Have the Tories been written off too soon? As commentators point to a “Badenoch bounce”, Reform UK has fallen to third place behind the Conservatives in recent polls.

Nigel Farage’s party has slipped to 21%, two points behind the Tories and three behind Labour, according to a YouGov poll carried out this week. The Conservatives’ 23% – up three percentage points on the previous week – is their highest rating since January 2025.

What did the commentators say?

Recent polling seems to point to a “Badenoch bounce” after “the most trouble-free Conservative Party conference in some years”, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. Her “improving recognition, policy announcements and forceful personality have helped to slowly drag her party back up in the polls”.

Badenoch “intends to reunite the right by welcoming back Reform UK’s voters while dismissing its leaders as racists, fraudsters and takers of dodgy donations”, said Andrew Gimson in The i Paper.

Boris Johnson “pursued” the same strategy seven years ago when he “proved he was serious about getting Brexit done by removing the whip from 21 Conservative MPs who refused to back him”, and this forced Farage “to stand down Brexit Party candidates in Tory-held seats”.

“Respectability is an important element in her pitch” and Badenoch “dares to be unfashionable”. This is “one reason why she carries conviction with those who might vote Conservative”, because “they too are unfashionable”.

Meanwhile, “cracks have begun to appear” in Farage’s “image as a straight-talking, honest alternative to the politicians whom he claims has let down the country”, said Jules Walkden on Politics Home. He “appears to be alienating the very voters Reform needs to win over”, and though he was once his party’s “greatest asset”, he “may fast be turning into a liability”.

You may be wondering “why much of the media are talking about a Badenoch revival”, said Jonathan Liew in The Guardian, when “her party lost 563 councillors and 40% of its councils” this year and “remains about four points below its apparent nadir of 2024”.

The fact is this “civil war on the right” is a “charade” – a “fake fight being enacted for our benefit” because the “right bloc is now a single basic substance, responsive and carefully calibrated to the different audiences it needs to capture”.

So if, “after all the bickering and infighting, a coalition should be required”, do we “really expect a Conservative Party founded entirely on the gain and exercise of power to suddenly turn it down?”

What next?

Following the successful Tory conference, Badenoch’s “first objective” is not “a spectacular leap in support, but to establish a consistent lead over Reform”. This would “begin changing the political dynamic on the right”, said Caroline Wheeler and Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper.

With sustained “small gains” leading to “incremental progress”, she can “gradually change how voters, commentators and rival parties perceive the contest”. This would increase the “evidence” that the Tories are “recovering” – a “perception” that might, “in turn”, help “attract voters who want a credible alternative to Labour”.

Donald Trump’s proposed “energy ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine has been dismissed as unfair and partisan with the US leaving Kyiv significantly weakened.

As the challenges of winter draw near, Trump’s move has thrown the future of Ukraine into doubt.

“It had already been a terrible week in Ukraine” before Trump’s “one-sided ceasefire plan” put Kyiv “in a tough spot as winter approaches”, said The New York Times.

What did the commentators say?

The deal “comes at a particularly bad time”, said The New York Times, as Russia is “stepping up efforts to target Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, including, crucially, its energy infrastructure” as “part of an ongoing effort to both cripple Ukraine’s economy and break its will to fight”. The coming winter “might be the hardest yet” because Ukraine is “facing a critical shortage of air defences”.

But the “bigger problem” is that Trump is “pressuring Ukraine to give up the best tool it has for fighting back” – its attacks on Russian oil refineries. Ukraine “effectively has no operational oil refineries”, so “this ceasefire, such as it is, would really only tie the hands of one party”.

After Russian drones and missiles “pummelled nearby power stations, triggering power cuts” and Kyiv was “plunged into darkness”, there was a “sense of outrage and betrayal”, said The Economist.

A Ukraine government source said American officials warned that unless Kyiv stopped its drone assaults on Russian oil refineries, the US would block weapons shipments under the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List, under which Ukraine has received “about $10 billion [£7.5 billion]-worth of American weapons” paid for by Nato allies and partners.

This move would “further weaken some of the country’s defences” and although Trump’s “new turn against Ukraine may be as transitory as the earlier ones”, this is still “a dangerous moment for Ukraine”.

But Trump’s threat of a suspension is “far from hypothetical”, said Sasha Vakulina on EuroNews. In 2025, the White House “temporarily halted intelligence-sharing and military assistance to Ukraine amid a diplomatic confrontation with Kyiv”.

Although “both were subsequently restored” following talks, the episode “demonstrated how quickly Washington could use security cooperation as a source of political leverage” and “how dependent Ukraine remained on American capabilities”.

US intelligence “remains crucial to Ukraine’s ability to anticipate Russian attacks”, and it is still “unclear how far European allies could compensate should another American suspension come into force”.

Although Trump’s announcement “seemed to make Ukraine’s situation even more perilous”, said Eric Ciaramella on Foreign Affairs, it’s not “necessarily a major setback for Ukraine”, because it “comes amid a broader shift” by Trump to “move away from pursuing an elusive comprehensive peace agreement in favour of a mutual ceasefire on strikes against energy infrastructure”. This shift “could ultimately be beneficial to Kyiv”.

Also, “in his angry retort” to Zelenskyy’s criticism of the diesel deal, Trump “revealed a potential way forward: as long as Ukraine stopped hitting Russian refineries, the president said, ‘you can do whatever you want to Russia’”.

Ukraine has “more leverage than a year ago”, said Nicholas Vinocur on Politico, and European leaders are “warning” Trump “not to squander it by pressuring Kyiv to ease up on Russia”. Although Trump “wants the attacks to stop, Ukraine’s European allies are keen to cripple Russia’s war effort”.

What next?

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said “repeatedly” that Ukraine is ready to halt its strikes on Russian oil refineries and other energy facilities if Moscow “did the same”, said the BBC.

But Moscow said Ukraine does not deserve the “respite” a ceasefire would bring, because it would mean Europe would be able to “pump” Ukraine with new weaponry.

Leaders of India’s Cockroach Janta Party have been detained after breaching a security cordon to demand the resignation of the country’s election chief, who deleted 130 million names from voters’ lists.

The activists, who claim the mass deletion was designed to benefit Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, evaded security to enter Jantar Mantar, a “historic Delhi observatory popular for protests”, said the BBC.

The election commission insists the purging of electoral rolls was to remove voters who have died, moved, or cannot otherwise be verified, and that those impacted can apply to be re-enrolled. But over the weekend, tens of thousands of people, including prominent lawyers and journalists, were detained and released in protests that show no signs of slowing.

What did the commentators say?

It will be “difficult” for Modi, who denies the deletions were carried out to benefit his party, to “quell the turmoil”, wrote Andres Schipani and Jyotsna Singh in the Financial Times.

The Cockroach Janta Party emerged as a student-led movement focussing on alleged examination irregularities, but it is now targeting the institution that “oversees elections in the world’s largest democracy”, making it harder for Modi to “find the right response”.

If the PM concedes to the demand for Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation, he could open the door to questioning the wider legitimacy of his government, Ruchi Gupta, executive director of the Future of India Foundation, told the broadsheet. Fundamentally, “the government has a trust deficit that it needs to address.”

“If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, nobody notices,” said Vidya Krishnan on Al Jazeera. Indian democracy currently resembles a “plucked chicken, stripped of its plumage”. The revision of the country’s electoral rolls was the last straw – an “exercise in bureaucratic fascism”, for “there is simply no other way to frame an event that strips 130 million Indians of their right to vote.”

Modi now finds himself “retreating behind barricades, facing the wrath of students for whom the slow erosion of democracy has left little to lose and even less to fear”. The mass protest on Saturday was “just an opening salvo”.

But even so, Modi “remains popular” among large swathes of the population, said Faisal Mahmud on Asia Times. His “popularity, cult-like charisma, organisational strength and electoral record cannot simply be wished away”, and “nor can allegations of electoral manipulation substitute for evidence”. But now, “the government’s handling of dissent has become an issue in its own right”.

What next?

The protesters and opposition party are showing no sign of letting up. Modi “does not understand that the game is over”, said the leader of India’s opposition alliance, Rahul Gandhi. “We will ensure that Modi pays for the crimes he has committed against the country.”

“The youth will keep coming out,” Uday Bhanu Chib, national president of the Indian Youth Congress, a unit of Gandhi’s party, told the FT. They’re “no longer afraid of this government”.

The Cockroach Janta Party protests “have laid bare the hollowed-out democracy that India holds up to the world as exemplary”, said Krishnan on Al Jazeera. There is little doubt that “history books will cast Modi in his proper role as the man who caused an entire generation of Indians to lose all respect for the government”.

Saudi Arabia has vowed a firm response to the deadly attacks on the kingdom’s airports and oil and gas facilities by Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

The Iran-backed Houthis said their latest drone and missile strikes – some of which struck King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, killing 13 people and injuring more than 300 – were launched in retaliation for “brutal Saudi aggression” against areas they control in western Yemen.

“The events of recent weeks are serious. Our response must be equally serious,” said Saudi energy minister Prince Abdul Aziz bin Salman today. There is “no room for fear in the vocabulary of Saudis”.

What did the commentators say?

“No political slogan, ideological grievance or claim of resistance can justify turning airports into targets,” said Hani Hazaimeh on Arab News. The Houthis are reckless, and Saudi Arabia “has every right to defend its citizens” and its “critical infrastructure”. It’s easy “to urge calm from a distance, far from the airports” and homes under missile attack; “it is far harder to explain to grieving families why the international response remains trapped in a cycle of condemnation followed by inaction”. All thought of “diplomatic theatre is over. The time for effective action is now.”

The Houthis are “drawing from Iran’s playbook” and “vowing a painful escalation” by “targeting critical infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and imposing a global economic cost”, said Mostafa Salem on CNN. So far, Saudi Arabia has largely confined itself to providing air cover for the anti-Houthi Yemeni coalition but “whether that restraint will hold” is now “an open question”. Putting Saudi troops on the ground in Yemen would plunge the nation “into an expensive and grinding ground war” and undercut Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s carefully cultivated image “of a stable, investment-friendly kingdom and global tourism hub”.

But the airport death toll is “bewilderingly high” for the Saudis, who are “unaccustomed to such fatalities”, and that’s “likely to prompt a bloody response”, said Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. If so, the kingdom faces a “long, intractable war with a resourceful and impassioned antagonist, one willing to sustain a high degree of pain in ways that Riyadh can’t match without orienting itself entirely towards war”.

The Iran war has “stirred political loyalties, triggering a surge of Houthi advancement”, destabilising the “region’s tense equilibriums” as Donald Trump “decided that the safety and security” of America’s Gulf allies were “secondary” to his beef with Tehran. Saudi Arabia is “bewildered and losing lives and capital, stuck between old alliances that no longer work and new hostilities that are too calamitous to confront”.

What next?

The Houthi attacks on the Saudis could “drive global oil prices even higher”, said Sky News’ Middle East correspondent, Adam Parsons. “Were the Houthis to put a stranglehold” on the Bab al Mandab strait, “it would have a major influence on trade that would hit the price of oil”.

This would “anger Donald Trump, who sees the price of oil as such a barometer of his own success”. The US president has said he is reviewing the situation, and is “going to look at” joining any Saudi response.

Tuesday “may go down as one of the most consequential days in the history of mathematics,” said The Economist. Less than a month after astonishing the world with its solution to the long-standing Navier-Stokes problem, OpenAI has released 722 maths papers, proving or disproving problems across numerous fields from algebraic geometry to number theory. OpenAI said it had consulted extensively with mathematicians about publishing the results but the news seems to have stunned maths world. How they react to this “mathspocalypse”, and the panic it’s inducing, could determine if there’s any human-led maths at all in 50 years’ time.

What did the commentators say?

“If you want some sense of what things feel like now in maths, imagine a hunter-gatherer who’s spent his entire life learning to survive deep in an unforgiving rainforest, then a giant resort hotel springs up right next to him with a helipad and heated pools and Airbnbs,” wrote Scott Aaronson, chair of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, according to Sky News.

This is “heartbreaking” for our community, said Jordana Cepelewicz, maths editor at Quanta Magazine. In mathematics, “problems are posed not so much because their answers will be practical and important, but because they represent interesting journeys”. As we “struggle to solve a problem” we might “come up with intriguing tools and connections, stumble on novel ideas and directions, take fruitful detours, and answer new questions” no one’s ever thought to ask. AI models “just skip to the end”.

AI was already changing maths. Researchers have stopped positing open conjectures at the end of their paper, so they’re not “scraped by bots”. Others are publishing their papers prematurely, to avoid getting “scooped” by AI. There is now widespread fear that new blood will no longer be “attracted to this remade discipline”, resulting in a “whole lost generation”.

“Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power," said the Association for Human Mathematics in a statement. “We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centres human understanding.”

The “floodgates are open”, said Joseph Howlett in Scientific American. This is without question the “biggest maths breakthrough in two decades”. But such is the speed of advancement, there are concerns the movement may be “coming too fast” even for the AI labs themselves. Not that they plan on slowing the tools down; they’re aiming to make them as powerful as possible to “show that their AI is really getting smarter”. The “consequences of this race are becoming harder and harder to predict”.

This could also have dangerous implications for cybersecurity, said Anthony Cuthbertson in The Independent. Cryptography forms the backbone of online encryption, used in web browsers, secure messaging and online banking. It also relies on “mathematical problems that are currently too difficult to solve efficiently”. There is no evidence that AI models have come close to breaking them but these latest advances could “lead to new algorithms capable of cracking them”, and reduce the time available to develop adequate protections.

What next?

It will take years to verify Open AI’s breakthroughs, said The Economist. Many of the papers are more than 100 pages long, only 127 of them “are accompanied by a code guaranteeing logical consistency (a norm in the field)”, and there is published internal reasoning for just 10. And it remains to be seen how many new research avenues the papers could open up. “For now, the mathematical problems AI is revealing are more existential than numerical.”

The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement has been invoked for the first time since it was signed in August, following Houthi-led attacks on Saudi infrastructure Mecca, Medina and the capital’s airport.

While not identifying the Yemeni group by name, the alliance, composed of Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, will undertake a “rapid deployment” of troops to Saudi Arabia as part of their “collective defence commitments”.

Saudi Arabia is also supporting an offensive by the Yemeni government to take back the capital, Sanaa, held by the Houthis since 2014. Three people have been killed in attacks on Saudi Arabian airports over two days, as fighting spilled across the Yemen border into the Kingdom. It is unclear how Pakistan and Turkey will contribute to this action.

As the US continues to focus on Iran, and has ruled out direct intervention in Yemen, the alliance’s success could redraw the lines of power and control in the region.

What did the commentators say?

“Even the threat of joint involvement could dramatically shift the Saudi-Houthi conflict,” said Foreign Policy. Although in its infancy, members of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement boast nearly 1.4 million active troops combined, as well as “3,400 aircraft, 6,000 tanks, and more than 340 naval assets”. Pakistan has nuclear capabilities – “the only nuclear-armed Muslim-majority nation in the world” – and Turkey stands second only to the US for the largest armed forces in Nato.

Defence relations between the countries had already been close, even before the Mecca Accord was signed in August, said Abid Hussain on Al Jazeera. Pakistan has trained Saudi military personnel since 1967, and a declassified CIA assessment from 1985 estimated that 13,000 to 14,000 Pakistanis were serving in the Saudi army.

However, the Turkish “footprint is less clear”. And there is a potential sticking point, as Article 92 of Turkey’s constitution stipulates that the “authority to send troops abroad rests with the parliament, which has yet to ratify the Mecca pact”.

The timing of the announcement also “carries deep symbolic weight”, said Sean Mathews in Middle East Eye. Pakistan has been positioning itself as an “honest broker” for peace in the region, mediating between the US and Iran in previous negotiations, and Turkey has overtly established its stance as a “rival to Israel”. And by invoking the pact, Saudi Arabia has demonstrated that it has the “support of the wider region in its counter-offensive against the Houthis” and, by extension, Iran.

In the grand scheme of things, the Mecca Accord should be perceived more as an “additional layer of regional security rather than a wholesale strategic realignment”, said international relations expert John Calabrese on The Conversation. Traditionally, states in the region have relied on external support to gain “greater strategic autonomy”. Yet, as the threats in the region become harder to “separate into discrete categories”, and suspicion of the conventional allies grows, Saudi Arabia is moving to “hedge” its bets to avoid becoming vulnerable.

What next?

Despite the invocation, a resolution in Yemen against the Houthis is “unlikely without a wider deal between the US and Iran”, said Samer Al-Atrush, The Times’ Middle East correspondent. Currently, however, Washington is intent on demanding “concessions” from Tehran by enforcing its own naval blockade.

A seventh man has been arrested in connection with a suspected terror plot near RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire, last month, which Andy Burnham has said was most likely linked to Iran.

Amid fears that Tehran was planning a complex drone attack against Fairford, which serves as a forward operating base for US aircraft targeting Iran, the Trump administration made a “historic, unprecedented” decision to withdraw all its 12 B-1 bombers on Sunday, said David Dunn, a professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham.

The incident “tells us much about Iran, Britain and the emerging threats to US forces and assets. None of it is good,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial.

What did the commentators say?

The Fairford plot is far from an isolated event. On Tuesday, three Iranian men appeared in court accused of spying on British-based dissident journalists on behalf of Iran’s foreign intelligence service. Earlier this year, a wave of arson attacks targeting British Jews were linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). And in July, a Tehran-backed cyberattack halted operations at a UK power plant for four days.

It is important to note here that the UK is technically “not at war with Iran”, said BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner. But the US is, and “that is a distinction Tehran has publicly challenged”.

In July, Iran warned “any base used for aggression against Iranian territory constitutes a legitimate target for our forces”. As far as the IRGC “is concerned, Britain is already a participant in America’s war with Iran”, said Gardner.

