A serving Royal Navy sailor has been charged with spying for an unnamed foreign country. Teddy Young, 24, was arrested at his Bedfordshire home on Tuesday and has been charged with two offences under the National Security Act, including an allegation that he “obtained, copied, recorded or retained protected information” intending to benefit a foreign power between November 2024 and May 2025. Drivers will be able to see the real-time price of fuel on Google Maps from today as part of a government attempt to save motorists money. The navigation app will use data from the government’s fuel finder scheme to display live pump prices at nearby forecourts when users search for petrol stations. Buff-tailed bumblebees, barn owls, Atlantic puffins and European hedgehogs have been picked to feature on the next generation of banknotes. The Bank of England revealed the quartet of creatures following a vote which asked the public to pick their favourites out of 18 options. It is as yet undecided which species will adorn which note.

Conservative frontbenchers have been “excitedly regaling” journalists about the party’s new strategy, says Tim Shipman in The Spectator: namely, to win back wealthy southern voters who have abandoned the Tories for the Lib Dems and Labour, and then to persuade moderate Reform UK voters that it is the Conservatives who are best placed to keep the left out of power. Sure enough, every major policy announcement in Kemi Badenoch’s speech at conference yesterday was aimed at exactly this group. Scrapping inheritance tax on family homes and letting couples leave an additional £1m to their children tax-free. Smoothing out the free childcare “cliff edge” for people earning over £100,000. The Tories, Badenoch said, should seek inspiration from Marks & Spencer, a once out-of-favour brand that had learned from its mistakes and was now “back in fashion”.

It obviously makes some sense to target these voters, who once backed David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Tony Blair. But it’s still a risky strategy. Reform will be able to paint the Conservatives as “the party of the few, not the many” – a mere 5% of families pay inheritance tax as it is. (Experts also warn that the change would further jam up the housing market by deterring the elderly from downsizing.) Many of the Red Wall voters who flocked to Boris Johnson in 2019 will feel the Tories are now offering them nothing. It’s true that the party has avoided being destroyed entirely, as many were predicting 18 months ago. But for all the hope and optimism at the conference, their poll rating has “barely moved” since the electoral wipe-out in 2024. Having dismissed Andy Burnham as a “vibes” politician last week, some Tories are in danger of “succumbing to the same intoxication”.

🗳️🙅 The big problem for the Conservatives, says George Owers in UnHerd, is that many of the prosperous areas they are now targeting – the likes of Surrey, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire – are now awash with graduates who can’t afford to live in big cities. These people will blanch at voting for any restrictions on immigration, abolishing Net Zero or withdrawing from the ECHR. And after the Brexit years, many still see voting Tory as an “unthinkable solecism”.

The UAE has reportedly warned that it may reduce its investments in Britain unless the UK government intervenes in the recent ruling against Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City. No 10’s response should be simple, says Matthew Brooker in Bloomberg: “that’s too bad”. The £30bn the Gulf state has committed over the past five years accounts for just 1.4% of total foreign direct investment, with 15 countries providing more. More important, Britain’s appeal as an investment destination rests largely on the credibility of its legal and regulatory system – and that credibility would be torpedoed by any attempt to undermine the Premier League’s case against Man City.

When Jane Austen readers learn that Mr Darcy has “ten thousand a year”, or Emma Woodhouse has “£30,000 to her name”, it can be hard to know what’s a lot and what isn’t. So Literary Hub has put together a helpful table comparing the incomes of various characters. Topping the list is Mansfield Park’s Mr Rushworth, whose annual income of £12,000 is the equivalent of roughly £1.36m today. Darcy (Pride and Prejudice) is second, with around £1.1m, while Sense and Sensibility’s John Dashwood brings in £680,000, Mr Bingley (Pride and Prejudice) rakes in £570,000 and poor old Col Brandon (Sense and Sensibility) nets a measly £227,000. See the rest here.

The Green Party’s decision to adopt a policy towards Israel that is more hostile than that held by the Palestinian Authority hasn’t just alienated “the vast majority of British Jews” and the millions of others who deplore anti-Semitism, says Rafael Behr in The Guardian. It has also brought censure from the European Greens group, to which the Green Party of England and Wales is affiliated. The bloc points out that the anti-Zionism motion was voted for by fewer than 1% of members, and that Green MPs and other senior party figures opposed it. In light of that contradiction, they say they are seeking “clarity” from the leadership. “They won’t get it from Zack Polanski.” If the Green leader wanted to make his position clear he could have stayed at the conference in Brighton where it was debated, spoken his mind and cast his vote. But he slipped away to campaign ahead of today’s by-election.

Couldn’t Polanski have swayed opinion by deploying the charisma and social media savvy that won him the leadership? “He didn’t appear to try.” Maybe he doesn’t know what he believes, or feels a hostage to the movement that carried him to the top. “Probably both.” That is the suspicion of Green veterans, who can still remember when the party was about environmental issues, and have watched their movement become captured by a “well-organised, itinerant caucus of militant left activists” who have been looking for a new host since Jeremy Corbyn lost control of Labour. Polanski had the opportunity to demonstrate a different kind of authority, expressing conviction derived from a stable core of belief, made compelling by courage – the stuff of which leadership is made. “Polanski doesn’t have it.”

Celebrity Traitors is turning into a fashion show, says Harriet Walker in The Times. Host Claudia Winkleman has inspired a resurgence in kilts, tweed and cashmere wrist-warmers. Richard E Grant has twice worn Burberry’s house check, as well as a Belstaff leather jacket. Maya Jama arrived in a £2,000 Saint Laurent trench (essentially “chic Inspector Clouseau”), then came to the first round table in a shaggy coat that made her look like the Honey Monster. And Jerry Hall prowls the corridors in a Texan take on Highlands chic – a tasselled suede safari jacket and cowboy boots.

It’s hard to overstate how seriously the people behind AI take themselves, says Kevin Roose in his new book The AGI Chronicles. Demis Hassabis, the British co-founder of Google DeepMind, once told a colleague he wanted to build a “control room” where he could watch Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – AI capable of performing a wide range of tasks at a human-like level – being born. He envisioned a “tiered spectator gallery, like the ones at NASA Mission Control, with huge arrays of screens on the wall and hundreds of stadium seats”. DeepMind employees would sit there together on the day AGI was released, “cheering for it as it cured diseases, made new scientific discoveries, and solved problems that had eluded humans for centuries”.

It’s a whopping great squash, says Indy Almroth-Wright on BBC News, which has broken the world record for the heaviest pumpkin. Grown by Hampshire grandfather Ian Paton and named “Bagheera”, the voluminous vegetable weighs 1,295.8kg and has a circumference of over 20ft. It’s the first time in 50 years that Paton, 65, had entered the competition without the help of his twin brother, and he said doing so was “bloody hard work” – requiring around six hours of careful tending and almost 600 litres of water a day. The victorious veg is now on display at Sunnyfields farm, near Southampton, alongside a 10,000-pumpkin mural of David Attenborough.