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In your briefing today:

• “Hero” train worker in life-threatening condition after train attack

• The many (many) columns on “open” marriage spawned by Lily Alan’s album

• Politicians are to blame for the state of the NHS, says a former minister

• Celtic win Old Firm cup battle - but Rangers left furious by referee’s call

📣 A “heroic” train worker, credited with saving many people’s lives during a mass stabbing on an LNER train on Saturday evening, was in a life-threatening condition in hospital this morning. (Sky News) (Guardian)

Eleven people were taken to hospital after the attack, nine of them with life-threatening injuries. Five have now been discharged.

One man, aged 32, is being held on suspicion of attempted murder. He’s been described as black and British, and police say the attack was not terror-related. The attacker told one passenger: “The Devil is not going to win”. (Mail)

• Live coverage: BBC | Mirror

• Heroes on the 6.25: the incredible bravery of passengers who threw themselves in front of the train knifeman to protect strangers (Mail)

• Devil on the 18:25: “Possessed” train knifeman seen swaggering down platform as passengers run for lives (Sun)

📣 Supporters of Alex Salmond have accused his “enemies” of leaving him penniless despite failing to defeat him in court. The Sunday Times reported yesterday that Salmond had almost no financial reserves when he died, having spent more than £500,000 fighting two court battles to defend his reputation.

Fergus Ewing, the former SNP MSP and minister in Salmond cabinets, said: “The costs involved were enormous and the prosecution against him arose, in substantial part, from motives of malice on the part of his enemies.”

He defined those “enemies” as a group of civil servants who campaigned to have Salmond prosecuted. “They couldn’t bring him down in court but they brought him down financially,” he added. (Times £) (BBC)

• Iain Macwhirter: Alex Salmond has been denied his rightful place in history (Times £)

📣 The sole survivor of the Air India plane crash, in which 241 people died, has said he feels like the “luckiest man” alive - but is also suffering physically and mentally from his ordeal. Viswashkumar Ramesh, who lives in Leicester, says he has struggled with PTSD since walking away from the disaster. (BBC) (Sky News)

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AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 Former health secretary Jeanne Freeman says the state of the NHS is down to the failures of successive governments, including her own. She said the business of politics too often got in the way of fixing the NHS’s problems. (BBC)

• Stephen Daisley: SNP ministers would much rather recline in their comfort zone of fantasy politics than confront fiscal reality (Mail)

📣 Falkirk Council will have to spend millions to repair a primary school it built in the mid-2000s after a series of major defects were found - including flammable construction materials, a poorly-installed fire alarm system, and failed connections between a balcony and the main structure. (The Herald has the exclusive)

📣 Russian aggression could target as many as seven sites in the north of Scotland, from North Sea oil rigs and subsea cables to military bases and energy firms, according to a P&J investigation. (Press & Journal)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 A powerful earthquake has killed at least 20 people in Afghanistan, with scores injured and the toll expected to increase. (BBC) (Reuters)

📣 China waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation over two years against staff from Sheffield Hallam University, documents have revealed. (BBC)

📣 The US government shutdown is approaching its sixth week, and is now at risk of becoming the longest-ever. (AP)

📣 Pregnant women are being warned about the risks of private baby scans, with unqualified sonographers giving out bad advice and misdiagnosing problems with pregnancies. (BBC)

SPORT

⚽️ A tumultuous Old Firm league cup semi final saw Celtic run out 3-1 winners, securing the right to meet St Mirren in the final next month: a bloody nose for new Rangers manager Danny Rohl, a return to familiar winning ways for Celtic stand-in Martin O’Neill, in his 28th Old Firm clash. (BBC)

The debate about the game’s events will occupy the back pages for a few days yet, however: a red card, and a red card that wasn’t, has sparked furious debate. It was a game typical of the Old Firm genre. (Daily Record)

• Will O’Neill still be in charge at Celtic for the final? (BBC)

• Keith Jackson: Celtic master O’Neill teaches pupil Rohl a hard lesson, but Rangers display suggests something (Daily Record)

