TODAY’S WEATHER

☀️ It’ll be another sunny and warm day for Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. London will not be quite as hot as yesterday, but still nudge 30 degrees. (Here’s the UK forecast).

THE BIG STORIES
Failures that led to University of Dundee’s collapse | Europe’s talks with Iran | Tributes to Deacon Blue star

📣 Shocking failures in management and oversight have been blamed for the University of Dundee’s financial collapse, which has cost the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds and placed hundreds of jobs at risk.

In her independent report for the Scottish Funding Council, Professor Pamela Gillies found the financial failure was “self-inflicted” and due to factors unique to the University of Dundee, despite widespread pressures on the University sector.

Problems at Dundee included “poor financial judgement, inadequate management and reporting, poor monitoring of the financial sustainability key performance indicator, lack of agility in responding to a fall in income by the University leadership and weak governance in relation to financial accountability by the Court. Financial oversight was lacking when most needed,” wrote Professor Gillies.

“These failings were compounded by the top-down, hierarchical and reportedly over-confident style of leadership and management, a lack of transparency and clarity in respect of financial data, the promulgation of a positive narrative around financial matters and a culture in which challenge was actively discouraged.” (Read the full report)

• In the wake of the report’s publication yesterday, the interim principal of the University and two longstanding members of its governing body resigned. (BBC)

• Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth said there were “serious questions” to be answered after the report’s publication. She said she would give an update to Holyrood next week. (Scotsman)

• How one of the University’s most dramatic days unfolded, including reaction from staff and students. (Dundee Courier)

• The now-former interim principal, Shane O’Neill, has been recalled to give evidence alongside his predecessor, Iain Gillespie, to parliament next Thursday.

📣 Foreign ministers from across Europe will meet their Iranian counterpart today for talks after Donald Trump backed down from immediate threats to bomb Iran, and gave a two-week deadline for progress in negotiations. (BBC)

• Israel’s attack has exposed Iran’s lack of firepower - but conflict could yet turn in Tehran’s favour (Guardian)

📣 Tributes have been paid to Deacon Blue star James Prime, who has died at the age of 64. The band’s co-founder and keyboardist had been diagnosed with cancer. (BBC)

• Obituary: Jim Prime, widely admired lynchpin of Deacon Blue (Herald)

• The Herald looks back on an interview Prime gave last year, where he talked of coming from “a long line of piano players in my house”. (Herald)

IDEAS
From the weekly magazines: Netanyahu’s unflattering profile, the uncertain path to Middle Eastern peace, and the rise of “Nigel McFarage”

🗣️ The New Statesman carries a long profile of Benjamin Netanyahu by his former bodyguard, Ami Dror. Drop is now a businessman, and is described as “one of the leaders against judicial reform that began in Israel in 2022.” He also, by dint of his former job, someone who saw Netanyahu develop as a politician in the 1990s. The portrait is not flattering, but it’s a compelling read.

“You have to remember that the politicians you see on television or on a social media feed are not like that in real life,” he writes. “What you see on a screen is a show that is put on for your entertainment. When their lives depend directly on your decisions, you begin to understand them differently. Foibles appear that are not displayed on the show.

“You might think that you hate Benjamin Netanyahu. Trust me, if you spent five minutes in a room with him you would come out raving about how wonderful he is. He would lie to your face again and again and again. You wouldn’t even realise.”

