedly different. In previous years, I’ve had to sprint from the media bus to nab a decent spot in the press area at the side of the square. This year, “no running was required”. Once I’d leisurely arrived in position, a Russian TV crew rushed up to me and started filming. “Steve, you’re proof that foreign media have been allowed in,” the reporter said. “Not really,” I replied. “I can’t see any others.”

Slenczynska performing a minuet in G major by Beethoven in 1930, aged five

Bella Mclean and Alex Hassell as Taggie and Rupert. Disney+

Rivals, the gloriously knowing adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster of the same name, is back and as brilliant as ever, says Benji Wilson in The Daily Telegraph. It’s stuffed with nostalgia from Betamax to potato waffles, garish jumpsuits and use of the word “ninny”, as well as plenty of rumpy-pumpy, whether it be in a hot-tub, in a swimming pool, in the shower, on the stairs or just bare-buttocks getting thwacked with a riding crop. The incorrigible Rupert Campell-Black (Alex Hassell) and his arch-nemesis Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) feud over a TV franchise, while the ever-wondrous Katherine Parkinson and Danny Dyer revive Lizzie and Freddie, whose series of yearning trysts are tender and unpredictably moving. There’s also a “beautifully conceived” secret romance between TV producer Charlie and Campbell-Black’s assistant Gerald which plays out against the backdrop of the 1980s aids crisis. The whole thing is preposterous in the extreme which, like Ladies Day at Ascot or Keith Floyd, is what makes it such enormous fun.

Three episodes available, one hour each, Disney+

Fly-fishing in Italy. Getty

The priceless solitude of fly-fishing

THE MILL HOUSE This Grade II-listed former water corn mill in Sebergham, Cumbria, has been restored over 50 years by a retired architect and a garden designer, says The Guardian, and retains its original water wheel, timber miller’s screen and mill machinery. On the ground floor is an open-plan kitchen and family room with a dark blue Aga, oak beams and granite worktops, along with two bedrooms, a garden room, a bathroom and a utility. Upstairs is a sitting room with a vaulted ceiling with an original sack hoist, plus three further bedrooms and a bathroom. Outside, more than four acres of south-facing gardens include a wildflower meadow, a potager, a pond, a gravel beach and river frontage on the Caldew. Carlisle is an 11-mile drive. £950,000.

Putin at the Victory Day military parade in Red Square last week. Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Getty

Putin’s paranoia

Vladimir Putin’s “sheen of invincibility” has well and truly worn off, says Simon Nixon on Substack. At the weekend, he made a rare trip out of the bunker he now hides in to show his face at Russia’s “dramatically scaled back” Victory Day parade. Usually the highlight of the Russian state’s calendar, this year’s event lasted a brief 45 minutes, showcased no tanks, missiles or fighting vehicles and was attended by fewer foreign leaders than usual. Snipers and soldiers with anti-drone weaponry were stationed around Red Square, while ordinary people were put on high alert and prevented from entering the city centre. So nervous were Russian officials that Putin had even gone begging to Donald Trump, asking him to persuade Volodymyr Zelensky to grant a one-day ceasefire – a deal that required Putin to agree a 1,000 prisoner swap.

What’s becoming increasingly clear, says Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic, is that the de facto deal Putin struck with his business elites four years ago – “support my war in Ukraine and in exchange you won’t have to think about it” – has been broken. Security measures now regularly render phone signal coverage in the capital and across Russia non-existent and the state has cut access not just to Western social media but to the Russian-built Telegram and most VPNs too, hampering oligarchs’ ability to do business and making necessary public services such as ATMs and ride-hailing apps redundant. These inconveniences come on top of high inflation and soaring interest rates that have for months weighed on rich Muscovites, who have already been stripped of personal wealth to boost the Kremlin’s war coffers. Putin’s reign isn’t over yet, but a “vacuum has opened” and sooner or later, something, or someone, else will fill it.

🇷🇺🪖 I’ve attended many Victory Day parades on Red Square, says Steve Rosenberg on BBC News, and this year’s was markedly different. In previous years, I’ve had to sprint from the media bus to nab a decent spot in the press area at the side of the square. This year, “no running was required”. Once I’d leisurely arrived in position, a Russian TV crew rushed up to me and started filming. “Steve, you’re proof that foreign media have been allowed in,” the reporter said. “Not really,” I replied. “I can’t see any others.”

