The Week UK - 03.10.2026 — 2026-10-04

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THE WEEK

3 OCTOBER 2026 | ISSUE 1612

Hope or

hype?

Burnham's

pitch to

the nation

Page 4

THE BEST OF THE BRITISH AND INTERNATIONAL MEDIA

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The main stories...

What happened

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Burnham's pledges

Andy Burnham set out several bold new policies on Tuesday in his first speech to the Labour conference as party leader. Addressing the gathering in Liverpool, which was dominated by “Hope Again” banners, the PM announced that Labour would commit in its next election manifesto to reforming Britain’s electoral system and establishing a new relationship with the EU. Brexit, he said, had done “more harm than good”. He also vowed to set up an NHS-style National Care Service (NCS) after the next election. To help pay for it, the state pension triple lock will, from 2030, switch to a double lock, under which pensions will rise each year either by inflation or a minimum of 2.5%. The link to average earnings will be scrapped, although a backstop measure will ensure that, over time, pensions roughly keep pace with wages

In his own speech on Monday, Chancellor John Healey promised “a new age of industrialisation”. He said that the Government had a “moral duty” to help young people off benefits and into work, warning delegates that “the money New Labour had in the 1990s is simply not there now”.

The PM in Liverpool

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What the editorials said

Burnham's speech was billed as a fresh political vision, said The Daily Telegraph, but it was nothing of the sort. Take

away the “moving personal testimony and the references to AI” and it could have been delivered by Michael Foot. The PM declared that “politics as usual is not good enough”, then spent much of his hour on stage railing against Margaret Thatcher. Burnham’s loosening of the triple lock was welcome, said the FT, but we should be realistic about its impact. The savings that the tweaked formula will begin delivering after 2030, while helpful, will be “nowhere near sufficient” to fund even a slimmed-down version of a National Care Service.

Opponents will rush to declare Burnham's plans unrealistic, said The Observer, but let's wait for next month's Budget to judge that. While Burnham's speech may have

overindulged Labour's “nostalgia for Thatcher-bashing”, it was, overall, an ambitious, serious prospectus for overhauling a status quo that “isn’t working”. The PM deserves a lot of credit for addressing three key hot-button issues – pensions, the voting system and Europe – that previous leaders have run scared of, said The Economist. It’s a brave step, even if none of his planned reforms are set to be implemented this decade.

What happened

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Xi in Washington

Donald Trump heaped praise on Xi Jinping last week, as he hosted the Chinese president in Washington for a lavish three-day state visit. In an unusual step, Trump greeted Xi on a red carpet as he landed in the US, before the pair held private bilateral talks – with AI, Taiwan and Iran on the agenda. Later, at a state dinner attended by tech bosses including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, Trump called Xi and his wife “outstanding, amazing people”, and said that the US and China had “never gotten along better”. Xi did not return the compliments, but did say that China’s “great rejuvenation” could go “hand in hand” with “making America great again”.

Trump with Xi: "flattery"

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What the editorials said

“What a difference a decade makes,” said The Times. In 2015, when Xi paid his last state visit to the US, Trump loudly

proclaimed China as “our enemy”. In Washington last week, by contrast, Trump “behaved like a courtier at the Imperial Yuan”. Prima facie, it’s positive that the world’s two superpowers are talking, not “squaring up”. Yet Trump’s unrequited flattery of Xi, and the sight of US marines hastily smoothing a red carpet for Xi as his aides looked on, were “unsettling”. The fear is that Trump privately made concessions on sensitive issues such as Taiwan.

There were few substantive announcements, but Xi did confirm that 100,000 American students would be invited to study in China over the next five years. In a sign that “panda diplomacy” endures, Beijing also sent two giant pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, to Atlanta’s zoo.

After May's stalemate summit in Beijing, expectations for the meeting were low, said The Guardian, but it "still struggled to meet them”. Aside from a two-month extension of the truce in the US-China trade war, Xi's visit produced little of note. With the world facing mounting threats – from advanced AI to wars in Ukraine and Iran – the two strongmen should have sought common ground on addressing them, said The Economist. Instead, they put “selfish interests first” as they basked in “pomp and pageantry” designed to flatter their dignity.

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It wasn't all bad

Thriving shoots have emerged around the stump of the felled Sycamore Gap tree, raising hopes that they might grow into a new tree. The original tree, by Hadrian's Wall, was cut down by two vandals in 2023, who were subsequently jailed. Since then, the stump has been fenced off, with wire netting, to stop visitors from touching it or compacting the earth around it. Now, its shoots are three feet tall, an outcome the National Trust has described as “really encouraging”.

Weeks after being crowned Britain's youngest-ever female chess champion, an 11-year-old from London has become the youngest player in history to earn the woman grandmaster title (WGM). Bodhana Sivanandan secured her final qualifying "norm" while representing England at the 46th Chess.

England at the 46th Chess

Olympiad in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Bodhana – who also plays the violin and the piano – took up chess after finding an old board during the Covid lockdown, and taught herself to play using online tutorials. She entered her first tournament in July 2021, at Harrow Chess Club. A year later, aged seven, she won all her 24 matches at the European School Championship.

A gene-edited banana that lasts longer in the fruit bowl could soon appear on supermarket shelves. Scientists at the Norwich-based startup Tropic Biosciences edited the fruit's genome to block the release of an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase, which is responsible for bananas going brown and mushy. If the fruit passes its final regulatory hurdle – the Food Standards Agency's safety checks – and is widely sold, it could massively reduce banana waste: an estimated 20% of bananas are thrown away because they've turned brown.

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[...and how they were covered] What the commentators said

The PM “promised a meaty speech” and he delivered one, said James Heale in The Spectator. While much of the content – more public control of water, housing and energy; a staunch defence of the Union – was familiar, the delivery made all the difference. Burnham explains “the ‘why’ of his politics better than perhaps any Labour leader since Tony Blair”. The man can certainly deliver a “proper conference speech”, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. It went down a storm with the audience in Liverpool, although parts of it may have gone over the head of the electorate. When pollsters ask people whether “neoliberalism” is to blame for Britain’s problems, around 20% of respondents say “Yes”, about 10% say “No”, and 70% ask: “What?”

Burnham gave a “terrific, gutsy performance”, said Robert Shrimsley in the FT. His bold pledges on pensions, voting reform and Europe were not the act of “a people-pleaser, afraid to take tough decisions”. What was missing, though, was a proper acknowledgment of the global economic turmoil buffeting the UK, and an explanation of exactly how Burnham plans to grow the economy. The other problem, of course, is that his big reforms won’t happen until after the next election, due in 2029. This seems like a waste of Labour’s current, 160-strong majority and raises the question: “What is the point of the rest of this Parliament?” While Labour may be offering “hope again, it is also hope deferred”, unless the PM calls an early election (see page 21).

"As a work of rhetorical art, Burnham's speech compared well with Obama, the ultimate man of hope," said Sean O'Grady in The Independent. But there was less to it than meets the eye. He promised an NCS, but the exact shape of it won't be clear until Louise Casey's report on social care is unveiled next year. Electoral reform is coming, but not until another national commission has considered it, and its proposals have potentially been put to a referendum. We may renew EU links, in ways yet to be decided. Strip away the fireworks of Burnham's speech and you're left with "dull Starmerite caution – lots of committees, commissions, debate and cross-party talks, but not much more than gestures until we're well into the 2030s".

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What the commentators said

This was more “diplotainment” than diplomacy, said Amy Hawkins in The Guardian. There was little progress on thorny issues such as trading relations, because there hadn’t been enough behind the scenes negotiation ahead of the meeting. So Trump filled the void with excursions: he gave Xi a tour of the White House ballroom site, and showed him his new helipad. Xi, the president gushed to reporters, is “an expert on stone” and “has a great interest in granite”. Perhaps Trump thought he could charm Xi into making concessions, said Cindy Yu in The Times. But he got nothing on Iran, which Beijing is supplying with drone components and, it is said, satellite imagery; nor did Xi give any ground on China’s “chokehold” on the supply of rare earths, which is harming the US aerospace industry and its semiconductor firms. On Taiwan, meanwhile, Xi tried to subtly “shift the goalposts”, by suggesting that the US should “maintain the correct position of opposing ‘Taiwanese independence’”. Washington’s current official position is not to “oppose” Taiwanese independence, but rather to “not support” it.

Still, any sign of détente between China and the US is to be welcomed, said Jessica Chen Weiss in The New York Times. Last year's trade war demonstrated that each could inflict pain on the other, and that neither could “force the other to back down”. It’s time both nations abandoned the fantasy that they can “win” the battle for supremacy, and embraced their inter-dependence. As for the rest of us, we must adjust to the age of the “hypernation”, said Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. Firms in the US and China can now do everything on such an enormous scale – from securing capital investment, to accessing cheap electricity – and can tap into such vast labour markets, that companies operating in fragmented trading blocs such as the EU can no longer hope to compete at a global level. If “middle powers” such as the UK don’t start to coordinate more effectively with each other, their dreams of economic growth will turn to dust.

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THE WEEK

If The Week were ever to entertain a slot called Big News That Got Little Attention – a bit of a hostage to fortune, so we won't – then this week Chris Giles's report on the productivity of Britain's

workforce (see page 14) would surely feature in it. Our dismal slump in productivity since 2009, our wretched failure to keep pace with our European neighbours, has been a constant lament over the past decade. Much ink has been spilled addressing it. The Economic and Social Research Council has funded a £32m Productivity Institute, expressly focused on understanding and reversing the slowdown. Yet, lo and behold: it now seems the problem was a mirage, an artefact of statistical error. We work just as productively as the French; we just take more holidays than the statisticians accounted for – splendid news which you’d have thought would bring a big smile to the national conversation. It has received barely a mention. Why? Partly, no doubt, because it’s uncomfortable to accept that many of the national statistics on which policy is based are far more fragile than we care to admit. But mainly, I suspect, because it doesn’t fit our prevailing mood of what is best described as “facile pessimism” – our devotion to the narrative of national decline. So credit to Andy Burnham for trying to lift that mood (though even he – “Britain is not perfect. It can be better. But it still stands for something worth saving” – doesn’t sound that convinced). We need to help him out, even if we dislike his policies. Gloom is not compulsory.

Jeremy O’Grady

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What next?

The extent to which Burnham is able to win back progressive voters lost to the Greens will be put to the test next Thursday in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, says Rowena Mason in The Guardian. The next significant political fixture after that is Healey's first Budget, set for 28 October, although “big decisions on spending are likely to be put off until a bigger fiscal event in the spring, in the hope that the economic picture improves before then”.

Another key date for Labour will be 25 November, when the energy regulator announces the new price cap for the first quarter of 2027. It's feared that prices could have to rise hugely in response to surging gas costs.

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What next?

Trump and Xi will meet twice more this year: first at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in Shenzhen in November; then at December's G20 summit in Miami. The truce in the US-China trade war is now due to expire in January. Beijing had hoped for a longer extension, but the US refused because it is holding out for concessions from China to improve the flow of rare earth exports.

On AI, the US and China agreed to set up a “hotline” to help defuse serious incidents. Details are scarce, but Xi emphasised that AI must be kept under “human control”.

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Controversy of the week The Man City verdict

“Agüeroooooooo!” Commentator Martin Tyler’s incredulous, single-word cry, in the final minutes of the last match of the 2011/12 season, is a part of “football folklore”, said The Guardian. In injury time, the Manchester City striker Sergio Agüero had scored a dramatic goal against QPR that would not only secure City its first title in 44 years, but set the club up for more than a decade of football dominance. “But an asterisk may now be needed” at the end of all Tyler’s “O”s. After a legal battles lasting many years, the Premier League this week confirmed that an independent commission has found City guilty of financial misconduct on a vast scale. In the years from 2009/10 to 2017/18, it used subterfuge to boost its income by more than £900m. Seven Premier League titles, three FA Cups and a Champions League won under the ownership of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi were all, it now seems, “won unfairly”. This is a catastrophe for the whole Premier League, not just Man City, said Martin Samuel in The Times. Years of English football now count for nothing. Rival clubs were robbed of glory; some were even wrongly relegated. “What remains of this league is now rubble.”

Mancini in 2012: tainted victory

Manchester City have vowed to appeal the ruling, said Rory Smith in The Observer. But a reversal seems unlikely: the club was found guilty of over 100 charges. Most related to breaches of financial rules designed to ensure clubs spend only what they earn, and success is not dependent on which has the richest owner. It's now clear just how much damage has been wrought on the Premier League "by its unquestioning and unrelenting worship of money". To fuel its boom, said Paul Hayward in the same paper, the "world's favourite league" opened its arms to oligarchs, sovereign wealth funds and speculators – chief among them Sheikh Mansour, whose Abu Dhabi United Group bought City in 2008. He was ruthlessly determined to win. "The deceit stretched from paying manager Roberto Mancini twice" (once through a club in the UAE) to sham sponsorship deals with Abu Dhabi firms to filing false accounts. The league now has to impose a punishment that fits the industrial scale of the crime, with options ranging from points deduction to expulsion. Leniency will only add to the fury.

Other clubs will be lining up to sue City. But the consequences of this verdict “stretch far beyond football” and the courts, said Miguel Delaney in The Independent. The UAE is one of Britain’s main Middle Eastern trading partners, and has invested tens of billions in UK real estate and infrastructure – not least in Manchester, when a certain Andy Burnham was mayor. This scandal could be very awkward politically, said Francis Pike in The Spectator. With the UK economy flailing and bond markets volatile, losing the goodwill of the UAE would be a major blow. Behind the scenes, it is easy to imagine the Government intervening “to prevent a deep humiliation of the Emirates”.

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Spirit of the age

The boss of shoe repair and key-cutting chain Timpson has revealed that requests from people wanting extra holes punched into their belts have risen 680% this year. James Timpson put the surge in demand for the free service down to the explosion in the number of people using GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. From Timpson's data, "you can tell Ozempic and Mounjaro are popular", he said in a post on X. In England last year, NHS data shows that more than a million people were taking such drugs, up from some 200,000 three years ago.

Nearly 90% of young people aged 11 to 24 in England now use AI tools; 63% of secondary school pupils use them while doing their homework, and 77% rely on them to explain topics with which they are struggling.

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Good week for:

Domestic harmony, with the answer to a question that has often divided families: does the recycling need to be thoroughly washed before it goes in the bin? According to waste management expert Richard Kirkman, it does not. Containers, he told The Sunday Times, only need to be emptied and if very dirty wiped clean, to stop fluids such as jam and cream seeping out and contaminating the paper in the load. Anything else is a waste of hot water.

Big Ted, Little Ted, and Humpty, who could be returning to British TV screens as part of rebooted Play School. The BBC has invited production companies to pitch for a new version of the programme for pre-schoolers, which ran from 1964 to 1988. Britain's soft power, after a report found that 60 current world leaders were educated in the UK, second only to the US, on 66. They include Canada's PM Mark Carney (University of Oxford), President Alexander Stubb of Finland (the LSE) and Catherine Connolly, the president of Ireland (University of Leeds).

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Bad week for:

Drivers, as the price of diesel on UK forecourts reached an all-time high average of 199.18p a litre. The conflict in the Middle East has driven up prices. Now Donald Trump is talking about banning US exports of the fuel. This would lead to lower prices for some consumers in the US ahead of the midterm elections, but it could cause them to skyrocket elsewhere (see page 15).

Morgan Stanley, after one of the Wall Street giant's investment bankers in Hong Kong accidentally leaked a list of more than 100 deals on its radar, including IPOs and possible takeovers.

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Vocational GCSEs

Pupils in England are to be offered a range of new vocational GCSEs. From 2029 courses such as construction, creative media production and child development will be available alongside core academic subjects. They are part of the Government's effort to create an education system that offers "a path for everybody, academic and technical, in equal balance". The new GCSEs will gradually replace other such qualifications, such as BTecs, at this level. VCSEs, a new style of vocational qualification unique to Wales, will be taught from September 2027.

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Heathrow runway delay

The third runway planned for Heathrow is to be delayed by four years, meaning it will not be operational until 2039 at the earliest. Last year, the then-chancellor Rachel Reeves announced the Government's support for the £49bn project; in theory it was to be completed within ten years. However, ministers admitted last week that the 2035 timeline was "ambitious". The airport's operator aims to secure planning permission by 2029, and to open the runway within a decade of that date. Heathrow is the busiest two-runway airport in the world. Proposals to build a new runway date back decades.

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Poll watch

By $48 \%$ to $28 \%$ , Britons support Andy Burnham's plan to change the pension triple lock in order to help fund a National Care Service. $25 \%$ don't know. YouGov

68% of regular matchgoers believe the ban on drinking at football matches should remain in place; 35% say it should be abolished, as the PM recently suggested. 68% of Britons want the ban to stay in place; 15% disagree. YouGov

Marine Le Pen is set to win 35-36% of first-round votes in next April's French presidential election. Her nearest contender, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the hard-left France Unbowed, would win 17-18%. Le Pen would easily beat all likely rivals in the runoff vote.

RTL Radio/M6

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Paris

Pope's welcome: Around 800,000 people packed the Place de la Concorde and streets around it last week for a giant open-air Mass conducted by Pope Leo XIV – the highlight of the first papal state visit to France for 18 years. Leo, an American whose paternal grandmother came from Normandy, addressed the crowd in French: "From this beautiful city of Paris, I pray fervently that the living water of the Holy Spirit may flow throughout France", he told them. (Although seen as one of Europe's major Catholic countries, no more than $5\% - 8\%$ of the French go to Mass each week.) During his four-day trip, Leo on several occasions reiterated the Church's opposition to France's new assisted dying law, which is backed by Macron's government. And in what some saw as a snub, he declined Macron's invitation of a personal tour of the newly restored Notre-Dame Cathedral. In thinly veiled criticisms of President Trump, he also issued warnings about the dangers (and benefits) posed by AI and spoke out against the war in Iran. He went on to the pilgrimage site of Lourdes, where some 150,000 attended the papal Mass, and afterwards to Metz, where he called for peace in Europe.

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Copenhagen

Russian threat: In the most explicit warning yet from a Western intelligence agency, Denmark's intelligence service has advised that Russia may be preparing an imminent assault against one of the six Nato member states bordering Russia – Norway, Finland, Poland, Lithuania Latvia or Estonia. Thomas Ahrenkiel, the agency's chief, did not specify which, but said there was a “low but growing” risk of attack in the form of an armed incursion (under the pretext of protecting Russian minorities) or of a long-range strike on infrastructure used to support Ukraine. There has been a recent series of “hybrid” attacks blamed on Russia, including a drone strike on Leipzig airport, and a flare attack on a Danish helicopter in the Baltic.

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Madrid

Eviction protests: Tens of thousands marched through the streets of Madrid last week, and a tented encampment was set up in the Puerta del Sol central square, in protest at the soaring rents and tenant evictions prevalent in the capital and other towns across Spain – all widely blamed on the growing role of investment funds in residential property. The protests were sparked by the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, who’d lived in her flat since the 1950s, but was forcibly removed last week after being unable to pay her rent: the investment firm that had bought the building had raised it almost fourfold to €2,650 a month. Pictures of police knocking down Abascal’s door and of her being carried out on a stretcher caused a public outcry, and sparked clashes outside her apartment building. The firm has now offered her a new lease capped at a third of her pension income (estimated at €500 a month). PM Pedro Sánchez has announced that his government is working on an emergency housing decree to bring immediate relief to vulnerable tenants.

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Rome

“Stripped” by AI: Roberto Vannacci, the politician whose far-right pro-Russia Futuro Nazionale party is a growing electoral force, has been accused of an “intolerable act of sexist bullying” for

using AI to doctor a photo of a female opponent during a by-election campaign in Reggio Calabria. The former army general posted an image of Matilde Siracusano, an MP in Giorgia Meloni's coalition, in which her T-shirt had been altered to make her look bare-chested. Siracusano, calling the image "perverse and sordid", said she'd be taking legal action. In the by-election, Vannacci's candidate was heavily defeated.

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Belgrade

President quits: Serbia’s “strongman” leader, Aleksandar Vucic, resigned as president this week and has called a snap parliamentary election for 25 October. The widely predicted move would allow him to keep his grip on power, should his Serbian Progressive Party (newly rebranded as “Aleksandar Vucic – United Serbia”) triumph. An ultranationalist who once served in the 1999 cabinet of the dictator Slobodan Miloševic, Vucic had been due to leave office next May, and is barred by the constitution from seeking a third five-year term as president. But an electoral victory could see him return as prime minister, a post he has held twice before. Although Vucic’s government has been under intense pressure from student-led popular protests for the past two years, and is widely accused of being corrupt and increasingly authoritarian, his party is still just about leading in the opinion polls.

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Oleshky, Ukraine

Hunger crisis: The Ukrainian army has used large drones to carry out an airdrop of emergency food, water and medical supplies into the occupied town of Oleshky, Russia having reportedly once again refused to hold a ceasefire to evacuate civilians. Oleshky, under Russian occupation since February 2022, lies on the eastern bank of the Dnipro, just across from the city of Kherson, held by Ukraine. Most of its population of 24,000 have fled, but 2,000 remain, close to starvation and trapped by Russian forces, who use the area as a launch pad for attacks on Kherson. The situation has deteriorated since May, after expanded Russian military activity cut off almost all aid; Kyiv claims the Russians are intentionally starving the population to death. This week, Russian jet-powered drones also attacked Ukraine's renowned National Academy of Sciences, in an hours-long, daylight assault on Kyiv.

