Table of contents for 1441 in The Week

What happened In the Commons on Monday, MPs gave their overwhelming backing to the long-awaited, and highly critical, report into Boris Johnson’s role in the Downing Street parties scandal. The Commons Privileges Committee found that the former prime minister had committed five contempts of Parliament. These included deliberately misleading the Commons on several occasions, and being complicit in a “campaign to abuse and intimidate” the MPs who conducted the inquiry. Had Johnson still been an MP, the report would have recommended suspending him from Parliament for 90 days. It also said that he should be denied the privilege of the parliamentary pass usually given to former MPs. Labour forced a vote on the report, which was passed by 354 votes to seven. In total, 118 Tories backed it. Theresa May…

“How should we, as a society, respond to a woman who doesn’t want to carry a pregnancy to term?” asked Vicky Spratt in The i Paper. The answer, according to a judge passing sentence at Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court last week, is “to send her to prison” for more than a year, taking her away from the children she already has. The court heard that the woman in question, Carla Foster, had terminated a pregnancy during lockdown in 2020, when she was 32 to 34 weeks pregnant – beyond the current 24-week abortion limit – using pills sent to her in the post by abortion services. She’d told them she was only seven weeks pregnant. There were many mitigating factors. Foster was suffering “emotional turmoil”: she had moved back in with…

Al Pacino, who celebrated the birth of his fourth child. The boy, named Roman, is the 83-year-old actor’s first child with his girlfriend, film producer Noor Alfallah, 29. Dame Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, who was one of only three people made Companion of Honour in the King’s birthday honours. The other two were the novelist Ian McEwan and Sir John Bell, Regius professor of medicine at Oxford University. Among those knighted were Mark Thompson, the former director general of the BBC, and the late Martin Amis, who had accepted his honour shortly before his death in May.…

Warsaw Migrant pushback: The leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, Jarosław Kaczynski, has threatened to hold a national referendum in order to block a migration pact that was agreed by a majority of EU member states last week. Under the deal, a proportion of the migrants arriving in border states such as Italy and Greece would be relocated to other EU nations, unless their governments pay €20,000 per migrant into a central fund to have them sent elsewhere. “We will not agree to it, neither does the Polish nation,” Kaczynski told Poland’s lower house of parliament last week, before MPs voted overwhelmingly against ratifying the deal. Kaczynski argued that since Poland had received less than €100 per head from the EU for the more than 1.5 million Ukrainian…

1 Chopsticks by Euphemia Allen (Arthur de Lulli), performed by Liberace 2 Mis-Shapes by Jarvis Cocker, Mark Webber, Russell Senior, Candida Doyle, Steve Mackey and Nick Banks, performed by Pulp 3 Waltz No. 14 in E minor (Op. posth.) by Frédéric Chopin, performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy 4 Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat by Frank Loesser, performed by Stubby Kaye and Original Cast Chorus of Guys and Dolls 5 Forgot About Dre by Andre Young, Marshall Mathers and Mel-Man, performed by Dr. Dre featuring Eminem 6 Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, written and performed by Tom Lehrer 7 A Lady of a Certain Age by Neil Hannon, performed by The Divine Comedy 8* San Diego Serenade, written and performed by Tom Waits Book: York Notes for The Complete Works of Shakespeare Luxury: a diary and a pen *…

The debate about whether nations should manage and protect their industries, or open them up to the world, is one of the oldest in economics. On the one hand, many believe that governments need to nurture the industries of the future. America in the 19th and early 20th centuries, France after WWII, Japan in the 1960s, and South Korea in the 1970s have all done so, to great effect. Conversely, there is the argument that governments are very bad at “picking winners”: Britain’s postwar experiences are a case in point. It’s also true that free trade has made the world rich. During the period of the 1990s and 2000s, economies around the world opened up their markets and embraced globalisation. That period saw the creation of the World Trade Organisation,…

The problem with the popular vote Jason Willick The Washington Post In US elections, winning the most votes doesn’t always win you the White House, says Jason Willick. The elections of 2000 and 2016 are cases in point: Democrat candidates won the popular vote in both those ballots, but were denied by the electoral college system, under which each state apportions electoral votes, generally on a winner-takes-all basis. It’s a source of frustration for Democrats, but some of them have been busily working on a solution. They want states to sign up to a pact, pledging to award their electoral college votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote, even if that candidate lost their state. The pact would take effect once states carrying 270 combined electoral votes…

