British workers are “shouldering the highest tax burden since the end of the Second World War”, says Camilla Tominey in The Daily Telegraph – and we’re about to be hit by a national insurance rise in April. Yet the money we hand over to the government is spent appallingly. There are 330 civil servants paid more than the prime minister’s £160,000 salary – Mark Thurston, chief executive of HS2, is on a whopping £620,000 a year. I’m sure this “fat-cat controller” is perfectly capable at his job, but if we can find someone to run the country for £160,000, then why not a railway line to Birmingham?

“The accepted narrative on Boris Johnson is that he is a liar,” says Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. He lies, we are told, “almost as easily as he breathes” – about Downing Street parties, about gold wallpaper, about airlifting Pen Farthing’s dogs out of Kabul. But perhaps the PM hasn’t been lying about any of it. Perhaps he is just “so disorganised and chaotic” that all sorts of things are happening in Downing Street without his knowledge – things he has no idea how to explain, let alone defend. After all, do you really think Johnson cares about wallpaper? Or loves animals so much that he personally intervened in the Farthing decision? Hardly.