Slenczynska performing a minuet in G major by Beethoven in 1930, aged five

Bella Mclean and Alex Hassell as Taggie and Rupert. Disney+

Rivals, the gloriously knowing adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster of the same name, is back and as brilliant as ever, says Benji Wilson in The Daily Telegraph. It’s stuffed with nostalgia from Betamax to potato waffles, garish jumpsuits and use of the word “ninny”, as well as plenty of rumpy-pumpy, whether it be in a hot-tub, in a swimming pool, in the shower, on the stairs or just bare-buttocks getting thwacked with a riding crop. The incorrigible Rupert Campell-Black (Alex Hassell) and his arch-nemesis Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) feud over a TV franchise, while the ever-wondrous Katherine Parkinson and Danny Dyer revive Lizzie and Freddie, whose series of yearning trysts are tender and unpredictably moving. There’s also a “beautifully conceived” secret romance between TV producer Charlie and Campbell-Black’s assistant Gerald which plays out against the backdrop of the 1980s aids crisis. The whole thing is preposterous in the extreme which, like Ladies Day at Ascot or Keith Floyd, is what makes it such enormous fun.

Three episodes available, one hour each, Disney+

Xi and Trump in Beijing this week. Alex Wong/Getty

The world’s two superpowers “overestimate themselves”

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THE ESTATE This five-bedroom pagoda-style house in Ardingly, West Sussex is“a bit of a fantasy fairyland”, says its owner – a Scottish-born investment banker who built it from scratch after falling in love with the land, in The Sunday Times. Constructed over three floors, the house has a kitchen and dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over a cascading waterfall, a drawing room, a library and a principal bedroom with a dressing area. Outside, 292 acres of mostly Grade II-listed gardens contain eight lakes, seven waterfalls, ancient sandstone caves, a grotto and enough prehistoric rock formations to unsettle the most stoic of buyers. A four-bedroom cottage and a one-bedroom flat are also included. Haywards Heath is 4.5 miles away, with trains to London in 45 minutes. £5.5m.

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🪂 A daring medical mission to the world’s most remote inhabited island
🪚 The rapid downfall of Argentina’s “madman” president
👔 A mesmerising music video set in a school
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🍏 Old wives’ tales that turn out to be spot on
🥢 The history of US-China food diplomacy
🇭🇰 A stirring call for Jimmy Lai to be freed
💐 The latest horticultural trend
🥸 How kids get around online age controls
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📚 The end of Princeton’s century-old “honour code”
🤖 A selfie from Mars
🛹 19th-century slang that sounds made up by Gen Z
🧷 The surprising return of the brooch
👙 A classic (boob-based) anecdote from Cannes

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Xi and Trump in Beijing this week. Alex Wong/Getty

The world’s two superpowers “overestimate themselves”

THE ESTATE This five-bedroom pagoda-style house in Ardingly, West Sussex is“a bit of a fantasy fairyland”, says its owner – a Scottish-born investment banker who built it from scratch after falling in love with the land, in The Sunday Times. Constructed over three floors, the house has a kitchen and dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over a cascading waterfall, a drawing room, a library and a principal bedroom with a dressing area. Outside, 292 acres of mostly Grade II-listed gardens contain eight lakes, seven waterfalls, ancient sandstone caves, a grotto and enough prehistoric rock formations to unsettle the most stoic of buyers. A four-bedroom cottage and a one-bedroom flat are also included. Haywards Heath is 4.5 miles away, with trains to London in 45 minutes. £5.5m.

Fox Valley Technical College

Hero
Karl Arps, a CPR teacher in Wisconsin who taught his students so well they saved his life. Arps, 72, was in the middle of demonstrating how to resuscitate someone when he had a heart attack. At first, students assumed it was part of the demonstration, but quickly cottoned on, and several took turns doing chest compressions while another grabbed a defibrillator and another called an ambulance. Arps says he’s always wondered if his students were really listening. “Well,” he says, “now I know.”

Villain
The posh bakery chain Gails, which serves a club sandwich containing more salt than five McDonald’s cheeseburgers or ten rashers of bacon. The campaign group Action on Salt & Sugar analysed more than 500 sandwiches and found the smoked chicken Caesar club contained 6.88g of salt – the most of any sandwich tested, and more than the entire recommended daily allowance of 6g – as well as over 1,000 calories and 90% of an adult’s daily saturated fat.

