Keir Starmer has announced a big shake-up of his Downing Street operation, moving Treasury chief secretary Darren Jones to a new role overseeing delivery of the PM’s priorities, and appointing Minouche Shafik, former deputy governor of the Bank of England, as his chief economic adviser. The BBC’s Henry Zeffman says the changes are an implicit admission that the start of the PM’s tenure has “not exactly gone to plan”. Xi Jinping has called on Russia, India and others to join China in leveraging their economic might to challenge the “bullying behaviour” of Western powers. The 2025 meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, currently under way in Tianjin, marks Indian PM Narendra Modi’s first visit to China in seven years, says the FT – a sign of Delhi’s “deep frustration with Washington” over Donald Trump’s tariff war. Millions of Britons who take a daily aspirin to lower the risk of heart attack could benefit more from a different drug called clopidogrel, a new study suggests. Scientists found that the blood-thinner decreases the chance of cardiac arrest by an extra 14%.

Leaving the ECHR won’t stop the boats

The list of legal and political luminaries calling for Britain to abandon the European Convention on Human Rights grows “more distinguished by the week”, says Fraser Nelson in The Times. Proponents now include Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court Justice; the former Tory foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind; and New Labour grandees David Blunkett and Jack Straw. You can see the appeal of leaving the ECHR: it’s a Brexit-like story of good people and bad law; of “taking back control of justice”. The problem is that it would do “almost nothing” to solve the asylum crisis.

The ECHR says zilch about asylum, or about the right to enter or remain in a country. In the past five years, the legislation was invoked in just 2.5% of cases that successfully challenged the deportation of a foreign criminal; since 1980, the number of deportation and extradition cases overturned by Strasbourg stands at just 13. The real legal problem is the Refugee Convention, which obliges Britain to settle everyone with a “well-founded fear of persecution” – a definition that covers much of the world’s population in an era when many have the money to travel. It is this law, not the ECHR, that the small-boats arrivals are citing. And while Conservative types complain of “rule-by-lawyers”, that’s a complete misnomer. It is entirely in the gift of parliament to reform the law: if MPs don’t support a decision by the Supreme Court – on asylum or anything else – they can settle the matter by passing new legislation. Parliament is the “supreme lawmaking body, beyond challenge by judges or monarchs”. It’s about time the government remembered that and replaced the hotchpotch of asylum laws that were “designed for another age”.

Queen Camilla is one tough cookie, says Valentine Low in his new book Power and the Palace. During a meeting with Boris Johnson in 2008, the then Duchess of Cornwall said a man on a train had tried to sexually assault her when she was 16 or 17. Johnson asked how she responded. “I did what my mother taught me to,” the future queen replied. “I took off my shoe and whacked him in the nuts with the heel.” Not only that, but when the train arrived at Paddington she pointed the man out to someone in uniform and he was arrested.

After years of skincare obsessives preaching the gospel of sun protection, says Sara Ashley O’Brien in The Wall Street Journal, “extreme tanning is back”. The “UV index”, developed in the 1990s to help people protect themselves against excessive exposure, is increasingly being used for the opposite purpose: to figure out when the sun is at its strongest, for maximum tan. Some influencers are also promoting a minimalist approach to sun cream – a practice known as “tanmaxxing”. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who doesn’t wear sunscreen, has released a specific UV-tracking app called “Sun Day”.

At last, a politician who tells the truth

France’s prime minister, François Bayrou, recently did something extremely unusual for a Western political leader, says Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph. He told voters the truth. Shortly before his country went on a summer holiday it can “ill afford”, Monsieur Bayrou presented a budget that would cut a whopping €43.8bn from public spending, with freezes on welfare spending and tax thresholds, along with – quelle horreur! – the abolition of two bank holidays. These extreme measures were necessary, he explained, to reduce the budget deficit, which has risen to an unsustainable 5.8% of GDP. France’s national debt is currently growing by an astonishing €5,000 a second, or €432m a day.

Few expected such “economic brutality” from Bayrou, a veteran centrist previously seen as “spectacularly boring”. The 74-year-old now faces a vote of confidence on 8 September that he may well lose; Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Corbynesque socialist movement have been waiting for a moment to “gang up and kick him out”. But Bayrou’s brave acknowledgement that “the party is over” may at least spur the rest of Europe into action. During a meeting with Emmanuel Macron on the Riviera last week, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz acknowledged that his own country’s welfare system is no longer viable. Germany, like France and indeed like Britain, simply has too many claimants and too few contributors. Berlin has clearly been watching its neighbour “living beyond its means and pretending for too long that it wasn’t”. Are they watching in Downing Street?

🙏💰 There has been talk that both Britain and France may eventually need a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, says Joseph C Sternberg in The Wall Street Journal. It’s nonsense. The world’s sixth- and and seventh-largest economies are far too big for the IMF “or anyone else” to rescue. And even if they did, it’s hard to see what it would achieve. The IMF specialises in smoothing over short-term liquidity crises – its 1976 bailout of Britain, for example, steadied the pound as the government tried to balance the budget. But the UK and France today aren’t illiquid. “They’re insolvent.”

Finland’s air force has announced it will begin phasing out the use of swastikas on its flags, says Isabella Kwai in The New York Times, after finally conceding that the ancient symbol – which has been on Finnish flags since 1918, long before it was adopted by Adolf Hitler – was “often viewed as a symbol of Nazism”. The new emblem will now feature a soaring golden eagle in place of the ill-thought-of insignia. “We could have continued with this flag,” says Colonel Tomi Böhm, “but sometimes awkward situations can arise with foreign visitors.”

To The Spectator:

Marian Waters, who recalled how she’d pass railway journeys imagining she was foxhunting alongside the train (Letters, 23 August), may be delighted with this. It appeared in staff copies of GWR timetables until nationalisation in 1948: “Every care must be taken to avoid running over packs of hounds which, during the hunting season, may cross the line.”

David Pearson
Haworth, West Yorkshire

They’re three brothers from Edinburgh who have set a new world record for rowing across the Pacific Ocean unsupported, says Sky News. Ewan, Jamie and Lachlan Maclean completed the 9,000-mile voyage from Peru to Australia in 139 days, five hours and 52 minutes, raising £800,000 for clean water projects in Madagascar. The trio rowed for up to 14 hours a day in often perilous conditions – at one point youngest sibling Lachlan, 27, was thrown overboard during a nightshift. This isn’t their first rowing rodeo: in 2020 the Macleans crossed the Atlantic in just 35 days, becoming the youngest and fastest crew to do so.