The emergence of sophisticated state-run drone attacks, such as Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web last year, when low-cost drones were smuggled into Russia and carried on lorries to locations near airbases before being set upon strategic targets, have changed the game when it comes to perceived threats from hostile nations.

But “the question on minds in London is not whether Britain could stage such an attack but whether it could repel one”, said The Times’ defence editor Larisa Brown.

Given that it would require “months of planning, utmost secrecy and the purchase or smuggling of large quantities of explosives undetected by Britain’s security services”, one senior US diplomat asked, does Iran “really have the capability to pull off an Operation Spider’s Web on foreign soil? I think most of the community doubts that.”

“Yet there was enough concern for America to act”, said The Times.

What next?

The government’s strategic defence review published last year earmarked up to £1 billion for homeland air and missile defence over the next four years.

This week, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch ramped up this pledge to £10 billion over the next 10 years to go towards a “Britannia Shield” that would protect military bases and critical infrastructure from missile or drone attacks.

While defence experts have questioned these figures, for Britain the “bigger problem has been finding the will to confront the Iranians and go on offence against their terror networks. Does protecting US jets and UK Jews fit the bill?”, asked the WSJ.

“The IRGC, like Vladimir Putin, clearly doesn’t think it will pay much of a price for orchestrating terror in Britain – or many other states. Until that changes, even the best defence technology can only do so much.”

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has launched a legal action against Thames Valley Police over search warrants issued for raids on his homes at the Sandringham Estate and Royal Lodge, Windsor, in February. He was subsequently arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office, before being released without charge. The investigation remains ongoing, and Mountbatten-Windsor denies all wrongdoing.

An initial judicial hearing will take place in private on Thursday, though it is not known whether the former prince will attend.

This is the “first time a member of the royal family has challenged the lawfulness of criminal actions against them since Charles I in 1649”, said royal editor Hannah Furness in The Telegraph. “And we all know how that went.”

What did the commentators say?

The review is the “last roll of the dice” to rehabilitate Mountbatten-Windsor’s image, said Furness. Winning would at least “put the idea of his innocence, or injustice, back in the public imagination”. With silence and charity work, he could in time have been able to at least become “unremarkable” in public life. However, this legal action will break that “stalemate”. Ultimately, though, there is only one way Mountbatten-Windsor can re-emerge: by “actually clearing his name”. “No loopholes, no PR – just the truth in the eyes of the law.”

There is an “unusual” form of “gamesmanship” going on here, former senior detective Martyn Underhill told The Times. “In about 50 years in policing I’ve never known legal action against a warrant,” because the threshold required to obtain one is “really quite low”. This looks more like an “effort to try and change the dynamic and narrative, to show he’s fighting back”.

His “calculated gamble” could destabilise wider accusations made against him, said Andrew Tillett in the Australian Financial Review. He will be encouraged by the “weakness” of the police’s “faltering” case against Peter Mandelson, and the failure of US investigators to make the full, unredacted version of the Epstein files available to UK forces.

Mountbatten-Windsor has lost almost everything, and challenging the police “won’t get that back”. But, with “customary arrogance”, he thinks he can “ease some of the shackles on his life in limbo”.

What next?

The former prince will have to finance proceedings on his own, said The Times. Mountbatten-Windsor’s “counter-attack” was made “seemingly without the King’s knowledge”, and Charles has “made it clear” that his brother’s private stipend – “understood to be in excess of £1 million a year” – “should not be used to fund the judicial review”.

“There are several possible scenarios ahead”, said The i Paper. The High Court will establish whether police had “reasonable grounds” for the searches. But even if the police were deemed to have acted unlawfully, “any material gathered in those searches could potentially still be used” against Mountbatten-Windsor.

Alternatively, the court could order that materials from the search be excluded from any case against him, and in the extreme, could award Mountbatten-Windsor compensation and a police apology. However, even if this were the case, “I can’t see that this judicial review would be able to derail the criminal investigation,” solicitor John Hagan told the newspaper.

The Conservatives have kicked off their conference in Birmingham in a buoyant mood. Four years on from the Liz Truss mini-Budget that shredded the party’s economic credibility, and a mere two years since the party’s worst general election result in history, Kemi Badenoch has “a modest spring in her step”, said Politico’s Noah Keate.

The Tory leader “can point to disarray” in Reform’s ranks, “decent personal ratings” and the establishment of “clear dividing lines with Labour” as “reasons to be cheerful”. But “it’s still a massive road back” for Britain’s “once-dominant” centre-right party.

What did the commentators say?

Last year’s conference “marked a low ebb for the Conservatives”; they were “in a fight for relevance and, perhaps, survival”, said Rob Ford, Sky News’ election analyst. A year on and “things are looking up at last”. The public have “warmed to Kemi Badenoch, soured on Nigel Farage” and the party has hauled itself “back into polling contention”.

Key to this turnaround has been the Tory leader’s stance as the “common sense” candidate, combining low-tax economic policies with a disdain for identity politics and a promise to put “foundation conservative values” at the heart of her offering to the public. Although 50% of voters still do not see her as a prime-minister-in-waiting, her net favourability rating is up 20 points from this time last year, according to YouGov polling in August

“Reports of the death of the Conservative Party now look premature,” political scientist Tim Bale told Agence France-Presse. Yet despite attempts by the Tories and their allies in the media to “create some momentum”, it’s still “too early to talk about a ‘Kemi-naissance’”, with the party itself far less popular than its leader and still four points below its disastrous general-election showing in 2024.

There has been “one clear message” from Badenoch’s public announcements: “that Britain must get off benefits and back to work”, said Robin Ashenden in The Spectator. She had framed this as a moral crusade, saying that a life of work, rather than dependency, is not just “better for society” but “better for the soul”. Badenoch’s lean into Thatcherite “Victorian values”, along with “her customary war-cry of ‘What a lot of nonsense!’ may have increasing voter appeal”.

With its talk of benefits scroungers and repealing the Human Rights Act, the party “the country still regards as toxic is determined to double down on its toxicity”, said John Crace in The Guardian. Badenoch seems “desperate to track ever further to the right and abandon its centre right to Labour and the Lib Dems.” This “feels like madness” but “this conference is all about Kult Kemi”.

What next?

Badenoch has released a 30,000-word treatise, “The Right Way” outlining her core principles. This is “the sacred text of the Badenoch project, designed to underpin this week’s Tory conference, the manifesto and – she hopes – a return to government”, said The Times’ political editor Ben Riley-Smith.

With unfavourable economic headwinds likely to limit Andy Burnham’s ambitious reform agenda, there’s now a question Labour strategists “dare not ask”, said Keir Starmer’s former speechwriter Alan Lockey in Arguably: Has Kemi Badenoch managed to turn her party round like Keir Starmer did his? “Is she, after two years of patient preparation, finally ready to make her move?”

President Donald Trump was impeached twice during his first term. As the midterm elections inch closer, there is impeachment talk in the air again, but this time with a twist. Democrats are now talking about impeaching members of Trump’s Cabinet, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could be first on the list.

What did the commentators say?

Democrats “stumbled” onto the Cabinet-impeachment strategy thanks to Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, said MS NOW. Massie, who lost his primary election to a Trump-endorsed opponent, introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth last month. This is a “highly underrated” strategy for forcing accountability on the administration, Massie said to the outlet.

Some party leaders are mum about the idea for now. Democrats “haven’t ruled anything out” if they win the midterms, said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to MS NOW. “And we haven’t ruled anything in.”

Impeaching members of Trump’s Cabinet would be an “effective accountability measure,” said David A. Graham at The Atlantic. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has “done serious damage to American public health,” Hegseth “waged an unauthorized war against Iran” and Attorney General Todd Blanche turned the Justice Department into a “partisan tool for persecuting Trump’s political adversaries.” Cabinet impeachments would focus on “actual administration actions and policy” and avoid a presidential impeachment likely to prove a “dead end.”

An impeachment push could “derail” Democrats’ affordability messaging in the midterms campaign, said Chad Pergram at Fox News. While the party’s “hard left” may demand impeachment “for someone,” this could prove “politically toxic” for scandal-weary voters.

What next?

Hegseth might be particularly vulnerable to an impeachment push, with even GOP members expressing “doubts about his leadership” amid a stalemated war in Iran, said The New York Times. The defense secretary has not “developed any productive relationships, even with Republican members,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) to the outlet.

Impeachment is “not a fetish” for Democrats, said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) to NBC’s “Meet the Press.” It is a “critical tool.” But the party’s higher priorities after November are “getting healthcare to the American people and ending the lawlessness.”

The price of diesel has hit £2 per litre – the most expensive it has ever been – at a third of UK petrol stations, said The Sun.

This is “uncharted territory”, financial analyst Kathleen Brooks told City A.M. Donald Trump has already sent markets into a “frenzy” by threatening to ban diesel exports from the US, said the same paper. Weakened infrastructure for refining diesel and lower reserves than European counterparts mean the UK could be uniquely “exposed” to any further “ripple effects”, including more price rises.

What did the commentators say?

President Trump is trying to bring diesel prices down for US consumers ahead of the midterm elections in November. If he does decide to ban exports of US diesel, it would “hurt the countries which heavily depend” on it, said the BBC, including the UK. But it might also have “unintended effects that could hurt US production” in the longer term.

Trump’s threats have “highlighted Britain’s over-reliance on the goodwill of other countries” for its diesel needs, said an editorial in The Times. Last year, the UK imported more than 50% of its diesel supply, around a sixth of that from the US.

Our infrastructure depends on it: around 10 million cars, a quarter of the country’s trains, 70% of buses, virtually all tractors and “almost 99% of HGVs” run on diesel. Yet the UK has enough reserves to last for only around six weeks, according to International Energy Forum data, compared to around six months for France, Italy, Spain and Germany.

Breaking the £2 threshold for a litre of diesel should “set alarm bells ringing in Downing Street”, said The Telegraph in an editorial. The government’s response so far has been to remove VAT from energy bills in an attempt to cushion the blow to consumers, but this “hardly addresses the fundamental issues”. As a nation, we have “failed to prepare”, allowing our refining capacity to “wither away” to leave us “dangerously exposed” to market fluctuations beyond our control.

The diesel crisis could “deepen” after the UK’s largest refinery shut down production for up to 10 weeks, said energy editor Jonathan Leake in The Telegraph. The Fawley refinery in Hampshire – which produces “one fifth of the fuel used on UK roads” – has closed for planned maintenance, a move that “will add to fears about another diesel price spike hurting drivers at the pumps”.

In the 1980s, the UK had 18 refineries, but that has dropped to just four. Two closures last year – in Grangemouth, Scotland and Lindsey in Lincolnshire – “slashed UK refinery output by about a third”. Now, any closures, planned or unplanned, temporary or permanent, have a “rapid impact on supplies”.

What next?

“Rising diesel costs aren’t just a problem for drivers generally but a wider inflation threat,” said Sky News. Diesel is the “engine of the UK economy” and shortages would heavily disrupt supply chains and lead to costs being passed on to consumers, particularly in the run-up to Christmas. This is the type of inflation that “worries” the Bank of England, which is “widely tipped” to raise interest rates in November.

Taxes on fuel – which account for “just over half of the cost of a litre” – are also set to rise. Hikes planned by former chancellor Rachel Reeves are set to come into effect in January, but her successor, John Healey, should “question the wisdom of raising prices at the pump at a time when they are clearly inflationary in nature”. As such, they are likely to be “scrapped or further delayed” at the upcoming Budget.

As the Israel-Hamas war nears its three-year mark, an outbreak of algae throughout Israel’s desalination plants is threatening the country’s water supplies, which could affect the sewage systems in Gaza. Experts say the ongoing war is likely to exacerbate the problem.

What did the commentators say?

The issue began after a microalgae bloom in the Mediterranean Sea forced five out of six desalination plants on the Israeli coast to shut down, according to Israel’s national water company Mekorot, per CNN. These plants remove salt from seawater, and their closures caused a ripple effect due to the “country’s heavy dependence on desalination for drinking water,” said the outlet. Israel is “arid and has neither big rivers nor abundant rainfall, but its mastery of this technology has made it a water superpower.”

While Israel itself is unlikely to see a shortage of water, it could lead to a compounding crisis in Gaza, which has already seen “many of its pipelines and water infrastructure destroyed during the devastating war with Israel,” said NBC News. The algae currently attacking Israel’s water supplies may actually be caused by the situation in Gaza.

The “discharge of untreated sewage from the Gaza Strip into the sea is contributing to the worsening crisis affecting the Israeli desalination facilities,” the Zalul Environmental Association, an Israeli environmental NGO, told The Guardian. The wastewater “contains nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, which feed microalgae.”

Scientists are “trying to assess possible environmental fallout from Gaza’s destroyed wastewater infrastructure” and determine how much of a role it may have played in the algae bloom, said Middle East Eye. Regardless of the cause, it is a “reminder of the dire humanitarian conditions facing 2 million Gazans,” said The Washington Post. Gazans have “faced severe water shortages and have often resorted to using makeshift latrines.”

What next?

This kind of event will probably keep happening thanks to the steadily warming planet. It’s a “fair estimation that this will not be a once-in-a-lifetime” thing, Edo Bar-Zeev, an associate professor in water research at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, said to CNN. People “can assume that this will occur more and more through climate change.”

Andy Burnham has promised to “undertake the most ambitious review of Brexit since Britain left the EU”, said Jon Stone in Politico. And, “for now at least, he’s keeping all his options open”.

With different figures within his party arguing in favour of joining the single market, joining the customs union or rejoining the EU altogether, the prime minister is keeping his powder dry, saying only that he hopes to “find consensus” around one option at the UK-EU summit later this year. With nothing yet ruled in or out, there’s “plenty of space for interpretation” about the direction he might take.

What did the commentators say?

Burnham’s pledge undoubtedly marks a “turning point in the story of Brexit”, said Denis Staunton in The Irish Times. He’s signalling a “readiness to rip up Keir Starmer’s red lines on Europe”, which included no return to the single market or the customs union and no unrestricted freedom of movement.

Burnham’s “dramatic shift on Brexit” comes after EU leaders warned him to “tone down British demands to be included in the bloc’s Made in Europe policy”, said Arj Singh, The i Paper’s deputy political editor. The UK’s push for inclusion, in exchange for lower tuition fees for European students, “sparked anger in Brussels” and “underlined the limits” of Labour’s red lines. Days later, Burnham has “used his conference speech to say he was now prepared to drop” them.

The prime minister risks “reopening the bitter division” that followed the 2016 referendum, said Reuters. His “desire to find a consensus will test his political skill in a nation still scarred by the tumult” of Brexit. But the timing makes sense: Donald Trump’s geopolitics are “reshaping alliances around the globe”, and the “threat of war in Europe” adds weight to an argument for a closer UK-EU relationship.

A commitment to stronger ties with the EU is “vital” for the Labour’s chances at the next general election, said Tom Brufatto of campaign group Best For Britain, on Politics Home. Voters would “resoundingly reward” any parties “who take the plunge”, increasing support by 7%, according to a Best For Britain/YouGov poll.

Rejoining the EU would first require another referendum and then “potentially years of de-Brexit negotiations”, said The Guardian. And Brussels would want “cast-iron guarantees that the UK wouldn’t just walk out again”.

It would create a “decade of trading chaos”, said Matthew Lynn in The Spectator. Any discussions will “take a long time”, and require Burnham to win at least one election while they are ongoing, and the EU would almost certainly demand “tough terms”, including signing up to the Euro. Then, in all likelihood, “all our other trade agreements will have to be cancelled”. The last thing that the British economy needs is a “decade of wrangling over the issue all over again”.

What next?

It’s obvious that none of this can be “rushed,” said The Independent’s editorial board. Even in the Labour Party, most recognise that “rejoining is no simple matter”.

There have been calls for Burnham to make reversing Brexit his top policy pledge at the next election but it would not be “right or sensible to try to fight an election on a single issue”. Labour’s next manifesto needs “imaginative solutions” and “now is the time to open up the debate” and “start clearing the way forward from Brexit”.

Who wants to see the new, nearly four-hour documentary about Elon Musk? Not Musk.

The former trillionaire is threatening a defamation lawsuit over explosive claims in Alex Gibney’s film “Musk.” Social media companies are hesitant to allow promotion on their platforms, and Hollywood is whispering that the tech mogul’s power might keep the public from opportunities to see the film.

What did the commentators say?

“So much for free speech,” said The Hollywood Reporter. Social media platforms YouTube, TikTok and Meta’s Instagram and Facebook all initially declined to run the trailer for “Musk,” though YouTube and Meta later backtracked. (Musk-owned X is not accepting ads for the movie.) A hesitance to provide publicity is a problem for the film because “traction on social media is key” to the success of most modern documentaries.

The social media freeze-out comes amid “concerns” that “political considerations are influencing the rollout” of the film, said The New York Times. “Musk” is set for an Oct. 9 release in the United States, but Universal “has yet to announce any release dates” overseas. The studio counters that it “simply needs more time” to schedule foreign markets.

Audiences at this month’s Venice Film Festival “loved” the documentary that depicts Musk as a “plutocrat with questionable judgment and unchecked power,” Lorraine Ali said at the Los Angeles Times. There was a time when Musk would have been featured as a forward-thinking entrepreneur. Now audiences want to see depictions of the “dark side of wealth, fame and alleged genius.”

What next?

“Musk” is scheduled to stream on HBO Max after its theatrical run. But Gibney is nervous the streamer “may not be inclined to back the film” following the merger of Paramount with HBO parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, said The Atlantic.

Paramount is reportedly seeking funding from Musk to help complete the merger. The tech mogul, meanwhile, is making his feelings clear about the film and its future. “Musk” is a “hit piece that misses,” he said on X. The documentary is guilty of the “fatal sin of being boring for four hours.”

