Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Cuba this morning with 120mph winds, after battering Jamaica yesterday. Jamaican prime minister Andrew Holness says the storm – the strongest to hit the country in modern history – has had “devastating impacts”: at least three-quarters of the island is without power and whole communities are under water. Israel launched a series of strikes on Gaza yesterday that reportedly killed around 100 people. Israeli defence minister Israel Katz accused Hamas of breaching the ceasefire deal by killing an Israeli soldier in an attack in Rafah and failing to return the remains of the last dead hostages. The morning-after pill will be available free of charge in England from today, in the biggest change to sexual health services for women since the contraceptive pill. The emergency birth control, which previously cost up to £35 a pop, will be offered at nearly 10,000 chemists, including Boots, as part of an NHS expansion of pharmacy services.

Protest all you like, but we need an elite

It is fashionable these days to position yourself as anti-elitist, says James Marriott in The Times, but I’m increasingly convinced elitism is “key to democracy’s survival”. People claim social media has “democratised” our discourse. In reality, the flood of “ignorant, wrathful and inexpert” voices has just left ordinary people worse informed and believing the sort of nonsense – Brigitte Macron is a man, Barack Obama is a lizard – that would have puzzled “even the Daily Sport in its Nineties heyday”. Meanwhile the (invariably richer and better-educated) minority who stick with newspapers – and first-rate lunchtime newsletters – continue to have access to reliable information about how their country really works. “Not so fair and democratic.”

The problem is that “popularity is a poor test of ideas”. It’s not that the old elite were smarter or more virtuous. But they were competing in a system that ascribed social status to “rationality as well as to mere name-recognition”. If you wanted to run for parliament, say, or not be shunned at a north London dinner party, you generally had to subscribe to a “tolerant and sane” worldview. In fact, democracy itself is a kind of “elite ideology”. Support for it is much stronger among the old-fashioned political and media class than it is on supposedly “democratised” social media. Prominent anti-democratic bloggers such as the preposterous Curtis Yarvin, who thinks America should be ruled by an absolute monarch, wouldn’t be allowed near the opinion pages of a newspaper. It increasingly seems like liberal principles such as free speech are “fundamentally counterintuitive” to most people, and that we need an elite to impose them. Elitism isn’t perfect, by any stretch: elites are self-serving, snobbish and prone to groupthink. But it’s “preferable to anarchy”.