What happened
A senior minister has insisted that the government’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, had no involvement in the decision to abandon the prosecution of two British men accused of spying for China.

Who said what
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said Powell (pictured above) “had no role” in discussions about the “substance or the evidence” of the case after reports suggested that political reluctance to label China a national security threat led to the charges being dropped. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accused ministers of “changing their story repeatedly” and being “too weak to stand up to Beijing”, demanding that Starmer address MPs directly.

There are “growing questions” over the collapse of the case, said Millie Cooke in The Independent. Legal experts have cast doubt on the government’s reasoning, said Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian. Nick Vamos, a former lawyer at the CPS and partner at Peters & Peters, told the paper he believed that prosecutors probably “messed up” either when they laid the charges or when they dropped them.

What next?
The Conservatives have tabled an urgent parliamentary question today, pressing the government to explain its role in the case’s collapse amid growing criticism of Labour’s softer stance on China.

What happened
Prince Andrew allegedly emailed Jeffrey Epstein the day after the now notorious photograph of him with Virginia Giuffre appeared, telling the financier “we are in this together” and adding “we’ll play some more soon”. The message, dated 28 February 2011, was reportedly sent from the Duke of York’s official address despite his public claim that he had severed ties with Epstein three months earlier.

Who said what
According to The Sun on Sunday, which published the message alongside the Mail on Sunday, the exchange casts new doubt on Andrew’s 2019 BBC Newsnight interview, in which he said his meeting with Giuffre “didn’t happen” and that he had ended contact with Epstein in 2010.

What next?
While convicted sex offender Epstein died by suicide in 2019 and Ghislaine Maxwell remains imprisoned for trafficking underage girls, renewed attention on the 2011 email is likely to intensify scrutiny of Andrew’s past statements and his attempts to rehabilitate his public image. The King has made it clear that he would prefer Andrew to be “invisible” at future royal gatherings, said The Times.

As Europe ramps up defence spending in the face of the growing threat posed by Russia, states on Nato’s eastern flank are turning to a more unusual line of defence: bogs.

“Water has played a role in defensive strategy for millennia,” said the Financial Times. Germanic tribes used peatland to defeat the Romans, while Holland mastered strategic flooding to ward off invasion by Spain and France. The great Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz thought that bogs were among “the strongest lines of defence”.

This was shown to devastating effect in 2022 when, in a desperate bid to stop the Russian army’s advance on Kyiv, Ukrainian authorities decided to blow up a massive Soviet-era dam to the north of the capital that had long contained the Irpin River.

The “desperate gamble” paid off, said The Telegraph, flooding a long-lost wetland basin and turning the land into “an almighty, impassable swamp that helped shield the city as Russian tanks languished in thick, black sludge.

By chance, “most of the European Union’s peatlands are located on Nato’s border with Russia and Belarus”, said military news site Defence 24. They stretch from the Finnish Arctic, through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, across the Suwalki Gap – judged by many to be the most likely point of attack in a future Russian confrontation with Nato – and on to eastern Poland.

Finland has already begun a bog-restoration pilot project close to its border with Russia, while Poland plans to revive and expand peatland and forests as part of its £1.9 billion East Shield fortification.

“There are not many things that environmental activists and defence officials agree on and here we find great common ground,” Finnish MP Pauli Aalto-Setälä told The Telegraph.