• Alan Pattullo: St Mirren and Hearts will be rubbing their hands (Scotsman)

🏉 Harri Morris made his Scotland debut on Saturday: it was a “full circle moment” for the hooker, whose mum Woody Morris used to present Scotsport Rugby Roundup on STV. She used to take baby Harri to Murrayfield, and did a photoshoot when she was expecting him, alongside Scotland greats Scott Hastings and Sean Lineen. (Scotsman)

IDEAS
What we learned at the weekend: Chancellor’s grim choice | Andrew’s impact | Lily Alan’s album prompts “open” marriage debate | Are you a social vampire?

🗣️ The Chancellor is stuck between a rock and a political hard place, writes Andrew Rawnsley. The decision on whether Rachel Reeves should put up the basic rate of income tax in England and Wales by 2p, or not touch it (as promised in Labour’s manifesto last year) is “the big strategic call of this parliament”.

The “fiscal rock” is the state of the UK’s finances. The “political hard place” is breaking that pledge when Labour is already floundering in the polls, made worse by a parliamentary Labour party that is in no mood to see budgets cut or welfare reformed.

The £40 billion hole she faces is huge: 2p on the basic rate, so politically fraught, fills “only” £14 billion of that. Yet it may be the easiest way to raise money fast.

Rawnsley says the Chancellor has yet to make up her mind which way to jump. It’s a choice few would relish making. (The Observer)

🗣️We continued to pick over the bones of Andrew’s expulsion to Sandringham (although that may end up being a “lavish Abu Dhabi palace” according to the Sun).

One of the columns of the weekend was Camilla Long’s coruscating effort in The Sunday Times (£), in which she says Andrew and Sarah Ferguson present a compelling case for a radically reshaped Royal family.

“To read anything about Andrew now, or even Sarah Ferguson, is to be beckoned into a disgusting, electrifying maelstrom of overspending, grifting, splurging, shame and greed.,” she writes. “How can I put it? They are ill.” Long points to a number of stories linking Andrew with alleged spies, who viewed him as “desperate”.

“Only William grasps the extent of the problem, and knows that it goes far beyond Virginia Giuffre,” writes Long. It’s time for a “massive cleanse” of the Royal family, she says: there may not be many left in “the firm” once it’s done.

🗣️ Lily Alan’s new album, West End Girl, is the record that has spawned a million columns: all of them agreeing that non-monogamous, or “open”, marriages are a really bad idea. “Women across the country have spent a week devouring West End Girl,” says Sophie Heawood in the Observer, “with its 14 catchy but devastating pop songs about the disintegration of Allen’s marriage.”

At the core of that disintegration was that her ex-­husband, the actor David Harbour, allegedly wanted their marriage to be “open”. As Alan puts it in one song, Madeline, “We had an arrangement, be discreet and don’t be blatant. There had to be payment, it had to be with strangers.”

Such arrangements are “a risky business emotionally”, one psychotherapist tells Jessica Murray in the Guardian. In Unherd, Sarah Ditum says Alan has exposed a “cult”: “For the last few years, the message that open relationships are the enlightened path has been almost inescapable,” she writes. “The Girl of West End Girl is not liberated by her experiences: she is exhausted, drained and depressed.”

Victoria Richards in the Independent says that “not only does the album cover the ignominy of being cheated on in plain sight in the name of ‘ethical non-monogamy’ – and the simple, brutal indignity of dating – but it unravels the pain of the breakdown of a marriage when you have children.”

And in the Telegraph (🎁 gift link), Rowan Pelling warns: “If a man is told that he’s allowed a teensy sliver of leeway in terms of fidelity, what he will hear is: “Do what you please, big boy!”

Don’t say you weren’t warned, Early Liners.

🗣️ Are you a social vampire, or a social butterfly? If you’re a little too fond of the sound of your own voice, hungry for attention, dictating the conversation and sucking the energy out of the room, you may not like the answer you get in the Telegraph’s quiz. (Telegraph)

👍 That’s your Early Line for the day

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