Rachel Reeves has urged European allies to follow Britain in boosting defence spending. Keir Starmer announced yesterday that the UK was raising its military budget from 2.3% of GDP to 2.5% by 2027, paid for with a 40% cut to foreign aid. Donald Trump says Volodymyr Zelensky will visit the White House on Friday after Kyiv agreed the terms of a minerals deal with Washington. The agreement has reportedly dropped earlier US demands for a right to $500bn in potential revenue from Ukrainian natural resources but does not include long-term security guarantees. The fraudster behind the disastrous Fyre Festival has confirmed that he is staging a sequel. Billy McFarland, who was jailed for six years after defrauding investors out of $26m with his farcical Bahamas-based party, says Fyre Festival 2 will take place in Mexico from 30 May to 2 June, with tickets priced between $1,400 and $1.1m. Book yours here, if you dare.

Has Starmer found his calling?

Keir Starmer has long claimed he would always “put country before party”, says Tom Harris in The Daily Telegraph. Yesterday, he did just that. Not only is the PM increasing defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 – and up to 3% in the next parliament – he is getting the extra £13bn a year in funding by slashing the international aid budget. This will infuriate many in Labour, from “left-wing worthies” to the members who “didn’t join the party to help arm Nato”. But it’s the right call. With Donald Trump wanting Europe to take more responsibility for its own security, Starmer needed something in his back pocket ahead of his visit to the White House tomorrow. If the price of that is upsetting his Labour “comrades”, so be it. “The party will not thank him, but we should.”

British politics is having one of its “periodic outbreaks” of consensus, says Rafael Behr in The Guardian. The Tories have also been calling for an increase to 2.5%, and the shift from overseas aid to defence will be widely viewed as a “symbolic and practical reorientation of Britain’s posture from soft to hard power”. This won’t be the last time national security is cited as a reason to pull resources away from things Labour MPs would prefer to be funding. With the US an increasingly unreliable source of protection, Britain is effectively “transitioning to a wartime economy” – starting the process of rearmament and shifting the national focus to security. That won’t be easy for a country “craving economic respite”, even if the extra spending does boost growth. But if people were still wondering what “this Labour government is for”, there’s your answer.

🤏🪖 Starmer’s worry will be that Trump won’t be satisfied with an increase of just 0.2 percentage points, says Eliot Wilson in The Spectator. The US president has suggested that European governments should be spending 5% of their GDP on defence – though that’s a figure probably “snatched unthinkingly from the ether” – and 2.5% is still way behind the likes of Poland (4.1%), Estonia (3.4%) and Latvia (3.2%). If the PM thinks he is taking a “fattened calf” to Washington, he may end up disappointed.

Obituaries used to be savage affairs, says Georgia Heneage in The Times. Sir John Gielgud was “able to assume romantic good looks in spite of a large nose”; American actor Edward Robinson was “short in build, with an ugly crumpled face” and so on. We’ve become softer in our approach, but there are ways to read between the lines. A large nose is now a “well-endowed face”, while raging adulterers might be “generous with their affections”. “She believed in hands-on mentoring” invariably means she was bonking junior colleagues, and if you read that someone “had a keen appetite for life’s pleasures”, it means he was a randy old goat.

One of Donald Trump’s aides is so obsessed with the president that the Secret Service worried she posed a security concern, says Michael Wolff in his new book All or Nothing. Natalie Harp, who is known as the “human printer” because she carries a mini printer to give Trump hard copies of positive media coverage, wrote him one letter saying: “You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this life.” In another, the 33-year-old quoted Bible verses and vowed to always stay by his side. When officials raised concerns about the “aggressiveness of her attention”, Trump told them: “Nonsense... she just loves her president.”

The only place where the left keeps winning

At a time when so much of the world is “lurching to the right”, says David Leonhardt in The New York Times, one country stands out: Denmark. Since coming to power in 2019, the Social Democrats have pursued a remarkably progressive agenda. Pension rules have been changed to enable blue-collar workers to retire earlier than professionals; landlords forbidden from raising rents for five years after buying property. Voters tend to punish this sort of stuff, but in 2022 the Social Democrats bucked the global anti-incumbent trend to win re-election. The key? Immigration. The prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, swapped her party’s support for “ever higher” immigration for policies that combine much tougher rules for border entry with efforts to improve immigrant integration. It’s called Retfærdig og Realistisk, or “Just and Realistic”.

Many of these policies are controversial: if a neighbourhood with at least 50% non-Western residents is struggling, the authorities encourage others to move in and even tear down housing units to gentrify the area. But Frederiksen believes they are also inherently progressive. First, because high levels of immigration hit the poor the hardest, with strained benefits programmes, crowded schools, and extra competition for housing and jobs. Second, because those problems make it harder to secure the collective buy-in needed for a strong welfare state and other leftist policies. This approach has not only helped the Social Democrats win in areas where it was losing – the equivalent of America’s Democrats winning in Texas. It has also effectively depoliticised immigration, destroying the previously ascendant far-right. Most progressives denounce strict immigration measures as unnecessary and cruel. Denmark suggests they may be “the only way for progressivism to flourish”.

In 2014, says The Browser, the German chamber music quartet Salut Salon performed a “competitive foursome” in which each player tried to outdo the others with a series of increasingly audacious playing moves. It’s a “virtuoso performance” – watch the full three-minute YouTube video, which has 41 million views, here.

A survey of more than 60,000 gay German men by one of Europe’s largest gay dating platforms, Romeo, found that the AfD was the most popular party among its users, on almost 28%. This comes as no surprise, says Elisabeth Dampier in The Spectator: “social attitudes have changed, even on the hard right”. Party leader Alice Weidel is a lesbian raising children with her Sri Lankan partner. Many gay men in Germany share her unease at mass migration from countries where homosexuality is seen as shameful, and in the most extreme cases punishable by death. For many, gay rights are secure – “the real danger comes from socially conservative immigrants”.

It’s in Aughton, a small village in West Lancashire, which has become Britain’s “culinary capital”, says Hannah Al-Othman in The Guardian. The rural spot has only 8,304 residents but a whopping five Michelin stars spread across three restaurants: Mark Birchall’s Moor Hall (pictured), which has just won its third star; its sister restaurant The Barn; and Tim Allen’s sō-lō just down the road. Birchall says they’ve had Californians “plan their honeymoon” around the village; on a weekday lunchtime at sō-lō last week, one table had travelled from Italy.