Donald Trump has begun assembling his top team, including “ice maiden” campaign manager Susie Wiles as chief of staff. In his first interview since winning the election, the president-elect said his administration will have “no choice” but to follow through on his campaign promise to deport people living in the US illegally en masse. Olaf Scholz is facing calls for a vote of confidence after his ruling coalition collapsed earlier this week. The German chancellor said on Wednesday that he would arrange such a vote in January, triggering a snap election, but opposition leader Friedrich Merz says the government’s mandate is over, and that the vote should be held next week “at the latest”. The Guardian has reminded staff that they can get counselling to help them cope with Trump’s election victory. In an email to workers, editor Katharine Viner said she could understand that the election result must be “upsetting” for some, and urged anxious journalists to access the firm’s support services if they want to moan about it.

Can Musk’s “war on red tape” work for government?

It’s hard to tell when Elon Musk is joking, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. This is the man who says his “finest piece of work” was fitting a fart-sound button in every Tesla. So was he serious when he claimed he could help Donald Trump cut US state spending by a third? Musk certainly “has his ways”. He built Tesla and SpaceX in part by “marching around factories” in a never-ending “war against waste”. He’ll ask workers why four bolts are being put into a panel, not two. Managers are told to compile an “idiot index” of a part’s price relative to the cost of its basic materials. “If the ratio is too high,” says Musk, “you’re an idiot.” To dismantle bureaucracy, he encourages managers to “delete” as many rules as they can, adding them back later if needed. “If you do not end up adding back at least 10%,” he tells them, “you did not delete enough.”

This stuff works. It took a team of just 500 SpaceX workers to put the first privately-built rocket into orbit – Boeing’s equivalent division has 50,000 employees. Tesla is worth more than its 10 biggest rivals put together. Musk has basically turned the phrase “war on red tape” into “the basis of a new industrial revolution”. But whether it can work in government is another matter. Because in government, those rules that Musk wants deleted are laws. Ignore them, and you get sucked into a legal vortex – as is happening in so many areas on both sides of the Atlantic. So don’t be surprised if the billionaire decides against setting up his proposed Department of Government Efficiency. He may decide that his other big goal – colonising Mars – is easier.

For all the talk of Donald Trump’s sweeping victory, says Bruno Maçães on X, it’s worth remembering that the election was, “as always”, quite close. If a total of just 125,000 people had switched their vote from Trump to Kamala Harris – in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – Harris would have won.

Good Housekeeping has compiled a list of “micro-joys” that cost under £20, says Carol Midgley in The Times. But why spend anything at all, when there are so many small pleasures that don’t cost a penny? Like watching a “wexter” (someone who walks as they text) ambling “straight into a bollard at groin height”. Or when a night out you’ve been dreading gets cancelled on the day. Or the sign I saw on a sweet bowl set out for kids at Halloween that read: “Take one and piss off.” Of course, if there are micro-joys it follows that there are also “micro-miseries”. Those Tesco “I got the power” TV ads, which are so bad they’re “shortening my life”. Or non-Americans who say “hey!” instead of “hello”, “reach out” instead of “email”, and “passed” instead of “died”.

Lycra, Levis and dodgy cleavage: the new class signifiers

Nancy Mitford’s essay detailing which verbal expressions indicated that a speaker was U (upper class) or non-U (common) was written 70 years ago this winter, says Mary Killen in The Oldie. Since then, millions of would-be snobs have learnt that they should be saying “looking glass” instead of “mirror” and “scent” instead of “perfume” and so on. My theory is that the idea was inspired by the snubbing of Nancy’s sister Debo and the Duchess of Rutland when they went to Paris to see Dior’s New Look collection in 1947. The Dior apparatchiks took one look at the English ladies’ tweedy coats and turned them away at the door. (The duchesses sat on a bench eating their sandwiches until they could decently return to the Embassy, where they were staying.)

Today, verbal class signifiers have been smudged by “camouflage and irony”. But clothes can still indicate whether strangers are likely to be what Mitford called “sympathetic coves”. For men, Hawaiian shirts, bright white shirts, Lycra for cycling, white trainers worn by over 40s, pale brown shoes, “ANY jewellery apart from wedding or signet rings”, three-piece suits and short overcoats (above the knee) are all non-U. Cream shirts, plain-coloured cashmere jumpers, Levi’s, three-buttoned suit jackets (four on the cuff) and hand-me-down shooting clothes are all U. For women, U is: plain-coloured cardigans, overcoats with dog hairs and cashmere polo necks. Non-U is white shirts you can see the bra through, white trousers, flip flops, “any handbag you have to go on to a waiting list to get”, overcoats without dog hairs and “viewable cleavages in the shape of buttocks”. So now you know.

The latest headache for divorce lawyers is who gets the TikTok account, says The Wall Street Journal. For influencer couples who make a living showcasing their love life online, splitting up could mean losing out on a highly profitable “digital asset”. When both sides argue that the account should remain under their control, there’s no obvious way to divide it fairly. These TikTok logins have become so valuable that they’ve even started cropping up in prenups.

In 1975, says Charles Moore in The Spectator, Henry Keswick – scion of the Jardine Matheson Hong Kong trading empire – came to England and bought The Spectator for £75,000, hoping it would be his ticket to parliament. Shortlisted for a Conservative seat in Wiltshire, Keswick, who died on Tuesday aged 86, was asked by the chairman whether he would, if selected, buy a house in the constituency. “Madam,” he replied, “my house borders the constituency, and indeed my arboretum is in the constituency.” The chairman bristled: “Mr Keswick, I must press you. If we choose you, will you buy a house in the constituency?” “Madam, if you insist, I shall buy a house in every village in the constituency.” He never made it to the House of Commons.

It’s an artist’s impression of the £100m “bat shed” that HS2 planners have promised to build on a 1km stretch of the London-Birmingham line in Buckinghamshire, to protect a colony of not-especially-rare Bechstein’s bats. Describing the structure as a “blot on the landscape” which was planned with “no evidence” that bats were really at risk, the project’s chairman Jon Thompson says the absurd add-on was his favourite example of why Britain’s insane planning constraints have made HS2 such a disaster. “People have this simplistic way of saying: ‘Oh, you’ve gone over the budget,’” he told a recent conference. “But do people think about the bat?”