Tony Blair has warned that Labour risks consigning Britain to “relegation from the Premier League of nations” as he cautioned the party against a leftward shift. In a 5,700-word essay, the former PM argued for the government to make AI a serious priority, crack down on welfare spending and abandon Net Zero, and called any potential leadership change “irrelevant” without a coherent policy plan. The price cap on British household energy bills will rise by 13% from July to the highest level in more than two years, triggered by the energy shock from the Middle East war. Regulator Ofgem says that the maximum annual energy bill for a typical household will rise by £221 to £1,862. Nasa says it will begin building a $20bn moon base this year with the aim of establishing a semi-permanent crew presence there as soon as 2032. The American space agency hopes to oversee 81 launches and 73 landings over the next six years as it undertakes what it called “one of the most ambitious engineering and exploration efforts in human history”.

Where on earth is Nigel Farage, asks Sonia Sodha in The Independent. After his party’s massive success at the local elections, the Reform UK leader has been uncharacteristically quiet. He hasn’t attended Prime Minister’s Questions, and broadcasters complain that they cannot get any Reform front benchers to come on their programmes, “let alone Farage himself”. The most likely explanation? Farage is rattled by the announcement that the parliamentary standards commissioner will be investigating his financial affairs, after it emerged that he received a £5m gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.

Harborne has long backed Farage’s political ventures. He has donated some £22m across seven years to Reform and its precursor, the Brexit Party, including a £9m crypto payment last August that was the single largest donation ever made to a British political party. But these were all declared political donations. The “hefty” £5m present, which came shortly after Farage told friends he wouldn’t stand in the 2024 general election because of the “financial toll” of politics, was not a matter of public record. The Reform leader has maintained that personal gifts don’t need to be declared, but he has struggled to get his story straight. He initially said the cash was to help with personal security costs, then described it as a “reward” for Brexit. If he is found to have broken parliamentary rules, sanctions could include suspension from the Commons or even a recall petition, potentially triggering a by-election. His abrupt retreat from public view suggests he’s “all too aware of the choppy waters ahead”.

I don’t claim to know the minds of all those who are agitating for Andy Burnham to replace Keir Starmer, says Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman, but I know they’ll be disappointed. On the EU, Burnham’s present position is that it would be damaging to “re-run those arguments”; on migration he supports the “broad thrust” of Shabana Mahmood’s controversial reforms; after Reform tried to re-air old comments Burnham made during the trans madness of 2022 calling concerns about women-only spaces a “minority view”, he said it was time to “take the Supreme Court ruling and the guidance and implement it”. This is pure, vapid Starmerism. The only difference is it’s being delivered in a rousing Scouse accent, not a “nasal and slightly robotic Surrey drawl”.

Robots are taking over Los Angeles, says Matthew Cantor in The Guardian. Not only are the roads full of driverless Waymo taxis, the pavements are increasingly home to fleets of boxes on wheels, whizzing past pedestrians to deliver “smoothies and keto-friendly salads”. And things are only accelerating. One firm, Serve Robotics, has deployed 500 new delivery robots in 40 neighbourhoods this month alone; another, Coco Robotics, is trying to expand its fleet of 300. And although they’re pretty convenient for consumers, out in the world they get mixed reviews. One worker at Millie’s Cafe, which has been serving breakfast at street-side tables since 1926, is frank: “We hate them.”

According to Americans, says Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic, “it is bad out there”. A recent poll showed that just 5% of Democrats think the economy is “excellent” or “good”, while consumer sentiment has dropped to its lowest level since records began in 1952. Rich families are as nervous as poor ones; students and retirees are particularly gloomy; and households today feel worse about their finances than they did during the Great Inflation of the 1970s. It’s the “deepest, broadest and stubbornest economic pessimism ever recorded”. Yet the economy right now is “pretty darn great”. The stock market is booming, unemployment is down and disposable personal income has reached record highs. America is massively outperforming Europe: if France and Britain were states, they would be the poorest in the US.

Why do people feel so bleak? The biggest factor is inequality. The top 10% of American earners make as much as the bottom 90%, and the richest 1% of households hold more wealth than the entire middle class. And because those extremely lavish lives are now plastered all over TikTok and Instagram, people have become “fiscally delulu”. We’ve gone from comparing ourselves to our friends and neighbours to gorging on unabashedly consumerist and questionably accurate short-form content, which leaves us with a warped sense of how we compare financially. In the real world, rates of teen pregnancy, domestic abuse and violent crime have plummeted, and scientists are saving babies, extending lifetimes and curing cancer. But nobody cares because they’re too busy feeling bad about the fact that someone they don’t know can afford to redecorate their second home in earth tones. That pessimism will be harder to fix than any actual downturn.

RadioGuessr is a fun game in which you listen to a random radio station from around the world and then select on a globe where you think the station is based. There are five rounds and you get up to four hints, which offer the station’s language, city and region. The closer you get to the location of the station, the higher your score. Give it a go here.

Ian McKellen’s downstairs loo is plastered with copies of a single page from the Bible, says Popbitch. It’s the passage that denounces homosexuality, “and they’ve all been torn from Bibles in hotel rooms he’s stayed in”.

It’s Ferrari’s first-ever electric vehicle, say Hans van Leeuwen and Nick Squires in The Daily Telegraph. The £475,000 Luce (pronounced “loo-chay”) can hit 60mph in around 2.5 seconds and is the Italian carmaker’s first five-seater. But its minimalist look – the work of former Apple design guru Jony Ive – hasn’t gone down well, with several online commentators comparing it to the rather less glamorous Nissan Leaf. Shares in Ferrari fell around 6% yesterday, amid fears the EV’s launch could become a repeat of Jaguar Land Rover’s disastrous “woke” rebrand last year.