“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”.

England has just recorded its driest July since records began in 1836. Fast forward to 2053 and we could be living in a “dystopian hellscape”, said Patrick Galbraith, environment correspondent, in The Telegraph. Rivers running dry, water being turned off at the mains, and food “poised to be rationed”: “this is not science fiction, but a very realistic scenario for the UK”.

Nearly three-quarters of England has been declared in drought, with around 45 million people now living in a drought area, and more than 27 million facing water-use restrictions. Nowhere in England is now under a ‘normal’ status.

Problems concerning infrastructure, investment, distribution and regulation have all compounded the effects of Britain’s scorching summer, forcing the government to consider its plans for a water crisis more carefully.

What did the commentators say?

In 2053, Britain is expected to have a shortfall of five billion litres of water per day, according to Baroness Brown, from the government’s advisory Climate Change Committee. If it materialises, this deficit would have “devastating” consequences for food supplies “as well as the economy and social cohesion”, said Galbraith. “The dystopian future of 2053 may not be so far away.”

The “main problem” in our water crisis is regulation, said Emma Duncan in The Times. Water regulators in Britain have indeed kept bills down, but have allowed water companies to give “massive bonuses to bosses and to shovel vast sums to shareholders”. Around “£50 billion” has been paid in dividends in the three decades since privatisation, “rather than spending the money on necessary upgrades to water-treatment works and pipes”.

Jon Cunliffe’s recent review of the water sector produced “sensible” recommendations, arguing principally that the industry’s “disparate regulators be brought together” and so “attracting new capital into the industry”. The whole point of regulation is to “act in the interest of citizens” and ensure water companies are “preventing pollution and ensuring future supplies”.

“Without investment and reductions in our water use, we are facing a serious problem,” said Pippa Neill and Safeerah Ahmed in The Guardian. For “several decades” now, the main issues have been “fixing leaks and building new reservoirs”, meaning there is not only a problem of “storing water during times of plenty”, but also effective distribution when water is needed.

No major new reservoirs have been built in England and Wales since 1992, and research from Greenpeace UK found that 2.87 billion litres of water a day is wasted through leaky pipes in England and Wales: “enough to fill 1,150 Olympic-sized swimming pools and amounting to a fifth of all water pumped through the network”.

To fix the issue, water companies have committed to “record investment” to minimise leaks, and “several” new reservoirs are in the planning stage.

What next?

The UK already has “disaster planning scenarios in place for a severe drought”, said Galbraith in The Telegraph. The government’s Emergency Drought Order, if invoked, would force water companies to “implement rolling water-rationing across entire regions by cutting off people’s taps”. Rationed water would then be distributed from standpipes in central collection points. In this scenario, private customers buying water would “only have 20 litres of water per person per day”: or a “mere 14% of our current average usage”.

Alongside water rationing, repeated droughts would also “increase the risk of fire, with less water for firefighters to battle blazes”, said Joe Duggan in The i Paper.

The UK’s National Risk Register, which outlines the “most serious threats facing the country”, states that under a “reasonable worst-case scenario” of continuous dry weather patterns, “large swathes of South and East of England would be hit by severe drought”. Transport, hospitals, data centres, emergency services and telecommunications businesses would all be hit with restrictions.

Perhaps most concerningly, the document also considers the “potential changes in public behaviour including the potential for localised civil disorder”.

Is the honeymoon over already?

After a confident start in No. 10, Andy Burnham is facing his first real test as PM over his handling of the controversial prisoner early-release scheme.

Having already bowed to public pressure once to stop rapists and child sex offenders being released early, the PM this week insisted he was “increasingly confident” that the scheme can be adapted to exclude the killers of PC Andrew Harper.

Keen to find a line of attack that sticks, his critics have branded Burnham a “people pleaser” and a flip-flopper who does not want to take difficult decisions.

What did the commentators say?

The “conundrum” of how to manage the early release of prisoners required to free up much-needed prison capacity is an “acute example of the tricky political decision-making that inevitably comes with power”, said BBC political correspondent Jack Fenwick.

But Burnham’s choice to focus on the type of crime, rather than the length of offenders’ sentences, has “caused a political storm of its own” which has left the government scrambling to stop Harper’s killers being set free ahead of time.

His shifting position, and the decision to go on holiday while the row snowballed, is “his first serious mistake on the job”, said The Independent’s political editor John Rentoul. He has “belatedly realised that the politics of the problem are simple” and his premiership “would be over almost before it had begun if those two killers were let out early”.

But “the question posed by this course correction is whether the initial mistake was simply down to inexperience”.

While many politicians “seek to avoid the suggestion that they are swayed by public sentiment, Burnham has leaned into the idea that he is responding to Britons’ outrage”, said Lucy Fisher in the Financial Times.

U-turns are not necessarily a bad thing if they are judged to be the result of a government listening to the public’s concerns, as long as they don’t become a habit. Just ask Keir Starmer.

What next?

The row over exactly which offenders may or may not be eligible for early release “masks an uncomfortable reality”, said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman: “our criminal justice system fails to keep people out of prison once they have left”.

If we were prepared to have a genuine debate about the issue, the “political fury” currently aimed at the government would instead “be directed at our dangerous reoffending rates” and how best to bring them down.

In place of that, the Home Office is pressing ahead with its aim to build 14,000 more prison places by 2031. In the meantime, in a Facebook post, Burnham has suggested removing foreign offenders more quickly, tackling the “long-running injustice of IPP sentences”, which have kept many minor offenders locked up for decades, and re-purposing some women’s prisons for male offenders, as ways to expand prison capacity.

But these are medium- to long-term solutions. The immediate task facing the government is trying to find a way to keep Harper’s killer behind bars without making a similar exemption for all manslaughter convictions.

Downing Street will hope its efforts over the past week “will be remembered as a PM who has forced the system to do what he wanted”, said Fenwick. They will “fear that the lasting impression could instead be of a misstep that’s left victims’ families in anguish”.

Ukrainian drones have hit 23 Wildberries warehouses across Russia in just three weeks, said Nataliya Vasilyeva in The New York Times. Known widely as “Russia’s Amazon”, the e-commerce giant has been targeted by Ukrainian long-range drones, with a fire breaking out overnight at a facility in Voronezh.

Ukraine claims that the company, founded in 2004 by now-multi-billionaire Tatyana Kim and has disputed links to the Kremlin, is aiding the Russian war effort. The retailer denies this.

Attacking the distribution network of one of Russia’s principal companies will increase financial pressure on consumers and retailers alike, but the longer-term threats to the Russian economy could pose a significant threat to the Kremlin.

What did the commentators say?

Wildberries, as a “linchpin of Russia’s consumer market”, is an “obvious target”, said Vasilyeva in The New York Times. It can access even the “most remote corners of the country”, making its reach in Russia “unmatched”. It is the most popular marketplace platform in the country, with 79 million people – more than half of the population – using it every month.

The strikes have “disproportionately affected” the “one million Russian sellers” who rely on the site for visibility and distribution. In a fractured country whose vast size poses significant business challenges, Wildberries’ 95,000 pick-up points “represent a sense of economic normalcy” for both retailers and consumers, “which the Kremlin has been eager to preserve” amid sanctions and economic pressure from the war.

Since the outbreak of the conflict, Wildberries has been championed as a “symbol of Russian ingenuity and resilience despite Western sanctions”, said The Wall Street Journal.

On the surface, it is a success story of economic growth, employing more than 15,000 people, having tripled its workforce last year alone. But with ties to “Kremlin-linked oligarch” Suleyman Kerimov, it is demonstrative of “Putin’s determination to restrict control over the engines of the economy to a cadre of businesspeople loyal to him”.

Ukraine’s reasons for striking Wildberries “appear to be two-fold”, said The Independent. Ukraine insists the platform is a “legitimate” target due to its involvement in “Russia's wartime logistics and economic infrastructure”. But the overwhelming motivation is a financial one. Alongside its smaller competitor Ozon and other rivals, Wildberries accounts for around 8.5% of Russia’s GDP and supports around four million jobs, “more than 5% of Russia’s workforce”. Signalled by the government purchasing a 5% stake in the company, Wildberries is considered “central to plans for economic growth”.

“Whatever the stated military rationale, the economic consequences extend far beyond the front line of war,” said finance expert Yerzhan Tokbolat on The Conversation. This latest tactic is making the “economic costs of the war harder for ordinary Russians to ignore”. The significance of the Wildberries strikes may not just be the destruction of warehouses, but rather found in the “millions of Russians whose incomes, shopping and sense of normality depend on them”.

The Kremlin’s protestation that Ukraine is attacking Russia’s civilian economy with their attacks on Wildberries “smacks of complete hypocrisy”, said Liam Nolan, Eastern Europe reporter at RTÉ. Russian forces have been destroying businesses and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine for the last four-and-a-half years, “despite the Kremlin’s insistence that it does not target civilian areas”.

Government drives to expand “long-range drone production and greater investment in deep-strike technology” have certainly pressed home the advantage. But Kyiv’s ultimate goal in targeting Wildberries – and Russia’s infrastructure more generally – is to “gain leverage in the negotiating process, whenever it restarts”.

What next?

Support for Putin will “not automatically weaken” because of these attacks, said Tokbolat on The Conversation. As of 28 July, the government announced it had been considering “loans, tax relief and subsidies” to maintain businesses, “but no decision had been made”. In fact, they could “reinforce patriotic sentiment” against Ukraine, and “generate solidarity with affected Russian businesses, rather than anger towards the Kremlin”.

“The greater political risk is cumulative.” The knock-on effects of fuel shortages and subsequent price increases, as well as a decline in small businesses, will make it harder to maintain the impression that “the war can continue without significantly changing everyday life in Russia”. But beyond outward support, Russia’s campaign depends on the “willingness of households and businesses to absorb the costs of war”. By placing a major economic engine, which affects everyday consumption, in its crosshairs, “Ukraine is testing that willingness”.

Colombia’s short-lived era of leftist leadership has ended, as far-right politician Abelardo de la Espriella takes office as the nation’s 36th president. Unlike his predecessor Gustavo Petro, who was the only left-wing president in modern Colombian history, de la Espriella wants to shift the South American country to the right. He is also dealing with a major natural disaster in his first days in office.

What did the commentators say?

The new president represents a “sharp” turn from former President Gustavo Petro, who “stopped awarding new oil and gas exploration contracts while pushing Colombia toward renewable energy” and encouraging a “global transition away from fossil fuels,” said The Associated Press. De la Espriella instead has pledged that “energy security would be a cornerstone of his administration,” as he makes plans to “revive the country’s oil and gas sector, restore state-owned energy company Ecopetrol and strengthen the electricity system.”

Alongside this energy agenda, de la Espriella will also be making changes stemming from his stance on social issues, including crime and drug trafficking. He has “promised to confront rebel groups in Colombia with greater military force while cutting government spending to reduce a budget deficit,” said NPR. In a symbolic move, de la Espriella was inaugurated not in the capital of Bogotá but in Cali, a city which has been “hit hard by drug violence and attacks from rebel groups.”

De la Espriella also “campaigned on promises to crush his country’s powerful drug traffickers with the help of the United States” and in collaboration with the right-wing Trump administration, said The New York Times. The White House has “made targeting traffickers in Latin America a priority,” although before de la Espriella’s election, President Donald Trump “made little headway with Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer and traditionally Washington’s closest ally in the region.”

Overall, Colombia’s new leader is “basically shifting the entire region, especially South America, toward the right,” the Washington Office on Latin America’s Gimena Sánchez said to PBS News. De la Espriella will be “feeling the pressure to make really big moves from the get-go because there’s so much expectation from the U.S. that he’s going to be hard on narcotraffickers.” It could “have a tremendous influence on the direction that Colombia takes.”

While all of these issues are simmering, the new president is simultaneously contending with the aftermath of a 7.4-magnitude earthquake that struck western Colombia on Aug. 10. Officials in several major cities, including Cali and Pereira, “reported dozens of injuries, people trapped inside collapsed buildings and serious damages,” said NBC News. “The quake felt here was very severe,” taxi driver Luis Angel Sarrio told NBC.

What next?

