The US and the EU have signed a trade deal setting a 15% tariff on all EU exports to America. Donald Trump finalised the agreement in a short meeting with European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen at his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland yesterday, calling it “the biggest deal ever struck by anybody”. Keir Starmer will meet the US president this afternoon in a bid to increase pressure on Israel and secure a ceasefire deal in the Middle East. The PM is also expected to recall his cabinet from their summer break this week for an emergency meeting on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The England women’s football team became back-to-back European champions last night after beating Spain on penalties. The Lionesses will attend a celebratory reception at Downing Street today, followed by a victory parade in central London tomorrow. “I am so proud of this team,” said Chloe Kelly, who scored the winning penalty (below), “and I’m so proud to be English.”

Are the Epping protests a sign of wider malaise?

The recent protests in the genteel Essex town of Epping should serve as a “warning shot” to our leaders, says Jason Cowley in The Sunday Times. The spark for the disorder was the arrest of an Ethiopian asylum seeker – one of 140 relocated by the Home Office to a hotel there – on suspicion of sexually assaulting a schoolgirl. But the anger fuelling the violence runs much deeper. Put simply, “something is rotten in the state of Britain”. Our rivers are full of excrement, a quarter of the working-age population is classified as disabled, shoplifting is at a record high. And Keir Starmer’s government doesn’t seem to know what to about it. Nigel Farage may be overegging things to warn of mass civil disobedience. But if violence can break out in this sleepy corner of Essex, “it can happen anywhere, at any time”.

Enough of this “relentless doomerism”, says Sam Freedman on Substack. The overwhelming majority of Brits wouldn’t go near a violent riot – 72% think the draconian sentences handed down to those convicted over last year’s Southport disorder were either fair or “not harsh enough”. Crime is falling, with violence, burglary and car crime down around 90% since the 1990s. The number of asylum seekers in hotels has gone from 56,000 in 2023 to probably below 30,000 today, and is on course to drop to zero by 2029. And talk of immigrants failing to integrate is pure baloney – on “every measure we have”, racial segregation is falling. Yes, Britain is in a “somewhat fragile state” and frustration at politicians is understandably high. But plenty of trends are going in the right direction, and the general mood is “nowhere near as gloomy” as many commentators make out.

🗳️😔 MPs get a lot of stick for the failures of our immigration and asylum system, says Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. Yet most of them are “desperate” to stop the boats, if only for reasons of self-interest. The problem is that fixing the issues would involve deep structural changes: extricating ourselves from international treaties, scrapping a mass of domestic laws and so on. And this sort of thing “leaves most voters cold”. They’re much more interested in supposedly simple solutions such as forcing small boats to turn back mid-Channel – “as if no one had tried that before”.

Nadine Dorries has recently reprised her claim that Hugo Swire, the former Foreign Office minister, once asked her in the back of a cab to feel the mink of his jacket, saying: “I bet a girl like you has never felt anything like that before.” But that’s not entirely accurate, says Private Eye. The lining wasn’t mink; it was hamster. Swire had come across several of the dead rodents and, “being a parsimonious fellow”, had the fur adapted for a jacket rather than letting it go to waste. In the taxi, “somewhat refreshed”, he showed off his new garment to Dorries and the two other passengers, hollering: “Cop a feel of that, Nadine – hamster pubes!”

Astronomer, the US tech company at the centre of the Coldplay kiss cam saga, has hired Gwyneth Paltrow as a “temporary spokesperson”, says Maddy Mussen in The London Standard. In a corporate-style social media video, the Oscar-winning actress – and ex-wife of Coldplay frontman Chris Martin – repeatedly dodges questions about the scandal, instead promoting the company’s work like a “supremely media-trained professional in full flow”. The video has been widely praised on social media, with one X user commenting: “That’s not marketing. That’s wizardry.” Click here to watch the full video.

Don’t confuse the Cotswolds with “ye olde England”

Life in the Cotswolds can be strange, says Harriet Fitch Little in the FT. I was having breakfast in the village cafe last week when David Cameron “strode in wearing sport shorts, looking for muesli and a paper”. People chat about “where they stable their horses” like Londoners do about where they walk their dog. Increasingly, there’s a “new oddity” lurking up those well manicured driveways: Americans. Former chat show host Ellen DeGeneres and her wife Portia de Rossi moved to the area in response to Donald Trump’s election win last November; Taylor Swift based herself in the village of Great Tew during her Eras tour. The latest US visitor is Vice President JD Vance, who is reportedly spending part of his summer holidays here with his family.

Many of these Americans no doubt think they’re enjoying real England – “ye olde unsullied cradle of tradition”. But that’s balls. Daylesford Organic has grown from fancy farm shop to “Cotswold theme park”, with three restaurants, 30-odd cottages to hire and an in-house creamery. It’s an “astonishingly dirt-free rendering of the countryside”, from the pristine Land Rover Defenders parked outside to the garden centre with a floor so clean you could eat your Cotswold chopped salad off it. Other favourite haunts include not just Soho Farmhouse, which at 10 years old is “practically old money”, but also the likes of Estelle Manor, a country pile turned “high-glam hotel”, and Aynhoe Park, the UK outpost of American furniture chain Restoration Hardware (“like Ikea for the superwealthy, with lobster rolls and a juicery”). If Americans wanted to see real England, they’d go to Herefordshire – “the forgotten county” as my godfather calls it. All they’re getting in the Cotswolds is “Hamptons-style clubbishness, minus the decades-long waiting lists”.

Singles have started to feel a little queasy about “ghosting”, says Katherine Bindley in The Wall Street Journal: the remarkably common practice of dating someone for weeks, even months, then one day never contacting them again without any explanation. So they’ve come up with a new strategy: “speed dumping”. The idea is that, after a bad or so-so first date, you get in touch with a brisk, clear text message explaining that you don’t want to do it again. The advantage is, in the long run, it spares confusion and hurt feelings. On the downside, says one serial speed dumper, people are starting to get competitive: “It’s like, who can get there first?”

Whenever we’re tempted to think people in the past were “relatable” or “just like us”, says James Marriott on Substack, it’s worth remembering that one of the most popular amusements in 18th-century Europe was “torturing and burning cats”. Children used to roast cats over bonfires. In the jeu du chat at the Fête-Dieu in Aix-en-Provence, they threw cats high in the air and “smashed them on the ground”. The English were no better: during the Reformation in London, a Protestant crowd shaved a cat to look like a priest, dressed it in mock vestments, and “hanged it on the gallows at Cheapside”.

It’s “Golf Force One”, says Janet Eastham in The Daily Telegraph, an armour-plated golf cart that has been trailing Donald Trump around his Scotland course as he plays. The black Polaris Ranger XP is thought to have an armoured windscreen and to have been specifically modified to offer as much protection as possible while – crucially – remaining “light enough to not damage the course”.