UK government borrowing was £14.6bn more than expected in the last fiscal year, and £20.7bn more than in the previous 12-month period, increasing pressure on Rachel Reeves to raise taxes in her autumn budget. The International Monetary Fund yesterday cut its 2025 growth forecast for Britain in the wake of Donald Trump’s tariffs, from 1.6% to 1.1%. Elon Musk says he will “significantly” scale back his role in the Trump administration to focus on reviving Tesla’s ailing fortunes. The car firm’s net income is down 39% from a year ago, in part because of a backlash against Musk’s political activities. Today is not actually St George’s Day. Under Church of England rules no saint’s day can be celebrated in the week before or after Easter, so this year the celebration has been moved to Monday 28 April.

Is net zero the next Brexit?

Nigel Farage thinks he has found his next crusade, says Rafael Behr in The Guardian: fighting net zero. The Reform UK leader told an interviewer on Sunday that the government’s continuing effort to decarbonise the economy by 2050 was “lunacy” – a policy on which parliament is “hopelessly out of touch with the country”, as it was with leaving the EU. But is that really true? For all the noise about net zero online and in the right-wing media, voters aren’t interested. Polls consistently show that opposition to the policy is “a minority position across every segment of the electorate”. This doesn’t look like the “Brexit sequel” Farage thinks it is.

Don’t be so sure, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. If you really want to know whether people support net zero, it’s too simplistic to ask: “Do you support net zero?” Instead, you should ask what sacrifices they’d be willing to make to achieve it. Would they be happy to give up flying? To pay more in green taxes? How much poorer are they willing to be? Even asking those questions wouldn’t necessarily lead to the truth. For years before the Brexit referendum, polls suggested that British voters couldn’t care less about whether or not we should leave the EU. Either these people held stronger views than they cared to admit, or, once they actually looked at it in depth, they formed views “an awful lot stronger than the ones they’d held before”. Farage has a proven knack for identifying overlooked issues that matter to ordinary people, from free movement to the small boats crisis. Dismissing his new focus on net zero would be a “grave mistake”.

A friend of mine is standing for re-election in the Durham council elections next Thursday, says Matthew Parris in The Times. Campaigning is usually a lonely business, but on Saturday my pal was joined for door-knocking duties by two helpers: an eager labrador called Nova, and her owner, Rishi Sunak. Credit where it’s due. I’m sure the former PM would rather have been doing a million other things on a sunny Saturday. For him to spend it schlepping around a council ward strikes me as “beyond the call of duty”.

Dubai has launched the world’s first “influencer academy”, says Natalie Wilson in The Independent: a dedicated training institute for travel content creators. Four aspiring influencers will be selected to attend a 12-week programme at the “Beautiful Destinations Academy” which has collaborated with Dubai’s tourist department to offer workshops, practice photoshoots, mentorship sessions and lessons in “photography and cinematography, editing and colour grading, sound effects, AI tools, and industry regulations”. Naturally, the whole thing comes all expenses paid with luxury accommodation, a “generous” salary, and “unprecedented access to locations and experiences” in Dubai. Apply here.

Liberals keep forgetting what Trump really is

The American comedian Bill Maher is in deep trouble with his fellow liberals, says Oliver Bateman in UnHerd. His crime? Deigning to have a private dinner with Donald Trump at the White House. Not only that, but Maher told viewers afterwards that the US president was “gracious and measured” in private, totally different to the bombastic figure you see on TV. “He’s much more self-aware than he lets on in public,” he said, adding that Trump even admitted to losing the 2020 election. “A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House,” Maher explained. “A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there.”

For all the outrage – Larry David wrote a satirical New York Times column about Maher headlined “My dinner with Adolf” – this is an insight liberals always seem to forget. Many on the left still work under the assumption that Trump’s erratic behaviour and inflammatory rhetoric stem from “genuine psychological deficiencies”. The prominent progressive commentator Keith Olbermann says the president suffers from “paranoid delusions”; late-night TV shows routinely portray him as “unhinged”. In reality Trump’s outlandish public behaviour is, and has always been, “performance art”, a skill he has honed over decades of reality TV, professional wrestling appearances and tabloid manipulation. By reminding liberals of Trump’s capacity to adapt his persona to his audience – the skill that has made him such a formidable political force – Maher has done them a huge favour. If only they’d listen.

At the annual Fine Water Summit, “water sommeliers” meet to sip and rank the world’s most luxurious H2O, says Thomas Wheatley in Axios. At this year’s gathering in Atlanta, the 1,000 featured aguas include bottles of Tasmanian raindrops collected before they reached the ground; snowmelt that has been “filtered through volcanic rocks in a remote part of Peru”; and a magnesium-rich brand that costs up to $200 for six bottles. “When I go to a party, I bring a bottle of Svalbarði, the iceberg water, and I tell people, ‘This is 4,000-year-old water – this is rain that fell 4,000 years ago,’” says organiser Michael Mascha. “No one talks about the 50-year-old Burgundy any more.”

Five years on from the start of the pandemic, “remote work is enduring”, says The Economist. A new Stanford survey of 16,000 graduates in 40 countries found that the average respondent worked 1.3 days a week at home in late 2024 and early 2025, roughly the same as in 2023. And topping the WFH ranks are those in the “industrious Anglosphere”: Canadians work 1.9 days a week from home, narrowly ahead of Britons (1.8) and Americans (1.6), compared to only one day a week for French workers and half a day for bottom-placed South Koreans. How remote work affects productivity still isn’t clear. But GPS data does provide one data point: “mid-week golf has boomed”.

It’s Osea Island in Essex’s Blackwater Estuary, says BBC News, which has come on the market for £25m. The 380-acre private estate, which hosted a secret torpedo boat base during World War One, has 38 residential properties and gets cut off at high tide. Its current owner, the music producer Nigel Frieda, has hired it out to several musicians over the years, including Rihanna, Charli XCX and Stormzy, who described staying there as a “very surreal, spiritual experience”. Put your offer in here.