The UK could eventually derive its electricity from solar power plants floating in space. So said the Energy Security Secretary Grant Shapps last week, as he unveiled £4.3m in funding to support the development of space-based power by private companies and universities. The technology involves capturing energy from the Sun using solar panels attached to satellites; the energy is then beamed in the form of radio or microwaves to a receiver on Earth, for conversion into electricity. Unlike Earth-based farms, the orbiting panels would be almost constantly bathed in light, providing a continuous source of power. Although it sounds like science fiction, researchers at Caltech, in Pasadena, say they have just managed to capture and send a small amount of energy to Earth from a prototype station, and China has…

Edinburgh was “a brave choice as the venue for the launch of Keir Starmer’s new energy and climate policy”, said Fiona Harvey and Severin Carrell in The Guardian. It “showed a willingness to face head-on Labour’s energy dilemma”: how to move the UK to a low-carbon footing, without destroying jobs. With a 200,000-strong North Sea oil workforce, and nearly half of the UK’s onshore wind farms, Scotland is “caught between the fossil fuel past and the renewable future”. Starmer’s message was that it could have both, with a carefully managed transition: a Labour government will end new North Sea oil and gas exploration, but will honour projects that have already been approved. It will also create a publicly owned green energy company, based in Scotland, which will coordinate a “Local…

“Success didn’t spoil me; I’ve always been insufferable.”Fran Lebowitz, quoted in Forbes “When I have to cry, I think about my love life. And when I have to laugh, I think about my love life.”Glenda Jackson, quoted in The Guardian “Making the decision to have a child – it is momentous. It is to decide for ever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”Elizabeth Stone, quoted in The Daily Telegraph “Hating the things other people like is not a reliable sign of superiority.”James Marriott in The Times “My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest.”Warren Buffett, quoted on The Motley Fool “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”Oscar…

To The Guardian I have always supported a woman’s right to abortion and will continue to do so – within the law, up to 24 weeks. It is a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body and the choice to do so should not be criminalised. But I had a premature daughter at 33 weeks who is now a thriving 24-year-old. I do not believe the right to choose extends that far. I know nothing about the woman in question and cannot imagine the trauma that she went through, taking abortion pills at that late stage. But there was access to healthcare and support even during Covid. Why did she not seek alternatives? The law is out of date and unbalanced, and the courts continue to treat women…

Running time: 2hrs 35mins In 2021, the success of Anything Goes at the Barbican proved that there remains a strong appetite for “classic tune and toe shows”, said Fiona Mountford in The i Paper. And this new production of 42nd Street – a musical that was first staged in 1980, but which is based on a 1933 Busby Berkeley choreographed film – is sure to delight. The archetypal showbiz story, it is about a chorus girl who becomes a star, and in this revival, it has a dream leading lady in Nicole-Lily Baisden, as well as “exquisitely expressive” tap routines from choreographer Bill Deamer – and all the “energy and pizzazz” you could hope for, from the show’s opening scene to its “shimmering finale”. Set during the Depression, 42nd Street’s…

“It was with a huge sense of trepidation” that I tuned into BBC One’s new four-part drama Best Interests, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. Written by Jack Thorne, it tells the harrowing story of a couple who must decide whether doctors should keep treating their desperately unwell daughter. Nicci (Sharon Horgan) and Andrew (Michael Sheen) have dedicated the past decade to caring for 13-year-old Marnie, who has muscular dystrophy. When a chest infection sends her to the ICU, the hospital suggests withdrawing care, and the once tight-knit family begins to splinter. This is the stuff of nightmares, but the acting is superb, and the writing manages to remain “witty and lively” even as the gut-wrenching power of the story encroaches. Best Interests is a bit overlong, said Barbara Ellen…