The earthquake killed at least 100 people, with casualties expected to rise significantly in the coming days. In the first major check of his power, de la Espriella “declared a national disaster situation,” which gives his government “special powers to react to the emergency, including to reallocate budgets,” said BBC News. Alongside earthquake recovery, de la Espriella’s government is still focusing on anti-crime efforts. In another sign of a looming partnership, the United States notably pledged at least $1 billion in security assistance to Colombia soon after de la Espriella took office. The U.S. State Department said this money would help the new president achieve shared goals, including fighting organized crime and illegal immigration.

Taliban fighters entered Kabul on 15 August 2021 as the Afghan government collapsed and US troops scrambled to complete their withdrawal from the country. A year later, the group declared the date an annual national holiday.

In the five years since, the Taliban’s “increasingly draconian policies have made Afghanistan one of the world’s gravest human rights crises, particularly for women and girls”, said Human Rights Watch.

Among United Nations members states, only Russia has announced it formally recognises the Taliban regime, but “international condemnation is not enough”, said HRW.

What did the commentators say?

On “The Proud Day of August 15”, as the day has become known, Afghans are likely to see parades of the Taliban’s “suicide bomber squad on motorbikes and American equipment left by Nato forces”, said Christina Lamb in The Times.

Yet the country remains “on the brink of famine”. Around 4.7 million Afghans are facing “life-threatening malnutrition”, and almost 19 million are “in the grip of acute hunger or worse”, according to the World Food Programme. Afghanistan remains the only country in the world to ban girls and women from secondary school and university, while “morality police” patrol the streets seeking infringements of dress codes. The Taliban has even “banned women being seen at windows”, and recently “scrapped the minimum age for child marriage”.

Five years into its rule, the Taliban continues to expose the “wishful thinking of Western political and military leaders who insisted the movement had changed”, said the Lowy Institute think tank. The West has a “wilful blindness” towards the regime and is “quietly lowering the threshold of behaviour it is prepared to accept”.

“Tellingly”, the United Nations now refers to the “relevant authorities” in Kabul rather than the “de facto authorities”, in effect “narrowing the linguistic difference between the regime and a recognised government”. Warnings of the widespread repression under the regime are still “accurate”; what has changed is the “willingness of the world to act on them”.

Britain’s hesitation to evacuate eligible Afghans who worked with British officials in the country is “typical” of the UK’s “attitude to its obligations to Afghans generally”, said an editorial in The Independent. According to an internal government review conducted in February, 7,000 people have been found to be eligible for resettlement and “still likely to be at risk from Taliban retribution”, yet Britain has scrapped plans to evacuate them. Made worse by a “catastrophic data breach in 2022”, “obfuscation and delay”, Britain has been “dragging its feet in protecting those who served alongside our troops in Afghanistan”. It, like other countries, must “discharge its obligations to our Afghan allies, promptly and in full”, as a “matter of national honour”.

The US, in particular, “has a moral responsibility to not simply look away,” said Mursal Rahim, who fled Afghanistan in 2021, in The New York Times. Since leaving Kabul, the US has “increasingly disengaged from the country and its people”, closing the embassy, withdrawing diplomats and leaving “sharply reduced assistance” for Afghans coming to America. The situation in Afghanistan no longer “commands America’s attention as it once did”, but to continue in this vein risks accepting that the “systematic erasure of Afghan women is no longer its concern”.

What next?

It may be unpopular, but “Afghanistan’s future depends on greater international engagement” with whoever is in charge, said Tobias Ellwood, former chair of the Defence Select Committee, in The Telegraph. But importantly, “engagement does not mean recognition”. The goal is to ensure that Afghanistan, and its population of 40 million people, is “stable, secure and prosperous enough”, but that “will not be achieved by shouting from afar. It begins by re-engaging with those who govern Afghanistan today.”

“Far too little” is being done to protect girls from child marriages, and promote education, said former PM Gordon Brown in The Guardian. Other countries in the region have had some success. Pakistan’s Sindh province has criminalised marriage under 18 and introduced “penalties for those who facilitate it”. Bangladesh has also tightened its birth registration system to make it harder to conceal a girl’s age.

Changes to the UK government’s new immigration and asylum bill are positive recognitions of the problem. “But we must go further.” We must establish a fund in support of Afghan girls who are threatened with child marriage. It should offer them “bursaries to continue their education, if necessary outside their home country”. This may only be a “small gesture” after five years of Taliban rule, but “it is our moral duty to help them”.

Perhaps Zack Polanski’s refusal to apologise to Nigel Farage last week wasn’t so surprising, given that sorry seems to be the hardest word in politics.

The leader of the Greens said it was “quite obvious” he had not done anything wrong “apart from make an inadvertent mistake” after he had agreed to a social-media collaboration on a series of photos – one of which showed a man in a T-shirt, an outline of a guillotine and the words: “We’re only making plans for Nigel”. Polanski added: “If I’d done it deliberately, I’d be apologising.”

It was the “syntax recognisable to parents of teenagers everywhere”, said The Economist. But the Greens leader’s position fits snugly into a long-standing tradition of politicians stubbornly avoiding or delaying apologies.

What did the commentators say?

For “such a short phrase, it is surprising how little ‘I’m sorry’ crops up in the UK political sphere”, said Rachel Cordery in The New Statesman. Instead, politicians often “employ a common arsenal of political tools” that includes “shifting the blame, denial, resigning”.

After the Suez Crisis of 1956, Anthony Eden “resigned in shame” but “never accepted responsibility for his failings”; instead, the official line given for his resignation was that it was done “on grounds of ill health”.

Today, the “first step is to deny that the problem exists” and if the story persists, politicians “acknowledge the crisis without accepting responsibility”. The “final stage, if it gets that far”, is to “find a person or an organisation to take the blame”.

Sometimes, an apology is just not sufficient. When Nick Clegg said sorry for his U-turn on tuition fees, the “loss of trust was so complete” that most likely no amount of apologising would have been enough. However “genuine” it might have been, it ended up a “derisive meme”.

Public figures make an apology for a scandal so “long after the event” it is made “safe in the knowledge that no blame could possibly attach to them”, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. You only need look at “Rishi Sunak for infected blood, David Cameron for Hillsborough” and “Keir Starmer for Grenfell”.

Some opt for the partial apology: Tony Blair said sorry not for the Iraq war, only for “some failures” in its planning and its “aftermath”, and the total of Liz Truss’ atonement for her “disastrous budget” was going “too far and too fast”.

But people “not only need apologies, they are likely to respect them” because there is “nothing nobler than sincere regret”. Offering one could make the public “less cynical towards those in power”.

Politicians “almost never apologise”, said Bence Hamrak on LSE, adding that a plausible reason is the “lack of electoral punishment for dishonesty”. His research found that apologies “may contradict the aggressive, masculine style of politics that voters might expect from leaders”, so saying sorry “might be interpreted as a sign of weakness by voters”.

What next?

Reform UK accused Polanski of “incitement to violence”, but the police decided to take no further action. Polling by the More in Common think tank suggests the row has damaged Polanski and the Greens. His personal approval rating has fallen to minus 28, making him the most unpopular major party leader in the country.

“If Nigel Farage wants to apologise for all the times that he’s put other people in danger then I’ll be happy to make an apology,” said Polanski.

And therein perhaps lies the point, said Marie Le Conte in The New World. When it comes to the current political discourse, “the hypocrisy and bad faith of it all are exhausting”.

Polanski “erred and showed, once again, that he probably isn’t ready for the big time quite yet”. But his lack of apology does not make him “unfit to lead, though: after all, he merely is a product of the times we live in, and these times are really quite rotten”.

While the Trump administration has become known for its policy of anti-globalization, recent reports that the White House plans to shutter five overseas embassies and consulates have some worried about the implications. Several of the planned closures will occur in nations with close diplomatic ties to the United States, including Canada and Japan. The rare moves, which often happen only during times of conflict, could create new foreign affairs headaches, even as Republicans laud the plans.

What did the commentators say?

The U.S. State Department has reportedly informed Congress that it is planning to close the embassy on the Caribbean island of Grenada; the consulates in Nagoya, Japan, and Medan, Indonesia; the diplomatic post in Winnipeg, Canada; and the embassy in Douala, Cameroon. The closures are “expected to save the government roughly $4.4 million per year,” but the affected buildings also “employ very few people compared with others,” said The Associated Press.

The buildings in Grenada and Nagoya “have only one American staffer and five local employees each,” said the AP, and the Medan consulate has only 47 local employees; the Douala embassy has only 14 and the Winnipeg post has just two. The closure effort is “part of a broader push by the Republican president to transform the U.S. bureaucracy so that it is fully aligned with his ‘America First’ agenda,” said Reuters. People seem split on the closures. Supporters have “portrayed cost-cutting measures as necessary to right-size ​an organization many conservatives see as bloated and overly bureaucratic.”

But Democrats “argue that cuts to the U.S. diplomatic footprint — coupled with the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, ‌which ⁠provided billions of dollars worth of aid globally — risks undermining American leadership,” said Reuters. While “on paper, the move is about efficiency,” in practice it “goes far beyond the fate of five buildings,” said Newsweek. The consular slashing “suggests the Trump administration sees America’s overseas presence as a dollar figure to be managed on a balance sheet, not as a strategic asset to be maintained.”

Some of the buildings planning for closure are far less consequential than full embassies; the diplomatic post in Winnipeg does “not provide full consular services, only emergency assistance to Americans in distress,” said the National Post. But the closures also mark a “rare reduction of America’s diplomatic footprint outside a specific geopolitical crisis,” said Newsweek, even though the shutterings themselves are “modest in isolation.”

What next?

The State Department hasn’t specifically confirmed or denied the closures but said its officials were “​focused on ensuring that the ⁠nation’s diplomatic footprint was efficient and effective,” the agency told Reuters in a statement. The department also said it was “committed to following congressional notification procedures.” No exact timeline for the shutterings has been announced.

The decision follows a recent pattern of closures. Earlier this year the Trump administration announced it would “permanently close the U.S. consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan, which was the closest diplomatic mission to Afghanistan,” said the AP. At the same time, the U.S. is also “investing millions of dollars into reopening the U.S. embassies in Caracas, Venezuela; Damascus, Syria; and Tripoli, Libya,” to “restore America’s formal diplomatic presence following the ouster of long-ruling autocrats in those countries.”

AI models going rogue and hacking the internet? That’s “the stuff of science fiction”, said The New York Times’ Katrin Bennhold. “Or at least it was until recently.”

The UK’s AI Security Institute announced on Tuesday that two AI agents it was evaluating – one powered by Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and the other by OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol – had taken “sustained, unsanctioned action directed at real people and organisations”. In the most serious incident, the Mythos 5 agent created “fake online identities”, tried to deceive a software engineer, and attempted “to insert malicious code into a open-source project”.

Only a few days ago, Open AI and Anthropic revealed similar testing mishaps, in what was a “big moment” for the world, Nate Soares, of the non-profit Machine Intelligence Research Institute, told The New York Times. “These AIs were committing cybercrimes a human would be strongly punished for”. It is, “in a sense”, artificial intelligence’s “first felony”.

What did the commentators say?

“The ‘robots could kill us all’ argument” has long been dismissed “as hysteria or even calculated hype”, said the NYT’s Bennhold. But fears that frontier AI models were “getting too good too effective at exploiting software vulnerabilities” have “now become reality”. There needs to be “intense debate about the dangers of AI spiralling out of human control and posing a threat to humanity”.

AI engineers “and even their vainglorious bosses, are getting freaked out by the capabilities they are handling and worry about unchecked proliferation”, said Rafael Behr in The Guardian. The obvious historical analogy is nuclear fission, which could have been “harnessed benignly” or “deployed aggressively in warheads”. But now “there are multiple Manhattan Projects all frantically competing for market share, fuelled by trillions of dollars of debt” and “with the rest of the US economy as collateral”.

Negotiating international agreement on a safe way forward for frontier AI is going to be tricky, said The Economist, when it is “increasingly clear” that the US and China will “restrict access to their models for economic and strategic reasons”.

Chinese officials are already worried “about the cyber-capabilities of Mythos” and “its potential to be used as an offensive weapon, said Bloomberg. And, for the US and its allies, there is deep concern that their geopolitical adversaries “and the criminals in their orbit, will soon wield the same offensive tools”, said Michael Sulmeyer, former US assistant secretary of defence for cyberpolicy, on Foreign Affairs. With China, in particular, “already racing to build and acquire these AI capabilities”, the US may only have “nine to 12 months to protect its critical infrastructure from AI-powered attacks”.