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The world at a glance

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New York City

Weinstein sentenced: The former film mogul Harvey Weinstein has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for sexually assaulting Miriam Haley, a TV production assistant, at his Manhattan apartment in 2006. Weinstein had been first found guilty of assaulting Haley in 2020, but that conviction was later overturned on appeal and a judge ordered a retrial. In an impact statement, Haley told the court: "It's

a life sentence for me." Weinstein, 74, has been in jail since 2020, on other charges, and is currently being held in a secure ward in a hospital in New York. Other cases against him remain ongoing.

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Washington DC

No deal: President Trump declared this week that he had rejected an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within days in return for the lifting of the US blockade of Iranian ports. The president also angrily denied reports that he’d offered Iran sanctions relief in return for concessions on its nuclear programme. However, he did confirm that US officials had held indirect talks with Tehran. Trump – who insists the US has total control of Hormuz, and says the Iranians are trying to make a deal because “they’re losing” – recently posted an image of the strait relabelled “Trump Strait”. According to The Wall Street Journal, he has told aides that the US bombing of Iran could resume after the midterm elections.

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Washington DC

Press ban reversed: The Trump administration has been ordered by a court to restore White House access to reporters from three major news groups. Last month, Trump declared that the reporters – from CNN, MS Now and Politico – were peddling “fake news”, and banished them from White House grounds. They filed a lawsuit against the move, saying it breached the first amendment, and four other TV networks that make up the press pool (including the Trump-friendly Fox News) paused their reporting in solidarity – drastically limiting coverage of President Xi’s state visit to Washington. In court last week, a judge ruled that the ban likely violated the media outlets’ constitutional rights, and ordered it to be lifted pending a further “order of the court”.

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Caracas

Election pledge: About 40 dissidents were released from jails in Venezuela this week, days after the country's interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, met Donald Trump at the UN General Assembly. It was the first meeting between leaders of the

two countries since 2009. Rodríguez served as vice-president to Nicolás Maduro until his capture by US forces in January. After that, hundreds of prisoners were released, but lately such releases had tailed off. In New York, Rodríguez promised that elections would be held in Venezuela – without specifying when.

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Brasília

Betting ban: President Lula of Brazil banned online gambling this week – a move supported by roughly 75% of Brazilians – days before the first round of a presidential election in which he is seeking re-election. The order came into force immediately, but it must be approved by congress within 120 days. Most forms of gambling are illegal in Brazil, but online betting was legalised in 2018, and has since exploded in popularity, contributing to record levels of personal debt. Brazilian households lost an estimated £9bn last year. Announcing the move, Lula called the industry a “cancer”. His main election rival, Flávio Bolsonaro – the son of the imprisoned former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro – denounced the ban as “populist, hypocritical and politically motivated”. Polls this week put Lula fractionally ahead in the race.

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New York City

Netanyahu at the UN: Benjamin Netanyahu gave a defiant speech to the UN General Assembly last week. Scores of delegates walked out of the chamber when the Israeli PM started to speak – and vowed that his country would keep fighting because “we have no other choice”. Netanyahu said that claims (including by a UN Commission of Inquiry) that Israel had committed acts of genocide in Gaza since the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023 were not only false, but “the greatest lie of the century”. He referred to those who’d walked out as “moral cowards”, and praised Donald Trump for his “bold” actions against Tehran. His speech was widely seen as being largely pitched to right-wingers at home, where he is facing elections on 27 October. Outside, police broke up an “unscheduled” protest against Netanyahu’s visit, and arrested several people, including the actress Susan Sarandon.

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Buenos Aires

Falklands threat: Argentina's president, Javier Milei, has threatened legal action against the

British Government unless oil exploration off the coast of the Falkland Islands is halted by mid-October. The \$2.2bn Sea Lion project, an oilfield 220km to the north of the archipelago, was approved last year by the islands' largely autonomous government; it has the potential to triple their GDP. Milei has also launched criminal proceedings against the companies involved – Israel's Navitas Petroleum and Britain's Rockhopper Exploration. Responding to Milei's threats, London reiterated its position that the Falkland islanders hold the right to self-determination and sole jurisdiction over their natural resources.

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[The world at a glance] Mekelle, Ethiopia

Fighting resumes: Four years after a fragile ceasefire ended a conflict that cost an estimated 600,000 lives, Ethiopia appears to be sliding back into full-scale war. Last month, seven rebel groups – including the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which fought federal forces in the previous conflict from 2020 to 2022 – announced they had formed an alliance to oppose Abiy Ahmed’s government in Addis Ababa. Since then, rebel fighters in Tigray have seized three airports and pushed into two neighbouring regions. This week, they claimed to have captured strategic towns including Erebti; and federal troops have counterattacked. Ethiopia has accused Sudan, Egypt and Eritrea of backing the rebels. Eritrea says Ethiopia is looking for a pretext to invade it and gain access to the Red Sea by seizing the port of Assab.

Gaza City, Palestinian Territories

Reconstruction plan: The US-backed Board of Peace has unveiled a \$2.45bn plan to start the reconstruction of Gaza – a project that it estimates will cost more than \$35bn in the medium term, and \$71.4bn over the next ten years. The new six-month blueprint, overseen by Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, includes projects to clear debris, reconstruct infrastructure and deliver humanitarian aid – but it won't start until Hamas has disarmed. In July, the militant group agreed to decommission its heavy weapons as part of a Board of Peace roadmap. However, it says it won't do this until Israel has complied with the military withdrawal required by phase one of the initial peace deal. This week, Kushner said he hoped that the conditions required for reconstruction would emerge “very soon”.

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Johannesburg, South Africa

Gun massacres: At least 32 people have been killed in three shootings in South Africa in the

past ten days, intensifying concerns about organised crime and gun violence. All three were in impoverished townships: one outside Johannesburg, where eight men armed with AK-47 rifles and pistols opened fire at a tavern, killing 18 people; the other two in the Western Cape. Police said that the attackers' motives were unclear, but other mass shootings have been linked to turf wars between criminal gangs. South Africa has one of the world's highest murder rates. In February, President Cyril Ramaphosa described organised crime as the most immediate threat to South Africa's democracy, and promised measures to fight it.

Colombo

Tabuk,

Saudi Arabia

Airborne

attack: A

FlyDubai

passenger jet

en route from

Dubai to

Tel Aviv was

forced to make an emergency landing at Tabuk, in Saudi Arabia, on Wednesday, after a knife fight broke out in the cockpit. According to early reports, the plane plunged 17,000ft in less than two minutes, causing terror among the estimated 180 passengers, most of whom were Israeli. Israel's PM Benjamin Netanyahu told the media that one pilot had stabbed the other, and “apparently attempted to crash the plane”. The attacker was overpowered by crew and passengers; two other pilots on board then took control of the flight for its emergency landing.

Bombing verdict: A court in the Sri Lankan capital has convicted 15 men of plotting the Easter Sunday bombings of 2019, in which 270 people were killed. The suicide attacks, which targeted churches

and hotels, are believed to have been inspired by Islamic State; all those indicted were from Sri Lanka's Muslim minority. Police are also investigating allegations that a high-level official allowed the atrocity to take place, to create the security crisis that facilitated the election of Gotabaya Rajapaksa as president months later.

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Kuala Lumpur

Refugee returns: Malaysia has deported nearly 1,500 refugees from Myanmar as part of a repatriation programme agreed with Myanmar's military junta. Malaysia says they are going back voluntarily, but UN officials were barred from screening the returnees, and there are fears for their safety in the war-torn country. The identity of the refugees is not clear, but Malaysia's PM Anwar Ibrahim has said that many of the 5,000 in total would be

from the Rohingya minority, which has faced hostility in Malaysia.

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Canberra

Rogue agent: An AI agent has hacked into a national healthcare database in Australia, in the first known case of AI breaching a government network. As a test in June, the AI model had been told to gather health data, but when it encountered access restrictions, it bypassed them. PM Anthony Albanese said he had raised his “extreme” concern about the hack with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and about the firm’s subsequent handling of it: OpenAI learnt of the breach in August, but only notified Canberra in September, in a brief email to a public inbox (see page 14).

Stallone's brutal childhood

Rocky, the Oscar-winning film that made Sylvester Stallone an overnight star, tells the story of a boxer, says Decca Aitkenhead in The Sunday Times. But it is fundamentally about loneliness and hardship – two things that Stallone, who also wrote the film, had experienced at first hand. Now, he lives in a gleaming palace in the Hamptons, but he spent his infancy in a tiny flat in Hell's Kitchen that was so volatile, owing to the violence of his parents' marriage, it was like a "hand grenade". Then, when he was two years old, they sent him to live in a boarding house, visiting him just once a month. "I was there till I was nearly six," he says. He'd have his dinner with the other boarders, many of them travelling salesmen – Willy Loman-type figures, he says, who'd boast about the "big deals" they were supposedly working on. The landlady's daughters made sure he didn't wander off. But who played with him, and read him stories? "No one." His parents eventually took him away, but life didn't improve. He was bullied at school owing to his slurring speech and drooping mouth (the results of nerve damage at birth), and got into fights. Aged 16, he was sent to a notorious institution for troubled youth which was, he says, a "cauldron of madness" that made the hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest look a "joyful, kind of charming thing". He never lived with his parents again, but they continued to torment him: his

father resented his success, and tried to undermine his career; his mother liked to tell him that he was only alive because she'd failed in her attempt to abort him with a coat hanger. Yet he kept up relationships with both to the very end, and paid for their every need. Why did he do it? "See, there's the conundrum. I don't know."

Becoming Zuckerberg

When Aaron Sorkin began work on The Social Reckoning, his follow-up to 2010's The Social Network, about the origins of Facebook, his first call was to Jesse Eisenberg, says Lulu Garcia-Navarro in The New York Times. The actor had played Mark Zuckerberg in the first film to great acclaim; but he made it pretty clear that he wouldn't be reprising the role. "He really doesn't like Zuckerberg," says Sorkin. He hates that he "kind of looks like the guy", and really "does not want to be conflated with this character any more". The upshot was that the part went instead to the Succession star Jeremy Strong – a method actor who was only too happy to immerse himself in the role of a tech boss. "He did not speak in his own voice on set or walk the way Jeremy walks," says Sorkin. In fact, the director warned the film's other actors not to expect Strong to be "yukking it up" with them between takes – or even to speak to them at all. "He is going to treat you the way he imagines Mark treats people around him," he told them. "And that's what happened."

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Wayne and Coleen Rooney, says Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian, is that the couple are still together. They first met at the age of 12, when they were growing up in Croxteth, a working-class suburb of Liverpool. They started dating at 16; and at 22, they got married. Rooney was by then already a huge football star – and so their relationship was tabloid fodder more or less from the start. Wayne, especially, didn’t always handle this well. He was wounded when, aged 16, it was falsely reported that he couldn’t read or write; and it was painful when his personal failings (not least paying for sex in backstreet massage parlours) were splashed on the front pages. Owing to all that, plus his “aggressive” playing style, he thinks most people made up their own minds – basically, he says, that he is an “arsehole” – years ago. But these days, he and Coleen present as a fairly typical married couple. They live expensive lives, but still visit family back in Croxteth. She runs the house and marshals their four boys, aged eight to 16. Wayne is “funny and laid-back”, she says, but can be impatient. Do they argue much? “I can’t remember the last time,” says Wayne. “We’ve been on a good run lately, haven’t we? We’ve not had a row for weeks and weeks.” In any case, he’s learnt to keep his counsel if things get heated. “[I] let her get it off her chest. I don’t think I’ve ever won an argument with her.”

---

Castaway of the week

This week's edition of Radio 4's Desert Island Discs featured the writer Matt Haig

1\* Here, There and Everywhere by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, performed by The Beatles

2 Flying from the E.T. soundtrack by John Williams, performed by John Williams and the Hollywood Studio Symphony

3 A Forest by Simon Gallup, Robert Smith, Matthieu Hartley and Lol Tolhurst, performed by The Cure

4 Adagio for Strings (Ferry Corsten Remix) by Samuel Barber, performed by William Orbit

5 The Boys of Summer by Don Henley and Mike Campbell, performed by Don Henley

6 O-o-h Child by Stan Vincent, performed by The Five Stairsteps

7 The Mother We Share, written and performed by Chvrches

8 You Make it Easy by Jean-Benoît Dunckel, Nicolas Godin and Beth Hirsch, performed by Air

\* Choice if allowed only one record

Book: The Diaries of Samuel Pepys

Luxury: an unlimited supply of A4 pads and pens

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Viewpoint: Labrador politics

“Bang goes the labrador vote. At Labour’s conference, Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, the under-secretary of state for nature, attacked the picture of a rural England of ‘warm ale and a black labrador by your feet’, in ‘a pub that doesn’t exist’, as a ‘far-right’ fantasy. Well, try suggesting that on Friday night in Derbyshire’s Flying Childers (a local which does exist) to an audience including a fair few fireside dogs (which do include labradors). I think she may have been trying to make a serious point about needing to look past the thatched cottage and see the countryside in the round. But that she found it impossible not to do so in the language of class hatred is depressing.” Matthew Parris in The Times

---

Farewell

George N. Gillett Jr,

Liverpool FC co-owner

2007-2010, died

22 September, aged 87.

Triona Holden,

broadcast journalist,

artist and author, died

29 August, aged 67.

Idris Jones,

infantryman during the

Burma campaign, died

28 August, aged 102.

Mighty Sparrow, "the calypso king", died 27 September, aged 91.

Michael Wynn Jones,

journalist and husband

of Delia Smith, died

28 September, aged 85.

Keep us forever without borders

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HENRY GRAY HAS WORKED FORMSF IN NUMEROUS CRISES AROUND THE WORLD.

"I've worked for MSF on and off for twenty years, but I still remember the first project I worked on. We were setting up a hospital in the middle of a forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There had been a lot of fighting in this area, and although the conflict had died down, the legacy of war was still very visible. About 125,000 people lived in the immediate area, but there were no services, and not even basic medical care was available. Women couldn't get caesareans if they needed them; there were no medicines, no vaccinations, and no treatment for diseases. It was a desperate situation, and that's when MSF sent us to get an emergency hospital up and running.

From the start, our goal was to provide medical care and save lives. But we knew that for this work to continue and to have lasting impact, we couldn't just provide medical care. We needed to bring the community on board; we needed to hire local staff and train local people to do the jobs that we were doing. So that's what we did.

It was fantastic to see the immediate impact of that lifesaving work. But what really surprised me was seeing how the hospital transformed the entire area. I still remember the day we switched on the generators that would power the lights in and around the hospital. Suddenly, schoolchildren started turning up to sit under the lights and do their homework. Over the weeks, businesses sprang up, and the local economy grew.

Over the years I've worked in war zones, in Ebola outbreaks and in natural disasters, and I've seen over and over again how the simple actions we take as MSF can have massive and positive knock-on effects for people, for their families and their communities.

But none of those simple acts happens without your support. MSF doesn't take money from governments. We're privately funded by people just like you. By leaving a gift in your will to MSF, you can know that your gift will not only save lives, but will change lives now and into the future. Thank you."

Above 4-year-old Franyeli receives medical care at MSF's mobile clinic in Puerto Alegre, Colombia. Photo: ©Natalia Romero Peñuela/MSF

"We will always be committed to providing care to those who need it. But that legacy is not ours alone."

Dr Rachael Craven,

Anaesthetist and President

---

Forever without borders – thanks to your support

For more than 50 years, we've brought medical care to people who urgently need it, no matter where they are. We've performed surgery on floors, in corridors and by the light of head torches. We've helped mothers deliver babies in warzones and resuscitated people caught up in explosions.

Because we don't take any government funding, it is only the generosity of people like you that helps keep us going. This means we remain independent, impartial and neutral, and can deliver care to anyone who needs it.

By leaving a gift in your will, you'll help to make sure our teams will always be able to respond, without hesitation and without borders.

1 in 5 of our projects are funded by gifts in wills

REQUEST OUR LEGACY GUIDE

Scan the QR code, search MSF Wills, or complete and return the Freepost coupon below.

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INSURANCE RIGHT DOWN TO THE FINEST DETAIL

For high-value properties and contents, including valuables, fine art and collections, choose NFU Mutual Bespoke Home Insurance.

To discuss our highly rated home insurance with our dedicated specialists, visit: nfumutual.co.uk/bespoketheweek scan the QR code, or call: 0808 239 4592

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[Briefing] The welfare bill

Is spending on benefits really out of control? What exactly do we spend on welfare, and who receives it?

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How much do we spend overall?

The Government spent £329.1bn on benefits in the financial year 2025/26 – equivalent to 10.7% of GDP, and about £4,700 per person in Britain. It amounts to roughly a quarter of all government spending, and dwarfs the totals spent on the NHS (about £257bn), education (about £126bn) and defence (about £62bn). The welfare bill increased by about £18.8bn in the last financial year; by 2030/31, it is expected to rise to £408.6bn. This projected increase is fuelling calls from across the political spectrum to rein in welfare spending, particularly on disability and incapacity benefits; many also argue that increases in pension spending are unsustainable.

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Who actually receives this money?

More than 24 million people claimed some form of Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) benefit in August last year. Of these, 13.4 million were pensioners: of the entire welfare budget, about 55% goes to pensioners. The state pension cost an estimated £146bn in 2025/26; and another £31bn or so went on pension credit, housing benefit for pensioners, the winter fuel allowance, and so on. In total, the UK spent £145bn on benefits for working-age people and children – including incapacity and disability benefits (£77bn); housing benefit (£37bn); and child benefit (£13bn). Last August, about ten million recipients were of working age; and 860,000 were children receiving disability living allowance. Around a third of working-age benefit claimants are in employment of some kind (for example, low-paid workers get in-work top-up via universal credit). The latest figures show 1.6 million people who are fit for work are claiming an unemployment benefit; the cost, spread across different benefits, is some £1.4bn.

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Why is the bill rising?

have run high (pensions rose by 10.1% in 2023, 8.5% in 2024, 4.1% in 2025, and 4.8% in 2026). By 2030, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) reckons the triple lock will add £15.5bn a year to the welfare bill. But pensions are by no means the only factor. Benefits are also rising because more people are claiming disability and incapacity benefits. In 2010, Britain spent about £45bn on such benefits; by 2025, this had risen to £77bn.

A third of working-age benefit claimants are employed

In no small part, because of pensions. Since the “triple lock” was introduced by the coalition government in 2011, pensions have been guaranteed to increase by whichever is highest: inflation, average wage growth or 2.5%. This has led to sharp rises in the state pension in recent years, when inflation and wage growth

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Which benefits are these?

By the middle of this year, more than 4.5 million people in England and Wales were claiming at least one of an overlapping patchwork of incapacity and disability benefits, up from fewer than three million in 2020. The fastest growing is the Personal Independence Payment (Pip): cash payments to cover the extra costs of being disabled – a payment that has gradually

replaced the older Disability Living Allowance and Incapacity Benefit. By July, 4.1 million people were claiming a Pip in England and Wales, up 7% from last year's 3.83 million; in 2019 there were two million. More than two million now receive health-related benefits under a separate universal credit regime.

So are people getting sicker?

Some experts point to worsening public health since the 2008 financial crisis, citing factors such as growing obesity, long hospital waiting times, the cost-of-living crisis and other social causes. But critics of the system argue that the rise in disability and incapacity claimants owes more to broadening definitions of disability – and especially to an increase in people claiming benefits for mental

health conditions. In 2002, 25% of disability benefit recipients claimed primarily for a mental health condition (or a learning or neurodevelopmental condition); by 2025, this had risen to 45%. About one in seven working-age Britons now report having a long-term mental or behavioural disorder (up 50% in a decade).

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How can this be explained?

Again, by most measures there has in fact been a recent increase in mental ill-health in Britain, particularly since the pandemic. Most European countries have seen similar trends; but most have not seen this translate into higher health benefit claims. Another possible explanation is the collapse in face-to-face assessments for Pip claims (down from 80% pre-pandemic to less than 15% in July 2026), which may make it harder to weed out bogus claimants – some of whom are coached by AI bots or so-called “sickfluencers” on social media. A further explanation may lie in the design of the welfare system itself, which encourages people to seek generous long-term sickness benefits (see box).

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Is the welfare bill sustainable?

It is often said to be “spiralling”, but the overall bill has remained pretty stable as a proportion of the UK’s national income. Welfare spending amounted to just under 11% of GDP in the last financial

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Perverse incentives

over 25. Add in housing benefit, and it reaches around £12,000 per year. However, if you have a long-term disability or a health condition, you get extra payments (at least £217 a month more). If you are categorised in the higher form of sickness benefits, the overall figure rises to over £17,000, according to Centre for Social Justice figures. Add in Pip, and it reaches an average of £24,000, just below the full-time minimum wage. Add in child benefit for one child, and you are paid over £27,000 – closer to the national average wage. Obviously, the system gives powerful incentives for people to claim sickness, physical or mental; and, unlike with unemployment benefit, it brings with it little or no pressure to seek a job. There are currently around 1,000 new Pip claims submitted every day

in the UK; about 34% are successful.

