Wage growth slowed and unemployment in the UK unexpectedly rose to 5% in the three months to March, in the latest signs of the effect the Middle East conflict is having on the economy. The Office for National Statistics also said that the number of job openings has fallen to its lowest level since the depths of the 2021 Covid lockdown. A California jury has tossed out Elon Musk’s high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI and its boss Sam Altman, saying the Tesla boss waited too long to file it, meaning his claims had essentially expired. Musk accused Altman of “stealing a charity” by converting OpenAI, to which he donated millions of dollars, from a charitable venture to a for-profit company. The King met David Beckham and Alan Titchmarsh at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show yesterday, ahead of its opening to the public today. This year’s show features a rustic cottage inspired by Charles’s Highgrove house, as well as various gnomes painted by celebrities including Joanna Lumley, Mary Berry and Brian May.

Ever since Keir Starmer took office in 2024, there’s been talk of a “reset” with the EU, says Lionel Laurent in Bloomberg. Now, with his premiership on the brink, any successor is expected to “hasten the rapprochement”. But who’s to say the EU wants Britain back? European diplomats still bristle at the UK’s history of “regulatory cherry-picking”. Nor is Britain’s sluggish economy the “El Dorado” it once seemed for a bloc struggling with its own stagnant growth. And good luck debating any kind of agreement while Nigel Farage is “on the march”. The local elections have only cemented to Brussels that Europe-friendly Labour will almost certainly be turfed out and potentially replaced by “Mr Brexit himself”. That’s enough to “keep everyone’s guard up”.

The question isn’t whether the EU would want us, says Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator, but why on earth we’d want them. The bloc is unable to agree on anything from Ukraine to its own budget. Frugal northern nations like Germany and Holland are fed up with the profligacy of an increasing number of southern nations. Italy is on course to surpass Greece as the most indebted country in the Eurozone; unemployment in France has risen above 8% for the first time since 2021, fuelling fears of a “long and deep” recession. Meanwhile, Spain’s decision to grant residency to half a million undocumented migrants provoked fury across the continent and marked the nation out as Europe’s “soft underbelly” – irregular crossings on the Western Mediterranean route into Spain are already up 50% this year. It’s hard to see how anyone could make the case for re-joining a bloc in such “terminal decline”.

🤖📈 Another danger of trying to rejoin is losing our competitive advantage, says Anne McElvoy in The i Paper. Many defence tech firms and top AI companies choose to operate in the UK “precisely because they don’t have to deal with the EU”. If we’re betting major growth on digital services rather than goods then we’re far better outside the bloc, where we can cut deals and innovate without all its complicated standards and constraints.

Voting in this month’s local elections wasn’t as “logical and considered” as you might have thought, say Jim Waterson and Polly Smythe in London Centric. Voters can typically put a cross beside the names of multiple candidates, who are listed in alphabetical order. This leads to the so-called “ballot order effect” – those with surnames beginning with A or B doing better than those further down the alphabet. Analysis of results in three councils – Bexley, Westminster, and Hammersmith and Fulham – found that in 82% of cases, the candidate whose name appeared highest on the ballot outperformed his or her party colleagues lower down the list.

Gen Z “brethren” are giving the Freemasons an image update, says Charlotte Lytton in The Standard. On TikTok, young members of the secret society are unpacking some of the mystery behind it, performing on-trend dance routines and producing their own grime music, with lyrics such as “faith, hope, charity; man walk the walk”. Stuffy dinners are being swapped out for trips to Nando’s, and some Freemason groups are centred on modern pursuits such as Formula 1 and rum. But some things never change: what goes on at the meetings remains “opaque”.

The mood around the Ukraine war has palpably shifted, says Lawrence Freedman on Substack. Russia’s economy is struggling and Ukraine’s long-range drones are striking ever deeper, hitting the Moscow Oil Refinery, a chemical plant producing nitric acid for shells, and Gazprom’s Astrakhan facility. The symbolism was hard to miss at this year’s Victory Day parade in Moscow: a truncated, paranoid affair shorn of the advanced weaponry that once intimidated the West. Russian forces are now losing as many as 20,000 men – dead – per month, “buying less ground at higher cost than at any point this year”. Even Marco Rubio has begun echoing Kyiv’s line, calling it “a bad war” for Russia.

Yet there are still reasons for caution. Ukraine’s recruitment process is flawed, desertion is rife and its forces are spread thinly across a front line over 1,000 km long. A corruption scandal has reached President Zelensky’s inner circle, with the former chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, now charged. Russia is still producing drones in vast quantities, and the firmer ground of spring will help its grinding push towards the so-called “fortress cities” of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Perhaps most important, Vladimir Putin shows no sign at all of giving up. He depends on a General Staff that has been “relentlessly optimistic and boastful”, and they have convinced him his forces can capture the entire Donbas region by autumn. In actual fact, at their current rate it would take three decades. Whatever’s happening on the battlefield, this war will only end when “Putin’s perceptions catch up with reality”.

Many of today’s most “playful, experimental” new wines are coming from an unexpected source, says Victoria Daskal in the FT: London. The city’s urban wineries buy grapes from Oxfordshire, Kent, Sussex and Essex (and occasionally further afield) and blend them in special facilities in old warehouses, railway arches and industrial estates. Fulham’s London Cru produces English sparkling wine, as well as Chardonnay and Pinot Noir; Vagabond Wines in Canada Water produces 100,000 bottles a year in more than 100 different styles. Also helpful: England’s relatively cool climate produces light, fresh, less boozy wines – “exactly where modern demand is heading”.

The late peeress Lena Jeger once told her fellow diners in the House of Lords dining room that all the people she had slept with were now dead, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. Someone at the table piped up: “What about me?” Jeger gave her fellow peer a look, and replied: “You were dead at the time.”

It’s an exclusive new pocket watch, say Kathryn Armstrong and Vicky Wong on BBC News, which has sparked a frenzy that has forced stores to close around the world and police to deal with unruly shoppers. The Royal Pop collection – a collaboration between the Swiss watchmakers Swatch and Audemars Piguet – drew huge “mob-like” crowds in cities across the UK and elsewhere when it launched on Saturday, as people rushed the doors after queuing, in some cases, for days. Sales were restricted to one £335 watch per person, which one buyer claims to have resold online for more than £1,000.