Keir Starmer has fended off the biggest challenge to his leadership to date, telling Labour MPs he was “not prepared to walk away”. After Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar broke ranks yesterday and urged the PM to resign, other senior Labour figures, including leadership hopefuls Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner, rallied around. Benjamin Netanyahu has brought forward a planned trip to Washington by a week after Donald Trump boasted of having had “very good talks” with Iran. The Israeli PM, who was due to travel to the US on 18 February, will now arrive today to argue that any deal with Tehran must curb its ballistic missile programme as well as its nuclear ambitions. Elon Musk says he will build a “self-growing city” on the moon within the next 10 years. SpaceX has “shifted focus”, he says, from colonising Mars to founding a lunar city because planetary alignment means the six-month voyage to Mars can launch only once every 26 months, whereas a two-day moon journey can set off every 10 days.

A chicken that loses its head can still, for a short while, “run around and flap its wings”, says Owen Jones in The Guardian. After the fall of our “de facto prime minister” Morgan McSweeney, this is the phase the government has now entered. There will be some flapping, but the head is gone. Those of us on the left always knew this would happen. We said as much when Keir Starmer abandoned all those left-wing pledges he’d made to win the leadership campaign, without which he lacked any sort of coherent policy vision. We warned that the faction around the PM, who received more freebies than every Labour leader on record – “including Tony Blair” – was one dangerously mesmerised by “wealth, proximity to power and elite approval”. We warned that Labour winning barely a third of the vote amid record low turnout was not the crushing mandate everyone claimed. No one listened.

Personally, “I have disliked almost every Starmer policy to date”, says Mary Harrington in UnHerd. But I’m certainly not cheering his demise. “Have you seen what the rest of his party is like?” Labour’s mass of backbenchers is a “monstrous hybrid” of different factions and interest groups. If Starmer cuts taxes he’ll anger MPs representing net welfare recipients. If he raises them he’ll further immiserate the country’s “net contributors”. Let more migrants in and he’ll upset one group; keep them out and he’ll disappoint another. The only way all these internal disagreements could be held in balance, “even superficially”, was through the ferocious political manoeuvring and dark arts at which McSweeney clearly excelled. The prospect of Starmer trying to “hold the madder daydreams of his party in check” without the Northern Irishman at his side is certainly “ominous”. But if the PM goes, it’ll be “full on factional war”.

When Keir Starmer visited Hastings on Thursday, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph, his event was, as has become usual, picketed by farmers protesting on their tractors. Foolishly, Team Starmer drove his official Range Rover on to the green turf of a local sports complex, where it duly sank into the waterlogged ground. The prime minister’s entourage appealed to the farmers for help extracting the vehicle. “They refused and drove off home.” It’s hard to think of a neater metaphor for Starmer’s predicament. “He is stuck in the mire, and hardly anyone wants to get him out of it.”

Are you Roady? is a work of “actual genius”, says Matt Muir in Web Curios: a racing game in which you play “AS THE ROAD”. Simply move your mouse up and down, and side to side, to make the road turn, rise or fall, with the goal of making eight racing cars crash. Clever and addictive. Give it a try here.

There’s an irony to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, says Idrees Kahloon in The Atlantic: what may never be more than an annoyance to Donald Trump, who knew the convicted paedophile well, threatens to topple Keir Starmer, who never met him. This is partly because “decency and shame” matter deeply in British politics. But it’s also because the prime minister’s power comes almost exclusively from parliamentary confidence and party support. If you successfully impeach and remove the US president – a practical impossibility given it requires a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate – you don’t get to succeed him; the vice president does. In the UK, by contrast, “palace coups” are practically encouraged, because if you remove your party’s leader you don’t even need a general election to take the top job yourself.

It is this system that has seen no prime minister since David Cameron complete a full five-year term. During the pandemic, Boris Johnson’s leadership was hobbled by “Partygate”. Yet similar illicit gatherings at the White House don’t even rank in the “hundred worst Trump scandals”, and California Governor Gavin Newsom, who dined at the three-Michelin-star restaurant French Laundry during lockdown, is the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. The defining scandal of Liz Truss’s premiership was that she proposed a tax-cut package without a proper scoring from the Office for Budget Responsibility; America’s Congressional Budget Office has no such power. In the US, unlike the UK, it will take a lot more to bring down the government than a single “dodgy ambassador”.

When I was the editor of British Vogue, says Alexandra Shulman in the The Mail on Sunday, I thought the key to being an “alpha female” was leaping out of bed at first light. Recently, I’ve had a Damascene conversion: the secret to life is staying in bed. If I get up, my well-intentioned early mornings are instantly taken over by “housekeeping hassles”. Now, “lying in my lair with a pot of coffee and a laptop”, I surge ahead with work, booking appointments and churning through emails. Having completed all that by 11am, I’m far smugger than all those “Lululemon-clad women who run on treadmills at 6am”.

Giving up territory that Russia has failed to capture has long been a “red line” for Ukraine, says Maria Varenikova in The New York Times. But today, a growing number of “war-weary” Ukrainians say they’d be willing to do so if it meant “lasting peace”. Back in 2022, 82% of the population believed their country shouldn’t surrender territory under any circumstances; today, some 40% would support giving up the Donbas region in exchange for security guarantees from Western allies.

It’s a tiny sketch of a foot by Michelangelo that has sold at auction for a record-breaking $27.2m, says Issy Ronald in CNN. The dinky drawing, which is barely bigger than a hand and wasn’t expected to fetch much more than $2m, was sketched out in red chalk by the Renaissance master in preparation for his fresco Libyan Sibyl on the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. “I have been privileged to see many wonderful Old Masters moments,” said Andrew Fletcher, Christie’s head of Old Masters, “but today topped them all.”