The government has delayed a planned overhaul of social care, unveiling an independent commission which will not produce its findings until 2028, just before the next election. Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting says the review, led by veteran Whitehall troubleshooter Baroness Louise Casey, will begin in April and aims to build a “cross-party consensus” to create an enduring National Care Service. Nick Clegg has been replaced as Meta’s president of global affairs after six years at the tech giant. The former Lib Dem leader is being succeeded by Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican who served as deputy chief of staff under George W Bush. Temperatures dropped to a bitter -8C in some parts of the UK last night as the country was hit by an Arctic blast. Yellow weather warnings for snow and ice are in place across most of England, Wales and Scotland, with freezing temperatures expected to last until Monday.

What can Keir Starmer do about Elon Musk?

Keir Starmer’s year begins with a tricky question, says Patrick Maguire in The Times: “What is the prime minister to do about the world’s richest man and his vendetta against the Labour party?” This week alone, Elon Musk has declared Britain a “wasteland for international investment”, blamed Starmer for the misery inflicted by grooming gangs, and suggested that Jess Phillips – the minister who refused Oldham Council’s request for a government inquiry into the issue – take the place of far-right leader Tommy Robinson in prison. Many in Westminster hope the incoming US government will benefit the UK, because Donald Trump is an “Anglophile”. But in the mind of the president-elect’s most important backer, Britain is a “dystopia of wokery, totalitarian thought police and violent crime”.

Musk’s “constant criticism of the government” might merely be irritating. But Musk owns the social network that makes “dead-eyed junkies” out of Washington and Westminster and still drives much of our political agenda. So what can Starmer do to improve relations? The answer may be “nothing”. Tony Blair has Musk on his “billionaire speed dial”, but he’s hardly likely to burn through capital on Starmer’s behalf. Influential Labour figures like Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting are pro-tech, but that may not move the dial. And Musk is no longer just a commentator on British politics, but a “power player within it”. Even if his mooted £100m donation to Reform UK never materialises, Nigel Farage and the Tories are now “part of his feedback loop”. Just as he rails against grooming gangs, for example, Kemi Badenoch calls for a public inquiry. Starmer’s top team hope Musk’s fixations will eventually move elsewhere, and so any damage from all this will be limited. On recent evidence “it may already be too late”.

The Substack writer Gurwinder Bhogal has published his always-popular annual list of “useful ideas” to improve the way people think and make decisions. They include the observation that social justice activism, for all its noble intentions, attracts large numbers of psychopaths and narcissists who use it to “feed their sense of self-importance”; that the easier an academic field – postmodernism, for example – “the more it will try to preserve its difficulty by using complex jargon”; and that the assumption that making more arguments to bolster a particular case is wrong, because “our weakest arguments dilute the strongest”. Read the rest here.

What today’s leaders can learn from Jimmy Carter

Bashing Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday, was for many years a US national sport, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. This was harsh on a “decent and often far-sighted” president whose struggles – inflation, US hostages in Iran – were outside his control. But without the “historic snapping of public patience at the end of the 1970s”, there would have been no appetite for new ideas. “No rage, no Reagan.” It was the same in Britain: general malaise, then a “galvanising humiliation” (Britain’s 1976 IMF loan) that persuaded voters to give carte blanche to Margaret Thatcher. “Things had to get worse to get better.”

Today, the Carter Rule – that “rich democracies need a crisis in order to change” – is on display in western Europe. The economic status quo is “uncomfortable”, but not as bad as the upfront cost of change. Southern Europe, meanwhile, has reformed its way to economic growth (Spain), fiscal health (Greece) and high employment (Portugal) precisely because of its “brush with doom” during the 2010 Eurozone crisis. Forced to change, “it did”. Leaders who nobly try to break this rule win few rewards. Emmanuel Macron’s controversial budget and attempts to raise the pension age might have incurred less public wrath if he had proposed them “amid a crisis, not to stave one off”. Keir Starmer, like Carter, is stuck in one of those pockets of history when the national appetite for change is growing, but not in time for his administration. Brexit isn’t as bad as many feared; the NHS forever teeters but never falls. “Things are tolerably bad.” In Britain, as in Carter’s America, we are still a few years from the moment voters look around and say: “Enough.”

If you like Wordle but want more of a challenge, try Hardle, says Zoe Williams in The Guardian. The game takes the same principle of guessing a five-letter word, but because you don’t know which letters are in the right place the difficulty level is in a “different league”. Correctly deciphering the word of the day is “by no means a given”. Try it here.

When Rafael Nadal retired from tennis in November, says BBC Sport, long-time rival Roger Federer reminisced about “that match on half-grass, half-clay”. In 2007, Nadal hadn’t been beaten on a clay court for two years and Federer hadn’t lost on grass for almost five. So an innovative tennis fan called Pablo del Campo proposed an “exhibition match” on a court made up of both surfaces. It cost £1.28m to build the half-half court in a velodrome on Nadal’s home island of Mallorca, and all 7,000 tickets sold out within two hours. The Spaniard won 7-5 4-6 7-6 (12-10).

There’s one major stumbling block for the electric vehicle transition, says James Titcomb in The Daily Telegraph: “the humble driveway”, and specifically what you do if you don’t have one. Almost half the country live in terraced housing or flats without dedicated parking spots. The rise of smart meters and EV-only energy tariffs mean charging at home costs almost nothing: about £2 for 100 miles, compared to £14 for petrol. But powering up at an ultra-rapid charging station costs the equivalent of £28 for 100 miles. “When electric cars are both more expensive to buy and more expensive to run, owning them makes little sense.”

It’s Jesus, or at least a model paid to look like Him, says The Wall Street Journal. Divine doppelgangers are in rising demand in Utah, where religious folk hire them for everything from family portraits and Christmas cards to wedding photos. Cheesemonger Bob Sagers began his “side hustle as a saviour” after a photographer approached him at a music festival and pointed out his Christ-like credentials. He and other lordly lookalikes can charge up to $200 an hour to pose with children, families and couples, often in religious settings: on salt flats, for example, as if walking on water.