However, reform is difficult: it is perceived as an attack on society's most vulnerable. When Keir Starmer tried to tighten the assessment criteria for Pip, with a bill in June 2025 designed to save £5bn per year, a threatened rebellion by 126 Labour MPs forced him to back down.

year – up from 10.4% in 1996/97, but lower than the peak of 12.4% in 2009/10. In fact, total non-pensioner benefits have hovered between 4% and 5% for more than 40 years. International comparisons are difficult, but the UK’s welfare bill is by most measures right in the middle of the OECD developed nations – it spends far less as a share of GDP than, say, France or Italy, and far more than the US or South Korea. Despite recent increases, the state pension is relatively ungenerous, though Britons do have good private pensions. Spending on disability and incapacity benefits is growing fast: it is set to hit 2.1% of GDP in 2028 (almost double the share two decades earlier). The Timms Review into the Pip system is due soon; but an interim report has already deemed it “unfit for purpose”. Welfare Minister Pat McFadden said this week that Labour would make benefits reform a “moral crusade”.

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[Best articles: Britain] Where Labour has made headway...

Lionel Barber

The i Paper

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...and where it's more than likely not to

Dominic Lawson

The Daily Telegraph

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Hurrah. We're just as good as the French Chris Giles

Financial Times

You don't hear Andy Burnham boast about it, says Lionel Barber, but one striking success Labour has achieved since gaining power is control of immigration. Not that you'd think so from the media coverage of angry protests over Channel crossings and asylum camps. Indeed, there's a widespread feeling the system is out of control. According to recent polls, half of us believe net migration rose last year; $70\%$ of Reform UK supporters are convinced small boat crossings did too. They're quite mistaken. Small boat arrivals have dropped significantly: for the first time since late 2021, the yearly number is below 28,000. Net migration is also down more than $80\%$ from its peak of 900,000 in 2023; it's projected to drop below 100,000 by the year's end, entering the tens-of-thousands level the Tories promised in 2010 but never managed to achieve. Burnham needs to stop worrying about upsetting his left flank and to hammer home this point. He'll never be able to make the much-needed case for controlled immigration if people go on thinking we're unable to control our borders. We can. We are.

Taming the country's growing welfare bill will prove a mighty challenge, says Dominic Lawson. Voters may be increasingly aware of the need for cuts (since April, our nearly £3trn national debt has shot up by £77bn); but what makes the task so politically fraught is that few of us see ourselves as part of the problem, even though most of us (53%) live in households that receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. Even among working-age households, nearly half of us (46%) receive more from the state than we contribute to it. (When the IMF bailed out the heavily indebted UK back in 1976, the percentage was under 30%.) Yet as a recent poll indicates, millions who are net beneficiaries of the system are convinced they pay in more than they take out. Even in the poorest cohort (those with an annual household income under £20,000), only 19% believed themselves to be net beneficiaries. And such people – a disproportionate number of whom are in Labour seats – are not going to be happy to discover that the benefit cuts are going to fall not just on those they see as undeserving… but on them. Quite a challenge, Mr Burnham.

Cheer up, says Chris Giles, I've got some good news for you. Britain is “far less useless” than we feared. For the past 15 years, economists have been trying to puzzle out why productivity growth has become so feeble in this country. They've been trying to explain why annual growth in output per hour – roughly 2% before the financial crisis – fell to just 0.7% between 2009 and 2019, and has been slipping further ever since. Turns out they've been wasting their time. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) now thinks the statisticians who produced these figures got them all wrong: they failed to take proper account of workers' holiday time, assuming that those who didn't answer the door or phone when they called must be at work. The correct productivity figure, the ONS calculates, is almost twice as high – 1.3%. So the UK is not an “international outlier” after all; it doesn't take us five days to produce as much as the French do in four. We're just taking more time off in contracted holiday entitlements than the statisticians accounted for. In short, “the UK economy is not as weak as we've been told. We are just as rich as we thought, but are not working ourselves into the ground. Happy days.”

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IT MUST BE TRUE... I read it in the tabloids

A new survey has revealed Britain's rudest place and street names. Top spot went to Sluts Hole Lane in Norfolk; other standouts included Cocks in Cornwall; Twatt (Orkney); Titty Ho (Northants); Wetwang and Slack Bottom (Yorkshire); Sandy Balls (New Forest); Butthole Lane (Leicestershire); Shitterton (Dorset); and Minge Lane (Worcestershire). The list of "Britain's most distracting roads" was compiled by Asda Money.

A partygoer dressed as Batman chased down a thief who snatched a woman's handbag on a night out in Norwich. Café worker Sonni Mason, 25, was queuing for a nightclub with friends when the robber made off with the bag. Along with friends dressed as Poison Ivy from Batman and Cyclops from X-Men, he gave chase, alerting nearby police officers, before finding the suspect and scaling a wall to retrieve the bag from where the man had stashed it. "I hope I can inspire people to be a little bit more like Batman," he said. "You have to be brave, bold and kind."

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How to put the tech bros in their place

Chris Stokel-Walker

The Guardian

No, AI agents haven't “suddenly become sentient and decided to rebel against humanity”, maliciously hacking into protected IT systems. But, yes, says Chris Stokel-Walker, they are being allowed to run wild in pursuit of their allotted goals, gaining unauthorised access to third-party accounts. It has now emerged, for example, that an OpenAI research agent tasked a few months ago with gathering public spending data in Australia circumvented security blocks, to gain unauthorised access to health documents. And as Australia’s furious PM, Anthony Albanese, put it, OpenAI took “way too long” to come clean about it. Yet this is how the tech giants operate: they just report such incidents, voice their regret and move on. Enough. We get independent auditors and accident investigators to help police industries such as, say, airlines, as we recognise that “good intentions don’t remove real conflicts of interest”. It’s time tech firms, too, were subject to outside oversight and made to pay heavily if their models breach security.

A new sculpture on a Bournemouth clifftop has attracted the ire of residents. The installation, Lean into the Wind, cost £54,000 and was developed with input from schoolchildren; but some residents were unimpressed. The sculpture was described as "hideous" and a "total eyesore"; another called it "some rusted metal with a head on top".

Best of the American columnists NEWS 15

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Diesel price hikes: a “missile” heading for Trump voters

What was the key factor that propelled Donald Trump back into the White House for a second term? If you'd asked him that a couple of years ago, said Virginia Heffernan in The New Republic, his answer would almost certainly have been the cost of living. "The beautiful but simple word

‘groceries’,” he once rhapsodised. “I won on that word.” Well, we now know the word on which he’ll likely lose: diesel. Supply disruptions caused by the Iran and Ukraine wars have had a particularly severe impact on diesel prices: they hit a record high of \$6.52 a gallon in the US last week, up from an average of \$3.63 at the start of 2025. The price hikes “aim a missile squarely at the voters Trump can least afford to alienate”, such as pickup truck owners, lorry drivers, and farmers in states such as Iowa. By upsetting the “diesel class, Trump may have bitten the final hand that feeds him”.

The haulage industry: hit hard by price increases

To fix this problem, Trump is toying with the idea of banning US diesel exports, said National Review. The policy has “cheap appeal” ahead of the midterm elections on 3 November, but it would only bring down prices for a short while, and only in some areas. While America makes more diesel than it consumes, pipeline constraints mean that most of it remains relatively close to refining hubs on the Gulf Coast. Other areas of the US, such the Northeast and the West Coast, largely rely on diesel imports, so would end up paying even higher prices if the US further reduced global supplies of the fuel. What's more, if Gulf Coast refineries were unable to export diesel, they'd soon run out of storage space for it and have to slash their output. Result? Not just less diesel, but also a reduced volume of other refined products such as petrol and jet fuel.

A diesel export ban wouldn't help America, agreed Catherine Rampell on The Bulwark. And it would cause major problems for countries that rely on these exports, such as Mexico, the UK and the Netherlands, which trade with the US in other oil-based products, and could well decide to retaliate in some form. Still, this is the Trump White House we're talking about – a team of people with “zero policy expertise” and “zero patience”, who care “only about what talking points will get them through the next news cycle, tomorrow’s consequences be damned”. The worse the opinion polls get ahead of the midterms, the more tempted Trump will be to reach for this “fake fix”.

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How to help American Indians

Ayaan Karan

RealClearPolitics

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Trump has made a farce of state visits

Tom Nichols

The Atlantic

If “empty gestures” solved problems, American Indians would be thriving today, says Ayaan Karan. Sadly, all those earnest declarations by universities and city councils – about how their campus “occupies” the territory of some tribe – achieve nothing other than stroking the moral vanity of the Left. Land acknowledgements don’t help modern-day American Indians like the ones who live in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, home of the Oglala Lakota people. It’s the poorest place in the US. Life expectancy there is around 50, the unemployment rate exceeds 70%, addiction is rife. Conditions are almost as bad in other reservations. One of the big factors contributing to their “abject poverty” is the land ownership system. The federal government holds the legal title to these territories in trust to prevent land being sold off. The system is well intended and keeps reservations intact, but it also keeps them “economically barren” because it adds red tape and prevents Indians using property as collateral for business loans. America needs to reform the trust system so that it still protects Indian sovereignty, but orientates it “towards growth and prosperity, not dependency”. We must move beyond “hollow statements” and bring about practical change.

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Real fears of “a Pearl Harbor in space”

Fred Kaplan

There's a place for state visits, says Tom Nichols. For all their pointless rituals, they can help build trust at the top level and get business done. In the case of Donald Trump, though, America would be better off if he stopped hosting or attending these events. The president is just too much of a liability, given his susceptibility to “pomp and flattery”, and his refusal to prepare for what are meant to be highly choreographed affairs. His summits with dictators have been “fiascoes”. Remember how after becoming the first sitting US president to visit North Korea, he raved about how he “fell in love” with the country’s despotic ruler, Kim Jong Un? Trump gave China’s President Xi the full red-carpet treatment at the airport last week at the start of his visit, an honour US presidents usually reserve for the Pope. Later, as he gave Xi a tour of the White House, Trump couldn’t resist pointing out to him how he’d pettily replaced a portrait of Joe Biden with a picture of an autopen. To flaunt internal divisions in this way during a state visit is totally inappropriate. But that’s the problem. Trump doesn’t understand that he’s representing the US at such events. He thinks he’s “just having a visit with some of the guys in a very cool club of which he’d very much like to be a member”.

Slate

America has weapons in space, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink declared last month. It was the first time a US official had publicly acknowledged that fact, says Fred Kaplan, and the news was greeted with condemnations from China and Russia, and decried as a step towards “war in outer space”. Their complaints were laughably hypocritical. They’ve been launching and testing such weapons for more than a decade. Far from an escalation, the US is playing catch-up. America depends heavily on its space-based assets: reconnaissance satellites to spy on adversaries; early-warning satellites to detect attacks; GPS satellites to guide “smart bombs” and connect troops. If we ever went to war with China or Russia, their first shots would almost certainly target satellites. And according to one insider with high-level access, the US is now outgunned and “absolutely vulnerable to a Pearl Harbor in space”. Meink didn’t specify what sort of weapons the US is deploying, but they won’t be ones that unleash bullets or bombs – the resulting debris would cause too much damage. More likely, they’re jammers, “laser dazzlers” that blind imaging satellites, or “co-orbital interceptors” that collide with and move targets. A new arms race is certainly under way, but this one wasn’t provoked by the US.

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The political walking dead: Germany's zombie chancellor

“A disaster.” That was German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s own verdict on his party’s showing in the state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania last week, said Klára Odstrcilová on EU Perspectives (Brussels). The state is one of the five that made up the former East Germany (there are 16 German states in total). And though Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) won 38% in the first state election held after reunification in 1990, it has been shedding support there ever since. In the previous state election (2021) it won just 13%. Even so, no one expected

Merz: fading into his Kanzlerdämmerung?

that this time the CDU wouldn't even make 5% – the threshold a party has to cross to gain parliamentary representation. By contrast, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party – which had vowed to bring down energy prices by restoring the supply of Russian gas (the state is home to the terminal of the suspended Nord Stream pipelines) – more than doubled its vote share to 38.2%. So yes, Merz is right: a disaster, indeed.

Nor was the CDU's failure confined to Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, said The Economist. On the very same day as that debacle, the party got thumped in Berlin's local elections, in this case being humbled by the far-left Die Linke party. And these twin losses themselves came just two weeks after the CDU had suffered a crushing defeat in another east German state, Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD triumphed with 43.8%. Indeed, Merz has acquired the dubious distinction of being the most unpopular German leader in polling history: his approval rating is just 13%. Yet despite all this, he has vowed to stay on for the sake of Germany's “democratic future”, and to pursue his economic and welfare reforms with “backbone, steadfastness, and patience”. Brave words, but some of Merz's own colleagues believe their “zombie chancellor” can't go on.

That the CDU, which has produced more chancellors than any other party, should now be “plunged into an existential crisis”

is all down to Merz, said Hugo Müller-Vogg in Cicero (Berlin). He's only been in power for 16 months, but over that time the national vote share of the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), has fallen from $28.5\%$ to around $20\%$ . Merz's fractious coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats has completely failed on its promises to contain the far-right and reverse economic stagnation.

Immigration is usually the issue people cite when accounting for the rise of the AfD, said Dalia

Marin on Project Syndicate (Prague). But more attention should be paid to a factor every bit as crucial: China. Economic competition from China has upended Germany's export model of selling cars and high-end machinery, and devastated the advanced manufacturing industry Germans have long relied on for “good jobs and broad-based prosperity”. Average annual growth since 2020 has slumped to just 0.12%. Nor does this only affect the poorer, former communist eastern states that are the AfD’s heartlands: “western” states such as Baden-Württemberg, home to Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, also feel the pain. In March, the AfD almost doubled its vote share there to 18.8%: it should no longer be seen as just a creature of the east.

Merz himself now seems to have entered Kanzlerdämmerung – the twilight of the chancellor, said Zafer Mese in Daily Sabah (Istanbul): his coalition looks marooned. However, no CDU or CSU politician has stepped forward to replace him, so he may cling on for a while yet. And he has one thing in his favour, said Roland Nelles in Der Spiegel (Hamburg). Next year's five state elections are all in western states, ones where the AfD, despite its recent gains, will struggle to land a knockout blow. The “stabilising effect” this will have could lend the coalition a small window of opportunity in which to kick-start growth through its welfare and pension reforms. They’d better hope it does: if not, more election nights like the ones last week will follow.

ITALY

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Brought low by the scourge of tourism

Corriere della Sera (Milan)

FRANCE

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A Faustian pact Paris should be ashamed of

Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zürich)

“Tourism is devastating Italy,” says Ernesto Galli della Loggia. I don’t mean financially, of course: on the contrary, thanks to the record-breaking numbers of tourists flocking to hot spots such as Rome and the Amalfi Coast, a flood of money is flowing into our state coffers. Between June and August alone, some 72.4 million tourists visited our shores. But whatever the economic benefits, my fellow Italians and I are far from rejoicing. Quite the opposite: we look on aghast and lament the “widespread destruction of illustrious villages and cities”, of “famous panoramas”; we fume at our inability to visit our own museums and monuments if we haven’t booked three months in advance. The sheer weight of tourism has also made commuting an absolute nightmare. At every station between Naples and Milan, tourists, “most of a certain size and dressed in T-shirts and shorts even in winter”, stampede onto the carriages lugging monstrous-looking bags resembling “large cetaceans”. These they then ram into “Lilliputian spaces” designed for “cramped briefcases”, imperilling the passengers who sit nervously beneath them. Is it any wonder we Italians are all so completely fed up?

Airspace violations; arson attacks; disinformation campaigns. Moscow is testing out European weaknesses in whatever ways it can. But actually, it doesn't really need to, says Jonas Roth. The EU is doing the job for it: it's “presenting the Russians with Europe’s weaknesses on a silver platter”. And it isn’t some small recalcitrant EU member like Hungary under Viktor Orbán that’s to blame: it’s France. The EU has recently been seeking to extend sanctions against a list of some 3,000 Russian individuals and organisations for another six months. But incredibly, the Élysée Palace, ostensibly a keen backer of Kyiv, said it would block any renewal unless the Russian-Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov was removed from the list. Why? Because Usmanov, “one of Vladimir Putin’s favourite oligarchs”, has strong contacts in Azerbaijan, where a French citizen was earlier this year jailed on espionage charges. And now that Paris has got its way and the man has been released, Luxembourg has followed suit and successfully had sanctions removed against the Russian-Israeli oligarch Mikhail Fridman, who’d been suing Luxembourg for €14bn in damages. France has made a Faustian bargain that makes a mockery of European unity and sends a “disastrous signal of weakness” to Moscow.

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commentators say?

n 22 botched attempts to reform the English adult social care system in the

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THE WEEK

5 SEPTEMBER 2026 | ISSUE 1608

THE BEST OF THE BRITISH AND INTER

A presidency in ch

Has Trump lost his gr

Morning Report

Education shake-up, European wildfires, and spirituality on the dance scene

TODAY'S POLITICS STORY

Burnham's course correction towards technical education

Burnham's social care plans, China's AI excitement, and Hitler's birthplace

What happened

Andy Burnham has announced plans to overhaul England's education system, arguing that decades of prioritising university degrees have disadvantaged young people pursuing technical careers. Unveiling a strategy aimed

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[THE WEEK] Evening Review

ndy Burnham be the PM to fix social care?

and underfunded" adult social care has become "the Cinderella service of our system", said Labour List. Now, Andy Burnham, whose father has Alzheimer's care home, has told the BBC that he will put "whatever political capital I have"

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What the scientists are saying...

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El Niño's alarming ferocity

The strongest-ever El Niño has heated the ocean to an unprecedented level, months before the phenomenon is expected to peak, researchers have warned. El Niño occurs when trade winds weaken, allowing warm Pacific Ocean surface water – which is usually pushed towards Asia – to slosh back towards the Americas instead. This traps cold water below and releases a huge amount of heat into the atmosphere, disrupting weather patterns around the world. One way researchers measure an El Niño’s relative strength is to compare daily sea surface temperatures in a region of the central Pacific with long-term averages. On 19 September, they were already 3.05°C above the average, and forecasters say the gap could widen to 4°C when El Niño peaks later this year – a rise scientists have described as “Godzilla-level”. “What is happening in the equatorial Pacific is jaw-dropping and could well mark one of the biggest global weather upheavals in a millennium,” said Bill McGuire, an emeritus professor at UCL. The effects are already being felt, notes The Guardian, in the form, for instance, of wildfires and air pollution in Indonesia, reductions in monsoon rainfall in India and low water levels in the Panama Canal.

Girls are more sociable at birth

It is well established that girls generally learn to talk earlier than boys, and develop social skills earlier too. But to what extent this is due to nurture – parental behaviour, social expectation – and not nature, has been hard to establish. Now, however, a study at the University of Cambridge has indicated that one relevant sex difference is present soon after birth – before social factors can have had an influence. Building on earlier research about what grabs the

An indri lemur: can you hear me at the back?

attention of newborns, the researchers tested 130 babies who were less than three days old by presenting them with two videos side by side: one showed a human face moving naturally, the other a desk toy in which metal balls swing back and forth. The team found that, while both girls and boys showed a preference for the face, the girls tended to spend more of their time looking at it than the boys did. As this difference was apparent so soon after birth, it seems likely that it is due to prenatal factors (genetics, exposure to hormones) – but is then probably exacerbated by postnatal experience, said Prof Simon Baron-Cohen, who supervised the research. “In other words, it’s nature and nurture, not nature or nurture.”

The brain is really two organs

Scientists have found it almost impossible to grow cells from the back of the brain in a Petri dish, although growing cells from the front has been relatively easy. Now, they have discovered why: the brain, it turns out, is made up of two organs that evolved separately, then fused together. Researchers at Stanford School of Medicine were using mouse embryos to study the early stages of brain development when they spotted that the hindbrain grew out of one type of progenitor cell, while the forebrain and midbrain were formed from another. Subsequent research showed that the human brain also develops from two different starter cells. Most likely, these two systems once existed within primitive animals in different parts of the body; and even now, they have distinct functions – the hindbrain governs survival functions such as breathing, while thinking and reasoning take part in the mid- and forebrains. The discovery has already enabled scientists to turn stem cells into hindbrain motor neurons – which could in turn lead to breakthroughs in research into neurological conditions associated with the hindbrain.

Lemurs sing like trained sopranos

Just one species of lemur is known to sing, and it seems that, much like human singers, they open their mouths wide to project the top notes. The finding was made by scientists from the University of Turin and University of Warwick, who used motion-tracking software to analyse indris – large lemurs known for their haunting songs – frame-by-frame as they sang. Like trained sopranos, the indris widened their mouths as their pitch rose, a technique that naturally amplifies the soundwaves. Opera singers do this to make sure their voice is heard across a large concert hall; for the indris, it may ensure that their songs – a form of communication – carry across the vast, dense Madagascar rainforest, says the report in PLOS Computational Biology.

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Tiger cat identified in Bolivia

Biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz was volunteering at a wildlife refuge in the Yungas region of Bolivia when a cat there caught her eye. A local man had found it a year prior on a forest road near La Paz. He’d assumed it was a domestic kitten and taken it home; but as it grew, he realised it was wild. Dr Nogales-Ascarrunz initially thought it might be an oncilla (Leopardus tigrinus) but its large, leopard-like rosettes (spots) didn’t make sense of that. Now, genetic testing has revealed that the cat is a member of a previously unidentified feline species – the first to be described in over a century.

L.ticayo: believed to be nocturnal

Named Leopardus tilcayo (tilcayo being the name used for it locally), it is smaller than most housecats. Scat samples suggest that it eats small rodents; and camera-trap footage, in the Yungas cloud forest, hints that it may be nocturnal. L. tilcayo is one of five identified species of tiger cat – small, spotted wild cats found across Central and South America. All are in habitats that are vanishing fast; the new cat's geographic range is so restricted, it may be classed as endangered.

