Officials in France and Spain have warned that the next 48 hours will be “decisive” in containing the wildfires that have forced around 335,000 people to flee, ahead of a heatwave starting tomorrow that will make firefighting more difficult. The blaze near Bordeaux, which has now consumed an area the size of the Isle of Wight, remained broadly stable overnight, while officials in Spain say the fires raging near Madrid are slowing but still “active and uncontrolled”. Andy Burnham is considering a crackdown on youth sickness benefits that could see young people stripped of their payouts unless they agree to do training or voluntary work. Teenagers on the upper tier of personal independence payments (Pips) currently receive £100 a week more than those who take a part-time job on the minimum wage. The broadcaster and comedian Bill Oddie has died aged 85. After making his name in the 1970s with the comedy trio The Goodies, Oddie went on to pursue his love of wildlife as one of the original hosts of BBC’s Springwatch as well as numerous programmes centred around his love of birdwatching.

It pains me to say it, says Tim Stanley in The Telegraph, but some of my fellow conservatives are talking themselves into “angry irrelevance” on climate change. The “pitiless” wildfires scorching Europe may not have been started by the weather per se, but they are made infinitely worse by the long, dry summers. France used to endure about 15 fires a year; in 2026 there have been 312 already. The UK has suffered three of its worst harvests on record in the past six years. All this is killing things conservatives claim to love: farming, rural tradition, self-reliance. The grain production lost – an estimated 10 million tonnes in Europe because of the June heatwave – will mean greater imports and higher prices. “Capitalism does not thrive in an apocalypse.”

The transformation of an ecological crisis into a culture war abstraction is partly down to the left, which framed the issue as a “divine chastisement” and “wallowed in its penance”. But the right responded with “misplaced sympathy for the devil”, casting fossil fuel giants as the good guys and mocking renewables as a joke. Right-wing podcaster Konstantin Kisin claims the future of climate change will be determined not by “wee Britain” but by developing countries that “couldn’t give a s*** about saving the planet”. In fact, the reverse is true. People in poor nations are more worried about global warming because they are more affected by it. And they’re acting accordingly: Kenya now generates about 90% of its electricity from (mainly geothermal) renewable sources; millions of poor Pakistanis are sticking up cheap solar panels on their roofs and balconies. Yes, oil and gas will need to remain in Britain’s energy mix during the green transition. But the right-wing opponents to the “renewal revolution” increasingly just come across as “silly”.

What’s the point of the Liberal Democrats, asks Madeline Grant in The Spectator, if all they ever do is vote for whatever the Labour government likes? It wasn’t always thus: few did more in the Commons to undermine the premiership of Gordon Brown than Vince Cable, who famously decried the prime minister’s transition “from Stalin to Mr Bean”. But when a few Tories in the House of Lords tried to compel Andy Burnham’s new government to answer a few questions before the summer recess, they were stymied by Lib Dems cravenly voting against, “presumably for the sole reason that it was a Tory motion”.

Self-published AI drivel is now so common on Amazon, says Sean Thomas in The Telegraph, that the site has had to ban “authors” from publishing more than 10 books per week. One 70-year-old retiree has used ChatGPT to write some 445 books. Another produced more than 200 AI-written volumes in 2025 alone, flogging 500,000 copies “for a six-figure income”. And in a mind-bending twist, the bots have become readers too. Kindle Unlimited pays authors from a fixed monthly pot according to “pages read”. Today, giant AI “click farms” of phantom readers flip the pages of AI-written slop books at inhuman speed, “draining the pot for flesh-and-blood authors”.

Andy Burnham has had a “charmed career”, says Janan Ganesh in the FT: an MP at 31, in the cabinet by 37, now in No 10 having received scarcely more scrutiny than that “accursed cat”. So what justifies his air of grievance? He says he remembers “sneering voices” in Westminster and felt “imposter syndrome” at Cambridge. “Life gets harder than that, brother.” If his frustrations are on behalf of the north, he is still wrong. London dominates Britain’s economy not because of some anti-northern bias but because – unlike in more devolved Germany, say, or Italy – England has been a unified entity for a millennium. Same with France, where Paris accounts for as big a chunk of GDP as London does here.

Burnham gets away with this because he benefits from “regional privilege”. The idea that London disdains the “provinces” was true before Brexit, but there has since been an over-correction – politico-media types in London now live in terror of being criticised as “out of touch”, so they pull their punches. In another era, our new PM would have been dogged by legitimate questions. Why does the northwest run such a huge fiscal deficit? Who honestly thinks the “gimmick” of No 10 North will last more than a few months? And, crucially, “in what world is Manchester a repeatable model for urban regeneration”? Most post-industrial cities don’t have 100,000 students, two enormous football clubs, an international airport and a BBC base – are Stoke and Sunderland supposed to just “magic up” similar advantages? All this serves as a reminder: beware politicians who bang on about their roots. The strongest leaders often seem placeless (Thatcher, Reagan) or act against their backgrounds (FDR, Attlee). “A biography is no replacement for a plan.”

Ukraine’s new commander-in-chief, Mykhailo Drapatyi, has the right sort of reputation, says Marc Bennetts in The Times. In 2014, when Russian-backed militants tried to seize the port city of Mariupol, Drapatyi famously led his battalion out of encirclement in a daring night-time operation that saved hundreds of soldiers from being captured. And on social media, a video recently emerged of an armoured vehicle smashing through a Russian barricade. Giving orders inside was Drapatyi. When the driver warned him there was a barricade ahead, he replied: “Floor it!”

One of two new ferries linking New Zealand’s North Island and South Island has a rather unexpected namesake, says Julia Gabel in The New Zealand Herald: Captain Cook. The decision to celebrate the British naval officer, who killed local Māoris when he and his crew landed on the country’s shore in 1769, is a direct rebuke to the current trend of renaming landmarks from their colonial-era titles to indigenous ones. “The snivelling wokesters will work themselves into a lather,” says Foreign Minister Winston Peters, who named the other ferry “Kupe” after the Polynesian explorer credited in Māori tradition with discovering New Zealand. “[But] a serious country does not vandalise its memory to satisfy the latest fashion in whinger politics.”

It’s Andy Burnham’s family dog Axel, who has been forbidden from making the move south to Downing Street and will instead stay in Manchester. Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg yesterday, the prime minister said his Bichpoo – a cross between a bichon frisé and a miniature poodle – has that “angry little man thing going on”, which means he’d almost certainly clash with longtime No 10 resident Larry the Cat. “I don’t think the nation would thank me,” he said, “if I brought Axel down to disturb Larry’s world.”