Keir Starmer has promised patients a “doctor in your pocket” as he made the NHS app the centrepiece of his 10-year plan to reform the health service. Every patient in the country will have a unified medical record on the app within three years, and a “neighbourhood health service” will see new local health hubs – open 12 hours a day, six days a week – shift healthcare away from hospitals. Zarah Sultana, Labour MP for Coventry South, has resigned from Labour, saying she will co-lead a new hard-left party with Jeremy Corbyn. The ex-Labour leader is yet to comment, but The Sunday Times’s Gabriel Pogrund says Corbyn was “furious and bewildered” at Sultana for launching the party without consulting him. Saint-Antoine-l’Abbaye has been crowned France’s favourite village after a national television vote. “This is a great honour,” says Maryline Longis, the mayor of the medieval village in southeast France, known for its soaring Gothic abbey, half-timbered houses and cobbled streets. “Even with more tourists, life will continue to be calm and untroubled.”

Can Reeves keep Labour’s “hotheads” at bay?

Given all the changes to the government’s welfare reforms before Labour MPs let them pass, says Will Dunn in The New Statesman, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves may end up spending slightly more than if they had done nothing at all. This is, patently, bananas. Young people are “dropping out of the labour market in unprecedented numbers”, which our economy cannot support, and the bill for disability and incapacity benefits will soon rise to £100bn a year, “which the government cannot afford”. Our debts are almost the same size as our entire economy and our borrowing costs are the highest since 2008. Yet Labour MPs are “unwilling to accept fiscal reality”. Which means the only option left is to raise one or more of the main taxes – income, National Insurance and VAT – which account for more than 60% of total government income. The question is whether they dare.

Despite the teary scenes this week, says Jeremy Warner in The Daily Telegraph, Reeves is “perhaps the best hope the country has” of getting through the current “quagmire of challenges” without descending into a devastating fiscal crisis. Her failure to push through the welfare reforms worried the bond markets – raising the government’s cost of borrowing – but they really spiked when it looked like she might get the boot. What investors are afraid of is what “madnesses and delusions” might come after her, from a Labour Party which, despite its appalling poll ratings, still has an “absolutely secure” majority. If, or when, Reeves goes, the floodgates will be open to the “hotheads of Labour’s rank and file”, with their inevitable calls for ever higher spending and wealth-destroying taxation. Reeves is the “last line of defence”.

💸 Top Labour types are terrified of raising taxes on “ordinary voters”, says Will Dunn. But the truth is that UK taxes on “working people” are at a multi-decade low. Economists calculate something called the “tax wedge” – the percentage of labour costs that become taxes of any kind. And the UK’s is among the lowest in the developed world, “below the US, Japan, Ireland and Canada”. The richest get fleeced (60% of income tax is paid by the top 10% of earners) while others, like landlords and pensioners, get a “much easier” ride. Strange as it sounds, “middle earners are not being taxed enough”.

Keir Starmer and Donald Trump are “strange bedfellows”, says Tim Shipman in The Spectator. Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former comms director, told the Chalke History Festival that Trump once complained he “could not access porn on White House computers”. Starmer, meanwhile, tries to connect with the thrice-married President by “talking about their families”, according to an aide. “Even this can be a minefield.” Halfway through their White House lunch, shortly after the Prime Minister’s brother died of cancer, Trump turned to him: “Your brother, Keir… He died… Was it a good death?” Starmer, to his credit, “kept his sangfroid in the face of the sheer weirdness of the conversation” and steered it back to tariffs. Trump, Starmer’s team concluded, is “obsessed with death”.

Most people use ChatGPT to draft emails and brainstorm ideas, says Tatum Hunter in The Washington Post. But others are turning to AI for beauty advice. Validation-seekers upload photos of themselves and ask for “unsparing assessments” of their looks followed by a request for a plan to improve their appearance or give them a so-called “glow up”. Generally, the bot doesn’t “pull any punches”, recommending treatments from hair dye to full-on Botox. As one user said, “ChatGPT brings you a level of objectivity you can’t get in real life”.

Trump, Iran and the end of the “Pottery Barn” rule

It was George W Bush’s secretary of state, Colin Powell, who came up with the so-called “Pottery Barn” rule for the use of US military force, says Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post: “If you break it, you own it.” His theory was that if you attack a country or initiate regime change, you become responsible for whatever happens next. But it turns out this doctrine isn’t true. “You can just break it.” When Donald Trump attacked Iran’s nuclear sites and threatened the ayatollah with assassination and regime change if he retaliated, no one thought the commander in chief was “planning to send 160,000 US troops to march on Tehran”. The mullahs knew he wasn’t bluffing. So they backed down.

This is the key point getting overlooked in all the back and forth over the scale of damage to Iran’s nuclear programme: the Iranians now know that Trump is serious. If they show any signs of trying to sprint to making a bomb, he “could strike again… and again… and again”. We know full well that Iran’s beleaguered military would be powerless to stop it, in the short term at least. (The Israelis worried that Tehran might retaliate to their own strikes with barrages of up to 1,000 ballistic missiles; in the event, the most the Iranians launched at any one time was 40.) More importantly, “the psychological taboo over striking Iran has been broken”. It’s impossible to overstate the value of that deterrent effect. For decades, the Powell rule constrained Washington from addressing threats from the Islamic Republic and other rogue states. That “debilitating” doctrine now lies buried “deep in the rubble of the Fordow nuclear enrichment plant”.

The young have gone scent-mad, says Alice Fisher in The Guardian. “PerfumeTok” videos are racking up millions of views, advising Gen Z and millennials in the art of “smellmaxxing” – essentially working out how to smell as good as possible. Top techniques include “scent layering” (wearing two or more fragrances at the same time) and “scent wardrobing” (matching fragrances to different occasions). Some 83% of Gen Z say they wear fragrances as often as three times a week – and it’s not just the girls. At a boutique perfumery, I recently watched a teenage boy chatting about cologne with an assistant twice his age with an extraordinary level of passion and sophistication, “beaming through his braces as he discussed smoky notes”.

To The Times:

Your editorial (28 June) accuses the M&S Red Diamond Strawberry and Creme sandwich of “desecrating” the legacy of the 4th Earl of Sandwich, thus perpetuating the legend that the Earl created the delicacy. The Romans, among others, might contest that claim. The first Earl of Sandwich, however, whose scorched remains, recognisable only by his clothing and medals, were washed ashore after his ship was set on fire at the Battle of Solebay in 1672, could lay claim to the dubious honour of being history’s first example of a “toasted” Sandwich.

Jonathan Coote
Erith, Kent

It’s Adam Kadyrov, says Nataliya Vasilyeva in The New York Times, the 17-year-old son of Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov. The 48-year-old strongman – and key ally of Vladimir Putin – is said to be seriously ill, leading to speculation about Adam’s role in his father’s succession plan. This spring, the teenager was appointed secretary of Chechnya’s Security Council, “chairing a meeting of security officials old enough to be his grandfather”. He’s been awarded two medals, including one for “active military duty” and last weekend, Putin personally congratulated the lad for his “lavish” wedding.