Rishi Sunak said at last night’s Question Time Leaders’ Special that he would “boot out” any further party members found to have broken gambling laws, as the FT reported an “unusual burst of bets” in the days leading up to the election date announcement. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer claimed that his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn would have made a “better prime minister” than Boris Johnson. Donald Sutherland has died aged 88. The “irreplaceable” Don’t Look Now and M*A*S*H star was “a commanding and versatile presence on the big screen, perfecting everything from villainy to sensuality”, says Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Thousands gathered at Stonehenge this morning to watch the summer solstice sunrise. Pilgrims joined the millennia-old tradition to celebrate the longest day of the year, in what one visitor called a “bucket list” event.

The looming battle for the British countryside

An almighty clash is looming between the highly lucrative renewables sector and “defenders of the rural landscape”, says Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Both Labour and the Tories want to weaken local planning rules and make it harder for citizens to object to new development in the countryside. The Conservatives recently announced the return of onshore wind farms, including a plan for a cluster of 200m-high Saudi-funded turbines on the Yorkshire Moors above Charlotte Brontë’s Calderdale. “It is hard to believe such an outrage is to be allowed for so trivial a contribution to the climate.”

This is nothing compared to the National Grid’s extraordinary plan for a massive £31bn expansion of its pylon network – including a chain of structures 50m high, three to a kilometre, running north to south from the Lincolnshire Wolds to Tilbury in Essex. This will spoil “some of the most beautiful landscape in eastern England”. A second branch, from Bangor in North Wales to Swansea in the south, intruding on the great landscapes of Snowdonia and the Cambrian Mountains, is like a “noose round Wales’s neck”. Both these lines could go underground, or in the adjacent sea. The cost would be higher, yes, but the cost of lowering carbon emission is high, and in many cases hard to assess, like the cost of a countryside “wrecked by fields of solar panels, wind turbines, electricity pylons and substations”. Beautiful cities like Bath, Norwich and York have largely succeeded in fighting the “visual destruction” of their townscapes by unscrupulous developers. The countryside should be able to do the same. Especially when, given our microscopic contribution to global emissions, turbines in Britain are “mere virtue gestures”.

🗳️13 days to go…
Everyone expects Rishi Sunak to have his bags packed on the morning of July 5, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. So naturally, party thoughts have turned to his successor. Liam Fox is in the frame, but he could very well lose his seat. Penny Mordaunt polls best, but her chances of keeping Portsmouth North “seem slim”. Kemi Badenoch is the bookies’ favourite, but she’d want the job in the long run so would likely snub a caretaker role. Then comes Priti Patel. She’s expected to stand with a pledge to resign after a year, a potential ruse for another agenda: “the return of Boris Johnson”. One cabinet minister tells me “she would let him back in the first by-election that came along”, as the “only man who can eclipse Farage” and reunite the right.

“Gird your loins,” says Chloe Mac Donnell in The Guardian: short shorts are in for men this summer. Out of 46 looks showcased at the Gucci menswear show in Milan on Monday, 41 featured micro shorts hovering high up the thigh. They included slouchy fluorescent togs, a slick leather number and, on the front row, a striped cotton pair worn by actor Paul Mescal that at first glance “could have been mistaken for boxers”. “Thigh guy summer” is officially here.

Why is this election not all about AI?

Imagine if we knew a war was coming, says Sean Thomas in The Spectator. A war that would change societies, transform economies “and possibly even endanger humanity”. Imagine if, during an election, no one mentioned that war, and instead politicians “waffled on” with their usual guff. “Mad, right?” And yet “that is what we are doing in Britain today, in regards to the looming revolution that is Artificial Intelligence”. The reason it’s so irresponsible is that AI is going to affect every single thing we do talk about. Take education. We’re right to be proud of our “world-beating” universities, but what happens when higher education is rendered essentially pointless by “a personal AI which can do every cognitive task, superbly”?

Britain’s world-class creative sector is also “about to be decimated”. Hollywood tycoons are already predicting the end of an entertainment industry that employs 2.4 million people in the UK. “All this can be applied across every cognitive sector.” Any coder, banker, solicitor, accountant, editor, engineer, scientist, therapist, or even “session violinist at Abbey Road Studios”, is, sooner or later, toast. The Chinese AI mogul Kai-Fu Lee predicts that 50% of jobs will be gone in three years. “This is a sobering if not terrifying prospect.” So why is nobody talking about it? In the face of an AI tsunami gathering on the horizon, our leaders are “like monkeys sitting on a strangely waterless beach, squabbling over who gets the flapping fish”.

There is a much-loved Fleet Street story about the legendary Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, says Douglas Murray in The Spectator. While editing the paper, MacKenzie discovered that his horoscope writer was recycling copy. He dispensed with her services in a letter that opened: “As you will no doubt have foreseen…”

It’s a mysterious monolith that appeared in the Nevada desert last weekend, says BBC News. The tall, reflective structure was spotted by police during a search and rescue mission north of the Las Vegas Valley. It bears an uncanny resemblance to other puzzling pylons that have appeared around the world since 2020 in places such as Wales, Romania and the Isle of Wight. “We see a lot of weird things,” the Las Vegas Police Department said on social media “but check this out!”