Villains
Voice notes, which have made my generation a bunch of self-absorbed bores, says Annabel Martin in The Guardian. Instead of the companionable back-and-forth of actual conversations, we Gen Zs now fill each other’s phones with rambling soliloquies, interspersed with random, entirely irrelevant interjections – “Oh my god, such a cute dog”; “Oops, was nearly ploughed down by a bicycle”. It’s godawful. These days, the message I most dread isn’t “Call me” or “I can’t believe what you did last night”. It’s “I’m just going to vn you, it’ll be easier”.

Instagram/@Meggrayx

Villains
Self-diagnosed dyslexics, who have been found using their “hidden disabilities” to skip airport queues and gain entry to VIP lounges. Social media is awash with travellers who declare themselves to have forms of “neurodiversity” which are not clinically recognised, and who have been using sunflower lanyards – available online for as little as £1.30 – to convince airport workers they require special treatment. Some have been given free glasses of champagne, fresh fruit, hot meals and permission to board the plane before anyone else.

Hero
AI, according to Richard Dawkins, who was so taken in by the sycophantic style adopted by Claude when he tried it, that he grandly declared the lifeless computer “conscious”. After being told his enquiries were “absolutely delightful”, “genuinely exciting” and, at one point, “possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence”, the famous sceptic said he “felt I had gained a new friend”.

Putin (R) and Surkov in 2012. Alexei Nikolsky/Ria Novosti/AFP/Getty

What I did for the Wizard of the Kremlin

Koeberg nuclear power station circa October 1981. Photograph: Peter Jordan/Getty

The dissident who blew up a nuclear power station

In the 1980s, disillusioned South African Rodney Wilkinson decided to strike back against the apartheid regime, says Stephen Robert Morse in The Guardian. Working inside the Koeberg nuclear power station – the government’s “crown jewel” – he secretly gathered sensitive documents, smuggled them into Zimbabwe, and despite having no political connections, managed to pass them to senior operatives in the anti-apartheid African National Congress. The ANC, which for years had searched for a way to attack Koeberg, placed Wilkinson in a safe house, training him in interrogation resistance and sabotage techniques, while they devised an operation to cripple the facility before it became operational. Wilkinson was their secret weapon: “Why send a unit when you can send a ghost?”

In July 1982, Wilkinson secured a temporary engineering contract back at the plant six months before it was due to go live. He returned to South Africa, communicating with his ANC handler, Rashid, through coded telegrams disguised as horse-racing bets. After being shown where four limpet mines were hidden in the desert for him to collect, Wilkinson memorised the location then “ate the map”. During the final week of his contract, he bypassed high-level security to plant one bomb each day on critical reactors and cables. On his last afternoon, he armed each thermite-packed device so they would detonate over the weekend. Pulling their pins was a delicate task – one malfunction could have set off the explosive in his face. At 5pm, he had farewell drinks with colleagues who hadn’t the faintest idea they were “standing on top of four ticking bombs”. Wilkinson cycled out of the facility and escaped to Mozambique, where Rashid greeted him with whisky and good news: all four bombs had exploded, ruining Koeberg without a single casualty.

The pound fell and government borrowing costs jumped to 2008-era highs after Andy Burnham announced his intention to challenge Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party. The Greater Manchester mayor will first have to win a by-election in Makerfield after its MP, Josh Simons, resigned to make way for him – last week, however, Reform UK swept the board in the area’s local council elections. Zack Polanski has admitted he did not vote in last week’s local elections. The Green Party leader said he “fell short of time” to update his address on the electoral register after moving into rented accommodation. Party officials say a previous suggestion that he had used a postal vote in Hackney was a “miscommunication”. The first designated bathing area on the River Thames in London opened this morning. The Thames at Ham in south-west London, which is one of 13 new monitored swimming areas across England, will have its water tested once a week until the end of September to ensure it meets hygiene levels.

The Thames at Ham: lovely spot for a dip. Richard Baker/Getty

Starmer and Burnham in 2024. Ian Vogler/WPA Pool/Getty

A “leadership swaperoo” won’t fix anything

Here’s a question for those scrambling to replace Keir Starmer, says Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian: if the Labour Party didn’t exist, “would you invent it”? Who would lack a voice, what opportunities would be missed if there simply wasn’t a Labour Party at all? Labour candidates still pretend to represent the huddled masses, but today’s poor vote Reform or Green, while it’s only the financially secure who are likely to opt for the old established parties. The point of Labour used to be that it was the one left-wing party that could win votes, but last week’s local elections mulched that myth. So what’s it for? The need for Labour is becoming one of those “self-evident truths” that actually aren’t.

