Jeremy Corbyn will stand as an independent candidate at the general election. The number of Conservative MPs who have said they will step aside before 4 July has reached 73, nearing the record 75 who quit prior to Labour’s landslide victory in 1997. A London-born boy is set to become the first millennial saint. Carlo Acutis, a computer prodigy who helped spread Catholic teaching online before his death in 2006, aged 15, has had a second posthumous miracle attributed to him by Pope Francis, clearing the way for his canonisation. Holiday bookings are up 57% as Brits flee the “bull and boloney” of the forthcoming political campaigns, says the Daily Star. It’s the “general ejection”.

Sunak’s gamble is certainly “bold”

After Rishi Sunak announced the general election to his cabinet, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph, ministers “banged the table with pretend approval”. In truth, the feeling most had was of “stunned disbelief”. David Cameron told Sunak his plan was “bold”, which every Yes Minister fan knows is Westminster-speak for “madness”. They were all invited to stay and watch the PM on a big TV as he popped out to make the announcement. “Blood drained from ministerial faces” as Sunak’s suit steadily soaked up the rain and his words were drowned out by Labour campaign music. “We all had to pretend we weren’t seeing what we all saw,” says one present. “It was a shambles.”

Ministers have since learnt that this is to be a “presidential campaign” – in other words: Rishi Sunak vs Keir Starmer rather than Tory vs Labour. There’s some sense in this. Sunak can be confident in his ability to “outclass the plodding Starmer” in television debates, and in polling, the Labour leader is less popular than his party. But Sunak’s own approval ratings are “worse than almost any PM in postwar history”. Johnson, Blair, Brown, Thatcher, Callaghan: “none had such low job-satisfaction ratings”. Admirers like me have to acknowledge that we are in a “small, almost cultish minority”. Sunak may not be one of the best prime ministers, but he’s certainly one of the best people to have been prime minister. His “ability, energy, sense of duty and basic decency” are striking to those who know him. But to fight a presidential-style campaign with such a low personal rating is, as Cameron would say, “bold”.

🗳️ 41 days to go…
We’re often told that political polarisation “has spread across advanced economies”, says Torsten Bell in The Guardian. It hasn’t. Though America might have become rabidly partisan in recent years, other rich countries have seen only modest rises (France and Switzerland) or modest falls (the UK and Germany) in polarisation. British voters, after all, “handed the Tories their biggest victory since Thatcher in 2019, but are now on track to give Labour a thumping win”. They’re not polarised – “they’re pissed off and volatile”.

Gen Z are going crazy for cassettes, says Bloomberg. More than 436,000 of the old-school tapes were sold in the US last year, up from 81,000 in 2015. Young audiophiles are drawn by the “second-hand nostalgia” of owning a physical music collection, and low production costs make it a more affordable option than (equally trendy) vinyl.

Scarlett Johansson and the future of AI

If you want to understand the philosophy that underpins Silicon Valley’s AI gold rush, “look no further than OpenAI’s Scarlett Johansson debacle”, says Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic. The company behind ChatGPT asked the actress if it could license her voice for a new digital assistant, in a faintly naff tribute to an AI she voiced in the 2013 movie Her. She told them to sod off, but two days before the company’s keynote event last week, they rang her team and urged her to reconsider. Again, no permission was granted. But when the event came around, they went ahead and launched a new chatbot called Sky, with a voice that was “alarmingly similar” to Johansson’s. When she then called in her lawyers, OpenAI claimed innocence – but removed the voice “out of respect” for the actress.

This is not just another example of a tech company “blowing past ethical concerns” with impunity. It’s also a neat reminder of the widely held and entirely sincere belief that the “superintelligence” they’re building is “too big, too world-changing, too important” for pesky concerns like copyright. The goal has always been to build an AI that would “alter the course of history”, ushering in a global utopia where professions disappear and humanity experiences “quantum leaps in science and medicine”. What they’re less hot on is what that means for ordinary folk. One OpenAI boffin was recorded last year confessing that it was “deeply unfair” that a small group of people building AI would “take everyone’s jobs away”, but that “there’s nothing you can do to stop them”. His suggestion? “I don’t know. Raise awareness, get governments to care, get other people to care. Yeah. Or join us and have one of the few remaining jobs. I don’t know; it’s rough.”

Here is a full list of the surnames of boys chosen as King’s Scholars arriving at Eton this year: Adeboye, Bajpai, Bonney, Cao, Kumar, Ong, Shi, Tan, Turner, Wang, Wang, Wang, Wu, Xu. As someone who got one of these scholarships 55 years ago, says Charles Moore in The Spectator, I give thanks for the late Chairman Mao, “whose Cultural Revolution so cut off his own people from the rest of the world that I was in no danger of having to compete with them”.

It’s a custom-made piano designed by Edelweiss, a family-run firm in Cambridgeshire. The piano was invented in Italy, refined by the French and “near-perfected by the Germans”, says the FT. But for a period in the 19th century, models made in England were among the best in the world. Edelweiss is trying to return to those glory days. “We passionately believe,” says founder Mark Norman, “that a piano doesn’t have to be big and black with three legs”. See more here.