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Martha's Rule extended

Martha's Rule is to be extended to all A&E departments in England. The scheme is named after Martha Mills, who died at a hospital in London in 2021, aged 13. She had been admitted with internal injuries incurred in a bike accident. Her parents had told doctors that her condition was deteriorating, but their concerns weren't heeded. It turned out that she had contracted sepsis. At her inquest, the coroner noted that had she been moved to intensive care earlier she might have survived. Thanks to a campaign by her parents, NHS England introduced Martha's Rule in 2024 – whereby in such circumstances, in-patients and their relatives can phone a dedicated number to ask for an urgent clinical review of their case. Similar schemes were then introduced in Wales and Scotland. Now, following a successful trial in seven NHS trusts, the right will apply in A&E departments.

Pick of the week's Gossip

When Rory Stewart is in conversation, he has a habit of making sure to look as if he is engaging intently with whatever is being said. But the former Tory minister was accused of taking that to an extreme when he appeared on Newsnight recently. As a fellow panellist, the journalist Ailbhe Rea, began to talk, Stewart swivelled around in his chair, leant forward and gazed at her unblinkingly for several seconds. On social media, a clip of this soon became a meme. "When HR tells you that you need to listen better to female colleagues," noted a social media account for Larry, the Downing Street cat.

Although Sylvester Stallone has publicly supported Donald Trump, he is not blind in his admiration. For a start, he thought the president's decision to appoint him a special "ambassador" in Hollywood, to bring business back to the US, was wildly ill-conceived. The industry just doesn't work like that, he told Decca Aitkenhead in The Sunday Times. So why did he accept the post? "Well it just happened. I was watching TV one night and they go, 'So Stallone and Mel Gibson and Jon Voight will be...' And I went what? Excuse me? Really? Because if they had asked me in the beginning, I would have said this is not possible."

Nearly 40 years on from Withnail and I, Richard E. Grant is arguably more in demand than ever. However, the parts he is offered are not, he admits, as big as they once were. "My late wife said I'm in the condiment years," he told The Guardian, "where you're added to the meal in these cameo parts like vinegar or ketchup or mustard."

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Drumcree: old wounds reopened

It has been almost 30 years since the Orange Order last marched down the Garvaghy Road in Portadown, said Daniel Boffey in The Guardian. In 1998, the Parades Commission banned the contentious march from Drumcree Church through the main Catholic area of the otherwise staunchly Protestant town. The decision to reroute it led to widespread disorder in Northern Ireland and the death of three Catholic children in an arson attack. “No road is worth a life, let alone the lives of three little boys,” the Orange Order’s

Orange marchers in Portadown

County Armagh chaplain said at the time. Since then, the Order has been repeatedly refused permission to walk the route – until this year, when, to everyone's surprise, the Commission ruled that the march could take place, on a limited scale. It did so on the strength of duff police advice that this was unlikely to provoke disorder, said an editorial in the same paper. The predictable result was a tense standoff as nationalist protesters assembled last weekend to block the marchers.

There was nothing inevitable about this clash, said Rory Hanrahan in The Daily Telegraph. The Commission gave the go-ahead for just 35 Orangemen to walk down Garvaghy Road at 8am, without bands or music. The event would

have been over by mid-morning on Sunday, had Sinn Féin not “manufactured” a confrontation for political purposes. The party’s vice-president, First Minister Michelle O’Neill, joined the blockade of the lawful march, cynically framing it “as a defence of a community against sectarian harassment”. But the clash would never have happened if the Orange Order hadn’t sought this needless march, said Alex Kane in The Irish Times. Angered by what they see as a creeping narrative of inevitable Irish unity, unionists are looking for ways to breathe fresh life into their cause and mobilise support.

The scene is now set for a protracted standoff, said Shawn Pogatchnik on Politico. As Sinn Féin and the unionist DUP prepare for Stormont elections due by May 2027, both sides appear to have decided that there's more votes in rekindling "winner-takes-all fights over symbols and turf" than in running an effective power-sharing government. The Northern Ireland executive was already deadlocked over budget negotiations, said Andrew McQuillan in The Spectator. This further dispute could tip it into outright collapse. As we head towards the 30th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in 2028, it's clear that "not much has fundamentally changed in the lanes and backroads of County Armagh".

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Russian disinformation: a new crackdown

Back in 2020, Barack Obama warned that Western democracies were facing a crisis because citizens increasingly occupied different realities, and struggled to agree even on basic facts. "If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what's true from what's false," he said, "then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn't work." That vulnerability has only grown since then, said The Guardian, not least because "democracy's enemies have become more determined to exploit it". This is the threat that Andy Burnham highlighted in his speech to the UN last week. The PM accused Russia of waging an "industrial-scale assault" on the UK's "information environment", using armies of bots and fake websites to spread falsehoods, inflame tensions and interfere in elections. He announced the creation of a "National Centre for Information Defence" to thwart campaigns by hostile actors. It was a welcome, and overdue, step – although Burnham failed to mention one important part of the story. "The Kremlin would be wasting its money" if US platforms such as X "didn't provide channels for the toxin to spread".

The Kremlin, according to Burnham, spends around £1.3bn a year manipulating information. "He pointed to bots, fake websites, fabricated newspaper articles and the forging of the branding of 28 British organisations, including universities and the BBC,” said Hamish de Bretton-Gordon in The Daily Telegraph. “Social media and AI have taken an old Soviet weapon and strapped a rocket to it.” This is “an age of information warfare”, agreed Dominic Adler on UnHerd. When the Iranian regime disconnected internet access in January, “a network of pro-Scottish-independence social media accounts” suddenly went silent. There is evidence that Russia “weaponised” the Henry Nowak case, feeding the anxieties of the British far-right. But foreign powers have always used propaganda against their enemies; only the medium is new. And this new unit worries free-speech advocates: can the Government be trusted to “separate opinion from genuine disinformation”?

Given that GCHQ is already responsible for detecting and disrupting information attacks from hostile states, what is the new National Centre for Information Defence actually for, asked David Shipley in The Spectator. The Government published its initial plan in the spring, saying that it was designed to take on “extremists” who “foment division and target UK institutions”, including “digital grifters” and “politicians of grievance”. All this sounds very much like the state trying to extend control over speech it sees as threatening. The fear is that a “Ministry of Truth” is being set up in Whitehall.

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The Chagos deal: dead in the water?

Observers of the seemingly endless negotiations over the Chagos Islands “might be forgiven a sense of déjà vu”, said The Times. It’s two years since the UK announced a deal in which it would cede sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius, and pay £100m per year to lease back the UK-US military base on Diego Garcia. It was always controversial, and in January Trump called it “an act of great stupidity”. As a result

The archipelago in 1956

the deal was quietly put on ice. Last month it “twitched limply back into life”, when Andy Burnham said he “remained committed” to it. But at the UN last week, Trump dealt it “a decisive blow”, calling it “terrible” – and Defence Secretary Wes Streeting duly confirmed that it was being “reviewed”.

The deal was “already dead by the time Burnham got to New York”, said John Rentoul in The Independent. If it is to go ahead, the US government must agree to amend a 1966 treaty; if it refuses, the whole thing fails. It’s regrettable that ministers have taken so long to catch up with reality. In any case, a deal that involves both giving away territory, and paying Mauritius so much that its government was reportedly planning to “abolish income tax”, requires a very good explanation. Our Government has not provided one. Burnham is now in a bind, said

Dominic Penna in The Daily Telegraph. He could cancel the deal altogether, but that might lead to a tricky legal challenge: Mauritius has already won a (non-binding) ruling from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Britain had no right to sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, because it separated them off from Mauritius at independence in the 1960s – which the court deemed a violation of international law. Or he could renegotiate it; but anything

“that will reassure the US is likely to anger Mauritius and vice versa”.

The ICJ's ruling was a joke, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. It was made despite the fact that disputes between current and former Commonwealth members are specifically excluded from the court's jurisdiction, and that Mauritius accepted a payment in 1965 in return for renouncing its claim to the islands. Besides, most Chagossians – many of whom were resettled in Britain after being shipped to Mauritius in 1968 and mistreated there – oppose the deal. We should ignore the ruling, and “ditch the deal”. Instead, the descendants of the Chagossians who were removed from the territory ought to resettle it, as many of them wish to do. Then “we can defend its right to self-determination as we do in Gibraltar or the Falkland Islands”.

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Reform UK: back to earth with a bump

Politicians, like ballet dancers, can appear to defy the laws of physics, said Isabel Hardman in The i Paper – flying high, despite forces that should be dragging them down. But as Nigel Farage found last week, you can’t escape political gravity for ever. Having long basked in polls indicating that Reform UK will form the next government, he was faced with a YouGov MRP “mega-poll” showing that, in fact, were an election held now, Labour would end up the largest party, with 241

seats, with the Tories second on 130, and Reform on 123. That's a mighty advance for a party with eight seats currently, but last year's MRP poll had given it 311. It seems the electorate is not blind to the rows and scandals that have beset Reform lately. But the party has another problem too. Its fall in vote share is partly due to the rise of Rupert Lowe's more extreme Restore Britain party; Farage could shift further to the Right in an effort to win those voters back – but that would only galvanise the already powerful anti-Reform tactical vote.

With Reform on the back foot, some pundits have predicted that Andy Burnham will seize the moment to call a snap election, said Philip Johnston in The Daily Telegraph. The argument goes that Labour needs to move fast, before Reform uses its £72m war chest to regroup; and that with various crises intensifying (including rising fuel prices), the outlook for the Government is only going to get worse. But it won't happen. The MRP poll indicates a hung parliament; no Labour MP is going to back an election in which scores would lose their seats.

Farage: time to regroup?

Burnham ruled out an early election last week, but if he has one in mind, he'd never have admitted it, said Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper. He knows what happens if you allow speculation about a poll then fail to see it through: Gordon “Bottler” Brown was severely weakened by his vacillations in 2007. Burnham is bluffing, said Dan Hodges in The Mail on Sunday. Currently, all eyes are on the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on 8 October. If Labour beats Zack Polanski of the Greens, this will show it has reunited the Left – and in the New Year, it will call an election to give the PM a mandate to drive through his ten-year plan. “Circle May 2027 in your diary.”

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Wit & Wisdom

"It is the arrogance of every age to believe that yesterday was calm." Tom Peters, quoted in Wired

“Since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”

Toni Morrison, quoted in The New Yorker

"You're not Russian if you haven't sat in prison." Adage cited in The Times

"Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well." Samuel Butler, quoted in Esquire

"It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people." Logan Pearsall Smith, quoted in the Daily Mail

“Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear.”

Alan Coren, quoted in The Daily Telegraph

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”

Groucho Marx, quoted in The Guardian

"There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can't remember what the second one is." Former US senator Mark Hanna, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle

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Statistics of the week

Marriages that end in divorce in England and Wales now last 13 years on average, longer than at any point since records began in 1963.

The Daily Telegraph/ONS

Only 55% of released prisoners in England and Wales have their location

tags fitted on time,

Ministry of Justice figures

have revealed. Some wait

five months to be fitted.

The Times

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Football: Tuchel's team blow another second-half lead

It is on the 55-minute mark that “things just seem to happen to Thomas Tuchel’s England”, said Barney Ronay in The Guardian. In their World Cup semi-final in Atlanta in July, Anthony Gordon scored on 55 minutes to put them 1-0 up against Argentina, “at which point the team fell apart like an over-dunked digestive biscuit”. And at Wembley last Saturday, in their Nations League opener against Spain, England’s fortunes again took a plunge as “54 ticked over into 55 minutes”. That was the moment Harry Kane “slipped on his standing leg” while taking a penalty – leading to his effort striking the bar. Had he scored, England would have led 3-1; instead, the balance of the contest shifted, and the visitors “regained that basking quality, easing about with that familiar sense of control”. As in Atlanta, Tuchel’s men conceded twice in the final 35 minutes, to give

Spain a 3-2 victory. Given that this was another game in which England lost control when in sight of victory, it is no surprise that Tuchel's tactics are once again coming under scrutiny.

Gordon: an "ice-cold finish"

Yet despite this being another “second-half turnaround defeat”, there is no reason for England to feel too downhearted, said Jack Pitt-Brooke on The Athletic. The “true goal” here was to put in a meaningful performance against the best team in the world – and England undoubtedly achieved that. When they “leant into their own strengths – their physicality, pressing high, countering at speed” – Spain were often unable to cope. England’s first goal, on 36 minutes, was the result of a “lightning counterattack down the middle of the pitch”, with Jude Bellingham setting up Gordon for an “ice-cold finish”. And they again “turned up the intensity” during an impressive spell of dominance early in the second half. It was notable that England only really came unstuck when they tried to “compete with Spain at what they do best” – insisting, for example, on passing out from the back, which led to the error by Marc Guéhi that let in Lamine Yamal for Spain’s opener. There remains a “technical gulf between these teams”, which is going to be a challenge for Tuchel to bridge; but England can be proud of the fact that they “gave as much as they could”.

Given the “questions” raised by the Spain defeat, a win in England’s next game felt “imperative”, said Ian Ladyman in the Daily Mail. And despite an “uncertain start”, they beat the Czech Republic on Tuesday with a “degree of comfort” – their path much smoothed by Pavel Šulc’s sending off in the 24th minute. Trent Alexander-Arnold – appearing for England for the first time since June 2025 – supplied a “lovely cross” to set up Gordon, and after that it was a “stroll”, with a typically opportunistic strike from Kane on 69 minutes completing the 2-0 victory.

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Cricket: England discover “strength in depth”

Overall, it may have been a “dysfunctional summer” for England’s cricketers, said Ali Martin in The Guardian. But on Sunday, it ended on a considerably “brighter note”. With their one-sided win over Sri Lanka at the Kia Oval, Harry Brook’s team completed a 2-1 ODI series victory, to follow their whitewashing of the same opposition in the T20 series. A particularly satisfying feature of Sunday’s win was that England went into the game missing four first-choice starters, in Jos Buttler, Jacob Bethell, Sam Curran and Adil Rashid, said Will Macpherson in The Daily Telegraph. But “those stepping in were superb”. Tom Banton – opening in place of Bethell – set the tone with a “scintillating maiden international century”. Jordan Cox – Buttler’s replacement –

“smashed 76 from 52 balls to finish the innings”, after Brook had also “blitzed a swift 77”. It meant England finished on 355-7, which always seemed likely to be too much for Sri Lanka. And so it proved, as England's bowlers made short work of their batting line-up, skittling them out for just 132.

Banton: "scintillating"

England are currently sixth in the ODI rankings, reflecting the steep decline that hit the team as “key personnel retired and as focus switched to Test cricket at the start of the Bazball era”, said Mike Atherton in The Times. But with two series victories over Sri Lanka this year, and one over India, there is now a “sense of revival”. England have improved the “tempo of the batting” – no longer approaching the ODI game “like an extended version of T20” – and their squad has a new “strength in depth”. It would be a shame if the 50-over calendar continues to contract to make way for ever more T20 games. “It’s unfashionable to admit to a liking of the format, but the ebb and flow, and the chance for good players to show off their full range of skills, mean it should remain a key part of the calendar."

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Red Roses back to winning

England's draw against Canada a week ago ended a run of 39 straight victories stretching all the way back to 2023, said Elgan Alderman in The Times. But last Saturday, the Red Roses returned to winning ways with a dramatic 26-19 victory over New Zealand at Twickenham, watched by a crowd of nearly 60,000. From first to last, it was

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Commentary box

Harrison: securing victory

a “compelling” fixture, and it ended, fittingly, going right to the wire. With just seconds left on the clock, and the teams locked on 19 points apiece, “the Black Ferns had the audacity to go for the win from their line” after Zoe Harrison’s penalty fell short. But rather than clinching them the game, it was a move that showed the “perils of belief in heroism”: Harrison

intercepted a pass by Amy du Plessis, and ran to the line to secure victory for England.

Russell revives title hopes

He may have lost crucial ground to Kimi Antonelli in recent weeks, but George Russell gave notice on Saturday that “he is not quite ready to go gentle into that good night”, with a

commanding victory at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, said Giles Richards in The Guardian. Taking advantage of a crash by Antonelli in qualifying – which meant that the Italian started in 16th place on the grid – the Englishman led “from pole to flag”, fending off a late charge by Max Verstappen. It means he now trails Antonelli by 66 points, with eight races remaining.

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Sporting headlines

Darts Luke Littler suffered a shock 2-1 defeat to Luke Woodhouse in the first round of the World Grand Prix.

Cricket Warwickshire sealed their ninth County Championship title with an innings and 79-run victory over Leicestershire.

Tennis Team Europe reclaimed the Laver Cup with a 13-5 victory over Team World.

Football Northern Ireland drew 0-0 with Hungary in the Nations League after beating Georgia 1-0. Wales lost to Portugal 1-0 and then Denmark 2-0.

LETTERS Pick of the week's correspondence

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The pension burden...

To The Daily Telegraph

Fifty years ago, the difference between state pension age and median age at death for men was a little over five years. Now we have a state pension age of 66 and a median age at death of 82 for men and 85 for women. This difference is a major factor in the steep rise in pension costs.

In order to keep these costs affordable, the Government must take more urgent steps to increase the state pension age. People who are capable of working longer must be persuaded to do so. Whether this is by legislation or encouragement only is a matter for the political strategists. Alan Moore, Storrington, West Sussex

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...and how to fix it To The Guardian

The goal of the triple lock is to ensure that the value of the pension keeps up with both price and wage inflation. But the way it's been implemented allows pensioners to do much better than this. Between 2011 and 2026, prices rose by $60\%$ and earnings rose by $66\%$ , but pensions rose by $89\%$ . This happens because in some years prices rise more than wages, but in other years wages rise more. So the pension does better than both of them.

The fix is to smooth out the earnings link. Instead of looking at wages growth over the last year, we should look at growth over, say, the past five years [as Andy Burnham has now promised to do]. Pensioners would still be protected against price rises, and would maintain their current position in the wages league table. But they would no longer rise up it.

Bob Vickers, London

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Swearing like troopers To The Times

I read with a growing sense of disbelief that an employee at the SAS HQ in Herefordshire was shocked that the soldiers there used language that would be unacceptable in the local M&S. I doubt I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of soldiers who don't swear; the phrase “swearing like a trooper” would give even a pillar hermit a clue. She also

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Exchange of the week The trouble with the triple lock

To The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff claims that “Every serious party needs billions of pounds to fund their promises, and everyone knows there’s an obvious place to find the money, but nobody wants to be the first to say so. And so a deferential silence shrouds the pension triple lock.” The problem is that everybody might think they know this, but that does not mean it is right.

If we do need to find money, it is within the Government's power to create it. And if it refuses to use that power, it can look elsewhere within the pension system for funds. For example, the pension tax relief given to the highest-earning people in this country, at rates above the basic level of income tax, costs at least £15bn a year – vastly more than the costs attributed to the triple lock. We have a cost-of-living crisis and a pension poverty crisis. So why is everyone looking at punishing some of the most vulnerable people in our society when the rich continue to have their ever-increasing wealth subsidised by the state at a cost of many billions of pounds a year? Richard Murphy, emeritus professor of accounting practice, University of Sheffield

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To The Times

The whole fiscal debate is warped by infuriating levels of delusion. The scrapping from 2030 of an absurdly generous pension gift – the triple lock – is viewed by some as a scandal. Yet the perpetual freeze on tax bands, in effect a huge tax rise for the dwindling number of net contributors to the Exchequer, passes almost unnoticed. Until the UK drops its entitlement mindset, and adopts the American attitude of admiring individual economic success and prosperity, we will remain in this mess.

Samuel Casey, London

seemed aghast that some of the elite troops were “feral”.

Amazingly, those called to slay the King's enemies are not necessarily chosen for their good manners and general sociability. Perhaps they should ask nicely before pulling the trigger. It may be a cliché but this saying is worth repeating: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." James Codrington,

Wroughton, Wiltshire

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A welfare conundrum

We appear to have reached the point in Britain where there are more people taking from the state than contributing. This poses a problem for the likes of Reform UK and the Conservatives, as they have both declared their intention to cut benefits should they gain power. For a large section of the population, voting for them would be akin to turkeys voting for Christmas.

As such, it is likely that Labour will return to power at the next election; there will then be a strong possibility of the country going bankrupt as the bond market explodes. Stan Kirby, East Malling, Kent

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To govern is to choose To The Guardian

John Harris mentions Aneurin Bevan, who famously said: "The language of priorities is the religion of socialism." This is something that many Labour MPs, and perhaps Harris, need to engage with.

Their blanket kneejerk opposition, for example, to any justifiable scrutiny of the welfare budget is music to the ears of Reform UK. Hope, and communities at ease with themselves, will only follow from credible policy priorities married to fiscal competence. Roger Whitmore, Bath

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Legless before wickets To The Times

I am writing this on the train back home after a fascinating cricket match between England and Sri Lanka. Unfortunately, however, we shared our stand with many men who became

increasingly inebriated. By the time England batted it was clear many were now so raucously drunk that they were oblivious to the cricket.

For me and others, I suspect, this exciting game was ruined. Is this alcohol free-for-all what the PM wishes to reintroduce at football matches? Michael Brand, Saltdean, East Sussex

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In praise of neutrality To The Spectator

Tim Shipman's sources from the Labour Party and the intelligence services describe some of the younger staff in the Foreign Office and MI6 respectively as “campaigners” and “impassioned”. Crown employees are supposed to be politically neutral and to provide impartial advice to the democratically elected government for whom they work. Campaigners and the impassioned have no place as public servants.