The word “hope” featured 21 times in Chancellor John Healey’s speech to the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, said Tom Peck in The Times. “Hope Again” was on the stage backdrop (twice), on a lectern, and hanging from the ceiling in “7ft-high letters”. Hope was certainly “in the air” but maybe it was mainly Labour MPs “hoping, specifically, that they will not all be out of a job again in a couple of years’ time”.

During his hour-long speech, Healey recommitted the government to the fiscal rules set out in 2024, and then promised “a new age of industrialisation”, and more jobs for young people. But, with the Budget less than a month away, he gave few indications of when, and how, these promises will be realised.

What did the commentators say?

It would have been easy for Healey to “slip from hope into hype”, said The Independent’s editorial board. Instead he exercised caution. Despite the “spring in their step”, conference attendees were “under no illusion that the room was squeezed by the elephants in it”. Compared to the era of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the money “is simply not there now”, the chancellor said, but he made it clear he’s “playing hardball with what he’s been given”: focusing on buying British, addressing spiralling welfare costs and encouraging growth. None of that can “happen immediately, but it’s a start.”

“Labour is caught between sunny aspiration and cold reality,” said Ian Dunt in The i Paper. This is not Healey’s fault: the scene was set by “austerity, Brexit, Covid, the war in Ukraine and the ineptitude of Liz Truss”. Healey “did a damn good job of sounding convincingly optimistic”. But that “doesn’t hide the brutality of the underlying conditions he faces or how unlikely it is that he can come through them unscathed”.

“Healey is in the uncomfortable position of a man who has just stepped into a lift in which someone else has recently farted,” said Will Dunn in The New Statesman. The air is thick with the “noxious” emissions of Donald Trump and his “cack-handed” war in Iran. That alone could cost the UK £28.5 billion in lost economic growth, and even that’s “assuming the disruption of energy supplies doesn’t get materially worse”. Then there’s borrowing costs – another thing over which Healey had “essentially no control” – reaching their highest level since 1998. But, if Healey does not support his hopeful agenda with action, the “acrid wafts of stagnation and inflation emanating from the UK economy will be assumed to be his fault”.

“With a Budget just weeks away, few policy announcements were expected but this was thin gruel indeed,” said The Telegraph’s editorial board. Healey called for increased growth, “yet everything this government has done has made life more difficult for businesses and entrepreneurs”. He’s right to tell Labour activists that the money they want for health and welfare can only come from increased growth but “few in his party are listening”.

It was what Healey “left unsaid” that is “far more important”, said The Guardian’s editorial board. He alluded to reducing the benefits bill but revealed no clear plan, and he talked of “revitalising industry” with “little explanation” of how this would create good jobs “across the wider economy”. With an “energy shock” on the horizon, the size of the fiscal headroom he is willing to “tolerate” will probably be the deciding factor between additional “taxing to fund a modest energy rescue package, or borrowing for a larger one”.

What next?

This was the “easy bit” for Healey, said Ben Zaranko in The Observer. What remains to be seen is whether he will use the coming Budget to announce “far-reaching reforms” or delay “the biggest and toughest decisions” until later. For now, he is betting that his “hopeful tone can survive rising borrowing costs, disruption to energy supplies, and all manner of painful financial trade-offs. We shall see on 28 October.”

The global impact of the upcoming “super El Niño” weather event is stark: latest estimates suggest more than 450,000 people will die, overwhelmingly in the global south, as a direct result of heatwaves. Extreme weather linked to the climate phenomenon, such as wildfires and flooding, is expected to take yet more lives.

While the UK will be spared the most direct and deadly effects of El Niño, it will feel the global ripple effects of its devastating impact.

What did the commentators say?

The precise effect of El Niño on UK weather is “notoriously tricky to predict”, said Madeleine Cuff in New Scientist. Conditions in northern Europe are “strongly affected” by weather phenomena in the North Atlantic, but El Niño develops over the Pacific.

An El Niño of average strength usually means a “wetter, windier, stormier” autumn and early winter followed by a late-winter cold snap. However, the “sheer size” of the developing super El Niño could mean that those wet and wild autumn conditions extend throughout the winter and even into the spring, according to Adam Scaife, who leads long-range forecasting at the Met Office.

Prolonged rainfall could help “replenish reservoirs and groundwater after an exceptionally dry summer”, said Cuff, but it comes at the price of elevated flood risk.

Perhaps easier to predict are the knock-on economic repercussions for UK consumers as a result of the disruption to global agriculture production and supply chains “already marred by the inflationary impact of the Iran war”, said The Times.

The cocoa market has been volatile in recent years, but hopes of calmer future prices are starting to reverse as investors brace for El Niño-related drought conditions in the crop’s West Africa heartlands. Prices of robusta, one of the world’s major coffee beans, are similarly soaring amid expected “pressure on reservoirs in Vietnam and weak irrigation in Indonesia”. European wheat production is more “resilient” to the effects of El Niño, but exports continue to be affected by “escalating attacks by Russia and Ukraine on each other’s Black Sea ports”.

As a result, British consumers can expect higher prices on supermarket shelves as manufacturers pass on those increases, which come in addition to higher transportation costs linked to fuel supply disruptions in the Middle East. It is, according to climate and commodities expert Hamad Hussain, “a perfect storm” for agricultural commodity markets.

What next?

It is now “beyond doubt” that the strength of the El Niño phenomenon has been supercharged by “human-made folly and injustice”, said The Guardian. The immediate priority must be to ensure support for the developing countries who have “contributed the least to the climate crisis but are likely to suffer most”. But more broadly, the “extraordinary toll” expected from this year’s El Niño must act as a “spur to action” for world leaders to change course. For the UK, that means “accelerating efforts to prepare the UK for increasingly extreme weather”. It is evident “we cannot afford not to do so”.

What do “Seinfeld,” “The Office” and “Family Guy” have in common? Each was used in a recent White House promotional video for the launch of what the administration has dubbed Trump TV, an official White House broadcast that has thus far largely been limited to previously recorded MAGA speeches and events.

Notably, the splashy, if dubiously copyright-compliant, rollout of what the White House has deemed its “Essentials Station” comes as the Trump administration escalates its running altercation with mainstream media outlets. So what exactly is Trump TV, who is it for, and what does this White House have in mind for the programming’s future?

What did the commentators say?

Trump TV was “born of necessity” after multiple major media companies “boycotted the White House press pool in response to the president’s ban on certain outlets,” said New York magazine. But unlike the “Oprah Winfrey Network-esque conservative media company Trump (allegedly) envisioned” as a potential outlet over the years, Trump TV is, for now, “just a dinky livestream on the White House YouTube page.” Still, the launch of an “administration-operated, around-the-clock video channel” places Trump TV “at the center of a coverage gap” caused by multiple major networks pulling out of the White House press pool, said USA Today.

“Not every big moment has made it on your tv,” said the White House in a social media post announcing the new service. “Now it can.”

In addition to streaming on YouTube, “Trump TV” is also featured on the White House website, alongside a “box titled ‘White House Live,’” which noted that it was “‘Off Air’ but advised viewers to ‘Stay Tuned,’” said The Hill. The window also features a “chyron reading official updates” and “statements praising Trump’s actions as president, among other texts.”

In launching Trump TV, the president “follows in Hugo Chávez’s footsteps,” said Al Jazeera. The former Venezuelan autocrat, with his “Hello, President” television program, “sang, took calls from viewers, attacked his opponents and sometimes announced major policy live on air.”

The White House is “drawing sharp backlash from critics” over the platform’s launch, said NJ.com. After banning independent media from the White House, President Donald Trump has launched “what is quite literally state-run TV,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), rumored to be mulling a presidential run himself in 2028, on X. Trump is “drowning out the fact that he and his corrupt administration are failing the American people.”

Trump TV “peaked at 8,000 viewers” for its Monday evening premiere before “dipping to around 4,000,” said The Independent. “Some 1,600 people” tuned in the following morning, “when footage showed the president signing an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico ‘Gulf of America’”

Some MAGA loyalists have “supported the launch of Trump TV” for “punching holes in the mainstream media propaganda,” said The Independent. Trump critics have “lost their minds over Trump TV,” said conservative commentator Benny Johnson, per the outlet. “The White House has perfectly trolled them again.”

What next?

It remains “unclear” whether the streaming platform will air “all current events and conferences involving the president,” said NJ.com. “Weirdly,” said New York magazine, Trump TV “did not even air the president’s big address” to the United Nations on Tuesday. “So far,” said Axios, Trump TV has “no anchors or news ticker.” It does display “banners asking viewers to text White House officials,” although it’s “unclear who staffs the channel, makes programming decisions or sets its schedule.”

Given this “calamitous start to life after the press pool,” The Daily Beast asked the White House if it “intends to try to fix the viewership issues” or if it is “waiting to patch things up with the TV networks,” said the outlet. The White House, to date, has not responded.

China is being quietly credited with keeping energy prices down in the wake of Donald Trump’s war with Iran, in turn helping prop up the global economy while cementing its own power on the world stage.

By tapping into its huge reserves of oil, “China kind of saved the day,” and helped the world avoid the “doomsday scenario” when the Strait of Hormuz closure choked off 20% of global energy supply, said Paul Gruenwald, global chief economist at S&P Global Ratings.

What did the commentators say?

For decades, China heavily depended on imported crude to meet its ever-growing energy needs. But over the past few years Chinese President Xi Jinping has sought to address what has long been viewed in Beijing as a major security weakness by spending billions of dollars amassing the world’s biggest stockpile of oil.

Last year China’s reserves were estimated at nearly 600 million barrels bigger than the US. This enabled it to dramatically cut its oil imports when the war in the Middle East broke out, keeping a lid on global oil prices and safeguarding its own economy.

Not only has this enabled China to weather the global commodities storm resulting from the closure of the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, it has seen China emerge as a “clear winner” from Donald Trump’s foray into the Middle East, said The Guardian, citing the findings of a report from geopolitical consulting firm Asia Group.

Long thought to be vulnerable to oil supply shocks, the conflict has made clear how China has “managed to transform that weakness into a surprising source of geopolitical power”, said The New York Times.

This has “big implications for the global energy industry, where oil producers like Saudi Arabia and the United States — not importers like China — have traditionally held most of the cards”.

“If they come to feel that in this domain, they are less vulnerable than they and many others may have assessed previously, that is a profound and important shift in one of the key inputs to how China makes decisions about its global strategy,” said Julian Gewirtz, a former White House and State Department official who worked on China issues in the Biden administration.

What next?

While the Iran crisis has vindicated Xi’s investment strategy, the “buffer” of China’s stockpile of oil, which has helped the world avoid a far deeper energy crisis up to now, “may face a test as Beijing shows signs of resuming purchases”, said CNBC.

Should this happen, the drag on global growth from elevated oil prices would deepen well beyond current estimates, said Krishna Srinivasan, director for the Asia and Pacific Department at the International Monetary Fund.

But the Iran crisis has also shown how “China’s muscular energy policy has afforded Beijing a major tool it could use, for instance, in a war over Taiwan”, said The Wall Street Journal.

“In the future, such power could be wielded in a clash with the US In the event of a war over Taiwan”. For example, “Beijing’s ability to slash oil imports for months on end could help China resist efforts by the US and its allies to block energy shipments”.

For China, “oil is not the Achilles’ heel we thought it was,” said Michal Meidan, head of China energy research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “I think a lot of people thought China was very, very vulnerable to oil supply disruptions. It’s not.”

China and the U.S. are locked in a race to develop the most powerful artificial intelligence models. Industry leaders are increasingly calling for regulations and guardrails to keep the technology from threatening humanity, which means the competing nations must collaborate to rein in AI as it gallops ahead. But observers are skeptical that Washington and Beijing can find the will to do so.

What did the commentators say?

AI safety is “on the agenda” for this week’s summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said The Associated Press. But both sides “see the other as the problem.” Trump has warned that “any efforts to regulate the technology would help China,” while Chinese leaders see talk of new safety rules as an attempt to slow their nation’s rapid advances so that the U.S. can create a “monopoly” on AI.

Some experts say Trump and Xi do not need to come to a full agreement on rules to create room for a slowdown. The two leaders “just need to create political space by acknowledging AI poses risks to both countries,” said Samm Sacks, a fellow at John Hopkins, to the AP.

Chinese leaders don’t see AI as an “existential threat to humanity,” said Kyle Chan, of the Brookings Institution, at The New York Times. The two countries have different anxieties. U.S. companies like Anthropic and OpenAI use AI to “develop even better AI systems,” creating concerns about a “feedback loop” in which humans “no longer have control over the process.”

Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Moonshot, by contrast, have “limited access to AI computing power” and so see that tipping point as being a “long way off.” Beijing is more worried about AI being used to spark a “mass movement powerful enough to topple the Communist Party.” It will be hard for the two countries to find common ground on the issue “without a baseline level of mutual understanding.”

Beijing would be “perfectly happy to watch Washington scare America into slowing itself down,” said Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) at the National Review. China’s Communist leaders are “actively working to exploit Americans’ fears” about the technology, and Beijing wins every time the U.S. “makes itself slower, more expensive and more afraid to experiment.” Washington is “flirting with exactly that mentality on AI.”

What next?

The U.S. is proposing an “emergency AI hotline” with China, said Axios. “More transparency” between the world’s AI superpowers is “very important," said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to reporters, per the outlet.

Still, neither nation “expects a breakthrough” at this week’s Trump-Xi summit, said The Economist. The growing risks posed by artificial intelligence “demand more urgency” than either side is bringing to the table. Until that urgency arrives, the “best hope is that the two sides keep talking.”

“What is the point of the Liberal Democrats?” asked Joanna Williams in The Times. Even those at the party conference weren’t sure: a Lib Dem council leader said the party was “lacking ambition”, while MP Roz Savage wondered why they were “struggling for relevance at precisely the moment when so many people feel powerless”.

During his headlining speech, leader Ed Davey campaigned for an anti-Reform firewall, income tax cuts and a closer proximity to the EU. Yet despite achieving a record number of MPs at the last election, the party is sliding in the polls and its blueprint to Westminster, for many members, is blank.

What did the commentators say?

“Younger readers may not believe me, but we used to take the Lib Dems seriously,” said Gareth Roberts in The Spectator. “Or at least more seriously.” We are surrounded by swathes of “repulsive or infuriating politicians”, but even so Davey is “merely laughable”. There have been calls from within for him to step down, but such is the predicament of the party, these outbursts “hardly seemed to register”.

Davey’s campaign to rejoin the single market in his closing speech underlines how the party’s strategy is “built on sand”, said columnist Sherelle Jacobs in The Telegraph. Traditionally, yes, the issue of Brexit proved the “ultimate gift” for the Lib Dems, allowing them to move to the left economically, while profiting as the “right tore itself apart”.

But now, the subject ranks “as a fifth-order issue” electorally, and placing it at the core of the party’s agenda “just seems odd”. In practical terms, Davey’s claim that his personal allowance reforms would be offset by “growth from a new EU partnership” would take “years to negotiate”, and also just “doesn’t seem credible”. The Lib Dem leader, aptly, is using the nostalgia of “exhuming the corpse of remainerism” to mask the problem that his party’s present “relevance is too terrifying to face”.

Given the current political climate, it “ought to be a boom time for Britain’s traditional third party”, said The Times. Labour is “tilting left”, the Conservatives are also “struggling for national relevance”, and Reform UK is embroiled in funding controversies. But Davey is leading them “towards irrelevance”. At the conference, all he could offer was a “grab-bag of woke talking points”, and he strayed from the popular issue of social care to pursue economic growth, “the standard fallback for the fiscally challenged (see Reeves 2024)”. Davey’s vision is “neither liberal nor democratic. Nor, for that matter, is it ­especially inspiring.”

Unlike other parties, the Lib Dems don’t crave the “sugar rush of going for temporary poll bounces”, said Ailbhe Rea, political editor of The New Statesman. Davey has a “seat-first, not vote-first, strategy”, a source told the outlet. His strategy is founded on local initiatives, building support “typically from councils up”, said Rea, and efficiently targeting only seats it can win. The party had 11 MPs when Davey took over in 2019, and rose to 72 after the 2024 general election, and made gains in “eight consecutive sets of local council elections”. This approach may grind out “unimpressive poll numbers”, but produces “sustainable gains”: “many of the party’s MPs are fully behind both it and him”.

The strange thing is, if a general election were to be called tomorrow, the Lib Dems would “probably repeat their record-breaking performance of 2024, or get very close”, said Hugo Gye in The Economist. They have “firmly dug in to their core areas”, such as Richmond-upon-Thames, where the Lib Dems won all 54 positions in recent council elections.

More pressingly, the party thrives most by riding a certain “brand of eccentricity”, appealing to a concoction of “wealthy, woke and weird” constituents who advocate for “cultural leftism” but hold “centrist views on the economy”. It may have strength in this demographic, but it’s difficult to see where the party will go next. “Not everywhere can be Richmond.”

What next?

Davey has a “balance to strike”, said Rafael Behr in The Guardian. He must hammer home his “progressive credentials” by showing his “anti-Farage firewall will be suitably robust”, and consolidate support among former Tory voters in “blue wall” seats that his economic policies will hold.

Local elections next year will test whether Davey’s method is working and a by-election win “may settle Lib Dem nerves”. Currently, while it is difficult to pinpoint the purpose of the party, if its firewall tactic works its “utility to British democracy won’t be in doubt”. Then again, you can only find out if it holds water “when you need it most, and then you don’t get a second chance”.

Andy Burnham, stateside for the United Nations General Assembly, is meeting Donald Trump for their first in-person talks today in a stronger position than Keir Starmer was as a new PM. Trump is increasingly unpopular at home, and preoccupied with the Iran war and looming midterm elections, while the UK has been strengthening its ties with Europe and Canada. “It’s completely different this time,” one official told Politico. “There’s no drama about having to stay in his good books.”

