In your briefing today:

📣 The SNP will demand the power to hold a second independence referendum immediately after next week’s election, should it win - and even if it doesn’t command a majority in Holyrood.

First Minister John Swinney said his first act after ministers were appointed would be to seek Holyrood's approval to make the request to Westminster. The Scottish Government would also publish a draft referendum bill.

Swinney’s officials confirmed he would do so even as head of a minority government, potentially with the backing of Green MSPs. (Guardian) (Times)

📣 King Charles and Queen Camilla arrived in the US last night at the start of a controversial US state visit, the first since Queen Elizabeth II’s in 2007. Their trip is taking place under “extremely tight” security after the shooting incident in Washington over the weekend. They immediately visited the White House to meet Donald Trump.

The King is expected to address US Congress later today, express sympathy over the weekend attack, and say that in times of great international challenges, it is “more necessary than ever to stand together” to defend democratic values. (BBC)

📣 Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces a(nother) critical day in his premiership as Morgan McSweeney, his former chief of staff, gives evidence to MPs on the foreign affairs committee hearing into Peter Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the US.

Starmer is also facing calls for a parliamentary standards investigation into his conduct, with a Commons vote later: Labour MPs will be whipped to vote against the Conservative motion, with the only true jeopardy likely to be around the scale of any rebellion. (Guardian)

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📣 There’s been a big fire in Uddingston: a garage and MOT centre went up in flames at around 6pm last night. (BBC)

📣 University of Edinburgh lecturers are to start a marking boycott this week in a continuing row over planned cuts. (BBC)

📣 Former Dr Who actor Peter Capaldi has criticised the show’s fans for taking it all too seriously. (Mail)

📣 Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz says the Trump administration is being played and “humiliated” by Tehran, and lacks a clear strategy to end the war. (Politico)

📣 The man accused of trying to storm the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner has been formally charged with the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump. (AP)

📣 Chancellor Rachel Reeves is considering a private rent freeze in England to help combat a cost-of-living crisis caused by the Iran war. (Guardian has the exclusive)

🎱 John Higgins produced a sensational comeback from 8-3 down to beat Ronnie O’Sullivan in snooker’s World Championship at the Crucible. The Scot’s victory was only the start of a thrilling day of action - later, world number one Judd Trump was eliminated by Iranian qualifier Hossein Vafaei. (BBC)

⛳️ Turnberry, the famed Ayrshire links golf course owned by Donald Trump, has failed once more in its bid to bring The Open to Scotland. (Mail)

⚽️ Manchester United beat Brentford last night to all but secure Champions League football. The question is: does Michael Carrick get the big chair on a permanent basis after leading a remarkable turnaround? (BBC)

🗣️ Is Britain ungovernable? It’s an idea that is having a moment: the latest voice to ask the question is Zoe Williams in the Guardian today, who notes Britons are threatening to oust their fifth Prime Minister in seven years. It is, she suggests, all just a bit… Italian, and not in a good way.

“‘The first five guys were just the wrong five guys’ starts to sound like the kind of thing Liza Minnelli would say,” writes Williams. “Doesn’t there come a point in every electorate’s life that it has to splash some cold water on its face?”

The “grownups”, says Williams, are more or less landing at this conclusion, just as Keir Starmer starts to ready his MPs to vote down a prospective sleaze inquiry. But if he goes, she suggests, “we make ourselves ungovernable, consign ourselves to the civic equivalent of a life on the shelf, always questing after some fresh bureaucrats, only to tear them apart when things get ugly.”

In the Financial Times yesterday, Tej Parikh was saying something similar. His point: Britain is acting richer than it is, doing and saying things it’s simply no longer prosperous enough to get away with.

One of those indulgent habits: politicians spending a great deal of time worrying about side issues. “Investors and businesses are baffled by how easily Westminster can get engrossed in such controversies, particularly amid global economic turbulence and lacklustre growth,” he writes.

“Britain cannot afford its penchant for drama and sacking prime ministers (particularly when there are few good alternatives),” he adds. “Political instability has sapped investment, stymied reform and pushed government borrowing costs higher. And yet, it resurfaces time and again”.

Why’s it happening? Parikh had, in a previous column on the subject, offered a few ideas: maybe a lack of leadership skills, he suggests, or a compounding of errors over a series of governments - weakening the position of the next one. Some people, he notes, have pointed to the rise of career politicians.

“That said, higher corporate representation in the previous Conservative governments didn’t exactly redeem them. A breadth of backgrounds and skillsets is what matters most,” he suggests. We don’t have that in the current crop of MPs.

In The Critic, Jack Davey says we’re worse than merely ungovernable: we are, in fact, living in a place that isn’t even coherent enough to be governed. “We live in a land with no shared expression of political identity. In short, there is no country to govern in the first place,” he argues.

But not all voices are quite so sympathetic to the body politic. The Economist may be struggling to mask its sneer as it notes: “An idea has taken root among Britain’s political classes that the country is ungovernable. Chief among them is the prime minister himself. ‘My experience now as prime minister is of frustration,’ said Sir Keir, who commands a majority of 165 in the least constrained executive anywhere in the democratic world, during one self-pitying explanation.”

It lays the blame for all this firmly at the door of the Prime Minister: “What Sir Keir can control, Sir Keir has blundered”, it says. The newspaper, rather wearily, predicts an inevitable relaunch next month after the elections with another batch of ideas that’ll never be enacted, by a cabinet with some new faces, or the old ones in new roles.

“Only a lack of clear alternatives keeps Sir Keir in office,” the newspaper says. “Sclerotic politics is just as damaging as a sclerotic state.

“Britain is not ungovernable,” it insists. “Even so, Sir Keir cannot govern.”

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