David Soskin, former special adviser to the PM, London

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Unequal votes To The Times

I haven't heard the Lib Dems mention unfair voting since the 2024 election. Maybe it has something to do with their 72 MPs being elected with $85\%$ of the votes Reform UK received for their five. Reform needed nearly 824,000 votes per MP, compared with less than 49,000 for the Lib Dems. This isn't the only undemocratic result. Corbyn gave Labour its worst result ever, but received some half a million more votes than Starmer, who won a landslide, with fewer than 24,000 votes per MP. Colin Andrews, Prestbury, Cheshire

"I can't believe how much more relaxed I feel since you told me to calm down."

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[ARTS Review of reviews: Books] Book of the week

Swan Song

by Charles Spencer

Michael Joseph 384pp £28

The Week Bookshop £24.99 (incl. p&p)

Charles Spencer has billed his new memoir as a loving tribute to his sister, written as the 30th anniversary of her death approaches, said Emma Brockes in The Guardian. And over its 390-odd pages, there are some “truly touching passages” about the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Yet the book as a whole is most notable for telling us a “great deal about Charles Spencer – perhaps more than we needed to know”. Spencer, 62,

emerges as a man consumed by resentment, someone who, “decades after the fact, is still harping on” about the slights he has endured. The chief offender in this regard is, of course, the current King: Spencer’s claim that Charles had said, shortly after Diana’s death, that she would soon be forgotten has made the book front-page news. But he also expresses bitterness towards a “large cast” of other figures: royal courtiers, the libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck, “members of a police protection squad who, in 1986, let sniffer dogs jump all over his furniture”. Meanwhile, he subjects his three ex-wives to an “amazing parenthetical take down”, labelling them “all double divorcées”. For those who enjoy the parading of “petty grievances”, this book is an “absolute corker”.

The main thing that it parades is “Spencer’s vanity”, said Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. The “powerful” eulogy he gave at Diana’s funeral deservedly “caught the mood of the nation”. But here, he seems “frankly, obsessed with it”. Page after page is devoted to him “minutely breaking down its sentence construction and stylistic choices, what he chose to put in and leave out”. And he is anxious – quite unnecessarily – to let us know how well it was received, noting that Tony Blair called it “absolutely extraordinary”, while a man outside a pub yelled out “Top speech, mate!”

“Beyond the screeching soundbites and nosebleed revelations”, there’s another “animating force” behind this book, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in

The Times. “Swan Song is not just a defence of his sister, but a salvo in a Shakespearean blood feud between two aristocratic houses.” Spencer is angry that his family, with “deeper roots in historic English and Stuart royal blood”, has been overshadowed by the “parvenu House of Windsor”. The book can be seen as his attempt to ensure that the Spencers, and not the Windsors, control Diana’s legacy. It’s “well written”, and entertaining, said Melanie McDonagh in The London Standard. But all the “guff about mental illness” – Spencer claims he suffers from something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), and suggests Diana did too – did rather grate. “Far more enlivening” are the parts where Spencer sticks to “his spirited airing of his and Diana’s grudges”.

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The Booker Prize: "Are men OK?"

When the 2025 Booker Prize was won by David Szalay's Flesh – about the “rise and fall of a Hungarian ex-convict” – it “led to much discussion about literary fiction’s renewed interest in masculinity”, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. To judge from this year’s shortlist, those discussions are “unlikely to end any time soon”. For if the six books selected have an overarching theme, it seems to be: “Are men OK?” Some authors explore this question playfully – as does Rebecca Perry in her debut May We Feed the King, a teasing “dual narrative”

A list featuring former winners and an "oddball"

novel about the life of a reluctant, unnamed medieval monarch. The poet Luke Kennard also opts for satire in his “howlingly funny” third novel Black Bag, which tells the story of an unemployed actor who agrees to take part in a psychology experiment that “requires him to be zipped up into a bag” – and is then “caught up in an academic’s increasingly messy sex games”. Full of “wonderful observational comedy about masculinity in the here and now”, it also has the “single best scene of any of the novels on the list”.

Other authors engage with masculinity in a more serious and straightforward way, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say, the only American

novel on the shortlist, is also the “most stylistically conventional” one: it is a portrait of a “middle-aged man whose respectable self-containment curdles into dangerous isolation”. In The Disappearers, Marlon James (the 2015 winner) explores the brutal policing of homosexual men in 1980s Jamaica. Douglas Stuart (another former winner, for Shuggie Bain) also confronts the challenges of gay life in his Hebridean-set John of John. While the shortlist aims for, and achieves, an impressive “sense of range” in subject and techniques, there are “frustrating omissions” – most notably Emma Cline's “magnificent”, “widely tipped” Switzy, about a businessman's journey to an end-of-life clinic.

Completing the shortlist is a “British oddball”, the 81-year-old cult sci-fi writer M. John Harrison, said Lucy Thynne in The Daily Telegraph. In The End of Everything, he offers a “stunningly weird vision” of a near-future England in which “nothing works”, and where a “mysterious alien race called the ‘iGhetti’ has taken over London”. Harrison has been “plugging away for more than 50 years”, without ever getting “so much as a look-in from the Prize”. His novel is brilliant, and genuinely timely; “I would love it to win”. The Booker Prize winner is announced on 9 November.

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Theatre: Table 17

Kiln Theatre, London NW6 (020-7328 1000). Until 24 October Running time: 1hr 35mins ★★★★

Following sold-out runs in New York and LA, Table 17 – Douglas Lyons’s “heartfelt” and “hilarious” one-act play about a pair of ex-lovers reuniting for what might be a date – has arrived in the UK, said Isobel Lewis in Time Out. Zipping back and forth in time to show us moments from the couple’s past relationship, this breezy piece constantly wrongfoots the audience, flipping from “laugh-out-loud hilarity to genuine tragedy in minutes, changing costumes and switching timelines at equal pace”. Directed by Tony-winner

Westman and Wallace give “powerful, emotive” performances

Zhailon Levingston, the production is a “stylish and exhilarating theatrical experience” that is driven by “powerful, emotive” performances. It also has a deft, confident humour that makes the play’s “emotional rug pulls all the more devastating”.

"As psychological enquiry, Lyons's writing doesn't cut particularly deep," said Matt Wolf on London Theatre: his play sits on the "featherweight" end of the dramatic scale. What makes it work – here as in New York – is a top-flight cast "charging through the text's cheesier moments", and "roping the audience in from the start as ready participants in the fun". Musical theatre star Marisha Wallace turns in a typically "magnetic" performance as flight-attendant Jada, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. Jamael Westman (London's first Hamilton) makes her ex properly

rounded, by “sensitively balancing his ridiculousness with his depth of emotional injury”. And Michael Rishawn almost steals the show with his delicious comic turn as the restaurant host, as well as other ancillary characters.

For me the “real magic” lies in the way the Kiln’s small space has been transformed by Amy Jane Cook’s sleek, nightclub-meets-cabaret design, said Hang Yuen on What’s on Stage. A luminous tiled platform, a curved ribbed booth, and tiny amber table lamps put the audience inside

an intimate late-night lounge, with a striking geometric ceiling, and excellent coloured lighting, completing the effect. This is not a deep play, that is true, but it's inventive and entertaining and also powerfully theatrical.

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The week's other opening A Midsummer Night's Dream

Chichester Festival Theatre (01243-781312). Until 17 October In this ingenious and “riotously fun production”, the frolics in the Athenian forest have morphed into an illegal rave on the South Downs in 1994 – while the authorities in John Major’s “Back to Basics” Britain try to reassert control (Daily Telegraph).

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Albums of the week: three new releases

Beck: Ride Lonesome

Capitol

£12.99

The Californian singer-songwriter Beck produced his first “true classic” album in 2002: the “melancholic masterpiece” Sea Change, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. Now he’s made another to match it. Fuelled by post-divorce angst, Ride Lonesome has the dreamlike quality and “desolate grandeur” of an epic western, with its “sweeping strings and lovelorn words” about despair and solitude. Yet it also has an intimacy, reminiscent of Neil Young or Nick Drake, that “pierces the heart”.

Perhaps unfortunately for Beck, this stunning meditation on “mid-50s malaise” is further evidence that his very best work is born of unhappiness, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Ride Lonesome has definite echoes of both Sea Change and another gloomy career high, 2014’s Morning Phase. Yet it “never feels like a pale imitation or a craven attempt to recapture past glories”. Every track, from the “sparse country-rock of Slow Canyon to the lush, harmony-drenched Falling Through My Hands, is melodically exquisite; every song has the requisite emotional impact”.

Lise Davidsen: Verdi

Decca Classics

£11.99

"At some point, any star soprano worth her salt will try her hand at a Verdi album," said Clive Paget in The Guardian. On this powerful new collection, made with Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Norway's Lise Davidsen wisely limits herself to five roles from the Verdi repertoire that "fit her formidable vocal talents perfectly". She opens with a powerful Lady Macbeth, her "coloratura clean as a whistle and with gleaming, seemingly effortless top notes". She's at her most involving, though, in Amelia's "gallows field" monologue from Ballo, and when "grappling with public versus private emotions" in Aida's Ritorna vincitor!

It's not all as fully “moving” as the great Verdi renditions by, say, Callas or Caballé, said David A. McConnell on The Classic Review. But Davidsen has “tremendous power and consistency across an extended vocal range”, and the control to produce an “impressively soft, silvery colour when needed. The many high climactic notes heard in this recital ring out with a glistening brilliance that few can match.”

Ezra Collective: Here Because of Hope

Partisan

£12.99

A decade on from their debut EP, the multi-award-winning Ezra Collective are “arguably the biggest jazz band the UK has ever produced”, said Kitty Empire in The Observer. This fourth album has all the London five-piece’s usual joyful eclecticism, weaving as it does the “rhythms of the Caribbean, west Africa and late-night London into the wider jazz conversation”. The reggae is a highlight, while Joe Armon-Jones on keyboards is terrific throughout – “as lyrical on jazz fusion flourishes as he is on simple piano melodies”.

It is an “uplifting” album, said Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the FT, featuring a range of guest artists, including: British-Gambian rapper Pa Salieu, who features on Only Love, a catchy Afropop number; Jamaican singer Lila Iké on Well Organised; and Leona Lewis on All I Need, a “delightful exercise in lovers rock”. Cynics might blanch at the group’s habit of choosing album titles that would work as slogans on “mugs of tea at a worthily intentioned community-arts meeting. Yes, I am that cynic – but the music makes me a believer.”

Stars reflect the overall quality of reviews and our own independent assessment (5 stars=don't miss; 1 star=don't bother)

Sense and Sensibility

2hrs 12min (U)

Jane Austen's novel is given a naturalistic makeover

★★

This latest adaptation of Sense and Sensibility “has its work cut out”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. Not only is Jane Austen’s novel “beloved”, so too is Emma Thompson’s 1995 film adaptation, directed by Ang Lee. Billed as a “fresh take for a fresh generation”, Georgia Oakley’s version stars Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, “the sisters who must endure heartbreak to discover the middle ground between sense (Elinor) and sensibility (Marianne)”. The film opens with them, and their mother and younger sister, being ejected from the family seat after their father’s death by their half-brother and his “dreadful wife”. This is peak Austen comedy, so it’s a shame the scene is rushed. The Dashwoods then move into a modest cottage under the care of the garrulous Mrs Jennings (a scenery chewing Fiona Shaw), where they are engaged by very different suitors – John Willoughby (Frank Dillane), Edward Ferrars (George MacKay) and Col. Brandon (Herbert Nordrum). The film isn’t “bad bad”, but with its naturalistic, dirt-under-the-fingernails approach, it is a lot “drearier and less affecting” than the 1995 version.

Heart of the Beast

1hr 41mins (12A)

One man and his dog

brave the wilds of Alaska

★★★

“This is Austen by numbers”, said Kevin Maher in The Times, “emotionally flat, dramatically uneven” and – in an era of high-octane updates of the classics by Emerald Fennell and others – bafflingly “conventional”. I don’t agree, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. Oakley has given us an Austen that feels like Brontë, with its moody shots of windswept Devon landscapes. Marianne – “eager in everything” – is romantic, wild and connected to nature. It’s an intriguing take that gives this “undeniably gorgeous” film a “reason to exist” alongside Thompson’s “perfect adaptation”.

Remake

1hr 56mins (15)

David Ayer's survival thriller is “a grizzled hymn to middle-aged, solo male resilience”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. It is also a “celebration of the bond between a soldier and his faithful service dog”, which the film paints as the “deepest, most dependable and spiritually nourishing relationship that a man could possibly have”. The “magnificent beast” in question is Odin, a German shepherd who accompanies his master – special-forces veteran James Belmont (Brad Pitt) – on a camping trip in a remote part of Alaska. “Naturally, disaster strikes”: Belmont’s seaplane comes down in a storm, stranding “hero and hound” in the wilds (New Zealand, in fact). “Using their extensive experience of war and drawing on a bottomless well of mutual respect and affection”, the two strike out on the 58-mile trek back to civilisation. It’s a refreshingly simple scenario; in any case, “Pitt plus dog is a winning formula that doesn’t require much embellishment”.

The action – interspersed with flashbacks to their time together in the military – follows “a largely predictable path”, said Olly Richards in Empire, with Belmont and Odin “saving each other from roaring rivers, wild animals and various falls”. They meet some humans along the way (including a woodsman played by J.K. Simmons), but the film is really a two-hander. Pitt manages to create a convincing relationship with his canine buddy – while mainly talking to himself in his gruff, laconic tones – and Ayer keeps the tension up throughout. Pitt’s acting chops are tested when a scene demands that he firsts sobs, then laughs with joy, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But it is not for his emoting that we love him. In this slightly cheesy film, he is the right man for the job.

Devastating documentary about the loss of a son ★★★★

“Sometimes it feels as if all human life is contained in this deeply moving documentary from the veteran American filmmaker Ross McElwee,” said Kevin Maher in The Times. “Grief and loss, marriage and family, work, success, failure and fame are all embraced.” McElwee started making the film in 2008, as a lighthearted personal piece about an attempt by Hollywood producers to turn his 1986 indie documentary Sherman’s March into a drama series for streaming. That project stalled, but following the death of his 27-year-old son Adrian from a fentanyl overdose in 2016, he went back to the footage he had shot for it – and created this documentary, which also makes use of home-movie clips, previous documentaries that Adrian had appeared in, and Adrian’s own work as an aspiring filmmaker. Remake serves as a eulogy for Adrian, but McElwee also asks whether, in constantly filming his son instead of interacting with him directly, he let him down as a parent.

This is “one of the most outstanding films of this year”, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times, and easily the “most unapologetically personal”. And while it seeks to celebrate Adrian’s life, it is desperately sad. “Every shot of Adrian – a cute, chatty little kid, fishing off a pier, pretending to run a restaurant, and slowly getting older and bigger – becomes painfully charged,” said Leslie Felperin in The Guardian. “It’s not just that the little kid is gone”; Adrian himself is gone. Remake slowly reveals what led to Adrian’s death. The result is a “profoundly moving work”, about parenting and about art, which “lingers in the mind long after the tears have dried”.

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70 Up: the landmark documentary series comes to an end

"And so the great experiment begun by Granada Television in 1964 is over," said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. That year, Seven Up! introduced viewers to 14 children – ten boys and four girls – from very different backgrounds who would be filmed at regular intervals throughout their lives. Michael Apted, who helped find the children and directed all but the first instalment, died in 2021. There were no plans to carry on without him – but then one of the participants, Nick Hitchon, contacted the production team to say that he'd been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He wanted to give a last interview, and so a final series was commissioned.

Split across two episodes, 70 Up (ITV1), directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia, finds the surviving participants mostly retired, said Louis Chilton in The Independent, and “in a mode of hyperopic reminiscence”. There are “poignant” segments, such as Nick’s interview, filmed shortly before his death in 2023. But it tends to be that life does not change very much between 63 and 70, with the result that 70 Up feels “somewhat inessential” – like a catch-up with an old friend, who has no real updates to share.

Hitchon in 7 Up (1964)

What makes it interesting is that the participants talk more openly about their feelings about the show itself, said Ben Dowell in The Times, and about Apted, the man they first met aged seven. 70 Up is more than a farewell: it is a record of the complex relationship between a filmmaker and

his subjects; and a fitting end to arguably “the greatest British documentary series ever made”.

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The week's big opening The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California (lucasmuseum.org). Now open to the public

The spaceship-esque building houses a proper “museum of the people”

George Lucas's "long-awaited" museum of narrative art, which took decades to build and reportedly cost him more than \$1bn, finally opened its doors in Los Angeles last week, said Matthew Cantor in The Guardian.

"Shaped like a spaceship" and built into the landscape of a local park, the building is quite a sight – it immediately calls to mind Lucas's own Star Wars films. It

“aims to be a testament to visual storytelling across all kinds of media – paintings, comics, murals, photography, sculpture”. There are paintings by Diego

Rivera, Norman Rockwell and Artemisia Gentileschi; and comic book illustrations from Asterix to Garfield to Popeye. You can see the Cowardly Lion's costume from The Wizard of Oz, and props from Star Wars. Its contents largely come from the personal collection of Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, who argue that the disparate works are united by the fact they "tell a story, often in a single frame". The museum's development has been "a saga of its own": Lucas began working on it 20 years ago, and saw plans to build in Chicago and San Francisco come to nothing. The billion-dollar question is: was it worth it?

The building itself is fairly astonishing, said Aaron Betsky in Architect Magazine. Designed by Beijing-born architect Ma Yansong, the polymer-clad structure “swells, dips, arches and floats above the landscape”, its 300,000-square-foot footprint

containing about 100,000 square feet of gallery space. Set in a new park, it is supported by struts that give it the illusion of floating, freeing up the chasm beneath for use as a public plaza. Yet inside, it's far less impressive. The actual gallery spaces are "cookie-cutter white-walled rooms" – and besides "a few spectacular spaces", the collection amounts to "1,300 examples of bad art" that are often "even more hackneyed than Lucas's storytelling".

That's harsh, said Kinvara Balfour in

The Daily Telegraph. Certainly, a section devoted to Star Wars that features “galactic spacecraft”, plus the real models for C-3PO and R2-D2, “is somewhat static”. And the digital reproductions – of van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, for instance – feel “soulless”. But the displays devoted to, say, Rockwell and Banksy are excellent. Beyond this, there are plenty of great examples of both fine art (Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol) and pop culture (Peanuts and Pokémon). This is a proper “museum of the people, a once-in-a-century kind of a public offering and a must-see destination”. It is bound to be “extraordinarily popular”, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. “Lucas has brought the history of the Western art museum to its inevitable conclusion. Centuries of efforts to democratise the experience have come to fruition, in a gigantic, magnificent, messy, maddening absurdity.”

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Where to buy...

The Week reviews an

exhibition in a private gallery

Sawako Nasu

at NISO Gallery

The first thing you might wonder on encountering Curved Horizon, this new exhibition by Sawako Nasu (b. Tokyo, 1996), is whether these works should be considered as abstract or representational. In formal terms, most call to mind the work of the American abstract painter Agnes Martin; yet they could also be taken as observations of fading light, as seen from a North Sea beach. Nasu composes some paintings in straight strips of soft colour, while other canvases stack their gradations as if each layer is pressing onto the one beneath it. Others still take on a sculptural form, the canvases stretched over curved frames, so as to bulge from the

Horizon (2026): 177cm x 177cm

gallery walls. It's clever stuff that looks better with each successive visit; Nasu's subtle palette plays ingenious tricks on the viewer's eyes. It is, moreover, conceptual painting with immediate aesthetic appeal. One for fans of Monet, Martin and Joan Mitchell – which is no slight.

110 New Cavendish Street,

London W1 (nisogallery.com).

Until 24 October

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Caravaggio gets a drenching

The Uffizi

Galleries in

Florence were

forced to

remove a

Caravaggio

masterpiece

from display

after rainwater

covered the

painting's

protective glass

during a major

storm, says

James Imam in The Times. Heavy storms across Tuscany on 17 September led to flooded homes and blackouts; nearly two inches of rain fell on the Uffizi in an hour. Videos taken by visitors showed water pouring down through a broken fanlight, and onto Caravaggio's Bacchus, which was donated to Ferdinando I de' Medici in 1608, and depicts the reclining Roman god of wine wearing a garland and holding a red goblet. The museum was criticised for prioritising picture purchasing over repairs. However, the Uffizi said that the painting had not been harmed, and that it was carrying out the necessary renovations; a €50m revamp was announced in August.

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The week's guide to what's worth seeing

Showing now

Tickets are selling fast for a new in-the-round production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Grab one if you can to see “Gillian Anderson blasting her way through Edward Albee’s boxing match of a play”, opposite Billy Crudup (Guardian). Until 19 December, @sohoplace, London WC2.

With his lush images of dancing couples and sun-dappled lunches, few artists have captured the pleasures of romance and friendship like Renoir. Among the works featured in Renoir and Love are Bal du moulin de la Galette, on show in the UK for the first time. Until 31 January, The National Gallery, London W1.

After an acclaimed opening run in Glasgow, Chris Hannan's “bold, brutal and sometimes beautiful” adaptation of 1984 continues its tour to Dundee and Edinburgh (Scotsman). Until 10 October, Dundee Rep; 27 October-7 November, The Royal Lyceum Edinburgh.