Netanyahu is, says Dror, cynical about many thanks, but not about Israel itself. “He believes he has been ordained to save the country,” he says. “Such beliefs are the stuff that catastrophic leaders are made from.” (The New Statesman £)

🗣️Ian Rankin is guest diarist in The Spectator: he’s in entertaining form as he travels to Australia for book festival appearances. He doesn’t quite tell us not to take up running in later life - in fact, he says, “I’ve grown to enjoy it” - but found himself “undone by a particularly vicious stretch of uneven pavement”. Later, as a doctor “cheerily” concluded she couldn’t quite see bone in his elbow injury, he was passed some bad news: “I learned that people my age (65) don’t actually fall. Rather we ‘have a fall’. This is the stage of my life I have reached.” (The Spectator £)

🗣️Tim Shipman, The Spectator’s new-ish Political Editor, writes the magazine’s cover story: a look at the difficult position Keir Starmer finds himself in over Israel, and its war with Iran. It contains a modest scoop (I think): Starmer knew in advance of Israel’s plans, or that there had been war-gaming in the Foreign Office fully four days before their attacks started.

Starmer’s stance has been a “relentless emphasis on ‘de-escalation’ of the crisis, he writes, and that’s for a number of reasons.

They’re partly strategic - there is concern about what might come after a successful attempt at regime change in Iran. There are also legal concerns about Israel’s actions. And there are deep political concerns: “Labour’s soft left is no longer willing to tolerate a morally neutral stance on Israel,” writes Shipman.

Moreover, “‘The moral–outrage politics that lie beneath Gaza are more difficult for the party in the medium term than the Iraq war was,’ an MP says.” (The Spectator £)

🗣️The Economist profiles the rise of “Nigel McFarage”, saying Reform’s progress in Scotland - it now polls second here, with 25% support - “fractures the myth of a progressive Scotland”.

“Exceptionalism has weak foundations,” it says. “Data from 2022 show no statistically significant difference between England and Scotland” on social attitudes on issues such as abortion and divorce, and on economic issues such as inequality, state ownership and competition.

“Scotland has plenty of the fuel that sustains Mr Farage in England,” it says. “Scots are more supportive of immigration than the English, but the majority who think it too high has grown fast.

“Scots are just as mistrustful of MPs, the media and the British government as the English. They are no more supportive of trans rights, and just as sceptical of net-zero targets.”

It warns that “businesses and academics learned to bite their tongues” even if they were sceptical about the SNP’s case for independence. “In a small country, to doubt the governing party’s founding cause could be career-limiting,” it writes. “Fantasies went unchecked. And so if Mr Farage finds his make-a-wish politics thrives there, it is because the SNP has weakened the country’s immune system.” (The Economist £)

AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 Staff at the University of Edinburgh will strike today over budget cuts that unions say could lead to the loss of 1,800 jobs. The strike is intended to disrupt the University’s annual Open Day for prospective students and their families. (Herald)

📣 More than 300 jobs are at risk as an outsourcing firm says it plans to transfer operations from Scotland to South Africa. (STV News has the exclusive)

📣 We’re still short of water, despite recent rain: water levels in many of Scotland’s rivers could still “deteriorate quickly”, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency has warned. (Scotsman)

📣 Veteran SNP MSP Fergus Ewing will run as an independent at next year’s Scottish Parliament elections, after he confirmed in March he would not stand for the SNP. (BBC)

AROUND THE UK

📣 Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying vote hangs in the balance for England and Wales today. Earlier in the year it passed its second reading with a majority of 55, but doubts about the bill’s provisions, and the number of MPs who offered support only to enable a debate, mean today’s final vote is less certain. (Independent)

• The UK is “behind the curve” on assisted dying measures, says Leadbeater (The Guardian has the exclusive)

📣 A Labour MP has resigned in protest at the government’s plans to cut disability benefits. (Guardian)

📣 The UK may see its hottest day of the year so far today, with temperatures in the south expected to reach 33 degrees. (BBC)

SPORT

⚽️ It’s fixtures day: all the fixtures for the 2025-26 Scottish Premiership will be released this morning at 9am. The BBC has details, and is the easiest place to review them when they come out. (BBC)

⚽️ The Fifa Club World Cup may be derided, but it’s still allowing Lionel Messi to show he has a magic touch: he scored a wonderful free kick from 20 yards to deliver a 2-1 win for his Inter Miami side against Porto. (BBC)