Labour may give workers the right to demand a four-day week. The government’s planned package of employee rights is set to include a “compressed hours” system, enabling staff to fulfil their weekly contracted hours over four days. Companies would be obliged to offer flexible working unless it is “not reasonably feasible”. Israel and Hamas will carry out a series of “humanitarian pauses” in Gaza to allow for the mass vaccination of 640,000 children against polio. The three-day breaks in fighting, due to begin on Sunday, were agreed after at least one case of type 2 polio virus was confirmed – the first in Gaza in 25 years. Weekend lie-ins “could save your life”, says The Times. A UK study of over 90,000 adults found that people who regularly sleep in on Saturdays and Sundays were 20% less likely to develop heart disease than those who don’t.

Who’s left to fight for liberty?

When Keir Starmer stood outside No 10 promising to “tread more lightly on your lives”, it seemed a promise he was “absolutely certain to break”, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. And sure enough, we now learn that he’s not only planning to revive Rishi Sunak’s smoking ban, but extending it to “anyone lighting up in pub gardens”. To see both parties fighting for custody of such a bad idea reveals one of the most interesting trends of our times: the shift “from a liberal past to an illiberal future”. And all with minimal political debate.

Who is there to fight for liberty? The Liberal Democrats are neither liberal nor democratic, spending years trying to overturn the Brexit vote while campaigning for stricter press regulation. The Conservatives talk about freedom but, in office, curtailed it. The debate overall is such that liberals, in the classical English sense of the word, are now dismissed as “libertarians”. But without anyone to make the case against these bans, more will follow. Starmer’s logic is clear enough: if sickness costs the NHS money, then your behaviour becomes his business. Obesity costs the health service far more than smoking, so restrictions on fizzy drinks, sweets, bacon and “life’s other guilty pleasures” are sure to come. If you let go of the principle of freedom, “including the freedom to make bad health choices”, it’s hard to see where it all stops. If the post-Sunak Conservative party is looking for a cause, “defending liberty would not be a bad place to start”.

🚬📊 Here’s a striking statistic, says Rory Sutherland on Substack: “If you quit smoking at the age of 35, you are likely to enjoy the same life expectancy as if you were a life-long non-smoker.” After that, for every year you smoke, you lose three months, on average. “Shit,” I remember thinking on my 35th birthday. “From now on every cigarette counts.”

Instead of listening to another boring podcast on the daily commute, says The Guardian, try birdsong. A new study by South Western Railway found that passengers who listened to natural soundscapes including chirruping birds, babbling brooks and even crackling storms, registered 35% lower stress levels and felt 32% less “nervous”, compared to passengers who rawdogged it. Participants who listened to music or another earnest episode of The Diary of a CEO only registered an 11% benefit.

Reports that Keir Starmer has removed a painting of Margaret Thatcher from Downing Street because he finds it “unsettling” have sparked outrage among Tory MPs, says Politico. But the artist behind the £100,000 work, Richard Stone, told BBC’s Today programme he takes it as “something of a compliment”. If the prime minister found it unsettling, he says, “well then I’d like to think that my portrait of Margaret Thatcher had a presence in that room”, which was the whole point.

Donald Trump’s identity crisis

Ever since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden, Donald Trump has been having an identity crisis, says Sohrab Ahmari in The New Statesman. Expecting to trounce an “unpopular and semi-senile 81-year-old”, Team Trump is now flailing while it struggles to decide whether to brand Harris a communist insurgent or an empty suit representing a failed elite that must be overthrown. What makes that task impossible is that the Trump campaign doesn’t know what it stands for any more. Is it still a populist “uprising against elites and the American status quo”? Or is it fighting the evils of communism on behalf of the good old boys in big business?

If Trumpism 2.0 is struggling to decide what it is, that’s partly down to the enormous success of Trumpism 1.0 in “shaking up the post-Cold War consensus”. In 2016, Trump’s opposition to globalisation and free trade “shocked the centre”. Eight years later, his critique of both has “attained the status of conventional wisdom among the establishment”. Biden expanded Trump’s tariffs on China and added a whole slew of other protectionist measures. Even on immigration, Harris now presents herself, however implausibly, as a “long-time hawk”. What makes things harder for Trump is that the old hits – lambasting corporate bosses and promising to protect ordinary folk from an overmighty elite – are no longer available, since he now relies so heavily on a handful of billionaire donors, “especially Elon Musk”. Hostile to any attempt to bring markets under control, or cut off their supply of cheap labour, these billionaires are trying to “re-channel Trumpism’s economic energies into strictly culture war grooves”. The result is a neutralising of Trump’s most radical, and loved, economic impulses, and a reversion to conventional Republicanism, with a few of Musk’s “edgy race memes” thrown in. Sad.

Sven-Goran Eriksson, who died this week aged 76, will be “remembered as much for his shagging as for his football management”, says Popbitch. He got up to so much of the former that “even the sports journalists got tired of the psychosexual drama”. When his affair with Ulrika Jonsson was broken by the News of the World in 2002, The Sunday Times demanded to know why their football correspondent – who was also Sven’s biographer at the time – didn’t know about it first. The hack’s reply? “Yeah, of course I did. I just didn’t think you’d be interested.”

The candidates vying to replace Rishi Sunak as leader of the Conservative party have their eyes on one man, says Dan Hodges in The Mail on Sunday. “Boris is the endorsement they all want,” a former cabinet minister told me. “He’s watching. And if it’s close, he could still turn out to be the kingmaker.” The “blond Cincinnatus” hasn’t given much away, but there are signs: he is said to regard Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat as enemies and James Cleverly and Priti Patel as genuine political allies and personal friends. But there’s reason to believe Robert Jenrick is the anointed one. Carrie Johnson is working on his campaign, “making calls for him”. Can’t hurt.

It’s a pizza dreamed up by AI, says BBC News. When restaurateurs in Dubai asked ChatGPT to create a recipe for “the best pizza” in the city, they received some curious concoctions, including this one, topped with blueberries and a disgusting neon breakfast cereal, and another featuring strawberries and pasta. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t add either of those options to the menu, though a “cultural mix” pizza the bot also designed – featuring Arab shawarma chicken, Indian grilled paneer cheese, and Middle Eastern Za’atar herbs – turned out to be a big hit.