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In your briefing today:

• The Home Office has squandered “billions” on asylum hotels, say MPs

• What we learned at the weekend: a divided Scotland turns to Reform UK, Dominic Cummings and his “nerd army”, Starmer eyes a turn to Europe

• Hearts beat Celtic to establish an eight-point lead at the top of the table. Now watch the hype machine go…

📣 The Home Office has “squandered” billions on asylum accomodation, according to a report by a House of Commons committee.

The Home Affairs Committee says "flawed contracts" and "incompetent delivery" had left the department unable to cope with demand, and it now relied on hotels as the first choice solution rather than seeing them as a temporary stop-gap.

The MPs said expected costs had tripled to more than £15 billion and not enough had been done to recoup excess profits. (BBC) (Guardian) (Read the report - PDF)

• Migrant sex offender released in error is arrested after manhunt (Independent)

• Timeline: Sex offender’s arrival in the UK, conviction, and re-arrest (Guardian)

📣 Prince Andrew and ex-wife Sarah Ferguson are edging closer to an exit from their Royal Lodge home, but only if they get two alternative houses in return, according to reports this morning. Andrew has his eye on Frogmore Cottage in Windsor, while the former home of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex - Home Park - is close to their existing 30-room home, too. (Mail)

📣 Ministers have been accused of putting public safety at risk after deciding not to enact tough rules on the sale of fireworks ahead of Bonfire Night next week. The evening was chaotic across Scotland last year, with trouble in several parts of Edinburgh, as well as West Lothian, Glasgow, and Clydebank.

But SNP community safety minister Siobhian Brown has now said the government will “not progress” plans to license and restrict sales, despite legislation being passed three years ago, in order to “focus resources” on police and fire services. (Mail)

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AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 More than 90% of Scots think the NHS should be reformed according to a new poll from the Enlighten think tank. Half think private providers should play a bigger role. (The Scotsman) (Enlighten)

• One million days of staff time for nurses and midwives have been lost due to a growing mental health crisis in the Scottish NHS (Daily Record)

📣 Broadcaster Kaye Adams says her name has been “dragged through the mud” after she was taken off her BBC Scotland radio programme. Adams says the BBC has yet to provide her with details of allegations against her. (STV)

📣 Baroness Michelle Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman have bought a £10 million home on Florida’s “billionaire island”. (Times £)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 Two men have been arrested over last week’s Louvre jewel heist, officials have confirmed. (Guardian)

📣 US and Chinese diplomats have agreed a framework for talks between President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, which are planned for Thursday. (🎁 WSJ - gift link)

📣 The decline of Pizza Hut, which went into administration and closed a number of branches last week, has sparked a wave of nostalgia - and the question: what went wrong? (BBC) (Manchester Evening News) (🎁 Telegraph - gift link)

• Where is dining’s middle ground? (The Drum)

SPORT

⚽️ Turn the hype-meter up to eight: that’s how many points Hearts are clear at the top of the Scottish Premiership table this morning, after their rousing 3-1 win over Celtic nearly took the roof off Tynecastle stadium. (BBC) (🎥 Highlights)

• Craig Swan: “The lid blew off tumultuous Tynecastle with a mix of joy and belief” (Daily Record)

• Mark Atkinson: “On the day the clocks changed, so did the Scottish football landscape. Hearts must now be considered a credible title challenger in the Premiership.” (Scotsman)

• “The buck stops with me,” admitted Brendan Rodgers (Mail)

⚽️ Rangers managed a win yesterday too, their first domestic home win this season. It was also new head coach Danny Rohl’s first home game - Kheredine Idessane thinks there were “the first blue shoots of recovery” on show at Ibrox. (BBC) (🎥 Highlights)

• Andy Newport: For once, Rangers fans were treated to a happy ending as their team refused to stick to the script they’ve been following for so long (Daily Record)

⚽️ Aberdeen boss Jimmy Thelin offered a blunt assessment of his side after their 2-1 defeat at home to Hibs: “We are losing too many individual battles in games, regardless of systems and players,” he said. (Scotsman)