But Trump has previously called Burnham “extremely liberal” and dismissed him as the “mayor of a town”. And if his past meetings with world leaders are anything to go by, there’s still plenty of potential for drama.

What did the commentators say?

In 2024, sucking up to Trump was the “medicine required”, one UK diplomat told Politico. Burnham, however, has inherited “an established relationship” with no need to lavish praise. His job is therefore to “fix the mess of unresolved threads left behind” – and “avoid a barrage of abuse on Truth Social”.

He is “not expected to take a big list of deliverables or policy goals”. His aim, according to senior UK officials and MPs, is: “Get in, smile, press the case for Ukraine, and try to leave without a major upset.” Officials are hopeful that he will encounter a “more pro-Ukraine atmosphere” in Washington, after the House of Representatives approved a “sweeping Russia sanctions bill”. Burnham hopes to persuade the US to increase the deliveries of air defence interceptors – but it’s unlikely that Ukraine is even in the top five of Trump’s priorities, said Daniel DePetris in The Spectator.

Burnham’s more assertive approach seems to be working so far, said Reuters. His team pointed out that Trump “did not push back” against Burnham’s ban on imports from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. But Trump is a “notoriously fickle and unpredictable” man who “spreads trade tariffs like confetti”, said The i Paper. Burnham will have to avoid the “minefield” of some of Trump’s “fixations”, such as North Sea oil and defence spending.

There is “no suggestion” Burnham will go further and emulate “the more combative approach” of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, said The Guardian’s Pippa Crerar. Nor would it be wise to; Trump is still angry the UK didn’t join him in strikes on Iran, and recent comments on the Falklands and Irish unification “suggest his displeasure has not abated”. The meeting will be “fraught with tension” with “potential for further clashes”. The US president might be weaker domestically, but he’s still in office for two more years. For now, “the power still rests with Trump”.

What next?

Even if Trump and Burnham hit it off, the meeting itself “isn’t the most important event”, said DePetris. “What truly matters is the follow-through.”

The Iran war remains “a dark storm cloud hovering over US-UK relations”, and with Houthi rebels continuing to advance, effectively controlling Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, Trump could grant Saudi Arabia’s request for military intervention. In that case, “you can be almost certain the Trump administration will expect the UK to get involved”, and Trump could slam Burnham’s government for insufficient defence spending in next month’s Budget. Remember, things were fine between Trump and Starmer – “until they weren’t”.

Donald Trump has hailed a deal that gives the US “permanent control over security” in Greenland, while backing down from threats to annex the semi-autonomous Danish territory.

The US president said on Friday that “from now on, no US adversary can EVER have a base in Greenland, have a military presence in Greenland, or make sensitive investments in Greenland, without our express written approval”. This was an “infinite life agreement”, he added.

The deal has been described as a win for both sides but, as ever with Trump, “the devil is in the details” and “the details about this deal are still scarce”, said Sabrina Escobar on Barron’s.

What did the commentators say?

The US has made it easier to “control encroachment on Greenlandic soil by China, Russia and other adversaries” and the Arctic is undoubtedly “a safer place for America and its allies today”. For this, “due credit must go to” President Trump, said The Economist.

A 1951 agreement with Denmark already granted the US military exclusive privileges over the “valuable strategic territory”, but the new deal is “a hedge against the risk that Greenlanders might someday declare independence from Denmark”, said The Wall Street Journal. Having said that, it is still “fair to ask whether this deal could have been reached without the collateral damage to US alliances from Trump’s bullying threats”.

“It is perhaps a triumph of optics,” said Marc Jacobsen on Al Jazeera. Despite all the backslapping in the White House, changes to the existing arrangement appear to be “relatively limited”. This is “a testament to the negotiating skills of the Danish and Greenlandic representatives”, who have given Trump “the opportunity to claim the victory he needed, while preserving sovereignty”.

Henrik Dahl, a Danish member of the European Parliament for the Liberal Alliance, agreed that, in practice, little appears to have changed. “A wise Danish politician once said that you can achieve almost anything if you are willing to let others take the credit,” he told The Telegraph. “So let us give Donald Trump the credit for something very close to the status quo. From a Danish and Greenlandic perspective, it could hardly be much better.”

Despite the US president’s “long-standing rhetoric on invading and annexing Greenland”, this deal “once again shows the limits of Trump’s disruptive politics”, said Swasti Rao in The Print. “The theatrics he created were annexation, but the transaction he got was substantive access,” though Trump still remains “extraordinarily capable of collapsing the distance between the two”.

What next?

The deal is expected to be signed on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, and will still need to be approved by legislators on both sides of the Atlantic before it comes into force.

But there are hopes the agreement “signals a weather change in Washington”, said The Times. The ongoing war in Ukraine and the chaos on energy markets caused by US and Israeli strikes on Iran “require a united Western response”, so Nato allies must now lay the matter of Greenland “to rest” and “humour the president and let him savour his supposed victory”.

Rebuilding trust will take time, however, said Tillie Martinussen, a former Greenlandic MP. “Even if it’s your best and brightest and strongest sled dog, and it turns around and bites you, you can never trust that dog again.”

“Wouldn’t it be lovely if Canada was the 28th state of the European Union rather than the 51st state of the United States?” asked Finnish President Alexander Stubb recently. That fanciful notion now appears to have taken a step closer to reality. In a speech to the European Parliament, the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney welcomed the European Union’s ambition for Canada to become its first “associate member”, calling for closer cooperation on defence, critical minerals and energy security.

His comments came a day after President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen proposed “opening the door” to Canada’s associate membership – “a status that does not currently exist”, said the BBC.

What did the commentators say?

The “not entirely straightforward case for CanadEU predates Trump”, said The Economist last year. “Canada is vast and blessed with natural resources but relatively few people, while the EU is small, cramped and mineral-poor.” Its Arctic border with Russia presents shared strategic interests with Brussels, while, culturally, Canada’s social-welfare state and social-democratic foundations align with the values of European democracies.

These arguments have only grown stronger since the start of Trump’s “combustive, combative second term”, said Ishaan Tharoor in The New Yorker. So much so that “a conversation once consigned to academic circles and the parlour rooms of Brussels and Ottawa has entered the mainstream”.

In the face of a hostile Trump administration waging an all-out tariff war with its biggest trading partner to the north, the thinking in Ottawa is simple, political scientist Bruno Maçães told The New Yorker. “If you cannot change your neighbour geographically, change it institutionally.”

Carney has ruled out Canada becoming a full EU member or joining the single market, even if such a thing were possible. But associate membership could, in theory, allow Canada to tap into Europe’s strategic supply chains in key sectors such as energy, AI, critical minerals needed for batteries or semiconductors and, crucially, defence. Underwater cables could be laid under the Atlantic linking data centres and cloud storage, and new pipelines could redirect Canadian gas to meet Europe’s ever-growing needs.

What next?

One Canadian official involved in the talks said in The Wall Street Journal this is a “tectonic change” that would be brought about by “working groups and bureaucracy”. “It’s terribly unsexy but terribly consequential nonetheless.”

Canada is already the first non-EU nation to join the bloc’s defence procurement programme, said Anand Sundar, from the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank. But if European leaders really “want to shift the relationship into a new gear”, they will have to rethink their arms-length attitudes towards third countries, “particularly in defence and security, where both sides’ dependence on the US runs deepest”.

And while Canada’s economy is “increasingly interested in the European market, diversification away from the US will not come overnight”, said Peggy Corlin for Euronews. “Geography, after all, matters.”

Russian voters joke that, if there’s a “special military operation” in Ukraine, there’s now a “special electoral operation” for their parliament, said The Economist. Polls open for the Duma ballot on 18 September – the first parliamentary election since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine – and, despite ever greater public opposition to the war, Vladimir Putin’s grasp on power is unlikely to be shaken.

But battlefield “bodies are piling up” and “smoke is billowing” from oil refineries across Russia hit by Ukrainian drone strikes. The failing Russian economy and continuing fuel shortages are weighing more heavily on the population and, although this election’s outcome is all but certain, the people’s “tacit consent is crumbling”. The educated and politically conscious, who always voted in the past “no longer see much point in the charade”.

What did the commentators say?

“The system of power in Russia is often referred to as ‘managed democracy’”, where “the Kremlin does the managing”, said the BBC’s Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg. Critics dismiss the elections as “neither free nor fair” but, frankly, the Kremlin “doesn’t care what the critics say”. Does this mean there will be “no surprises”? “Far from it.” We’ve already seen a TV debate with “six empty lecterns”.

The election of 450 deputies to Russia’s lower legislative house “gives the impression of some diversity”, with communists, nationalists and “even some self-described liberals” on the ballot, said Brawley Benson on Foreign Policy. “In reality, scope for disagreement is vanishingly small.” United Russia – Putin’s party – holds 70% of the seats and there’s “little tolerance for genuine opposition”. The other Duma deputies are seen as “systemic opposition”, or parties that partially differ in their priorities, but “broadly support” Putin.

“United Russia’s popularity has been hovering around 32% in public opinion polls,” said political science professor Regina Smyth on The Conversation. That’s the lowest percentage since the invasion of Ukraine, and “even then, the number is likely inflated by respondents’ fear of revealing their opposition”. But the Kremlin has long deployed an “arsenal of tools” to retain its grip on power. Gerrymandering, “significant” levels of electoral fraud and, this time round, the banning of eight out of 19 political parties have, in effect, “eliminated non-partisan organised opposition”. The election is not about who wins but what could be telling is seeing how heavily the Kremlin needs to place “its thumb on the scale to maintain its party’s two-thirds majority”.

“Engineering” the outcome too tightly is “not without a risk for the ruling regime”, said The Guardian’s editorial board. “Too blatant” an election steal can be “a sign of weakness”. Already last month, Russia’s supreme court blocked the “old and marginal liberal party”, Yabloko, from participating in the vote. It does not “pose a serious challenge to the regime” but it is opposed to the war in Ukraine. The case for banning it was “spurious to the point of absurdity”. Putin wants to look as if he is well supported but “the harder the Kremlin is seen to work at constructing electoral proof of that support, the less confident it looks”.

What next?

While there may be “little reason to care” about this “snoozefest” election and its “foregone conclusion”, many Russians “are worried” about what might follow, said The New York Times’ Moscow-based correspondent, Valerie Hopkins.

“Rumours of a large, forced mobilisation are rampant”, as the military “burns through” troops in Ukraine. And, for a country that is a major oil producer, it “has found itself in the unusual position of running short of fuel”. Nearly 60% of Russians think the “people around them are experiencing anxiety”, according to a July poll from the state-affiliated Public Opinion Foundation. That’s “a four-year high”. And the state-owned Sberbank reported Russians withdrawing more money from banks this summer “than in the previous six years”.

Most significantly, the Kremlin public relations machine has been forced to switch tack. Picking up on the fact that many people are “struggling and scared”, it has abandoned its old “business as usual” message for a call “to rally around President Vladimir V. Putin and his war”.

Republicans have usually claimed the faith mantle in U.S. politics. This year’s midterm elections are developing along a different path, with Democrats like James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas highlighting their religious bona fides on the campaign trail.

What did the commentators say?

“Faith is back in Democratic politics,” Jim Wallis said at Religion News Service. Democrats have often chosen to “ignore, dismiss or even discredit religion” because they did not know how to talk about such values without sounding as though they were “imposing their religion upon a pluralistic society.” But a new generation of “faith-forward” candidates is “reclaiming religion” as a “moral framework for public service.” They talk of faith “with authenticity instead of apology.” There could be broad benefits. “Faith may be our last line of defense in saving, and then restoring, our democracy.”

Democratic Socialists have received a lot of attention this campaign cycle, “but Democratic Christians may prove more influential this November,” Bill McKibben said at The New Yorker. Candidates like Talarico and Hamilton are leading a “resurgence of the once dominant and long-dormant mainline Protestant tradition” in Democratic politics. Their prominence can be seen as a response to the “right-wing evangelical hijacking of the Gospel message” and evangelicals’ embrace of Donald Trump. “Everyone should welcome a new depth to the debate.”

Other faith-centric Democrats in this year’s midterm elections include Iowa’s Sarah Trone Garriott, a Lutheran minister, and Arkansas’ Robb Ryerse, an evangelical pastor. Iowa’s Rob Sand is not a pastor, but his campaign has featured messaging about “how his faith is deeply woven into his public service,” Vote Common Good’s Doug Pagitt said at The Hill.

A “sense of belonging” is important in “both religion and politics,” said Pagitt, but Republicans are “narrowing their definition of who belongs and which faith matters” with conservative Christian Nationalist rhetoric. Democrats have an opportunity to “welcome those Trump is denying.”

Democratic efforts to “reclaim God” are “unlikely to succeed” unless the party moves toward the center, Eric Teetsel said at The Washington Post. Barack Obama embraced religious rhetoric during his rise to the presidency, but once in the White House he advanced causes — abortion access, LGBT rights — that were “at odds with evangelical priorities.” Today’s progressive Christians are “not reaching out to religious voters by taking a more moderate stance” on transgender rights or euthanasia. Trump is problematic, but he has been able to “achieve reasonable policy wins consistent with a Christian understanding of the good.”

What next?

Republicans are pushing back. Democratic candidates “don’t profess the true gospel of Jesus Christ,” Iowa congressional candidate Joe Mitchell said at July’s Family Leadership Summit, per Religion News Service. Democrats also have to figure out how to speak the language of faith without alienating the large number of secular voters who make up their base, said ABC News. Achieving that balance is a “tricky road,” the University of Notre Dame’s David Campbell said to the outlet. Some candidates “do it better than others.”

Does money matter in an election?

In the US, where billions of dollars are spent each election cycle, the answer has long been a definitive yes. But in the UK, in part because of strict campaign spending limits, the jury is still out.

Now, two record-breaking donations to Reform UK totalling £72 million look set to test the theory to its limits.

Despite calls to strengthen legislation going through Parliament to include a cap on individual domestic donations, government sources insist last week’s mega-donations by two crypto-billionaires are “not being viewed inside Downing Street as a game-changing moment in this debate”, said Jack Fenwick on the BBC.

“But people across the political spectrum are now asking whether this massive injection of money will be remembered as a key moment when politics in this country changed.”

What did the commentators say?

“For all the failings of modern British politics, one virtue has largely remained,” said Lee David Evans on UnHerd: “big money plays little role in deciding our elections.”

In total £94.5 million was spent across the entire 2024 UK general election campaign, according to the Electoral Commission. By contrast, $11.6 billion is reportedly going to be spent in advertising alone for this year’s US mid-terms, said Reuters.

It would be “too defeatist (or triumphalist, depending on your perspective) to conclude that these [Reform] donations mean the next election is already over”, said Evans. But they are likely to “leave the ordinary party member feeling more irrelevant”. And if it means Britain’s political parties and politicians have to spend more time fundraising, “then our politics will have become a lot more American – and will be worse for it”.

The focus up to now has been on foreign influence, and “for good reason; it is for UK voters to choose their government”, said The Guardian. But now “ministers must look beyond the narrow question of outside interference” and find ways to limit mega-rich donors paying for “years of polling, advertising, data and staff, before election-period limits apply”.

But this is just “frothing at the mouth and gnashing of teeth”, said Ameer Kotecha, chief executive of the Centre for Government Reform, in The Spectator. There has been a “collective amnesia” from the mainstream parties, who have long received multimillion-pound donations from wealthy individuals and trade unions.

Arguments about how such donations help level the playing field for upstart parties such as Reform aside, these are “huge and potentially transformative sums for British politics”, said Ian Birrell in The i Paper. Yet Labour and the Tories have “only themselves to blame for this toxic situation after their failure to clear the stench of corruption that hangs over Westminster, despite a string of funding and lobbying scandals”.

The two parties have “tinkered at the edges of real funding and lobbying reforms” and now Reform “threatens to wash them both away with a tide of cash from a couple of billionaire crypto kings”.

People also naturally “assume that the donors are driving a bargain – that for a large donation, they expect something in return”, said former Conservative parliamentary candidate Iain Dale on LBC. “In my experience, that is not true, and most donors act philanthropically.”

The only alternative “is for the taxpayer to fund political parties through a regime set up by the state”. I do “wonder how many taxpayers would think this was a wise use of their taxes”.

What next?

Labour’s Angela Rayner has said the law to stop foreign and crypto donations will be used “retrospectively” and “backdated to 25 March” when it was announced.

But surely the “real question here is whether Labour is trying to save British democracy or itself”, said David Maddox on The Independent.

It’s a dangerous game they’re playing. “They may celebrate forcing Reform to hand back £72 million”, but if Reform were to win power “they could easily point to Labour’s actions to justify their own attempt to stop other parties receiving funding”.

Andy Burnham and his ministers “need to beware of creating a tit-for-tat scenario, which could be far worse for British politics in the long run”.

Amid stark warnings that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity by the end of the decade, the heads of the largest AI firms in the US have all backed a proposal by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to slow down development to ensure public safety. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark went even further, saying all AI software should have a mandatory “kill switch”, so society can “pull the plug” on anything that gets too dangerous.

The warnings sent both tech stocks and Donald Trump into a tailspin. The US president dismissed calls for “guard-rails” on the development of AI as a “SICK conspiracy” that would only benefit China.

What did the commentators say?

We’re long past “more mundane” warnings about AI causing job losses or cheating in exams, said BBC Tech and AI editor Zoe Kleinman. Talk now of “existential threats” to humanity has led to “a chorus of serious voices urging a slowdown”. And yet that’s “far from an easy solution” because it relies on AI companies who “haven’t been behaving responsibly enough” so far. It’s like a bull escaping a farmer’s field and wreaking havoc, leading computer scientist Wendy Hall told Kleinman. “Of course it’s not the bull’s fault – it’s the farmer.”

The problem, said AI sceptic Ed Zitron, is that “nobody has given a substantive explanation of what ‘slowdown’ means”.