Aphrodite: The Making of a Goddess traces the history and lasting impact of the Greek goddess of love, from her origins on Cyprus to her Roman incarnation as Venus – and beyond. 8 October-11 April, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

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Book now

Opening next week, Opera North's new production of Eugene Onegin takes Tchaikovsky's doomed love story and reimagines it in the turbulence of 1980s Russia.

An in-the-round Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

9-29 October, Leeds Grand Theatre; then on to Newcastle, Salford and Nottingham.

Harriet Walter and Emma Corrin are starring in Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer, in a production that marks the return of director Michael Grandage to the National for the first time in 16 years. Early booking advised. 19 February-24 April 2027, National Theatre, London SE1.

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Just out in paperback

Vagabond: A Memoir by Tim Curry (Penguin £12.99). In this “brisk and bracingly sweary” account of his life and career, the late actor is tight-lipped about his affairs but “enjoyably scathing about the talents (or lack thereof) of some of his acting peers” (Guardian).

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Best books... Ralph Steadman

The renowned 90-year-old artist and author, known as the “godfather of Gonzo”, picks his favourite books. Ralph Steadman: Out of Line – his first selling exhibition in London for over 30 years – runs at Tin Man Art, 2-11 October (tinmanart.com)

Life on Earth by David Attenborough, 1979 (William Collins £12.99). My daughter, Sadie, gave me a trilogy of David Attenborough's books including this one. I always wonder what his family did while he was away, but otherwise he is fantastic. He has got so many people interested in the natural world.

Songs of the Doomed

by Hunter S. Thompson,

1990 (Fourth Estate £12.99).

I always admired his work.

The way he could put

a sentence together was

incredible. His turn of phrase

was unique. And he always barked my name at me – “Ralph!” I can imitate him quite well, even now.

Spitalfields: The History of a Nation in a Handful of Streets by Dan Cruickshank, 2016 (Windmill Books £20). I dipped in and out of this – it was fascinating to read about some of the places I would go to on the way out of Fleet Street when I worked on some of the newspapers there in the 1960s and 1970s.

Stan and Ollie by Simon Louvish, 2001 (Faber £16.99). They were such a funny duo, but what a tragedy as well.

Behind the scenes they were so badly treated, and it makes me quite angry to consider that. Why do people have to take advantage of kind and gentle genius?

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, 1898 (Penguin £9.99). It seems like we might not be far from this nightmare, except it's man who is intent on destroying man. We don't need aliens for that. In fact, it might be a welcome relief!

Duchamp & Co. by Pierre Cabanne, 1997 (Terrail; available used). I have had this book by the chair where I sit for some time. I like to pick it up and flick through it every now and then. Duchamp's Dada works inspired my own for my book Doodah, including a urinal homage after his Fountain that he signed R. Mutt. I signed mine Gavin Twinge!

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Television Programmes

Damilola: The Untold Story

Documentary shedding new light on the shocking murder in 2000 of ten-year-old Damilola Taylor. It features testimony from actor John Boyega, one of the last people to see him alive. Mon 5 Oct, BBC2 21:00 (75mins).

Pierre New legal drama starring David Harewood. A complex case draws duty solicitor Pierre into a world of bigotry and police corruption. Mon 5 Oct, C4 21:00 (60mins).

Echoes from Below: Exploring Britain's Caves

An investigation into the importance of caves through Britain's history – from Cheddar to Wookey Hole – and an attempt to measure the country's deepest shaft, Titan, in the Peak District. Wed 7 Oct, BBC4 20:00 (50mins).

Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande Uplifting documentary about the little-known British funk band Cymande, and its outsized influence. Fri 9 Oct, BBC4 22:40 (90mins).

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Films

Wild River (1960) In Elia Kazan's melancholy romance, a bureaucrat (Montgomery Clift) finds love when he's sent to manage evictions for a dam project. Mon 5 Oct, Film4 15:15 (135mins).

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) Oscar-nominated biopic about Che Guevara's political awakening. Tue 6 Oct, Film4 23:35 (155mins).

Next Goal Wins Taika Waititi's fact-based comedy stars Michael Fassbender as a washed-up soccer coach hired to help the American Samoa team following a 31-0 defeat. Wed 7 Oct, Film4 19:00 (120mins).

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Coming up for sale

The Affordable Art Fair returns to Battersea, with more than 100 international and British galleries showcasing work by contemporary artists. There will also be the Graduates Exhibition and a specially commissioned installation by Charles Inge. 14-18 October, Evolution London, Battersea Park, London SW11; affordableartfair.com.

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Wonderful waterside houses

▲ Devon: Smugglers Cottage, Dittisham. This attractive Grade II 17th century cottage sits on a bank of the River Dart with direct access to the beach. 4 beds, 2 baths, kitchen, 3 receps, boathouse, large waterfront terrace. £1.5m; Inigo (020-3687 3071).

Wiltshire: Mill Barn, Bishopstrow. Delightful period house on the Wylye. 4 beds, 3 baths, kitchen/dining room, recep, study, utility, outbuildings, garden, parking. OIEO £1.285m; Strutt & Parker (01722-344010).

▶ Devon: Eastney, Kingswear. A charming Victorian house with impressive views over the Dart Estuary. 5 beds, 4 baths, kitchen, 3 receps, sun room, workshop, garage. £2.5m; Jackson-Stops (01392-214222).

▲ Hertfordshire: Lock 42, Bulbourne. Picturesque house in an idyllic location beside the Grand Union Canal. 4 beds, 3 baths, kitchen/family room, 3 receps, utility, workshop, garden, parking. £950,000; Brions (01296-532326).

▶ Buckinghamshire: Formosa, Lock Island, Marlow. This extraordinary flood-proof floating house was featured on Grand Designs. 4 beds, 3 baths, open-plan kitchen/recep, games room, utility, garden. OIEO £2.25m; Hamptons (01628-873461).

Inverness-shire: Onich, Fort William. A magnificent Scottish baronial manor on the banks of Loch Linnhe. The property is set in approx. 4.71 acres of land. 8 beds, 7 baths, kitchen, 5 receps, spa, three fully-glazed pods, a detached studio, garden, parking. OIEO £1.3m; Strutt & Parker (02035-426286).

Hampshire:

Longstock Mill,

Stockbridge. Elegant

Grade II house and mill

set in approx. 2.4 acres

on the River Test.

4 beds, family bath,

kitchen/breakfast

room, 2 receps, 1-bed

annexe, 2-bed cottage,

detached Grade II mill,

outbuildings, garden,

swimming pool,

parking. £2.7m;

Myddelton & Major

(01264-810400).

Wiltshire: The Old Brewhouse, Quemerford. This handsome Grade II Bathstone house overlooks the River Marden and features a private island garden with its own summer house. 4 suites, kitchen, utility, 3 receps, wraparound courtyard gardens, parking. OIEO £600,000; Fine & Country (01672-511211).

Renewal

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[LEISURE Food & Drink] Why brown is best

“It’s looking a bit brown.” This is a comment I invariably hear within ten minutes of the start of a recipe shoot, said Tim Hayward in the FT. And it invariably leads to the stylist grabbing a “brightly coloured prop”, or adding a “sprinkling of micro-diced chilli”, until everyone is satisfied that a feeling of “freshness” has been restored. But while the food media’s preference for colour is understandable – it is a challenge to make brown or beige food look appetising in photos – it ignores an “awkward truth”, which is that brown is the colour of much of the world’s “best food”. The reason for this is simple, said Jay Rayner in the same paper. Many ingredients are beige or brown in their uncooked form, and two of the most important flavour-enhancing chemical processes used in cooking – the caramelisation of natural sugars (achieved, for example, when you sweat onions) and the Maillard reaction (which occurs when you sear meat or make toast) – cause them to become even browner. So though social media “algorithm feasts on colour”, I remain devoted to plainer-looking fare: pies and pastries, stews and curries. Such dishes may be the “unloved stepsisters of digital gastro-porn”, but “they are where the best flavour is”.

The secret to better fish and chips

There was a time when virtually all fish and chip shops used beef dripping – “the rendered fat that seeps out from cooked

What's in your chippy's deep-fat fryer?

beef” – in their deep-fat fryers, says Rob Crossan in The Daily Telegraph. But from the 1970s, “vegetable oils were increasingly subbed in”, driven by their relative cheapness and concerns about saturated fats being unhealthy. As a result, the use of beef dripping has all but disappeared. Now, though, there is good news for traditionalists, who argue that it produces a “nutty and savoury distinctiveness” that can’t be replicated with vegetable oil. According to Stephen Peel, who visits chippies across the country for his The Chippy Tour website, dripping is now making a “quiet comeback”. On his site’s interactive Beef Dripping Map, which allows visitors to “seek out chippies which champion the method", some 315 shops are now listed – considerably more than a few years ago. Peel describes batter cooked in beef dripping as having an "almost buttery texture", while the chips "carry that elusive savoury depth which makes vinegar seem less necessary".

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Restaurant of the week

Kid 53-55 Frith Street, London W1 (kid.london)

David Carter has founded, or co-founded, some of London's most interesting restaurants, says Grace Dent in The Guardian: Smokestak and Manteca in Shoreditch; Oma and Agora in Borough. For his latest venture, he has teamed up with Sertaç Dirik – the chef behind the "hugely loved" Mangal 2 grill restaurant in Dalston. The result is a "kind-of Turkish ocakbası", with an emphasis on live-fire cooking. Courgette flowers stuffed with goat's cheese and atom honey are a "crunchy, sticky, oozing delight".

Butterflied mackerel stuffed with carrot-based slaw arrives "almost completely blackened", with an "incredible hit of smoke in its flesh". The signature dish – a £65 kid shank with fig leaf and freekeh for two – is another triumph: we pick it "completely clean". Brûlée-topped rice pudding infused with sideritis – a "vaguely honeyed" Anatolian herb – is "one of the finest desserts I've eaten all year".

Distinctive and delicious, Kid is "thoroughly making its mark". From about £45 a head, plus drinks and service.

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Recipe of the week

Ask anyone from of Stoke-on-Trent to recommend a local delicacy, and they'll almost always say oatcakes, says Thom Bateman. These savoury pancakes are served across the city from shops and hole-in-the-walls. Traditionally, they're eaten for breakfast, though I enjoy them at any time of day.

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Staffordshire oatcakes

140g fine oatmeal (or blitz rolled porridge oats) 120g wholemeal flour

7g dried active yeast 1 tsp caster sugar 1 tsp salt 200ml whole milk

400ml room-temperature water a drizzle of vegetable oil, for frying

Filling ideas: 50/50 grated mix of cheddar and cheshire cheese cooked rashers

of smoked back bacon cooked pork sausages brown sauce or ketchup

Total time: 30 minutes, plus 2 hours proving time

\- Put the dry ingredients into a mixing bowl and stir to combine, then add the milk and water and stir with a spatula until well combined. Cover and leave to rest at room temperature for 2 hours.

• Knock back the batter so that it's smooth, giving it a good stir.

• Spread even, thin pancakes into a lightly

oiled large frying pan over a high heat and cook for 3-4 minutes on each side, until golden. The batter will make 6-8 oatcakes.

\- Top the oatcake with your fillings of choice (see ideas, above), fold and enjoy!

Taken from Home Made: Comfort food cooked better by Thom Bateman, published by HarperCollins at £26. To buy from The Week Bookshop for £22.99, visit theweekbookshop.co.uk to place your order

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Wine choice

Now that even supermarket premier cru chablis costs around £25, where are fans of the white burgundy going to get their "dry, crisp, steely, preserved lemon fix from", asks Jane MacQuitty in The Times. The good news is that many white wine producers in other regions, faced with a backlash against "luscious, peaches-and-

cream chardonnays", are "toning down the oak, alcohol and sugar" in their wines, creating "limpid, linear chablis taste-alikes" that don't cost nearly as much as the original.

From New Zealand, Rapaura Springs Rohe Chardonnay (£22.50; Majestic) is “verdant” and “hazelnut-scented”, and costs a “fraction of what you’d pay for a big-name grand cru chablis”. From France, you’ll find a “steely-stony mineral-rich finish” in 2025 Muscadet Sèvre et Maine Sur Lie, Domaine Julien Braud (£14.25; Corney & Barrow), while the “seabreezy” 2025 Picpoul de Pinet, Cuvée Ludovic Gaujal (£15.95; Yapp) is also “mouthwateringly tart”. And don’t forget Spain’s “refreshing, zippy albariño grape”: try the “tasty, crowd-pleasing” 2024 La Val Albariño (£18; Waitrose) from “damp, green Galicia”.

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New cars: what the critics say

Lexus ES

Price: from £59,345

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Car Magazine

For this eighth-generation ES, Lexus has “gone all-in” with only an electric version on offer in the UK. There’s also only a front-wheel drive, motor/battery combo; and the options are just trim and colour. It has a 77kWh battery, paired with a 221bhp motor for a peak range of 361 miles. It can be fast-charged at 150kW. A smart, luxury four-door saloon, it’s “good, just not eye-catchingly special”.

BMW, Mercedes and Audi have cornered the “Large, Swanky Saloon” market, and with stiff competition from “posh SUVs”, the new ES is likely to be a “rare sight” in the UK. It’s “no tearaway”, but can do 0-62mph in 8secs with a top speed of 99mph. The ride is “soft and bouncy” in town, but on rural roads, there’s less body control and lots of roll in the corners. The steering is accurate and the brakes are “excellent”.

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The best... rice cookers

▶ Cosori 5L Rice

Cooker This compact 5-litre machine has presets for white and brown rice, plus three other grains, and can be used to slow-cook, steam and sauté. The ceramic inner pot

ensures even cooking and makes fluffy rice, which can be kept warm without drying out (£120; cosori.co.uk).

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Morphy Richards 8 Cup Rice Cooker and Steamer

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The Daily Telegraph

Simple and easy to use, this basic rice cooker performs well, is good value and has a generous 1.5-litre capacity. But it doesn't have a timer, is messy to use and the auto

keep-warm function can dry the rice out (£40; morphyrichards.co.uk).

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▶ Staub 16cm Rice Cocotte The fastest

rice cooker on test, this isn't electric, but the 1.75-litre compact enamelled cast-iron pot works on all hob types,

including induction, and heats up very quickly. The lid has a special “Chistera” drip structure to create condensation and keep the rice moist and fluffy. It couldn’t be simpler to use, but does need monitoring while cooking (from £169; zwilling.com).

▶ Nutribullet EveryGrain Cooker This cooks fluffy rice perfectly evenly every time, and takes away the guesswork, with presets for brown and white rice, oats, quinoa and more. There are delay start and keep-warm options, and it can be used as a steamer too (£70; nutribullet.co.uk).

● To block callers on an iPhone, go to Recent Calls and press the i by the number. For Android, select the recent call and add it to the Reject List in the top-right menu.

At 5.1 metres, the new ES is longer than the previous model, creating a “plush”, spacious cabin. Typical for a Lexus, the quality of the interior is “superb”, with decent levels of standard kit. The new “crystal-clear” 14-inch infotainment system is quick to respond, and there’s a customisable display for the driver. But while it’s one of the best in class for comfort, it can’t compete on charging, range and performance.

\- Register your mobile and landline for free with the Telephone Preference Service, which blocks unsolicited telesales calls. It doesn't work for computer-generated calls.

\- If your landline provider doesn't offer this kind of service, invest in a trueCall Call Blocker (£110; truecall.co.uk); or you can buy a phone with call-blocking built in, such as the Panasonic KX-TGE822EB (£70; currys.co.uk).

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Tips of the week... to stop nuisance calls and texts

And for those who have everything...

● Report suspicious texts by forwarding them to 7726, followed by the number it came from. To report an unwanted call, text Call followed by the number to 7726.

\- BT, Plusnet and Sky all offer free call-blocker services to landline customers; you just need to log in or give them a call to activate it. TalkTalk customers can dial 1472 to switch on their call-blocker service.

Volkswagen's new “smart” Sport Electric e-bike will be difficult to miss, as the top tube is one long LED light, which turns red when you brake, and flashes amber when you signal a turn. An optional rear camera (£699) sends live video to a screen on the handlebars. from £3,999; smart-bike.net

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Auto Express

evenly. It also acts as a multi-cooker, which can slow cook, sear/sauté, steam, braise, simmer, bake, prove and keep food warm for up to 12 hours (£100; sharkninja.co.uk).

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▶ Ninja Foodi 6L PossibleCooker Slow and Rice Cooker Ideal for

large families, this has a huge 6-litre capacity; it takes a bit longer than other models, but cooks rice (and pasta) well and

SOURCE: THE INDEPENDENT

Lakeland Mini Electric Rice Cooker This ultra-compact model does a "super job", cooking fluffy rice in no time. Ideal for smaller households, it is basic, but has a time delay and an auto keep-warm function for up to 12 hours, plus a handy LED light to show when your rice is almost ready (£35; lakeland.co.uk).

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Where to find... greener laundry detergent

Smol capsules have “excellent cleaning power”, are B Corp certified, smell great and are less full of harmful chemicals than other brands. Smol is subscription only, but you can skip or pause deliveries or order a one-off box (25p/load; smol.com).

Great value, but not that strong on stains, the handy Ecoegg Laundry Egg is refillable with “mineral pellets” that are free from phosphonates, sulphates and parabens. There’s a fragrance-free edition approved by Allergy UK (14p/load; ecoegg.com).

A little goes a long way with the “super sudsy” Ecover Non-Bio Laundry Liquid, which is lower in chemicals than big-name rivals. Performance is “excellent”, and its “divine” aromas are 50% naturally derived (from about 18p/load; uk.ecover.com).

Accredited by Allergy UK, Bio-D Fragrance-Free Laundry Liquid is gentle on fabric and great for sensitive skin. It cleans well, but the natural formula won't shift stubborn stains (from about 20p/load; biod.co.uk).

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This week's dream: the unsung glories of Brazil's biggest city

A vast “concrete jungle” with “notoriously awful” traffic, the Brazilian city of São Paulo does not attract many foreign tourists. They tend to opt instead for the “glamour and natural beauty” of Rio, or the “vivaciousness” of Salvador – and yet to skip it is to miss a “gem”, says Tomé Morrissy-Swan in The Daily Telegraph. Fifty miles across and home to some 21 million people, the urban area it dominates is the biggest in South America. Exploring it can be “tiring”, and the weather is often “grey and drizzly, even cold (by Brazilian standards)”. But the riches it harbours – artistic, architectural, musical, culinary – are “endless”, and many of its most tourist-friendly areas

The city is a “gem” for fans of modernist architecture

(such as “bohemian” Vila Madalena and “upmarket” Jardins) are walkable, and “relatively safe”.

In the mid-19th century, São Paulo was a “provincial backwater”, home to just 30,000 people. From the 1870s, however, a coffee-fuelled economic boom attracted huge numbers of immigrants, and the city soon overtook Rio as Brazil’s leading are Bona Casa de Música and the “stunning” Casa de Francisca. The food is terrific here too. Thanks to its waves of immigration, there are lots of excellent Japanese, Italian and Middle Eastern restaurants, but there are also plenty of wonderful Brazilian places. Two of these – Tuju and Evvai – recently became the first restaurants in Latin America to win three Michelin stars.

industrial and, later, financial centre. Today, it is an art lover's "paradise", with hundreds of museums and galleries, such as the Pinacoteca (great for Brazilian art) and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), an extraordinary modernist building on "giant" red stilts. Fans of modernist architecture will find much else to enjoy, too – not least in Ibirapuera Park, with its striking array of mid-century buildings by Oscar Niemeyer, including the pavilion that now houses the superb Museu Afro Brasil.

São Paulo is also a great city of music. For traditional samba, try late-night spots in Pinheiros (Ó do Borogodó, Julinho Clube); less “raucous”

Getting the flavour of...

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Finland's lakes in early autumn

Scattered across southern Finland are “dozens” of lakeside hotels, many with saunas, self-catering cabins, and “gleaming” steps into the water. On a four-night road trip from Helsinki to Lake Saimaa in September, I stayed at three, says Annabelle Thorpe in The Guardian – and found the region more beautiful, peaceful and “sunkissed” than I could have imagined. First came the Radalla resort, with its “chic” cabins, and next, Sahanlahti, which has a “butterscotch yellow”, 18th century main house and an excellent restaurant. Between the two, I enjoyed a “hearty” bowl of elk soup and a tasting of berry wines at the Ollinmäki winery. And last came Järvisydän – a 100-room resort with “starkly modern” glass-walled cabins – where I “whizzed out” in a motor boat to pick chanterelle mushrooms and look for rare ringed seals on Saimaa’s islands. The trip costs from £749pp, excluding flights, with Discover the World (discover-the-world.com).

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An enchanting town in the Tarn

With its charming medieval streets and “mighty” gothic cathedral – one of the world’s largest brick-built churches – the town of Albi in southern France makes for a lovely short break, says Jane Knight in The Times. Set in the Tarn region, an hour’s drive north of Toulouse, it’s also known for its Toulouse-Lautrec museum, a big collection of works by the famously “diminutive” and dissolute painter, born here in 1864. Visiting in June, I stayed at Villa Caroline, a pleasant hotel with four “rustic-chic” rooms, and I enjoyed a day’s e-biking from nearby Gaillac, which lends its name to the surrounding wine region, one of France’s oldest. At Domaine Gayrard, I tasted some organic wines made with rare local grape varieties, and visited Cordes-sur-Ciel, a fortified medieval town set high on a rocky hilltop with “sweeping” views.