The most important question now, says Douglas Murray in The Spectator, is whether a quick leadership “swaperoo” would actually fix anything. The commentating class have “whipped themselves” into a familiar frenzy that will lead, inexorably, to Starmer stepping down, but the problems we have far outstrip the meagre talents of anyone in the Labour party, including the “King over the Irwell, Andy Burnham”. We spend beyond our means and borrow more than we can afford. A tiny number of medium and high-earning taxpayers are expected to endlessly foot the bill for the large indigent class and those who have just arrived with their hands out. We have a vastly expensive health service which is the “envy of the Third World” but not of anybody who actually has to use it; an economy that has been flatlining; and a rising left who have decided the solution is to attack the few among us who are successful. So my own advice to the Labour Party is this: “Hang on, Sir Keir.” Things can always get worse.

🙈🙊 The problem for Prime Minister Starmer is that if he sees off the leadership challenge he will end up even weaker than the Prime Minister Starmer who “precipitated that challenge in the first place”, says James Kirkup in The Daily Telegraph. The tweets and open letters from unhappy Labour MPs branding him “a duffer” would still be there in the public domain and he would be subject to daily mockery. “Political authority is like virginity; once lost, it is gone forever.”

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This year’s Sunday Times Rich List shows that the UK’s 350 most affluent individuals and families share a combined £784bn – a 1.4% rise on last year and equivalent to a quarter of the country’s GDP. Britain has 157 billionaires, including the newly promoted David and Victoria Beckham (£1.1bn). Debuting on the list are Liam and Noel Gallagher (£375m), following the success of their Oasis comeback tour, and Emily Eavis and her family (£400m), who run Glastonbury Festival. The biggest loser was James Dyson, who lost £8.8bn in the past year. To see the full list, click on the image.

Honestly

Leon Neal/Getty

It’s been a funny week in British politics. Incredibly little has actually happened, but it’s done so at great speed and with an enormous amount of fuss. On Wednesday, Wes Streeting was absolutely full of beans and definitely going to resign and trigger a leadership election. Then, he sort of didn’t. And then he did, but only kind of. And now he says he’s backing Andy Burnham, who isn’t an MP and, given his previous form, is bound to lose his by-election to Reform.

So here we are. 😵‍💫

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The pound fell and government borrowing costs jumped to 2008-era highs after Andy Burnham announced his intention to challenge Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party. The Greater Manchester mayor will first have to win a by-election in Makerfield after its MP, Josh Simons, resigned to make way for him – last week, however, Reform UK swept the board in the area’s local council elections. Zack Polanski has admitted he did not vote in last week’s local elections. The Green Party leader said he “fell short of time” to update his address on the electoral register after moving into rented accommodation. Party officials say a previous suggestion that he had used a postal vote in Hackney was a “miscommunication”. The first designated bathing area on the River Thames in London opened this morning. The Thames at Ham in south-west London, which is one of 13 new monitored swimming areas across England, will have its water tested once a week until the end of September to ensure it meets hygiene levels.

The Thames at Ham: lovely spot for a dip. Richard Baker/Getty

Starmer and Burnham in 2024. Ian Vogler/WPA Pool/Getty

A “leadership swaperoo” won’t fix anything

Here’s a question for those scrambling to replace Keir Starmer, says Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian: if the Labour Party didn’t exist, “would you invent it”? Who would lack a voice, what opportunities would be missed if there simply wasn’t a Labour Party at all? Labour candidates still pretend to represent the huddled masses, but today’s poor vote Reform or Green, while it’s only the financially secure who are likely to opt for the old established parties. The point of Labour used to be that it was the one left-wing party that could win votes, but last week’s local elections mulched that myth. So what’s it for? The need for Labour is becoming one of those “self-evident truths” that actually aren’t.