Amodei’s broad-brushstroke proposals include independent monitoring of AI models as they’re developed, and global agreements on safety standards and security issues. While laudable, these are seen by many as unrealistic, given the current geopolitical landscape. “The US federal government is committed to a global AI arms race”, and “previous proposed AI legislation has wilted under intense, well-financed corporate lobbying”, said The Guardian.

And then there is China. Its state-run newspaper, Global Times, characterised Amodei’s essay as a thinly disguised effort to restrict Beijing’s tech ambitions, arguing that it was “packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a ‘Cold War playbook’ for the AI sector”.

America “appears to be increasingly weaponising its dominance in the sector, seeing it as a strategic asset to be protected”, said CNN’s John Liu. China, which is “lagging in the race”, prefers “a more open model” but has given no indication it would mirror any US slowdown in AI development. With so much at stake, it seems neither side would be willing to back down.

What next?

Anthropic is caught in a “classic prisoner’s dilemma”, said Tim Higgins in The Wall Street Journal. If it “is the only one to heed the call, it falls behind OpenAI”; if all US AI labs follow through on a slowdown, “it could well benefit all of humanity” but this would probably see America “fall behind China”.

With both Anthropic and OpenAI planning to list on the US stock market, some have also questioned if their new-found security concerns are all they seem. “That is the IPO story in essay form: we are the responsible firm; we are the cure; buy the safety premium,” said AI entrepreneur Brian Roemmele on X. For him, these dire warnings are nothing more than a sales pitch.

The first ministers of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland will meet today to affirm their right to seek independence from the UK, with SNP leader John Swinney warning Andy Burnham he “must now be facing up to the idea that he will go down in history as the final prime minister of the United Kingdom”.

In what The Telegraph called an “unprecedented summit” in Cardiff, Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth, Swinney, and Sinn Féin Vice-President Michelle O’Neill are expected to “put pen to paper on a joint declaration demanding the right to hold independence referendums”.

Labour was routed by Plaid at May’s local elections, the SNP maintained its dominance at Holyrood and Sinn Féin, which won Stormont elections in 2022, is widely expected to do so again when the nation votes next year.

“For the first time ever, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are led by pro-independence first ministers,” said Swinney. “There could be no clearer sign that the status quo is not sustainable – and that Westminster must prepare for a post-UK future. The momentum behind serious constitutional change is undeniable.”

What did the commentators say?

Already boosted by talk of further devolution of powers away from Westminster, two seemingly off-the-cuff interventions last week gave fresh impetus to independence movements ahead of today’s meeting. First, Burnham was forced to row back on comments at PMQs on Wednesday when he suggested he would authorise another Scottish referendum if there were a “clear consensus” in favour of one, wrongly stating that the trigger for a separation vote was “exactly the same situation in Scotland” as Northern Ireland, where the Good Friday Agreement provides for a referendum on Irish unity when there is evidence that a majority would support it.

“Burnham has not read his brief and doesn’t seem to know the basics of the UK Government’s position on the Union,” a source close to Swinney said. “If I was a Unionist I would be very worried.”

Then there were Donald Trump’s comments on Saturday, when he said he would “love” to see a united Ireland, and called the idea of reunification “fantastic”. In so doing, the US president “cast aside decades of White House neutrality”, leading “officials on both sides of the dispute” scrambling to “tamp down the fallout, leverage it or just make sense of Trump’s latest diplomatic curveball”, said Steve Hendrix in the Washington Post.

Trump’s remarks may have been quickly dismissed by No. 10, but they matter because they “potentially change how political actors calculate what can be demanded, defended or negotiated”, said Grace Russo Bullaro on VNY: La Voce di New York, a US Italian English news site.

And in a UK “already arguing over who has the right to determine its constitutional future, his finger on the scale can bear consequences”.

What next?

The legal significance of the so-called Cardiff initiative “lies in the contrast between a shared political claim and three different constitutional positions”, said Edmarverson A. Santos on Diplomacy and Law. “Self-determination, legislative authority to hold a referendum, and a legal entitlement to secede are separate questions.” Scotland and Wales currently require consent from Westminster, while Northern Ireland already has a consent-based mechanism governing the possibility of Irish unity contained in the Good Friday Agreement. “That distinction is essential to understanding what claims of a ‘right to decide’ mean in legal rather than purely political terms.”

Latest polling suggests only around a third of voters in Northern Ireland would currently back reunification, with a similar percentage in Wales supporting independence. Support for Scottish independence is stronger, hovering around half of decided voters. In all three cases, however, support is substantially higher among those aged 45 and under, meaning time is on the side of those seeking the break-up of the UK.

“There seems to always be a troubling aura of delusion and ignorance when it comes to Unionists,” said Steph Brawn in The National. But “whichever way Burnham looks, he should be on edge about a UK that is falling apart around him”.

Twenty-five years on from the most deadly terrorist attack in history, and almost 25 years into the War on Terror, “the world is a less safe place despite our actions”, said Iraq veteran Joslin Joseph on The Hill.

According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, the military interventions after 9/11 led to the deaths of over 900,000 people and cost the United States more than $8 trillion (£5.9 trillion). “Afghanistan and Iraq ended in failure”, said The American Conservative’s David Brady, while “most Americans believe that the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East were a mistake”. Indeed, this was a major part of Donald Trump’s initial appeal: “They lied,” he said of the War on Terror architects in 2016.

But while “there is much to criticise in the war on terrorism,” said Douglas J. Feith in The Washington Post, on its main objective “the success has been remarkable”. There has been no second 9/11. “Terrorists have not exploded skyscrapers, stadiums and power plants across the country” and “they have not transformed America into a police state.”

What did the commentators say?

“Hasn’t Osama Bin Laden gotten everything he wished for?” asked The American Conservative’s Brady. The financial costs “have taken an undeniable economic toll, fuelling unprecedented levels of debt” while the “human costs have soured many Americans, not just on Mideast wars, but on the elites who got us into them”. Syria is even “run by a former member of al-Qaida, who has been welcomed to the White House”.

But the “most costly single event to the US would have been another successful major attack”, said The Guardian’s Jason Burke. The fact that this never came is an “unarguable success of US policymaking since 9/11 and a major failure for al-Qaida”. And despite the obvious economic problems in the US, “no one could argue that the country has suffered a similar fate to the USSR”.

The terrorist group that Bin Laden headed up, meanwhile, faces the question of whether it can replace its ageing fighters. Although this is conceivable, al-Qaida as a brand is “visibly fading”, terrorism expert Behnam Heidenreuter-Said, head of the research centre for Strategic Police Research at Hamburg Police Academy, told Deutsche Welle. In Europe in particular, militant jihadism has become less attractive.

Some analysts “add together the presumed strength of groups in Somalia or Mali that have very loose, historic links to al-Qaida, and warn that their total membership is higher than those loyal to Bin Laden in 2001”, said The Guardian’s Burke. However, “these few thousand young men with AK-47s have little in common with the organisation Bin Laden led 25 years ago, both in aims and capabilities”. The fact that al-Qaida “still exists is an achievement of sorts for the group and, posthumously, for its founder”. But “it should not be described as any victory”.

What next?

A key lesson of 9/11 is that “perils grow when enemies conclude that America lacks the will, capability or staying power to defend itself”, said The Washington Post’s Feith.

But America and the West are again under attack, this time “from a Cold War enemy” in Russia “that watched the US and its allies waste lakes of blood and trillions in treasure enfeebling themselves after 9/11”, said The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley.

The West is now “spiritually and politically impoverished, deeply indebted and unable to meet new defence needs, and therefore vulnerable”. Vladimir Putin “has Bin Laden to thank for that”.

Ukraine’s air defences are “dwindling” and Vladimir Putin is “planning to make the most of it”, said international relations expert Rajan Menon in The New York Times. While Russia might be suffering an estimated 30,000 casualties a month and is struggling to replenish its troops, its president appears “adamant he will pay whatever price – human or financial – necessary to win”.

Last week Donald Trump sent his son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff to Moscow for talks with Putin. Then on Sunday they travelled to Ukraine for the first time to meet Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who announced plans to widen peace discussions. The Ukrainian president agreed that he wanted to resume trilateral negotiations with the US and Russia in September, amid mounting civilian casualties and intensifying Russian strikes.

But afterwards, senior Kremlin officials “doubled down on Putin’s demands for Ukrainian capitulation”, said the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, claimed the situation “worsens each day” for Ukraine.

What did the commentators say?

This year has brought “a series of Ukrainian successes that led many to believe Kyiv may have regained the initiative”, said Miro Sedlák on the Atlantic Council. But the “technological gap” between Russia and Ukraine is narrowing, “dramatically reducing” the chances of battlefield breakthroughs. Zelenskyy’s dismissal of his “tech-savvy” former defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov sparked “widespread dismay” in Ukraine, while many Russian commentators “cheered the news”.

Ukraine has run out of Patriot missile interceptors, said Menon in The New York Times. Russia is gearing up for “massive strikes” on Ukraine’s energy grid during the winter, aiming to “break morale” and increase pressure on Zelenskyy to “seek a deal”.

Ukraine’s drone strikes are still “inflicting pain on some of the most strategic sectors of the Russian economy”, said Alexander Osipovich in The Wall Street Journal, especially on oil refineries, leading to fuel shortages. “The costs are adding up.”

Ukrainian air strikes are “bringing the war home to a misled, disillusioned public”, said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. But does “out-of-touch” Putin even realise? He doesn’t use a smartphone or the internet, and relies on “inner circle apparatchiks” and loyalists telling him what he wants to hear. He’s likely to “double down” by becoming more aggressive and expanding the war beyond Ukraine, intensifying “hybrid warfare operations across Europe”, than to sue for peace.

Putin’s understanding of the war is “severely distorted by the Russian military’s systematic lying”, which is emboldening him to insist on “his maximalist demands”, said the ISW.

And if Putin cared about the Russian economy, he wouldn’t have launched the invasion in the first place, said Owen Matthews in The Spectator.

He remains “determined” to keep fighting and Trump has “no new plan for peace” other than letting the war end on Putin’s terms. Zelenskyy is “deluded about Ukraine’s chances of defeating Russia”, and about stopping Moscow’s “slow but relentless advances” and its “ruthless campaign to render Ukraine’s cities unliveable”.

Western sanctions on Russia have “basically failed” because of the West’s “hunger” for its cheap oil and gas. Russia is “stepping up” its defence capacity, while Ukraine’s allies in Europe are also “prioritising their own defence”. Ukraine is heading into “the hardest and most punishing winter of war”, and it’s about to run out of missiles, men and money.

What next?

There are signs that Europe’s “political taboo” on talking to Putin is cracking, said Matthews in The Spectator. Alice Weidel, co-leader of the pro-Russia AfD in Germany, has called for “an open channel to Russia” to reach “an understanding and achieve a peaceful solution”. Putin’s intention seems to be to give Ukraine “a brutal final kicking” before settling the war “on his terms”.

He may try to freeze the conflict while reorganising and re-arming, said Tisdall in The Guardian, or he could accept Zelenskyy’s ceasefire offer “without sincerely committing to a lasting settlement”. But a ceasefire without “cast-iron, pre-agreed security guarantees” could leave Ukraine more, not less, “vulnerable to renewed aggression”.

After the Russian parliamentary elections from 18-20 September “we’ll see whether Putin is going to throw the kitchen sink at this wall to finish it, in his view, once and for all”, said Sky News military analyst Michael Clarke.

“The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank – perpetrated by settler terrorists.”

With these words, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has delivered the “biggest reset in UK relations with Israel for decades”, said The New Statesman political editor Ailbhe Rea.

His decision to introduce a ban on imports from illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank is not without “political risk”, but it marks a determination to “inject values and politics into British foreign policy” that many at home and abroad feel has been lacking for years.

What did the commentators say?

“Ethnic cleansing” and “forced displacement” are often seen as acts of genocide, a word Miliband was careful not to use, said The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley. In this context, sanctions against settlers seem “disproportionately low and leave the State of Israel off the hook”, but the “effects of the new British legislation will be felt far more widely”.

Israel has reacted strongly and swiftly by announcing four “counter-measures” against the UK, including the closure of the British Consulate in Jerusalem, and the denial of entry to Israel to 12 “British elected representatives and other British nationals involved in antisemitic and anti-Israel activity”. Among these are former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, also hit back on X with: “The Brits have lost it. The Jew hate of their government knows no boundaries and knows no facts”.

With this announcement, Britain “risks moving from being a country capable of connecting Israel, the Gulf, Washington and Europe to one whose positions are increasingly predictable but whose involvement is decreasingly necessary”, said Labour peer Jon Mendelsohn in The Spectator. This could result in a “remarkable loss of influence in pursuit of policies which have yet to demonstrate that they have made peace, Palestinian statehood, regional security, the safety of British Jews or Britain’s national interests more attainable”.

Miliband will hope his Jewish heritage – his mother was a Holocaust survivor who fled to Israel – and “staunch support of Israel’s right to exist will reassure the Americans”, and he “emphasises the difference” between targeted West Bank sanctions and the full boycott of all Israeli goods which Miliband himself opposes, said Rea.

What next?

Aside from the heavily signposted but underreported impact that West Bank sanctions will have on Palestinians living there “there are other potential prices to pay for this muddled gesture,” said The Times View. Not least, in next month’s crucial Israeli general election where a “siege mentality could rear its head, propelling more hardliners into power”. Were this to happen, the current feel-good mood created by joint UK, French and Canadian sanctions could prove “hugely counterproductive”.

Still, Miliband shows no signs of backing down, and intends to use the UN General Assembly later this month to shine the “clearest and harshest spotlight on what is happening and what must change” in Gaza, he told the Commons.

Those who have long claimed the UK has no influence on the world stage are “missing what’s happening”, said former foreign office special advisor Ben Judah on X. By pulling together CANZUK countries (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK) with EU members and their associates into these “issue coalitions of non-US led Westerners”, the UK has “found a role and an influential one, partially as a consequence of America abandoning hers”.

“This move against the Israeli settlement project to attempt to protect the possibility of a two-state solution from an extremist Israeli government is a continuation of this geopolitics.”

Donald Trump suggested last week that the US might reconsider its tacit support for British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands in retaliation for the UK’s failure to support him in the Iran war. The US president implied that he would not support the UK in a territorial dispute with Argentina.

Soon after, in a televised address, Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, said he would reopen the country’s claim to the islands it calls las Malvinas, declaring that the geopolitical “winds of change” would favour Buenos Aires. He proposed a “handover” of the islands akin to the transfer of Hong Kong to China, dismissing Britain as a country “in decline”.

What did the commentators say?

During the Falklands War in 1982, Margaret Thatcher had “the solid backing of the special relationship, and her ideological soulmate, Ronald Reagan, in the White House”, said Robert Tait, The Guardian’s US political correspondent. But Andy Burnham “must contend with the chill wind emanating from the menacing and destabilising presence of Trump”.

The US president’s “vindictive mindset” is to Milei’s advantage and “was almost entirely the trigger” for his address; the Argentinian president is trying to counter his own “falling political popularity”. Indeed, the same factor “may have played a key role” in the military junta’s decision to invade the Falklands in 1982.

But there’s no suggestion that Argentina would “dream of repeating” that “disastrous” decision, which led to the death of 907 sailors and soldiers, said The Economist. Milei “appears uncompromising” but, in truth, he knows forcing any change in status for the Falklands is a “tall order”. In a 2013 referendum with a turnout of more than 90%, all but three of 1,517 islanders voted to remain a British Overseas Territory .

Milei claims “this territory is ours”, but he wants to reach a “consensus solution” over the future status of the islands, similar to Britain’s agreement with China to cede control of Hong Kong. There are “risks to stirring up fresh confrontation”: Britain could block the sale of weapons containing British parts to Argentina, or influence how the International Monetary Fund “deals with” Milei’s struggling government. Milei may simply be trying to “shore up the more conservative parts of his base” ahead of elections next year. “Amping up his rhetoric” is less a show of strength than a reflection of Milei’s weakening domestic position.

In the event of a conflict, even a deployment of “two destroyers and three or four frigates” would be a “stretch” for the Royal Navy, said Lewis Page in The Telegraph. However, the UK’s aircraft carrier capability would be “completely dominant against Argentina”. Their forces are “even more run down than ours”.

While the UK could not sustain an aircraft carrier presence “indefinitely”, we could “dominate the skies over the Falklands for long enough to mount a campaign there”. And, unlike in 1982, the Falklands are “at least somewhat garrisoned”, which would be a “serious problem for a renewed Argentinian invasion”.

What next?

Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said British support for the Falkland Islanders’ right to determine their own future was “unwavering”.

However, as part of a “furious backlash” to the UK’s plans to sanction Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, Israel is now calling for sanctions on Britain over the Falklands, said The Independent. Far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir described the islands as “Argentine territory under occupation”. Yair Netanyahu, the son of the Israeli prime minister, took aim at what he called Britain’s “hypocrisy and hostility towards Israel”, saying Israel would only “stop recognising the Malvinas” once Britain stops “recognising Palestine”.

Plans for large-scale oil production around the Falklands “raise the economic stakes”, said Al Jazeera. Milei declared that the Sea Lion deep-sea oil project, a joint UK-Israel operation due to begin production in 2028, was a “clear and present danger” to Argentinian interests. Argentina has threatened to file criminal charges against Israeli energy company Navitas Petroleum and its executives, claiming they have violated Argentinian law by holding UK-issued exploration and exploitation licences.

John Healey has said Britain’s economy is finally “turning a corner” as he set out his mission to “make Great Britain growth Britain” again.

In his first major speech as chancellor, Healey sought to reassure the markets by pledging to stick to Labour’s tax and spend fiscal rules, while trying to present a more optimistic view of Britain’s economic prospects. But only days ago a global bond sell-off saw UK yields hit their highest level since the 2008 financial crash, further increasing the cost of borrowing for the UK government.

