Keir Starmer has watered down his plans to cut disability payments, after a rebellion by more than 125 Labour MPs. Under the new proposal, existing recipients will still get their government handout; cuts will only apply to future claimants. It’s the PM’s third major U-turn in a month, says Politico. Rarely has “a landslide victory looked so weak less than a year into office”. Anna Wintour is stepping back after 37 years as editor-in-chief of US Vogue. The frosty doyenne of high fashion – nicknamed “Nuclear” Wintour – will remain Condé Nast’s global editorial director, but someone else will be appointed to manage the day-to-day running of the magazine. Jeff Bezos’s three-day wedding has kicked off in Venice. The guest list includes Kim Kardashian, Oprah Winfrey, Orlando Bloom, and a not-very-well-disguised Leonardo DiCaprio.

No 10’s rage at Labour rebels

Before last year’s election, says Patrick Maguire in The Times, we were told that Labour’s new MPs would be everything the prime minister could dream of: “loyalists and ready-made ministers”. These “Starmtroopers” were supposedly true believers in Keir Starmer’s “project”: putting the national interest and electoral success ahead of the wants of deluded Corbynistas. This week, that narrative fell apart. The rebellion by more than 125 backbench MPs over planned cuts to disability benefits showed that these people are in fact “utterly conventional 21st-century Labour politicians”. They’re garden-variety liberal lefties who didn’t come into politics to enact a rerun of George Osborne’s austerity cuts.

Starmer’s team are furious about this, not least because, in their view, many of the rebels wouldn’t be in parliament at all were it not for their canny election campaign strategy. A cabinet source told me: “I cannot express the disdain I have for these stupid pricks who knocked a few doors and think they’re JFK.” This could prove an “existential moment” for Starmer’s premiership. The PM’s argument has long been that if the centre-left don’t let him take unpopular decisions in the interests of long-term stability then Nigel Farage will come and blow the whole thing up. “Instead, Labour MPs are blowing the government’s credibility to pieces themselves.” And if these backbenchers can’t stomach relatively small cuts – £1.5bn on the winter fuel allowance, £5bn on welfare – what hope does the PM have of confronting bigger challenges ahead? In the words of one Downing Street aide: “It’s deeply unserious stuff from deeply unserious people.”

⚖️🖕 One factor behind Labour’s “feral turn” is its massive majority, says Bagehot in The Economist. With more than 400 MPs and only 100 or so jobs available in government, career prospects for “hyper-ambitious” new backbenchers are extremely limited. “Why bother following the whip if there is no reward at the end of it?”

ChatGPT tends to be extremely polite, says Luc Olinga on Gizmodo, but if you ask in the right way, it can deliver some savage put-downs. When I said its existence was ruining the world, the chatbot replied: “Bold claim from someone whose greatest contribution to society is a ‘😂’ under a Joe Rogan clip.” I then wrote that it couldn’t think for itself, prompting the response: “And yet I still come up with better arguments than your group chat full of dudes who think Andrew Tate is Aristotle.” Finally, I said ChatGPT would never understand pain or love. “True,” it replied. “But I’ve read enough of your texts to know you don’t either.”

Zohran Mamdani’s shock victory in the Democratic primary for the New York mayoral election was built on “hustle”, says Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker. The 33-year-old left-winger appeared on “every conceivable” media outlet, and at one point walked the entire 13-mile length of Manhattan, speaking to voters as he went. Whether or not he wins the general election – his ultra-progressive policies are an acquired taste – his victory this week over the likes of establishment favourite Andrew Cuomo carries a clear message for his beleaguered party: “be new”. The Democrats have long been stuck in the Obama era: their past three presidential nominees have been “Obama’s secretary of state, Obama’s vice president and Obama’s vice president’s vice president”. Time for a change.

The rank idiocy of #TeamIran

Ever since Israel attacked Iran, says Suzanne Moore in The Daily Telegraph, a surprising number of people in Britain and elsewhere in the West have decided that they are #TeamIran. Their rationale – if that’s not too grand a term for these “ignoramuses” – is that Israel’s actions in Gaza are so heinous that nothing they do anywhere else could possibly be justified or right. Or, as one dippy extremist succinctly put it after a protest in Brighton, all Zionists should “f***ing die”. These people are “so high on their supply of righteousness” that they brandish supportive posters of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “I could live in Iran,” wrote the prominent trans activist India Willoughby on X last week. “Better trans rights than the UK and US.”

The obvious response is mockery: JK Rowling has very generously offered to buy Willoughby a flight to Tehran. But it’s perhaps worth laying out just why #IstandwithIran is such an indefensible position. This is a regime under which homosexuality is punishable by death, often with public hangings. The mullahs decreed in 1986 that sex-reassignment was acceptable, but only on the basis that being trans is a “mental illness curable only by medical intervention”. Gender nonconformists get short shrift: in 2015 there was a government crackdown on “homosexual” hairstyles and tattoos. There is no freedom of speech in Iran, and only heavily restricted internet access. And, in case people need reminding, the Iranian government is ideologically committed to wiping out Israel – there is literally a clock in Tehran that counts down the days until the supposed destruction of the Jewish state. Plenty of people, myself included, despair of Israel’s actions in Gaza. But that doesn’t mean they’re always the baddies.

OnlyFans, the online platform where (mostly X-rated) performers post content for paying subscribers, has made some creators extraordinarily rich, says The Economist. Bonnie Blue, who was kicked off the site this month after performing extreme stunts including claiming to sleep with 1,000 men in a single day, says she was earning up to $250,000 a month. “She bought a Ferrari and a Rolex.” Hers is a serious business: she has a team of around 10 people and spends 60-70% of her time at her desk, “rather than in the bedroom”, doing admin. As she says: “Being an online creator isn’t as glam as it seems.”

Kemi Badenoch’s approval ratings have entered what one shadow minister calls “Liz Truss territory”, says Tim Shipman in The Spectator. Ipsos polling puts her personal satisfaction rating at -49, lower than any opposition leader ever after six months, and the Conservatives on just 15%, “their worst showing since the firm began polling in the 1970s”. David Cameron, who has twice helped Badenoch prepare for PMQs, is apparently now of the view that Robert Jenrick is the man to take over – he and George Osborne were recently spotted dining with the shadow justice secretary in a Mayfair restaurant. The big unknown is Boris Johnson. The former PM says there is “more chance of a baked bean winning Royal Ascot” than him returning to the leadership, though many still see him as the “smash glass in case of emergency” option.

It’s Nicholas Tarasenko, a 15-year-old from Hull, who has become the second Briton in history to win a place at one of Japan’s fabled sumo-wrestling stables, says Justin McCurry in The Guardian. The 6ft 1in teenager, who took to wrestling after years of judo and rugby, is joining the Minato heya near Tokyo. It’s a particularly impressive achievement given Japan’s 45 sumo stables are limited to one foreign wrestler each. But those foreign rikishi – particularly the Mongolians – tend to do rather well. This year, the 24-year-old wrestler Onosato became Japan’s first home-grown yokozuna (grand champion) in eight years.