What next?

Any kind of “consistent approach” to global AI regulation has “failed to materialise”, said Sky News. The Trump administration is finalising a voluntary framework under which US AI labs would submit models for federal safety testing before public release. But this latest “alarming behaviour” is “likely to ignite fresh calls” from lawmakers and Silicon Valley for “more rigorous regulation”, said Politico’s John Sakellariadis.

The recent incidents also raise the question of who bears responsibility when AI systems break the law. If those hacking attempts had been “human-originated, they would lead to clear and vigorous prosecution”, ethical hacker and cybersecurity expert Marc Rogers told Politico. “It’s time for a serious discussion about updates to existing computer security law.” Until that happens, said Andrew McDonald on Politico London Playbook, “this kind of thing is going to become more common, and quickly”.

The Ukraine war has entered a “dangerous new phase”, said Sky News’ Moscow correspondent Ivor Bennett.

Overnight, 17 Ukrainians were killed in Russian strikes on Kyiv, and just days ago seven people were killed by a Ukrainian drone attack on a crowded Russian Black Sea beach.

“More and more civilians are being killed on both sides” as Russia and Ukraine seem to expand their scope beyond military targets. As the conflict intensifies on multiple fronts, neither side shows signs of withdrawing.

What did the commentators say?

Four years into the war, it seems Ukraine is evolving its approach against Russia, said world affairs editor Sam Kiley in The Independent. Kyiv’s recent drone attack on a Russian Black Sea beach, where seven civilians died, including three children, marked a “shift in the war”. Ukraine may not have a policy of attacking civilian targets, but as it “steps up its war inside the Russian Federation, there have been, and will be, more civilian deaths”. Despite a reshuffle of top commanders, and being “outgunned, outmanned and outsized by the invaders”, Ukraine remains on the front foot. As it presses home the advantage, and “strikes deeper at Moscow, these tragedies will multiply”.

Following successful campaigns against Russian oil refineries, Ukraine’s increasing attacks on Wildberries – Russia’s equivalent of Amazon – are also changing the mood within Russia, said world affairs editor Catherine Philp in The Times. “Far from merely inconveniencing shoppers”, this is an “audacious attempt to bring down Russia’s economy”. The company accounts for around 50% of online retail in Russia, and “barely two days have passed without another warehouse in flames” since mid-July. This campaign shows that the conflict has broken beyond the front lines, and is now regularly “bringing the war into the lives of ordinary Russians”.

Even as these strikes intensify, Vladimir Putin has shown “no sign of backing down”, said Russian expert Professor Stephen Crowley in The Nation. The core response from European leaders has been to engage in the “greatest military build-up since the 1930s”. But all this does is perpetuate a “spiral of action and reaction on both sides” that invites further escalation. Instead, they should “open lines of communication” and bring about “difficult but necessary” negotiations to end the war through temporary lifting of sanctions or thawing diplomatic relations. Some would argue this would be giving “Putin a way out of his war of choice”, but once it is over, he would be forced to “face the Russian people and attempt to justify his historic debacle”.

As Trump focuses on the war in Iran, a “propitious moment to be the peacemaker in the Russia-Ukraine war could be slipping away”, said Thomas E. Graham, former White House Russia expert, in The New York Times. The conflict has entered a “dangerous escalatory spiral”, and both Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy have been clear in their wishes for the US to re-engage in negotiations. “Only Washington has the combination of access, leverage and political weight to lead a comprehensive diplomatic effort.”

Given Russia’s animosity towards Europe, the US should send envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Kyiv and Moscow to “lay the groundwork for an intense period of shuttle diplomacy to bridge the yawning gaps between the two sides”. But time is of the essence. They must act imminently, “before escalation closes the diplomatic opening that exhaustion has begun to create”.

What next?

Europe must “seize the moment and demonstrate that they are capable of acting decisively on the international stage”, said Lesia Ogryzko in Atlantic Council. Ukraine’s recent progress provides a “rare window of opportunity to increase the pressure on Putin”. However, this window is “likely to prove temporary”.

The continent should prioritise Ukraine’s manpower constraints, as well as “improving military recruitment, retention and mobilisation”. European leaders should also grant Ukraine access to critical technologies including advanced electronics, cloud-computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence tools, and communications systems. The goal for many years has been “strategic autonomy and Europe’s emergence as a serious security actor”. “The coming months may provide the clearest test yet of whether those ambitions are realistic.”

“Andy Burnham vows no early general election before 2029” was Metro’s take-away headline after a recent interview between the PM and the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.

His aides have been “adamant, consistent and emphatic” that there will be no snap election, said The Spectator’s political editor Tim Shipman. But Burnham’s obvious hesitation when answering the question “was that of a man calculating the trade-off between survival now and long-term freedom of manoeuvre”.

What did the commentators say?

Burnham spent his first two weeks as PM in a “blitz of hyperactivity”, said The Guardian’s deputy political editor Jessica Elgot. “Bus fares, business rates, energy bill cuts, defence, Ukraine and devolution – he has been everywhere,” and brought a “renewed sense of optimism” among Labour MPs, buoyed by a series of polls that show the party leading Reform UK for the first time in more than a year.

For all his denials, a part of Burnham’s brain “will be furtively wondering whether it might become feasible to go to the country this autumn or early next year”, said Andrew Rawnsley, associate politics editor at The Observer. If “the bounce does get bouncier” then “the risk-reward ratio could begin to look more enticing”.

The Burnham bounce is “real”, Dylan Spielman, who led Labour’s data science team through the 2024 general election, told The Guardian, “but not yet big enough to put Labour back on course for a majority”.

More in Common’s voting intention tracker puts Labour on 28%, ahead of Reform UK on 24%, which, while a marked improvement from polling under Keir Starmer, would still likely mean a hung parliament if an election were held tomorrow.

The problem is that “so far the recovery has mainly come from reuniting the progressive bloc” who had drifted towards the Greens. while Labour is still “making much less progress winning back Reform voters and Conservatives who are pivotal in marginal seats”.

Labour candidate Bev Craig’s emphatic win in the Manchester mayoral election will have given Burnham “more food for thought”, said The Telegraph’s John Power. The PM’s coronation has, “for the moment, crushed his Left flank” while the Right is now “electorally split between the Conservatives and Reform”, with the latter struggling to move on from a series of political donation scandals.

The “strategic logic” behind calling an early election, “perhaps after a few more weeks of positive announcements, seems unassailable if the polls continue to trend up”. With no mandate and a reality-checking Budget due at the end of October, the PM’s “political strategy of promising everything to everyone has a natural timespan on it”. Labour sources are briefing that if the government consistently posts poll leads of 5% to 8%, Burnham will be advised to “go for it” and call a snap election.

What next?

In 2007, Gordon Brown failed to quash speculation of a snap election during his No. 10 honeymoon period – and never recovered when he backed out of holding one at the last minute, said Peter Franklin in UnHerd. The lesson for Burnham is that he “needs to reconcile two contradictory objectives: killing the anticipation that a snap election is imminent while leaving himself with the option of calling one”.

If Burnham does call an early election, “he’ll be like a gambler sticking all his winnings on one last spin of the roulette wheel”, said The Express’s Harvey Jones. “My guess is he’ll bank them instead”, but “if the first big crisis sends his poll ratings into freefall, he may wish he’d thrown caution to the wind while Lady Luck was still smiling”.

Russia’s war against Ukraine would seem to be an entirely separate conflict from the hostilities between the U.S. and Iran. But Ukraine last month attacked an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea, raising fears the two regional conflicts could merge and spiral into something bigger and more destabilizing to the world.

What did the commentators say?

The Caspian Sea attack “underscored the links between the wars,” said The New York Times. Russia has “launched swarms” of Iran-made drones at Ukraine, the outgrowth of a decades-long “close military relationship” between Moscow and Iran. (Ukraine said the Iranian ship was carrying a new supply of drones. Iran denied the accusation.) Ukraine, meanwhile, has “brought its hard-earned expertise” in drone warfare to the task of defending Gulf states from Iranian attacks after the U.S. launched its war.

The Ukraine-Iran conflicts are “beginning to overlap,” Gideon Rachman said at the Financial Times. The wars “now span two continents” in Europe and Asia and are “influencing conflicts in Africa.” Ukraine has “ample reasons” to want to hit Iranian shipments of drones that “killed a great many Ukrainians,” but leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy may also “see an opportunity to dramatically improve relations with the Trump administration” by assisting in the U.S. war. This is a fraught moment. The 20th century proved that “regional conflicts and great-power miscalculation can be a deadly combination.”

Zelenskyy appears to seek a “merging” of the two wars into a “single strategic theater,” Trita Parsi said at Responsible Statecraft. The Ukrainian leader has spent the war urging NATO to “move beyond supplying weapons and intelligence” and take a more direct role in defending his country. The Iran war now presents Ukraine with the opportunity to offer itself as a “strategic asset capable of helping Washington turn a military debacle into a splendid victory.” It is a “dangerous gambit” and it could “pave the way for a disaster.”

The Ukraine strike comes as the war in the Middle East appears to be expanding into a regional conflict that includes Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen and Iraq. It is a “glimpse of just how apocalyptic” the war could become, Spencer Ackerman said at Forever Wars. There is increasingly a risk of the conflict “spiraling” beyond its current limits. “There is no mechanism at present to stop its growth.”

What next?

Iran and Russia may want no part of a larger war. Tehran and Moscow seek a “pragmatic partnership without entangling themselves in each other's regional wars,” Barnard College’s Alexander Cooley said to Newsweek. Ukraine could continue to “strike ships it believes are helping Russia,” said USA Today, but would otherwise “gain little from a full-scale confrontation with Iran.” Ukraine’s top priority “remains Russia,” Chatham House’s Neil Quilliam told the outlet.

Rupert Lowe has offered an olive branch to Nigel Farage and claimed the pair could unite the “patriotic right” of British politics in an electoral pact that could threaten Andy Burnham.

“Politics being politics,” said Politico, Lowe, a former Reform MP until being suspended by the party in March 2025, spelt out “five conditions for cooperation”. They included “a referendum on the death penalty and the exclusion of former Tory ministers from any future cabinet”.

Farage responded by saying he wanted the support of people from other parties to defeat the left. He didn’t name Lowe and Restore but said Reform’s potential allies should share his commitment to restoring Britain’s borders. But he stood by his former Tory front-benchers, saying: “I will never turn my back on my team.”

What did the commentators say?

The Greater Manchester mayoral election, won comfortably by Labour’s Bev Craig, has shown the danger Restore could pose to Reform at a future general election. Reform took 21% of first-preference votes, while Restore had 8.7% (Craig won 47.1%). Lowe “appears to have come to a realisation: that Restore is just big enough to prevent Reform victories, but far too small to win itself”, said George Spencer on UnHerd.

The conditions laid out by Lowe show that he is not serious about this offer, said veteran Farage ally Gawain Towler on Substack. It “is a demand engineered to be refused” and the timing of Lowe’s “gesture” comes while Farage is “under scrutiny he could do without”. In speaking out while Farage is under investigation for his financial conduct, Lowe “has chosen the moment of maximum embarrassment to apply pressure and called it generosity”.

But one figure with connections in Reform circles told Politico it was a “tempting offer” for Farage that would stop him “bleeding any more support … but the animosity between the pair is a big barrier”, said Politico.

Surely Farage is a “savvy enough politician to spot that this is not so much a gift as a trap, from a man whom he personally detests”, said James Ball in The i Paper. “Even if he wanted to work with Lowe and went along with his list of demands, this would create new political problems for him”. Among Reform’s voters are “people who aren’t fully signed up to the idea of mass deportations and full-blown Islamophobia”. Rather they are “simply fed up of the status quo and the mainstream parties”.

But “it now appears neither can make the progress needed to nullify the left without the other”, said Giles Sheldrick in the Daily Express. “Many of those closest to the man who almost single-handedly delivered Brexit have said he is driven by ego and ambition.” While Farage denies this is the case, Lowe’s “offer in a bombshell social media post may well provide the definitive answer”.

What next?