A heroic self-portrait of Rembrandt as a militia man has come “home” to the Dutch national museum, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, says Bruno Waterfield in The Times. The Standard Bearer (1636) was one of the first works the artist created after moving to Amsterdam. It shows him, then 30, posing as one of the soldiers who led Dutch troops into battle against their Spanish rulers in the 80 Years War, which resulted eventually in independence for the Netherlands in 1648. It was bought for €175m from the French branch of the Rothschild family, which had owned it since 1844, after a “diplomatic tussle” with the French government; private donors paid $25m and Dutch taxpayers the rest. It now hangs alongside Rembrandt’s epic The Night Watch (1642), for which The Standard…

As Stella weighs up her options with Brian, Justin urges her to bide her time. Lee and Tom go on their mission to see Rob, but Lee ends up knocking Rob to the ground, and they flee. Harrison calls to question Lee, and Helen learns about the altercation – Rob is accusing Lee of assault. Helen is furious at Tom: Lee might get jail time and it could help Rob’s access case. Freddie quits at Lower Loxley to focus on his DJ career; later Vince tries to make him see sense. Uncomfortable about Justin’s scheme to end Home Farm’s BL contract, Stella apologises to Brian and agrees to return. Helen tells Kirsty she’s contacted Rob – she needs to see him and take control. Nervous Rob tells Helen his version…

Finished in 2014, Grayson Perry’s A House for Essex, in Wrabness, is a kitsch, ceramic-tiled folly designed for a fictional Essex girl, overlooking the River Stour (sleeps 2, from £1,250 for 2 nights; living-architecture.co.uk). The Dunmore Pineapple, near Airth, Stirlingshire, was a single-storey summerhouse in Dunmore Park until the pineapple dome was added in 1777 (sleeps 4, 3 nights from £459; landmarktrust.org.uk). The Grade I-listed rusticated Fonthill Arch was the grand entrance to the Fonthill Estate in Wiltshire, built in 1755 (sleeps 4, from £295/night; www.beckfordarms.com). Blickling Tower, a toy castle with a Rapunzel turret, was built in the late 18th century as the Earl of Buckingham’s race stand with ogee arches and crenellations (sleeps 4, from £779 for 3 nights; nationaltrust.org.uk). The Gothic Temple, in the grounds of Stowe,…

Tarifa’s wild and windy beauty Tarifa in the far south of Spain has a wild coastline made up of sweeping, pale beaches, sand dunes and “rock-strewn” hills. The area has long been popular with backpackers and kitesurfers, says Bridget Harrison in The Times – but more recently a “well-heeled crowd” has been attracted to its “laid-back beachy vibe”. It’s not a good place for sunbathing – the wind is relentless – but there’s riding, hiking, biking and water sports to enjoy. Tarifa itself has a beautiful old town with Moorish city walls, excellent tapas bars and “upmarket surfy boutiques”; there are “impressive” Roman ruins beside the nearby Bolonia beach, and Tangier is a ferry hop away. Among the area’s most stylish hotels are La Residencia and The Lances, and there’s…

Glenda Jackson 1936-2023 Fearless, sharply intelligent and sometimes caustic, Glenda Jackson, who has died aged 87, “had a career unmatched by any of her contemporaries”, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. From 1957, she enjoyed huge success on film (she won two Oscars) and on stage; then, in 1992, she gave it all up to become a Labour MP. She served diligently, as a junior minister in the Blair government and on the backbenches, for 23 years before returning to the stage in 2016, aged 80, as a “magnificent Lear”. When she was an MP, some were surprised that her Commons speeches were dry and untheatrical, but off stage, Jackson had always been notably low-key, said The Times. For her, acting was a serious job, and she had no time…

First there was “shrinkflation”, when products got smaller while the listing price stayed the same. Now brace yourself for “drinkflation”, says Daniel Woolfson in The Daily Telegraph. In a bid to cut costs, the brewers of some of Britain’s most popular beers – including Foster’s, Spitfire, Old Speckled Hen and Bishops Finger – have been slashing their alcohol content, or ABV (alcohol by volume) to save on tax. Although the amount saved on each can or bottle is minimal – 2p say – it can add up to large sums for the producer, making the move an easy win. So far there’s been no revolt against weaker, often more expensive beer. Brewers insist most punters can’t tell the difference.…