The most important question now, says Douglas Murray in The Spectator, is whether a quick leadership “swaperoo” would actually fix anything. The commentating class have “whipped themselves” into a familiar frenzy that will lead, inexorably, to Starmer stepping down, but the problems we have far outstrip the meagre talents of anyone in the Labour party, including the “King over the Irwell, Andy Burnham”. We spend beyond our means and borrow more than we can afford. A tiny number of medium and high-earning taxpayers are expected to endlessly foot the bill for the large indigent class and those who have just arrived with their hands out. We have a vastly expensive health service which is the “envy of the Third World” but not of anybody who actually has to use it; an economy that has been flatlining; and a rising left who have decided the solution is to attack the few among us who are successful. So my own advice to the Labour Party is this: “Hang on, Sir Keir.” Things can always get worse.

🙈🙊 The problem for Prime Minister Starmer is that if he sees off the leadership challenge he will end up even weaker than the Prime Minister Starmer who “precipitated that challenge in the first place”, says James Kirkup in The Daily Telegraph. The tweets and open letters from unhappy Labour MPs branding him “a duffer” would still be there in the public domain and he would be subject to daily mockery. “Political authority is like virginity; once lost, it is gone forever.”

Advertisement

There’s no shortage of financial information out there. That’s why we’ve created The Knowledge Briefings, to cut through the noise and answer the finance questions that matter. Together with our partners at Netwealth, we’re hosting a series of short discussions and articles about the issues investors ask us about the most. No jargon, no one‑size‑fits‑all solutions. Just honest answers from real experts to your questions.

Our first topic is one of the most common dilemmas people face: whether to top up your pension or pay down the mortgage.
Do you prioritise long‑term security, flexibility later in life or peace of mind now?
How to factor in inflation, interest rates, tax rules and life changes?

This recorded discussion will go live at 1pm on 22 May. Use this link now to register for exclusive access, and please send your questions in to the host, Netwealth Deputy CEO Matt Conradi, by clicking here.

Click here

This year’s Sunday Times Rich List shows that the UK’s 350 most affluent individuals and families share a combined £784bn – a 1.4% rise on last year and equivalent to a quarter of the country’s GDP. Britain has 157 billionaires, including the newly promoted David and Victoria Beckham (£1.1bn). Debuting on the list are Liam and Noel Gallagher (£375m), following the success of their Oasis comeback tour, and Emily Eavis and her family (£400m), who run Glastonbury Festival. The biggest loser was James Dyson, who lost £8.8bn in the past year. To see the full list, click on the image.

A lot of old 19th century slang sounds like it was made up yesterday by Gen Z, says T A Barron on Instagram. There’s “uhtceare”, meaning lying awake unable to stop worrying; “brabble”, meaning to quarrel loudly about something inane; “zwodder”, to denote a foggy state of mind; “snoutfair”, describing someone attractive; “scurra”, meaning someone who makes a living mocking others; and “mumpsimus”, describing someone who stubbornly holds a wrong belief even after being corrected. To see others, click here.

Getty

I’d always had brooches earmarked for a later life stage, says Jess Cartner-Morley in The Guardian, but in an unexpected turn of events the accessory has suddenly cast off its church fête vibe and become cool. Zendaya wore a diamond serpent brooch to last year’s Met Gala; Meryl Streep had no fewer than six on the lapel of her Dolce & Gabbana suit at one Devil Wears Prada 2 premiere; Pedro Pascal wore a huge Chanel camellia brooch to the Oscars. And I get it: there is something “cheerfully chaotic, pleasingly off-centre” about a sharp object you attach to yourself for no good reason.

A poster in Tehran earlier this month. Majid Saeedi/Getty

Does Trump have any good options in Iran?

Winston Churchill famously said of Anthony Eden’s failed 1956 Suez strategy: “I don’t know whether I would have dared to start; I would never have dared to stop.” The same can be said of Donald Trump’s attack on Iran, says John Bolton in The Washington Post. Now that it’s begun, any negotiated end to the crisis would be a disaster for the US: the Iranians would conclude that they could open and close the Strait of Hormuz at will and face only diplomatic, not military, consequences. Trump should either resume the bombing of what’s left of Iran’s regime, or restart his abandoned “Project Freedom” – militarily escorting merchant ships through the strait – while maintaining the blockade on Iranian ships. Eventually, the pressure in Tehran would tell.