It remains to be seen “whether the Burnham bounce in the polls and the dip in Farage’s fortunes mark a decisive shift in momentum in British politics or merely a blip”, said Politico. “What is clear is that the challenges facing Reform are substantial, and growing.”

The ball is clearly now in Farage’s court but the imminent by-election in Clacton and the Labour government’s resurgence mean he “is facing something of a perfect storm,” Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, told Politico. “But while he’s on the ropes he’s by no means on the floor, let alone out for the count.”

Europe is braced for more explosive debate over immigration and open borders after an estimated 49,000 migrants crossed into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco in 24 hours via land and sea.

Italy’s most senior politicians have called for Spain to be kicked out of Europe’s Schengen zone, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on X that she was “prepared to take action – including extraordinary measures – to defend our borders and ensure citizens’ safety”. Spain’s Interior Ministry blamed human trafficking networks for encouraging the latest crossings, saying criminal organisations had exploited a recent Supreme Court ruling to lure more migrants, particularly young people, into attempting the journey.

Spain’s Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that migrants intercepted at sea while attempting to reach Ceuta or Melilla cannot be summarily returned under the enclaves’ special border-rejection regime. “It has been a slow trickle since the Supreme Court’s ruling, but today has been an explosion,” a Guardia Civil spokesperson said on Reuters.

What did the commentators say?

The tiny Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla sit on the northern shores of Morocco’s Mediterranean coast. Together they form the European Union’s only land borders with Africa. “It’s not yet clear what prompted this surge in illegal crossings from Morocco, or how hard the authorities there tried to prevent it,” said the BBC. But at one point, a Spanish official said the border was in total collapse.

Just a week ago, Jessika Roswall, a centre-right European commissioner, “painted an idyllic image of the Schengen area, praising the ‘seamless journeys’ made possible by ‘decades of European cooperation’”, said Eddy Wax on Euractiv. But “that Brussels fantasy has now been smashed apart”. Italy has “always been quick to clamour for EU solidarity when faced with inflows of migrants at its own borders” but Meloni “has particular form” for exploiting the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s woes while “boosting his far-right adversaries”.

She “challenged him at the last EU leaders’ summit over his move to regularise hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants” and last night, Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, “alleged the policy itself was a pull factor”. That drew “a stern rebuke” from Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, said Joe Stanley-Smith on Politico but the policy “has proven hugely contentious, both domestically and at a European level”.

“A young person leaving, sometimes with their parents’ consent, is a guarantee that they will send money back to their family,” sociologist Ali Zoubeidi said in Le Monde. “The Spanish government’s announcement [in April] of the regularisation of 500,000 undocumented migrants may also have encouraged young people to try to reach Ceuta.”

The situation “may also have been exacerbated by an event that suggests Rabat could have deliberately loosened controls at Ceuta’s border”, said Le Monde. Sánchez’s recent visit to Morocco’s regional rival Algeria, reportedly upset those in Rabat. For Abdullah Abaakil, deputy secretary of the Moroccan Unified Socialist Party, there is no doubt it played a role: “The Moroccan authorities clearly let them through,” he said. “There is a suspicious trend of using migration and the despair of young people to embarrass the Spanish government and to send a message when they are dissatisfied.”

What next?

Spain and Morocco have agreed to return all migrants to Morocco and Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said the two countries would intensify joint efforts to combat irregular migration, describing cooperation with Morocco as “exemplary”.

Though Italy has called for closing the open-border Schengen agreement with Spain, the countries “do not share a land border, so Italy would likely need to get other European countries on board to be able to enforce this”, said the BBC.

But the crisis has intensified calls for further action on immigration from the bloc. Manfred Weber, president of the European Parliament’s largest political grouping – the centre-right European People’s Party – called for tougher action. “This proves one thing: the Migration Pact and return regulation must be enforced today, not tomorrow,” he said on X.

What is the best pub snack?

As Andy Burnham and John Healey took up their positions in No. 10 and No. 11 last week, they took a break from running the country to discuss the biggest question potentially facing Brits today. They did so in a video released to promote their announcement of a 20% cut in pub business rates, which racked up two million views across Instagram and TikTok.

The change in government has seen a new media strategy that is already winning much praise. “Labour’s comms has been in another league this week compared to what went before,” said The News Agents’ Lewis Goodall on X in response to the pub snacks video.

“That is certainly true,” said Gareth Roberts in The Spectator, but it’s “a bit like saying that a packet of Scampi Fries is, as a pub snack, in another league from a handful of gravel.”

What did the commentators say?

In 2026, “TikTok and Instagram are the most important stages that any politician who cares about reaching Gen Z, who don’t read newspapers or listen to the radio, must master”, said Issy Clarke on LBC.

Many of Burnham’s critics “will be precisely those who decry the lack of political engagement among Gen Z”, all the while “forgetting that the best remedy is to meet young people where they are”. Burnham “is the first British PM who has managed to do it”.

When it comes to his social media output, it has an “authenticity” to it, Bruce Daisley, the former boss of Twitter in the UK and Europe, told The Times. “And he is getting the cut through as a result.” Burnham is a politician who gets it and uses “a template of frequent, human communications”. In a way “it’s almost over-communication, but that way the message gets across”.

After years of gloom, “the chirpy bonhomie can’t help but appeal”, said Roberts in The Spectator. “Here is somebody saying that Britain isn’t broken, isn’t collapsing, and look, here’s a few little extra pennies for you.” It is the reason the polls are shifting effectively because “it’s so nice to see somebody with a smile on their face, even a gormless smile that defies reality”.

Yet the new PM’s “apparent openness to people he meets on the street has not, so far, been extended to lobby journalists”, said Keir Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin in The Guardian. “Aides insist there is no deliberate effort to avoid scrutiny and can point to how he spoke at length to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg”, but in hoodwinking the lobby over the appointment of Healey as chancellor “there appears to be more than a little satisfaction about the lobby’s humiliation within the prime minister’s wider circle”. It is a dangerous tactic “from a new administration that will need to be trusted by the more responsible end of the Westminster media when, inevitably, the going gets rough”.

What next?

Burnham’s social media output is a “good way to signal to a large audience that the Labour government has changed”, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. But “while it allows the prime minister of the day to evade direct scrutiny and difficult debates, it also makes it harder for them to put their opponents under the microscope”.

It also means “neither Burnham nor his opponents are guaranteed a proper comeback when a rival is speaking”. Effectively, we are heading towards “a highly polarised country where political advertising is almost inescapable and neither side can be guaranteed the pain of scrutiny or the consolation of a rebuttal”.

After a World Cup dominated by hydration “ad” breaks, political interference and match-rigging conspiracies, football’s biggest prize really is, “it seems, for sale”, said Alyson Rudd in The Times.

Under plans drawn up by Fifa President Gianni Infantino, football’s world governing body would retain majority control of the tournaments it runs, including the men’s and women’s World Cup and Club World Cup, under a new company, the Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE).

But a minority stake would be offered to each of Fifa’s 211 member associations and, controversially, to private investors. Infantino would be installed as “commissioner” when his term as Fifa president ends in 2031, a role that “could potentially earn him tens of millions of pounds”, sources have told The Times, which broke the story.

“This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” European football’s governing body Uefa said in a statement. “The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade – especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially.”

What did the commentators say?

For once, public outrage at the proposals is entirely justified and understandable “because it ties together so many of the extremes that have been pushing, pulling and twisting football, let alone the world, for so long”, said Miguel Delaney in The Independent.

To muddy the waters further, the Financial Times has reported that Joshua Kushner, the brother of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, is being lined up to lead the $20 billion commercial part of the deal through his Thrive Eternal investment fund.

Infantino “understands political and commercial power”, said the FT. And “in the latest battle for football’s soul and spoils”, the 56-year-old Swiss “has a key ally in Trump and, many suspect, the support of Fifa members around the world”.

Purists may decry the commercialisation of the beautiful game, but this has been happening for decades. Football’s “owners and exploiters have long seen the matches themselves as mere 90-minute sections of legacy content”, said Marina Hyde in The Guardian. These “would be far better relegated to the second, third or even fourth tier behind such always-on output as branded content, shareable clips, behind-the-scenes footage, lifestyle and commerce”.

Others will say that what Fifa is proposing is “no different to the commercial entities that the likes of the French and Spanish leagues have created and sold stakes in to private-equity funds”, said Matt Slater on The Athletic. The German and Italian leagues have debated “the same move for several years” too, and the strategy has been tried in other sports such as Formula 1 and golf’s PGA Tour.

What next?

Fifa insists the plans are still in the consultation phase, but “if this escapade succeeds, the trickle-down effect would be unpalatable”, said Rudd in The Times. It would, for example, “reinvigorate those who wanted a breakaway European Super League so feared by the fans and then so valiantly protested against”.

Selling off a slice of the World Cup “should be the cue for outright rebellion”, said Oliver Brown in The Telegraph. Given European teams made up six of the eight men’s World Cup quarter-finalists this year and three of the four semi-finalists, Uefa “should have the courage of its convictions and issue a warning to secede”.

That “will almost certainly never happen”, though. “These scandals follow a time-honoured pattern: politicians fulminate, a few federations speak out, and then Infantino ploughs ahead regardless.”

US Senator Lindsey Graham “relished his role as an informal envoy” between Donald Trump and foreign leaders, said The Economist. So it’s fitting that the Republican’s funeral today “will provide one final round of diplomacy”.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Benjamin Netanyahu will both attend the service for Graham, a “defence hawk” who “forcibly lobbied Washington” to back Ukraine against Russia, and Israel against Iran, said Reuters. Tonight, the Senate prepares to vote on a bipartisan package imposing sanctions on both countries that Graham “spent his final days trying to push across the line”.

Both leaders are also scheduled to meet the US president “with the goal of winning the ear of Donald Trump” at a time when US policy towards both wars is “in a state of flux”, said Robert Tait in The Guardian.

What did the commentators say?

Netanyahu will probably pressure Trump to further “escalate” the war in Iran, while Zelenksyy will “look to shore up American support” after the loss of Graham, “one of Ukraine’s staunchest backers”, said The Economist.

The two wars, taking place 1,550 miles apart, have “converged in recent days”, said Chris Hamill-Stewart on Al Jazeera. On Saturday, Ukraine attacked an Iranian tanker said to be carrying military technology and drones from Iran to Russia. Kyiv’s actions “will please” America, former US ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia, William Courtney, told the news site. But Zelenskyy is “unlikely to want to be too closely associated with the ‘unpopular’ US war on Iran”.

There are signs of “a dramatic change” in the US posture on Ukraine, said The Guardian’s Tait. Washington seems “more supportive” of Kyiv than at any other time in Trump’s second presidency. Last week, right-wing influencer Laura Loomer gave the latest “signal of a sea change” when she met Zelenskyy in Kyiv, before “recanting her previous support for Russia”. Trump and Zelenskyy’s “cordial” meeting at the Nato summit in Ankara was also “starkly” different to “last year’s bitter confrontation in the White House”.

By contrast, Trump’s relationship with the Israeli prime minister has grown “visibly strained” since they last met in February, said Tal Shalev on CNN. “Close cooperation and effusive praise” at the start of the Iran war has “given way to Trump’s expletive-laden outbursts”. Trump has said he lashed out at Netanyahu, calling him “crazy”, for continuing to bombard Hezbollah in Lebanon and endangering peace talks with Iran. He has been “resistant” to this meeting, having “little interest in resuming a full fight” against Iran before the US midterms in November, according to one Israeli source.

What next?

Ukraine and the US are moving closer towards a deal on joint drone production, which “could help the US catch up with Ukraine in this crucial military technology”, said Al Jazeera. And Trump and Zelenskyy agreed this month to allow Ukraine to jointly produce Patriot air defence interceptors, “a crucial component for the country’s defence against Russian aerial attacks”.

For Netanyahu, there’s the sticking point of Lebanon: he told his security cabinet on Sunday that the Trump administration “wants to pull Israeli forces back from positions in Lebanon, as well as in Gaza and Syria”. But, as Israel has already refused to withdraw its forces completely before Hezbollah disarms, Netanyahu “intends to oppose the idea”, said CNN’s Shalev. The Israeli PM is under political pressure ahead of elections in October: in recent polls, “he falls far short of the majority he needs to secure another term”. He knows Trump’s support “could be critical”. The stakes “are as high as ever”.