Assets invested in global exchange traded funds (ETFs) have hit a record level of $10.3trn on the back of rallying stock markets and “resilient inflows”, said Steve Johnson in the FT. It’s quite a milestone – demonstrating the ongoing popularity of this form of investing. ETFs are passive funds that track stock indices, bonds, commodities and almost any other asset in much the same way as mutual funds. The difference is that they can be bought and sold like regular stocks and can be structured to track almost anything – including cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin ETFs look set to become all the rage, said Tom Mitchelhill on CoinTelegraph.com. Hot on the heels of news that “investment colossus” BlackRock has filed an application to run its own spot bitcoin ETF, two other big…

Marina Berlusconi Every Monday for the past 30 years, Marina Berlusconi and her younger brother Pier Silvio discussed business over supper with their father at his 18th century estate outside Milan, said Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli in the FT. That ritual is now at an end – opening up the question of what will happen to the multibillion-euro empire built by the former Italian PM. At first sight, the succession looks uncomplicated. Marina, 56, has chaired the €4bn family holding company, Fininvest, for more than two decades – supervising assets including publisher Mondadori, lender Banca Mediolanum, football club AC Monza and the family’s Mediaset media empire, which is run by Pier Silvio. In a statement, Fininvest said there would be “absolute continuity”. The late Berlusconi was reportedly so “shocked” by the…

Who’s tipping what The week’s best shares B.P. Marsh & Partners The Mail on Sunday BP Marsh invests in early-stage insurers – covering US trucks, building kit and sports injuries – selling them as they grow. Wisely run by an industry veteran, profits are up 42%. Buying back shares and hiking the divi. Buy. 376p. Games Workshop The Times The miniature wargaming company is beating forecasts. Strongly cash-generative with a new online store, there are lucrative Warhammer licensing deals and the promise of films and TV shows with Amazon. Buy. £102.10. GB Group The Times GB is a world leader in identity verification, location intel and fraud prevention. Margins have been hit by post-Covid end-market corrections, yet it’s a “tempting add-on for a big fintech group”. Buy. 251.4p. Inspiration Healthcare…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1368 An Ettinger pass holder and two Connell Guides will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 3 July. Send it to The Week Crossword 1368, 121-141 Westbourne Terrace, London W2 6JR, or email the completed grid/listed solutions to crossword@theweek.co.uk. Tim Moorey (timmoorey.com) This week’s winner will receive an Ettinger (ettinger.co.uk) travel pass holder in assorted colours, which retails at £115, and two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 1 Most here unwinding? (4,4) 5 Beauty proves the rule? Not entirely (6) 9 Nuts could be stuff for the party (8) 10 Ford’s car range? (6) 12 Quick look both ways (4) 13 Not how a minister should be welcomed in speech! (4,6) 15…

Extensive efforts were under way this week to rescue the five occupants of the submersible that went missing while diving down to the wreck of the Titanic on Sunday. Surveillance aircraft picked up banging sounds in the area on Tuesday, and a French ship carrying a robot capable of diving beyond the 3,800 metre depths of the Titanic was en route on Wednesday. But there were fears that if the 6.7 metre Titan was stuck on the ocean floor, it would be challenging to find it and bring it up in time. The best hope seemed to be that the vessel had surfaced and would be spotted, semi-submerged in the North Atlantic, before its oxygen supplies ran out (it cannot be opened from the inside). The Titan, which carries five…

Hunter, makers of the wellies once prized by everyone from King Charles to Kate Moss, which went into administration with debts of more than £100m. The collapse has been put down to factors such as dry weather in the US stalling demand, but it’s also the case that customers had reported a sharp fall-off in quality since production moved to China in 2008. Glyndebourne, after a performance of Poulenc’s opera Dialogues des Carmélites was interrupted by Just Stop Oil protesters armed with air horns and glitter cannon. In London, police used their new powers to break up slow marches by the group. Final year students at Cambridge, with warnings that half of them won’t graduate this summer due to the marking boycott. Academics nationwide are refusing to mark papers as…

