Senior government officials are preparing to hand over their electronic communications with Peter Mandelson ahead of the release of evidence about his appointment as US ambassador. Keir Starmer yesterday apologised to Jeffrey Esptein’s victims and said he was sorry for “having believed Mandelson’s lies”. Former deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman said the apology made the PM look “weak, naive and gullible”. A top Russian general is in critical condition after being shot several times in Moscow this morning. The Kremlin says an unidentified assailant opened fire on Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev – number two in Russia’s GRU military intelligence directorate – before fleeing the scene. Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has blamed Ukraine, so far without evidence. Statins are far safer than previously thought, according to researchers at the University of Oxford. A comprehensive review of studies involving more than 120,000 people concluded that the cholesterol-lowering drugs, used by millions, do not cause the majority of the listed possible side effects, including memory loss, depression, sleep disruption, weight gain and impotence.

In retrospect, says Bagehot in The Economist, “the signs were there”. Asked by the FT a year ago about Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Mandelson replied: “I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?” Twelve months on, Mandelson has gone and Keir Starmer’s government is embroiled in “Britain’s worst political scandal of this century”. Which raises an interesting question: “What is the point of Sir Keir staying in office?” If the PM ever had a political purpose, it was ending Tory chaos and instability. He was, we were told, a politician of “process rather than conviction”. Yet Downing Street knew Mandelson stayed close to Epstein long after the latter was jailed for underage sex offences. “Sir Keir ploughed on – process be damned.”

Similarly, despite Starmer presenting himself as a “fair-minded pragmatist” in a party riddled with “psychopathic factionalism”, Mandelson was appointed mostly because of the people he knew – in particular Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s chief of staff – and the wing of the party he represented. That this “hollow administration” has had to bring in so many New Labour figures is itself damning: it’s as if Tony Blair had “relied on apparatchiks from the Harold Wilson era”. Starmer’s fate now lies in the hands of backbenchers who “regard him with contempt”. And his best excuse for his failings is the most embarrassing: that he was effectively pushed into sending Mandelson to Washington by McSweeney. In the 2025 book Get In, Labour insiders compared the PM to a toddler on the driverless Docklands Light Railway: “He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.” Somehow, “the Starmer train has still crashed”.

In 2009, says Charles Moore in The Spectator, I reported that Peter Mandelson and Cherie Blair had been on a shooting weekend with the Rothschilds, together with Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saif, who was assassinated this week. Mrs Blair’s lawyers quickly let us know that she hadn’t overlapped with Peter or Saif and, “most important”, hadn’t shot a thing. Mandelson’s government office, too, made a point of noting that although he was there he hadn’t done any shooting. The then business secretary was, clearly, less bothered by my assertion that he had been “rubbing shoulders” with the son of the man responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, “the biggest terrorist atrocity ever committed against British citizens”.

Crime in England and Wales is falling, says Joanna Marchong in The Critic, with murder at a record low and knife crime down too. The trouble is, it doesn’t feel like it. Nearly everyone knows someone – a friend, a colleague, a neighbour – who has had their phone snatched or their bag nicked, or witnessed brazen shoplifting in their local Waitrose. This week’s dinner party talk has presumably included: “Did you see that jewellery shop in Richmond getting its windows smashed by robbers?” (Pictured above.) So yes, the stats look good on paper, but politicians will struggle to fight the “broken Britain” narrative until the everyday experience stops corroborating it.

After the second ICE shooting in Minneapolis, says Aaron Zamost in The New York Times, Silicon Valley tech workers took to their internal Slack channels to denounce the president and his deployment of federal officers across America. The companies themselves? Not so much. Just hours after the murder of Alex Pretti, Apple CEO Tim Cook joined Donald Trump and other luminaries at the White House for a screening of the new documentary about Melania. Despite internal complaints, the software firm Palantir shows no sign of pulling back from its work with immigration enforcement. And the bosses know they don’t have anything to worry about: at a time when they’re shedding workers by the thousand, “dumping them into an increasingly shaky job market”, progressive tech employees are suddenly powerless.

The idea that the tech tycoons have undergone some kind of political “vibe shift” is flattering to politicians, but it’s beside the point. These are industrialists. They care about economics, not ideology. The idea of “woke corporations” was always nonsense, but during the 2010s and early 2020s, tech firms were in a fierce battle to hire and retain the best employees, whose work could be the difference between billions and bankruptcy. With these vastly rich firms relentlessly poaching one another’s talent, tech staff had all the leverage. That manifested itself in fancy offices with lame, kooky décor and lots of bean bags. And it also turned up in a “bring your whole self to work” culture, which naturally extended to politics. There has since been a “market correction”, with a massive glut of tech workers and dwindling opportunities thanks to AI and automation. In 2020, Facebook donated $10m to “racial justice” organisations. Last year, Mark Zuckerberg binned all DEI initiatives. His “politics” didn’t change. The power dynamics did.

Inspired by an old Ayurvedic practice, wellness wonks on TikTok have taken to “dark showering”, says The Guardian: a pre-bedtime ritual in which they take a warm shower either in complete darkness or by candlelight in a bid to calm their nervous system before sleep. The science behind the trend is that warm water reduces the stress hormone cortisol and darkness triggers the release of melatonin, which is thought to reduce the time it takes to nod off. Worth a try.

Russia is “haemorrhaging” soldiers in Ukraine at historic rates, says Tom Newton Dunn in War & Peace. The estimated number of Moscow’s dead and wounded since the invasion began in February 2022 has passed 1.2 million, “more than any major power in any war since World War Two”. And for what? A recent report by the CSIS think tank has found that all three of Russia’s biggest current offensives are seeing slower rates of advance than the Battle of the Somme in 1916 – between 15 and 70 metres a day, compared to the Somme’s 80 metres.

It’s a “KegChup”, says Steven Morea in Delish: a three-and-a-bit-litre vat of Heinz’s famous sauce. The gimmicky gizmo, complete with a spigot so you can “tap your sauce like you’re pouring a pint” has been unveiled in time for the Super Bowl on Sunday, and is intended to hold enough of the red stuff to slather over chips, burgers, chicken wings or anything else for “all four quarters”.