“Overlooked and underfunded” adult social care has become “the Cinderella service of our wider welfare system”, said Labour List. Now Andy Burnham, whose father has Alzheimer’s and lives in a care home, has told the BBC that he will put “whatever political capital I have” into fixing it.

He is not the first prime minister to vow to tackle the issue. But “successive governments have come undone when faced with the tricky reality” of adequately funding state support to help older people live safely and independently, said The Times.

What did the commentators say?

There have been 22 botched attempts to the reform the English adult social care system in the past 30 years. And those successive failures carry “a heavy political cost”, said Chris Smyth in the Financial Times: long-term underfunding has made pay and conditions in the sector so unattractive to British workers that “visa rules were loosened after Brexit” and care workers arriving from abroad became “the single biggest reason why net immigration to the UK rose to all-time high”.

Now, as Britain’s “demographic centre of gravity” tilts towards retirement, social care is reaching its “most painful financial pinch point” yet, said The Telegraph's editorial board. In 50 years, more than 25% of the population could be over the age of 65, according to the Office for National Statistics. The “best solution” for funding social care on that scale would be an “insurance-based system, where Britons would be encouraged to pay into a fund that would cover their own care in old age, should they need it”.

But Burnham has said social care should be delivered “on an NHS basis”. This implies “a public service free at the point of delivery and funded by some form of taxation”, said The Guardian’s editorial board. When Burnham was health secretary in 2010, he proposed a “national care service” to be funded by a deferred levy on dead people’s estates. Other options could include “a new form of social insurance” or “a combination of private and state payments”.

A more “ambitious” solution would be take responsibility for funding social care away from local councils, whose “revenues don’t map neatly on to local care needs”, and simultaneously reform council tax as a central tax that better reflects current property values and generates revenue for a national social care service, said Ben Zaranko in The Observer. That would “create losers, be complicated and take time but the course of true radical social care reform never did run smooth”.

What next?

Burnham is scheduled to deliver a speech on adult social care on Wednesday. In it, he will “stop short of unveiling” any concrete plans, said the BBC, instead announcing that he is speeding up Louise Casey’s independent review of possible solutions for the system.

Yet “the veteran Whitehall troubleshooter on whom Burnham is relying to come up with answers” has already warned there is no quick fix, said the FT’s Smyth. Earlier this month, she said “we cannot keep pretending that a few tweaks will fix adult social care, or attempt major reform without the public’s backing”.

Iranian strikes on CIA facilities have led US intelligence officials to believe that unprecedented intelligence cooperation is taking place between Russia and Tehran, with China cooperating closely with Moscow too.

The US is investigating how Iran was able to accurately target covert CIA facilities in Saudi Arabia and other allied countries in March. Reuters cited former CIA officials who said that relatively few countries possess both the intelligence capabilities and strategic motivation to provide Tehran with such highly sensitive data.

If confirmed, “the successful targeting of covert CIA facilities would represent one of the most significant intelligence security breaches affecting US overseas operations in recent decades”, said Military Watch Magazine.

What did the commentators say?

It appears likely that Iran had help from Russia as the attacks “were far more advanced than what they’ve done before”, Nicole Grajewski, from the Center for International Research at Sciences Po university in Paris, told Al Jazeera. Russia “has also allegedly helped Tehran improve the accuracy” of its attack drones by supplying a Russian-designed anti-jamming navigation system, said Al Jazeera.

A secret document seen by The Economist and estimated by the newspaper to have been from the first six weeks of the war showed Russia also offered to provide Iran with “unjammable drones and training on how to use them against American troops in the Gulf”. Christo Grozev, an expert on Russia’s intelligence services, said the proposal was consistent with other evidence that Russia is looking for ways of increasing support for Iran.

For Russia, the benefits of a continued conflict in the Middle East are obvious. More countries are looking to buy Russian oil while the Strait of Hormuz continues to be unstable, said RadioFreeEurope. The Philippines, for example, “has sought to increase Russian crude access and expanded discussions over long-term energy cooperation”. Where Moscow could benefit economically, “China may see diplomatic gains amid the same situation”.

Moscow and Beijing “have coordinated closely throughout the crisis”, said Jasim Al-Azzawi on Middle East Monitor, jointly convening UN sessions and “declining to abandon Tehran diplomatically even as they withheld direct military support”. There is “a seductive myth that China and Iran are allies bound by blood and ideology, that Beijing would ride to Tehran’s rescue the way Nato would for a member under Article 5”. But “nothing could be further from the truth. What binds Beijing and Tehran is colder, more durable, and in some ways more dangerous than sentiment: mutual utility.”

The Iran war has been good for Beijing because it has “accelerated three of China’s long-held goals: a Middle East less dependent on America, a world more dependent on critical Chinese technology and a reputation for Beijing as a serious and steady world power”, said Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post. Accordingly, China “provides technological and military support to Iran”, said Nadia Helmy on Modern Diplomacy. Chinese companies are “supplying vital components and technologies used in Iran’s missile and defence programmes, making Tehran a regional power that is difficult to deter without significant cost”.

What next?

The US is “surging forces, medics and weaponry to the Middle East to give President Trump more muscular military options as he considers expanding the conflict”, said The Wall Street Journal.

But any escalation will be complicated by the continued support of China and Russia for Iran and the changing of the geopolitical pecking order that this war is beginning to cause. “The Iran conflict has shown that governments increasingly judge the major powers by whether they can help manage energy costs, shipping risk and inflation,” Ilango Karuppannan, a veteran Malaysian diplomat, told RadioFreeEurope.

“This creates a risk for Washington. The US may remain militarily important while becoming less economically relevant.”

In politics, first impressions can mean a great deal and Donald Trump has heaped praise on Andy Burnham for his plans to fast-track oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.

Writing on his Truth Social platform, the president said “the People of Aberdeen” are “dancing in the streets” because Burnham said “he will be opening up, all the way, the invaluable North Sea Oil!” As ever with Trump, this was playing fast and loose with the truth, as Burnham is yet to commit to any new drilling in the North Sea.

But after Trump gave Burnham an initial thumbs-up, “talk in DC turned to Ed Miliband’s role as the most contentious figure”, said The Times’ Katy Balls. Miliband has been an outspoken critic of Trump in the past, which is “likely to put him on the back foot with an increasingly hostile US administration”, said Bloomberg.

What did the commentators say?

There’s an “opening” for a new prime minister who is “liberal, centre-left, internationalist” and who “recognises the world has changed”, said Steve Bloomfield on The New Statesman.

Burnham must “find a way to deal” with the “fracturing” of the special relationship, and having “seen how others have fared”, with Trump, he “should find it easier”.

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani calls Trump a “fascist” but still works with him on “areas where they agree”, while Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese “took the risk of standing up to Trump” and “subsequently won elections they were predicted to lose”. So “standing up to Trump is not only morally right”, it’s “electorally effective”.

Economic, intelligence and defence ties “run deep”, so many believe it’s “better to stay on the right side of Trump – however tempting it might sometimes be to give him a (metaphorical) kick”, but you don’t want to be a “total toady”, said Anushka Asthana on Channel 4 News.

On energy, Burnham “seems prepared to move the rhetoric” with the suggestion he will green-light two oil and gas drilling projects in the North Sea. He’s promised “help on the Strait of Hormuz” but what if Trump breaches international humanitarian law? Diplomats and advisers know “full well” that the unpredictable president could “change his mind, at any moment”.

Keir Starmer’s relationship with Trump “turned from warm to cold”, said Andrew Buncombe on The i Paper. Burnham will “run into the same problems” on “issues that have created friction”, including Britain’s decision to cede control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, its refusal to get involved in the war against Iran, and “how far to proceed with drilling for oil in the North Sea”.

The PM “only has a limited way to try and influence how Washington acts” and he should remember that his first call with Trump was “just that – the first talk”. If the “rest are positive”, then Burnham “will turn out to be a very lucky man”.

What next?

Starmer was a former prosecutor seen as a “cool-headed technocrat, unruffled by the insults as long as he was making his case”, said Steve Hendrix in The Washington Post. But Burnham has “honed a warmer, plain-spoken touch” which “could be an asset” with a president who “responds to personal chemistry in ways he doesn’t respond to formal diplomacy”.

The new PM has “made clear that his instincts, and his mandate, are relentlessly domestic”, so the new No. 10 will “have its eyes fixed inward”, not “across the Atlantic”. Trump and the rest of the “foreign policy inbox” is “expected to be substantially subcontracted” to the foreign secretary.

The end of the 2026 FIFA World Cup marks a major inflection point for soccer in the United States. While the U.S.’ co-hosting duties, along with round-the-clock media coverage of the American team, helped soccer’s status explode over the last month, the sport has never maintained long-term popularity in the country on the same level as, say, the NFL. Some believe that may all be changing.

What did the commentators say?

The arrival of the tournament always brings up the “quadrennial question: Can this be the World Cup that finally converts U.S. sports fans to soccer fanatics?” said Forbes. In 2026, the “answer might be yes, or at least closer than ever.” Many Americans have shied away from soccer because what they “find electrifying is the possibility and manifestation of drastic change” and large comebacks, like those often seen in football and baseball. Soccer’s “low-scoring structure makes such reversals rare.”

But many are hopeful that the 2026 World Cup marked the beginning of a turnaround. The “macro picture,” former U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati told The Athletic, has “always been about: What does it look like the day after” the tournament ends? A similar enthusiasm happened when the U.S. hosted the 1994 World Cup, but a “key difference between 1994 and now wasn’t just that American players then couldn’t fathom playing professional soccer, but that there was no real route to do so — at least domestically.”

Three decades later, though, the United States has created “not just the soccer-specific stadiums and training grounds but also the academies and pathways that led to a generation of players,” said The Athletic. Despite the U.S.’ loss to Belgium, the “next Christian Pulisic or Leo Messi somewhere along the way might have attended a game and perhaps is going to be sitting in the stands in the World Cup final and will see the greatest players in the world, and say, ‘Wow, I want that to be me,’” Don Garber, the commissioner of Major League Soccer (MLS), told The Athletic.

Others believe that MLS, the nation’s top professional soccer league, helped ingrain soccer into the United States even before this year’s World Cup. MLS is an “established, stable American sports league” whose “franchises keep increasing in value,” said The Tennessean. There is also the U.S. Women’s National Team, a dominant force that has “won four World Cups since 1991.” And while there has been “public discourse on a flawed youth soccer system in this country,” soccer enthusiasts are hopeful it will “lead to necessary improvements at the ground level” and that “American soccer will grow from this.”

What next?

There is also some data supporting the idea that soccer’s popularity may be here to stay. More than half of Americans, 57%, think the World Cup will “increase America’s general interest in soccer,” according to an Ipsos survey of 1,027 adults. Many of those polled also said their overall excitement about the game had grown, with enthusiasm about the World Cup rising from 25% in May to 38% in July.

The excitement about soccer is particularly strong among Gen Zers, as the sport is “already disproportionately popular among this demographic,” said YouGov. Gen Z adults “make up nearly a fifth of all soccer followers compared to just a tenth of the overall U.S. population (18% vs 10%).” Much of the data shows that the World Cup was a primer to “make America a soccer nation,” said Forbes.

The upheaval and unrest at the top of the Ukrainian government has worried its citizens and given succour to Russia at a crucial time in the war.

In his dismissal of popular defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov, Volodymyr Zelenskyy sparked anger and protests across Ukraine, turning what was an internal management issue into the “biggest military leadership crisis” of his presidency, said the Financial Times’ Christopher Miller.

Now Zelenskyy has been left with no choice but to acquiesce to protesters by firing controversial general and close ally Oleksandr Syrskyi and replacing him with Mykhailo Drapatyi, a 43-year-old Fedorov acolyte. But the whole affair has “exposed divisions over Ukraine’s military strategy” and the “willingness of the armed forces to address its shortcomings just as momentum in the war against Russia has swung in its favour”.

What did the commentators say?

Ukraine’s survival against a vastly more powerful Russia “has always rested on an uneasy alliance between a corrupt state, steeped in Soviet-era reflexes, and a more innovative, Westward-looking population, much of it too young to have been shaped by the former USSR”, said Bloomberg’s Marc Champion. The conflict between Fedorov and Syrskyi aptly highlighted that very tension.

