👋 Good morning! It (really is) Saturday 21 February 2026. I’m Neil McIntosh, editor of The Early Line, and it’s great to have you here.
⚠️ Whoops! Apologies all, for the accidental send of this edition yesterday afternoon. The Early Line - as the name suggests - is always written early, between 5am and 7am.
But with a day off from the day job, I took the chance to get ahead - and a lie-in today - by preparing your Party Line in advance. By accident, and habit, I hit “send now”, rather than “send later”.
This edition is the same as sent to you yesterday, but repeated to make sure it’s where you’d expect it in your inbox.
🙏 Thanks, as ever, for your continuing support of The Early Line as a paid subscriber.
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Have a wonderful weekend, all!
🌧️ The weekend’s weather: It’s going to be a wet weekend for Glasgow, Edinburgh and Inverness, although Aberdeen will see less rain today, and maybe even some sunshine tomorrow. London will be dry today, wet tomorrow. (Here’s the UK forecast).
And here’s all you need to know this morning:
SIX THINGS TO TALK ABOUT
Ukraine: a war foretold | The adult gap year | Cut your cancer risk with food | The madness of Kid Nation, remembered | The Glasgow coffee house that’s the UK’s finest | La Casa, a remarkable Scottish home
🍸 “A war foretold” is a remarkable piece of reporting by Shaun Walker of the Guardian: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine, but struggled to get anyone to listen.
Even in the final days before the invasion, vital players - such as France, Germany and even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy - failed to see disaster approaching.
It’s well worth your time this morning.
There’s a lot that is new here, but also older knowledge placed within a new context. For instance, we knew that Putin was turned towards his plan - turned mad? - during the Covid lockdown of 2020, when - isolated - he avidly read up on Russian history “and pondered his own place in it”.
What we couldn’t have seen, until now, was how a subsequent string of parliamentary and espionage actions was “Putin getting his ducks in a row before implementing the big Ukraine gambit,” as Walker puts it.
It’s a story which makes Ukraine’s partial success in repelling the Russian attack - at the cost of 55,000 Ukrainian, and 400,000 Russian, lives - all the more remarkable. They really did not have much time or ability to prepare because officials across Europe could not bring themselves to believe that Putin would act so irrationally, or in such a direct way.
Also poignant: the links within the piece to contemporary reporting, such as this piece from February 2022, which paint an accurate but slightly incredulous picture of the disaster that lay ahead. (Guardian)
Upgrade to read the full Party Line, and find out which Glasgow coffee house - a “hidden gem” - has been named the UK’s finest, and one of the best in the world. Plus: an utterly remarkable Scottish home on the market, the rise of the adult gap year, and how to reduce your cancer risk with particular foods.
PLUS: find top TV, film and sporting picks for the weekend, as the Winter Olympics winds up, and the Six Nations hots up.
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