John Prescott, who served as deputy prime minister between 1997 and 2007, has died aged 86. One of New Labour’s “big beasts”, he was chiefly remembered for owning two Jaguars and punching a protester who threw an egg at him, and was a key link between the party’s traditional voters and Tony Blair’s modernising leadership. Paying tribute, Blair called Prescott “one of the most talented people I ever encountered in politics… and definitely the most unusual”. Judges at the International Criminal Court have issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as for former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas’s almost-certainly-dead commander Mohammed Deif. The Hague said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe the three bore “criminal responsibility” for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war between Israel and Hamas. Maurizio Cattelan’s viral artwork Comedian – a banana duct-taped to a wall – has fetched a whopping $6.2m at auction. Its new owner, crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun, will receive: a banana, a roll of duct tape, and instructions on how to combine them, including, crucially, “how to replace the banana”.

The political power of Farmer Clarkson

There was something oddly profound about Jeremy Clarkson’s appearance at the farmer’s march on Whitehall this week, says Tom McTague in UnHerd. His defence of rural Britain against what he called Keir Starmer’s “infernal government” was a reminder of the animating spirit of Clarkson’s Farm: an old, “almost forgotten” Toryism. This is not the “free trade” ideology of Liz Truss, who is held in contempt by farmers for her ruinous zero-tariff deals with New Zealand and Australia. Instead, it is the deep conservatism that drove many people’s instinctive sympathy with Brexit: “protectionist, national, territorial and utterly opposed to centralising notions of uniformity”.

What Clarkson represents is really a return to the politics of Benjamin Disraeli. “In a progressive country change is constant,” the old Tory icon warned. The question, he said, is not whether to resist change, which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out “in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people”, or in deference to “abstract principles”. Disraeli thought the former, as does Clarkson. Starmer and Rachel Reeves believe in the latter. And if I were the Labour leader, I would be worried that this is “the wrong side to be on today”, particularly in the era of Donald Trump and the “animal spirits” his election has released into popular culture. The real power of Clarkson’s politics, and the threat he poses to Starmer, is captured in TE Utley’s self-professed brand of Toryism: “at once traditionalist and populist, which holds sway in every public bar in the kingdom and is almost entirely denied parliamentary expression by the Establishment”.

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