TODAY’S WEATHER

☁️ There’s the threat of rain this morning across Scotland, although Glasgow and Edinburgh should brighten up later. Aberdeen may be damp all day. London, like the lowlands, will dry out for the afternoon. (Here’s the UK forecast).

THE BIG STORIES
A stunning victory for Labour in South Lanarkshire | Trump and Musk hurl insults, as the world watches

📣 Labour is celebrating an “incredible” win in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election, defying grim national polls, landing an unexpected blow on the second-placed SNP and holding an insurgent Reform UK to third place.

Davy Russell became the new MSP with 8.559 votes. The SNP’s Katy Louden polled 7,957 and Reform’s Ross Lambie won 7,088 votes. The turnout was 44.2%.

A jubilant Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, told the BBC his party had "proven the pollsters wrong, the political commentators wrong and the bookies wrong".

Saying he believed he could now go on to win next year’s Holyrood elections, Sarwar said voters had shown they were “scunnered” with the SNP. “They want the SNP out of office,” he said. “Reform aren’t at the races”. (BBC) (STV)

• In his acceptance speech, Russell told supporters: “This community has sent a message to Farage and his mob: the poison of Reform isn’t us, it isn’t Scotland and we don’t want your division here.” (Guardian)

• The result is “a massive boost” to Scottish Labour, says David Wallace Lockhart, but there are some caveats. (BBC)

• “Anyone putting a tenner on Davy Russell at 1pm on Thursday would now be £110 up,” notes Andrew Learmonth. The “remarkable” result can be put down to a strong campaign. Sarwar was in the constituency almost every day for the last month. (Herald)

• The result was a “humiliation” for First Minister John Swinney, writes Tom Gordon. (Mail)

• Reform’s third place “makes life extremely uncomfortable for all the other parties,” reckons Tom Harris. (🎁 Telegraph - free to read)

📣 Elon Musk and Donald Trump hurled insults at each other in an extraordinary social media exchange which marked the end of their friendship and lucrative political alliance, and left Washington holding its breath at the prospect of each inflicting real-world damage on the other in the weeks ahead. (AP)

• “Elon Musk called for Donald Trump’s impeachment and mocked his connections to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as the US president threatened to cancel federal contracts and tax subsidies for Musk’s companies.” (Guardian)

• Timeline: the best buddies broadcast their breakup (🎁 Bloomberg - free to read)

• “Clash of the Titans”: Inside the Trump-Musk implosion (Semafor)

• When the end came, it was “every bit as lowdown, vindictive, personal, operatic, childish, messy and public as many had long expected,” writes Shawn McCreesh. (🎁New York Times - free to read)

• Eight ways Musk and Trump could inflict pain on each other (🎁New York Times - free to read)

• Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon called for the US government to seize SpaceX from Musk by invoking the Defense Production Act. (Mail)

• The feud has already cost Elon Musk $8.73 billion - his net worth has plunged, along with Tesla’s share price. (Guardian)

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FROM THIS WEEK’S WEEKLY MAGAZINES
Gove’s bet on Reform goes awry

🗣️ Sometimes, the fates can be cruel, especially to the editors of weekly print magazines. So spare a thought for Michael Gove, editor of The Spectator, who must have been pleased with this week’s cover story on the rise of Reform UK - “Nigel’s Army: Reform’s plans for victory” until… around 6pm yesterday, when news of its chair resigning broke. Just as the magazine hit the newsstands, and only a few hours before it came third in South Lanarkshire.

