Kemi Badenoch says the next general election will be a “battle for the soul of the nation”. Addressing the Conservative party conference earlier today, the Tory leader pledged to abolish inheritance tax on family homes and increase the threshold for the levy to £1m, reform the welfare system so that “those who can work, will work”, and claimed her party has identified £70bn worth of savings in the public finances, half of which would be used to cut the country’s deficit. MI6 is investigating whether its classified information or spies have been compromised after the former head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service was arrested yesterday on suspicion of selling secrets to a foreign power. August Hanning is accused of illegally collecting classified documents for 16 years through a serving official known as “Manfred D”, who has also been arrested. A British man who has spent 28 years walking around the world without using any form of transport has made it back to the UK. Karl Bushby, 57, began his journey at the southern tip of Chile in 1998 and is heading for his mother’s home in Hull. He arrived in Dover on Monday after swimming the Channel over three days.

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s viral interview with Tucker Carlson really was “jaw-dropping”, says Peter Franklin in UnHerd. There were farcical moments, such as when Rees-Mogg politely but firmly corrected the former Fox News host’s claim that Britain’s economy is smaller than Russia’s. More shocking was Carlson’s attempted revisionism over World War Two. He insisted Britain would have been better off staying out of the conflict – we lost our “self respect”, apparently – and repeatedly claimed that Hitler didn’t want to go to war with Britain. At this point, even the otherwise unflappable Rees-Mogg expressed “a degree of exasperation”.

Scepticism of the allied cause is rife on the American right, says James Marriott in The Times, from “pseudo-historian” Darryl Cooper calling Churchill the “chief villain” of the war, to far-right provocateur Nick Fuentes describing Hitler as “awesome”. This is partly just because “gutter contrarianism” drives social media engagement. But it’s also because victory in 1945 is the “founding myth and ultimate justification” of the liberal world order that Carlson and co despise. It’s why the US wants to defend Europe; it explains the UN, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Israel. The war also provides liberal democracy, an otherwise “bloodless creed” lacking the passion of nationalism or faith, with heroism and drama. We tell its triumphs again and again: Bridge Over the River Kwai, Saving Private Ryan, Dunkirk. It is our Iliad, our Odyssey, with every retelling steeped in the righteousness of liberal freedom. Many on the American right see this emphasis on helping others as dangerous – they think trying to “do the right thing” for weaker nations, such as Ukraine, will lead their country to ruin. Don’t be taken in. The struggle against fascism was a “heroic moment” that has morally sustained our civilisation for 80 years. It’s a history that cannot – and must not – be rewritten.

Doctors have long observed that people who have suffered traumatic head injuries enjoy an unexpected benefit, says Jake Currie in Nautilus: their bones heal faster. Naturally, boffins began to wonder if it worked in reverse – could bones heal damaged brains? To find out, hard-hearted scientists in China “artificially caused traumatic brain injuries” in pigs and mice, then fitted them with devices that tapped their shin bones a couple of times a second for five days. Incredibly, it worked: the tapping appeared to reduce brain cell loss, promote neuron growth and relieve chronic inflammation, while also increasing their survival time and improving their ability to navigate mazes.

Coldplay used to encourage audiences to wave their smartphones around during concerts. Today, says Jemima Kelly in the FT, the band routinely asks audiences to put their phones away entirely for a single song. Others go further: Phoebe Bridgers has imposed an all-out smartphone ban, requiring attendees to stow devices in magnetically sealed pouches. Harry Styles and Bob Dylan have similar diktats. And the young love it: a study which reported a 567% increase in explicitly phone-free events on booking platform Eventbrite between 2024 and 2025 also found that 49% of millennials and Gen Z said they wanted live events to feel “more real”.

This is a “bad year for incumbents”, says Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal. Donald Trump is “testing new lows” in the polls ahead of an expected bruising in the midterm elections. But by global standards, his mid-30s approval rating is not to be sniffed at. As riots sweep France, the flailing Emmanuel Macron is confronting approval ratings in the mid teens. His German counterpart, Friedrich Merz, fares even worse: one recent poll showed only 10% of Germans satisfied with his performance. Britain’s Keir Starmer had to stand down two years after winning a landslide. Spain’s beleaguered prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has called for early elections after a “stinging defeat” to his emergency renters’ rights agenda. To that list of battered leaders, we can now add Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who looks likely to lose to the charismatic son of the imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro.

The problem, says David Graham in The Atlantic, is that most of the really major issues that agitate voters in rich countries are impossible to fix, at least by conventional political means. And it’s drastically shortening leaders’ shelf-lives. Until recently, incumbents were understood to have natural advantages in democracies: defeats after one term – like Trump’s and Biden’s – were historic outliers. But if voters’ default stance is now to “throw the bums out” after only a few years, parties and leaders will struggle to make lasting policy changes. This is likely to create instability and conflict, as politicians try ever more extreme tactics to attract voter attention and achieve their goals in their short time in office. Trump treated his 2024 win as a “huge popular mandate”. As long as voters remain this dyspeptic, any incomer should be treated as “fragile and fleeting”.

I last saw Jeffrey Archer, who died on Monday aged 86, at The Spectator summer party, says Sophia Money-Coutts on Substack. He was on “typically sparkling form”. Everyone, he said, was telling him his new novel, Adam and Eve, is even better than his 1979 blockbuster Kane and Abel. His American publishing team had only one problem with it on first reading, he told me, “his eyebrows leaping up and down waggishly”. It was a line in which the main character has “a lovely time on the Norfolk Broads”. Who were these broads, the publishers asked, and where had they come from? “We roared with laughter.”

The Tories have long sought the endorsement of Jeremy Clarkson, says Ethan Croft in The New Statesman, and after years of him remaining stubbornly in the “grey zone”, they might be about to get lucky. In 2024, the broadcaster descended on Whitehall surrounded by tractors, denouncing changes to inheritance tax. He later campaigned in public with Kemi Badenoch on that same issue. Then, on Monday, he made a surprise appearance at the Tory party conference, venting his frustrations at the Labour government with “flippant asides that would not have been out of place in the studio”. And all “in the dark suit and tie of a politician”.

It’s an illustration of an ultra-rare “phoenix planet”, says Robert Lea on Space.com, born from the ashes of its dead star. Discovered by astronomers at the University of Warwick, the planetary phenomenon is the first ever to be spotted in orbit around a “white dwarf” – the dim, collapsed core left after a star dies – suggesting it was assembled from these leftovers rather than surviving from its original planetary system. The discovery could help us understand whether something similar will happen in our solar system after the death of the sun, around five billion years from now.