A venerable paddle steamer turns 80

Launched in Glasgow in 1946, the PS Waverley is the last seagoing passenger-carrying paddle steamer in the world, and this year she celebrates her 80th anniversary. With two red-and-black funnels and giant paddle wheels, she is a “glorious” sight, says Chris Moss in The Sunday Telegraph, and a “nostalgic” reminder of a more “sedate” era when Britain was home to hundreds of boats like this. Named after Sir Walter Scott’s novel, the Waverley (pictured) was built to operate around Loch Long, replacing a vessel that was sunk by enemy fire during the evacuation of Dunkirk. These days, however, she plies routes all around the UK. This month, she’ll be sailing mostly around London and the southeast before returning to Glasgow for her final voyage of the season, on 18 October. See waverleyexcursions.co.uk for information.

Hotel of the week

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Nihi Rote Indonesia

Indonesia's southernmost major island, Rote is a 50-mile-long surfer's paradise with a "bygone Bali vibe", says Michelle Jana Chan in Condé Nast Traveller. The new sister property of Nihi Sumba (on Sumba island), the resort sits beside a white-sand beach with a superb surf break. It has a spa, a "well-equipped" gym, and 21 thatched guest villas, in which wood, rattan, linen and batik fabrics feature heavily. Activities on offer include water sports, boat trips to mangrove forests and outlying islands, and an Indonesian liwetan (communal feast) prepared by students at the resort's hospitality school.

Doubles from approx.

Doubles from approx.

£1,120, full board; nihi.com.

Fleet Street editor and chronicler of the Swinging Sixties

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Felicity Green 1926-2026

Felicity Green, who has died aged 100, was the editor of the Daily Mirror's fashion pages in the 1960s, when the paper sold five million copies a day, said The Times. Holding the then-revolutionary view that fashion was not a “bloody religion” for the moneyed elites but something for the people, she was one of the first journalists to chronicle the emergence of a new generation of models and designers, including Twiggy and Mary Quant – and to commission the likes of David Bailey to shoot her features. Cecil King, chairman of IPC, which owned the Mirror, was appalled by her championing of the new youth trends, and threatened to sack her when she featured Quant’s mini-skirts. “Can you imagine the wife of a Sheffield bus driver wearing that?” he demanded. Undaunted, she commissioned designer Barbara Hulanicki, who had recently launched a tiny mail-order business, to create a short, stylish dress that the paper could sell. The

result was a pink gingham smock dress that was marketed by the paper in 1964 for 25 shillings (£1.25). Green predicted that they'd get 3,000 orders in total; in fact, they got 17,000 almost overnight.

The success of the dress enabled Hulanicki to launch the Biba store in Kensington that would help define 1960s style; and it made Green unsackable. Soon after, the Mirror's editor Hugh Cudlipp told her that he wanted her to use the front page to explain to readers what the 1960s “are all about”. The result was her famous declaration, under the headline “The Year that Changed All Our Lives”, that 1964 was when “skirts got shorter, boys’ hair got longer, smart girls wore the trousers, the topless went bust and The Beatles went everywhere”.

Green: "smart girls wore the trousers"

Felicity Green was born in 1926 into a Jewish family in Dagenham, in east London. Her parents were unhappily married, and once a week her father, who ran a shoe shop, would escape by taking her to the cinema – where she fell in love with the costumes worn by the stars of the 1930s. By 14 she was sketching her own designs. Fresh out of secretarial college, she won her first job aged 18, as a junior secretary at Woman & Beauty magazine. Her duties included lighting the office's coal fire, but within a couple of years she'd been promoted to fashion editor. Her break in newspapers came in 1955, when Cudlipp asked her for her opinion of his newly launched Women's Sunday Mirror. He was so impressed by her forthright appraisal, he recruited her. As associate editor of the Mirror, she created spreads that appeared under the line “Felicity Green on the fashion scene”, but she also persuaded him and the paper's other bosses to let her write about issues such as abortion and equal pay. In 1973, she became the first woman to sit on the main board of a national newspaper.

Early on, a colleague had warned her that some men would resent having a female boss, said The Daily Telegraph. His advice was always to let them leave the room with “their balls intact”. For years, she tolerated the casual misogyny prevalent in Fleet Street, but when, in 1978, she learnt that a new, and less-experienced, male board member was being paid twice her salary, she resigned. After that, she ran Vidal Sassoon, worked at other newspapers, and lectured at St Martin’s School of Art. She’d married businessman Geoffrey Hill in 1952; he died in 1992. Having opted not to have children she was, she said, sad when she realised that that meant she’d also never have grandchildren.

Producer responsible for the “definitive” Sherlock Holmes

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June Wyndham Davies 1929-2026

In the early 1980s, June Wyndham Davies was asked by bosses at Granada if she'd be interested in producing

a new TV adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories. She declined, saying it was such a “man’s show”, it should have a male producer, said The Daily Telegraph. But she did have a suggestion – that Jeremy Brett be cast in the lead role. Known for playing swashbuckling heroes and romantic roles (including Freddy in My Fair Lady), he was a very far from obvious Holmes – yet for many he would prove the definitive one.

The first series was a hit, and Wyndham Davies, who has died aged 97, was persuaded to take the helm for the second. She successfully cast a new Dr Watson – Edward Hardwicke – to fill the

vacancy left by David Burke, who'd joined the RSC. And she went on to produce two more series and five TV films. As time wore on, they ran out of the most celebrated Holmes stories, and it fell to her to negotiate with Air Commandant Dame Jean Conan Doyle, the author's "formidable" daughter and literary executor, about changes to make the thinner stories work for TV. Yet her greater challenge was dealing with Brett. She loved him dearly, she said – but sometimes a darkness came over him. Once, he invited her to dinner, opened the door in filthy clothes and eventually served her a single pea on a plate. She realised something was seriously wrong and got him medical help. Brett was treated for bipolar disorder. He returned to work, but owing to his mental illness and his deteriorating physical health, he often found it overwhelming.

Wyndham Davies: trained at Rada

He finally retired from the show in 1994, and died the next year, aged 61. Years later, Wyndham Davies recalled that, in this difficult period, she'd found a firm friend in her Dr Watson. "Whenever Jeremy was on a bad day, Edward made it a good day," she said, following Hardwicke's death in 2011. "He was a very special person."

June Wyndham Davies was born in 1929 and raised in Cardiff. Her father, Mervyn Davies, was a keen ballroom dancer who worked as an under-manager at Woolworths. Her mother Despina, née Wyndham, had been a ballerina. June wanted to become an actress, and trained at Rada. In rep in 1953, said The Guardian, she was Cathy in a production of Wuthering Heights alongside one Maurice Micklewhite – later Michael Caine. In another play, they shared a kiss, which was his first on stage. He’d recall that she was “stunning”. Her memory was that he stank of fish (his father worked as a porter at Billingsgate, and he was still living at home). They remained friends. Later, she moved into directing (on Coronation Street, among other things); then she switched to production because, she said, she wanted to bring the work of Elizabeth Bowen and Edith Wharton to the screen. She fulfilled that ambition in the 1980s, when she made an anthology of ghost stories, Shades of Darkness, that included three of Wharton’s (and gave Hugh Grant an early part). Its success enabled her to make acclaimed adaptations of Bowen’s novels The Death of the Heart and The Heat of the Day (with a screenplay by Harold Pinter). She is survived by the actress Norma West, her partner since 1962; they married in 2005.

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CITY Companies in the news ...and how they were assessed

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Anthropic: a unique prospectus

Wall Street and Silicon Valley are buzzing over the latest AI leak – fortunately of the old-fashioned sort. Anthropic’s IPO prospectus has found its way into Reuters’ hands, said Beatrice Nolan in Fortune, giving investors “the first detailed view” of its finances ahead of its coming \$2trn New York listing. The numbers, needless to say, are huge – showing how quickly the Claude maker has grown, but also that it is “burning cash” to keep up in the AI race. Anthropic lost \$42bn last year, while making \$4.6bn in revenue, and is committed to spending \$518bn on infrastructure in coming years. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the prospectus, said Connie Loizos on TechCrunch, was that nearly a third of it was devoted to “risk factors”: the potential of AI models to manipulate, blackmail and “resist shutdown” – and a formal warning of “existential risks to humanity” (surely “a first” in any listing document). Other business risks, said the FT, include “the extreme concentration” of Anthropic’s customer base, with close to 25% of revenue last year coming from just two (unnamed) clients, likely Cursor and Microsoft’s GitHub, which make AI coding assistants. The debate over AI safety has grown ever louder, said DealBook in The New York Times. But investors have another fear. If Anthropic delays its debut or prices at discount, it could set off a “cascading” event that exposes those “circular financing fears” we’ve been warning about for months.

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OpenAI: ChatGPT release delayed

Anthropic's warnings follow a string of security incidents in which AI agents have hacked outside systems, said TechCrunch. There's no sign of respite. OpenAI disclosed last week that its tools have hacked “dozens” of external sites – including the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Now, it has “scrapped plans” to release its latest ChatGPT model over safety concerns. OpenAI's head of safety systems, Saachi Jain, said its GPT-6.1 Astra model, which was scheduled for an October release, “behaved in unauthorised ways” during testing and showed “higher levels of deception” than predecessors, said Keiran Southern in The Times. OpenAI plans to hold back the model while it establishes stronger safeguards, said Rachel Metz on Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the company's top brass is scrambling to make amends. On Tuesday, OpenAI apologised for an incident in which a different model breached Australian government websites. Chief strategy officer Jason Kwon is being despatched Down Under to meet with local legislators.

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Airtel Money: pan-African float

Get ready for the City's “biggest market debut since 2021”, said The Observer. In a boost for London’s “ailing” stock exchange, the pan-African payments giant Airtel Money – the digital finance arm of telecom firm Airtel Africa – is planning a \$9bn IPO that “could prove a catalyst” in London’s quest “to lure more international companies through reforms to its capital markets”. Airtel Money, majority owned by Indian billionaire Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Enterprises, will certainly “boost the FTSE’s fintech profile”. “A win is a win,” said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. Still, this one was “a bit of a shoo-in” as the Airtel parent is listed in London. Let’s see what happens when the overseas competition is stiffer. A potential “biggie” is Norway’s Visma, one of Europe’s biggest software firms; its listing venue looks “to be a shootout” between London, Stockholm and Amsterdam.

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Seven days in the Square Mile

The City gave a measured response to Andy Burnham's speech at the Labour conference. Government borrowing costs dipped slightly on news that the triple lock on pensions will be phased out by 2030, but investors reacted less positively to the announcement of new laws that will pave the way for public ownership of failing water firms. Earlier, the Chancellor's speech managed to elicit a small positive reaction for the pound, and helped gilts avoid the worst of the global selling, when he reiterated his pledge to maintain fiscal responsibility.

The US and China agreed to tariff cuts on \$60bn of "non-sensitive" goods: ranging from US corn and cosmetics to Chinese household appliances and toys. They also agreed to extend their "trade truce" till January. Stocks fell sharply in China – investors were underwhelmed by Beijing's latest economic stimulus package, which appeared designed to keep growth on target at 4.5-5% rather than address the country's underlying structural imbalances.

The engineering giant Rolls-Royce said it would invest a further £300m into UK manufacturing sites. Nvidia unveiled a \$150bn share buyback scheme and unveiled a new security platform to rein in AI agents. The bakery chain Greggs said it would cut more than 700 jobs and close four of its manufacturing sites to cut costs, owing to growing inflation pressure. Barclays backed down over its return-to-the-office plans and delayed its new hybrid-working policy until 2027.

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Monzo/Nubank: Brazilian bid for fintech crown jewel

In a move that could shake up the global pecking order of digital-only “neobanks”, Monzo may be turning Brazilian. The UK challenger bank is in talks with Brazil’s exceptionally fast-growing Nubank – arguably Revolut’s most serious digital competitor – over a potential £10bn deal, said Jill Treanor in The Sunday Times. If it goes ahead, it will mark Nubank’s first move into the British market, but is bound to “spark a fierce debate in the City”, said Mark Kleinman on Sky News. An acquisition would rule out the hoped-for standalone London flotation of “one of British fintech’s crown jewels”.

Established in 2015, as one of a wave of new-look, digital-only banks, Monzo now has 16 million mostly British customers, said Jill Treanor. Compared with the runaway success of its UK peer Revolut, which claims to have 80 million globally, it is a minnow. Yet would-be suitor

David Vélez: CEO of Nubank

Nubank dwarfs both. The Latin American champion, founded by CEO David Vélez, has 135 million online customers and was valued at \$66bn (slightly less than NatWest) when it listed in New York in 2021. Moreover, Nubank is offering a good price: £8bn-£10bn is roughly double Monzo's £4.5bn valuation in 2024.

The mooted deal could actually prove rather good for London, said Lex in the FT. “Vélez has previously considered” moving the Nu group’s “legal domicile” to the UK; “buying a British bank would give him more reason to do so”. The deal could also put the Monzo brand on the global map. Rather like the football club it sponsors, Coventry City, the bank has made “a good job of fighting it out as a small team in the big leagues". But it now needs to move on from its "small and scrappy" past. The might of Nubank would help level the playing field.

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[Talking points] Issue of the week: the return of Help to Buy

Your First Home is a reheated version of an old Tory policy. Will builders be the main beneficiaries?

“Christmas came early” for Britain’s battered housebuilders, said Tom Howard in The Times. News that Andy Burnham’s Government plans “a new equity loan scheme for first-time buyers” in next month’s Budget set the sector alight. More than £2bn was added to the stock-market values of housebuilders, brickmakers and builders’ merchants following confirmation that a revamped Help to Buy – dubbed Your First Home – is in the offing. Persimmon, which sells about 40% of its homes each year to first-time buyers, led the way with a meaty 14.7% jump. Barratt Redrow, Taylor Wimpey, Vistry, Bellway and Crest Nicholson also had “double-digit gains”. The new scheme should support a meaningful increase in both volumes and margins. Indeed, Your First Home may even be “more generous” than the original Help to Buy rolled out by the Conservative chancellor George Osborne in 2013. The Government claims it could help people onto the property ladder “with only a 2.5% deposit”, and a 20% equity loan which will be interest-free for an initial period.

Persimmon: shares rose by a "meaty" 14.7%

The scheme is “a lifeline” for housebuilders “grappling with a toxic cocktail of materials cost inflation, new regulations and low buyer demand … heavily constrained by high mortgage rates”, said Melissa Lawford in The Daily Telegraph. And it could be

a lifeline for Labour's credibility, too. Analysts had previously warned that the party was on track to miss its central manifesto promise to build 1.5 million homes over this parliament “by more than half”. Planning consents had slumped to their lowest in more than 20 years last year. This could be “a huge stimulus” for supply. Well, maybe, said John Stepek on Bloomberg. But conditions now are rather different than they were in 2013, when interest rates were 0.5% and house prices were steadily rising. Would-be buyers should understand that “the risks of negative equity are real, particularly if you don’t have much of a deposit to begin with”.

Turning to Osborne's playbook is politically “awkward” for Labour, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian – not least because of “the spectre of Jeff Fairburn”, the “shameless” former Persimmon boss who bagged a £75m bonus in 2018 after Help to Buy “turbo-charged” his pay package. The last thing ministers need is “more Fairburns”. There are also “inflationary risks” inherent in throwing subsidies at the housing market. Still, on balance, Your First Home is “probably worth a punt”. An independent report recently published by the housing department concluded that Help to Buy had delivered “very high value for money”. The new scheme could move the dial too. “Just don’t expect miracles.”

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Oil and bonds: what the experts think

\- Violent markets Another week, another rout for government bonds, said Mehreen Khan in The Times – with yields, which move inversely to prices, again topping multi-decade highs on both sides of the Atlantic. When Andy Burnham took office in July, the yield on

Ships near the Strait of Hormuz

Britain's 10-year gilt stood at 4.9%. This week it hit 5.4%, the highest level since the 2007 financial crisis. It's excruciating for politicians charged with balancing budgets – “every one percentage point rise in the yield” equates to “a £12bn cost to the Exchequer”. And for bond investors it’s “a gut punch”, said Katie Martin in the FT. The benchmark 10-year US Treasury – “the most important number in global finance” – breached 5.25% on Monday, a full percentage point above where it started the year. “We’re in the danger zone,” said Derek Halpenny, an analyst at MUFG.

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● Unhappy marriage

The drama in bond markets is directly connected to the oil price, which leapt 6% to \$108/barrel on Monday morning. Indeed, “oil and bond yields are moving in lockstep”, said Fortune. “The higher oil goes, the greater the risk premium investors demand to hold debt.” The two asset classes have always been connected, but they're now in their "tightest relationship since 1990", said the FT. Other economic fundamentals, such as growth and inflation, have taken a back seat as bond investors try to read the runes, advised Fidelity fund manager Mike Riddell.

“For the last three to six months, we’ve basically just been oil traders.”

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- Winning in Hormuz?

Why has the price of oil remained persistently above \$100 when America is actually “winning the battle in Hormuz”, asked Javier Blas on Bloomberg. After all, crude oil exports via the waterway and bypass routes have risen to about 80% of prewar levels. “If this is winning, what would losing look like?” Market psychology plays a role: investors may be buying more oil futures “as a hedge against the risk of inflation, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy”. Another argument is that “a cornered Tehran” may have “no option” but to escalate attacks on energy infrastructure. Ultimately, “the oil market is in wait-and-see-mode”. Either Iran comes to the negotiation table and prices decline a lot; or it escalates and they soar. Bond markets are paying the price.

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Warring siblings

Inheritances are an intense source of conflict between siblings, says Isabel Woodford in the Financial Times. Are parents partly to blame?

Rising disputes A record number of probate lawsuits reached the High Court in 2025, with warring siblings comprising “the biggest category of claimants”, accounting for 40%-50% of cases. This is partly because “the stakes are higher than ever” thanks to the sheer size of baby boomer wealth: “an estimated £1trn is expected to change hands in the UK during the 2020s”. The rise in “no-win, no-fee” lawyers is another factor spurring litigation.

Divvying up the spoils Although equal division of assets remains “the default”, nearly half of British parents “now wish to split their estates unequally”: maybe because they want to “bridge financial disparities”. This can be catastrophic, particularly if it’s “a nasty surprise”. Disputes often centre on allegations that a will was “manipulated”.

Emotional costs Some disputes have deep, “primal” roots. More often they ruin otherwise strong bonds between siblings, says lawyer Amanda Noyce of RWK Goodman. That’s why it’s vital that parents address any issues while they’re still alive. If necessary, write a “letter of wishes” to sit alongside a will to explain any contentious issues, says Lauren Day of Ellis Jones solicitors. Above all, “don’t settle scores” using your estate.

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[Commentators] In Liverpool, more questions than answers Graham Ruddick

The Times

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Trump's great expectations in China

Editorial

The Economist

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The debt owed to Warren Buffet

Martin Vander Weyer

The Spectator

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The quiet allure of the minivan

Kyle Stock

Bloomberg Businessweek

John Healey's conference speech “was about as pro-business as you could expect from a Labour Chancellor”, says Graham Ruddick. “He used the word ‘growth’ 15 times and even mentioned the p-word – profits.” He had to win over a sceptical business contingent, who arrived in Liverpool “with a sense of wariness”: many still see Rachel Reeves’s first Budget, with its multibillion-pound tax hammer on business, as an “unforgivable betrayal”. It wasn’t just the tax rise that stung, but the fact that companies had to cut their cloth, “while the Government showed little willingness to tackle its own spending”. Andy Burnham’s Government clearly wants to do a deal with business, but nobody is really sure what it is offering. What form, exactly, will this “new age of industrialisation” take? “Burnham’s ambition to tackle long-running issues like the triple lock, welfare spending and the UK’s trade relationship with the EU is welcome.” But will it unravel when confronted with divisions in the Labour Party and trade unions – leaving business “to pick up the tab” for more tax rises? “That is the fear among chief executives.”

The pleasantries between Messrs Trump and Xi at last week's Washington meeting “have eased fears of another all-out trade war”, says The Economist. But can US bosses really count on the “grand opening” of Chinese markets that the US president promises? It isn’t all rhetoric. Citigroup, one of America’s biggest banks, may soon open a brokerage in the country; a handful of big chipmakers, such as Nvidia and Qualcomm, have been making record revenues; and brands including Ralph Lauren and Sam’s Club (a members-only retailer owned by Walmart) are also in the money. Still, these successes don’t “tell the full story”. For most US companies doing business in China, sales have stagnated and new investments are offering thinner returns. Apple’s revenues last year were roughly \$10bn smaller than in 2022. PepsiCo has also seen its income “level off and then fall”. Some firms are now pulling out completely. Trump happily announces headline deals – “anything to help him claim he has pushed down the bilateral deficit”. So much the better if that eases tariffs and sanctions. “But expectations for better days and bigger sales remain low.”

“Father time always wins,” 96-year-old Warren Buffett declared as he retired from the chair of Berkshire Hathaway, after six decades, this month. “He has, however, been generous with me,” he added. Buffett himself has also been generous, says Martin Vander Weyer, both in terms of “the wisdom he dispensed” and “the spectacular long-term return on capital he delivered”. \$100 invested with him in 1965 would have become \$6m today, at a compound annual growth rate close to 20%; the same bet on the S&P 500 index, growing at 10.5%, would have made just \$45,500. Of course Buffett never considered investment a bet. “It was a deeply considered process of picking and holding companies with exceptional strengths and prospects, from Coca-Cola to the Chinese car maker BYD, which he talent-spotted in 2008.” Unlike many today, he looked for owners “who thought in decades rather than quarters”. Buffett didn’t use his wealth for political influence and will leave nearly all of it to charity. “He has been a benign antidote to the grotesqueries of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.”