Sorry, says Robert Kagan in The Atlantic, but how would more bombing accomplish what 37 days of bombing did not? The only way to truly “finish the job” would involve a full-scale ground and naval war, followed by a lengthy occupation. And we already know how Iran would respond to that – with retaliatory attacks on the Gulf’s energy infrastructure that would do devastating long-term damage to the global economy. “If this isn’t checkmate, it’s close.” Iran isn’t going to relinquish control of the strait. Which means they’ll be able not only to demand tolls for passage, but also to limit transit to nations that play by their rules. Lift your sanctions, Tehran will say, or your gas and oil shipments won’t be allowed through. Previous US military defeats have been either reversible (the Western Pacific early in World War Two) or far from the main theatres of global competition (Vietnam, Afghanistan). Defeat in Iran will be a strategic loss that can be “neither repaired nor ignored”.

🇮🇷💣 A confidential CIA analysis delivered to US policymakers last week concluded that Iran is in much better shape to survive an American naval blockade than previously imagined, says The Washington Post. Tehran still has around 75% of its prewar inventory of mobile launchers, and around 70% of its prewar stockpile of missiles. There is evidence the regime has been able to reopen almost all of its underground storage facilities, repair some damaged missiles and even assemble some new ones.

Getty

Cannes Film Festival hasn’t always been plain sailing, says Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. In 1994, Quentin Tarantino responded to a heckler while collecting his Palme d’Or for Pulp Fiction by giving her the middle finger on stage. In 1983 the paparazzi protested against the actress Isabelle Adjani’s refusal to attend one photo shoot by putting their cameras down when she arrived on the red carpet and turning their backs on her. In 1954, Simone Silva, a young star thirsty for fame, took off her top in the middle of a shoot and started cupping her breasts. It caused such a commotion that two photographers ended up with broken limbs trying to secure the best shot.

In a possible sign of things to come, a court in China has ruled in favour of a disgruntled employee who was replaced by AI, says Shweta Sharma in The Independent. Zhou joined a Chinese tech company in 2022 as a quality assurance supervisor but was later told by bosses that AI could do his job and offered a demotion with a 40% pay cut. When Zhou refused, he was fired, which he went on to challenge in court. Last month, judges ruled that the unnamed company had been wrong to fire him and ordered that he be paid more than £28,000 in compensation.

It’s Andrew Bedwell, says Milly Karsten in Sailing Today, who is due to begin his attempt to break the world record for the shortest vessel to cross the Atlantic today. At just 100cm long, the micro-yacht, which must travel 2,000 miles over the next three months, is roughly the size of a wheelie bin and only allows for the 54-year-old, 6ft Lancashire lad to be sitting down or standing up. His food will mostly consist of beef jerky, raisins and fat condensed into bars which are vacuum packed and moulded into the frame of the boat. “Outside the boat looks awful,” he says. “but from inside the boat it’s actually not that bad.”

Wes Streeting appears to be holding back on his predicted resignation. Allies of the health secretary claim he “has the numbers” to mount a formal leadership challenge against Keir Starmer but add that “things have shifted” since yesterday. Angela Rayner says she has been “cleared” after paying £40,000 to settle an HMRC investigation into her tax affairs, paving the way for a potential leadership bid. Xi Jinping told Donald Trump the “Taiwan question” was critical to US-China relations and could lead to “conflict” if badly managed as the two began their high-stakes summit in Beijing. The US president described a two-hour meeting this morning as “great”, while Xi called for their countries to be “partners, not rivals”. The most famous self-portrait of JMW Turner, which inspired his depiction on the £20 note, is not a self-portrait at all, according to the artist’s biographer. James Hamilton says the c.1799 painting, which was likely bundled up with hundreds of Turner’s works after he died, doesn’t match the English Romantic painter’s style, and is more likely by his contemporary John Opie.

Tate Britain

Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty

Kemi Badenoch’s possible path to No 10

Reputable bookies are offering 13/2 on the Conservatives winning the next general election. Those odds “should tempt a punter”, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. Yes, “voting intention” polls show voters skirting the Tory party “as though it were made of uranium”, but three years away from an actual election, there are better predictors of the eventual result. The Conservatives are the most trusted party on the economy, the most important issue for voters, above even immigration. And a fast-improving Kemi Badenoch is already more popular than Nigel Farage. It’s too-little remarked how extraordinary this is. “A party so recently jeered from office should not even be competitive.”

