TODAY’S WEATHER

⚡️ We’ve a yellow ⚠️ weather warning for thunderstorms all day, across all of Scotland. That notwithstanding, it’ll be another sunny and warm day for Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. London likewise. (Here’s the UK forecast).

THE BIG STORIES
Tensions rise ahead of Trump/Putin summit | Nuclear accident at Faslane | UK economy’s growth slows

📣 Private diplomacy and public rhetoric is stepping up ahead of tomorrow’s summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Putin faces “very severe consequences”, Trump has warned, if he can’t agree a truce in Ukraine. But if the meeting goes well, the US President said, he’d push for a three-way summit with him, Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (Guardian)

• Zelensky has warned Donald Trump that Vladimir Putin is “bluffing” over his intentions to end the war in Ukraine, ahead of a crucial summit between the US and Russia on Friday. (Independent)

• Peace talks ahead of tomorrow’s Putin/Trump summit may be fraught, but Russia and Ukraine do communicate, secretly, to arrange trades of prisoners of war. (🎁 WSJ - gift link)

• Keir Starmer will greet Zelensky outside 10 Downing Street this morning, in a public show of support to the Ukrainian leader. The UK Prime Minister says he sees a “viable chance” of a ceasefire. (BBC)

• A way to secure that ceasefire would be a West Bank-style “occupation” of parts of Ukraine invaded by Russia. (The Times (£) has the exclusive)

📣 There was a serious nuclear incident at the Faslane naval base on the Clyde earlier this year, although details of the “Category A” incident - which carries an “actual or high potential for radioactive release to the environment” - are scant. Official figures show that the incident occurred between January 1 and April 22 this year. It’s not known whether a radioactive release actually occurred or if there was merely a high risk of one happening. (The Herald has the exclusive)

📣 The UK economy’s rate of growth slowed to 0.3% between April and June this year, figures released at 7am show. The numbers, although not as bad as some predicted, still aren’t a huge help to Chancellor Rachel Reeves who, as Harry Farley points out, made her “number one aim” to “kickstart economic growth.” They will also have implications for her autumn budget, where she is now expected to raise taxes on the well-off. (BBC)

• Treasury targeting inheritance tax reforms to reduce UK deficit (Guardian)

• Rachel Reeves: we must build a stronger economy (Guardian)

IDEAS
Frankly, by Nicola Sturgeon: the reviews are in

🗣️ Frankly, by Nicola Sturgeon, is most significant political memoir to be published in the UK this year, at least, and certainly in Scotland for years. I wanted to wait for some considered reviews based on full reads of the book - originally due to be published today - rather than the hurried efforts pushed out when the book unexpectedly went on sale early this week.

🗣️Scotland is “a small country with a taste for beheading its tall flowers”, says Neal Ascherson, and his implication is clear. “Readers outside Scotland must find it hard to believe the venomous and often misogynistic nastiness still daily piled on Sturgeon by almost all the Scottish media,” he writes. “In England, a common reaction to her name – even today – is awe and affection.”

His review of Frankly is affectionate. The book reads, he says, “like an old Protestant memoir of a soul’s lifelong struggle against sin and temptation, illustrated with lavish confessions of failure and blameful self-analyses.

“In a sense, this book is addressed to herself, to her inner demon: the voice that never ceased to tell her that she wasn’t up to the job, that she was a fraud. All such insecurities express the impostor syndrome that continues to torment many of those in public life.”

But the book, he knows, also “skates around her most damaging weakness” - her first-person style of government. “Her isolation was a high-wire act bound to end in tears.” (The Observer)

🗣️The former First Minister “doesn’t seem like a martyr” to self-doubt in her views and pronouncements, writes Melanie McDonagh. “If politics is divided between Roundheads and Cavaliers, she’s a diminutive Roundhead, her inner Presbyterian evident in dogmatic progressivism.”

She’s thinking of moving to London, notes McDonagh, and now knows what, and who, makes her happy. “Politics didn’t, which is perhaps this book’s most useful lesson.” (London Standard)

🗣️Unlike many reviewers, reporter Libby Brooks saw Sturgeon up close for her decade in power. “I’d always found her to be a master of the lengthy, lawyerly obfuscation and the disarming but consequence-free apology,” writes Brooks. “Would she really engage with the questions that overshadowed the final years of her leadership until her shock resignation in 2023?”

The answer: only so far. Along the way, “she is an entertaining storyteller, with a good eye for detail – such as the relief she felt on discovering a dead fly in her restaurant meal at her first SNP conference, meaning she didn’t have to pay for it from the £40 her cash-strapped parents had given her to last the weekend.”

But there is much she does not explain, from her claimed ignorance about Salmond’s alleged behaviour to her lack of succession planning for her eventual departure. This does not, says, Brooks, “feel like the whole story”. (Guardian)

🗣️“Frankly is well written and easy to read,” says Tom Harris. “It skips along at an easy pace, not dwelling over-long on the more contentious elements of her ‘journey’.”

This is a two star review, however, and Harris’s reservations become clear. “At the centre of this effort is Sturgeon’s almost obsessive need to reinvent herself, to assure her critics that everything they thought about her was wrong, so wrong.

“It takes a certain degree of gullibility – or, to be more charitable, generosity – to believe that the woman who led her party and the Scottish government with a rod of iron for nine years, who out-argued, out-manoeuvred and out-classed every political rival during her long career as a member, and then leader, of the Scottish Parliament, was actually a victim all along, a vulnerable target of other people’s misogyny and cruelty.

“Frankly is too replete with omissions, too manipulative of its readers, to be a serious addition to the current crop of political biographies,” he concludes. (🎁Telegraph - gift link)

🗣️Alex Salmond’s book, The Dream Shall Never Die, is probably the “worst political memoir ever written, says Andrew Nicoll: “shallow, self-serving, exculpatory mush.

“Sturgeon’s Frankly is a lot better, but falls well short of her high ideals – and for those of us who followed her 30-year political career, it leaves an awful lot of questions unanswered.

“Frankly is driven by the very flaws – the vanity and self-justification – that Sturgeon said she wanted to avoid. They are unavoidable. They are baked in.” (The Independent £)

AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 Former SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC has warned of a “shocking” threat to free speech at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, putting part of the blame on former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon but also describing Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar as being “missing in action” on the issue. (Herald)

📣 Liam Gallacher was “misinformed” over comments made about Oasis fans by council officers, the leader of Edinburgh Council has said. (STV)

📣 Fugitive Nicholas Rossi, who faked his death and fled to Scotland to escape justice, has finally been found guilty of rape by a jury. (BBC)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 Russian hackers have been blamed for suspected sabotage at a dam in Norway in April which affected water flows. The attack was part of a broad campaign of disruption across Europe blamed on Russia. (AP)

📣 New police guidelines now encourage forces to record the race and nationality of people charged in high-profile cases: race campaigners say this will set a dangerous precedent for “dog-whistle politics”. (Guardian)

📣 Britain’s property surveyors have reported a rapid drop in new rental properties coming on to the market. (Guardian)

SPORT

⚽️ It’s a European night of promise for Scottish clubs, with two sides aiming to get into the final stage of qualifying, within touching distance of European group football:

• Dundee United host Rapid Vienna with the score poised at 2-2 - but Jim Goodwin’s side have an injury crisis to contend with. (BBC) (Record)

• Hibs have a more commanding 2-0 lead over Partizan as they welcome the Belgrade side to Easter Road. You can watch the game on BBC Scotland tonight (7.45pm). (BBC)