I recently mentioned to a Labour bigwig that “Blairites seem to have lost faith in this government”, says Tim Shipman in The Spectator. “Of course they have,” the former cabinet minister replied. “This is the second term of Gordon Brown.” I got the point. The Starmer government can be seen as the “final triumph” of Brown’s communitarian creed over Tony Blair’s individualism. Starmer and Brown are both excessively cautious, indulgent of the left and morally sniffy about political opponents, and each spent a decade angling for power then didn’t know what to do when they got it. But whatever Brown’s flaws, says the former cabinet minister, “Gordon had dense knowledge, constant curiosity and intellectual flair… Keir just has the flaws”.

Yet for the moment, at least, the race to replace the PM is on hold, says Ailbhe Rea in The New Statesman. Andy Burnham flamed out at the Labour conference. Angela Rayner has unfinished business with HMRC that prevents her from running. And Wes Streeting was incandescent when he found out that top Starmer aide Morgan McSweeney had been briefing the press that he was planning a coup. During a “bitter, angry” exchange, Streeting said he wasn’t “plotting”, but with the party languishing in the polls, he was, of course, “planning”. Half the cabinet, he explained, were planning. What’s striking is that the new year has brought a new consensus: “We don’t do regicide.” This may be less a moral stand than a reckoning with parliamentary arithmetic. A challenger would need the backing of 80 MPs to trigger a leadership election, and many doubt whether the Parliamentary Labour Party would be disciplined enough for the job. “I know the PLP,” says one Labour veteran. “They’re a bunch of cowardly custards.”

Every day of his 27-day spell in jail for corruption last year, says Muriel Zagha in Engelsberg Ideas, Nicolas Sarkozy sat down at a plywood table to document his experience with a Bic pen. In Journal d’un prisonnier, which somehow stretches to 200 pages, the former French president describes his conversations with the prison chaplain, the “alarming sounds” outside his 11-square-metre cell, his reading list – a biography of Jesus and Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte-Cristo – and his interference-proof diet of yoghurt and cereal bars.

The “prison memoir” is something of a French tradition. When denied ink and paper in his cell at Vincennes in 1750, the writer Jean Henri Latude – who spent 35 years banged up at the behest of Madame de Pompadour – wrote chapters of his bestselling Mémoires Authentiques de Latude on “flattened pieces of bread with a fishbone dipped in his own blood”. The Marquis de Sade completed The 120 Days of Sodom in tiny writing covering both sides of a 12-metre-long roll of paper in the Bastille in 1784. As Simone de Beauvoir put it: “Into prison walked a man, and a writer came out of it.”

I once visited Florence in very early January, says Marina O’Loughlin in the FT, and discovered a secret: the “off-off season”, the magical moments when not even the most intrepid (and presumably child-free) tourists are making travel plans. That week in Florence wasn’t the usual “elbows-out nightmare”, but simple enchantment. Crisp and wonderfully cold, the streets still draped in festive lights, “I had the city to myself”. No queues at the Duomo or the Uffizi; no jostling with a million zombified Americans gawping at the city’s Renaissance splendour through their smartphone cameras. Tricky bookings at the hottest restaurants were easily come by; hotels were cheaper; the occasionally frosty Florentine welcome became distinctly warmer. During summer visits, I never, ever walk over the rammed Ponte Vecchio. “This time it was mine, all mine.”

November in Sicily is “equally heavenly” – in the summer heat the only options are pool or air-conditioning, “with a great deal of time dedicated to showering”. In autumn you can take things more slowly, exploring all the odd, ancient little shops selling hardware or “slippers that look like they’d never seen the 21st century”. You can linger in a drowsy, fusty cafe sipping a granita “ripe with mulberries and blowsy with cream”. Having discovered this secret, I feel truly sorry for those tourists who persist in clogging Rome’s ancient byways in the grisly heat of August. I have occasionally dodged crowds in less benign circumstances, as when I arrived in Bangkok to find the road to the Four Seasons blocked by violent protesters. Gloriously, “we were the hotel’s only guests”. This month I’m off to Athens. “Queues at the Parthenon? Pfft.”