In your briefing today:

📣 Keir Starmer has forced out his most senior civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Chris Wormald, as he attempts to rebuild Number 10’s operations amid the disastrous Peter Mandelson scandal.

The move was expected, but has caused anger among other senior civil servants, with one person telling the Guardian the mood was “sulphurous” over the prime minister’s apparent willingness to let senior officials go.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the cabinet secretary was the “latest person Keir Starmer has thrown under the bus to save his own skin”. (Guardian)

📣 The Scottish Government does not have the money for doctors’ pay deals, with next year’s budget looking “increasingly detached from reality,” the Institute of Fiscal Studies has warned.

The IFS says whoever forms the next government after the Holyrood election in May will be left with “some very difficult decisions” because health and social care pay rises have not been fully funded. (Scotsman)

📣 Good news for people in the north east: as today’s weather forecast notes, the people of Aberdeen and the surrounding areas have finally seen some sunshine - if only 30 minutes - after the longest sunless period in the area since records began in 1957. The news gets better: there’s lots more sunshine today, and tomorrow. (Guardian)

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📣 The UK government should end the windfall tax on oil and gas firms and reverse its ban on new licences for North Sea drilling, Sir Tony Blair's think tank has said. (Scotsman)

📣 Thousands of on-the-run criminals, including rapists and murderers, are on the run every day, according to new figures. (Daily Record has the exclusive)

📣 There are small signs of hope for the capercaillie, one of Britain’s most endangered birds: the population of the grouse, found only in the Scottish Highlands, has increased by 50%. (Guardian)

📣 Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky says he will not present a “bad deal” to end the war in a referendum, and that his country will only hold elections when security guarantees and a ceasefire are established. (Independent)

📣 Goldman Sach’s top lawyer has resigned from her job after emails showed she had a close relationship with the financier, to whom she referred as “Uncle Jeffrey”. Kathy Ruemmier was a former White House counsel to Barack Obama. (🎁 WSJ - gift link)

📣 There are fresh calls to scrap a controversial NHS deal with AI company Palantir, with health officials concerned the company’s reputation will hinder the delivery of a “vital” £330m NHS contract.

Palantir, a US surveillance technology company that also works for the Israeli military and Donald Trump’s ICE operation, has been hired to build an AI-enabled data platform to connect disparate health information across the NHS. (The Guardian has the exclusive)

📣 The US is sending a second aircraft carrier - the world’s largest - to the Middle East as tensions with Iran remain high. (AP)

🏉 Scotland faces England at Murrayfield tomorrow, and for the first time since 1998 no Edinburgh players will take to the field in Scotland’s starting line-up, and 10 players from Glasgow. “It is a damning indictment of the capital club that Townsend has to lean so heavily on Glasgow,” writes Graham Bean. (Scotsman)

⚽️ Scotland’s footballers have been handed a tough Nations League group: they’ll face Switzerland, Slovenia and North Macedonia in Group B1. The competition offers a route into Euro 2028, although as the nations of the UK are hosting, the odds of being there are improved - although not certain. (BBC)

📣 Ukrainian skeleton competitor Vladyslav Heraskevych wore a “helmet of memory” featuring pictures of some of the 600 Ukrainian athletes and coaches killed by Russia since 2022, and has now been banned by the International Olympic Committee. He sacrificed his dream of winning a medal, but succeeded in putting the horrors of the war in Ukraine back on the agenda, writes Sean Ingle. (Guardian)

🗣️Read of the week comes in The New Statesman, where editor Tom McTague offers “Morgan McSweeney’s political obituary”, but which is really an obituary for a broader sweep of Labour thinking, and a vivid description of an ideological crisis at the heart of the party. Historically rooted, and with a clear eye for Labour’s (many) factions, it’s political analysis of rare quality.

McTague says symptoms abound of a “crisis of faith” similar to that which Labour suffered in the late 1960s, and the broader failure of a system the party is incapable of controlling. There are red flags: the state of the economy, persistent support for Scottish independence, failing utilities and universities, court backlogs and NHS waiting times. All prove how bad things are.

The Epstein scandal, he notes, “is at once unrelated to these systemic crises of governance and yet entirely representative”, and a reminder of the purpose and need for social democracy itself: “to democratise economic power through the ballot box”.

“Here are missions the Labour Party can believe in, because it has always believed in them,” he says.

“The challenge, however, is that in facing up to this defining purpose of social democracy, Labour would have to confront the kind of difficult decisions it has so far preferred to avoid. Can the interests of global capital be tamed by a single state alone or can it only be done through European cooperation? But even if the answer to that question lies on the continent, it is one thing to declare that Britain must break with America, and another to follow that logic to its conclusion.”

McTague’s broad sweep poses the questions… although we have to note, also, that this ideological nervous breakdown would always be difficult for Labour to work through - and doubly so while in power. (£ New Statesman)

🗣️Reaching for the Shakespeare - Hamlet, specifically - The Spectator says Keir Starmer can only delay the inevitable (his evacuation from Downing Street) so long.

It laments that Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, hesitates over wielding the metaphorical knife: “He is intelligent enough to know there is no point, purpose or moral justification for remaining in a government presided over, but hardly led, by Keir Starmer,” the magazine leader.

“Still, he hesitates to act. Instead he is absorbed in calculation about future positioning. And all the while, his party and the country lose. ‘The native hue of Resolution is sicklied o’er, with the pale cast of thought.’ If the Hamlet of Ilford North wants to be leader he needs to show leadership.

“Starmer cannot even begin to provide the leadership this country needs. Labour MPs know it. Labour ministers see it daily. The cabinet is face to face with that failure hourly. Yet they won’t act. While they play the Dane, so much remains rotten in the state of Britain.” (The Spectator £)

🗣️ The Economist profiles “the world’s most powerful woman”: Takaichi Sanae, Japan’s Prime Minister, who called a snap election for February 8 and won almost 70% of seats in the parliament’s lower house. Having “offered hard-nosed realism for a hard-edged era” and won handsomely, “[she] now has a historic chance to transform her country. She must not squander it,” writes the newspaper.

With advice that might be familiar to readers considering economies and societies around the world, it calls on Takaichi to “think bigger and broader. She cannot treat her time in office as routine, focused on short-term relief to ease the pain of today; she must take Japan’s long-term demographic and economic challenges head on.

“She should also recognise that her country has a crucial role to play as a stabilising force in a turbulent world. And she must be a leader for all of Japan, not only for her right-wing loyalists. She must, in short, gamble all over again.” (Economist £)

^{Feelin’ lucky, kid?}

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