Hamas says Israeli airstrikes killed more than 400 people in Gaza last night, in the deadliest attack since the ceasefire began in January. Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that Israel will act “with increasing military strength” until Hamas hands over its remaining 59 hostages, up to 24 of whom are thought to be alive. Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall will today unveil the government’s overhaul to the benefits system. The controversial reforms include billions of pounds in cuts to disability benefits, including making it harder for those with mental health conditions who don’t struggle with everyday activities to qualify for personal independence payments (PIPs). The last surviving Battle of Britain pilot, John “Paddy” Hemingway, has died aged 105. The Dublin-born air ace was only 21 when he defended Britain’s skies from the Luftwaffe, and survived World War Two despite being shot down four times. “I’m alive because of luck,” he said in one of his last interviews. “This is not false modesty.”

Keir Starmer’s “extraordinary metamorphosis”

British prime ministers need one skill “above all else”, says Iain Martin on Substack. They must be “capable of learning, at speed, and becoming better at it as they go”. Margaret Thatcher had it, “in spades”; so did Tony Blair, to a lesser extent. “Theresa May did not have it.” At first, it looked like Keir Starmer didn’t have it either – he appeared to have ascended to the top job “almost by accident”. But ever since Donald Trump took office, the PM has undergone an “extraordinary metamorphosis”. He has slashed foreign aid to increase defence spending and will likely have to scrap Labour’s previously sacrosanct borrowing rules. Cuts to welfare payments and sickness benefits are coming; NHS England is being axed. The Tories must be looking on “in wonder”.

As Dominic Lawson points out, this burst of “Starmerite radicalism” is leading to some big contradictions. The government says it is pro-business and pro-growth, yet its hike to National Insurance is “killing economic dynamism”. Any effort to reindustrialise will be hampered by our “cripplingly high” energy costs. Lawson describes Starmer as a “pushmi-pullyu” – the two-headed creature capable of looking both ways in Doctor Dolittle. But another explanation is that the PM is just a pragmatist. When Daniel Finkelstein met “Starmer the leftie” in the 1980s, he came away convinced that the then lawyer was someone who always starts out on the left but is then “mugged by reality” into moving towards the centre. It’s not pretty, in other words, but he “gets there in the end”.

🙂😡 The problem with being prime minister, Tony Blair once said, is that time spent in the job tends to make you better at it but also less likely to continue doing it. “You start at your most popular and least capable and end at your least popular and most capable.”

Keir Starmer’s efforts to cut benefits may prove more popular than you’d think, says Will Dunn in The New Statesman. While policy types stress that the large numbers of young people off work with long-term sickness must be taken seriously, recent polling suggests “the public is more sceptical”. Asked what had caused the recent spike in working-age recipients of disability and health benefits, the top answer was that more people were “trying to cheat the system by claiming to have health conditions they don’t have”. The second-most popular was: “Society now sees more health conditions, eg mental health, as valid reasons for not working.”

The online game Quickflip is addictive but “infuriating”, says Matt Muir on Web Curios. Players are presented with eight tiles bearing a letter, each of which can be flipped to reveal another letter. The aim is to find an eight-letter word by flipping the tiles – but there is also another eight-letter word that you must avoid spelling out. The latter comes with a clue; the former doesn’t. Give it a go here.

Have scientists learnt nothing from Covid?

Five years ago, says Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times, when people started speculating that Covid might have been caused by a lab accident, they were treated like “kooks and cranks”. Prominent public health officials dismissed the idea as a “conspiracy theory”, insisting the virus had emerged in a seafood market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. We have since learnt that officials and scientists “hid or understated” crucial facts, misled reporters and compared notes about how to make emails “disappear”. Jeremy Farrar, now chief scientist at the World Health Organisation, bought a burner phone to contact Anthony Fauci. An influential open letter in The Lancet dismissing the theory was organised by the president of EcoHealth Alliance – a research organisation carrying out dangerous virus work in Wuhan.

Not only has this utter shambles vastly undermined faith in science and boosted the kind of anti-vaccine nonsense that recently led to the death of an unvaccinated child in Texas from measles. Worse, it seems to have led to precisely zero lessons being learnt among the scientific establishment. Anyone in any doubt that the next lab-leak pandemic is “only an accident away” should consult a recent issue of the prestigious scientific journal Cell, in which researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, that one) describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, bats again) and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk – all with minimal safety precautions. You’d think we would have learnt that it’s not a good idea to “test possible gas leaks by lighting a match”. Apparently not.

In honour of St Patrick’s Day yesterday, Mental Floss compiled a handy list of Irish names and how to pronounce them. Most people will be familiar with the ones popularised by Hollywood actors Saoirse (“SER-shuh”) Ronan, Cillian (“KILL-ee-in”) Murphy and Domhnall (“DOH-null”) Gleeson. But others are perhaps less familiar, such as Odhran (“Or-in”), Mairead (“muh-RAID”), Faolan (“FWAY-lawn”), Dearbhla (“DURV-luh” or “DEERV-luh”) and Grainne (“GRAWN-yuh”). See the rest here. Ádh mór!

The idea that Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon needs to be “decolonised” – as proposed by some activist academic – is absolute “tosh”, says Giles Coren in The Times. Nobody British goes there anyway. It’s just somewhere for international visitors to go for the day “should they inexplicably find themselves in Birmingham”. The Chinese are the ones who really love it – they’re building a replica in Fuzhou. And believe me, “those guys do not think white people are superior”. Soon enough, they’ll own the whole of Stratford, along with London, Britain and everywhere else. “And they will mainly be rendering us down for cooking fat and soap.” Rather than getting worked up about Shakespeare’s “white supremacy”, we should just be grateful. “He’ll soon be China’s only reason to tolerate Britain’s continued existence.”

It’s a meme posted by Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform, declaring that because Joe Biden signed his pardons with an autopen – a mechanical device that reproduces someone’s signature – they are “void, vacant and of no further force and effect”. Legal experts think it’s “unlikely” a court would agree, says Avery Lotz in Axios, not least because US presidents have been using autopens since Harry Truman. But that may be beside the point. Targeting pardon recipients on this basis could still force them into an “expensive, stressful legal battle”.