John Healey’s first budget was a “modest” affair, says the FT, with the chancellor deferring the biggest decisions on welfare and defence spending until next autumn. The most attention-grabbing policy was a £100 handout for 20 million households to help with the rising cost of energy bills, paid for in part by tax rises on landlords, banks and gambling firms. In interviews this morning Healey denied shirking responsibility, saying he has funded the Defence Investment Plan and vowing to cut “unsustainable” welfare spending before the next election. The chancellor said reforms to reduce the welfare bill would be set out by the end of the year, including being “tough” on those who refuse help. King Charles joined a street dance parade in the Bahamas yesterday on the second day of his Caribbean tour. Flag-waving crowds cheered as the monarch bobbed in time to the beat, surrounded by dancers wearing sequins, feathers and tropical fruit necklaces. At one point he sought out a cocktail stand, telling the owner: “Save one of those for me later.”

Last year, says Will Lloyd in the FT, Rachel Reeves offered up what she called a “smorgasbord budget”. With John Healey, her Gradgrindian replacement, “you’d be lucky to get half a pork scratching”. The chancellor yesterday put off all the spending decisions that really matter – defence, welfare, energy – until next year. Instead of the “radical rewiring of the state” promised by Andy Burnham, we were given a “laundry list of regional bungs”: a few million quid for a market hall in Stafford, a bit of cash for a science park in North Wales. “Something about an airport in Doncaster.” The markets “barely flickered”, which will have been a relief to No 11. But the lack of ambition, the “fiscal minimalism”, was breathtaking.

This was effectively the “Martin Lewis budget”, says Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian – a set of tiny cash-saving measures of the sort you find in the MoneySavingExpert founder’s weekly email. Many of the most eye-catching policies – scrapping standing charges on gas bills, shielding more pensioners from income tax, helping poorer households with energy bills – came straight from Lewis’s wishlist. Healey even hosted the broadcaster in Downing Street for a “personal briefing” yesterday morning. Good politics, perhaps – Lewis “may be the closest thing Britain has to a genuine national treasure”. But even those of us who want Burnham to succeed will look at these “micro-policies” and conclude that his critics were right. He’s all talk. Kemi Badenoch put it best: “The prime minister came to power promising to end 40 years of neoliberalism, and instead we got 4p off gherkins.”

🎄🗳️ An early election – possibly as soon as December – looks more and more likely, says Tim Shipman in The Spectator. Burnham’s major policy announcements – social care, electoral reform, reversing Brexit – can happen only with a new mandate. And this “milquetoast” budget appears to have been designed not to disrupt Labour’s steady climb in the polls, where they currently sit eight points ahead of the Conservatives and 10 clear of Reform UK. The Tories are still “woefully unprepared”, with many candidates not yet selected for key seats, and moving quickly would limit Reform’s ability to spend its recent £72m donations windfall. Burnham has ruled out an early election, of course. But don’t be surprised if he rolls the dice.

Scientists have developed a ground-breaking personalised vaccine to treat skin cancer, says Nina Agrawal in The New York Times. In a trial, patients who received the jab were 42% less likely to experience a recurrence of the disease within two years than those who didn’t. The treatment uses the mRNA technology pioneered during Covid: doctors use genetic sequencing to identify the tumour’s distinctive proteins, then create a bespoke vaccine that teaches the patient’s immune system to target them. Researchers are already exploring whether the same technique will work for more complex cancers – and even, in high-risk patients, if it could prevent cancers from ever forming.

There’s a new “celebrity power pose”, says Carol Midgley in The Times: lying with one leg horizontal and the other stuck vertically in the air, ramrod straight. Victoria Beckham, Amanda Holden and Myleene Klass have all posted pictures of themselves in the uncomfortable-looking position, presumably to show off how incredibly supple they are. Personally, it reminds me of “a cat cleaning its bottom”. Still, it beats the “power shower pose” that was popular among celebs a few years back. I remember one video with Jennifer Lopez rubbing her body so furiously “I worried the poor woman might have ringworm”.

I’m no soppy liberal, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. But these midterm elections are frying my circuits. Take Texas, where Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico once claimed there are six sexes and that God is “non-binary”. Or the gubernatorial race in Ohio, where Democratic candidate Amy Acton spent the pandemic as health director, and imposed the rigid authority of the state with blind faith. Both would be “terrible political choices”. And yet I hope they win. Their opponents – Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio, Ken Paxton in Texas – are so abject that their election to public office would erode voters’ faith in democracy itself. “Ethically challenged” Paxton was reported to the FBI by his own staff for alleged corruption, and “shameless cynic” Ramaswamy enlisted the testimony of a woman who sided with the monster charged with abusing her child. A thrashing for this vile generation of Trump-aping Republicans is just what conservatism needs.

But if the Democrats do sweep the board on Tuesday, says Justin Webb in the Daily Mail, they may, strangely, come to regret it. Four years ago, the party did much better in the midterms than anyone expected, which helped convince an elderly Joe Biden to make the fateful decision to run again. Had they done badly the Democrats might well have ditched Biden, found a better candidate and seen off Donald Trump in 2024. Today, voters are backing the party not through enthusiasm for its policies or leaders, but through disgust at the nastiness and general stench of corruption in the Trump White House. If the Democrats mistake a romp in the midterms for a vote of confidence in the progressive ideology that is still prominent in parts of the party, they may delay or simply not bother with the essential work of growing up. And that’s bad for everyone.

🍳🤑 It’s easy to get over-excited about this or that political trend, says Edward Luce in the FT, but remember: if the Republicans do badly next week, voters won’t be “rejecting populism” any more than they were embracing it when they re-elected Trump in 2024. Americans are, once again, reacting against the high cost of living, which parties of all kinds are failing to fix pretty much everywhere.

The latest health concern doing the rounds online is “ferritin face”, says Nicola Davis in The Guardian, a term used by influencers to describe the pallor, dark eye circles, dry skin and hair loss that supposedly indicate low iron levels. Unlike many social media health fads, there’s something in this one. Sue Pavord, a consultant haematologist in Oxford, says people with an iron deficiency really do tend to look pale and tired with “dull and saggy” skin, and welcomes anything that raises awareness of a condition that affects 35% of women of reproductive age. “We need to stop normalising fatigue.”

There’s nothing like a parliamentary sketchwriter to prick a politician’s ballooning ego, says The Economist. Recent victims include Ed Davey (“like a smiley rural GP doling out cod-liver oil to old ladies”), education secretary Lucy Powell (“the sluice gates of mediocrity opened”) and Tory shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith (“a less sentient version of the PG Tips monkey”). Theresa May never escaped the nickname The Guardian gave her after a “particularly robotic” set of interviews: the “Maybot”. Such “indelicate sentiments” rarely grace the pages of mainstream newspapers in other countries. Here, they help keep our politicians honest. “Almost.”

It’s Apple’s brand new folding iPhone Duo, says Nicole Nguyen in The Wall Street Journal, which is causing consternation among some users by breaking almost as soon as it’s opened. One poor sod was showing off his new $2,000 handset to his wife when it got stuck at a 45-degree angle. When he tried to pry it further, he heard a “loud pop” and a bright line appeared on the screen. Another owner opened his to show a friend a mere six hours after receiving it, and got a similar “audible crack” and bright line. Apple says it’s happy to replace dodgy devices, but declines to reveal how many are affected.