Jeremy Hunt is expected to cut national insurance from 10% to 8% in today’s Budget, saving the average worker £450 a year. The chancellor will also announce an overhaul of “non-dom” status, which spares UK residents living abroad from certain taxes, and a new levy on vape liquid. Joe Biden and Donald Trump dominated yesterday’s “Super Tuesday” primary elections, all but guaranteeing a presidential rematch later this year. Republican contender Nikki Haley is expected to exit the race this afternoon, but Trump has notably “underperformed the published polls in every big primary contest”, says Peter Spiegel in the FT. It seems his support has a “soft underbelly”. A German man has received 217 Covid jabs without suffering negative side effects, according to a new study, indicating the drugs have “a good degree of tolerability”. The intensely inoculated 62-year-old, who spread out his copious jabs over 29 months, says he did so for “private reasons”.

Olaf Scholz: “the wrong man in the wrong job”

German chancellor Olaf Scholz has been having a “disastrous” time, says Moritz Koch in Handelsblatt. Under domestic pressure to supply Ukraine with Taurus cruise missiles, he “divulged confidential information” about his military allies in public: Britain and France, he revealed, control the targeting of the cruise missiles they have supplied to Ukraine, meaning their soldiers are “part of the chain of command”. The “devastating” verdict of former British defence minister Ben Wallace is that Scholz is “the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time”. The fact that Moscow was able to listen in on a conversation on the same topic between high-ranking German military officers – conducted on a “weakly protected line”, despite its sensitivity – only “reinforces the impression that the Federal Republic is not up to the challenge posed by Russia”.

One thing Scholz is right about, though, is the “risk of escalation” that comes with supplying Ukraine with cruise missiles. The Americans have refused to do it and the British and French clearly share some concerns, given they’re not giving Kyiv the autonomy to fire these weapons freely. This all raises an important point: the interests of Ukraine and its Western allies are mostly, but not entirely, aligned. Ukraine is fighting a battle for survival; if the situation on the front continues to deteriorate, its leaders “could take risks that are unacceptable for its partners” – like striking Moscow itself with Western weapons. This is a conversation well worth having. It’s a shame that Scholz’s “clumsy and short-sighted” intervention has derailed it.

When Gordon Brown sold off 395 tonnes of Britain’s gold almost 25 years ago, he told the House of Commons the move would “achieve a better balance” in the nation’s investment portfolio. The metal was increasingly seen as a “barbarous relic”, as John Maynard Keynes had called it in 1924, and Brown wanted to get into something more profitable. It proved a costly mistake. The sale yielded $3.5bn, but at today’s record prices that same gold would be worth more than $26.6bn. It turns out the former chancellor sold at a 20-year low – a period now known to gold traders as “Brown’s Bottom”.

Queens Park Rangers maverick Stan Bowles, who died last month aged 75, belonged to an era when “footballers drank down your local” and occasionally got caught “trousering envelopes full of cash”, says The Upshot. Paid £200 a game to wear Gola boots, Bowles was offered £250 to defect to Adidas. “Instead, he simply wore one Gola boot and one Adidas, pocketing both fees.”

Scaramucci, Trump and Lawrence of Arabia

Anthony Scaramucci was Donald Trump’s White House communications director for 11 days before he was fired, says Alastair Campbell on Leading. A self-described “blue-collar kid” who became a successful businessman, Scaramucci worked on the Trump campaign for nearly a year before taking his short-lived job. Now one of Trump’s most vehement critics, he says the White House he experienced was “frenetic” and run on “ignorance”. But Trump was too insecure to admit what he didn’t know, so the only way to give him information was by telling stories. To explain how the Middle East was divided up by the Sykes-Picot Agreement after World War One, for example, Scaramucci asked if Trump remembered Lawrence of Arabia. “Oh, you mean Peter O’Toole?” Trump said. “Oh, yeah, I remember that. Yeah, that was a great movie.” Only then could he explain the political story behind the movie.

If re-elected, says Scaramucci, Trump would pose a “systemic threat to Western liberalism”. But Biden will beat him. Trump is hated by at least 65% of independent voters, particularly suburban housewives in the swing states that will decide the election. And in October and November, the Democrats will run a “highlight film” reminding people of Trump’s “insanity”. But perhaps most importantly, the country’s demographics have changed: there are now simply not enough “rich, older, white, angry people” to vote Trump back into office. He “has a lot more energy than 81-year-old Biden”, but Biden will beat him, which is the great irony – it’ll “destroy Trump’s ego” to be beaten for a second time by “Sleepy Joe”.

🏔🤦‍♀️ When I was at Davos in January, says Rory Stewart, Scaramucci sent out a tweet: “There are three reasons Trump’s not going to be president,” he wrote. “The first is that everyone here at Davos thinks he’s going to be president again. Don’t worry about the other two.”

Taylor Swift is related to another famous American wordsmith, says Sky News: Emily Dickinson. According to genealogy company Ancestry.com, the poet and popstar both descend from a 17th-century English immigrant, “Swift’s ninth great-grandfather and Dickinson’s sixth great-grandfather”, who was an early settler of Windsor, Connecticut. Fans have long connected the pair: Swift’s album, Evermore, was released on Dickinson’s birthday, while the title is thought to reference a line from one of her poems. The singer has previously said some of her lyrics might sound like “a letter written by Emily Dickinson’s great-grandmother while sewing a lace curtain”. The revelation means they are in fact sixth cousins, three times removed.

Cigarettes might be on the way out, but record numbers of Gen Zs are turning to pipes, cigars and cigarillos. Research from University College London has revealed that over the past decade, young adults have driven “a five-fold increase in non-cigarette tobacco smoking”, with rates highest among those aged between 18 and 24.

It’s Yao Ming, the retired Chinese Olympic basketball star. At 7ft 6in (2.29m) tall, the former Houston Rockets athlete towered over some 3,000 officials gathered in Beijing for the opening ceremony of the National People’s Congress this week. During his playing career, he garnered nicknames including Ming The Merciless, Chairman Yao and The Beast from the Far East. He was at the meeting in his capacity as chairman of the Chinese Basketball Association – on this occasion, with a special row all to himself.