In your briefing today:

📣 Police are investigating donations worth £500,000 made to Reform UK by the mother of convicted fraudster and Nigel Farage ally, George Cottrell. The probe centres on two £250,000 donations made by Fiona Cottroll, who is said to be of modest means, and concern they were intended to conceal a donation made by an impermissible donor.

The latest allegations appear to be separate from another deposit of £1 million made to Reform UK’s deputy leader, Richard Tice. Bankers haven’t been able to trace the origin of that money, it is claimed.

Lawyers for George Cottrell, who is resident in Montenegro, say he is a permissible donor, but have refused to explain how this is the case. (The Guardian)

📣 Several former SNP councillors and party officials are demanding an investigation into the party’s former auditors for failing to spot Peter Murrell’s £400,000 embezzlement. They’ve complained to the chartered accountancy industry regulator about Johnston Carmichael, which audited the party’s accounts until it resigned in 2022. They say the auditor “may not have responded appropriately to multiple counts of suspicious behaviour” or escalated their findings to senior party figures. (Mail)

📣 There was violence in Paris and London after France beat Morocco in the World Cup quarter-final. In London’s Edgware Road a police officer was injured and four people injured after disorder involving a group throwing bottles and setting off fireworks. (Sky News)

In Paris, celebratory scenes turned violent - again - and police used water cannon to disperse a large group of people who had been targeting them with fireworks and stones. Around 10 people were arrested. (Mail)

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📣 The leader of hard-right Restore Britain has been criticised after he described the Dunblane school massacre, in which 16 children and their teacher were killed, as “one murder”. Rupert Lowe was calling for a relaxation of the UK’s gun laws. (STV)

📣 A woman has told of how her brother died in agony, alone, after twice being refused an ambulance after suffering an aortic dissection. Scottish Ambulance bosses have found his case was wrongly logged. (Daily Record has the exclusive)

📣 An investigation has been launched after yesterday’s big fire on Princes Street in Edinburgh, which gutted the former Debenhams department store building. The building, now a dangerous shell, will disrupt the city centre for some time yet. (Edinburgh Live)

📣 STV will broadcast its final news programme from Aberdeen later today. (STV)

📣 Andy Burnham has been backed by the vast majority of Labour MPs to succeed Sir Keir Starmer: he remains the only declared candidate after nominations opened yesterday. (BBC)

📣 Former Conservative MP and minister Ann Widdecombe has died aged 78, it was announced this morning. (Mail)

📣 The Bayeux Tapestry has been delivered successfully to the British Museum in an operation carried out in the dead of night. It goes on display in September: there’s been a huge clamour for tickets, which are now sold out into next year. (BBC)

📣 There have been further exchanges of fire between the US and Iran overnight, with the use of force escalating and continuing to involve Iran’s neighbours in the Gulf region. (AP)

📣 Eight men have been indicted on murder and conspiracy charges for their roles in a thwarted plan to attack the UFC cage fighting show staged at the White House in June. An affidavit claims they planned to fly explosive-laden drones into the event and then shoot panicked crowd members as they fled. (AP)

⚽️ France didn’t quite ease into the semifinals of the World Cup - Morocco put up too much of a fight for that - but in the end their 2-0 win was comfortable enough. Mbappe missed a penalty in the first half, but his curling, long-distance strike in the 60th minute was wonderful, and Ousmane Dembele put the cherry on top six minutes later. (Report & highlights)

⚽️ English anxiety is building ahead of their game with Norway tomorrow: defender Marc Guehi is nursing a minor hamstring injury, and Declan Rice is suffering from a sickness bug. (BBC)

🗣️ A sanctioned Russian industrialist argues in the Economist that the West's post-war plans for Russia - humiliation, absorption into China's orbit, fragmentation, or permanent siege - all share the same flaw: each strips Russia of sovereignty, and a state without sovereignty cannot be a reliable partner to any peace deal.

Andrey Melnichenko’s essay - a cagey, difficult read - has a structural rather than moral claim at its heart: a “supplicant” Russia just stores up trouble for later. Think Versailles after the First World War, rather than the post-1945 rehabilitation of Germany and Japan. We don’t want to go there.

He argues that, despite that, the West's current approach - backing Ukraine "for as long as it takes" - has become a strategy of attrition that puts off the question of what security order should exist in Europe, while shifting the grim human cost onto Ukrainians and Russians.

He warns that with nuclear weapons in the mix, there’s an existential threat: history shows escalation of conflict doesn’t necessarily stop at a rational point.

Sanctions, he says, taught Russia's business and creative classes that global integration was never neutral - pushing them toward building sovereign, domestic institutions instead.

He frames the real global choice as being between predictable, sovereign powers and one whose trajectory nobody can shape or forecast. (Economist (£))

🗣️ It’s an intriguing essay, and The Economist makes a lot of its scoop. An accompanying leader points out Mr Melnichenko is “hardly a member of the anti-Putin opposition” - indeed, he’s an insider whose businesses have supported the Russian war economy.

But that makes the fact he’s speaking out - and he’s the first oligarch in Russia to do so at such length - all the more interesting. “He is talking now because he and his fellow tycoons can no longer afford to ignore the rot in a country they watched descend into tyranny,” the newspaper says.

In the 1843 long read section, they run an interview with Melnichenko, whose companies account for nearly 1% of Russia’s GDP. His account of a meeting with Putin makes clear his sympathy for his President’s views.

He understands the risks of speaking out. “If you don’t participate,” he tells the newspaper, “you exclude yourself from your own future”. (Economist (£))

🗣️ After all that grand geopolitical thinking, discussion of Nigel Farage and the Clapton byelection feels like moving from chess to Connect 4, but that’s where the New Statesman goes with its cover story on “Nigel Farage, the confidence trickster”.

Writes Tom McTague: “Farage’s decision to resign as an MP before the findings are published looks like a transparent attempt to pre-empt the ruling, taking back the initiative and turning the pressure on his opponents.”

But McTague also argues: “His latest display was a reminder – if anyone needed one – of why Farage is such a formidable politician. Part of the art of politics is to define the terrain on which you wish to fight.”

And yet… maybe the magazine had to go to press before the full nature of the fight in Clacton became clear. It doesn’t feel like Farage - now in a contest against a man with a bin on his head and no mainstream candidates - isn’t fighting on any sort of desirable battlefield at all. (New Statesman)

🗣️Does China have its own Star Wars plan - a way to destroy Starlink, the satellite system which provides the internet to tens of millions of people, including Ukraine’s military? The answer - after a year-long investigation by a trio of European news titles - appears to be yes.

Even more alarmingly, the plan appears to be heavily backed by China and its technology, which will alarm Western leaders who’d long suspected China was being much more supportive of the Putin regime than it was letting on, but lacked evidence. (Spectator (£))

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