Wilmington, Delaware Hunter Biden’s deal: Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, has reached a deal with federal prosecutors that will see him plead guilty to two misdemeanours, while avoiding jail time. These concern his failure to pay $200,000 in tax, in 2017 and 2018, before the deadline. He has also “resolved” a felony firearms charge, relating to him possessing a gun while being an active drug user. House Republicans slammed the deal as a sign of the Justice Department’s double standards (citing the indictment of Donald Trump) and vowed that their investigations into the Biden family would continue. Washington DC China relations: Joe Biden claimed this week that his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, had done a “hell of a job” on his much delayed two-day visit to…

“Many news reports used similar euphemisms to describe Silvio Berlusconi: he was ‘colourful’, ‘larger than life’, ‘flamboyant’. What those words actually mean is that he was a convicted tax fraudster, an alleged Mafia associate and an astonishingly prolific user of prostitutes, including at least one who was underage. Nearly every article written about him includes the words ‘bunga-bunga parties’, a forgiving, Benny Hill-esque phrase, given it refers to his orgies, to which young women were procured by vast pimping networks. Like Johnson and Trump, Berlusconi let himself be treated as a joke so the public wouldn’t realise the joke was on them.” Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times…

How Oxbridge is outshining the Ivy League Simon Kuper Financial Times Are the US and UK true meritocracies? Not to judge by their top universities – the “main gateway to the adult elite”, says Simon Kuper. On both sides of the Atlantic, “the happy few” selected for entry come disproportionately from rich families. But at least the UK is trying to change. Oxbridge colleges take pains to diversify their intake by making admissions “contextual” – so “getting seven As at a school where the average is four counts more than getting seven at a school that averages ten”. And the strategy is working. Last year, state schools provided a record 72.5% of Cambridge’s undergraduate entries; and 28% of Oxford students identified as “black and minority ethnic”. Contrast this with, say,…

Light drinking tamps down stress Several studies have found that light drinkers seems to have a reduced risk of heart disease, but scientists have struggled to explain why that might be the case. Now research in the US has suggested that one factor may be alcohol’s ability to tamp down a stress response in the brain. The large-scale study, involving 53,000 people, confirmed that light to moderate drinkers – one drink a day for women, one or two a day for men – had a 21% lower chance of heart attacks than teetotallers; and the reduction was even greater in people with pre-existing anxiety. Scans then showed that the drinkers had less activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes fear and threats – although they had…

The late Glenda Jackson (see p.42) was unimpressed by life at Westminster when she became an MP in 1992. She was dismayed when a fellow MP asked her: “What do you want to come here for? You’re famous already.” And she found her colleagues uncollaborative and ill-disciplined. “The kind of behaviour you saw in Parliament would not be tolerated for 30 seconds in a professional theatre,” she said. “There’s a lack of professionalism, very poor timekeeping, a great deal of wasting time, and egos the size of which I’ve never seen in my life before.” Liz Truss has said the media is partly to blame for the failure of her premiership. Speaking at a conference in Dublin, she accused the press of spending too much time generating “froth”, and lamented…

“Every time we think we’ve seen or heard the worst of it, another shocking detail rears its head,” said Katie Strick in the Evening Standard. Footage emerged last weekend showing dozens of young Tory staffers drinking and dancing at a “jingle and mingle” party in Conservative HQ at the height of the pandemic in December 2020. The clip is mortifying, agreed Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph – and not just on account of the “novelty braces” and “ugly jumpers”. It was an unwelcome reminder of the double standards of many officials during the lockdowns – their contempt for the rules they helped impose on others. The hypocrisy of the political class during that bleak time explains why “anger towards the Tories is so intense”, and why there was such…

Since becoming England captain last summer, Ben Stokes has repeatedly said he’s on a mission to make Test cricket entertaining, said Mike Atherton in The Times. And it cannot be denied that in the first Ashes Test at Edgbaston, England gloriously achieved that goal. This was a “brilliant, absorbing Test” that will be “inked into the history books as a classic”. And yet while England made “all the running”, they still somehow contrived to lose the match, said Paul Newman in the Daily Mail. Set 281 to win, Australia got over the line on a rain-affected fifth day with just two wickets to spare. England had appeared overwhelming favourites when Joe Root “held on to a spectacular return catch” from Alex Carey to leave Australia eight down with 54 runs…

