Wes Streeting appears to be holding back on his predicted resignation. Allies of the health secretary claim he “has the numbers” to mount a formal leadership challenge against Keir Starmer but add that “things have shifted” since yesterday. Angela Rayner says she has been “cleared” after paying £40,000 to settle an HMRC investigation into her tax affairs, paving the way for a potential leadership bid. Xi Jinping told Donald Trump the “Taiwan question” was critical to US-China relations and could lead to “conflict” if badly managed as the two began their high-stakes summit in Beijing. The US president described a two-hour meeting this morning as “great”, while Xi called for their countries to be “partners, not rivals”. The most famous self-portrait of JMW Turner, which inspired his depiction on the £20 note, is not a self-portrait at all, according to the artist’s biographer. James Hamilton says the c.1799 painting, which was likely bundled up with hundreds of Turner’s works after he died, doesn’t match the English Romantic painter’s style, and is more likely by his contemporary John Opie.

Reputable bookies are offering 13/2 on the Conservatives winning the next general election. Those odds “should tempt a punter”, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. Yes, “voting intention” polls show voters skirting the Tory party “as though it were made of uranium”, but three years away from an actual election, there are better predictors of the eventual result. The Conservatives are the most trusted party on the economy, the most important issue for voters, above even immigration. And a fast-improving Kemi Badenoch is already more popular than Nigel Farage. It’s too-little remarked how extraordinary this is. “A party so recently jeered from office should not even be competitive.”

Another reason to think the Tories are underpriced is that Labour will fall even further. If Keir Starmer goes, Britain faces three years with an unelected prime minister, enacting policies to the left of the government’s 2024 mandate. “It would take a Dante to put into words how hated these people are going to be.” The problem isn’t Starmer but Labour itself, which exists to spend public money, and will still be screaming “austerity” when the bailiffs come banging on the door. Winning back “moderate, tax-fatigued voters” shouldn’t be tricky. Beating Nigel Farage will be harder. But the Reform leader has an under-discussed liability: in 2029, he will be 65, which would make him the oldest incoming prime minister since Winston Churchill’s return to power in 1951. And Britain is nearing a “1979 moment”, when long-delayed reform – taxes and borrowing are both vastly too high – finally becomes inevitable. Farage is too much the crowd-pleaser to slash welfare; Labour wouldn’t obey a leader who tried. Voters may look at Badenoch and conclude: “There is no alternative.”

If you’re endlessly returning things you bought online, here’s a cautionary tale, says Sophia Money-Coutts on Substack. A friend of mine ordered a dress for Ascot last year and when it arrived, she didn’t love it but decided it would do for the day. She sneakily kept the tag in, intending to return it afterwards, which she duly did, only for an email to arrive from the brand a few weeks later reprimanding her. She had clearly worn the dress before sending it back to them, they said, “since they’d found a betting slip in the pocket”.

When a poll recently asked Gen Z which public figures they’d most want to model their lives on, there was a clear winner, says Casey Lewis on Substack: Zendaya. The actress was picked by 13% of respondents, way ahead of Elon Musk on 8%, Beyoncé at 4% and Taylor Swift and Kylie Jenner down on 3%. A pleasing 36% didn’t want to be like any of the celebrities on offer. The most desirable careers were “successful but non-famous tech entrepreneur” (18%) and “respected intellectual” (17%). Just 5% wanted to be an influencer, down from a whopping 50% in 2023. And just 3% said lawyer. So there’s hope.

There’s no doubt that another pandemic will strike, says Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times. And now the final passengers have disembarked from the MV Hondius – on which at least seven people were infected with the so-called “Andes strain” of hantavirus, three of whom are now dead – it’s not impossible the next one has begun. The World Health Organisation has tried to reassure the public that hantavirus can only be transmitted through “close and prolonged contact”, and Donald Trump echoed the WHO on Monday, saying it’s “not easy to spread”. But research on previous outbreaks of this exact strain suggests just the opposite: airborne transmission, “superspreaders” and a reproduction rate not much lower than Covid. The one thing we know, in other words, is that the current policy of “crossing our fingers and hoping for the best” won’t cut it.

In 2018, this same strain of hantavirus broke out in a small, isolated town in Argentina. One infected person went to a birthday party with around 100 others for about an hour and a half. Five others – not just those who sat closest to him – later sickened. One of those five went on to infect six more, including his wife, before dying. At his funeral, his wife infected 10 more people. At this point authorities noticed and enforced strict quarantine measures, which worked. But what researchers learned should worry us: the period between infection and symptoms appearing can be as long as 40 days, during which time people are likely to be infectious. The MV Hondius passengers are scattered to the wind, including one who collapsed on arrival at Johannesburg airport 19 days ago and died soon after. It will be 21 days before we know how many she has infected. We may be lucky, but complacency is mad.

In 1876, says Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, an editorial in The Princetonian argued that having professors invigilate exams produced a “bad moral education”. Instead, students should simply promise not to cheat. It worked: the university’s “Honour Code” was adopted in 1893 and scarcely modified in the 133 years since. Old Princetonian F Scott Fitzgerald said breaking the code “simply doesn’t occur to you”. No longer. This week, after the rise in AI-assisted cheating became “too obvious to ignore”, Princeton voted to begin invigilating exams again. The Honour Code survived two world wars, the upheaval of the 1960s, Google and iPhones. But not ChatGPT.

I sat in Cabinet under two prime ministers whose leaderships unravelled, says Kwasi Kwarteng in The i Paper. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss failed for different reasons, but the last days were the same, defined by “uncertainty, delusion and panic”. One thing that is often overlooked is how big a factor politicians’ personal finances play in their decisions at these moments. Under Johnson, rich MPs like Rishi Sunak and Nadhim Zahawi were free to throw their weight around, but others hesitated not out of principle or vision, but because they knew their salaries would “nose dive” the minute they left office, and they needed the dosh.

It’s Nasa’s Perseverance Mars rover, says the Jet Propulsion Lab, in a “selfie” taken looking out over the sweeping backdrop of the so-called Lac de Charmes. The picture is a composite of 61 images taken using precision movements of its telescopic robot arm over the course of an hour, during the six-wheeled bot’s deepest push yet into the untouched Martian landscape beyond the Jezero Crater where it landed. The selfie was taken on 11 March, the 1,797th Martian day, or “sol”, of its mission, during which time it has travelled almost 26 miles – “just shy of a marathon”.