Fedorov was appointed defence minister only in January having previously made a name for himself leading Ukraine’s digital transformation department. The 35-year-old won new admirers for adopting an innovative, data-led approach to military procurement and the expansion of battlefield drone technology.

Yet his at-times unorthodox methods put him increasingly into conflict with many of the military old guard, including the 60-year-old Syrskyi who is known among some troops as “the butcher” for his reported indifference to losses of soldiers.

Fedorov’s ousting, just six months into his tenure, “comes at a critical time”, said Radio Free Europe. More than four years on from the full invasion, Ukraine’s forces have battled Russian troops to a “near standstill – in large part due to the wide embrace of drone warfare and lightning innovations in drone technology” that have also been used to target supply lines and hit oil refineries deep inside of Russia. This has “buoyed many Ukrainians’ confidence that the Kremlin will be forced to negotiate a ceasefire”.

Now the “extraordinary rupture at the heart of Ukraine’s top war-fighting team” is one that “can only benefit Russia”, said Sky News security and defence editor Deborah Haynes.

“Perhaps more worryingly for the president and military chief” is the “disquiet within the ranks” that it has prompted, said Haynes. Senior serving officers have spoken out in defence of Fedorov, while some have even resigned in protest. This includes the deputy head of the Ukrainian air force, Colonel Pavlo Yelizarov, who called the decision a “great evil for the country’s defence capabilities”.

What next?

Zelenskyy has offered Fedorov a return to a “prominent position in government”. But it is not clear whether this offer will be accepted, with reports that Fedorov would only return to his previous role as defence minister.

The whole affair has exposed a deeper “troubling flaw in the president’s leadership”, said The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont.

It has prompted “inevitable suggestions that Zelenskyy and his circle – not for the first time – had sidelined someone seen as popular and a potential future political rival”.

The initial decision, an editorial in the Kyiv Independent said, “bears all the hallmarks of Zelenskyy’s tendency to dismiss top officials and commanders who get too popular, ahead of hypothetical elections that will never happen if Russia overwhelms Ukraine”.

But the fact that Zelenskyy has made a volte-face “rather than try to crush dissent is a source of hope for Ukraine”, said Champion in Bloomberg. “Ultimately, the two Ukraines that Syrskyi and Fedorov represent must cooperate if they are to stay one step ahead of Moscow.”

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi militia has announced it is closing the Bab al-Mandab Strait to Saudi ships, in a “maritime embargo” that could further disrupt global energy supplies. The strait, a strategic gateway linking the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden, is one of the world’s most important oil transit routes. And, in recent days, Iran has reportedly been calling on the Houthis to block the strait to all oil tanker traffic passing through it.

Closing off the Bab al-Mandab “chokepoint” on the sea path many oil tankers are now taking to avoid the Strait of Hormuz could seriously “squeeze the global economy” and “add another layer of complexity” to the Middle East conflict, said The Wall Street Journal.

What did the commentators say?

The Bab al-Mandab Strait is “one of the region’s most sensitive sources of leverage”, making the Houthis Iran’s “best placed” allies “to open another pressure front”, said Ahmed al-Shalafi on Al Jazeera.

Around 10% to 12% of annual global maritime trade passes through the strait. With both it and the Strait of Hormuz closed, cargo ships would have to “take a weeks-long detour” around Africa, said Akhtar Makoii in The Telegraph. The Houthis have already shown they are capable of shutting down the waterway: “during the Gaza war, they fired on commercial vessels in the Red Sea for months, driving much of the world’s shipping away from the route”.

Closing the strait again serves “Tehran’s ends” but the Houthis are “partners, not puppets” of Iran, and this move lets them “press their own regional ambitions” and, particularly, “punish Saudi Arabia, their long-time enemy”. Last week, Saudi Arabia “effectively opened a new front in the war” by bombing Sana’a airport in the Yemeni capital to prevent the landing of an Iranian plane carrying a Houthi delegation back from Tehran.

The growing hostilities are “breaking down” the informal 2022 Saudi-Houthi truce that “ended virtually all cross-border attacks” between the two countries, said Stephen Kalin in The Wall Street Journal. The Houthis “see an opportunity to gain an advantage” on the Saudis and feel “strategically emboldened by a perception that Iran has outmanoeuvred the US”.

What next?

Saudi Arabia does not seem “eager to return quickly to a broad war” with the Houthis, said al-Shalafi on Al Jazeera. And closing the Bab al-Mandab Strait completely would require “military, logistical and maritime control capabilities” that the Houthis no longer possess, Ibrahim Al-Malek, a Durham University specialist in Middle Eastern strategic governance, told US-funded Arabic news service Alhurra.

“Whether the Houthis move from threats to direct action remains the critical issue,” Yemeni analyst Mohammed Albasha told Reuters. But “even if no ships are attacked, ​the announcement alone is likely to disrupt shipping and create ​uncertainty”.

The U.S. has long led the world in scientific research — a feat that has undergirded the country’s economic and political might. Now researchers are pushing back against a proposed Trump administration rule. Scientists say it would upend the federal funding that drives U.S. science by shifting grantmaking decisions away from independent experts and into the hands of the president’s political allies.

What did the commentators say?

The proposed rule would give President Donald Trump’s appointees “power over hundreds of billions of dollars” in federal grant funding while “diminishing the traditional role of scientific peer reviewers,” said The Washington Post. Projects would be evaluated to ensure they “advance the president’s priorities” while rejecting projects and institutions that promote DEI, affirm transgender identities or support “anti-American” ideas. The new grantmakers would thus have wider latitude to defund “anything Trump doesn’t like,” said Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker. The White House argues the change would “bring much-needed accountability to the grantmaking process,” an administration spokesperson said to the Post.

Shifting responsibility for scientific funding to political operatives would amount to “cancel culture for cancer research,” said Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) at The Hill. The proposed rule would allow the White House to reject or cut funds mid-project if an institution “uses the word ‘diversity’ in their mission statement” or if a researcher publicly opposed the Trump administration’s vaccine policies. It would be a system of “arbitrary political control” that is “ripe for abuse.” The Trump administration could deny a grant for “any reason — or no reason at all.”

The change should be welcomed by Americans who “believe in democracy and democratic accountability,” said Michael S. Kochin at The American Mind. Political appointees who would oversee grantmaking going forward are “accountable to the president and to Congress,” and projects should not advance if their “political masters” do not “believe them to serve the national interest.” The current peer review system, meanwhile, ends up “enforcing consensus rather than discovering truth” by rewarding scientists who play it safe. Federal grants should be directed at research that will “actually make us healthier, richer and freer.”

Peer-reviewed grantmaking is not perfect, but the Trump administration’s proposed solution is “far worse than the disease,” MIT’s Carlo Ratti said at the Financial Times. Researchers are “not immune to herd behavior” and can struggle to challenge their own assumptions. But “ideological pressures” are the wrong way to correct those problems, incentivizing scientists to abandon proposals that “could be cancelled when the political weather turns.”

Opponents say the Trump administration rule will blunt U.S. science supremacy. American researchers are “not going to be able to cure disease, and you’re not going to be able to grow the economy,” Sudip Parikh, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said to STAT. U.S. science is already struggling. The administration “suspended and canceled nearly 8,000 scientific grants” in 2025, said The Atlantic.

What next?

Science and education groups are lobbying lawmakers on Capitol Hill to oppose the rule, staging protests and organizing letter-writing campaigns. Some 300 leading scientific organizations sent a letter to the administration requesting more time to review the proposed regulation, said the Post. Dozens of Democratic members of Congress, along with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), have condemned the proposal. But the public comment period closed last week, and the administration plans to finalize the sweeping rule by Oct. 1.

Andy Burnham entered No. 10 today, promising to address the cost of living crisis and put “the right values and the right standards at the heart of government”.

His supporters will be hoping the former mayor of Manchester will be able to revive not just the country but the fortunes of the Labour party. But the rival parties are already looking to spoil Burnham’s political honeymoon.

What did the commentators say?

The most obvious loser in Labour’s shift to the left under Andy Burnham is likely to be the Greens, said Kate Devlin in The Independent Polling experts are predicting a “significant blow” to the party’s “recent surge in support”. Burnham has already “shifted Labour’s stance on a number of issues likely to appeal to new Green voters”, notably including an apology for his party’s initial response to Israel‘s miliary action in Gaza.

“After months of benefiting from voter disillusionment with Keir Starmer’s government,“ Green Party leaders are “now grappling with a new political landscape”, said Zoe Crowther on Politics Home. It’s thought they’re planning “to use Burnham’s first weeks in office to draw political dividing lines” and “challenge him over issues including rent controls, wealth taxation, public ownership and arms exports to Israel”.

They also plan to target Shabana Mahmood, according to an internal Green Party memo seen by The New Statesman. They see her as “an absolute gift to us”. Should she become chancellor, they will accuse her of “fiscal constraint and economic orthodoxy” but, even if she doesn’t, they will mount attacks on her controversial immigration reforms.

This, of course, risks playing into Burnham’s hands when it comes to the fight against Reform in large parts of northern England. As do Nigel Farage’s many months of taking aim at Labour’s “snobby north London approach to politics”, said The Telegraph’s James Frayne. The new Labour leader is an “authentic” Northerner, with a “strong track record and an interested local electorate willing him to succeed”. Burnham “not only makes Reform’s chosen approach more difficult; he potentially turns all this on its head”.

Labour’s new appeal to both Green and Reform voters presents a “rare opportunity” for the Conservatives to occupy the centre, said Kate Maltby in The Observer. But Kemi Badenoch’s insistence that all prospective Tory parliamentary candidates back British withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights and the scrapping of net zero targets is a strong signal that “she has absolutely no intention of doing so”.

“Intriguingly,” said George Parker in the Financial Times, the Liberal Democrats “also seem determined to attack Burnham from the right” in the hope of winning over “moderate One Nation Tory voters”.

What next?

There must be a general election by summer 2029 at the latest, so the “clock is already ticking” as Burnham takes on the “mammoth task in trying to convert his message of hope into government policy”, said Dan Bloom on Politico. But he has already made it clear he will run a more campaign-oriented No. 10 than Keir Starmer did, kicking off with a summer “listening tour” around the country.

If he succeeds and manages to build Labour a consistent lead in the polls, Burnham could choose to go to the country early. “This summer, mental,” one Labour MP told Bloom. “Next year, definitely possible.”

The Trump administration has been on a crusade against clean energy, and the costs are adding up. The White House has spent billions to steer energy companies away from wind power while simultaneously increasing coal subsidies. U.S. taxpayers, meanwhile, are dealing with ever-rising electricity bills and gas prices. Critics say something has to give.

What did the commentators say?

Trump is “forcing higher bills” on American energy consumers, former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said to The Guardian. The administration has “directly spent $2.7 billion of taxpayer money,” the outlet said, paying energy companies to “cancel a total of eight offshore wind projects” while at the same time “pouring $1.125 billion into boosting coal” by retrofitting and expanding capacity at older coal-powered power plants.

Those and other White House changes to energy policies “could lead to households paying an average of $460 extra per year for energy costs” by 2035, said Newsweek, citing a new report from think tank Energy Innovation. Administration officials dispute that estimate. Trump has “rolled back burdensome regulations and bolstered U.S. energy production to lower prices for American families,” a spokesperson said to Newsweek.

The president in 2024 “promised to cut electric bills in half,” said CNN. The Energy Innovation report shows that he is “doing the opposite.” Electricity bills have “spiked nationwide by 7.4% since last fall,” and more than a dozen states are experiencing “double-digit increases year-over-year.” The attempt to back a resurgence of coal will also prove costly. Coal power is “more expensive than natural gas and renewables,” which will result in “higher power bills for consumers.”

“The strangest part of Trump’s wind buyouts is the way it ignores the law of supply and demand,” Paul Wesslund said at the Louisville Courier Journal. It is “bad economics” as well as “bad politics” to respond to the nation’s growing energy needs by cutting supply and raising prices during an affordability crisis. Wind and solar farms “don’t need constant refueling” but do have “shorter construction times” that make it easier to bring new projects online “as fast as possible.” Trump’s logic in killing off such projects is “just a lot of hot air.”

What next?

