Keir Starmer will battle for his Downing Street future in the Commons this afternoon, as he seeks to explain to MPs how Peter Mandelson was appointed British ambassador to the US despite failing security vetting. The PM, who has rejected calls to resign, is expected to blame the former Foreign Office permanent under-secretary, Olly Robbins, for the “unforgivable” act of not disclosing the vetting verdict. Tehran has accused America of violating the countries’ fragile ceasefire agreement and vowed to retaliate against US forces, after they took “full custody” of an Iranian cargo ship that tried to evade their naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. Iran says it has “no plan” for the next round of peace talks with America, which are scheduled to take place today in Pakistan, and that no decision had been made whether to even attend. The glorious spring weather conditions have caused Britain’s bluebells to bloom unusually early this year. A mild and rainy winter combined with the clement start to the season have created prime conditions for the flowers, which cropped up around the country two weeks earlier than normal.

I hold no candle for Keir Starmer, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph, but on the Peter Mandelson vetting scandal I’m inclined to believe him. I went through security vetting so that I could read unreleased government papers for my biography of Margaret Thatcher. The first thing they tell you is that any information you disclose will never be shared with ministers or civil servants or anyone else – this is essential, because no one would reveal anything if they thought their secrets would be “passed around” Whitehall. UK Security Vetting provides its recommendation to the relevant civil service official – in Mandelson’s case, the Foreign Office permanent under-secretary, Olly Robbins – who then makes a final decision, either sticking by the recommendation or overruling it, and tells the government. “Them’s the rules.”

Where Starmer does have a case to answer is in his treatment of Robbins, saying his failure to inform No 10 that he, Robbins, had overruled the vetting advice was “unforgivable”. But it was Sir Olly’s job to make a decision, and he was under no obligation to explain the details or process. Plus, of course, given Mandelson’s appointment had already been announced, he may have thought keeping schtum would spare the PM some “unnecessary pain”. You could argue that Robbins deserved to be sacked because he made a bad call. But he should never have been put in the position of making such an important decision in the first place, as per the “once-basic principle” of the British government: “Officials advise; ministers decide.” Contrary to the claims of Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey, none of this makes Starmer a liar. “He just does not understand how government and politics work.”

🇷🇺🤨 One area where the PM cannot claim ignorance, says Dan Hodges in the Daily Mail, is on Mandelson’s directorship at the Russian company Sistema. The firm was known to be, in the words of one security source, “riddled with Russian intelligence officers”. Yet Mandelson retained his interests in Sistema until 2020. These links were included in the Cabinet Office’s “due diligence checklist” – which is one of the few documents in this sorry affair that Starmer has admitted he read. “No one told me,” the PM will protest this afternoon. But they did. He just chose to ignore them.

Teenagers in New York have developed an obsession with “conquesting”, says Sarah Maslin Nir in The New York Times: taking empty subway trains for a joyride. To carry out their subterranean seizures the youths break into the conductor’s car and use a skeleton key – available on Amazon, apparently – to jimmy the controls, filming the whole thing for social media. Last year, 23 “conquesting” incidents were reported, up from just two in 2023. In the first three months of this year, there have already been a dozen.

For some reason, says Matthew Parris in The Times, most people cannot bring themselves to confront the obvious truth: “Donald Trump is mentally ill.” I don’t mean that as a cheap shot at his intelligence or political acumen or whatever, I mean it as a serious diagnosis. The US president is not of sound mind. He is suffering from “substantial cognitive decline”. An early and critical sign that someone has taken such a turn is when they begin to act and communicate in ways that are obviously not in their own interest. Picking a fight with the Pope when you run a country that’s home to more than 50 million Catholics, say, or declaring a country’s nuclear capability destroyed, and then the next minute declaring that that capability represents an immediate threat.

If the US president were in any lesser job, colleagues would be having urgent discussions about his mental fitness. But he has surrounded himself with a ragtag platoon of loyalists who know that if he fell, so would they. It was the same with Joe Biden, who was stumbling gently around, falling over and forgetting things for months without any of his entourage being prepared to admit it. And as with Biden, many partisan commentators are unable to confront the King Lear-like reality of Trump’s madness. So they stroke their beards and say it’s the “madman theory” or that he’s an inveterate dealmaker who opens with a preposterous bid (invade Greenland) then negotiates down. If that was ever true, it isn’t now. The only question is whether Republicans can find the backbone to impeach their own president. In due course, everyone will be saying that evidence of Trump’s personal disintegration was visible from the start. “I say it now.”

Last year, says Andrew Gregory in The Guardian, humanoid robots competed in Beijing’s half marathon for the first time. The winning machine clunked over the finish line in 2hr 40min 42sec – more than double the time of the human winner – and nearly all the other robots fell over or were otherwise unable to finish. This year, however, marked a “significant improvement”. Entirely autonomous robots from the Huawei spin-off Honor took all three podium places and the winner, Lightning, completed the race in 50min 26sec, eclipsing the human world record of 57min 20sec. Disturbingly, Honor engineer Du Xiaodi says the sector remains “in an early phase”.

English used to have “dual pronouns”, says Sophie Hardach in BBC Future. Around 1,000 years ago, somebody wanting to say “we”, but meaning just them and one other person, would have said “wit”, essentially meaning “we two”. Instead of “our”, that same pair would have said “unker”. And to refer to them – meaning “you two” – an observer would have said “git”.

It’s the tiny Swiss town of Zug, just south of Zurich, which has become a “haven” for the rich Gulf set looking for a European base during the Iran war, says Mercedes Ruehl in the FT. Capital of the picturesque canton of the same name, Zug is home to around 135,000 people and known for commodity traders and cryptocurrency firms. The influx is creating fierce competition for rented accommodation, with queues to view a two-bed flat the other weekend stretching around the block.