• Andrew Petrie: Was Aberdeen’s brief revival a flash in the pan? (BBC) (🎥Highlights)

🏎️ Lando Norris romped home well ahead of his rivals in a thrilling Mexico Grand Prix last night, taking the lead in the drivers’ championship and setting up a thrilling finale to the season. (Report & 🎥 highlights - Sky Sports)

IDEAS
What we learned at the weekend: a divided Scotland turns to Reform UK, Cummings’ ‘nerd army’, Starmer eyes a turn to Europe, and sport-triggered nostalgia

🗣️ Fresh polling painted a picture of a divided Scotland that is pessimistic about the future, and starting to turn towards Reform UK for answers.

According to a Survation poll on behalf of the IPPR Scotland think tank, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is now in second place on both the Holyrood constituency (22%) and list (20%) votes. The SNP (34% constituency, 29% list) remains Scotland’s largest party. Labour (18%, 17%) is in third.

These results would have John Swinney 10 seats short of a majority. According to modelling by Mark Diffley, the SNP would end up with 55 seats (-9), the Conservatives 12 (-19), Labour 19 (-3), Greens 10 (+2) and Liberal Democrats 11 (+7). Reform UK would win 22 seats. (The Herald (£) had the exclusive)

What’s driving this political shift? The same polling finds concern around the rising cost of living, economic insecurity, declining trust in politicians and institutions and the decline of public services as the top three. (This was all exclusive in the Herald too)

🗣️ Might a “nerd army” led by Dominic Cummings rise up to rebuild Britain? In all honesty, probably not. But Wessie du Toit paints another picture of a dissatisfaction, this time among part of the young professional class, 1,300 of whom gathered late last week to hear assorted venture capitalists, business leaders, politicians and Cummings humself speak, under the banner “Looking for Growth”.

Most of the people there, reports du Toit, “said they were frustrated with the malaise they felt around them every day, and responsive to Looking for Growth’s message, spread through X and Instagram, that they did not have to passively accept it.”

The movement “may draw inspiration from Britain’s past”, he says, but “it is really closer to the modernising elite factions which appeared in the late stage of civilisations such as Edo Japan, Qing China, Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

“These groupings saw the rise of technologically advanced Western powers in the late-19th century and realised that their only hope of survival was to seize control of their own states and force them to undergo rapid, radical reforms.

“Likewise, Looking for Growth is contemporary Britain’s answer to the Young Turks: an elite tendency urging a hidebound establishment to look at Silicon Valley, Shenzhen and Dubai, and to recognise the lateness of the hour. As [Matt] Clifford [a speaker] put it: “we are here to save our country.” (Unherd)

🗣️ A pivot towards Europe by Keir Starmer’s government is a little more likely. Alex Wickham reports that, almost a decade on from the UK’s referendum decision to leave the EU (how time flies!), “Brexit is back on the agenda” for Labour.

Senior figures are starting to argue with him privately that, in the name of finding that all-important but elusive growth, he needs to “make a premiership-defining decision to take the UK much closer to the EU”.

But there would be a gamble - risk alientaing working class voters who wanted Brexit and are already tempted by Reform, by attempting to woo liberals and left-wing voters who might be tempted by the Lib Dems and Greens in England, and nationalists in Scotland and Wales. (🎁 Bloomberg - gift link)

🗣️ I enjoyed a melancolic wee piece by author Ben Markovits, writing about going to an NFL game at Wembley with his daughter, who’s just left home to go to university. It caused him to reflect on his childhood, and the end of his daughter’s, and all the triggers of nostalgia that you feel as you watch a sports game unfold.

It’s written with the exactly the same tone as his melancholic book, The Rest of Our Lives, which is one of the better things I’ve read this year, and is up for this year’s Booker Prize. Both piece and book are recommended. (The Observer) (The Rest of Our Lives)

👍 That’s your Early Line for the day

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