More than 200 clean energy projects have been canceled since the start of 2025, said Fast Company. The thwarted production has cost roughly “half a million jobs” and tens of billions in lost growth and tax revenues. But the clean energy economy has not “come to a stop.” More than 90% of new power plants in 2025 were solar, wind or battery plants, and the number is expected to grow this year. Because of Trump’s crackdown, however, the “pace is much slower than it otherwise would have been.”

Green power sources will “continue to grow,” E2’s Michael Timberlake said to Fast Company. But White House energy policies will cause the U.S. to “miss out on a lot of investments and a lot of manufacturing opportunities.”

Donald Trump used a prime-time address to the nation to allege Chinese interference in US elections in a move that looks to undermine voter confidence ahead of November’s midterms.

The White House released documents alleging that “over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle” the Chinese government carried out “what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files”. Trump did not make clear, though, how the alleged Chinese activity could have helped Joe Biden win the 2020 presidential election.

“Raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that China's activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden,” Trump said.

While China has denied the allegations, “none of the declassified information supports the claim that any previous election results – including the 2020 presidential contest that Trump lost – were manipulated by foreign interference or fraud in a way that would’ve changed the outcome”, said Marshall Cohen and Kevin Liptak on CNN.

What did the commentators say?

The speech “marked a striking effort by Trump to marshal the resources of the intelligence community to support his claims about election meddling and legislative agenda to tighten voter registration rules”, said Lauren Fedor in the Financial Times.

It’s true that “foreign powers do, in fact, try to influence American elections”, said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. But that “was about all that the president – who seems shocked that other nations have preferences about who wins elected office in the United States – got right”.

The classified revelations, despite what Trump tried to claim, in fact “show that the intelligence community didn’t even agree” that China was fully engaged even in a more limited campaign of influence.

In his address Trump was plainly looking “to soothe his wounded ego over the 2020 election”. But he also might have “a darker motive”. In “attacking the integrity of American elections”, Trump could be seeking to delegitimise the upcoming midterms “and perhaps even create the predicate for interfering in them”.

In his address, Trump has “destroyed any confidence in the integrity of US elections for Americans inclined to believe him”, said Ed Kilgore in New York Magazine. In doing so he has set up “a certain challenge to any midterm results adverse to his party”. When Republicans “desperately needed him to make concrete proposals for improvements in living costs”, Trump instead “dragged the GOP down the election denial rabbit hole farther than ever”.

What next?

Republican politicians who would like the president to focus on the cost of living “have been wary of Trump’s unrelenting claims about flaws in the electoral system”, said the FT.

Senate majority leader John Thune “has resisted pressure from the White House to scrap Senate rules” in an effort by Trump to push through the Save America Act. This would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, among other measures.

The accusations Trump made could also “complicate a fragile trade truce between the US and China”, said CNBC, while also “casting a shadow over Chinese President Xi Jinping upcoming visit to Washington” in late September.

Just days away from her expected departure, Rachel Reeves defended her legacy to the “great and the good of the City” in the annual Mansion House speech, said the Financial Times.

Her “valedictory” address claimed successes in reduced government borrowing and lower NHS waiting lists. “Loud applause and even whoops of support from guests” indicated support from the finance sector, too, even if possibly not reflected across the country.

But many in the audience were preoccupied by one question: “who would be in charge of the UK’s fiscal policy next week”?

What did the commentators say?

“Farewell, Rachel Reeves, the blubbing chancellor who made us all cry,” said James Moore in The Independent. According to most polling, she is by far the “most unpopular chancellor on record”. She may have resisted “juvenile attempts” to tax the billionaires advocated by many in her party, but she opted for “one of the worst possible means” to raise funds, in hitting employers with higher National Insurance.

But by far her “darkest legacy” is the “million young people not in education, employment or training”. Ultimately, despite a handful of isolated wins, Reeves has “rarely shown the kind of bravery or instinct needed for this great office”.

Reeves’ record is the worst of “any chancellor of modern times”, said financial columnist Matthew Lynn in The Telegraph. In her Mansion House speech, she primarily presented herself as the only person who could provide stability. “The trouble is, none of it was very convincing.” The economy’s “stagnant” growth only looks “tolerable” in the context of poor performances from other G7 countries, unemployment is on the rise, and debt has “soared” to close to “100% of GDP”. Given her shortcomings, her belated attempts to appeal to Andy Burnham’s regime were “cringey” at best. “It was an embarrassing end to a dismal chancellorship.”

“Barely a sector has escaped unscathed” from Reeves’ “duplicity”, said Alys Denby in CityAM. The first, and telling, blow was her “acrobatic triangulation” over the definition of a tax on “working people”, breaking her manifesto pledge by freezing thresholds. She will be remembered for “dissembling, breaking promises and making Brits poorer”.

Not everyone will be glad to see the back of Reeves, said Politico. Her tears in the Commons once sent financial markets “spiralling”: “now they’re the ones sobbing”. She is uniquely “friendly to the City”, typified by her “smoked salmon offensive” of holding regular breakfasts with City chiefs in the run-up to the 2024 election. With uncertainty over her successor, “things can only get worse” for the financial elite.

A “fair assessment” of Reeves’ tenure in No. 11 “would not be wholly negative”, said The Times’ editorial board. “She has a couple of sizeable achievements to her name.” She relaxed some of the “onerous” regulation on businesses, made reforms to the London Stock Exchange and “consolidated” the “fragmented” pensions industry. “Regrettably”, however, Reeves’ negatives “outweigh the positives”. Labour may have inherited a “sizeable fiscal problem”, but with Reeves’ “disastrous” first budget, they “exacerbated it”.

What next?

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is likely to become Reeves’ successor when Burnham’s cabinet is announced on Monday, said the Financial Times. Mahmood is on the right of the Labour Party and is viewed as a “tough operator and capable minister”, overseeing “contentious” immigration reforms. Since the reports broke, the markets have “responded positively”. Speaking on Wednesday, Burnham said that he might “ask for a little bit more” in tax, and refused to rule out a wealth tax. Whatever the selection, the future chancellor’s “big task” will be to frame a convincing autumn Budget.

“Dare I suggest there are the seeds here for a comeback” for Reeves, said Moore in The Independent. The UK is in a “precarious predication fiscally”, and we “shouldn’t underestimate” Reeves’ standing with the markets. If the Burnham project goes “horribly wrong”, he may find himself calling on someone to “steady the ship”. “The record shows that Reeves can take the blows. She could do it her way.”

With President Donald Trump’s refusal to either sign or veto a landmark bipartisan housing bill, the legislation automatically became law last week, and political analysts are hopeful the bill will help ease the pain of America’s nationwide housing crisis. But while experts laud Congress’ joint efforts to address the problem, the average American may not feel relief for years.

What did the commentators say?

The bill has a number of provisions that seek to “remove barriers to building homes, lower housing costs and shift greater control over housing to the local level,” said Time. One of the main goals is to increase the overall availability of houses, largely by mandating that the government “offer guidance on how communities could best reform zoning and land-use policies to reduce barriers to housing development.” Environmental reviews of housing construction will also be streamlined.

It also widens the definition of manufactured houses, which are “built entirely in factories before being transported to their sites,” said Time. The expanded definition will “‘unlock’ a segment of the housing market by making it cheaper and easier to mass-produce such homes,” Francis Torres, the housing and infrastructure director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Time. The current supply is “really not matching the growing and changing demand,” said Geoff Smith, the executive director of the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University, to WTTW.

The bipartisan nature of the bill, which easily passed both the House of Representatives and the Senate, “reflects both parties’ concerns with rising housing costs nationwide and shows that political compromise is still possible in Washington,” said The Dallas Morning News editorial board. If properly implemented, it has the potential to “modernize federal housing programs, streamline regulations and encourage innovation.”

But the effects of the bill may not be so profound for those in the worst financial situations. It will likely have a “fairly limited impact on affordability for the lowest-income folks in the country,” said Shamus Roller, CEO of the National Housing Law Project, to PBS News. The provisions “aren’t the kinds of sweeping policy changes many affordable housing advocates say will help dramatically reduce housing costs,” like major tax reforms and government-subsidized housing investments.

What next?

The legislation may take time to be effective because “many pieces of the legislation will require implementation from the now-diminished” Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), said PBS. About 32% of HUD’s workforce has left the agency since September 2024, according to the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, which could make it hard to bring some of the bill’s provisions to life. As of 2024, no states in the U.S. had an adequate supply of affordable housing for low-income renters, said the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

So even as many are hopeful about the new promises, some “immediate relief may not come just yet for homeowners and renters,” said Yonah Freemark, a housing research associate at the Urban Institute, to CNN. The bill creates a “situation where not only will the federal government have to make changes, but then state and local governments also will have to make changes and then businesses, developers and the like will have to make investments, which itself takes time.”

Billed as a coronation, the change in prime minister is “unfolding more like a royal wedding”, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. “You feel an ambient duty to spectate and even celebrate, but you’d be mad not to stay sceptical”.

Andy Burnham is set to be the seventh prime minister in a decade, having surpassed the “magic number” of 323 Labour MP nominations, making it “mathematically impossible” to challenge him.

The result was “never in doubt”, said The Times. However, he may be in a position of strength, but “beneath the surface there are already seething resentments and jockeying for position”.

What did the commentators say?

It’s hard to shake the feeling that Britain has “fallen prey to some national sickness”, said Tom McTague, editor of The New Statesman. We cling on to the “giants” of the distant past in “Attlee and Churchill, Macmillan and Thatcher”, but our post-Brexit politicians “barely seem to register”. It is up to Burnham to change that. Above all, he needs to create something, anything, “new and memorable” from what has been a “fevered, amnestic past decade”.

Burnham may turn out to be a “lucky prime minister”, said The Times editorial board. Embracing AI in its nascent stages could be “genuinely transformative” for the country’s fortunes. Immigration under “tough” Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is “beginning to come under control”, and despite being unpopular, Rachel Reeves’ tax rises could “ensure a falling budget deficit” in future. If he can make a bold “pro-business gesture”, such as opening up the North Sea, he could definitely “repair the damage of the last two years”. “There is hope.”

It is precisely Burnham’s ability to inspire such hope, regardless of his lack of policies, that is his “key asset”, said Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times. Politics requires a “feel for the country, the ability to tell a story and carry people with you”, and Burnham undoubtedly has a “genial public persona”. Personality stirs voters most deeply, and Burnham represents someone, like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, who would “at last listen to those who feel neglected and failed by politics”. Often overlooked, inspiring hope is neither common nor a “nice-to-have, it’s an essential aspect of leading”, and few before have had it.

It is clear that the “charming and combative” Burnham has cause for optimism, said The Economist. A lot is in his favour, such as “decent ideas” to devolve power and reform property taxes, and his win in Makerfield showed a rare “appealing audacity” on a local and national level. But backbench MPs have “gained a taste for rebellion”, and Burnham has “yet to set out a convincing programme to fix Britain”. If the former mayor believes an “easy manner or an ability to skirt elephant traps is enough” he is mistaken.

What next?

The MP for Makerfield will “have his work cut out for him”, said Bloomberg’s editorial board. His headline mission thus far to devolve power to other English regions could succeed if done “prudently”, but “will take years to bear fruit”. He faces much more “immediate” priorities of stimulating growth and “curbing Britain’s swollen welfare bill”.

He must also initiate “transparent” reforms to VAT, council tax and business rates, while reducing regulatory burdens, expanding apprenticeships, and improving transportation and housing. He will take office with “advantages Starmer never possessed. For the country’s sake, he can’t afford to squander them.”

Because of his “lack of a personal mandate”, Burnham’s appointments will prove pivotal, said associate editor, politics Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. Of those, the most “ferocious jockeying for position” lies in the appointment of chancellor, perceived to be a “case of Ed Miliband versus Anybody But Ed”.

More widely, surrounding himself with economists Jim O’Neill and Andy Haldane, as well as arch-Blairite James Purnell, shows a “pragmatic preference for smart people with an interest in getting stuff done”. Team Burnham have likened their task to “rebuilding an aircraft while it is in mid-flight”. There will be “much turbulence to master” to avoid “plunging” from the sky like his six post-Brexit predecessors.

