Defence Secretary John Healey has refused to rule out tax rises to enable Britain to hit its new defence spending target of 3% of GDP, after Keir Starmer pledged yesterday to make the nation “battle-ready”. Under plans outlined in the government’s 10-year strategic defence review, the British Army is set to grow for the first time in a generation to 76,000 full-time soldiers, up from around 70,000. The proportion of people surviving cancer in the UK has doubled since the 1970s amid a so-called “golden age” of progress in diagnosis and treatment. Half of those diagnosed now survive for 10 years or more, up from 24%, a 50-year study by Cancer Research UK has found. The rate of people dying from the disease is down 23% over the same period. Women who drink coffee age better, according to research which tracked nearly 50,000 women for more than 30 years. Those with higher caffeine consumption – around three small cups of coffee a day – maintained better physical, mental and cognitive health into their seventies and beyond.

Europe is falling for “MAGA’s siren song”

The populist nationalist Karol Nawrocki’s presidential victory in Poland has sent another warning to Europe, says Lionel Laurent in Bloomberg. The former boxer, who beat the pro-EU candidate Rafał Trzaskowski 51% to 49% on Sunday, preaches “MAGA rhetoric”, was publicly backed by Donald Trump and won for his distinctly conservative views on issues such as migration and abortion. In the election run-up he “wore his Catholic values on his sleeve”, attacked Brussels’s Green Deal and opposed Ukraine’s Nato membership. And his campaigning attacks on Poland’s pro-European prime minister Donald Tusk – accusing him of holding a “monopoly of evil power” – suggest the country is set for years of “fractious, paralysed politics”.

“MAGA-infused” politicians like him are seeing success across Europe. The AfD is leading national polls in Germany; 50 years of two-party dominance in Portugal has been shattered with the far-right Chega party now the official opposition; France’s National Rally are already tipped to win the first round of the 2027 presidential election. In every case, the issues driving people to the right are the same. Young voters are tempted by anti-establishment politicians in an era of unaffordable housing, job insecurity and “TikTok politics” – the first round of the Polish vote saw anti-abortion candidate Sławomir Mentzen come top among voters under 40. And the “familiar urban-rural divide” crops up each time, in what is essentially the revenge of “places that don’t matter”. This really is a generational shift in our politics. Leaders in Brussels, Berlin and Paris are running out of time to stop voters heeding “MAGA’s siren song”.