Donald Trump arrived at Chequers this morning for a meeting with Keir Starmer and a US-UK business reception, ahead of a much-anticipated joint press conference later. At last night’s state banquet in Windsor Castle (see Food and Drink below), King Charles praised his guest’s “personal commitment” to resolving the world’s “most intractable conflicts”, while Trump said of the “special relationship” that the word special “does not begin to do it justice”. Starmer will reportedly formally recognise the state of Palestine this weekend, having delayed the announcement until after Trump’s departure this evening. The US president is firmly opposed to recognition, having previously warned that the move would reward Hamas. Chimpanzees in the wild are consuming the equivalent of a pint of lager a day, a new study has found. Scientists in Uganda and the Ivory Coast measured the boozy beasts’ intake of ripe figs and breadfruit, which contain a dash of alcohol from fermentation. Much like us, says The Times, our evolutionary cousins are “steady boozers”.

The sobering truth about that “far-right” rally

In the few days since attending Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” march in London, says Helen Pidd in The Guardian, I’ve been grappling with how best to describe it. There’s no doubt many of the speakers were openly racist, delivering variations on the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. “Every single Western nation faces the same problem,” Robinson told the crowd: “an orchestrated, organised invasion and replacement of European citizens.” But most of the roughly 110,000 marchers couldn’t see or hear the speeches, and I didn’t get the impression they were there for the speakers anyway. “This was about being heard themselves.”

The attendees I spoke to said they were “ordinary people” with “ordinary jobs” but that – and this phrase came up again and again – they’d “had enough” of a Britain they felt was no longer working. “We have potholes in the roads, we can’t get GP appointments,” one man from Norfolk told me. “This country is becoming a joke.” They blame all this on immigration, specifically illegal immigration – everyone insisted they had no problem with the hundreds of thousands a year who enter Britain legally. There are all sorts of counter-arguments one could make: that illegal immigrants accounted for just 4% of arrivals in 2024, so it’s a bit rum blaming them for the pressure on our services; that it’s unfair to say these people are “raping our kids” when only a tiny number have been found guilty of sexual assault. What’s striking, though, is that so many attended this march despite widespread media descriptions of it as a “far-right” event. They weren’t put off by that label. How have we got to this point? Until some of Britain’s underlying problems get fixed, “this movement is only going to get bigger”.