Inside Keir Starmer’s No 10

Villain
Lily Allen, who has revealed that she ranks her friends by how much she likes them and sends the list to her assistant to schedule FaceTimes with them. She said she was joking, but some people actually do this, says Esther Walker in The Times. I once went through the WhatsApps I’d received from a very successful and busy friend, and realised that I get a message from her every three months on the dot. “I genuinely think a calendar alert goes off and an auto reach-out is delivered into my chats.”

Villains
The Taliban, who have banned Afghans from playing chess while they decide whether the game is compatible with Islamic law. There are concerns among the high-ups that the 1,500-year-old board game might encourage gambling, which is considered taboo by the murderous, radically misogynist theocracy.

Heroes
A couple in west London who stole back their own car from thieves after police said they were too stretched to investigate. Lawyers Mia Forbes Pirie and Mark Simpson had fitted their Jaguar E-Pace with an AirTag locator, so after it was stolen from outside their home they could see it was parked up only a few miles away. Forbes Pirie said the car was largely undamaged, and that the recovery mission was “kind of fun”.

Villain
The Michelin restaurant guide, for being racist, Eurocentric and elitist – at least according to an academic at Emerson College in Boston. Tulasi Srinivas complains that the foodie bible covers neither India nor any country in Africa, while celebrating “obscure” European gastronomic processes such as “fire cooking” in Stockholm and “molecular gastronomy” in Spain, asking: “Perhaps a side of racism with the boeuf bourguignon?”

Why we millennials are the way we are

It’s hard to imagine in these more straitened times, says Alexander Starritt in The Sunday Times, but 20 years ago the UK was swept by a popular campaign of astonishing ambition: to “make poverty history”. Hundreds of thousands marched in the streets; millions more, from Stephen Fry to Wayne Rooney, wore plastic wristbands. “Nelson Mandela wore a special one made of cotton.” We all felt so prosperous that the idea we could eliminate poverty altogether didn’t seem absurd at all. “That world is gone now.” The years since have been a period of relentless economic and political disorder: the financial crisis; austerity; Brexit; Donald Trump; the pandemic; war in Europe; Trump again. And most people don’t understand how much young people have been affected by all this.

It was Napoleon who said: “To understand the man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was 20.” Well, a youngish adult in the UK today has known only “fragility and disintegration”. Adjusted for inflation, the average working person in 2022 earned less than the average working person in 2008. Soaring house prices have made home ownership an impossible dream for many. Is it any surprise that millennials and Gen Z tend to be “anxious, sober and depressed”? The good news is that living through this era of “permacrisis” has given young people a “yearning for meaning and purpose”. My smartest friends have no interest in climbing the corporate ladder; they want to develop climate tech, or found battery companies, or work for the government. Yes, it’s easy to mock today’s youth for being worried about everything. But it’s surely better to “harness this force rather than to denigrate it”.

Series two of The Gold starts off with an irresistible premise, says Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian: what happened to the second half of the stolen bullion from the infamous Brink’s-Mat heist of 1983? The series follows the money through a “sprawling network of villains”, including Jack Lowden returning as the fugitive Kenneth Noye and Tom Cullen as the “charming rogue” known as “Goldfinger”. Hugh Bonneville is “at his best” as the copper leading the investigation, and Joshua McGuire as a dodgy accountant is an absolute “standout”. This is “top-quality British drama”.