Councils face an “uphill struggle” to be ready for May’s local elections, administrators have warned, after Keir Starmer abandoned plans to postpone ballots in 30 authorities yesterday. The prime minister’s latest U-turn – his 14th, or thereabouts – came after officials concluded that they were likely to lose a legal challenge brought by Reform UK. Wage growth slowed and unemployment rose to a five-year high in the final quarter of 2025, raising the likelihood that the Bank of England will cut interest rates in the spring. Unemployment hit 5.2% in the three months to December, up from 5.1% in the previous quarter, while wage growth fell to 4.2%. The US civil rights leader Jesse Jackson has died aged 84. The Baptist minister was a protégé of Martin Luther King and made two groundbreaking runs for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988. “He may never be president, but some black American will,” a Washington Post columnist wrote at the time. “And whoever it is will owe a tremendous debt to Jackson.”

At the end of Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, says Sylvie Kauffmann in Le Monde, the German delegation exchanged nods and rose for a standing ovation. The US secretary of state had spoken warmly of German beer, Beethoven and the Beatles, and emphasised that the end of the transatlantic era was “neither our goal nor our wish”. Afterwards, several European leaders openly expressed relief that there had been no repeat of JD Vance’s jaw-dropper a year ago. But while the tone of Rubio’s address was different, the substance was the same: the US is willing to co-operate on defence but only on its terms. Those celebrating were soon being compared to the “abused wife who wants to believe her husband has changed because he stops beating her for a few days”.

Europe’s “delusion” reminds me of that old quote attributed to Winston Churchill, says Wolfgang Münchau in UnHerd: “Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.” Many leaders still cling to the belief that Donald Trump is an “aberration”. But getting the Europeans to do more on defence has long been US policy – Barack Obama called us “free riders” – and not even a pro-Europe Democrat in the White House would change that. Unfortunately, there is little evidence Europe is up to the task. This isn’t just because of money. Another factor is that each European country has its own procurement policy, so the whole system is hopelessly inefficient and expensive. Russia pays up to four times less for its artillery shells, for example. That’s why our current situation is so dangerous: we have left one security framework but have yet to enter a new one. Until we do, “anything could happen”.

When Israel responded to the October 7 massacre by launching air strikes not just on Gaza but also on Lebanon and parts of Syria, says Robert Worth in The Atlantic, you might have expected the then Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, to have been giving it his full attention. Not so. A former Hezbollah operative says Assad was in fact spending much of his time playing Candy Crush and other video games on his phone. That wasn’t the only distraction: he had also been having an affair with an adviser and sleeping with women she procured for him, “including the wives of high-ranking Syrian officers”.

To celebrate Shrove Tuesday, The Times asked Patricia Trijbits, founder of the London restaurants Where The Pancakes Are, for her “batter basics”. She recommends whisking only until the flour is just combined, and no more, to avoid the pancakes coming out tough; leaving the mixture to sit for 30 minutes so the gluten relaxes; not using too much butter or oil in the pan (“you want the pancakes to brown, not to fry”); and waiting until there is no liquid on top of the pancake before flipping or tossing.

The earliest reviews of Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heights, were not forgiving, says Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. Writing about the “eccentricities of women’s fantasies” and “unchecked passion” was an outrage, and the book was dismissed as “wild, confused, disjointed”, even “revolting”. Reading nearly exactly the same things in reviews of Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation – self-indulgent, wrong, “a travesty” – was as if “180 years had not happened”. Sure, some of the saucier scenes aren’t lifted directly from Brontë’s prose. But I can tell you this: “she would have loved it”.

To the Brontës, living in mud, imagination was everything; Fennell’s genius is in her ability to be voluptuous and inventive. Thrushcross Grange, where Cathy flees in search of a better life, is a Saltburn-esque paradise of silks, velvets, dresses, ribbons and trinkets. There are jellies, croquet, rose-tinted glasses, ruffs and muffs (of “both varieties”). To the charge that there’s no sex in Brontë’s novel, well, yes: but just because she didn’t explicitly write a 40-page sex scene doesn’t mean the book doesn’t “ripple with lust”. Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff – glowering, tall – may as well have been “hand-picked” by the author, whose hero had “deep-set” eyes full of “black fire”. To Victorians, men panting over a sketch of a woman, as in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, would have been about as filthy as Cathy “cracking one out on the moors” is to us today. Yes, Fennell has chopped out half the book, as is usual with adaptations. A decorous one wouldn’t have prostitutes, squelching, strawberries the size of cannonballs, “erotic eggs”, half as much blood, or Cathy running about the moors in “ever more teetering (mouthwatering) bits of couture”. But who’d prefer that adaptation over this?

📙📈 I wasn’t a fan of the film, says Jo Ellison in the FT, but I’m “eternally grateful” to Fennell for reacquainting me with Brontë’s book. And I’m not alone: sales have risen by 469% in the UK since last year, and more than doubled in the US, as thousands return to a novel they haven’t touched since school.

The Egyptian tennis novice Hajar Abdelkader – who crashed out of a professional tournament in Kenya after convincing organisers to give her a wildcard – joins the list of sport’s “great pretenders”, says Patrick Kidd in The Critic. Others include amateur cricketer Adrian Shankar, who secured a contract at Worcestershire in 2011 after telling them he’d had a “prolific first-class winter in Sri Lanka”; and would-be golfer Maurice Flitcroft, a 45-year-old crane driver who blagged his way into the 1976 Open Championship qualifying round with a half set of clubs, having never played 18 holes. He went round in 121 shots, 49 over par.

To The Guardian:

Confirmation that the world has gone mad: I got into my car, a Smart #1, on Saturday, and before it did anything else, the car said “Love is in the air” and wished me a happy Valentine’s Day. As a matter of principle, I refused to speak to it for the rest of the day.

Ray Woodhams
Cawthorne, South Yorkshire

It’s Liz Truss meeting Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago earlier this week, says Kate Nicholson in HuffPost. The shortest-lived prime minister in British history, who posted the photo on X with a caption saying the US president was “right about everything”, has increasingly sought to position herself as a MAGA voice since losing her parliamentary seat in the 2024 election. Responses to the image weren’t entirely kind. “A bona fide lunatic,” wrote journalist Alex Massie. “And Donald Trump.”