Benjamin Netanyahu says it is too early to tell whether Iran was behind the apparent attempt to crash a Tel Aviv-bound flight yesterday. After the co-pilot stabbed the lead pilot, the Flydubai plane plunged more than 17,000ft, before passengers entered the cockpit, subdued the assailant and brought the aircraft under control. The Israeli PM says their actions averted a “9/11 disaster”. A Tennessee death row inmate has been taken to hospital after an attempt to execute her by two lethal injections failed. Christa Pike, who was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, was given two syringes of pentobarbital but could still be heard snoring 40 minutes later. The broadcaster and campaigner Esther Rantzen has died aged 86. The That’s Life! presenter launched both the youth charity Childline and the old age charity Silver Line, and became a vocal supporter of assisted dying after an incurable lung cancer diagnosis in 2023. Andy Burnham led the tributes, saying Rantzen “changed countless lives”.

Say what you like about Andy Burnham, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, “at least he does not pretend to care about growth”. What he calls his “theory of growth” is so thin I double-checked the transcript of his conference speech for a missing page. Unlike Keir Starmer, who feigned interest then raised taxes and red tape on business, or the last few Tory prime ministers – who extolled dynamism in the abstract while favouring pensioners, gumming up the planning system and spurning Europe – Burnham is a “fairly honest stagnationist”. Asked about the potential economic tonic of a third runway at Heathrow, he said it was a “matter for London”, as though he were not prime minister in London. He still says things like “UK plc”, the kind of 1990s flannel someone with “nil interest in business” rote learns before a speech.

Doubtless Burnham would prefer healthy growth, but what matters is whether a government wants it more than other things: “equality, sovereignty, climate goals, low immigration”. The US, for example, doesn’t have a growth plan but a “growth preference”. When faced with inevitable trade-offs, it reflexively chooses growth. What did Burnham spend his conference speech on? “Adjusting” the unaffordable pensions triple lock to find savings to spend on social care for the elderly (a “fiscal transfer from the retired to the retired”), and electoral reform. “A man who spends scarce time and political capital on this while his country borrows more expensively than Greece is letting you know who he is.” So welcome the new candour. A Labour government exists to steer cash to its own people “until the economic waters close over it”. At least Burnham, unlike his predecessors, “hardly pretends otherwise”.

🤝🗳️ Burnham’s pledge to push for electoral reform is probably an attempt to “lock in his coalition for after the general election”, says George Osborne on Political Currency. If there’s a hung parliament, the Liberal Democrats (and possibly others) will have to choose whether to do a deal with the main parties. By dangling electoral reform – a perennial ambition for Britain’s third party – the PM is pre-emptively making them an offer they can’t refuse.