Football England beat Malta 4-0 and North Macedonia 7-0, making it four wins out of four in their Euros qualifiers. Formula 1 Max Verstappen claimed the 41st race victory of his career – equalling Ayrton Senna’s tally – by winning the Canadian Grand Prix. Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso came second. Lewis Hamilton of Mercedes came third. Cycling Swiss cyclist Gino Mäder has died at the age of 26. The former Giro d’Italia stage winner sustained fatal injuries after crashing into a ravine at the Tour de Suisse.…

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, 2017 (Fitzcarraldo Editions £14.99). Stepanova’s sweeping narrative of her family’s history in Russia begins with the knick-knacks in her aunt’s Moscow flat and runs all the way back to life under Stalin. Memory versus reminiscence, anecdote versus actuality: the truth is tested here in a brilliantly new kind of meta-memoir. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 (Penguin £7.99). Is there a more perfect short novel? The enigmatic zillionaire who never seems to appear at his own dazzling parties; the married woman he loves; her husband’s affair; two sudden murders. Fitzgerald’s magnificent prose-poem is an elegy to lost love and regret whose charm and sadness never fail to hold their power. The Madonna of the Future by Arthur Danto, 1997 (UCP, out of…

Programmes Princess Anne: The Plot to Kidnap a Royal Now 72, Anne has crept up to become one of the most popular of the royals. This documentary examines the attempt to kidnap her in 1974. Sun 25 Jun, C4 20:00 (60mins). The Clinic Documentary charting the rise and fall of the Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service, which was ordered to close in 2022 after three decades. Sun 25 Jun, ITV1 22:20 (65mins). Boris, the Lord & the Russian Spy: Dispatches An investigation into Boris Johnson’s friendship with press baron Evgeny Lebedev – now a member of the House of Lords – and his father, a former KGB agent. Tue 27 Jun, C4 22:00 (65mins). The Trouble with KanYe Journalist Mobeen Azhar travels to America to find out how the…

Corfu adults-only paradise Stay 7 nights at the Cook’s Club with a free upgrade to a “panoramic bay view” room. From £959pp all-inclusive (incl. Belfast flights). 020-3617 7202, inspiredluxuryescapes.com. Depart 14 September. Tuscan spa getaway Unwind with 4 nights at the Hotel Parma e Oriente, in Montecatini Terme. From £409pp half-board (incl. flights and one day’s sauna access). 020-4505 9783, travelodeal.com. Depart 31 July. Idyllic Devon retreat Nestled in the countryside, The Mole Resort is ideal for active days, with hiking and cycling trails nearby. From £128pp for 3 nights (four sharing). 020-3608 0135, secretescapes.com. Arrive 10 July. Food adventure in Mexico Get a taste of the country on a 9-day journey through some of its most famous culinary regions, such as Oaxaca. From £1,430pp b&b (excl. flights). 0330-808 7325,…

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A secondary school in East Sussex found itself at the centre of a social media storm this week, after a teacher was recorded calling a pupil “despicable” for refusing to accept that there are multiple genders. The row erupted when the Year 8 girl questioned a fellow pupil identifying as a cat. According to The Daily Telegraph, there are other schools where children identify as non-humans: it found one case of a pupil identifying as a dinosaur; another as a moon. Three types of zero-alcohol beer were on sale at Manchester’s recent Parklife festival, reflecting a growing trend for sober revelry. Factors behind the shift are believed to include Gen Z-ers not wanting footage of them drunk turning up on social media.…

A survey of adults in 29 countries has found that British people have the third most positive attitude to refugees, behind Spain and New Zealand. 56% of UK adults believe refugees make a “positive contribution”, compared to the global average of 45%. Ipsos/The Guardian Labour is on course to beat the SNP in Scotland at the next election, according to Panelbase. It predicts that Labour will take 26 seats, up from one, and that the SNP will lose 24 seats, leaving it with 21. The Sunday Times Nicola Sturgeon’s net favourability rating in Scotland has dipped into negative figures for the first time. It now stands at -7. Savanta/The Daily Telegraph…

