Will Trump finally stand up to Putin?

Hero
Kamala Harris, according to Kamala Harris, who argues in her new memoir 107 Days that she would have done a great job as US vice-president – and presumably beaten Donald Trump to the presidency – had she not been constantly undermined by Joe Biden’s team. Even if you buy that somewhat far-fetched narrative, says Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post, it was “her show” after she replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee last summer. The reader is left asking: if you did such a terrific job, “why couldn’t you manage to win even one swing state”?

Hero
Dan Shillito, a lorry driver who leapt into action when he saw police holding a man dangling off the edge of a bridge on the M1. “I drove the lorry underneath him so at least if he fell, he would only fall a short distance,” the 34-year-old tells The Times. “Then I ran around, jumped up on the container and supported him.” Shillito held the man on his shoulders for around eight minutes, before the officers safely lowered him on to the container without injury. “His son messaged me to say thank you, and said ‘You’ve saved my family.’”

Villains
The BBC, according to Alastair Campbell, who tweeted last week that a report on Reform UK’s party conference by the corporation’s political editor, Chris Mason, “reads like a press handout from an event organiser”. What Campbell really meant to say, responded journalist Stephen Pollard, was: “I loathe Reform, therefore any journalist who reports that it is becoming more popular and isn’t sneering about it and its members is A DISGRACE”.

Villains
The organisers of Newcastle’s Great North Run on Sunday, for giving the 60,000 finishers a medal with a map of Newcastle’s rival north-east city, Sunderland. The mislabeled merch does at least carry the words “Newcastle”, “Gateshead” and “South Shields”, but unfortunately they are overlaid on to a map of Sunderland’s streets. 

Villain
Mark Zuckerberg, according to another, lesser-known Mark Zuckerberg, who says his Facebook account is constantly getting blocked because of his namesake. Zuckerberg, a bankruptcy lawyer in Indianapolis, says he receives hundreds of friend requests, phone calls seeking tech support and complaints about Facebook, says Adeel Hassan in The New York Times. He is suing Meta, the social media site’s parent company, for making “false accusations of ‘impersonating a celebrity’”.

Villain
A slug in Germany that has been unmasked by police as the culprit behind a spate of nuisance doorbell ringing. Residents of an apartment block in Schwabach, Bavaria initially assumed the phantom ringer was a prankster, says Kate Connolly in The Guardian. But when the ringing continued even after a visit from two police officers, and a motion detector failed to activate, they realised the actual villain was a naughty nacktschnecke (literally “naked snail”).

The ancient joy of sausages

Who was it, asks Olivia Potts in The Spectator, who first thought of “grinding up all those little unused odds and sods from an animal carcass” and stuffing them in a bit of intestine? “Many people, apparently.” Sausages are one of those products which emerged independently all around the world thousands of years ago. The first recipe is from around 2000BC: an Akkadian cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia describing “intestines filled with forcemeat”. And in The Odyssey, Odysseus tossing and turning in bed is likened to “when a man besides a great fire has filled a sausage with fat and blood and turns it this way and that and is very eager to get it quickly roasted”.

The Romans brought sausages to Britain, and our word “sausage” comes from the Latin for “salt”. Which makes sense, given that they probably began as a form of preservation – in many places around the world, sausages are still smoked or cured. British bangers tend to be sold raw, of course, and their unique character comes primarily from their use of rusk (alongside the lean meat and fat and spices), which soaks up juices as the sausage cooks, “retaining the sausage shape and making the sausage succulent”. Historian Diane Purkiss points out that the more than 400 different types of British sausages are hyper-regional – the “equivalent of cheese in France”. And the old saw that it’s best not to see how laws and sausages are made is unfair to sausages. Watching the lean meat and fat be ground separately, then together, before being piped into a seemingly endless tube and deftly pinched off and hand-knitted into bunches – it’s a “beautiful thing”.

What I learned trying to become a Labour MP

When I was trying to stand for parliament as a Labour candidate in 2010, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times, I saw the party’s “peculiar internal dynamics” close up. During my first meeting with Keith Vaz, the man charged with helping minority candidates, he frowned when I said I’d done well financially and owned more than one property. “That won’t do at all,” he said. “It isn’t a good look. Don’t mention this to anyone, even if you have to lie.” “Lie?” I asked him, stunned. “For f***’s sake,” he said. “Just keep your mouth shut.” He also told me I needed to meet a couple of trade union leaders, because they had a “lock” on certain constituencies. “Make sure you’ve read their policies,” he said, “and agree with everything they say.” But most of what they say directly contradicts Labour policy, I complained. “Don’t worry,” he said again. “Just lie.”

It went on from there: the phone call from a party official just before my formal interview, furtively telling me he had the list of interview questions (“all the other candidates will be cheating too”); the bizarre meeting with the party’s chief whip in a Mayfair nightclub called Whisky Mist. I wasn’t selected – they told me I was the “outstanding candidate” but that the unions wanted someone else. After everything I’d seen, “I almost felt relieved”. Labour is an institution that has “turned dissembling into an art form”; it demands “duplicity” from its candidates right from the off. That doesn’t create politicians – it creates “chameleons”, people who will “say whatever is expedient and believe in nothing”. No wonder no one has a clue what Keir Starmer or his party stand for.