“You see, Mr President, I have nothing to hide”

If you’re not well versed in popular culture, the US election may require some interpretation, says Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. At the Democratic National Convention, Nancy Pelosi was introduced as the “Mother of Dragons” – a reference to Game of Thrones. Kamala Harris herself has been anointed as “brat”, in homage to pop star Charli XCX’s album of the same name, denoting a “confident, nonchalantly rebellious woman”. Then there are the “wife guys”: men like Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, and her running mate Tim Walz who are “not ashamed to talk up their wives” and “take a back seat”. Since the moment Joe Biden stepped down, we’ve seen the world of social media and politics fully converge, with memes, celebrity and cultural symbolism now the language of the Democratic campaign. And so far, it seems to be working: Harris is, by all accounts, having a “Rennaissance” (a reference to Beyoncé).

Labour can do things the Tories would never get away with

I have watched Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s abolition of the winter fuel allowance with “something like awe”, says Douglas Murray in The Spectator. Not because I like the allowance, which has always seemed to me one of those schemes by which the government bribes the public “with the public’s own money and expects gratitude for doing so”. What interests me is the “non-response” Reeves has received. If a Tory chancellor had cancelled the scheme, it would have been widely decried as “fresh evidence that the Conservative party’s policy platform included freezing the elderly to death”. Yet for some reason what would have been “genocidal” in the hands of the Tories is mere economic sense in the hands of Labour.

Similarly, I have long believed only Labour could tackle illegal immigration. And lo, last week the Home Secretary announced a “large surge” of return flights out of the UK for failed asylum seekers. So far, everyone has nodded and accepted that Yvette Cooper is “trying to mend a broken system and good luck to her”, instead of denouncing her as a “white supremacist, a member of the KKK, or ‘literally Hitler’”. Had Priti Patel or Suella Braverman announced such a policy, it would have been declared the start of a “fourth Reich”. I wonder what Labour’s next miracle will be. My money’s on the “unreformed money-pit” of the NHS. The left loves accusing the Tories of wishing to destroy the NHS, despite the “vast spigot of cash” the last government turned on for it. But when Health Secretary Wes Streeting announces his inevitable plan to give patients access to private hospitals to cut waiting lists, he won’t be privatising the NHS, he will be saving it... “Lucky Rachel. Lucky Yvette. Lucky Wes.”

In the world of Formula One, fortunes can change in a heartbeat, says Theo Baker in Air Mail. In 2006, while leading the Monaco Grand Prix, Kimi Räikkönen’s silver McLaren caught fire. The “steely Finnish driver” pulled over to the side of the track, lifted himself out of his car, and, as race officials rushed to put out the flames, calmly removed his helmet, brushed off the debris, walked straight to his yacht in the nearby marina, and watched the rest of the race from a hot tub. A year later, he won the Drivers’ Championship, the highest award in motorsports, by just a single point.