US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says “the ball is in Russia’s court” after Kyiv accepted a proposal for an immediate 30-day ceasefire following talks in Saudi Arabia. Washington has resumed military aid and intelligence sharing with Kyiv as it awaits a response from Russia. The EU says it will impose retaliatory tariffs on €26bn-worth of US imports from next month after America’s global levies of 25% on steel and aluminium came into effect this morning. Donald Trump yesterday reversed his plan to double the metal tariffs on Canada to 50% just hours after announcing it. Thousands of patients in England with multiple sclerosis will become the first in Europe to benefit from a major rollout of a new immunotherapy pill. Rather than regular trips to hospital for drug infusions and injections, MS patients will instead take the cladribine tablet 20 times over the course of two years.

Why the Reform spat matters

In one respect, says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times, the split within Reform UK is “a classic of the genre”. Nigel Farage has always believed, with some justification, that he is surrounded by idiots who would be political nobodies were it not for his own charisma and savvy. He made great play of David Cameron’s comment that Ukip were mostly “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists”, but privately he was very much of the same view. So when his fellow Reform MP Rupert Lowe questioned last week whether Farage could “deliver the goods” as leader, he was immediately thrown out of the party and publicly discredited. Many others who thought they knew better than Farage – Douglas Carswell, Robert Kilroy-Silk, Neil Hamilton – have met the same fate.

But this dispute is more than just a “personal tiff”: it’s a battle between people who want to broaden Reform’s appeal and those who want to deepen it. Farage is a “broadener”. Lowe is a deepener: he has pressed for mass deportations, expressed sympathy for the far-right cause célèbre Tommy Robinson, and joined an absurd boycott of a supposedly “woke” butter. He wants a “purer” Reform, more attuned to its most radical supporters and incapable of being outflanked on the right. Farage understands that deepening a party makes it less electable. So Lowe had to go. The question is whether Lowe – who has attracted the admiration of Elon Musk – will now seek to become an “alternative populist voice”, perhaps even forming a rival party that would strip away support from Reform. Farage’s allies clearly hope to neutralise that threat by destroying Lowe’s reputation. “I strongly suspect that this will not prove enough.”

🍿😎 The real winners from all this are Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch, says Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman, who are presumably watching all this and indulging in a “brief spot of schadenfreude”. It’s not every day an existentially dangerous insurgent party “loses one fifth of its parliamentary cohort and disintegrates into infighting”.

Everyone in Washington is sick of Elon Musk, says Edward Luce in the FT. Donald Trump’s White House has been remarkably leak-free so far, in stark contrast to his first presidency. But it appears senior staff are so keen to see the back of the “chainsaw-wielding oligarch” that they risked telling The New York Times about a recent cabinet meeting in which Trump “clipped Musk’s wings”, informing him that cabinet heads, not DOGE, would be responsible for hiring and firing. Perhaps most tellingly, recent efforts by Musk to funnel fresh millions into Trump’s political action committees have been turned down. “Trump is not known to refuse money.”

The latest TikTok trend is the worst yet, says Chas Newkey-Burden in The Spectator. “Airport theory” holds that the best way to travel is arriving as late as possible for your flight, so staff are forced to whizz you through. Occasionally it works: one influencer managed to get through passport control and on to his flight in seven and a half minutes. Another filmed herself using the same technique and watching her plane take off without her. But it’s not really about the flights, it’s about the online clout: “Airport theory” videos have been watched over 400 million times on TikTok. Even the girl who missed her flight got more than 20 million views.

The new dash for nukes

One big consequence of Donald Trump dismantling the post-war international order deserves more attention, says Gideon Rose in Foreign Affairs: we may be entering a new era of nuclear proliferation. Most large countries have long had the resources to develop nukes – the expertise is widespread and the technology relatively cheap. What stops them is a non-proliferation regime, codified under the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is part of a broader US-led international system. With the Trump administration “shredding” this web of partnerships, many governments no longer think they can rely on America’s nuclear umbrella. So they’re looking at developing the technology themselves.

Germany’s incoming chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has said he’ll talk to Britain and France about sharing their nuclear deterrence. Poland’s Donald Tusk has hinted at the same, saying “conventional weapons” aren’t enough to guarantee his country’s safety. Beyond Europe, Japan has long had a latent nuclear capability – a “bomb in the basement” – that could be turned into a weapon within months if needed. South Korean officials have spoken about needing nukes to hold off the threat from the North; Taiwan almost certainly feels the same about China. What’s scary is that the most dangerous phase of proliferation is when countries are about to cross the nuclear threshold, as that’s when their enemies are most likely to launch a pre-emptive attack. The years ahead may be “defined by nuclear crises”.

☂️🍄‍🟫 Back in the 1960s, French President Charles de Gaulle decided that France shouldn’t rely on America’s nuclear umbrella, and had his scientists develop a force de frappe – a nuclear “strike force”. For generations, most non-French analysts “scoffed” at this reasoning, dismissing it as typical Gallic pride and paranoia. “Few are scoffing now.”

In traditional Eastern medicine, the mushroom species cordyceps sinensis has long been hailed as a panacea, says Adam Popescu in Bloomberg. Today, it is better known for its aphrodisiac qualities: many refer to the fungus – native to Nepal, India, China and Bhutan – as “Himalayan Viagra”. Dug from the ground and painstakingly cleaned with a comb and toothbrush, the “sex mushroom” is generally taken whole in tea, crushed into pills or downed in whisky. In Beijing, it can fetch around $300,000 per kilogram.

To the London Review of Books:

Paul Sutton writes about the Grenadian prime minister Eric Gairy and his fixation on UFOs (Letters, 23 January). In September 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Panama Canal Treaty and invited each of the Latin American leaders in attendance to an individual meeting. That included Gairy. Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzeziński, met with Gairy in the White House cabinet room, where he unfurled a large scroll, highly illuminated. This was an invitation for Carter to visit Titania, a moon of Saturn, from its supreme leader. Carter did not react. But Brzeziński asked deadpan whether Titania had good relations with the other moons of Saturn and whether, if Carter were to visit Titania, he would be expected to give a speech.

Robert Hunter
Washington DC

It’s a crate containing 1,461 cans of Canadian lager, says CNN: roughly one beer a day for the remainder of Donald Trump’s second term. The $2,400 “Presidential Pack” is produced by the country’s oldest beer-maker, Moosehead Brewery (which just so happens to have been hit by Washington’s latest round of tariffs), and is designed to be “just enough to get through” the rest of Trump’s time in the Oval Office. “While we can’t predict how the next four years will go,” says the brewery’s marketing director Karen Grigg, “we have a feeling that this large pack will come in handy.” Cheers.