In your briefing today:

📣 It’s being branded a “humiliation” for Keir Starmer: a vast tranche of WhatsApp messages revealed in the latest Mandelson files shows in-fighting among ministers, and grave doubts about the direction of the government and the Prime Minister’s leadership. The files place Lord Mandelson at the centre of a web of gossip and intrigue, offering unsolicited advice and damning opinions on colleagues. (Independent)

📣 A court will hear more details of how former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell embezzled goods worth more than £400,000. Murrell will be in court during the hearing, which comes ahead of his sentencing later this month. (Daily Record)

📣 More than 60% of people in the Northern Highlands are unhappy with he impact of the North Coast 500 on communities in the region, according to research commissioned by the popular tourist route.

It has brought with it a “huge” economic contribution, and supports around 1,335 jobs. But most residents do not think it acts “in the best interest of the local area”, and 90% of locals say they have seen signs of damage to the environment along the route.

The findings are an echo of a global debate about the impact of tourism on communities. (Press & Journal)

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📣 Campaigners have described a proposed £2 billion data centre in the Borders as a “monster” which would drain “the life and beauty from the landscape”. (BBC)

📣 STV has been given permission to reduce its regional news coverage as part of cost-cutting plans that put up to 60 jobs at risk. The changes will mean the effective end of an STV North bulletin broadcast from Aberdeen. (Times)

📣 A new train service between London and Stirling were suspended only a week into operation after the only train on the route broke down. More trains are due to arrive in the months ahead. (Scotsman)

📣 There’s a parrot loose in Inverness, and it’s causing “havoc” - including “hundreds of pounds worth of damage to cars”. (BBC)

📣 A large-scale Russian attack on cities across Ukraine has killed at least 10 people and injured dozens more, including children. (BBC)

📣 Tube strikes have started in London after last-ditch talks over drivers’ working weeks failed to find a solution. (Independent)

📣 It’s being called the “dig of the century”: a team of archeologists is digging down outside Paris’s Norte Dame cathedral and uncovering artifacts from the Roman era, 2,000 years ago. (AP has the exclusive)

📣 The company behind Claude AI - Anthropic - is to go public in a vast IPO later this year: it was valued at nearly $1 trillion earlier this year. (WSJ)

⚽️ It’s a “straight fight” between Martin O’Neill and Robbie Keane for the Celtic manager’s job, with Keane - who played for Celtic - due for an interview with the club’s major shareholder, Dermot Desmond, today. (The Sun has the exclusive)

⚽️ The President of the Scottish Football Association is very pleased with his choice of Steve Clarke as Scotland manager, as the World Cup approaches. “It might sound arrogant,” ventured Mike Mulraney, who also owns Alloa Athletic, “but I don’t need vindication.” (Daily Record)

🗣️ Reading through the Mandelson files last night, I’ll confess to a degree of weariness.

This is not - I promise you - some politically-motivated attempt to play down the embarrassment of Mandelson’s communications with senior members of the UK government.

Nor is it, in any way, an acceptance that some of his conduct - as revealed in all those messages - is somehow anything other than awful: nasty, slippery, sub-Machiavellian bile.

No. It’s more a question of: well, what did we expect? When people reveal themselves to you, through their words, their actions and - let’s face it - their two significant public scandals in decades gone by, we can’t subsequently affect to be vastly surprised when a tranche of messages emerge which show them to be… well, slippery, nasty and sub-Machiavellian. (Sub-Machiavellian, I should add, because old Niccolò understood the importance of getting the dirty work done in the shadows, never to be spotted. Mandy, it appears, never truly grasped that important point).

So I struggle to get all aflutter at those messages, I’m afraid. Reaction across Fleet Street varies, however.

For the Mail, the big reveal is “the fear and loathing at the heart of Keir Starmer’s government”. For the Express, it’s the words used by Pat McFadden to describe Labour MPs’ apparent love of taxing people. Simon Walters, in the Independent (£), thinks the same exchange could “destroy Labour for a decade”.

There are slightly cooler voices, too. John Crace has been on a rich vein of form in recent days - his review of the Nicola Sturgeon interview was cutting - and articulates his own exasperation very neatly. “Hell, there were enough warnings,” he writes.

“If you weren’t put off by him twice being sacked from government, his close associations with Jeffrey Epstein and allegedly leaking inside information to a US bank, surely the emails begging for ministers to vote for him to become Oxford chancellor […] and the requests to delay taking up the role of ambassador so he could clean up in China with a public-speaking gig should have raised a few red flags. But apparently not.”

No, apparently not.

He goes on to note “betrayal is in Mandelson’s lifeblood” - in his dismissal of Wes Streeting, to appears to view Mandelson as some form of mentor, as “pathetic”. Or in his knifing of Pat McFadden, who made the mistake of confiding in the veteran only to be branded an insignificant lightweight in another aside.

“And what does Mandy get in return for his disloyalty?” asks Crace. “Just about everything he’s always wanted.”

For Patrick Maguire at the Times, the absence of Keir Starmer from the documents speaks volumes. It reveals, he says, “the prime minister does not set any direction for this government and so it does not have one,” he writes.

For Maguire, it’s possible to read too much into the more damning excerpts from all this correspondence. If the PM had not left a vacuum of strategy, he says, Mandelson wouldn’t be in a job in the first place, and his colleagues wouldn’t be complaining of Downing Street’s dysfunction.

But Keir wasn’t leading. “So they cycled through half-baked solutions. A spad here or there to replace the ‘highly sub-optimal personnel in No 10’; a ministerial job running Downing Street for Baroness Smith of Malvern; […] and a think tank that could invent a political strategy for a leader utterly uninterested in strategy, politics or thinking.”

Over at the Telegraph, meanwhile, Tim Stanley reckons the files are “a hoot”.

“What we must never assume is that politicians are on the make – oh no,” snorts Stanley. “Not Mandy, who appears in the files begging for votes for Oxford chancellor, or asking that his appointment as ambassador be delayed so he can deliver a talk in China (less an alarm bell than a clashing gong).

“His MO was simple,” he adds: “praise, advise, trade gossip”.

But another reason for the weariness, perhaps, is the wearing down of any belief in politics and its purpose. You read through all these messages, all the energy expended on tittle-tattle, and you wonder: what was it all for? What was the purpose? What good did it all do?

And, as when watching our former First Minister on Sunday morning, you realise it was all for nought. Absolutely nothing. No good came of it at all. And that’s wearying too, isn’t it?

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