Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, is considering running for the leadership of Canada’s Liberal party following Justin Trudeau’s resignation yesterday. The PM’s decision to step down after nine years comes with his party floundering in the polls over its loose immigration policies, the high cost of living and the lack of affordable housing. Emmanuel Macron has joined Keir Starmer in criticising Elon Musk for interfering in European politics. The French president said Musk was “supporting a new international reactionary movement”, specifically citing the billionaire’s support for the hard-right AfD in next month’s German federal elections. Around 30 people have been snowed in at Britain’s highest pub for the past three nights. Customers and staff at the famous Tan Hill Inn in North Yorkshire still have a month’s worth of food and two weeks of beer to keep them going, says the Daily Star. “Lucky gits.”

Why Trudeau took a “walk in the snow”

Justin Trudeau became the Canadian PM a decade ago in a “burst of excitement and hope”, says Serge Schmemann in The New York Times. He was “43, handsome and fresh”, and promised to make Canada a progressive utopia of universal medical care, multiculturalism and internationalism. For a time, the “Trudeau vision” dominated. But then, as always in politics, the pendulum swung the other way. Canadians began seeing him as too far left and soured on his looser immigration policies. A few political scandals “muddied” his previously saintly image. With his Liberal party polling as low as 16%, his colleagues urged him to take a “walk in the snow” – as his father Pierre famously did before he resigned as PM in 1984. Yesterday, Trudeau Jr finally bowed to the inevitable and did the same.

Few in Canada will mourn his departure, says Jamie Sarkonak in the National Post, not least those affected by his “kneecapping” of the country’s energy industry, or those worried by the ballooning deficit ($62bn last year, rather more than the PM’s promised $10bn limit). But there’s a reason he won three elections, in 2015, 2019 and 2021: voters wanted what he was offering. He appealed to the “strong Canadian desire for niceness”, and followed through on many of his big pledges, from taking a softer approach on crime to relaxing immigration rules. Voters didn’t consider the costs of these policies – urban disorder, rising house prices, a tougher jobs market – until it was too late. So yes, let’s all rejoice in the fact that we no longer have to listen to Trudeau’s “haughty stage voice”. But we should also try to learn from his premiership – specifically, to remember this moment the next time we are “pitched a utopian future completely divorced from common sense”.

🇨🇦🦆 The timing of Trudeau’s resignation leaves both his party and his country in a terrible position, says Campbell Clark in The Globe and Mail. The Liberals will have to rush to pick a new leader before parliament returns on 24 March, and that leader will almost certainly face an immediate election. In the meantime, with the PM a “lame duck” there’ll be no one to negotiate with Donald Trump on his threat to impose 25% tariffs on all goods entering the US from Canada. “Rarely has an outgoing prime minister left his successor so few options.”

Elon Musk’s avid interest in Westminster has left many scratching their heads, says Ed West on Substack. Some argue he has gone mad with power and loves the influence he can wield in smaller countries; others say his English ancestry (he had a Liverpudlian grandmother) means he feels part of a diaspora and naturally cares what happens in the old country. Perhaps a more convincing theory doing the rounds is that the billionaire has become an insomniac, and follows British politics on account of “spending so many waking hours on European time”.

In Wordfall, players are presented with a seven-letter word and must use six of the letters to make another word, then a five-letter word, then four, then three. Letters can only be used once per word, “dead end” words that are in the dictionary but don’t allow the game to be completed turn orange, and words that work turn green. Try it here.

How Britain lifted humanity out of tribalism and racism

It has become commonplace, says John Ellis in The Wall Street Journal, in compulsory workplace training sessions and on university campuses, to hear that “white supremacy is ubiquitous”, that whites hold money and power because they “stole it from other races”, and that systemic racism and capitalism keep the injustices going. But we need only look at how the modern idea of common humanity evolved to see that “critical race theory has everything backwards”. A simple study of history shows that the thinkers of the Anglosphere, “principally in England”, are not the villains of this story, but the heroes.

For most of recorded history, neighbouring peoples regarded each other with suspicion, if not “outright fear and loathing”. Tribal and racial attitudes were universal. But in Britain, beginning with Magna Carta and the first representative parliament, the spark of liberty grew into a unique culture of individual sovereignty. British philosophers like John Locke and David Hume began arguing that every individual was of equal importance, part of one human family. The idea gained ground so quickly that in Britain, “and there alone”, arose a powerful campaign to abolish slavery. By the end of the 18th century that campaign was leading to prohibitions in many parts of the Anglosphere, while “Africa and Asia remained as tribalist and racist as ever”. Similar thinking led Britain eventually to dismantle its own empire, but not before exporting the now-ubiquitous, but then-heretical idea that all humans are equal. Critical race theory tells us that all was racial harmony until racist Europeans disturbed it. The truth is that “all was tribal hostility until the Anglosphere rescued us”.

In a bid to banish the January blues, the Daily Mail has compiled a list of the “most spectacular” Airbnbs around the world. They include a mirrored-glass home on an extinct volcano in Mexico; The Naked House in Thailand, with retractable floor-to-ceiling glass windows throughout; a Moroccan palace complete with a traditional “hammam” steam bath and views of the Atlas mountains; a bamboo eco-home in Bali resembling a “tall, decorative hat”; and a blowout 16-person beachfront villa in Turks and Caicos with an infinity pool, tennis court, gym, chef and butler, from £50,000 a week. See the rest here.

The “history business” is booming, says Will Dunn in Bloomberg. It’s not just the astonishing success of The Rest Is History, which has just signed a deal with a Hollywood production company to develop TV and film formats based on its rollicking stories. In 2023, people in the UK and Ireland spent more on history books than in any year since Nielsen BookData’s records began in 1998. In the US, where overall book sales are flat, history has grown by 6% in the past 12 months and outsold politics for the first time in an election year, by two to one.

It’s a cane corso, an increasingly popular Italian mastiff breed described by one dog-training expert as a “killing machine” akin to an “XL bully on steroids”, says The Times. The powerful pooches, which can weigh up to 50kg, are said to be descended from the Molossian war dogs of Ancient Rome. Unlike XL bullies, which require an exemption certificate and have to be muzzled in public, the cane corso is still legal in the UK, making it attractive to those seeking a new scary “status dog”. There are no official ownership numbers, but professional dog-walkers say they’re becoming more common and puppies are selling on the Pets4Homes website for up to £1,600.