The accidental artist Maggi Hambling is one of Britain’s most prominent painters, says Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times; but art wasn’t her first ambition. As a child growing up in Suffolk, she dreamed of becoming a TV newsreader, she says, because “I thought they made it up as they went along. And next, when all the other girls were hoping to be ballet dancers or something, I wanted to be a Wrens admiral. I loved all those uniforms.” It was only by chance that she discovered her talent for art. “There was a school exam and I did nothing but flick paint at people and generally draw attention to myself,” she says. Left with just ten minutes to finish, she chose the subject “laziness”, and drew a woman lying on…

The 666 bus route to Hel in Poland is to be renamed, its operator has announced. PKS Gdynia said it had decided to change the number to 669, in response to complaints from Christian groups that the bus to Hel bears the Biblical “number of the beast”. The route is mainly used by tourists travelling to beaches on the picturesque Hel peninsula in the Baltic. Religious conservatives have long accused the bus route of “spreading Satanism”, expressing outrage that some saw the issue as a “joke”. A craze is sweeping Chinese social media in which users make and eat “white people food”, such as bland sandwiches, carrots sticks and canned tuna, as a form of self torture. “The point of the white people’s meal is to learn what it feels…

FRANCE Why the young are giving up on sex Le Point (Paris) Something very worrying is happening in France, says Clément Pétreault. Young people “aren’t making love any more”. Earlier this year, an Ifop poll showed that 43% of French people aged 15 to 24 had not had any sexual partners during the past year. “This abstinence (voluntary or not) is accelerating.” Eight years ago, the figure was “only” 25%. In fairness, this is not just happening in France. There’s a “sex recession” in the US and across much of the West. Why? The truth is that today, “a thousand factors” conspire against the libido of the young. It’s not just Netflix and iPhones in the bedroom that come between couples – one survey revealed that 36% of young Americans…

“When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex announced their $20m, multi-year deal with Spotify in 2020, it was hailed as the centrepiece of the couple’s growing business empire,” said Nadia Khomami in The Guardian. Last week, however, news broke that the partnership was coming to an end. The decision was described as mutual, but insiders reported that the couple had failed to meet a “productivity benchmark”, and would not be getting the full payment. In other words, said Reaction, Spotify had looked at their total output – 12 episodes of Meghan’s dreary Archetypes podcast, in which she interviewed some of her famous friends about the “labels that hold women back” – and concluded that it just wasn’t good enough. One senior executive went rather further, by implying that the couple…

On 4 September 1939, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, the BBC Proms opened with pieces by Richard Wagner. In the following weeks, said Kenan Malik in The Observer, works by Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Strauss were played. Even when fighting the Nazis, Britons found it “possible to appreciate the culture of an enemy country” as part of their common civilisation. Compare and contrast that admirable sentiment with the hysteria that caused the American author Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) to withdraw her forthcoming novel, The Snow Forest, in response to what she called an outpouring of “anger, sorrow, disappointment and pain”. Her offence? She had set her book in Russia. The criticisms make no sense at all, said Jane Shilling in The Daily Telegraph.…

It may be the “greatest football transfer story ever told”, said Barney Ronay in The Guardian. Ever since Kylian Mbappé emerged a decade ago as one of the game’s most remarkable talents, Real Madrid – the club he idolised as a child – have been on a mission to sign him. A deal has looked imminent on several occasions, but the Frenchman has always eluded the Spanish superclub. As a 14-year-old, he signed for Monaco – his parents wanted him to stay in France; and in 2017 he turned down Real to join Paris Saint-Germain – on the guarantee he’d get first-team action. Then, a year ago, another offer from Real looked certain to lure the superstar from PSG – only for the French club to offer their prize player…

AI cannot do God’s work To The Daily Telegraph At Mass last Sunday, after his sermon celebrating Corpus Christi, our parish priest confessed that he hoped nobody would congratulate him on his sermon, as it had been written by AI in seconds. After the service, he told me of the parameters he set, and that the sermon was as given, except that he asked for a joke to be included. This turned out to be unsuitable for repetition in a church (or anywhere else in polite society). The verdict was that the sermon was nowhere near his normal standard. So much for AI. Dr Chris Topping, Pilling, Lancashire One country separated… To The Times Apropos your report – “Army could get shot of ‘male’ ranks” – in Old English the…

