“Matt Hancock did it. Allegra Stratton did it.” But Boris Johnson, “our bumptious schoolboy-on-the-make leader”, still can’t bring himself to resign, says Judith Woods in The Daily Telegraph. “Britain deserves better.” We are deep in a cost of living crisis, with food banks in the UK now outnumbering branches of McDonald’s. “Russia is pushing the West to the brink of war.” Yet here we are, having to deal with such dysfunction in Downing Street that on Monday Johnson even missed a phone call with Vladimir Putin – a vital opportunity to avoid conflict in Ukraine – because he was busy trying to console angry MPs. He should do the “decent thing” and leave before being pushed ­– it’s his last opportunity to “salvage something from the ruins of his personal reputation”.

After a brief period of “opening up”, China is once again withdrawing from the global economy, says Michael Schuman in The Atlantic. In the 1970s and 1980s, the then “paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping transformed his country’s insular economy by allowing in a “torrent” of foreign money and ideas. But now Xi Jinping is closing the gates. He wants to make the economy “self-sufficient” to protect it from US sanctions – by spending hundreds of billions of dollars on homegrown semiconductor companies, for example. And it’s not just the economy. Xi has also vowed to curtail foreign cultural influences in a bid to “infuse more ‘socialist’ values into Chinese society”.