But Healey “begins with a credibility problem that is not entirely of his own making”, said Simon French in The Sunday Times. He is the eighth chancellor in 10 years, so many businesses, households and investors are “fatigued and sceptical” about yet another new vision for growth.

What did the commentators say?

“A glance at the news could easily reinforce the gloomy impression” that the UK economy is in dire straits, but some key indicators are “telling a more cheerful story – one of growth”, said James Moore in The i Paper.

There is a “surprising level of optimism” among businesses in the services and manufacturing sectors, with overall GDP growth expected to beat Bank of England forecasts for the third quarter, boosted by warm weather and the men’s football World Cup. The data shows “that UK plc is more resilient than anyone really expected in the face of the strong headwinds that it is battling against”.

There are tentative signs that “consumer confidence has also improved”, said Delphine Strauss in the Financial Times. Private new car registrations are up by almost a fifth compared to last summer, while earlier figures from the Bank of England show growth in consumer credit.

UK recruiters also saw hiring pick up in August for the first time in four years. It adds to “evidence that the UK’s weak jobs market was stabilising and business and consumer confidence were improving – albeit from a low base – before a renewed rise in gas prices and sovereign bond yields that again threatens to hold back the economy”.

Most members of the public who describe the economy as broken “put its condition down to poor political priorities rather than to other reasons, such as global shocks, immigration or failings on the part of individual citizens (such as not working hard enough)”, said Anoosh Chakelian in The New Statesman.

Andy Burnham and his chancellor are constrained by costly rising debt – interest on debt costs more than the defence, Home Office and justice departments combined – rigid fiscal rules, and Labour’s manifesto pledge not to raise the three main taxes. But they need to find a way to pay for their ambitious policy platform “that commands the confidence of markets – and a public more and more convinced that the economy is broken by design”.

What next?

While the underlying numbers look positive, were the Bank of England to raise interest rates later this month, or Healey to announce tax rises in the Budget at the end of October, things could turn sour very quickly.

For now, the chancellor is trying to strike a more upbeat tone than his predecessor. After the equivalent speech in the last two years since Labour returned to power, the public has been “left with a clear message of tough times, and significant tax rises ahead”, said the BBC’s economics editor Faisal Islam. Today was different.

The chancellor is “trying to nurture some fragile early signs that confidence is returning” but “the burning question is how to fill multi-billion gaps in public finance plans before the Budget, in a way that minimises the economic impact.

“While vibes are important, policy matters more.”

“We hate the French! We fight wars against the French! Did all those men die in vain on the fields of Agincourt?” What would Edmund Blackadder think to see Emmanuel Macron and King Charles cosying up in front of the Bayeux Tapestry?

The tapestry, as Andy Burnham said at its unveiling at the British Museum this week “shows a new leader emerging from a northern territory, travelling to the south of England in search of the crown. Something clearly that couldn’t happen today.”

Macron has now become the first EU leader to visit Burnham at No. 10. This week of renewed bonhomie between the British and the French comes as Donald Trump’s America “is threatening to leave Europe to fend for itself”, said The Economist. So that might be one reason why France is “being so nice to Britain”.

What did the commentators say?

Another reason for this French “love-bombing”, as The Economist put it, is that “it costs France very little and buys it so much”, said the UK’s former Brexit negotiator David Frost in The Telegraph.

Much of the British establishment loves this kind of thing and it does so “because it sees diplomacy primarily as a matter of personal relationships and symbolism”. But that belief “generates the besetting sin of British diplomacy: the wish to be liked rather than respected” and sadly “nowhere is that truer than with France”.

But “in these fractured times, the enduring appeal of this 11th-century artefact speaks of a need for a national story”, said The Guardian. The Bayeux Tapestry is a “devastatingly human saga” and, with war raging in Europe, “this medieval masterpiece is a reminder of conflict’s brutality, human suffering and the importance of collaboration between countries”.

Indeed Macron himself “played an instrumental role over nearly a decade in pushing for the tapestry loan”, said France24, and it “is viewed as another step towards healing the rancour of the Brexit years”.

On a political level there is “no shortage of common ground” between Burnham and Macron, said Le Monde, “particularly regarding their policies on the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East”. The French president praised Burnham's recent trip to Kyiv, but also highlighted that, while Paris and London “collaborate in vital areas such as defence, nuclear energy, space or artificial intelligence”, they “do not always agree on everything”.

What Macron “seems to be saying is that despite Brexit, despite Donald Trump, or perhaps because of both, France and Britain need to stick together now”, said The Economist.

A new Charles De Gaulle biopic “not only evokes nostalgia for an age of unimaginable bravery” but “also speaks to modern worries about national sovereignty, dependence and democratic values”. The film “carries another message too”: that “the dark forces of nationalism can be beaten”. With Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage on the rise, the new-found affection from Macron could signify that “this battle is yet another that Britain and France are in together”.

But “what did the love-in between Andy Burnham and Emmanuel Macron actually achieve?” said The Sun. “For a start, don’t expect the small boats to stop any time soon” as it remains in “France’s interest to let migrants set sail and wait for British border forces to rescue them – especially as we pay £1 billion for the privilege”. And Burnham was “gushing over France’s role in another terrible idea: helping him achieve closer ties to the EU”.

What next?

“To move forward on all these issues and put the entente amicale to the test,” said Le Monde. A French-British summit is due to take place later this year, Burnham confirmed, but he did not give a date.

Zack Polanski will need to reverse his party’s faltering fortunes if he is to win the Holborn and St Pancras by-election created by Keir Starmer’s decision to leave Westminster.

Membership of the Greens has more than tripled since Polanski was elected leader almost exactly a year ago and they won their first Westminster by-election in Gorton and Denton in February. Now the leader has said he wants to stand in the vote to replace former PM Starmer in the London constituency and become his party’s sixth MP.

But the Greens have also been dogged by accusations of antisemitism, while Polanski has been criticised for a series of gaffes. There have been questions over his tax affairs, his “inflated CV and ever-presence on social media”, said Pieter Snepvangers in The Telegraph.

What did the commentators say?

Polanski’s likely candidacy “makes what was expected to be a Labour hold into a much more interesting race, with Green activists already flooding [the] constituency”, said The Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar on X.

With Andy Burnham riding a wave of optimism as the new prime minister, the Green Party’s popularity has “plunged to its lowest level ever recorded”, said Snepvangers. A YouGov poll carried out in July put its net approval rating at -23, down 28 points from last August. A majority of the public (56%) has a negative view, up from 39%.

Polanski is “easy to dislike”, said Eliot Wilson in City A.M.: there is something “preposterous and confected about him”. He demonstrates “armour-plated self-belief”, even when he’s declaring “the most implausible silliness”.

But many voters still “like what they’ve heard”. And party leaders compete now not to be the most popular, but to be the least unpopular – Polanski is far less unpopular than Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage. But “the party’s position has begun to slide” and its policy platform is “uncompromising yet unrealistic”. The question now is: “How is the Green Party to stop this leakage?”

To be fair, a fifth of the country still likes Polanski, said Ben Walker in The New Statesman. But “a lot more people now feel negatively towards him”, especially voters over 35. “This may not be down to any missteps on his part. Rather, the Greens may have just reached their natural ceiling.” But the prospect of winning power “looks far away”.

True, the “unexpected resurgence of hope” in the Labour Party poses “an unmistakable threat” to Polanski, who previously “had a virtual monopoly on such things”, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Newcomers to the Green Party are now “squarely in Burnham’s sights” as he apologises for the way Starmer handled the Gaza war. But it would be “ridiculous” to assume “this Labour honeymoon can last”. With the Greens “unconstrained by the realities of government”, they will have “the freedom to say whatever Labour won’t”. That could “easily become a powerful weapon”.

At the 2024 general election, the Green candidate came third in Holborn and St Pancras, nearly doubling the party’s vote share in 2019. Meanwhile, Labour’s majority fell dramatically. Hence the “immediate pressure” on Polanski to stand, said John Rentoul in The Independent. I expect Labour will hold it, provided they choose a “solid candidate” – it is “by no means” a safe seat. But Burnham has “calmed the anti-politics rage a little, and I think Polanski will fail to catch the wave at the right moment”.

What next?

Polanski is now under pressure from Green activists to “take more radical left-wing stances to halt the rising popularity of Labour”, said Aubrey Allegretti in The Times. Animah Kosai, a member of the Green Party Council, has tabled a motion to be debated at the Greens’ conference in October. It urges the party to “embrace more enthusiastically the kind of radical policies which excite activists”, said Wilson in City A.M., including the pledge to introduce a wealth tax and attacking Labour for the sale of arms to Israel.

Holborn and St Pancras “has long been a Labour stronghold” and Labour “will throw everything at defending it”, said The Guardian’s Crerar. In the way Makerfield was Burnham’s proof of concept that he could beat Reform, “Holborn and St Pancras will be his test that he can win back progressive voters to the Labour fold”.

Two top-level summits held simultaneously this week offered contrasting visions for the world and who will lead it in the coming years.

Chinese President Xi Jinping welcomed world leaders including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Indian PM Narendra Modi, and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, presenting Beijing as a driver of stability and champion of an “orderly multipolar world”.

Meanwhile, 6,826 miles away at a meeting of G20 finance ministers in Asheville, North Carolina, the mood could not have been more different. Western finance ministers expressed outrage at the Trump administration’s decision to invite Russia. There was anger at the US’s ongoing trade spat with Canada, Trump’s decision to punish South Korea and, of course, the continuing economic fallout from his war against Iran.

What did the commentators say?

If the Bishkek summit was “designed to project solidarity”, then the G20 gathering “offered an image of fracture”, said David Pierson for The New York Times.

China is using ever-closer ties with Russia and Iran, which are both at war with the West, to “project its influence”, at the same time as the US is “straining the alliances and economic relationships that have underpinned decades of global leadership”.

“China’s theory of the case for bending the international political order in its preferred direction is to amass support from the ‘global majority,’” said Ryan Hass, a former White House national security official now at the Brookings Institution think tank. Xi’s role as lead convener “builds a narrative around China gaining momentum in building support for playing a more central role on the world stage”.

This shows that the “emerging global order is not simply dividing into two fixed camps”, with countries such as India “maintaining relationships with competing powers while pursuing their own strategic interests”, said Business Insider Africa. That is why Xi has also sought to build bridges with the West, hosting the leaders of Germany, Britain and Canada this year, as long-standing allies turn away from the US under Trump.

The world’s two leading economies are “uneasily preoccupied with their trajectory these days”, said Evan Osnos in a recent New Yorker article entitled “The future, made in China”. China is “eager to restore its historical eminence”, but, in a sign the centre of global politics may be shifting, having long “looked West for visions of the future”, nowadays “it favours its own”.

What next?

China’s show of strength, on display not only in Bishkek but also in Asheville where it blocked a G20 joint statement, comes ahead of a crunch meeting between Xi and Trump in Washington DC later this month.

With China now viewed more positively than the US in the majority of 36 countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center, Xi could do worse than acknowledge the assessment by Beijing’s Renmin University when meeting the famously vain US president.

Entitled “Thank Trump”, it hailed his efforts to hasten the “twilight of an empire” by undermining America’s international alliances, its institutions at home and credibility abroad, said The Economist.

Observers have long feared Russia’s war against Ukraine will expand to the rest of Europe. The concerns are rising. Moscow has reportedly backed a rise in so-called hybrid sabotage attacks on European targets, as CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Russia last week to warn the Kremlin against attacks on NATO.

What did the commentators say?

Authorities have linked Russia to a growing number of “drone incursions, acts of sabotage, cyberattacks” and other hostile “gray zone” acts in Europe, said The Wall Street Journal. The incidents include several discoveries of explosive drones at or near a German airport — a sign that Russian President Vladimir Putin may have a “rising appetite for risk” as he seeks to sow divisions among Ukraine’s continental allies.

Hybrid attacks fall short of provoking open conflict. But the frequency has increased to the point that Russia’s hybrid war in Europe is “starting to look a lot less hybrid,” said Politico.

The attacks “require a more concerted response” than Europe has mounted so far, said Bloomberg. It is easy to treat hybrid attacks as a “problem to be managed” because they are “small-scale, deniable and rarely lethal.” Ukraine’s European allies must “demonstrate that attacks come with costs,” with more layered defenses against drone incursions and aggressive action against Russia’s “shadow fleet” of tankers that transport black-market oil. Russia does not want to “take on NATO outright,” but it is “testing how much the alliance will tolerate.”

Putin now has a choice. The Russian leader can keep the hybrid attacks “below an open assault” that would trigger a NATO response, said David Ignatius at The Washington Post. Or he can “take a harder punch” to see if President Donald Trump will keep the U.S.’s defense commitment to Europe or have the alliance “exposed as a paper tiger.” The war “risks leaping any remaining guardrails” as Ukraine and Russia continue to trade blows. “Where’s the de-escalation button?”

What next?

Analysts suspect Putin has given up hope that Trump “might be able to coerce Ukraine” into surrender, said CBC News. Russia’s leader may turn instead to “expanding the conflict” to conclude the nearly five-year-old war.

Some military think tanks have warned Russia could stage “some kind of provocation in Eastern Europe” to divide the NATO alliance and its support of Ukraine, said CBC News. That could include an attempt to “seize a slice of Russian-speaking territory in a neighboring country” to see how NATO might respond. The latter concern was reportedly behind Ratcliffe’s trip to Moscow. The administration decided to “read the Russians the riot act,” said Glen Howard, of the Saratoga Foundation, to the outlet.

Other European officials are skeptical that Putin can expand the war. Russia is “bogged down” in Ukraine and “doesn’t have capabilities to challenge NATO” in a conventional conflict, said Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braze on “PBS NewsHour.” But attacks below the level of outright war will likely continue. “We all need to be ready.”

For three and a half months, Andy Burnham has been “in campaign mode”, said The Telegraph. He fought and won the Makerfield by-election, “ousted” Keir Starmer as Labour leader and prime minister, and “spent the summer seeking to establish his credentials for the job”. He has been in No. 10 for 42 days without facing the Commons: longer than any prime minister in British history.

But today, “the honeymoon is over”. Parliament reconvenes after the summer recess, and Burnham and his newly formed government face MPs in the House of Commons. Time for him to “stop campaigning and start governing”.

What did the commentators say?

If there’s one thing Burnham’s “friends and enemies can agree on”, it’s that he’s a “nice guy”, said Martin Ivens in Bloomberg. “Niceness is a bankable political asset.” But some allege he’s “too nice: a political chameleon who likes to be liked, lacking the backbone to confront either his party or the voters with uncomfortable truths”.

Burnham’s team denies such charges, saying he will set out a more comprehensive 10-year plan later this year, said Jim Pickard for the Financial Times. But in at least seven areas, Burnham has already “backed away from his original position”. And on vital matters like welfare cuts and increased defence spending, Burnham seems to have inherited Starmer’s “vice of ducking hard decisions”, said The Times editorial board. No fool, he knows that “spiralling working-age health benefits” and the triple lock state pension are “unsustainable”. But he’s “kicked the can down the road” with a Starmer-style “flimsy alibi”: two “interminable reviews”. Burnham is shaping up to be a “new compère for an old and recognisable show”.

So far the public is responding well to Burnham’s “humanity and emotion”, said Isabel Hardman in The i Paper. But this also could be his downfall. To prevent the killers of PC Andrew Harper from being eligible for the early release prisoner scheme, Burnham tweaked the criteria to exclude anyone convicted of manslaughter. Of course politics “should be conducted with humanity and empathy”, but the PM “simply cannot respond with emotion” to all victims, especially given the “profound” consequences for our overcrowded prisons. How will he bear the “roar of thousands of campaigns” and grieving loved ones on other issues?

Don’t underestimate the “importance of sentiment in economics”, said John Rentoul, The Independent’s chief political commentator. Starmer and Reeves failed to grasp that: they overdid “the doom and gloom” before their first Budget, and “allowed the dead weight of negative speculation” about their second to “gain its own momentum, dragging the economy down”.

Burnham and Chancellor John Healey – “Dr Feelgood and his cheerful sidekick” – seem to understand this, and are downplaying the upcoming Budget accordingly. Consumer and business confidence are rising, and (despite the Iran war) there is “no pressing need yet for immediate tax rises”. “Easy to dismiss as ‘just vibes’, the optimism of the new administration matters.”

What next?

Today Burnham will “signal fresh measures to help voters with the cost of living”, said the Financial Times, “drawing a clear dividing line” with the newly reshuffled Conservatives, whose leader he will face at Prime Minister’s Questions tomorrow.

Ultimately, Burnham will be called to take “decisive action” on the economy, said The Times. Britain’s national debt is almost £3 trillion: equivalent to about 94% of GDP, and costing more than £100 billion a year in interest to service, and this “mountainous liability must be tackled”. In the end, said The Telegraph, Burnham will be forced to make decisions that “will make him unpopular among potentially large swathes of the population”.

Andy Burnham’s plan to impose tougher sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank risks becoming “a de facto boycott of all of Israel”, a group of Labour MPs and peers has warned.

The Times reported the PM wants to take a more “robust” approach when dealing with Israel than his predecessor, Keir Starmer, with a senior government source saying he is expected to approve plans for a trade ban and the sanctioning of individuals involved in settlement activity.

It comes after the Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, said Israeli plans to open tenders for the controversial E1 settlement east of Jerusalem would effectively cut the West Bank in two and destroy any hope of a two-state solution.

What did the commentators say?

Having already pledged sanctions against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government over plans to build thousands of new settlement homes, a trade embargo would “risk further harming relations, which have already deteriorated” since Burnham took office, The Telegraph’s senior political correspondent Dominic Penna said.