The American writer Cormac McCarthy, who died last week aged 89, was a novelist “utterly wedded to the apocalyptic sublime”, said Rob Doyle in The Guardian. Over a career that produced 12 novels and two plays – and spawned some excellent film adaptations, notably the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men – he wrote obsessively about the “darkness, violence, horror and chaos he perceived at the core of all creation”. He did so, however, not with the “hysterical terror of H.P. Lovecraft, but with an ecstatic lyricism more like that of Muslim mystic-poets rapturously praising their holy-beloved”. It was McCarthy’s fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985), that “exploded” his reputation, and is today regarded as his masterpiece. Set in the US-Mexico borderlands of the mid-1800s, this “revisionist western” follows a…

Caragh Thuring at Thomas Dane Gallery Painters who paint works chiefly about the act of painting itself can easily seem like a boring and self-indulgent bunch. Not so in the case of Belgian artist Caragh Thuring (b.1972), who makes the process of questioning her own work as an artist through her pictures look infectiously fun. In The Foothills of Pleasure, her current show, she takes as a starting point her 2022 canvas of that name: an oddball, surrealist-tinged work peopled by fragments of postcards tacked to a wall, pink bricks, a mountainous horizon and some cartoonish cacti. It’s something that could have been created by Leonora Carrington, had she been a 21st century hipster. The other works, created in response to it, are almost like remixes of a classic song, chopping…

The man who reinvented sauces Compared with the likes of Thomas Keller or René Redzepi, the French chef Yannick Alléno lacks “public recognition”, says Tony Turnbull in The Times. All this proves is that “there is no justice”, because he’s “one of the world’s … most innovative chefs”. The holder of 15 Michelin stars (second only to Alain Ducasse, who has 20), Alléno is “the man credited with taking sauce-making, still the bedrock of French cuisine, into the 21st century”. And next month, he opens his first London restaurant: Pavyllon, at the Four Seasons in Mayfair. Although less formal than some of Alléno’s establishments, Pavyllon will showcase many of his greatest creations, including his painstaking “extraction method” for sauces. He begins by cooking an ingredient – “fish, vegetables, whatever” –…

• Elevate inexpensive materials: in one room, what looks like dark tropical flooring is in fact plywood, scorched with a blowtorch to darken it and bring out the grain. • Use every last scrap of fabric. Vanessa Macdonald uses the same floral linen on armchairs, curtains and scatter cushions in the same room to bring cohesion. • Panelling creates a more decorated look and can be created using simple wooden mouldings or MDF cut to size. Christian Bense uses a half-wall of glazed panelling as an internal window to separate a small sitting area. This could work as a room divider in a large open-plan living space. • Adding texture to the ceiling rather than painting it white helps make a room cosier. • Mirrors can be used in clever…

Silvio Berlusconi 1936-2023 Silvio Berlusconi, who died last week aged 86, “dominated the public life of his country” as no other Italian had since Benito Mussolini, said The Guardian. The Republic’s longest-serving prime minister, he held power for eight of the ten years between 2001 and 2011. The “Berlusconi decade” will be remembered as a period in which Italy’s economy remained dismayingly stagnant. Yet the buccaneering, perma-tanned one-time cruise-ship singer was PM four times, and survived countless scandals, financial and sexual – as well as numerous criminal investigations, and a conviction for tax fraud. For years, Berlusconi provided “colourful copy” for newspapers, said The Times. He tended to be affable in private, but he was prone to shocking gaffes: he caused outrage in Berlin by comparing a German MEP to…

Forget about renationalising water Jim Armitage The Sunday Times Summer’s here and, with it, the usual hosepipe bans and political chuntering about renationalising Britain’s failing water companies, says Jim Armitage. Be careful what you wish for. Bringing them back into public hands “would be like pouring money down the drain”, and there’s little evidence it would improve services. When the infrastructure was state-owned, it was neglected abominably by governments of all colours for decades – London remained reliant on Joseph Bazalgette’s 1860s system. “The reason is simple: sewers and pipes don’t win votes, so never get prioritised by politicians.” We can’t even provide decent funding for education and health, so the idea of creating a state-run “golden age of storm drains” is for the birds. Private water companies have had…