| Kemi Badenoch is appointing her shadow cabinet today, after beating Robert Jenrick to win the Tory leadership contest on Saturday. More than a sixth of the party's 121 MPs will be in her top team, says Politico, and after four months the Labour government will finally "taste what it's like to face a strident and awkward opposition". Moldova's pro-Western president has beaten a Kremlin-friendly newcomer to win a second term in office. Maia Sandu's victory in yesterday's run-off election marks a significant boost for her country's aspirations to join the EU, says The Guardian, and a "clear rebuke" to Moscow. Quincy Jones, the renowned American producer and composer, has died aged 91. During an illustrious career spanning more than 75 years, Jones produced Michael Jackson's Thriller album, worked on Frank Sinatra's hit Fly Me to the Moon and won 28 Grammys. | | |  | Badenoch with her late father, Femi. X/Kemibadenoch |
| Kemi Badenoch's unique view of Britain | The most interesting thing about Kemi Badenoch is not that she's the Conservative Party's first black leader, says Tom McTague in Unherd, but that she is its first immigrant leader. The distinction is crucial: Rishi Sunak was the country's first ethnic minority prime minister, but he was also just another "Winchester boy who went to the City via Oxford". Until the age of 16, Badenoch was raised in an entirely different country – Nigeria – not because she was the daughter of ex-pats or diplomats, but because she was Nigerian. She happens to have been born in the UK, but only because her upper-class Yoruba parents chose to have her at a private hospital in Wimbledon. | All this gives Badenoch a unique perspective on the country she has made her home. As an immigrant, she believes she can see more clearly than the home-raised English that disquiet about mass immigration is not racism, but a recognition of the danger of losing a unifying sense of nation. The language she uses to speak about patriotism is more strident that any other politician I have interviewed. Citizenship, she tells me, is not about having a passport or how you look, it means "being rooted in a place, wanting it to succeed". It's about hoping your neighbours do well; the "success of your country for the next generation". When she looks at Britain, Badenoch does not see a "cesspit of racism, inequality and backwardness", but a place with relatively mild faults that needs protecting, perhaps even from itself, "before it loses what it has". | 👫 Badenoch says her leadership campaign was run by her "best friend in politics" Lee Rowley, says Lara Spirit in The Times. The pair, both 44, became close after entering parliament together in 2017. They resigned from Boris Johnson's government together, and it was Rowley who ran her first leadership bid – to replace Johnson in 2022 – in which she went from rank outsider to "breakout star". Rowley lost his seat in July's election and immediately turned his attention to Badenoch's campaign; he is due to be rewarded with a top job in the party she now leads. As a mutual friend says: "It is genuinely hard to sometimes know where Kemi ends and Rowley begins." | | | | Radiologists have unveiled a new database comprising more than 1,000 X-rays and CT scans of rare and exotic animals, says The New York Times. The project, a collaboration between seven zoos, is harder than it sounds: it has involved "persuading giraffes to present their hooves" and "moving anaesthetised rhinos with front-end loaders". The hope is that scans will make it easier to diagnose the likes of the bowmouth guitarfish and the short-beaked echidna when they get poorly. See more examples here. |
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| | | Jeremy Clarkson has led the charge against Labour imposing a 20% inheritance tax on farms worth more than £1m, saying it could be "the last straw" for struggling farmers. But the number affected will be tiny, says tax expert Dan Neidle on X. Only 500 farms claimed agricultural property relief – the exemption for inheritance tax – of more than £1m in 2022. Plus, the new rules allow married couples to claim the £1m cap twice, and farmers with no other big assets can use the zero-rate tax band. So the real cap for a family farm could be as high as £2.65m. "That could mean as few as 100 farms per year are affected." | | | | |  | Remy in Ratatouille (2007) |
| New York is going to extraordinary lengths to address its rat problem, says The Atlantic. Not only have city officials appointed a $155,000-a-year "rat czar" to spearhead the crackdown, and experimented with giving the rodents birth-control medication. They have even started using different foods for bait, depending on what curbside cuisine the rats are used to: pizza in Brooklyn, say, or dim sum in Chinatown. | | | | Enjoying The Knowledge?
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| | |  | Trump supporter Jake Angeli at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Selcuk Acar/NurPhoto/Getty |
| The US election pits "Guardians against Counter-revolutionaries" | We tend to think of the US as being polarised across a left-right divide, says Ezra Klein in The New York Times. But the election tomorrow is really a fight between two very different tribes: "Guardians against Counter-revolutionaries". Democrats believe America's institutions – government, universities, the media and so on – are fundamentally trustworthy, and need to be "protected and preserved". Donald Trump's Republicans think those same institutions have been corrupted by a "leftist revolution". Some call it the "Deep State"; others prefer the "Cathedral" or the "Regime". And they believe the only way to restore the natural order is with a counter-revolution – whatever the costs. Kevin Roberts, head of the influential conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, said recently that the "second American Revolution" was already under way, and that it would "remain bloodless" only if "the left allows it to be". | Look at how much more generously Democrats view the various arms of government. The net favourability gap is enormous not just for "liberal-coded" agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (80 percentage points), but also for the FBI (62) and the Department of Homeland Security (37). As recently as 2019, Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to say big corporations were a force for good; today, they're both similarly sceptical. There are myriad likely reasons. The Democrats are increasingly popular among highly educated voters, who tend to dominate the institutions in question. Trump's extreme behaviour has led to institutional actions that have enraged his supporters – his 2021 ban from major social media platforms, for example. Whatever the explanation, it's a huge shift. One party wants to defend America's institutions; the other wants to "conquer them". | | | | Not even AI is immune to a little slacking on the job, says Frank Landymore in The Byte. Anthropic's AI bot Claude – which has been taught to control a computer like a human, using the mouse and so on – appeared to get bored during a recent coding demonstration, firing up Google and browsing pictures of Yellowstone National Park. In another demo, the AI accidentally stopped a lengthy screen-recording, causing the footage to be lost. We've all been there, Claude. | | | Britain's productivity crisis has a pretty clear culprit, says Matt Ridley in The Sunday Telegraph: the public sector. Private sector productivity has risen 50% in the past 30 years, which is "good but not great". In the public sector, however, it is the same as it was in 1996. Think about that. Over that period we have seen the emergence of the internet, mobile data, sat-nav and all sorts of other labour-saving, cost-saving technology. Yet despite all this, public sector workers are still doing the same amount of work in any given time. | | | | | | | | It's an empty tin, says The Mirror, which is being flogged to tourists at Italian lakeside town of Como for €10 a pop as a can of "Lake Como Air". The 400ml containers have been available at several locations since early October, cashing in on the record numbers of visitors the tiny town is attracting – 5.6 million last year alone. The canned air concept harks back to post-war Naples, where empty food containers left by American GIs were resealed and rebranded as souvenirs. | | | "Know your circle of competence, and stick within it. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital."
Warren Buffett |
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