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The day Cameron “humiliated” my husband
🫧 Sweeney’s soap | 📉 “TACO trade” | 🕸️ Operation Spider’s Web
In the headlines
Keir Starmer has unveiled the government’s strategic defence review, pledging to raise military spending to 3% of GDP, build six new munitions factories and a dozen new attack submarines, and invest £15bn in nuclear weapons. The 10-year defence plan, which warns of the “immediate and pressing” threat of Russia, does not specify when the 3% target will be hit. Far-right candidate Karol Nawrocki has won Poland’s presidential run-off, narrowly beating the pro-EU candidate Rafał Trzaskowski. The outcome is a “heavy blow” for Poland’s centre-right prime minister Donald Tusk, says the FT, and a win for the “Maga movement abroad”. Britain is twice as likely to have a hotter-than-usual summer this year. The promising prediction comes from the Met Office’s three-month outlook for June, July and August, which also anticipates an increased chance of heatwaves.
Comment

Samantha Cameron (L) and Sarah Vine in 2010. Leon Neal/AP/Alamy
The day Dave “humiliated” my husband
The Brexit referendum might have been so different, says Sarah Vine in her new book How Not To Be A Political Wife, excerpted in the The Mail on Sunday, if David Cameron had not “deliberately humiliated” my then husband Michael Gove. As education secretary, Michael had done everything Cameron asked: pushing through unpopular education reforms at considerable personal and political cost. His thanks? In 2014, Dave demoted him to chief whip, cutting him out of Cabinet, and – “much more catastrophic, given the perilous state of our finances” – slashing his pay by £36,000. It proved something important: after all those years of school runs, shared holidays and jolly kitchen suppers, Cameron had no loyalty to Michael, either as a friend or political ally. That was the point when a “shard of ice entered Michael’s heart”.
My ex-husband has always been a Eurosceptic. He wasn’t going to swallow his principles for someone who had “not only abandoned him, but also very deliberately fed him to the wolves to save his own skin”. His decision to join the Leave campaign didn’t go down well. At a birthday party, George Osborne spluttered to a friend of mine: “But… but… we made Michael Gove. Who was he before? He owes us his whole bloody career!” Pithy proof of what we always suspected: we Goves were “never quite good enough” for the public school nabobs in Cameron’s inner circle. I remember Dave turning to me in a lift, with “daggers in his eyes”, and saying through clenched teeth: “You have to get your husband… under control. For fuck’s sake, Sarah, I’m fighting for my political life here.” It was the last time we spoke. On the morning of the referendum he called Michael to coldly confirm the result, then walked out of Downing Street and resigned. “What a massive man-baby.”
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On the way back
Golden eagles are venturing back into England, says Jo Lonsdale on BBC News. The UK’s second-biggest bird of prey was wiped out by farmers and gamekeepers in England and Wales in the mid-19th century and has largely been confined to the remotest parts of the Scottish Highlands and islands ever since. But the majestic birds have recently been spotted across the border, some as far south as Yorkshire. The returning raptors “fit in perfectly with the landscape”, says wildlife enthusiast Ian Glendinning, who has spotted four in Northumberland in the past two months. “It just feels like they belong here.”
Giving the fans what they want

Sydney Sweeney in a bath
It’s an $8 bar of soap infused with Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater, the White Lotus star tells GQ, “because fans always joke about wanting my bathwater”.
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