UK officials warn that a ban would bring “significant practical difficulties”, The Times reported. “Distinguishing between goods from the settlements and goods from Israel would be challenging” while a ban on services would be “impractical”. There is a risk that “legitimate” Israeli businesses “would be hit by the ban” which risks “undermining trade with Israel more broadly”. There are also concerns Palestinian businesses in occupied territories could be hit by the sanctions.

That may be true, but having apologised for Labour’s response to Gaza, Burnham “must ban settlement trade” to show he “meant it”, said Ismail Patel in Middle East Eye.

Unlike Ireland, which outlawed settlement imports in late July, Britain merely labels settlement goods, “a policy that acknowledges they come from stolen land while inviting shoppers to buy them anyway”.

According to The House of Commons Library, UK trade with the occupied Palestinian territories was worth around £38m in 2025, compared with total UK trade of around £1.95 trillion.

The UK, by contrast, is a “tremendously important” trading partner for Israel, said Jo-Ann Mort in Prospect, meaning if the British government really wanted to intervene, “it has weight” and “leverage available”.

What next?

Around a third of Labour MPs have signed a letter calling for a ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements, with supporters also preparing a motion at Labour’s annual conference next month.

The PM is expected to set out steps to introduce a trade embargo before then “as he looks to avoid the issue overshadowing his first party conference as leader”, said the Daily Mail.

But the move still risks splitting the party.

Labour Friends of Israel, which includes senior Labour MPs and peers, said it “strongly opposes” the Israeli settlements and supported “calibrated steps against extremist settlers and extremist settler groups”. But, it added, “a boycott of trade with settlements is practically impossible and will become a de facto boycott of all of Israel, which would be deeply damaging to the UK national interest, the British Jewish community and Palestinian workers”.

A significant drought in Panama caused by the El Niño weather pattern has forced the Central American country to slash the number of vessels it lets through its major canal. And the reduced flow of goods through one of the world’s most consequential shipping lanes could create a ripple effect that shakes the world’s economy.

What did the commentators say?

Starting on Sept. 15, the Panama Canal Authority will let 32 ships pass through the canal’s locks daily, a drop from the 36 it currently allows. While a decrease of just four ships per day may not sound significant, it represents a major change for a “critical chokepoint that moves about 5% of the world’s shipping,” said CNN. The United States is the “canal’s biggest user — about 70% of all the goods moving through it are coming to or going from the U.S.”

These reductions are necessary because the Panama Canal “relies on fresh water to operate its locks and has had less rain than normal” in recent years, said the Financial Times. The coming El Niño, when “surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean rise, potentially causing severe drought and warmer winters, could be one of the most intense ever.” And for Panama, the “result is a wet season that’s already been drier than usual and is likely to get worse,” said CNN, possibly causing a massive shortage of freshwater in the canal.”

This shift in the number of vessels could result in higher prices for consumers in the U.S. and globally, experts say. While some ships “may wait to transit to avoid the higher fees, those carrying more time-sensitive cargo are likely to take the plunge and pay the steep transit prices, driving up the price of those goods,” said CNN. One notable example: the pharmaceutical ingredients in Tylenol and certain prescription drugs, which “come, in large part, from China and are believed to transit through the Panama Canal to the U.S. East Coast,” said Prashant Yadav, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, to CNN.

Others are not convinced the change will have much impact on prices, especially in the United States. There is only a “small chance that cargo owners, pressed by paying more for shipping and other costs, will pass on this increase to customers,” Simon Heaney, a senior manager at the Drewry shipping research and consultancy firm, told Newsweek — especially since global shipping has already “been upended for months by the U.S.’ war with Iran,” said the outlet.

What next?

The shipping reductions are just the Panama Canal’s latest in a line of “other water conservation measures, such as lowering the maximum draft — the vessel’s depth in the water — for the largest ships,” said The Guardian. But the canal itself could also turn into a hindrance for vessels, as officials said that with the “upcoming reduction, waiting times for ships trying to get through without making a reservation beforehand will increase.”

In the meantime, shipping companies have already been “preparing for possible disruptions in the 110-year-old canal,” said the Financial Times, with many taking drastic measures to get ahead of the cuts. For ships that don’t make reservations to pass through the canal, officials typically issue several extra slots through an auction; at least one large ship “paid a staggering $4 million to fast-track its trip,” said CNN, leaving “others, either unwilling or unable to shell out that kind of sum, in maritime limbo.”

The UK’s productivity, which measures the economic output of each worker per hour, has been dismal since the financial crisis of 2008. But new research suggests Britain’s economy has enjoyed a hidden productivity boom over the past two years.

Productivity has been growing by 1.1% per year since late 2024 – far above the official 0.2% estimate by the Office for National Statistics – according to the Resolution Foundation. The think tank analysed payroll data from HMRC and tax returns from the self-employed, arguing that this gives a more accurate representation of the workforce than the much-criticised Labour Force Survey the ONS uses.

The proportion of people responding to the ONS survey has collapsed since the pandemic, so experts say it has overestimated the increase in worker numbers. So productivity growth has been “respectable” and not as “dismal” as the ONS’ “flawed” measurements suggest, said the Resolution Foundation.

What did the commentators say?

“Britain’s dismal productivity record since the global financial crisis explains a lot of its economic stagnation and weak living standards growth,” said Simon Pittaway, the think tank’s principal economist. But contrary to official figures, our “more accurate productivity measure” suggests the output of workers has been “improving” since 2024.

Explanations include the introduction of AI into sectors like IT and financial services is “boosting output per hour”, said Mehreen Khan, economics editor at The Times. Increases in employment taxes might also have “forced firms to rein back on hiring”, leading to job cuts in low-pay sectors such as hospitality and retail, meaning the average worker appears more productive.

“But neither explanation is borne out by the data,” said Pittaway. The share of the workforce employed in hospitality is not lower than it was in the late 2010s, and AI is more widespread across different sectors of the economy. “Instead, the UK’s productivity recovery has been achieved by the same workers, doing the same jobs, and working in the same sectors.”

In May, economists at the London School of Economics also combined HMRC’s payroll and self-employment information with the ONS’ annual figures for an even brighter estimate. Since Labour was elected in 2024, annual productivity growth has run at about 1.6% – a “remarkable turnaround to our key barometer of material wellbeing”, said LSE professor John Van Reenen, who was chief economic adviser to former chancellor Rachel Reeves.

Despite the “toxic economic and fiscal legacy” the government inherited, and “the headwinds” caused by Donald Trump’s trade wars, Reeves’ strategy of fiscal stability and investment has “started to deliver results”. We might also be witnessing “the first macro-economic flowers of the AI boom”.

However, said Sam Fleming and Amy Borrett in the Financial Times, economists “differ sharply over the relevance of the AI narrative at this stage given the patchy nature of the evidence”. The sectors that registered the biggest uptick in productivity included accommodation, wholesale and retail, which aren’t “leading adopters of AI”.

Still, recent reports are painting a “relatively optimistic picture”, said The Guardian’s economics editor, Heather Stewart. The UK was the joint fastest-growing economy in the G7 in the first half of this year, while consumer confidence rose to a two-year high this month. The economy may finally be emerging from “the long shadow” of the financial crisis.

The UK is now in “an OK place”, said Morgan Stanley’s chief UK economist, Bruna Skarica. That’s true of “the top end” of Britain’s economy, said Mihir Sharma on Bloomberg, but “the bottom is struggling”.

Slowing wage growth, fewer job vacancies than since the pandemic and rising unemployment all tell an “uncomfortable” story. Since Labour took office, Britain has had a “K-shaped recovery”. Its “nascent top-end revival is worth protecting”, but policymakers must think harder about “how to get young people and those in AI-exposed professions in on those productivity gains”.

What next?

In the US, productivity growth “picked up after the pandemic” and has been strong for three years, said Reuters; Skarica at Morgan Stanley expects a similar pattern in Britain.

But this productivity recovery “needs to be sustained and built upon if it’s to lead to big improvements in living standards”, said Pittaway at the Resolution Foundation. If people are still “priced out of jobs without being able to find alternative opportunities”, higher productivity growth offers “a less benign picture of the economy’s performance”, said the FT.

The ONS’ Labour Force Survey is being “revamped to encourage wider participation”, said Khan in The Times. It expects to launch the Transformed Labour Force Survey next year.

Once a fringe movement, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party is on course to take control of a German state for the first time, and blast through a post-war consensus designed to keep extremists out of power.

With polls suggesting that 40% of voters in Saxony-Anhalt intend to support the AfD in next week’s vote, it is now “completely undemocratic to permanently exclude” the party, said left-wing party leader Sahra Wagenknecht. “The firewall has failed.”

What did the commentators say?

Germany’s political “firewall”, the Brandmauer, is an agreement between mainstream parties that they will all refuse to work with extremists, forming coalitions or otherwise cooperating with each other instead. It has succeeded in keeping the AfD out of power at state and federal level until now but it has done nothing to harm the party’s popularity. If anything, being excluded has contributed to its rise in national polls, where it now enjoys a clear lead over all the mainstream parties.

Maintaining the firewall has created a “hollowed-out centre”, said politics professor Alexander Görlach in Jacobin magazine. Building majorities that exclude the far-right “has led to uncomfortable compromises”: parties on the left and centre-right have made coalitions “born of necessity rather than conviction”. Not only has this alienated some voters – in some cases even driving to extremist alternatives – it has also blurred the distinctions between mainstream parties, reinforcing the AfD’s line that they are carbon-copy “cartel parties”.

The Brandmauer also means the AfD has “no incentive” to moderate its policies in order to gain power, as some other populists in Europe have done, said The Economist. Behind the firewall, the party is protected “from the disappointment that accountability in a democracy implies”, Christian Stecker, a political scientist at TU Darmstadt, told the magazine.

It’s certainly “plausible” that the firewall “has contributed” to this “specifically German phenomenon of rapid growth combined with increasing radicalisation”, said Thorsten Benner of Berlin’s Global Public Policy Institute on Foreign Policy. AfD supporters can currently back ever more extreme positions, free from “the risk of having to live with the consequences of their choice”.

What next?

If current polling proves accurate, the AfD could secure an absolute majority in the Saxony-Anhalt state election on 6 September – a rarity under Germany's proportional-voting system.

The consequences of that “would be far-reaching”, said The Centre for Strategic & International Studies. It would not only “create a shock to the ideological spectrum” but also, for the first time, enable a far-right party in Germany “to put some of its agenda into practice”, on issues such as education, security and cultural identity. That could “catapult the far-right into power across Europe’s biggest economy”, said The Spectator. Or it could “be the beginning of the end”, as the AfD “confronts squaring its lavish election promises with sky-high voter expectations”.

The UK will continue to support Ukraine despite the “outrageous threats” made by Russia, said Andy Burnham in Kyiv on the 35th anniversary of the nation’s independence.

On his visit to Ukraine, his first overseas trip as prime minister, Burnham will also be giving his hosts blueprints for building long-range missiles, which can strike “around 150 miles (241km) into Russia”, said the BBC.

Last week, following reports that drones made by British companies were being used to attack targets within Russia, Moscow’s embassy in London said that the UK’s “actions will inevitably carry consequences for which it will have to answer”.

“Blustering” threats have been directed at the UK before, said Owen Matthews in The Independent. But now, with Russia growing “restless” amid a fast-evolving geopolitical landscape, the UK is antagonising Vladimir Putin more obviously than ever before.

What did the commentators say?

The relationship between the two countries has “already sunk close to rock-bottom”, said Jonathan Singh and Will Hazell in The i Paper. Moscow withdrew its ambassador to the UK last month, reflecting a deepening trend with both nations of “reducing staffing in their respective embassies and expelling each other’s diplomats”.

“Most Britons have little grasp of just how much their country is hated in Moscow,” said former diplomat Andy Pryce on the Centre for European Policy Analysis. In “Kremlin demonology”, it is “Britain that wears the Devil’s face”.

But curiously, Russian media outlets also “mock the UK, at some length”. Britain may be the “organising hand behind Russian failure, especially in Ukraine”, but its “army is too small, its navy overstretched” and its economy is “exhausted”. But this contradiction in propaganda is not a “flaw”: it presents the UK as “large enough to hate and weak enough to be worth threatening”.

But Britain has long been on the receiving end of “regular, blood-curdling warnings” from Russia, said Matthews in The Independent. Supplying Storm Shadow missiles and more recently “BAE-made Nyan drones” to Ukraine is the latest provocation for the “Kremlin’s attack dogs”. Putin believes Britain can be “kicked about with impunity” whereas his “complicated on-again, off-again relationship” with the Trump administration tells of very different priorities.

There were arson attacks in 2024 in Leyton and Birmingham that were both thought to be orchestrated by Moscow. A thwarted attempt by a “gang of dim-bulb Eastern European crooks” to assassinate journalists and activists, and the arson attacks on Keir Starmer’s former home also point the finger at Russia. The success of this “aggravated hooliganism” has been somewhat limited, but one thing is clear: Britain is becoming “extremely vulnerable and unprepared for attack”, whatever form it will now take.

Now is “as good an opportunity as any for the Kremlin to make a political point”, said Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian. Any effort to “undermine public confidence” in the UK, with Parliament in recess and “less domestic political news to crowd out the embassy’s remarks”, is vital for Putin’s agenda. As its economy suffers, and with Moscow being in range of Ukrainian drones, Russia is more vulnerable than ever. What would be concerning is if, now that it feels cornered, Russia’s “brinkmanship” spirals out of control.

What next?

Russia is unlikely to launch direct missile or armed drone strikes on the UK, said David Blair and Roland Oliphant in The Telegraph. Their first port of call would be to “intensify the existing campaign of sabotage, drone incursions and cyberattacks”. Disruptive incidents – like the recent drone attack in Leipzig – cyber attacks and sending drones to “loiter” near airports will all become more regular. Attacking British military targets in Ukraine, whether personnel or equipment, would also be a “straightforward way of retaliating” against the UK.

But, more broadly, Nato has a “deterrence problem”, said Katia Glod in Prospect. The alliance has “formidable mechanisms” to prevent a full-scale armed attack on its member states, but Russia can “operate precisely where those mechanisms become less automatic”, effectively in a “grey zone” where it knows there won’t be a response.

Deterrence will work only if the Kremlin believes there will be proportionate “consequences”. Nato, therefore, needs to “make activity below the Article 5 threshold more costly” to its adversaries, providing stronger protection of military logistics, communication, better counterintelligence and “graduated responses to hostile activity”. The objective should be to deny Moscow the “freedom to operate below the threshold of war”. Nato must “balance between avoiding an unnecessary war with Russia and ensuring that fear of one does not become a weapon Russia can use against us”.

Football may not have come home this summer, but Harry and Meghan are on their way.

This “unexpected development” is even more surprising “when you recall all the things the Sussexes said in books, on Netflix, and to Oprah Winfrey about their unhappy life in Harry’s country of birth”, said ITV’s royal correspondent Chris Ship.

The couple will reportedly move into a private, non-royal residence outside London. One of the main reasons behind the surprise announcement, according to news.com.au is that Meghan has been offered a role in an upcoming TV project in the UK.

No further details have been forthcoming, leaving great speculation over the reasons for their return from California.

What did the commentators say?

This is the culmination of “Project Thaw”, said royal author Andrew Lownie in The Washington Post – the plan, involving King Charles, “to bring Harry back into the fold after years of estrangement following the couple’s ‘Megxit’ from Britain”. In that way “the news should not have caught everyone off guard” and “there have been signs for the past year that Harry was keen to set up his own alternative royal court in Britain”.

“Please say that the Prodigal Son and the Prodigal Daughter-in-Law have decided to return to Britain for the right reasons – to heal family rifts, rather than their finances,” said Harry Mount in The Independent. Experts have noted the couple “have now achieved six full tax years of non-UK residency – enough to manage the ‘temporary non-resident’ rules for capital gains tax”. Their return then “just happens to be ideally timed for their bank accounts, as well as for their children to start the new academic year in British schools”.

But the decision is an “admission of failure, whether Harry and Meghan are intellectually honest enough to admit it or not”, royal commentator Kinsey Schofield told Page Six. “They had America, Hollywood, enormous contracts, global name recognition and every conceivable advantage,” she said. “And six years later, they’re coming back. That is failure.”

But I am told this move is “not due to any problems in the US”, said the BBC’s senior royal correspondent Daniela Relph. Instead “it has been driven by the couple’s desire to spend time in Europe, nearer Harry’s family and wanting to educate their children in the UK”.

The theme that came up again and again “when I spoke to people close to Harry earlier this year” was homesickness dressed up as ambition, said Dan Wakeford on Celebrity Intelligence. “He doesn’t care about the appearance of wealth. He cares about the appearance of doing good work,” one source said, describing a man who missed his family, his friends and his old life. Another source told Wakeford on Celebrity Intelligence the couple were “wildly unhappy”.

While it is “great on a personal level” for Charles to have more private access to his younger son and grandchildren, it will “take a long time to establish a reasonable degree of trust”, Joe Little, managing editor of Majesty Magazine, told The Guardian. “People will still wonder: do Harry and Meghan have another media deal set up?”

What next?

Harry “has no plans to return as a working royal”, said royal editor Matt Wilkinson in The Sun. But sources admit some elements of their move back to the UK remain “up in the air”.

One such detail is the prospect of a Gallagher-brothers-style burying of the hatchet for Harry and Prince William. But it appears there will be no Knebworth equivalent for the royals quite yet with the former BBC royal correspondent Peter Hunt suggesting William would be “apoplectic” at the Sussexes’ return.

“In the long term, the return of the Sussexes to the UK opens up the prospect of two rival courts, William’s and Harry’s,” he said. “In the short term, Harry will be able to deepen his rapprochement with his father. And his presence back home will make it harder for his brother to duck a reconciliation.”

The fractures in Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s premiership are beginning to show. Sacked defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov has called for an election, despite a constitutional ban on polls being held in times of war. “Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia,” he said in a YouTube video address. Ukraine must “renew its full democratic process even in the conditions of a long war”.

