G7 leaders have agreed to use frozen Russian assets to provide Ukraine with a $50bn loan. At the group’s annual meeting, taking place this year in Puglia, Italy, Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky also signed a bilateral security agreement committing the US to provide military backing to Kyiv for the next decade. Reform UK has overtaken the Conservatives in an election poll for the first time. A YouGov survey found that support for Nigel Farage’s party had increased by two points to 19% while the Tories were unchanged on 18%. Several bars on Munich’s main square ran out of beer yesterday, as Scotland fans got stuck in before the opening game of Euro 2024. An estimated 100,000 supporters have descended on the Bavarian city for their team’s match against hosts Germany tonight. Prost!

Starmer’s “welcome present” from the Tories

Many conservatives are convinced Keir Starmer is a secret socialist who’ll “unleash financial disaster” the moment he steps into No 10, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. Certainly, his team are doing everything they can to disabuse people of that notion: Angela Rayner sounds like she’s been “spat out of a Conservative re-education camp”, telling anyone who’ll listen that “you cannot tax your way to growth”. But “if this is a schtick”, my hunch is they’ll keep it up for a while. Starmer understands that, after the Liz Truss debacle, he needs to keep the financial markets happy. So he’ll leave any radical changes until much later. Those of us eager to highlight the danger of Starmerism “may spend some time searching for something solid to point to”.

It will help his cause that the Tories have left him a fabulously generous “welcome present”. Those NHS waiting lists that Rishi Sunak kept promising to reduce will be “tumbling by Christmas” – the backlog caused by lockdown has finally cleared, delayed only a little by the junior doctors’ strike. Thanks to extra capacity put in by the Tories, NHS waiting lists will be at a five-year low by the end of next year. Also, Starmer will soon be able to say immigration is plunging, thanks to the emergency brakes slammed on by James Cleverly – by the end of his first year, net migration is forecast to be around half what it is under the Tories. Inflation is tamed; living standards are set to rise to an all-time high. Starmer won’t deserve the credit for all this: “he will be reaping Sunak’s harvest”. It’s cruel, it’s unfair, “but that’s politics”.

Former defence secretary Ben Wallace had a “rather strange business lunch” with Liz Truss last year, says Popbitch. The ex-PM arrived a bit late, “looking rather harried”, and immediately began “rummaging around under the table”. This wasn’t a “discreet rummage” – it was a very obvious, “full-body one”. After a few seconds, as Wallace was wondering what on earth was going on, Truss lifted up the pair of stockings she’d been wearing. Placing them on the table, “right where they were about to eat”, she gave a satisfied sigh: “There! That’s better!”

Michael Mosley pushed his body to “extreme lengths for the cause of good television”, says The Times. The broadcaster, who died last week aged 67, ingested tapeworms, ate a black pudding made with his own blood and injected snake venom into his veins. He swallowed a tiny camera, giving viewers “a never-to-be-forgotten close-up of his inner workings”. “The really unpleasant part was that the night before I had to drink four litres of laxative,” he said. “I was meant to be going to dinner with the director-general of the BBC and the gastroenterologist said, ‘Not a good idea’.” Mosley’s wife Clare drew the line when he wanted to infest himself with pubic lice.

We’ll miss mundane tasks when they’re gone

As technology automates more and more aspects of life, says Olivia Ward-Jackson in UnHerd, what will happen to those “mundane tasks which allow space for thought”? I rather like doing the washing up, for example, “mulling over my day with the warm, soapy water flowing over my hands, for once neither tapping nor scrolling”. Consider the dreamy tranquility of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, as she pours milk from a terracotta jug. Such moments of serene reflection are vanishingly rare nowadays, as we “whip out our phones to kill time as we sit on a train or wait for the kettle to boil”.

It’s not just our attention that we’re surrendering to technology, but our memories too. When my grandfather was a child, he learned great chunks of poetry by heart. I, by contrast, “like my whole generation”, have outsourced my memory to my phone. Why bother remembering the words of the Bard – “or even my new postcode” – when I can look them up in an instant? But “just because we can delegate our duties to machines”, doesn’t mean we should. The AI hypesters claim we’re heading for a glorious utopia of unlimited leisure, where we’re free, like ancient Roman aristocrats, to devote ourselves to higher things: “family, culture, nature, charity, contemplation, amusement” and so on. But, of course, we’re just as likely to become “consumerist marshmallows”, all Deliveroo, Hinge and TikTok, living for dopamine hits and little else. For every innovation, we should consider “what, exactly, are we saving all our time and effort for”? As Blaise Pascal put it in 1654: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

In 1939 a chap called Geoffrey Tandy was “summoned for war work” at Bletchley Park, says The Economist. As a botanist at the Natural History Museum, he wasn’t entirely sure what he could offer in the fight against fascism. It turned out – so the story goes – that Britain’s spymasters had wanted an expert in cryptograms (encrypted text), not, as Tandy was, an expert in cryptogams (algae). Either way, his botanical knowledge came in handy – his expertise on saltwater algae “proved essential in salvaging German codebooks recovered from the sea”.

It’s a gold signet ring that once belonged to a British prime minister, says BBC News. Metal detectorist Tom Clark, 85, unearthed the lost loot in a sheep pasture in Buckinghamshire. The original owner turned out to be George Grenville, who was PM from 1763 to 1765, and it sold at auction this week for £9,500. Clark says he didn’t watch the sale, however: “I was out metal-detecting.”