In your briefing today:

📣 A high-stakes plan for the “King of the North” Andy Burnham to win a Westminster seat and challenge Keir Starmer for leadership of the Labour Party is starting to emerge.

Burnham, currently the Greater Manchester mayor, will ask to run for Labour in the nearby seat of Makerfield after its Labour MP, Josh Simons, said he’d resign to make way for him. Keir Starmer has said he will not block Burnham’s candidacy. (BBC)

Winning the byelection would allow Burnham to challenge Starmer. But it’s a strategy fraught with risk: he will face a tough fight to win the vote. In last week’s elections, Reform won 50.4% of the vote across eight wards in the constituency that were up for grabs. It came second for the parliamentary seat in the last election.

Nigel Farage said yesterday it would “throw absolutely everything” to halt Burnham, whom it regards as a far tougher opponent than Starmer. (Guardian)

📣 Scotland’s Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain, plans to stand down and First Minister John Swinney is searching for a successor, the Scotsman reports.

Ms Bain has been at the centre of a prolonged row over the dual role her job entails: the Lord Advocate is both the Scottish government’s most senior law advisor and Scotland’s top prosecutor. There have been demands to split the job in two. (The Scotsman has the exclusive)

📣 Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are holding their final round of talks in Beijing with the US president claiming many problems between the two have been “settled”. At send time, the two leaders are meeting in the walled-off Zhongnanhai complex, a secretive leadership compound. (Independent)

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📣 Nearly 500 complaints against Police Scotland lie unresolved more than a year after being made. (The Herald has the exclusive)

📣 A small number of people in Scotland have been linked to the hantavirus outbreak and are being tested, according to the national public health body. (BBC)

📣 Scotland’s retail bosses have made fresh pleas over taxation and red tape after sales in Scottish stores fell for a second month. (Scotsman)

📣 Nigel Farage bought a £1.4 million property with cash shortly after receiving a £5 million gift from crypto billionaire Christopher Harbone. The revelation came as the Reform UK leader appeared to change his line on the reason for the £5m gift, saying in an interview it was a “reward” for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years. (Guardian)

📣 Police have identified the three women found dead in the sea off Brighton this week: they were all related. (Mirror)

📣 Five Italians have died while exploring underwater caves in the Maldives (Independent)

📣 It’s the Eurovision song contest this weekend: Australia’s odds have shortened after its performer, Delta Goodrem, produced a “stunning” performance of her power ballad Eclipse at last night’s semi-final. (BBC)

⚽️ It was a penalty call which united the football world in condemnation, but Scottish referees boss Willie Collum has backed referee John Beaton for making the right decision - and giving Celtic that stoppage-time penalty against Motherwell.

The ref is said to have followed SFA guidelines on handball, which appears to vary in its interpretation of the handball rule by placing less emphasis on the intent of the handballer, and more emphasis on the position of the offending hand. (Sun)

🗣️ The Economist leans into an apocalyptic warning for its cover story this week: prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse, it says. “Society may be on the verge of a profound reallocation of resources, and political upheaval,” it says.

“Though the market will find uses for human labour even as models and robots become more capable, the quality of those jobs and the wages they pay are not guaranteed.

“As AI firms bid up the price of land and energy, the dollars people earn will go less far. Eventually humans could, like horses in the age of the car, become uneconomical. Income may go mostly or entirely to owners of capital, who then go on to spend it on things that are made by AI and robots using natural resources that they monopolise.”

What should governments do? “If employment falls, income that once went to workers is likely to show up as high profits in AI firms, chipmakers, data centres or elsewhere in the supply chain,” it notes. Clever tax reforms, including tougher inheritance tax to prevent “the entrenchment of a capital-owning elite”, would make the economy more efficient and fair.

The time to act is now, it says. “Concentrations of rent must be confronted early, before the power of rentiers is too great.” (The Economist (£))

🗣️ The Economist also calls for Sir Keir Starmer to quit. “His mission was to show that the fruits of sober, competent policymaking are worth more than the empty promises of demagogues,” it writes. “This week it became clear how abjectly Sir Keir has failed.”

“Prime ministers need authority and clarity,” it says in a leader. “Sir Keir, it turns out, has neither. He cannot articulate a vision. Nor is he grounded in one. Twenty-first century policymaking is so complicated that voters want to be able to trust that the prime minister has the instincts to appoint the right people, weigh the evidence and make sensible decisions. Yet voters have sniffed out what Sir Keir is made of.”

Whoever replaces him “will inherit an enviable majority, three more years in office and a loyal cat,” notes the newspaper. The cat is chief mouser Larry, who has seen Prime Ministers come and go in a flurry: he, by contrast, “has become a furry beacon of stability”. (The Economist (£))

🗣️ The New Statesman, as you might expect, is full of what just happened to the Labour Government, and what might happen next. Ailbhe Rea, the magazine’s political editor, paints a picture of a Prime Minister brusquely refusing to stand aside at the start of the week, and then getting on with every aspect of his job which did not involve speaking to rebellious colleagues (mostly dealing with Iran).

Andrew Marr has the more interesting contribution, however, because he delives into ideas on how the country digs its way out of the mess it finds itself in.

Yes, he paints an apocalyptic picture (and yes, I’m sorry that’s the second apocalyptic picture of the roundup). “Ahead of us is the possibility of a complete fiscal collapse."

Even worse is to come: “We probably have not yet seen anything like the full impact of the shortages and price rises caused by the Iran war. An angry public isn’t going to get any happier. The likeliest outcome is an eventual Reform government,” he warns.

But, he concludes: what the country - and the centre left - needs to fend off the populist right are two things: growth and security. He has lots of ideas to help fuel that, from backing 800 fast-growing tech companies to reforming taxation and ending the triple lock.

Most of all, he demands energy: “What is needed isn’t the digging up of surprising new ideas but genuine energy and heft from the centre to put the ideas already there into practice – something we haven’t had so far under Starmer.” (The New Statesman (£))

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