Donald Trump told Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday that if he doesn’t accept Vladimir Putin’s terms for ending the war then Russia will “destroy” Ukraine. The White House meeting repeatedly descended into a “shouting match”, says the FT, with the US president tossing aside maps of the Ukrainian front line and insisting Zelensky surrender the entire Donbas region. The Metropolitan Police are investigating claims that Prince Andrew asked one of its officers to dig up dirt on his late accuser Virginia Giuffre. In her posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, which is released tomorrow, Giuffre claims she had sex with the prince on three separate occasions, including once with Jeffrey Epstein and approximately eight other young women. The Mongolian wrestler Hōshōryū Tomokatsu won the Grand Sumo Tournament at the Royal Albert Hall last night. After five days of fighting – during which the assembled rikishi ploughed through 700kg of rice, 1,000 packets of miso soup and 400 bottles of soy sauce – the 150kg 26-year-old beat his 191kg opponent in a crisp 10 seconds.

Labour is the party of the middle class

For years, says Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times, Labour’s policy was to keep as quiet as possible about Brexit. But all of a sudden Rachel Reeves says the reason taxes are going up, when she specifically promised they wouldn’t, isn’t that her last set of tax rises knocked the stuffing out of the economy, but because “the impact of Brexit is severe and long-lasting”. Keir Starmer is at it too, using his conference speech last month to attack the “Brexit lies on the side of that bus” and denounce the politicians who “lied to this country, unleashed chaos and walked away after Brexit”. After years of silence on the “B-word”, what’s changed?

It isn’t just that Labour has run out of other excuses. It also represents a “long-overdue accommodation with electoral reality”. Labour thinks of itself as the party of the workers, but really it has always been an “alliance between the organised working class and the progressive middle class”. Today, the progressive middle class entirely dominate, while unions say their members are “deserting for Reform en masse”. The data is striking: if the vote were restricted to households earning over £70,000 a year, Labour would romp home at the next election. The latest polling shows Reform winning handily among those who attended comprehensive and grammar schools but lagging Labour by 13 points among the privately educated. What Labour’s anti-Brexit turn reveals is that they accept they have lost the workers and are now desperately trying to hang on to their new “core vote”: centrist dads who listen to The Rest Is Politics and get all huffy about “racist, populist, Brexiteering old Nigel”.

Rory Stewart’s star appears to be waning, says Popbitch. Seat-filling services, which offer discounted prices for under-subscribed events, were offering 50% off tickets for “An Evening with Rory Stewart” in London this week. Still, he’s not the only one. Another one-man show in London currently offering half-price discounts is a play based on the infamous football fan Charlie Perry, titled Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Arse for England.

They say never meet your heroes, says Jack Blackburn in The Times, but if they do disappoint it’s worth “giving them a second go”. Early in his career, Richard Madeley was devastated when Don McLean walked out of an interview because he didn’t want to talk about his hit song American Pie. Some 35 years later, the broadcaster interviewed his idol again – and McLean immediately recognised him. “You’re the guy that pissed me off,” said the singer. “I’ve never forgiven myself.” They made up, and Madeley was able to ask, again, what American Pie really means. “It means,” replied McLean, “I never have to worry about a pension.”

Are we heading for a financial crash?

Every October, says Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail, some 10,000 finance ministers and bankers descend on Washington DC for the simultaneous gatherings of the IMF, the G7 and the World Bank. This year, beneath the “veneer of polished calm”, a terrifying new consensus is building: we are heading for another financial crash. The first big threat is the renewed US-China trade war, specifically Donald Trump’s potentially devastating pledge to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese goods entering the US. The second is the “plainly overwrought” valuations of the big American AI firms and the “incestuous” nature of recent multibillion dollar deals between them. Many are comparing the “AI bubble” to the dotcom speculation that ended with an “almighty bang” in 2000.

Another cause of alarm is the sheer scale of debt among the world’s richest nations: Britain owes £2.9trn, America a “staggering” £28trn. “No one believes it is sustainable.” The nature of that debt is also a concern, as much of it is underwritten by private lenders in the unregulated “shadow” banking sector. The recent collapse of two players in the US motor industry, First Brands and Tricolor, has “set alarm bells ringing”: both relied heavily on private finance, but – as with the opaque financial instruments that led to the 2008 crash – the scale of those debts only became clear after it was too late. If the system does come crashing down then Britain is more exposed than most – our reputation in the bond markets is still no better than after the Liz Truss implosion. But everyone will be hit, and hit hard. “The financial world stands on the edge of a precipice.”

🥭 Never mind the FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google), says Erica Pandey in Axios. In the age of generative AI a new acronym is taking hold: MANGO (Microsoft, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google DeepMind and OpenAI). It’s a sign of the times. The FAANGs represented an era when each tech giant ruled its own domain: social media, streaming, search, and so on. “In the MANGO age, there’s just one that matters – AI.”

To the London Review of Books:

David Runciman, writing about the relationship between the UK and Europe since 1945, says a fair bit about that most interesting and intransigent of politicians, Enoch Powell. My uncle spent a lot of time with Powell during the North Africa campaign in World War Two. He told us that Powell’s preferred mode of transport was the motorcycle (typically, he was a trenchant opponent of compulsory helmet use in the 1973 parliamentary debate). On one occasion he was required to drive a truck. Coming into a bend caused by the presence of a sand dune, Powell did not turn the wheel but leaned his body and head into the bend, as a motorcyclist would. To his surprise, but nobody else’s, the truck chugged straight into the dune.

Charles Skinner
London W2

Lowering the flag as a mark of respect was once a rare symbol of public mourning in the US, reserved for presidents, vice-presidents and other “significant deaths”, says Justin Murphy in The Atlantic. Today, states use the gesture for “all manner of tragedies”, from the death of a highway-maintenance supervisor to annual federal observances – “Peace Officers Memorial Day” – which most people don’t even realise exist. It’s become so commonplace in New York that in the past 15 years, flags in the state have been lowered for more than 850 days combined. “That equates to roughly one day a week.”

It’s Jess Rowe and Miriam Payne, says Ben Doherty in The Guardian: English rowers who have just become the first female pair to cross the Pacific Ocean unaided. The dogged duo spent 165 days hauling themselves from the Peruano yacht club in Lima, Peru to Australia’s Cairns yacht club, averaging 50 nautical miles a day, fuelled by 400kg of “mostly freeze-dried” food, a solar-powered water desalinator (which broke and had to be fixed using a pair of knickers) and a system for growing “micro-greens”. The aptly named Rowe and Payne (28 and 25 respectively) slogged away all day, and took turns rowing through the night and sleeping in two-hour shifts. Their first stop in Cairns? A “long-awaited pizza”.