TODAY’S WEATHER

☀️ The weather is largely fine today across the country: dry in Glasgow, Aberdeen and London, with a brief shower risk in Edinburgh at lunchtime. Enjoy it while it lasts - there are weather warnings for torrential rain and thunderstorms in the days ahead. (Here’s the UK forecast)

THE BIG STORIES
Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear sites, killing scientists and military leaders | Search on for cause of plane disaster

📣 Israel launched strikes against Iran overnight, hitting nuclear sites and targeting senior military figures. The attacks killed at least two military leaders: the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ commander and the country’s Armed Forces’ Chief of Staff. Senior nuclear scientists were also killed. Iran quickly retaliated, sending 100 drones towards Israel. (BBC Live coverage)

• Some form of attack from Israel had been expected in recent days as tensions rose over Iran’s nuclear programme. It had been censured, again, for refusing to work with international inspectors. After that move, Iran said it would establish a third nuclear enrichment site and put more advanced equipment to work. (AP)

• Israel's President Benjamin Netanyahu said the strikes were “targeted” at Iran’s military threat, saying that "if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time".

• Footage showed explosions and buildings ablaze in Tehran (🎥 BBC)

📣 What could have caused that horrific plane crash in India yesterday? The focus of recovery efforts in Ahmedabad has switched to locating Flight AI171’s flight recorders to help understand what caused the Boeing 787-Dreamliner to crash only moments after takeoff, killing 241 people on board. One of those flight recorders has been found, it’s being reported. (Guardian live coverage) (BBC)

• Today’s newspapers, meanwhile, focus on the remarkable story of the British man who was the sole survivor of the disaster. Hailed as “the miracle of seat 11A”, Viswash Ramesh escaped the plane. His younger brother Ajay died. (Mail)

• Ramesh was pictured walking away from the wreck. “Thirty seconds after takeoff there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly,” he told the Hindustan Times. (Guardian)

• Captain Sumeet Sabharwal issued a frantic mayday moments before the crash, saying the plane was “losing power”. (Sun)

IDEAS FROM THE WEEKLY MAGAZINES
Starmer vs Cummings: two very different views on how to fix Britain

Two magazines, two long reads, two profoundly different political outlooks. 

In The New Statesman, a long and beautifully written profile, based on deep access, of Sir Keir Starmer. On the Spectator’s website, the transcript of a speech, furiously articulate, delivered by former Boris Johnson aide, Dominic Cummings.

🗣️The New Statesman profile of Starmer paints a rich picture of a thoughtful, cautious and occasionally awkward Prime Minister, and also one that might belong to a different age.

He leads a country that, “from 2008, […] has stumbled from one crisis to the next: financial, political, medical, social”. The open question throughout: is this very decent man the right one for this age? Is his plan to defend the existing order “through retrenchment and steady reform” one that will hold?

Here’s a key paragraph - although the whole, long piece - What Keir Starmer Can’t Say - is worth the cost of the magazine by itself:

“His lack of ideology means you hear much clearer explanations about the depth of Britain’s malaise from his aides than you do from him. Starmer has been warned by some that too much of the conversation in government feels like it belongs to “a previous world”, before Donald Trump and Ukraine, Gaza and the technological revolution. Where Starmer sees a failure of leadership, his closest aides see a more troubling systemic breakdown. […] Starmer has been warned that this failure had led to an even deeper crisis – a crisis of national purpose. ‘What is the way of life we are defending?’ one aide asked him in a note. ‘A country can only come together as a social democracy or come together to defend itself if it believes it is worth defending.’

“It is in such interactions that an incoherence at the heart of this government can be glimpsed: between those who see deep structural challenges and looming political dangers, and those who believe such talk alarmist and overblown.” (New Statesman £)

🗣️The Cummings speech transcribed in The Spectator offers an answer: no, this gradualism is nothing like enough.

We need revolution - “Westminster must fall”, says the headline. If you read the ideas section of this email yesterday, you’ll have read an excerpt of Allister Heath’s angry denunciation of what Britain has become, from the Telegraph. Cummings’ “the whole thing is broken” theme echoes Heath’s: his ideas are gaining momentum on the right, a switch of attention from the old bogeymen of the European institutions, to Britain’s own.

“The old political parties, the old Whitehall institutions, the old media, the old universities, the old courts constitute a political regime. This regime has become cancerous,” he told the audience. “The cancer has metastasised and the cancer is attacking everything healthy in the country; all the healthy institutions and healthy impulses are the target of Whitehall.

“We’ve got to deal with the dysfunction of Westminster. We have to return to a civilisation in this country where other parts of the country can actually build things and do things,” he said.

As a start, he called for a replacement of the schools system. “The old European (system of) education and the institutions […] is doomed. New things are definitely going to come. And the sooner the people like those in this room start building them, what comes next, the better.” (The Spectator - free to read)

🗣️The pieces share an acknowledgement of how broken Britain is, and paint clear but wildly different pictures of the ideas on offer to fix it.

In the words of Tom McTague, author of that masterful profile, either Starmer becomes “the country’s first normal prime minister”, or “the Britain we saw last summer will break out again, and he will be remembered as the last leader of the old normal, the final defender of the shaky post-2008 world before it was dragged into a new state by the figures now jockeying for mastery of the populist right.”

Cummings, then, offers a picture of how revolutionary that world might be.

AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 There are fresh “limogate” claims in today’s Mail: that Scottish Health Secretary Neil Gray used an official car to be chauffeured to the pub, and then on to a pivotal Aberdeen match. The trips, made in May 2024, were logged as trips to and from a “personal address, Aberdeen”, with the true destination only being revealed through the Mail’s investigations. (The Mail has the exclusive)

📣 CalMac’s MV Caledonian Isles has seen its return from 18 months of repairs delayed again. The ship, which runs to and from Arran, has required extensive repairs, involving the removal of its engines, after corrosion was discovered. (BBC)

📣 Six Trustees of a East Ayrshire leisure centre have been fined a total of £11,825 for health and safety breaches which led to a disabled swimmer almost drowning in its pool. The fine followed another £10,000 fine, in 2019, after another near-drowning. (BBC)

📣 Tributes have been paid to academic and human rights campaigner Sir Geoff Palmer, who has died aged 85. The professor emeritus at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh became Scotland’s first black professor in 1989. (Scotsman)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 Britain will face higher taxes if the economy shrinks any further, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned. The warning came after news yesterday that the economy had contracted by 0.3%. (Independent)

📣 There’s been a fourth night of disorder in Portadown, Northern Ireland, with the violence being described as “racist” by senior police. (BBC)

📣 The UK will face torrential rain and thunderstorms in the days ahead - just as drought is declared in Yorkshire. (BBC)

📣 If Spotify died on you last night, here’s why: Google Cloud, which provides infrastructure for many online services, had problems around 8pm our time last night. (AP)

📣 New smart tyres being developed by Pirelli will be able to report on the condition of the roads they’re being driven on. A trial’s being launched in a region of Italy, where the data will be used to report back to local government on what’s needing fixed. No word on when they’re coming to Scotland… or how Scottish councils will cope with the cyber cacophony of complaining Pirellis when they do arrive. (Ars Technica)

SPORT

⚽️ Dumbarton will become the first SPFL club to be liquidated since Rangers, with a rescue plan for the troubled club now finalised. (Herald)

⚽️ Spurs announced Thomas Frank as their new manager, replacing Ange Postecoglou, who was sacked after finishing 17th in the Premier League - but also winning the Europa League. Frank joins from Brentford, which he established as a Premier League club on a tight budget. (Guardian)