In your briefing today:

📣 Keir Starmer remains in a dire position this morning, despite his key advisor’s resignation and attempt to take the blame for the Mandelson scandal.

His chief of staff, Mogan McSweeney, insisted he should take “full responsibility” for the PM’s decision to appoint Mandelson to the role of US ambassador.

But Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch says Starmer needs to “take responsibility for his own terrible decisions”.

Starmer meets his own backbench MPs in private later today: it’s certain that a large number now think he should also depart. (Live coverage: BBC)

📣 Tributes have been paid to Jeane Freeman, the former health secretary and campaigner who has died aged 72. Former SNP MSP and Chief Executive Mike Russell said she put “people, especially women, before party and politics” and called her “the most loyal and supportive of friends”. (Times - gift link)

📣 The Seattle Seahawks delivered a defensive masterclass to emphatically beat the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 60. Briton Aden Durde, Seattle’s defensive coordinator, played a pivotal role and became the first overseas coach to win in America’s biggest sporting event. (BBC) (🎥 Highlights) (🎥 Extended highlights)

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📣 Research shows “traumatised” shop workers are being routinely subjected to violence, with three-quarters of convenience stores and corner shops seeing trouble at least once a month. (Mail)

📣 A man is in hospital after an alleged daytime stabbing in Perth city centre. Two people have been arrested. (Courier)

📣 Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party will stand candidates in the Holyrood elections this year, it was decided at the founding of Your Party Scotland in Dundee. Co-founder Zarah Sultana said Scotland deserves better than “a politics that wears the veneer of progressivism”. (STV)

📣 Calum Watson had his car nicked - I share his pain, not to mention bafflement, at recently losing a trusty warhorse of a vehicle when far more expensive models lie unmolested nearby. He outlines six lessons he learned in the aftermath. (BBC)

📣 Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor leaked trade envoy reports to Jeffrey Epstein, sparking calls for him to also face a full criminal investigation for alleged misconduct in public office. (Sun)

📣 Japan’s conservative governing coalition has strengthened its grip on power with a landslide victory in elections. Sanae Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party won easily enough seats for an absolute majority: a coalition with the Japan Innovation Party gives her a supermajority. (Guardian)

📣 Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai has been jailed for 20 years after the Briton was found guilty, late last year, of charges of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces. Lai’s sentence was branded “punishment for dissent” by campaigners. (Independent)

🏉 The future of Scotland head coach Gregor Townsend is being questioned after his Scotland side’s Six Nations hopes ended at the first hurdle, and an 18-15 defeat to Italy in Rome. (Scotsman)

⚽️ Rangers and Celtic will face each other in the Scottish Cup quarter-finals, while cup holders Aberdeen or Motherwell will have to travel to Dunfermline. (BBC)

⚽️ Manchester City’s 2-1 win over Liverpool at Anfield was gloriously incident-packed, although VAR’s role at the end - denying a goal at the death - was a big talking point. It’s a shame: the goals, not least Szoboszlai’s incredible opener, should have taken the spotlight. (BBC report & highlights)

📣 The Mandelson scandal had thrown the spotlight on Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and long a controversial figure within Labour politics. Exactly what he meant to Starmer, the government, and the wider Labour Party may be something historians will argue over for years to come, however.

On the one hand: the conventional view, echoed by Labour acquaintances of mine who insisted McSweeney was something close - and I do not exaggerate - to political genius. That view is reflected by Patrick Maguire’s piece on him in the Times:

“Sir Keir Starmer has never led the Labour Party without Morgan McSweeney. He would never have become leader of the Labour Party without Morgan McSweeney. Everything he has done as leader of the Labour Party has been driven, to varying degrees, by Morgan McSweeney. The politics and people were those of Morgan McSweeney. The resignation of the prime minister’s chief of staff over one of those people, Lord Mandelson, means we are about to learn whether Starmer is capable of doing it himself. This particular lesson may conclude quickly.”

On the other hand, this (older) analysis from Adam Beinkov, who doesn’t buy the “McSweeney as slayer of the far-right” nor the idea of him as some sort of ace whisperer of British political opinion.

“The mythology about McSweeney somehow singlehandedly massively bucking the broader trend with ‘one of the most successful campaigns in British political history’ just doesn’t seem to stack up when you actually look at the numbers,” he wrote last summer.

“With every week that passes, it becomes clearer that the mythology surrounding Morgan McSweeney and his supposed political brilliance is grossly out of line with reality.”

Who’s right? Maybe there’s an element of truth in both. Or maybe they’re both at extremes. Although you might be justified in asking: under his guidance, just how well do people think it has gone?

📣 The Sunday Post offers an extraordinary statistic about Scotland’s youngest schoolchildren: a quarter of pupils entering P1 are “at risk of being overweight,” with one in eight “at risk of being obese.” And it’s the poorest who are the most severely affected: youngsters from the most deprived parts of the country are twice as likely to be obese as those from more affluent areas.

Experts say it’s all down to modern food, and the way it’s marketed. “Looking back to the 1970s, the problem of childhood obesity just didn’t exist,” says Dr Andrew Fraser of the think-tank Obesity Action Scotland. (Sunday Post)

📣 Olympians are often mad, of course, but that is what makes them great. I won’t pretend to have been caught up in Winter Olympic excitement just yet, but some stories crash into the mainstream: the tale of downhill skier Lindsey Vonn, 41, deciding to compete yesterday with a ruptured cruciate ligament in her left knee (and a replaced knee on he right), was one such breakthrough story.

So off she set. Within seconds she crashed - badly - and after half an hour was being airlifted to hospital, where she was described last night as being in a stable condition. She broke her left leg.

It was never just about winning, writes Bryan Armen Graham, who assesses Vonn’s legacy and what must, now, be the end of her top-class career.

Meanwhile, Time has a moving account of watching her attempt alongside her family: the anguish it describes reminds us these competitors, doing things most of us would never even consider in the name of winning, are human too, and surrounded by humans who fret for them every step, and stumble, of the way. (Time)

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