 7 September, 2021 In the headlines Boris Johnson has announced a 1.25% increase in national insurance contributions as part of his plan to overhaul social care. The £12bn-a-year levy breaks with the 2019 Conservative manifesto, says Christopher Hope in the Telegraph. "The rumblings of an all-out Tory rebellion are growing louder." Priti Patel is threatening to withhold a £54m payment to France after a record number of migrants arrived in the UK yesterday. Paris is "going to have to get its act together if it wants to see the cash", the Home Secretary told MPs. Germany's only naked football team played their first match in front of spectators yesterday, wearing nothing but their boots and socks, and drew 8-8. It was "a spectacle of high balls and flying tackles", says The Times.
Comment of the day  David Buchan/Variety/Shutterstock and Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images The skill Sally Rooney shares with Boris Johnson It might sound like "cultural blasphemy" to compare Sally Rooney and Boris Johnson, says Matthew d'Ancona in Tortoise. But they share an "absolute yearning to win" forged on the debate circuit. Rooney, whose new book has just been published, was "the number one competitive debater in Europe" aged 22. And Johnson made an early mark "in the "braying carnival" of the Oxford Union. He winged it to the top of that organisation, just as he has gone on to do in so many others, "including Her Majesty's Government". One is a self-described millennial "Marxist" author, the other Britain's Tory PM. But that "rigorously" drilled rhetorical flair set both up for life. In an essay in The Dublin Review in 2015, published before she was a novelist, Rooney identified the "cold potential of debating" as a form of self-advancement and self-definition. "Competitive debating," she wrote, "takes argument's essential features and reimagines them as a game." In this game, "the emotional or relational aspects of argument are superfluous, and at the end there are winners... I was number one." Johnson, as a child, declared his ambition to be "world king". Rooney, like the prime minister, continues to do what she set out to do in the first place, albeit in the bestseller lists. "Which is to win."
China is turning on its billionaires China's billionaires are "scrambling", says Rana Mitter in The Observer, after President Xi Jinping declared the country's new goal: "common prosperity". A crackdown on tech bosses and movie stars has already begun. Alibaba's founder, Jack Ma, disappeared for three months in 2020 after criticising the authorities, actress Zheng Shuang has been told she owes $46m for "unpaid taxes" and her fellow performer Vicki Zhao Wei has been all but wiped from China's internet. Now censors are coming after China's "wild" celebrity fan culture, in particular something they see as a serious source of corruption: "sissy boys", young male stars who wear make-up and appear "feminised". The drive for common prosperity and the desire to stamp out "sissy boys" point to a growing trend in Xi's China – "the wish to eliminate difference". It's the same with Uighur inmates at "re-education camps" or children in Inner Mongolian being forced to learn Mandarin. The Chinese Communist Party may be right to worry about presiding over an economy that's almost as unequal as America's, with a quarter of the country living on less than $5.50 a day. But it seems the price of common prosperity is a flat culture with no variation, where anyone flaunting their wealth or, worse, their lengthy, unpatriotic skincare regime might at any moment disappear.
Inside politics  Jacob Rees-Mogg has posted a picture of his six lookalike children on Instagram. The Tory MP was celebrating his youngest child's first day at Hill House, a £15,000-a-year prep school in Knightsbridge. The Leader of the House of Commons has five boys and one girl: Peter Theodore Alphege (13), Mary Anne Charlotte Emma (12), Thomas Wentworth Somerset Dunstan (11), Anselm Charles Fitzwilliam (9), Alfred Wulfric Leyson Pius (5) and Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher (4).
Noted  "The slow bicep stroke, the longing stare, the kiss of the arm and subsequent hug as they laugh together" – Hollywood stars Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain's performance on the red carpet at the Venice film festival sent the internet into meltdown, says Georgia Aspinall in Grazia. Despite their sizzling sexual chemistry, both are married to other people – Chastain, 44, to an Italian count, and Isaac, 42, to a Danish film director, who happened to be watching in the wings. The clip has been watched 9.8 million times on Twitter, with one tweet concluding: "We are starved for on screen sexual tension."
Tomorrow's world Nasa's Perseverance rover has collected the first sample of Mars rock intended for return to Earth. "With the whirr of a drill, a robotic geologist some 244 million miles away just made history," says Maya Wei-Haas in National Geographic. The finger-size cylinder of rock will be brought home by a future mission.
Snapshot 
On the way out Wallets, which are being rendered useless by mobile phones, says The Guardian. Half of us will use our phones, rather than banknotes or cards, to pay for things by 2025, predicts eMarketer. What's more, driving licences, train tickets and even loyalty cards have all gone digital.
Snapshot answer It's a chandelier made from empty Covid vaccine vials by a nurse in Bolder County, Colorado, who wanted to bring light to "such a dark and challenging year". She says it's a tribute to her fellow healthcare workers.
Quoted "If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right." Henry Ford That's it. You're done. Been forwarded this newsletter? Sign up to receive it every day and get free access to up to six articles a month Subscribe for a free three-month trial with full access to our app and website. Download our app from the App Store or Google Play
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September 07, 2021
The skill Sally Rooney shares with Boris Johnson
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