British industry has been exempted from Donald Trump’s doubling of tariffs on steel and aluminium, which comes into effect today. The UK’s five-week reprieve from the new 50% levies – up from the current 25% – is to allow time to finesse the details of the US-UK trade deal, which could see Britain receive a zero-tariff quota for steel if it agrees to exclude China from its supply chains. Rachel Reeves has announced £15bn for transport projects outside London, including investment in trams, trains and buses in the north and the Midlands. The funding is an attempt to tackle a “surge in support” for Reform UK in Red Wall areas, says The Daily Telegraph. Britain is bananas for bananas. Last year, sales of the tropical fruit jumped by 70 million, meaning each adult bought an average of 80 bananas. The spike in sales is apparently the result of growing demand for homemade smoothies and milkshakes.

The radicalisation of “Bobby J”

Robert Jenrick, the favourite to replace Kemi Badenoch if the Tories give her the boot, has been on quite the “political journey”, says Owen Jones in The Guardian. On becoming an MP in 2014, he was described by one colleague as a “full-fat” Cameronite. He staunchly opposed Brexit, and in 2022 rebuked his own boss, Suella Braverman, for saying Britain faced an “invasion” of illegal migrants. “I think in this job,” he said, “you do have to use your language carefully.” Today, by contrast, Jenrick complains that Britain has imported hundreds of thousands of people from “alien cultures” with a “medieval attitude towards women”. During last summer’s riots he called for anyone shouting “Allahu Akbar” – the most common phrase used by observant Muslims – to be arrested. And the “once-passionate” Remainer wants Britain to leave the European Court of Human Rights.

Jenrick may just be saying this stuff to become leader, after which he’ll tack back to the centre – “a Tory Keir Starmer, if you will”. Braverman says her former underling looked “horrified” when she first floated leaving the European court. But the Tory faction Jenrick once belonged to is largely gone, and the prevailing wisdom in the party now is that “only by lurching rightwards can the Farageist threat be dispelled”. And unlike Badenoch, “who seems allergic to anything resembling a cut-through message”, Jenrick is very good at spreading his “demagoguery” – witness, for example, the recent video of him chasing after fare dodgers on the Tube. That’s the worry for the rest of us. If – or rather, when – Jenrick replaces Badenoch, Britain will have “two high-profile right-wing agitators spraying political discourse with incendiary rhetoric”.

🦸‍♂️🧼 Jenrick is “getting the taste for Opposition by video”, says Patrick Kidd in The Daily Telegraph. His latest (pictured) is a “two-minute harrumph” about Lord Hermer, the attorney general and an old pal of Keir Starmer’s, and all the “rotten folk” he defended as a human rights lawyer. “Not one, not two, not three, not four but FIVE terrorists linked to al-Qaeda!” said Bobby J, as if he were in a bleach advert. He reminded me of Barry Scott, that shouty chap from the Cillit Bang ads: “BANG! And the scum is gone!”