More than 200 flood warnings are in place in England, Wales and Scotland in the aftermath of Storm Bert. Torrential downpours and winds of up to 82mph killed at least four people over the weekend, and widespread travel disruption is expected to continue into the week. A pro-Kremlin ultra-nationalist has taken a shock lead in Romania’s presidential election. Nato critic Călin Georgescu has won about 22% of the vote, and will go to a run-off in two weeks with either the prime minister or the opposition leader. Still life paintings of food are having a renaissance, according to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, which is devoting its annual exhibition to culinary scenes this year. The institute’s president, Adebanji Alade, said the trend was simple: “It is what people love and can relate to.”

What “warmongering” pundits forget about Ukraine

Britain’s decision to allow Ukraine to fire our Storm Shadow missiles into Russia has naturally been welcomed by “warmongering pundits”, says Peter Hitchens in The Mail on Sunday. But how the rest of the world must snigger at our “great power posturing”. Britain’s armed forces are pitifully weak. Our submarines can barely move, and the two “giant targets” we call aircraft carriers are always conking out. We haven’t been this ill-prepared to defend ourselves “since the days of Ethelred the Unready”. The one consolation is that the only big nation with a conventional military “more useless than ours” is Russia. After 1,000 days of fighting, its army of “released convicts and ancient howitzers” still hasn’t managed to capture Kharkiv, a city just 19 miles from its border. “You think this lot are going to march to Berlin and on to Calais?”

As we head “down the road to chaos”, it’s worth remembering how we got here. In 2008, President George W Bush declared that he wanted Ukraine to join Nato. Many sensible folk, including Bush’s ambassador in Moscow, warned that the Russians saw this as a red line: the equivalent for Americans of – “oh, let’s think of an equally far-fetched parallel” – a Russian nuclear missile base in Cuba. But Bush didn’t give up, and nor did his successors. Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych stood up to the West on this issue in 2013 – and when a violent mob drove him from power the following year, the US and Britain immediately condoned the “lawless putsch” and recognised the resulting government. It was this sequence of events that brought about the war in Ukraine. Like everyone else, I condemn Russia’s “barbaric” invasion. But we cannot “ignore its causes”.

💥🤷 Many in the West don’t seem to understand why Moscow is so angry about last week’s decision, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack. Just ask yourself: if Russian troops helped one of their allies assemble and launch a missile into the US – possibly killing American soldiers – do you think a US president would “let it slide”?

Lost in the noise over Donald Trump’s most controversial hires is the fact that this might be “the most ideologically diverse cabinet” in modern US history, says Axios. He has chosen a pro-abortion rights scion of the Kennedy family to run the health department (RFK Jr), a former elected Democrat as director of national intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard), a pro-union centrist to run the Department of Labor (Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer) and a former George Soros adviser for the Treasury (hedge fund manager Scott Bessent). It’s yet another reminder that “traditional conservatism is dead”.

Pop star Kate Nash says she’s planning to subsidise her loss-making concert tour by selling pictures of her bottom on OnlyFans, says BBC News. Under the slogan “Butts for tour buses”, the Foundations singer announced this week that she was joining the mostly-porn platform to highlight the parlous situation for most touring musicians. “I think the arse is the perfect combination of comedy and sexuality,” says the 37-year-old. “I enjoy taking pictures of my bum. Always been a bit of a flasher.” Last month fellow singer Lily Allen revealed that she makes more money by selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans than she does from Spotify streams.

Is this really the way to sell cars?

You’ve probably seen the new Jaguar ad, says Giles Coren in The Times: a load of “angry, half-starved non-binaries (plus a fat one)” arrive on Mars in a passenger lift and start redecorating. With them is a “pony-tailed Japanese man wearing a rubber ring under a girl’s gym vest”, an albino “they/them” wielding a sledgehammer, and a wrinkled old crackhead with a paintbrush, all in the sort of “unwearable couture” that has seen sales of Vogue (which loved the ad 🙄) plunge into single figures. It is so “grim, depressing and derivative” that the world’s most famous Jaguar driver, John Prescott, “literally died the next day”.

It’s tempting to read this as an attempt by the once-iconic carmaker to solve the problem that their vehicles have become such dustbins that no right-thinking person would buy one. Why not try to sell them instead to “anorexic, teenage, intersex manga fans of colour” who might just be stupid enough to fall for it? But really, like most ads, this is a case of “rich white heterosexuals selling stuff to other rich white heterosexuals”, using images of multi-ethnic, pansexual, differently abled humans as a cheap way to appear progressive. It’s the same reason that, at my local cinema, an audience full of elderly Jews has to spend 15 minutes before the new Woody Allen movie watching “young black gay couples with rainbow offspring eating breakfast cereal”. Nobody’s family is like this – all it achieves is making most people feel “alienated and marginalised and confused”. It’s what got Trump elected: “ivory tower wokeists” snooting the middle class and pushing nice people further and further to the right. “It’s happening to me even as I write this column.”

Hugh Grant’s speech at the ceremony where Richard Curtis received an honorary Oscar last weekend has been viewed more than 220,000 times on YouTube. Paying homage to the writer’s “repulsively successful career”, Grant chided Curtis for spending so much time on his humanitarian work. “I’d be desperate for his next film, and I’d be told he was away for a year in Africa saving starving children,” Grant said. “I found that annoying and, frankly, selfish.” Every few years, Curtis would ring up and say something like: “Could you possibly put on this little red nose, and mud-wrestle with Colin Firth while Maggie Smith plays the bongos?” The actor finished by saying he was of course delighted Curtis was receiving the award. “Would we call it an Oscar? It’s a kind of Oscar, isn’t it? It’s a better-than-nothing Oscar.” Watch the speech in full here.

For the first time, says New Atlas, mosquitos have been used to deliver a malaria vaccine rather than the disease itself. Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine genetically modified the single-celled plasmodium falciparum parasite that hides in the salivary glands of female mosquitos and causes the deadly disease following a bite. After somehow finding volunteers to test the method – getting bitten up to 50 times – the pointy-headed parasitologists showed that a remarkable 90% of those inoculated in this way had developed immunity to the disease. The hope is that the technique will lead to widespread vaccination programmes without the need for refrigerated supply chains, sterilised needles and trained medics.

On the left is Kylie Minogue’s bestselling rosé; on the right is Aldi’s suspiciously similar-looking Rosalie Côtes de Provence. The Australian singer, who sells 17 million bottles of her wine a year, is considering legal action against the discount German supermarket, says the Daily Mail. Aldi, which has been taken to court over several other copycat products, doesn’t seem fazed. The company agreed that it was a “dead ringer”, and said a wine expert who had blind-tasted the two had found them “completely identical”.