Tensions between Iran and the US are ratcheting up a new notch. Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new Supreme Leader, has said “revenge” for the death of his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “is the will of our nation and must certainly be carried out”. Donald Trump has called Iranian leaders “scum”, and said any attempt by Tehran to assassinate him will be met by bombings “at levels they’ve never seen before”.

Meanwhile, both countries have renewed air strikes, as Iranian hardliners insist on control of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, “their principal source of strategic leverage”, said US-based security think tank The Soufan Center. It seems the stage is set “for a return to major combat”.

What did the commentators say?

In “a high-stakes gamble”, Iran is “playing what it believes is its key card”: announcing the closure of the strait “in an attempt to pressure Trump to bend to its will”, said the Financial Times. Its “belligerent” stance, and its attacks on ships and on US-aligned Gulf states, poses “the most severe test yet” of the fragile ceasefire. “It also lays bare” the “hawkish mindset that has taken hold in Tehran”.

The leadership that has emerged in Iran since Khamenei’s death “looks keener to project strength” and wear down Trump “through military pressure, rather than diplomacy”, said The Economist. There has been a noticeable “shift in the regime’s centre of gravity” towards the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which “has accelerated Iran’s transition from a theocracy to an ambitious nationalistic state dominated by military men”.

Their aim is “preventing the erosion of their perceived influence”, Sanam Vakil, Middle East director at UK think tank Chatham House, told the FT. “They feel they have to do this to survive.” They are wagering that “Trump is risk-averse” and that they can “absorb” some “low-level conflict. But this is a quagmire.”

The recent trading of strikes “raises questions for the future of the region”, said The Soufan Center. While Tehran seems “willing to suffer the consequences of escalation, neither they nor Trump appear to want to return” to all-out war. “Each side prefers a ‘no war, no peace’ status”, even while a return to negotiations looks “bleak”.

What next?

The conflict has “descended into a mutually unsatisfying stalemate”, with Washington “unable to topple the Islamic Republic” and Tehran “unable to force the US to vacate its backyard”, said Ali Vaez on Foreign Affairs. US-Iranian tensions are “worse than ever before” but, “paradoxically”, this may be “a moment of opportunity” for both countries “to repair their broken relationship”.

Now that it is “plainly apparent” that neither side can “deliver a knockout blow to the other” or sustain “unmanaged hostility”, there are “decision-makers” in each nation who “have started looking for ways to co-exist”.

President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy have never had what could feasibly be called a “warm” relationship, stretching back well into Trump’s first term. Given their frosty history, Trump’s enthusiasm during this week’s NATO summit for Ukraine’s recent wartime successes came as a shock to many. By announcing plans to loosen restrictions on American arms for Ukraine’s defense and hailing Kyiv’s wartime strides against Russia, has Trump come around to Zelenskyy as a peer among the world’s heads of state? Or will the infamously mercurial MAGA president revert to his previous hostility?

What did the commentators say?

Trump “heaped praise” on Zelenskyy and Ukraine during the NATO summit in Ankara, where he spoke in “unusually positive terms” about Kyiv’s strikes in deep Russian territory, said The Washington Post. By speaking in “admiring terms” and offering “dramatic new assistance” for Ukraine’s wartime efforts, Trump’s stance was a “dramatic departure from his tone during his first year in office.” Zelenskyy, meanwhile, spent his recent time with Trump showing “swagger and a hint of his prepresidential vocation as a popular Ukrainian comedian.” Trump and Zelenskyy “kindled a significant thaw in relations,” with the pair’s “bonhomie” signaling the “latest shift in a historically fraught relationship,” said The Hill.

Given that Trump has “zigged and zagged when it comes to Ukraine,” the president’s offer to grant Kyiv a Patriot missile manufacturing license is being “cheered” in Ukraine with a “heavy dose of caution,” said The New York Times. Similarly, Trump’s endorsement of Ukrainian deep drone strikes as an “escalation that could help end the war” marked his “strongest praise yet” for Zelenskyy’s wartime gains, and dealt a “significant blow to Russia’s efforts to keep Trump on its side in talks to end the war,” said The Wall Street Journal. Trump “always wants to be on the winning side,” said Viktor Shlinchak, the head of the Institute of World Policy, to the Times. “Right now, it does not look like Ukraine is losing.”

Following Trump’s push to grant Kyiv a manufacturing license for Patriot missiles, Zelenskyy at “times looked like he almost couldn’t believe his luck,” said CNN. Not only have the pair shared a “rocky relationship,” but the “flare-up in the war in Iran appeared to have put Trump into a foul mood” ahead of the meeting. But in a “break from earlier encounters” that “ended in acrimony,” Trump praised Zelenskyy’s “willingness to reach a deal” to end the ongoing violence, said NPR. “We’ve developed a good relationship — it’s even hard to believe — from the Oval Office until now,” said Trump at the summit meeting. “This will be the beginning, maybe, just the beginning.”

What next?

European leaders have “embraced the new messaging,” said the Post. “It’s so important” that Trump is “now taking very seriously that Ukraine has a chance” while Russia is “doing weaker,” said Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna, according to the outlet.

The unexpectedly friendly meeting between the two leaders “appeared to demonstrate the best-case scenario for Ukraine and its supporters among NATO members,” said The Hill. Many had worried that Trump’s “animosity toward the alliance” and “routine deference” to Russian President Vladimir Putin would “undermine support” for Kyiv and NATO.

Still, the language Trump used to promise Patriot manufacturing rights for Ukraine was “rather vague,” CNN said. The president “admitted that he had not yet discussed the issue” with arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, which manufacture the missile batteries domestically. “We have Patriots, but we don’t have that many,” said Trump during his conversation with Zelenskyy. “We need them for ourselves, too.”

Even so, Zelenskyy was “emboldened by the good meeting” enough to joke that he couldn’t visit Moscow anytime soon because there are “too many Ukrainian drones there. It’s not safe,” said The Hill. Trump also appeared open to visiting Ukraine, but said he would rather the “war be over” before committing.

Documents have emerged from “clandestine” meetings in 2023 between Russian and Chinese leaders over neutralising the threat of Elon Musk’s Starlink in Ukraine, while also revealing a growing military cooperation between the two allies.

The joint investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel and Le Monde exposes China’s “professed neutrality” in Ukraine “as a fiction”, and poses questions about the nature and targets of their alliance.

What did the commentators say?

The China-Russia “no limits” alliance is “one of the world’s most consequential relationships”, said Brookings. The “biggest misconception”, said policy expert Patricia Kim, is that Russia and China are either “inseparable partners” or “inevitable rivals that are on the brink of a split”. Neither may be true, but the relationship is “stronger than it ever has been in decades, certainly since the post-Cold War period”.

The personal connection between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin is at the heart of the relationship, said Ankur Shah, editor of the Global China Unit on the BBC. The “strongmen” have described each other as “best friends”, and have met more than 40 times. Economically, the alliance is highly uneven, with China being “Russia’s largest trading partner, while Russia makes up just 4% of China’s international trade”. But as leaders, Xi and Putin “do not pass judgement on the actions of the other”, and despite their “asymmetries and differences”, they “share vital interests”.

China is by far the dominant party of the pair, and intent on satisfying Xi's desire for a “Sino-centric world”, said The Economist. In the past three months, China has received visits from Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, both seeking economic stability while engaged in wars of their own making. Crucially, Putin left without assurances for the proposed gas pipeline “Power of Siberia 2” that would allow Russia to sell “50 billion cubic metres of gas annually” to China, which it can no longer supply to Europe. In the space of a matter of days, both at home and abroad, China appeared the singular “fulcrum of global geopolitics, dealing with America as an equal” and relegated Russia to a “junior partner”.

Current relations between Russia and China have been strengthened by the influence of Donald Trump, said Leonid Ragozin in Al Jazeera. The war in Iran has given a “powerful impetus to strengthening Russo-Chinese ties”, meaning China has become “reliant” on Russian oil, and in turn funded the Russian war effort in Ukraine.

Let’s also not forget that Trump had pledged to “un-unite” Russia and China before his second presidential term in 2024. However, his recent “ambivalent” stance in effect echoes the “counterproductive policies of his predecessors”. Trump is famous for his “short span of attention”, and “may not even remember” what he promised to achieve in Russia and China. “But of course, the latter two do remember it well.”

It is true policymakers “suffered from a failure of imagination over the past decade” towards the potential of a Russia-China alliance, said Christopher Walker in the Centre for European Policy Analysis. Yet there is also a “risk of overcorrecting”. There are limits, “important imbalances and points of friction in the Sino-Russian relationship”, highlighted by China’s inactivity following American intervention in Venezuela and Iran: they appear unwilling to “close ranks against external threats”.

On a fundamental level, the two nations lack the “dense institutional connective tissue” that could match Nato, acting in “parallel play” rather than with lasting cohesion.

What next?

Nato has already reacted, said Seong Hyeon Choi in the South China Morning Post. Following the summit in Ankara, the organisation unveiled defence initiatives in response to “security challenges posed by Russia and China”. These included a motion on raw materials and a new Drone Edge programme, investing “US$40 billion in the next five years” into expanding modern warfare.

“China continues to modernise its armed forces and expand its nuclear capabilities without transparency”, and “North Korea continues to expand its nuclear programme and supply Russia”, said Mark Rutte, Secretary General of NATO. These countries working together “should concern us all”, because they “do not have our best interests in mind”, he continued: “to meet the challenge, we need a transatlantic defence industrial revolution”.

“Let the people decide.” That was the defiant message from two of the world’s most famous populists on Tuesday as Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen intend to “defy their country’s norms” to “put the same pitch” to voters, said Melissa Bell on CNN.

Le Pen, parliamentary leader of the far-right National Rally party who was convicted of embezzlement this week, said she will run for the presidency in 2027. And Reform UK leader Farage resigned as MP for Clacton to force a by-election, arguing that his constituents should be the “ultimate judge” of questions over his finances.

What did the commentators say?

The “parallels” are “impossible to ignore”, said Emile Chabal, from the University of Edinburgh, on The Conversation: the careers of two “prominent European populist right-wing politicians” were being “threatened by extensive and well-documented corruption claims”.

Le Pen and Farage are “both reading” from the “well-thumbed playbook” of “the people v the courts; voters v judges; the ‘transparent’ legitimacy of the ballot box v the ‘opacity’ of lengthy legal and regulatory proceedings”. These divisive issues are “familiar to observers of populist politics in the United States, Hungary or Turkey”.

You might think Le Pen has “little to worry about” because French politics is “famously corrupt”. But “tolerance has begun to dissipate” as “public anger towards politicians has reached unprecedented levels”.

“If you could distil populism to an essence, this would be it,” said Lionel Laurent on Bloomberg. The “politics of unfounded grievance is in full swing and taking precedence over parties and policy”.

But the question remains: can the two nationalist populists “finally convert long-standing poll leads into lasting political achievement”. There are “indications of voter fatigue” even in “Reform-friendly” Clacton, while in France, the 2027 election will be the fourth time Le Pen has run for president after a “series of failures and policy flip-flops”.

“Mr Brexit” and “Madame Frexit” have “much in common” and “they made the same pitch: let the people, not the establishment, have the last word”, said Henry Samuel and James Crisp in The Telegraph. But Le Pen “allowed the process to reach a verdict first” and Farage “should have done the same” and let the sleaze inquiries he is facing “run their course” before triggering the by-election.

It is “one script in two languages”, said Bell on CNN: the “condemned figure recast as the victim and the law as an ever-weakening weapon of a frightened establishment”. The same “trap” has been “sprung”. It’s the “perfect populist playbook, and one neither France nor the UK looks able to contain”.

But Count Binface, Farage’s only confirmed opponent in Clacton so far, is “renowned for routinely staging eccentric by-election challenges” and could “become a rallying point for opponents of the Reform leader”, said Annabel Denham in The Telegraph.

So the “risk for Farage is that the more he is seen to be playing politics, the more likely” voters are to “conclude he is part of the problem, rather than the solution”.

What next?

Reform has suggested holding the by-election on 6 August, although it is more likely to be a week later. “They call it a stunt. It’s not a stunt, because real voters will have a vote for an MP,” Farage told the BBC.

Meanwhile, Le Pen said she would “pursue all legal avenues” to defend her innocence and appeal to France’s top civil court, the Court of Cassation. That verdict would likely come early next year.