Fedorov stopped short of launching a direct challenge to the president, but even so political and public support for Zelenskyy seems more fragile than ever. The former defence minister is popular among younger Ukrainians and his dismissal in July sparked protests across the country. Anti-corruption agencies have also announced they are investigating an official in Zelenskyy’s office.

What did the commentators say?

Fedorov’s address was unexpected, said investment strategist Timothy Ash in Kyiv Post, and I “struggle with his logic”. Elections will be impossible to hold and there is no “great clamour” for them anyway.

Perhaps he is advancing his own political ambitions, realising a “desire to take advantage of the momentum he gained” after his dismissal. This announcement seems like an “extraordinary political error of judgement, which some would likely use against him if he ever pitches in to run as president in the future”. In short, “it looks a bit like political suicide from Fedorov”.

“Internally”, this video has been the “biggest challenge to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy yet”, said Nick Paton Walsh on CNN. “But it will likely, practically, come to nothing.”

Zelenskyy’s popularity is “sliding” but a vote is “pretty much impossible”. Even if the war were to end, Ukraine would need a minimum of six months to “implement legislative reforms” that would “meet European standards”. And that’s without the complications of reaching soldiers on the front line, or the “millions of Ukrainian pensioners who live off-line”. Fundamentally, a vote would “utterly cripple Kyiv” and could “spell defeat from within”.

The “swelling” corruption cases against several of Zelenskyy’s closest allies have also “contributed to a fall in the president’s approval rating”, said Christopher Miller in the Financial Times. In the latest of a “litany of graft allegations” against his supporters, Zelenskyy was forced to sack one of his top aides, Iryna Mudra, following “Operation Forrest Gump” raids by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine.

Previous charges brought against former chief-of-staff Andriy Yermak and ex-energy minister Herman Halushchenko (both of whom, as well as Mudra, deny wrongdoing) have also “sparked concern among Western partners who have provided billions to keep the country afloat and support its military”.

Infighting like this just plays into Russia’s hands, said Adrian Blomfield in The Telegraph. The friction that led to Zelenskyy sacking Fedorov and the ensuing “public discontent” have already undermined the nation just as it seemed to be “regaining the initiative on the battlefield”.

And if an election were to take place, “Russia’s record of electoral interference speaks for itself”. Moscow has “yearned” for a Ukrainian leadership challenge so that it can accomplish what it has “failed to do on the battlefield: sow dissension and encourage Ukrainian society to devour itself”. Whatever narratives “prevail”, it is clear the president is “accumulating powerful public rivals who were once deeply loyal to him”.

Zelenskyy “still commands broad support as a war leader”, said Politico. As his allies have pointed out, there is only so much he can reveal about the “inner workings” of the state, when “national survival is at stake”. Fedorov is “certainly popular”. In a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll, “63% of people saw him as trustworthy”. But Zelenskyy “scored a robust 56%” so is hardly “out of the picture” in terms of any future election.

What next?

This coming “winter crunch” will be a test for the Zelenskyy premiership, said Paton Walsh on CNN. It will “feed into the lacklustre and purblind peace process that the Trump White House is trying to reignite”. Harsher conditions will increase demands on him to “concede territory” to “get the fighting to stop”, a move he has repeatedly ruled out.

Zelenskyy has made clear that any permanent ceasefire would have to be supported by security guarantees. But he is “clear-eyed that the winter ahead is bad, both in the skies and on the front lines”.

The United Nations’ 17th Conference of the Parties in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, has once again brought together an array of countries to battle climate change. But this COP edition is focused on a unique element of the shifting environment: desertification. As more fertile land degrades into dry, barren desert, the meeting is workshopping climate solutions using its key anti-desertification treaty, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

What did the commentators say?

While the U.N. is working on a cohesive plan to fight desertification, the main goal of the Mongolia conference is to “put pledges made two years ago into action through projects in the developing world,” said The Guardian. A plan like this will involve “allocating more than $12 billion to vulnerable countries to help them deal with drought and land degradation,” specifically in countries that don’t have many resources to fight climate change.

The “biannual talks on desertification have taken on far greater importance in the wake of recent heatwaves and wildfires in the Northern Hemisphere, Europe and Asia,” said French radio broadcaster RFI. The $12 billion pledge is also “small compared to the needs — about $2.6 trillion by 2030,” which would be required to “repair degraded land, halt desertification, protect against drought and restore soils.” There’s also a push to focus more on the UNCCD, which has been “garnering the least attention” of three environmental treaties signed in the 1990s, said The Guardian.

The need for additional funding appears dire, as “up to 40% of the world’s land is currently degraded,” said the U.N. regional information center’s site. Beyond desertification causing environmental damage, it can also “reduce food production and water availability, undermine livelihoods and increase economic and social vulnerability.” The “choice of Mongolia as host for COP17 brings particular significance to this year’s conference,” as the U.N. estimates that at least 77% of the country’s land is degraded, making “sustainable management a pressing national concern.”

Solutions are being worked on in Mongolia as countries around the world are “bracing for food price rises as a result of damage to harvests from record heat and lack of water,” said The Guardian. The U.N.’s World Food Programme also “predicts that 50 million more people could be pushed into hunger by the ‘super El Niño’ weather system currently developing.” Better implementation of anti-desertification funds will be needed, as “initiatives to restore land and prevent drought have up to now been poorly funded and badly managed.”

What next?

Many are hoping that the conference will help propel the UNCCD more into the foreground. It is currently the only one of three U.N. environmental treaties from the 1990s in which the U.S. “remains a full party” and is “one of the last multilateral arenas for environmental diplomacy,” said Jean-Daniel Cesaro, a member of the French Scientific Committee on Desertification, to Le Monde. It is “crucial to keep it alive and maintain dialogue and reflection on these issues, which are essential to our future.”

COP17 is slated to run until Aug. 28. Major funding announcements are “generally made at climate COPs, even when they are closely linked to land management,” said Cesaro. The rest of the conference should be used to “remind everyone that science remains, above all, a space for dialogue in a world that more than ever needs healthy land and living ecosystems to face climate change.”

Following his reforms in Manchester, Andy Burnham “enters No. 10 understanding what drives the crisis” of rough sleeping, said Jennifer Williams in the Financial Times.

To fund his A Bed Every Night scheme – 600 new beds across shelters in each of Greater Manchester’s 10 boroughs, open 365 days a year – he donated 15% of his own salary, and used the media to draw attention to the issue. And in the region, rough sleeping numbers are 25% below where they were in 2017.

But crucially “in the almost-decade Burnham was mayor he never ended rough sleeping in Greater Manchester”, said email newspaper The Mill. And that’s why there remains a healthy dose of scepticism about his pledge that every person sleeping on England’s streets is to be offered somewhere to stay this winter. “Ever an optimist” it could be that Burnham “feels that with the power afforded to him as prime minister he can finally make good on the promise”, said The Mill. But regardless, “it is still an incredibly bold one to make”.

What did the commentators say?

He may have failed to meet the Manchester target, said the FT, but he “galvanised a fragmented local system to focus on the crisis, while experimenting with a series of local policies, some of them successful”. But a growing group of long-term rough sleepers are now emerging from the asylum system.

This policy raises “all sorts of political questions” when it comes to homelessness, said Britain editor Anoosh Chakelian in The New Statesman. Primarily, “regarding ‘no recourse to public funds’”, which bans migrants without settled status claiming most benefits. This condition is a “significant cause of hardship and rough sleeping”, and is only getting worse through the “closure of asylum hotels” which is “contributing to more visible destitution on Britain’s streets”.

Burnham’s pledge to end rough sleeping by Christmas echoes the success of the Everyone In scheme undertaken during the Covid pandemic, said the BBC, which saw “thousands of rough sleepers housed in hotels and temporary accommodation”. In total, around “37,000 people were helped by that scheme”. But currently, according to government data, an estimated 4,793 people were sleeping rough on a single night in autumn last year, which is a 96% increase since 2021.

“The Christmas pledge is a major test for Burnham’s key day-one promise to tackle homelessness,” said Vicky Spratt, housing and society correspondent in The i Paper. And “it is possible that not all councils will welcome being asked to work towards this goal”. Currently in England, more than 1.3 million households are “languishing on local councils’ social housing waiting lists”, and addressing this issue with local authorities is “non-negotiable” for Burnham and Minister for Housing Angela Rayner.

This is one of the “hardest-to-achieve” pledges in office, said Caroline Hug in Politico. His announcement of an additional £102 million gives his “big rough-sleeping pledge some meat”, but it is light on detail. “It still doesn’t set out a route to zero or say when the government actually expects to get there.” And while highly effective efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic show a solution is possible, it is “harder to make that solution stick”. This policy will test Burnham’s resolve on devolution, as he “has not given his government control over all the levers to achieve it”. And it could backfire: “if shop doorways empty over Christmas but fill again in spring, who will the public decide is responsible?”

What next?

The issue is not whether ending rough sleeping is “desirable or achievable”, it is figuring out why “previous attempts have collapsed”, said Jo Richardson, professor of housing and social inclusion at Nottingham Trent University, on The Conversation. Even if enough homes were built, the “biggest fear” for rough sleepers is not being able to provide rent, it is “being alone behind a locked door”. “Any serious homelessness strategy needs to fund social connection as deliberately as it funds bricks and mortar.” This requires a dedicated support workforce, and integrated partnerships across health and social care: a “bigger, more specific commitment than five years of funding alone can achieve”.

Reform UK’s plans to cut £50 billion per year from the welfare bill – unveiled yesterday by Robert Jenrick – are “extremely ambitious”, but also a “political risk”, said Ben Chu on BBC Verify.

Nigel Farage has said the party will not cut pensions, meaning roughly £207 billion of the overall £353 billion welfare budget is up for grabs, and Jenrick aims to cut around 25% of that.

Under the plans, long-term welfare claimants who are fit to work would be forced to do 20 hours of community work a week, and foreign nationals would be banned from claiming benefits altogether. Personal Independence Payments (Pip) to disabled claimants would be scrapped and replaced with a “health security allowance” with more stringent eligibility criteria that could exclude up to two-thirds of current recipients.

These proposals may fit Reform’s “current ideological appeal”, pollster Sir John Curtice told The Independent. But this has limitations to their wider appeal, and has the potential to significantly backfire with their base.

What did the commentators say?

The “centrepiece” of the policy is to exclude foreign nationals from claiming most UK benefits, said an editorial in The Times, including European Union citizens with ­settled status in the UK.

This is just another “calculated bang on the populist drum”: the majority of foreign nationals “don’t qualify in the first place”. UK visas stipulate a clause of “no recourse to public funds”. Not only would stripping entitlement from the 4.3 million EU citizens who have been in the UK for many years antagonise relationships with the bloc, it would be “pointless”; many of those with indefinite leave to remain would have a “near-certain chance of being granted British ­citizenship should they apply”.

But for the Reform base, a more pressing issue is the “proposed abolition of Pip”, said journalist Fraser Nelson on his Substack newsletter. “Every Reform MP sits on more Pip claimants than the majority that elected them.”

In Jenrick’s seat of Newark, where he was elected as a Conservative with a majority of 3,572, there are 6,011 residents who claim Pip. And almost all of Reform’s target seats are “heavily welfare dependent”. Jenrick risks going into the next election as “the Pip-snatcher, the grim reaper of welfare”. “The Labour attack lines write themselves.”

There’s no doubt that the welfare state “needs reform – but not Reform”, said The Independent’s editorial board. Not only would the proposed cuts impose “much misery on the most vulnerable in society”, but they would also “substantially weaken” the British economy.

Employers with more than five staff would “take on the role of the state in social insurance and health care”, carrying a “significant increase” in cost, risk and pastoral responsibilities. Afforded only “tiny tax breaks” in return, employers would be “even less willing to take on people with long-term conditions, or who they perceive as liable to develop them”.

There may be “flaws” in the Reform approach, but the ambitious scale of the reforms is “laudable”, said an editorial in The Telegraph. Jenrick is seeking to “revive” the “something-for-something contributory principle” of William Beveridge, “founder of the welfare state”, but is up against a system that is growing at an “unsustainable” pace.

What next?

Reform has been overtaken in the polls by Labour “for the first time in more than a year”, because of the “bounce” under Andy Burnham’s leadership, said the Financial Times. The government has said that it was “already reforming welfare by narrowing the gap between standard and health universal credit rates”, by reintroducing face-to-face assessments and “investing £3.5 billion in employment support”.

Burnham’s willingness to get to grips with the expanding welfare state is “likely to emerge as the key dividing line over the coming months”, said Rupert Yorke, former deputy chief of staff to Rishi Sunak, in The i Paper. “It remains to be seen whether he prioritises this issue with his backbenchers over his ambitious plans for regional devolution or social care”.

Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to scale back annual joint military exercises with South Korea after the country stayed out of the war with Iran.

Writing on Truth Social, the US president said the exercises “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, which “has been unthreatening and respectful” during his second term. He also noted that South Korea had recently declined to join the US in the “denuclearisation” of Iran.

What did the commentators say?

The US is losing the Iran conflict, so Trump has “taken the logical next step” of “punishing” a “loyal American friend”, said Tom Nichols on The Atlantic.

In fact, “scaling back the exercise” is an “insane” decision but in “Trump’s world, every loss, every defeat, is a personal insult”, and “when things go wrong, someone must be held responsible” and, of course, “that someone is never Donald Trump”.

So the world is “witnessing a public exhibition of narcissistic rage” because Trump “embarked on a war for personal glory”, but “what he got instead was ongoing humiliation”.

The Chinese, Russians and North Koreans will “draw the appropriate lessons from this deranged policy”, and notice that “when Trump fails, he hurts those he feels safe hurting”.

It is the “latest example” of Trump “appearing to turn against an ally in favour of a leader that previous administrations have cast as an adversary”, wrote Konstantin Toropin and Alanna Durkin Richer on The Associated Press. It’s a particularly “sharp turnaround” from how his administration has viewed South Korea recently.

The announcement could be “part of an effort to divert attention” from the war in Iran, which has “left energy costs high”. This has become a “sensitive economic issue” ahead of the US midterm elections, said The Korea Times.

It could “trigger a debate over whether the scaling down of joint exercises could affect the allies’ deterrence” against North Korea as the “recalcitrant regime has been doubling down on its nuclear and ballistic missile programs”.

The “sudden” announcement “risks renewing concerns” that “US forces are too stretched to support crucial Western allies or maintain deterrence against autocracies that threaten them”, said Brad Lendon on CNN. It’s also a “gift” to Kim Jong Un at a time when he has “ramped up his own nation’s threat to global stability and offered no concessions in return”.

What next?

Experts told the BBC that the “walking back” of these joint military exercises could “carry a high cost with relatively little benefit”.

They are “essential for military forces to be ready and capable of doing their jobs”, Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, told the broadcaster.

“Scaling them back” could “damage alliance coordination”, as well as “slow the process of South Korea taking on greater responsibility for its own defence, and weaken deterrence against possible conflicts in Asia”.

In a statement, South Korea’s presidential Blue House said it was reviewing Trump’s comments and added that it hoped a favourable relationship between Washington and Pyongyang could lead to meaningful talks.

“What was the point of it all?” said Joe Pike on the BBC. Given that Nigel Farage “triggered this race and the result was entirely predictable”, did the Reform leader get what he wanted out of the Clacton by-election?

If he did, he didn’t celebrate it at the count. Reform UK claimed that Essex Police had warned of a threat to Farage’s safety, which meant he stayed away from the result declaration. But that claim was denied by the police.

When Reform chair Lee Anderson was pressed on this counter-narrative he told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme: “It’s not up to you at the BBC to decide if there’s a credible threat, it’s up to Nigel and his security team. He celebrated a stunning victory in Clacton. The people have stuck two fingers up to people like the BBC, the establishment, the whole blob.”

Not everyone agrees though. Farage “wanted a narrative of him taking on all comers on his own terms”, said James Ball in The New World. But the reality is, he “ended up in a low-stakes fight for his political survival against a comedically oversized bin”.

Farage won with 63% of the vote, with comedy candidate Count Binface coming second with 27% in an election boycotted by all of the main Westminster parties, who dismissed it as a stunt.

What did the commentators say?

In calling the by-election Farage “hoped to cock a snook at an establishment he feels is trying to bring him and his party down via allegations about financial contributions to himself and his party”, said polling guru John Curtice in The Times. In practice, “his decision was followed by an immediate fall in his party’s support, just when its year-long lead in the polls was under threat”. Reform’s national vote share in the polls is down to 24% after hitting a high of 32% last September.

What the by-election has revealed is that Farage, “a savvy, guerrilla political operator, and perhaps the most able political communicator of his generation, can be guilty of missteps”, said Jonny Ball on UnHerd. His victory “will not put a stop to awkward questions” and “the standards inquiry into his donations row will now continue”. He had hoped the by-election “might allow him to chalk up another success on his long political journey, but this victory will feel pyrrhic, and particularly hollow”.

But will it? I'm not so sure, said Ross Clark in The Spectator. Farage has shown that in Clacton “his personal support is every bit as strong as it was before”. It is remarkable that he won “more votes than he did in the 2024 general election in spite of the turnout collapsing”. Yes, Clacton “tells us nothing about the state of political play in Britain at the moment, because it wasn’t a proper contest”, but “I would be wary of anyone claiming that Farage has been weakened by it”.

What next?

Farage has “managed to professionalise Reform UK”, said Pike on the BBC. In securing significant funding and recruiting high-profile figures like Robert Jenrick and Zia Yusuf he is seeking to prove “that the third political party he has led during his long career is not just a one-man-band”.

But ultimately it is “voters nationally, and not in this corner of Essex”, who will decide Farage’s future and whether this by-election will “mark a downward shift in Farage’s brand”, or whether it will “be a springboard towards achieving his bigger aspiration of getting to Downing Street”.