Another reason to think the Tories are underpriced is that Labour will fall even further. If Keir Starmer goes, Britain faces three years with an unelected prime minister, enacting policies to the left of the government’s 2024 mandate. “It would take a Dante to put into words how hated these people are going to be.” The problem isn’t Starmer but Labour itself, which exists to spend public money, and will still be screaming “austerity” when the bailiffs come banging on the door. Winning back “moderate, tax-fatigued voters” shouldn’t be tricky. Beating Nigel Farage will be harder. But the Reform leader has an under-discussed liability: in 2029, he will be 65, which would make him the oldest incoming prime minister since Winston Churchill’s return to power in 1951. And Britain is nearing a “1979 moment”, when long-delayed reform – taxes and borrowing are both vastly too high – finally becomes inevitable. Farage is too much the crowd-pleaser to slash welfare; Labour wouldn’t obey a leader who tried. Voters may look at Badenoch and conclude: “There is no alternative.”

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Regular gallery visits, choir rehearsals or pottery classes could slow ageing, says Theo Farrant in Euronews, according to a new study of more than 3,500 people. Researchers at UCL found that those who took part in an arts activity at least once a week appeared to age around 4% more slowly, at a biological level, than those who rarely engaged with them – similar to the benefits gained by those who do weekly exercise.

End of an era

Princeton exams, as imagined by ChatGPT

For the past 133 years, kids at Princeton haven’t been invigilated during exams, they just promise not to cheat and the profs leave them to it. The so-called “Princeton Honour Code” has survived several wars, the upheaval of the 1960s, the advent of Google and even the iPhone. But this week, Princeton’s faculty voted to end it, and bring back the click clack of the invigilator’s shoes in the exam hall. You’ll never guess why.

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Wes Streeting appears to be holding back on his predicted resignation. Allies of the health secretary claim he “has the numbers” to mount a formal leadership challenge against Keir Starmer but add that “things have shifted” since yesterday. Angela Rayner says she has been “cleared” after paying £40,000 to settle an HMRC investigation into her tax affairs, paving the way for a potential leadership bid. Xi Jinping told Donald Trump the “Taiwan question” was critical to US-China relations and could lead to “conflict” if badly managed as the two began their high-stakes summit in Beijing. The US president described a two-hour meeting this morning as “great”, while Xi called for their countries to be “partners, not rivals”. The most famous self-portrait of JMW Turner, which inspired his depiction on the £20 note, is not a self-portrait at all, according to the artist’s biographer. James Hamilton says the c.1799 painting, which was likely bundled up with hundreds of Turner’s works after he died, doesn’t match the English Romantic painter’s style, and is more likely by his contemporary John Opie.

Tate Britain

Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty

Kemi Badenoch’s possible path to No 10

Reputable bookies are offering 13/2 on the Conservatives winning the next general election. Those odds “should tempt a punter”, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. Yes, “voting intention” polls show voters skirting the Tory party “as though it were made of uranium”, but three years away from an actual election, there are better predictors of the eventual result. The Conservatives are the most trusted party on the economy, the most important issue for voters, above even immigration. And a fast-improving Kemi Badenoch is already more popular than Nigel Farage. It’s too-little remarked how extraordinary this is. “A party so recently jeered from office should not even be competitive.”

Another reason to think the Tories are underpriced is that Labour will fall even further. If Keir Starmer goes, Britain faces three years with an unelected prime minister, enacting policies to the left of the government’s 2024 mandate. “It would take a Dante to put into words how hated these people are going to be.” The problem isn’t Starmer but Labour itself, which exists to spend public money, and will still be screaming “austerity” when the bailiffs come banging on the door. Winning back “moderate, tax-fatigued voters” shouldn’t be tricky. Beating Nigel Farage will be harder. But the Reform leader has an under-discussed liability: in 2029, he will be 65, which would make him the oldest incoming prime minister since Winston Churchill’s return to power in 1951. And Britain is nearing a “1979 moment”, when long-delayed reform – taxes and borrowing are both vastly too high – finally becomes inevitable. Farage is too much the crowd-pleaser to slash welfare; Labour wouldn’t obey a leader who tried. Voters may look at Badenoch and conclude: “There is no alternative.”

Regular gallery visits, choir rehearsals or pottery classes could slow ageing, says Theo Farrant in Euronews, according to a new study of more than 3,500 people. Researchers at UCL found that those who took part in an arts activity at least once a week appeared to age around 4% more slowly, at a biological level, than those who rarely engaged with them – similar to the benefits gained by those who do weekly exercise.