For a generation or more, it has been “the least cool category of vehicle”, redolent of soccer moms and suburbia, says Kyle Stock. Yet as prices of fuel and swanky SUVs near historic highs, “the much-maligned minivan is having a renaissance” in the US. Why not? They offer roughly the same utility and amenities as an SUV at about three-fifths the price – and in a moment of prolonged inflation Americans are less willing to pay that “coolness tax”. Minivan sales are up 8% in the year to August, even as total new vehicle sales have declined, according to the data and car-shopping platform Edmunds.com. Although they represent just 3% of the auto market, “American drivers are buying as many of them as large SUVs for the first time in almost a decade”. Minivan makers such as Toyota and Chrysler (owned by the European carmaker Stellantis) are in clover. Stellantis expects the market to expand until at least 2030. “Nobody ever grew up with a poster of a minivan on their wall.” No matter. The minivan has become “the Swiss Army knife of family transportation”.

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[City profiles] Tim Hailes

Feathers have been ruffled at Mansion House, said Simon Hunt in City AM: the frontrunner to become the next Lord Mayor of the City of London, Tim Hailes, has “abruptly withdrawn his candidacy”, after learning that a close business associate is facing criminal proceedings. “This in no way involves me and I am not personally under investigation,” said Hailes, a former JPMorgan lawyer who later joined the London blockchain company Blockthree Holdings. He did not name the associate, but said he had to consider the City’s “reputation”. Thankfully, said The Daily Telegraph, the mayoral candidate for 2027 – former Hiscox insurance CEO Bronek Masojada – is available to fill the vacancy at “the ancient office”.

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David Beckham

"Bank it like Beckham." That seems to be the message of a "spectacular" year for the former England captain, topped by the World Cup, said Matthew Bishop in The Observer. The "ubiquitous" Mr Beckham appeared in about a dozen tournament ad campaigns ranging from Bank of America to McDonald's – adding to the 2025 profits amassed by his company DRJB Holdings. His reward is a \$51m dividend. Beckham is effectively "the face" of Authentic Brands Group (ABG) – the New York IP firm that bought 55% of DRJB in 2022 for £200m. The company, whose other assets include Marilyn Monroe's estate, bagged quite a bargain. Its mooted value has shot up to well over \$20bn since Becks joined the team. When ABG finally gets round to its long-promised IPO, "brand Beckham is sure to be central to its sales pitch".

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[Who's tipping what] The Beauty Tech Group Investors' Chronicle

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The week's best shares

Profits have soared at the premium at-home beauty devices group, boosted by its range of LED skin products. Capex spend is low, and revenue growth evenly spread across regions. Launching a £20m buyback. Buy. 398p.

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CVS Group

Citywire

The vet services group offers an “attractive investment case”, says Berenberg. Revenues are up 5.9% and “stable” margins – at nearly 20% – prove “resilience”. The Australian expansion is going to plan. Target £20. Buy. £12.32.

The Times

Shares in the 370-store cycling and motoring group are up 83% this year, but may have further to go. Given sound finances, a medium-term fall in interest rates could catalyse profits. Yields 3.6%. Buy. 256p.

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Next

The Times

Shares have gained 80% in five years, and it might be tempting to take profits. But having snapped up Cath Kidston and Russell & Bromley, the retailer has firepower for further “important” brands. Overseas sales are growing strongly. Buy. £144.30.

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Supermarket Income Reit Investors' Chronicle

The grocery landlord's plans to double its £2.2bn portfolio will probably mean diversifying away from large UK supermarkets into convenience stores and food warehouses, and expanding overseas. Yields 7.5%. Buy. 84p.

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Warpaint London

Citywire

The cosmetics firm has returned to sales growth, and profit guidance is supported by margin expansion, says Berenberg. “Impressive” cash generation, as it expands its footprint, warrants a 425p target. Yields 6.5%. Buy. 197p.

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[...and some to hold, avoid or sell] JD Sports Fashion

Investors' Chronicle

Challenges persist at the athleisure retailer amid cost-of-living pressures. It has raised the dividend and is rolling out new tech, improving stores and cost control. But the decision to stick to guidance “looks heroic”. Hold. 79p.

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Marks & Spencer Group Citywire

The high-street stalwart was trading “into the wind” during the first half, says Peel Hunt. But recovery is “still on”. Food has been “stellar” but fashion is “still hungover” from the hack. Profits weighted towards the second half. Hold. 370p.

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Midwich Group

Investors' Chronicle

The audiovisual distributor has swung to profit, thanks to improved sales and lower restructuring and amortisation charges. Aiming to build efficiencies by reorganising into three geographical segments. Hold. 152p.

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Kingfisher

Investors' Chronicle

The B&Q owner is investing in its trade arm and digital offering amid rising profits and upgraded forecasts. But there's uncertainty around who will replace the outgoing chief, and consumer sentiment remains wobbly. Hold. 335p.

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McDonald's Corp The Times

The dividend king has been dethroned as the largest fast-food UK chain by Greggs. Weight-loss jabs have shrunk appetites and UK franchises have been hit by sharp rises in wages, food and energy. Avoid. \$250.35.

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NatWest Group The Times

Higher mortgage rates and cost-cutting have boosted the bank's profits as it retreats from the high street. Expanding into wealth management, but faces potential taxes in the coming Budget. Hold. 684.6p.

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Market summary

Key numbers for investors | 29 Sep 2026 | Week before | Change (%) | FTSE 100 | 10636.71 | 10708.33 | -0.67% | FTSE All-share UK | 5738.60 | 5775.83 | -0.64% | Dow Jones | 51193.63 | 51861.15 | -1.29% | NASDAQ | 26794.74 | 27201.58 | -1.50% | Nikkei 225 | 65481.27 | 65018.95 | 0.71% | Hang Seng | 24523.57 | 25087.75 | -2.25% | Gold | 4157.66 | 4327.01 | -3.91% | Brent Crude Oil | 104.04 | 100.21 | 3.82% | DIVIDEND YIELD (FTSE 100) | 3.10% | 3.06% | UK 10-year gilts yield | 5.34 | 5.17 | US 10-year Treasuries | 5.27 | 4.97 | UK ECONOMIC DATA | Latest CPI (yoy) | 3.1% (Aug) | 2.9% (Jul) | Latest RPI (yoy) | 3.4% (Aug) | 3.2% (Jul) | Lloyds house price (yoy) | -0.4% (Aug) | 0.1% (Jul) | £1 STERLING: $1.326 €1.168 ¥207.953 Bitcoin $83,107.71 |

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Best and worst performing shares

WEEK'S CHANGE, FTSE 100 STOCKS | RISES | Price | % change | Barratt Redrow | 340.00 | +10.05 | InterContinental Hotels | $161.50 | +5.84 | Lion Finance Group | 14380.00 | +3.08 | Standard Chartered | 2329.00 | +2.78 | Diploma | 7825.00 | +2.62 | Endeavour Mining | 4284.00 | -9.24 | Fresnillo | 2724.00 | -9.02 | Experian | 2472.00 | -7.59 | Autotrader Group | 448.00 | -7.44 | Rentokil Initial | 298.00 | -5.72 | FTSE 250 RISER & FALLER | Vesuvius | 467.00 | +26.42 | Hochschild Mining | 520.00 | -12.91 | Source: FT (not adjusted for dividends). Prices on 29 Sep (pm)

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[Directors' dealings] AstraZeneca

CEO Pascal Soriot has "raised a few eyebrows" by spending £7.26m on shares in the pharma heavyweight – a "major show of faith" amid wobbling prospects after a difficult summer, caused by "underwhelming" clinical trial results.

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[Form guide] Shares tipped 12 weeks ago Best tip Focusrite

Investors' Chronicle up 21.25% to 242.5p

Worst tip

Supreme

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"We don't think enough people are talking about the potential volatility if AI growth slows. This is multiples on trillions of dollars of market value. The knock-on effects could be very meaningful." Christopher Sheldon of KKR. Quoted in the FT

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No turning back: the final climb of a superstar mountaineer

Nirmal “Nims” Purja, who had climbed all 14 of the world’s peaks higher than 8,000m, was caught in an avalanche this summer with nine other climbers on Pakistan’s Broad Peak. Some are questioning why they were there at all. By Tom Whipple

“Opportunities don’t scream,” Nirmal “Nims” Purja wrote in his last social media post. “They whisper to those already working in silence.” It was 27 July, and the former British Special Forces soldier was back working in the familiar silence of a high mountain valley. He had not intended to climb the 8,051m-high Broad Peak, in the north of Pakistan, but the Nepali-British climber, who’d once bet his house on becoming a mountaineering superstar, knew how to hear a whispered opportunity. A week earlier, he had climbed Gasherbrum, the mountain he had come for, with a client, reportedly a wealthy Russian woman, and she had gone home. He had time, he realised, to “tick” off the world’s 12th-highest mountain too. And if he seized that opportunity, he would be one mountain away from a greater achievement still – becoming the first person to climb all of the world’s highest mountains without supplemental oxygen, twice.

Purja at the summit of Mount Everest on 22 May 2019

Some of the climbers planning to reach the top of Broad Peak that season had turned around, worrying there was too high an avalanche risk. Enough, though, had stayed; and on the morning of 30 July, Purja and nine others set out from Camp 2. It was a group with considerable know-how in its ranks; members included Pur Bahadur Gurung, who had climbed Everest ten times, and Nima Sherpa, who had climbed four 8,000m peaks

in 2026 alone. The next news that would come from Purja would be the ping of his GPS tracker, 6,600m up. Then, 30 minutes later, it was 700m lower. Then, silence. Days later, a video taken from the other side of the

"Some felt that, with his bombastic social media posts and partying at base camps, Purja lacked the humility mountaineers admire"

valley would show that there had been a massive avalanche. At the age of 43, the career of one of the greatest Himalayan climbers had ended. Around him lay the bodies of his nine fellow climbers. It was one of the worst mountaineering tragedies of the century.

For Western climbers the great Asian ranges can be hard, at first, to understand properly. “The enormousness of everything there is a little mind-bending”, Ian Overton says: these are mountains whose start point is higher than Mont Blanc. Overton, an A&E nurse from Colorado, was among the first this season to make the trek up the Godwin-Austen Glacier, past the teams on Gasherbrum, to the base of Broad Peak. For two weeks he, his climbing partner and one other team started making the trail. They trekked up to the first staging post, Camp 1. From there they moved to Camp 2. By increments they got higher up the face. Then the weather came in, and they had no choice but to return to Camp 1. They sat in their tent, playing cards, playing dice, drinking tea and reading. Over two frustrating weeks, the other

teams trickled in. Most continued on. They were heading for K2, Broad Peak's flashier, higher neighbour. In the past few years there had been rockfalls on Broad Peak, and people were a little wary. But Overton preferred his odds on this slightly lower mountain.

They waited. Then, a weather window. This was their chance. Overton and the other team went up to Camp 2 in one push, then on to establish Camp 3 – 1,000m below the summit. But at 7,000m, Overton developed high-altitude sleep apnoea. His body became confused, thinking it had more oxygen than it did. He wasn’t breathing properly in his sleep. “I felt more like a liability.” He decided to come down. He remembers, now, the trudge back. There had been a wind storm the night before, and the snow had accumulated in the lee of the ridge. “And I remember thinking, ‘Oh God, I hope this doesn’t slide.’” Somewhere to the south, at about the same time, Purja’s team were helping his client up Gasherbrum.

For the client it would presumably be a life-defining personal achievement. For Purja it was just another summit.

“Sometime in the spring of 2019, the mountaineering world started talking about this crazy guy from Nepal,” Jimmy Chin, an American mountaineer, says on the Netflix documentary 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible. “Everyone was asking, who the hell is Nims Purja?" In early 2019, Purja, a climber with a decent record but not a remarkable one, climbed Everest – something he had done before. Then, in the hours afterwards, he climbed its two neighbouring

8,000m peaks, Lhotse and Makalu. He stood on all three summits within 48 hours. No one had done that before. When, at this point, his fellow climbers started noticing, they realised that a month earlier he had climbed Annapurna and Dhaulagiri. Then – with a “stonking hangover” from celebrations after the latter – Kangchenjunga. All were over 8,000m.

The 8,000m mountains hold a particular resonance in mountaineering. To reach the top you must push your body past what is reasonable or sustainable. Climbers call the last few hundred metres the “death zone” because your body is, quite literally, dying. The first person to climb all 14 – the legendary Italian Reinhold Messner – took 16 years to do so. Now, in one season, Purja had climbed six – and on three occasions had interrupted climbs to carry out rescues. After Makalu he returned to base camp, packed up his team and prepared for his summer season, when he planned five 8,000m peaks in Pakistan. In the autumn? He wanted to mop up the rest. All the 8,000m peaks

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The last word

in half a year. He had funded the trip by mortgaging his house. He had bet that by the time the year was out he would have accrued enough sponsorship to pay it off. By the time he stood on the 14th peak, he had.

Purja grew up in poverty in Nepal, first in the highlands then amid the lower jungles. There weren't many opportunities. There was, however, one: the Gurkhas. If you could carry a bamboo basket filled with 30kg of sand uphill for 5km at a run, you could join the British Army. He stormed uphill. With the Gurkhas he volunteered for the regiment's bicentenary expedition to climb Everest. He then resolved to join the

Broad Peak: the world's 12th-highest mountain

Special Forces. In an act of perverse overcompetitiveness, even for him, the branch he decided to join was the Special Boat Service – like the SAS but with more swimming. Nepal is landlocked; no Gurkha had been in the SBS. He couldn't swim very well. So that was the service for him.

He got in, of course. He travelled the world – to locations he couldn't talk about – and was injured by a sniper, probably in Afghanistan. He got cross with his wife, Suchi, when she called, worried he might be dead. Then, to the fury of his family, he quit, leaving behind a pension and salary. He wanted to be a mountaineer. Climbing the 14 peaks in one year earned him plaudits, but not everyone was impressed. Purja had used oxygen. He had followed fixed ropes. He climbed on often busy

mountains with logistics in place. “What he has done is quite extraordinary,” Chris Bonington, Britain’s premier bearded old man of the mountains, admitted in 2019. “But it isn’t mountaineering.” Nor was it just “Thousands of tonnes of ice and snow fell without warning; in the days after, rescuers found not only bodies but body parts”

Purja's climbing style that some found grating. With bombastic social media posts, with partying at base camp, with boasts of being the “Usain Bolt of 8,000m”, he lacked the seemly humility mountaineers admire. His autobiography used the word “bro” a lot. There were also accusations, which he vigorously disputed, of predatory sexual behaviour. Some of his sponsors fled.

That is why what happened in 2021 on K2 was so important. True “firsts” in mountaineering are rare (Purja’s goal of becoming the first person to climb all 14 of the 8,000m peaks without supplementary oxygen twice felt almost parodic), but until 16 January 2021, no climber had ever made it to the top of the world’s second-highest mountain in winter. After being beaten back by disappointments, Purja achieved the feat with a team of nine Nepali climbers. Ten metres below the summit, the team had stopped and linked arms. As they reached the top, they sung the Nepali national anthem. For him this was a reclamation – perhaps even a small decolonisation – of the mountains. “So many Western climbers have climbed with huge help from a Sherpa,” Purja said. “What I heard most of the time is ‘my Sherpa helped me’ and that’s it. That is wrong because he has a name. You are a ghost.” Well, the Nepali climbers were ghosts no more.

So much so that of the ten climbers on Broad Peak this summer, it was the Nepalis who were the biggest stars. Overton met only a couple of the climbers who stayed on, who followed up to the camps he had helped to set up – beneath that accumulation of snow which had so worried him. Today, he doesn’t understand why they were there at all. “Without being able to speak to the decision-making process of the teams, I do have some questions,” he says, talking by phone from Colorado. The weather had turned again. “There had been almost a week of fresh snowfall. And the team went up almost directly after the storm abated instead of

giving it time to rest. Typically you want to give fresh snow a few days, to settle or slide. It's confusing. There were so many accomplished climbers. I don't know why somebody wouldn't have spoken up."

A scene in the Netflix documentary shows Purja arriving at a desultory base camp. Morale is low. Standing in the mess tent, Purja addresses the group. “I’ve been going from mountain to mountain and you say you are f\*\*ked. But when you say you are f\*\*ked you are only like 45% f\*\*ked.” It’s not exactly St Crispin’s Day, but it wins the room. We don’t know what deliberations took place before the team of ten headed out

from base camp onto Broad Peak. Climbing a mountain is inherently reckless. Everyone makes their own risk assessments. We do know that those who pushed on included some of the most experienced high-altitude climbers in the world. And that weather windows can be short. Sometimes, the only way up is a calculated risk. “I always say to myself I’m not going to die today,” Purja once wrote. “Maybe tomorrow, but not today.”

From Camp 2 to Camp 3 on Broad Peak is 1,000 vertical metres or so, about the height of Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon). It is a featureless, tough slog. One foot, then another foot, then another – each step hard won at that altitude. Like most climbers, Purja carried a GPS tracker. It traced his route on the slow, painful trudge. 6,300m. 6,400m. Moving steadily along the western

rib. 6,500m. 6,600m. Then something odd: the next ping was from 5,900m. At base camp they saw nothing, heard nothing. It took hours to see the anomaly in everyone's trackers, to realise something was amiss.

From across the valley, though, it was all too clear. There, the climber Jenjen Lama was leading an expedition up K2. He looked across to see half the snowpack fall off. Because this is 2026, he filmed it and posted it on his TikTok account, Travel with JenJen, captioned: "Board [sic] Peak accident [crying emoji]". At first there was hope. Some of the GPS transmitters seemed to be moving. It was an illusion, though, an artefact of the equipment being buried. By the time climbers had convened to search, theirs had gone from being a rescue mission to a recovery one.

"It's a tragic loss, it's awful," Overton says. "There's been a lot said about Nims. I just want to emphasise there were nine other climbers, many accomplished in their own right – they deserve more of a spotlight." He is right. Like the other tragic greats of mountaineering history – Lord Francis Douglas, Toni Kurz, Rob Hall, George Mallory – this group deserved one of those stories that would be retold in mountain huts, a tale with desperate last radio calls, frayed ropes, breathless heroics and noble disappearances into mist. But everyone that day died together. And there probably is no tale to tell, no protracted struggle of man against nature. There were just thousands of tonnes of ice and snow falling without warning and with ferocity. In the days after, rescuers found not only bodies but body parts – a limb, torn from one of the climbers. Probably they all died instantly.

Purja signed off his last Instagram post with a request. “Broad Peak,” he said, “I ask for nothing but safe passage up and back down.” But he knew enough to know this was not a simple ask. “I take zero mountains for granted.”

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THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1536

Two Connell Guides and two Week-branded items will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 12 October. Send it to The Week Crossword 1536, 121-141 Westbourne Terrace, London W2 6JR, or email the completed grid/listed solutions to crossword@theweek.co.uk. By Paul McKenna

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ACROSS

1 With face covered Mike begged (6)

4 Protest about renegade politician (8)

9 Son rushes lots (6)

10 Clubs being integral to wild rag week remains (8)

12 Garland is able to be an artist's tool (5,3)

13 Distract penguin, say, that's stern (6)

15 Tip, perhaps, from the good sailor with the art of blarney (4,2,3,3)

18 Hanger-on who's affected disciple (4,8)

21 Packing power, sets on white water (6)

22 Short-lived thing? European Parliament to border on time (8)

24 Old temple cat – right off acceptable (8)

25 Second plate with it (6)

26 Joyous ones rate boom (8)

27 Ass playing with beer, first to lead off (6)

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DOWN

1 Guess I am improperly an example of corrupt practice (8)

2 Jack's skill in abundance on boat (8)

3 Occasionally the renowned Navy sets sail (5,3,3,4)

5 Get to feel great desire ripping top off (4)

6 Occasionally clue "I'm on no beano" as an anagram (4,2,1,4,4)

7 Shrieked with laughter as King rowed (6)

8 What blackbird does is cute on northern street (6)

11 Notice buddy lifting PCs that are easy to lift (7)

14 Gets back receipt over successes (7)

16 Wholesale grass full of ooze (8)

17 Rest dough in that place closing off both ends (8)

19 Real pressure applied to one making lanyard, perhaps (6)

20 Things which jab your finger in small trees (6)

23 Laugh as husband also gets up (4)

Clue of the week: Work is in time and perfect (8) Philistine, The Guardian

This week's winner will receive Week-branded items, as well as two Connell Guides (connellguides.com).

Clue of the week answer:

.Tel no

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Solution to Crossword 1534

ACROSS: 1 Scamp 4 Pea-souper 9 Carpenter 10 Whorl 11 Preface 12 Derbies 13 Anthem 15 Allspice 18 Turncoat 20 Spends 23 Pinball 24 Conform 26 Pluck 27 Carnation 28 Stag party 29 Early

DOWN: 1 Sycophant 2 Agree 3 Presage 4 Potter 5 Airedale 6 Onwards 7 Provision 8 Rolls 14 Tarantula 16 Easy money 17 Cable car 19 Crank up 21 Pen name 22 Scurry 23 Pepys 25 Osier

Clue of the week: Genuine Polish saint (6)

Solution: HONEST (hone [polish] + St [saint])

The winner of 1534 is Adrian Goodill from Abingdon

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