In your briefing today:

📣 Keir Starmer offered his apologies for believing Peter Mandelson’s “lies” about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein during his appointment as Britain’s ambassador to the US. “None of us knew the depths and the darkness of that relationship,” Starmer said.

But, amid pressure from Labour MPs, he is continuing to resist calls to sack his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who is regarded as having been a close ally of Mandelson, and a key figure in persuading Starmer to appoint him to the ambassadorial role last year. (Independent)

📣 Criminals born as men should be allowed to live “fully as a woman” and be housed alongside women in the prison estate, lawyers for the Scottish Government have argued. Requiring them to be housed in men’s prisons, in new transgender prison wings, could drive them to suicide, they claimed.

The arguments were made in the Court of Session, where campaign group For Women Scotland has brought a judicial review seeking to have prison rules, which say men can be placed in female jails if they say they identify as trans, ruled unlawful. (BBC)

📣 Why is it so wet in the north east of Scotland? This year has not been a good one, meteorologically, for that part of the world: after 10 days of snow at the start of the year, it’s rained relentlessly: “the longest sunless period in the area since Met Office records began in 1957”, according to a BBC long read on the subject.

It’s hampered North Sea operations, caused the cancellation of Aberdeen v Celtic this week, and is even killing puffins. And it’s depressing to live through.

A map of January rainfall shows how bad it’s been in that corner of the country, with many of the rest of us seeing either normal or well-below normal amounts of rain through the same period. And, yes, Inverness - the comparative dryness of which I’m starting to obsess over - is one of those areas below average. (BBC)

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📣 NHS Scotland will need to find “heroic improvements in efficiency or significant reductions in patient demand” to stop its services deteriorating, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned. The think tank says that, in the wake of last month’s Scottish budget, other areas of public spending may need to be cut to prop the NHS up. (Herald)

📣 Changes to “highly toxic” street drugs being sold in Scotland could kill users, Public Health Scotland has warned. A new sedative drug, medetomidine, has been detected in drugs sold as heroin and street benzos. (STV)

📣 Hundreds of Scotland fans have missed out on tickets after they clicked on an “easy access” option on an official ticket website, not realising it was for disabled fans only. (Daily Record)

📣 Iran and the US will meet in Oman for talks over the Middle Eastern country’s nuclear programme, amid fears of a regional war. (AP)

📣 The army has been deployed in Spain after Storm Leonardo battered parts of the country, causing floods and landslides and leaving rivers and reservoirs full. (Independent)

📣 Voyeurs are placing cameras in Chinese hotel rooms and selling the resulting footage, sometimes broadcast live, to thousands of online viewers. (BBC)

⚽️ Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is on the brink of a move to Celtic: he’s been without a club since leaving Besiktas in the summer. The 32-year-old is expected in Glasgow today to complete a deal for the rest of this season, with an option for another year. (Daily Record)

⚽️ Aberdeen want to take on Norwegian Erik Horneland as their new manager: he’s just left French side Saint-Etienne. (Sun)

🏉 France swept aside Ireland 36-14 to open this year’s Six Nations with a bonus-point win, showing in the process why they’re favourites to win this year’s tournament. It was as bruising to Irish egos as it was their bodies, writes Jonathan Bradley. (BBC)

🗣️ The Spectator leads on “how to fight the AI revolution”, in its cover story “AI-pocalypse now”. What will this revolution look like? The magazine reckons it is “the most consequential technological development since the splitting of the atom”. It’s just that nobody’s quite sure how it’ll pan out.

“Last month, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s co-founder, suggested that humanity is unprepared for the AI Götterdämmerung in a blog entitled ‘The Adolescence of Technology’,” the magazine notes in a leader. “He is responsible for Claude, one of the most popular AI chatbots, so the essay reads a little like Victor Frankenstein warning the villagers that his latest creation is not entirely friendly.”

This being The Spectator, thought turns to government policy. Britain, because of its large service economy, is particularly exposed to AI’s risks. “So far, there is little evidence that ministers are thinking seriously about what this technology means for the country,” it notes.

“Ministers must be honest with the voters about AI’s ramifications: it should be treated neither as a panacea nor a phantom, but as a massive disruption that we must plan for with care. The development of AI infrastructure needs to be sped up, enabling homegrown companies to compete with foreign equivalents. (The Spectator £)

🗣️The New Statesman sees “a very Labour weakness” in the Mandelson scandal, but Ailbhe Rea fails to identify it in a long cover story about the scandal. She does, however, delve deeply into the role played by Morgan McSweeney, who is described as an ardent admirer of Mandelson’s capabilities and campaigned within Number 10 for his appointment as ambassador to the United States.

Her piece also paints a picture of Mandelson being heavily involved, albeit indirectly, in many of Keir Starmer’s key decisions when he arrived in Number 10: a “lost” McSweeney, struggling to operate in the new environment, consulted constantly with his mentor.

“As one person who worked with McSweeney in opposition puts it, ‘Morgan wouldn’t breathe without consulting Mandelson first.’ ‘They talked all the time,’ observes another.” (New Statesman £)

🗣️The New World features an oddly stomach-churning photomontage of Nigel Farage with a blonde bob on its cover, and asks: “Are you Liz Truss in disguise?”. Aha: all is explained.

Inside, Paul Mason reckons a flood of defections from the Conservatives mean Reform UK is becoming “the even nastier party” - a blend of the worst of Trussnomincs and the worst of racist nativism. He thinks the party will struggle to create a coherent policy platform from the patchwork of views - some quite extreme - which now inhabit its ranks.

“There is now, at the very least, a competition between the ‘respectable’ ex-Tories and the street populists - like Zia Yusuf and Matt Goodwin - over who will set the tone for Reform, and who are key to its outreach to the unashamed fascist plebs.” (The New World)

🗣️ The Economist notes that the dollar is in some bother: since January 2025, when Trump returned to the White House, the dollar has lost a tenth of its value against a basket of other currencies. It’s partly to do with narrowing interest rate gaps between the US and other countries. But it’s also to do with “spasms of investor panic”, such as those around Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.

“Volatile policymaking and a falling exchange rate make holding the dollar riskier than for decades.” (The Economist £)

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