The now-former-Chair, Zia Yusuf, is quoted in the magazine describing Reform “as a ‘start-up’, breaking apart SW1’s monopolistic cartel”. Hours later, it’s a start-up that’s simply breaking apart. Who’d be an editor? (The Spectator £)

🗣️Philip Hensher is more entertaining, on the horror of the “experimental novel”. He highlights Eimear McBride’s rapturously received new novel, The City Changes Its Face, although “there is no shortage of other exemplars”. The trouble is, he sighs, “I’ve spent the past five years writing a history of the novel in Britain. One conclusion is that almost everything greeted as radical in the experimental novel was being done by novelists not just decades, but often centuries ago.” But realising that this New Thing has been done before is, of course, the curse of all true expertise. (The Spectator £)

🗣️The New Statesman focuses on “Britain’s new-build nightmare”, opening with a truly horrifying story about homeowners trapped in a decaying, damp, and rotting new-build block of flats in London. These near-million-pound flats are worth nothing now. The developer says, blandly, only that it is “working to find an acceptable solution”, while engineers say the place should be torn down. Meanwhile, across the country, an effective monopoly of a few big-name housebuilders is often doing little better - a big problem in a country that needs to build a lot of new homes, fast. (New Statesman £)

🗣️There’s a “stunning” decline in the preference of parents for having boys, notes The Economist in a leader. Part of the cause is the decline in “gendercide” over the last 15 years. But there are other signs that girls are preferred - for instance, parents who have a girl first are more likely to stop there. Firstborn boys are more likely to be joined by a sibling. Blame rising concerns about boys’ prospects, as well as cultural expectations about the role a girl will play later in life (caring for relatives). (Economist £)

🗣️The Economist has developed a “SCOTUSbot” - an AI tool to predict Supreme Court rulings. They fed the main briefs and oral-argument transcripts for 10 of the court’s biggest pending cases into ChatGPT, along with the same for three cases already decided. It did very well on the test cases, and its predictions on the 10 upcoming cases are interesting. (Economist £)

AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 Water restrictions could be imposed on businesses in the north and north-east of Scotland unless rainfall improves, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency has warned. (STV)

📣 BBC Scotland presenter Bryan Burnett is taking a break from his popular Get It On show to undergo treatment for a rare cancer, he told his listeners last night. (BBC)

📣 The fraudsters convicted in May of swindling the Scottish NHS of £6 million have been jailed for a total of 29 years. Judge Lord Arthurson said the corruption engaged in by the four men “was on a grand scale”. (Daily Record)

AROUND THE UK

📣 Reform UK chairman Zia Yusuf walked out on the party he was instrumental in professionalising, giving Nigel Farage only 10 minutes’ warning that he had concluded working for the party, and its ambition of putting Farage in Downing Street, was no longer a “good use of his time”. His departure came after he was critical of Sarah Pochin, Reform’s newest MP, calling for a burka ban at Prime Minister’s Questions. (Mail) (Times £)

• Yusuf was a central character in the rise of Reform - the party will miss his money, his heritage and his organisational abilities, says Chris Mason. (BBC)

• Reform’s non-stop psychodrama threatens to drive voters away, says Tony Diver. (🎁 Telegraph - free to read)

📣 Liz Truss is upset the Tories’ shadow chancellor has disavowed her hastily-reversed mini-budget of 2022. Mel Stride said it had damaged the party’s reputation for economic competence. Truss said Stride was a “creature of the system”. (Guardian)

📣 David Beckham will be awarded a knighthood in next week’s Birthday Honours List, with Sir David’s wife Victoria becoming Lady Beckham. (The Sun has the exclusive)

SPORT

⚽️ Rangers unveiled new head coach Russell Martin yesterday, with the new boss saying he wants to win trophies straight away. (The Sun)

• He was “dead keen” on getting the job, to the frustration of his agent. His appointment met with a “mixed” response from the club’s support. (Herald)

• The new head coach has admitted he’s a “weirdo” in the football world - he’s “a vegan Buddhist and fully paid-up member of the Green Party”. (The Sun)

⚽️ Scotland play Iceland tonight at Hampden, with manager Steve Clarke pleased his increasingly cosmopolitan array of stars have all made the training camp despite a gruelling season. Among them: right-back Max Johnston, who’s just won the Austrian Bundesliga with Sturm Graz. He’s yet another Scot doing well overseas. (Scotsman)

• Here’s the match, previewed. (BBC)