If you’re endlessly returning things you bought online, here’s a cautionary tale, says Sophia Money-Coutts on Substack. A friend of mine ordered a dress for Ascot last year and when it arrived, she didn’t love it but decided it would do for the day. She sneakily kept the tag in, intending to return it afterwards, which she duly did, only for an email to arrive from the brand a few weeks later reprimanding her. She had clearly worn the dress before sending it back to them, they said, “since they’d found a betting slip in the pocket”.

Zendaya in 2024. Dia Dipasupil/WireImage/Getty

When a poll recently asked Gen Z which public figures they’d most want to model their lives on, there was a clear winner, says Casey Lewis on Substack: Zendaya. The actress was picked by 13% of respondents, way ahead of Elon Musk on 8%, Beyoncé at 4% and Taylor Swift and Kylie Jenner down on 3%. A pleasing 36% didn’t want to be like any of the celebrities on offer. The most desirable careers were “successful but non-famous tech entrepreneur” (18%) and “respected intellectual” (17%). Just 5% wanted to be an influencer, down from a whopping 50% in 2023. And just 3% said lawyer. So there’s hope.

A passenger on a military bus after disembarking the MV Hondius in Tenerife earlier this week. Jorge Guerrero/AFP/Getty

Is hantavirus the next Covid?

There’s no doubt that another pandemic will strike, says Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times. And now the final passengers have disembarked from the MV Hondius – on which at least seven people were infected with the so-called “Andes strain” of hantavirus, three of whom are now dead – it’s not impossible the next one has begun. The World Health Organisation has tried to reassure the public that hantavirus can only be transmitted through “close and prolonged contact”, and Donald Trump echoed the WHO on Monday, saying it’s “not easy to spread”. But research on previous outbreaks of this exact strain suggests just the opposite: airborne transmission, “superspreaders” and a reproduction rate not much lower than Covid. The one thing we know, in other words, is that the current policy of “crossing our fingers and hoping for the best” won’t cut it.

In 2018, this same strain of hantavirus broke out in a small, isolated town in Argentina. One infected person went to a birthday party with around 100 others for about an hour and a half. Five others – not just those who sat closest to him – later sickened. One of those five went on to infect six more, including his wife, before dying. At his funeral, his wife infected 10 more people. At this point authorities noticed and enforced strict quarantine measures, which worked. But what researchers learned should worry us: the period between infection and symptoms appearing can be as long as 40 days, during which time people are likely to be infectious. The MV Hondius passengers are scattered to the wind, including one who collapsed on arrival at Johannesburg airport 19 days ago and died soon after. It will be 21 days before we know how many she has infected. We may be lucky, but complacency is mad.

Princeton exams, as imagined by ChatGPT

In 1876, says Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, an editorial in The Princetonian argued that having professors invigilate exams produced a “bad moral education”. Instead, students should simply promise not to cheat. It worked: the university’s “Honour Code” was adopted in 1893 and scarcely modified in the 133 years since. Old Princetonian F Scott Fitzgerald said breaking the code “simply doesn’t occur to you”. No longer. This week, after the rise in AI-assisted cheating became “too obvious to ignore”, Princeton voted to begin invigilating exams again. The Honour Code survived two world wars, the upheaval of the 1960s, Google and iPhones. But not ChatGPT.

I sat in Cabinet under two prime ministers whose leaderships unravelled, says Kwasi Kwarteng in The i Paper. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss failed for different reasons, but the last days were the same, defined by “uncertainty, delusion and panic”. One thing that is often overlooked is how big a factor politicians’ personal finances play in their decisions at these moments. Under Johnson, rich MPs like Rishi Sunak and Nadhim Zahawi were free to throw their weight around, but others hesitated not out of principle or vision, but because they knew their salaries would “nose dive” the minute they left office, and they needed the dosh.

It’s Nasa’s Perseverance Mars rover, says the Jet Propulsion Lab, in a “selfie” taken looking out over the sweeping backdrop of the so-called Lac de Charmes. The picture is a composite of 61 images taken using precision movements of its telescopic robot arm over the course of an hour, during the six-wheeled bot’s deepest push yet into the untouched Martian landscape beyond the Jezero Crater where it landed. The selfie was taken on 11 March, the 1,797th Martian day, or “sol”, of its mission, during which time it has travelled almost 26 miles – “just shy of a marathon”.