In the headlines

Senior government officials are preparing to hand over their electronic communications with Peter Mandelson ahead of the release of evidence about his appointment as US ambassador. Keir Starmer yesterday apologised to Jeffrey Esptein's victims and said he was sorry for "having believed Mandelson's lies". Former deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman said the apology made the PM look "weak, naive and gullible". A top Russian general is in critical condition after being shot several times in Moscow this morning. The Kremlin says an unidentified assailant opened fire on Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev – number two in Russia's GRU military intelligence directorate – before fleeing the scene. Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has blamed Ukraine, so far without evidence. Statins are far safer than previously thought, according to researchers at the University of Oxford. A comprehensive review of studies involving more than 120,000 people concluded that the cholesterol-lowering drugs, used by millions, do not cause the majority of the listed possible side effects, including memory loss, depression, sleep disruption, weight gain and impotence.

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Happier times: Starmer with Mandelson in Washington last year. Carl Court/Getty

"The worst political scandal of this century"

In retrospect, says Bagehot in The Economist, "the signs were there". Asked by the FT a year ago about Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Mandelson replied: "I'm not going to go into this. It's an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?" Twelve months on, Mandelson has gone and Keir Starmer's government is embroiled in "Britain's worst political scandal of this century". Which raises an interesting question: "What is the point of Sir Keir staying in office?" If the PM ever had a political purpose, it was ending Tory chaos and instability. He was, we were told, a politician of "process rather than conviction". Yet Downing Street knew Mandelson stayed close to Epstein long after the latter was jailed for underage sex offences. "Sir Keir ploughed on – process be damned."

Similarly, despite Starmer presenting himself as a "fair-minded pragmatist" in a party riddled with "psychopathic factionalism", Mandelson was appointed mostly because of the people he knew – in particular Morgan McSweeney, the PM's chief of staff – and the wing of the party he represented. That this "hollow administration" has had to bring in so many New Labour figures is itself damning: it's as if Tony Blair had "relied on apparatchiks from the Harold Wilson era". Starmer's fate now lies in the hands of backbenchers who "regard him with contempt". And his best excuse for his failings is the most embarrassing: that he was effectively pushed into sending Mandelson to Washington by McSweeney. In the 2025 book Get In, Labour insiders compared the PM to a toddler on the driverless Docklands Light Railway: "He thinks he's driving the train, but we've sat him at the front of the DLR." Somehow, "the Starmer train has still crashed".

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The winner of the 150th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show – held this week in New York – was Penny the Doberman pinscher. Around 2,500 hounds were in the running, from the shaggy Alaskan malamute to the bald, Mexican xoloitzcuintle. Second place ("Reserve Best in Show") was Cota, a chocolate brown Chesapeake Bay retriever, while the "Terrier" category was won by a smooth fox terrier named Wager, and the "Herding" award went to an old English sheepdog called Graham.

It's the economy, stupid

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In Donald Trump's first term, big tech companies were at the forefront of the #Resistance, pumping money into diversity schemes, putting rainbows in their logos and having their corporate social media accounts post things like "silence is violence" and "I'm with her". Today, not so much. Mark Zuckerberg has had a "MAGA makeover" and mere hours after the second ICE shooting in Minneapolis, Apple's Tim Cook was yucking it up at the White House for the premiere of the first-lady hagiography Melania. What changed?

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