Rachel Reeves will likely have no choice but to raise taxes in the autumn budget, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Any hope that the tax hikes and benefit cuts in yesterday’s Spring Statement would buy the treasury some fiscal headroom evaporated this morning, says the FT, after Donald Trump announced 25% tariffs on all car imports. Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer are leading a meeting of their pro-Ukraine “coalition of the willing” in Paris today in which they will brief world leaders, including Volodymyr Zelensky, on what a peacekeeping force could look like. US officials have not been invited. The young are going off tea, says The Times. According to a study of 6,000 Britons under 35, coffee is now the preferred hot drink, with 37% naming it their go-to, followed by hot chocolate with 31%. Down in a measly third, with 25%, was the “beloved cuppa”.

China’s global war on dissidents

The 19-year-old Chloe Cheung made headlines earlier this year when it emerged that Hong Kong had put a bounty on her head, says Cora Engelbrecht in The Atlantic. She had fled the former British colony aged 15 after being spotted protesting its repressive new security law. Today, she’s “one of thousands” escaping to the UK, only to find that China’s “harassment and surveillance” has followed them here. Months after Finn Lau, another dissident, arrived in London, three masked men beat him unconscious. Chinese authorities declared he’d be “pursued for life”, froze his assets in Hong Kong and offered a bounty for information leading to his arrest. Others have been stalked in public, smeared online, and had loved ones back home interrogated and attacked. Meanwhile, in Britain, letters have arrived at neighbours’ doors promising a reward for turning dissidents in to the Chinese embassy.

Beijing has “discredited and silenced” critics in Europe, Canada, Australia and even the US. It is responsible for more recorded cases of repression beyond its borders than “any other country over the past decade”. But for obvious historical reasons, the UK is home to the largest community of expat Hong Kongers. British officials have shut down Chinese outposts suspected of “monitoring and harassing” diaspora communities and arrested a handful of people suspected of working for Hong Kong’s intelligence service. But Xi Jinping evidently has “little fear of provoking the West”, openly continuing his “brazen and far-reaching” crusade. Until Western governments are prepared to mount a more muscular defence of dissidents, fleeing China won’t be enough to escape its clutches.

Rachel Reeves approached the despatch box yesterday “like Anne Boleyn at the hairdressers”, says Madeline Grant in The Daily Telegraph, and quickly raised a laugh by declaring that Labour was “strengthening the economy”. Just hours earlier the Office for Budget Responsibility had slashed their growth forecast from 2% to a paltry one. But our “Playmobil-headed chancellor” appeared to be on an “extended trip on LSD”, painting a picture of a Britain “on the up” thanks to her brilliance and Keir Starmer’s amazing plan. In occasional jolts of reality, when she seemed to acknowledge the mess we’re in, she blamed it on everyone else: Vladimir Putin, Liz Truss, and a “changing world”, were all apparently more culpable than the person running the economy. “There are people in Broadmoor with more realistic fantasies.”

Winston Churchill was an admirable boozer, says Carol Midgley in The Times. While visiting Lake Como with his daughter and his doctor Lord Moran in 1945, the trio polished off 96 bottles of champagne across the two-week trip. That adds up to 576 glasses, or 192 each. Spread over the fortnight, that works out at around 14 glasses a day. Presumably for the former prime minister, this was on top of his six or seven daily brandies and whiskies. He had just led Britain to victory in a war, but still, “you can’t say that isn’t impressive.”

Our ridiculous obsession with St Paddington

In this godless age, there remains “one last object of piety”, says Gareth Roberts in The Spectator: “a fictional bear from darkest Peru”. Our creepy veneration of “St Paddington” was laid bare this week, with the news that two young RAF engineers – “after drink had been taken” – forcibly removed a statue of the creature from a bench in Newbury. The next day, investigating officers erected a pink forensics tent around the crime scene, as though they vary the colour depending on the “campness of the incident”. There is always something perversely amusing about this kind of drunken prank, particularly when it involves something trivial: “policemen’s hats, traffic cones, bloomers run up a flagpole, etc”. What’s been even funnier this time is the reaction.

When the two lads were hauled in front of magistrates on Tuesday – pleading guilty to criminal damage and being fined nearly three grand each – the prosecutor told the court: “When you think about England you think about two things: Paddington Bear, and the royal family.” That was silly enough, but then the District Judge got involved: “Paddington Bear is a beloved cultural icon,” he thundered. “He represents kindness, tolerance and promotes integration and acceptance in our society…Your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for.” Yes, that is an actual sentence delivered by a judge in an English court of law. I can only imagine it was a test to see if the defendants could keep a straight face. It wasn’t a war memorial, “it was a statue of an effing bear”. The Old Testament had the sin of idolatry; Islam bans graven images. “You begin to wonder if these desert chappies were on to something.”

Before the unfancied American boxer Chuck Wepner took on Muhammad Ali in a title fight 50 years ago, says Patrick Kidd in The Times, he gave his wife a sexy negligee and told her to wear it on fight night because she’d be sleeping with the world heavyweight champion. When he returned to their room, resoundingly defeated and with 23 stitches in his face, his wife asked: “OK bigshot… do I go to Ali’s room or does he come to mine?”

When Ford executive Mike O’Brien emailed colleagues to announce his retirement last month, he included an unusual attachment, says Mike Colias in The Wall Street Journal: a spreadsheet containing thousands of “verbal flubs” committed by his co-workers over 32 years. In 2019, for example, one blurted out: “let’s not reinvent the ocean”. Other top malapropisms include: “Too many cooks in the soup”; “Read between the tea leaves”; “We need to make sure dealers have some skin in the teeth”; “We need to talk about the elephant in the closet”; and “He’s going to be so happy he’ll be like a canary in a coal mine!” One executive made the list 184 times, and nobody was above a grammatical roasting: “Ford CEO Jim Farley twice made the list.”

It’s a “wolfdog”, says Taniya Dutta in The Sun, which has became the world’s most expensive dog after selling for £4.4m last month. The pricey pooch – a cross between a wolf and a Caucasian Shepherd – eats 3kg of raw chicken every day and at eight-months-old already weighs a whopping 75kg and stands nearly 3ft tall. Named Cadabomb Okami, the conspicuous canine was born in the US and sold to Satish, a renowned dog breeder from southern India who owns over 150 different breeds. “I spent 50 million rupees on buying this pup,” says Satish, “because I like to own unique dogs and introduce them to India.”