In your briefing today:

📣 The UK Foreign Office’s top civil servant has left his post after it emerged his department had overruled a decision to fail Peter Mandelson during his security vetting. Sir Olly Robbins was told he had to resign after Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper lost confidence in the civil servant. (Guardian)

📣 The SNP has ignited the Scottish Parliamentary elections by promising to cap prices on up to 50 supermarket food staples, in a move hailed by its supporters as a bold move against food poverty and the cost of living, and by critics as a “potty gimmick throwback to the 1970s”.

The move is a key part of the party’s election manifesto, launched yesterday, which also promises more funding for childcare, a £2 cap on single bus fares nationwide, and a pilot programme for a minimum income for artists. (BBC)

📣 Europe has “maybe six weeks or so” of jet fuel stocks, the head of the International Energy Agency has warned. Fatih Birol says flight cancellations are coming “soon” if oil supplies remain blocked by the Iran war. (AP has the exclusive)

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📣 Harassment complaints within the Scottish Government have risen in recent years, according to new figures released under FoI. (The Herald has the exclusive)

📣 The Glen Sannox has run solely on diesel fuel since July, making the ferry billed as “eco-friendly” one of the most heavily-polluting ferries in the CalMac fleet. (The Express has the exclusive)

📣 A judge has said around 15,000 drivers can pursue a compensation claim against Arnold Clark, the car retailer, after a data breach. (STV)

📣 Team Scotland has condemned “abhorrent” racist abuse aimed at two models who were photographed wearing its new Commonwealth Games outfits. (BBC)

📣 The Kremlin has threatened four UK locations with a missile attack in the wake of a new British deal to supply Ukraine with attack drones, claiming Ukraine is “increasingly drawing those countries into war with Russia”. (The Sun)

📣 Finance ministers, central bankers and financiers have raised serious security concerns over a powerful new AI model, Claude Mythos, made by Anthropic. (BBC)

📣 Cuts to overseas aid will worsen shocks to the global economy, David Miliband has warned. (Guardian)

⚽️ The Scottish Football Association has banned football pundit Michael Stewart from Hampden over his criticism of the association and its referees. (The Sun has the exclusive)

⚽️ Nottingham Forest completed a win over Porto to reach the Europa League quarter-finals last night, raising the prospect they could find themselves in the Champions League next season (having won the Europa League)… but in the Championship, thanks to their poor league form. (BBC)

⚽️ “Sensational” Crystal Palace also progressed to the semi-finals of the Conference League, less than a year after their first major trophy win in the FA Cup. (BBC)

🗣️ America’s free-wheeling treatment of AI, the world’s most potent new technology, is coming to an end, says the Economist. The reason is that the technology’s “dizzying” progress has started to pose a threat to national security and build resentment among American voters. “A laissez-faire approach is no longer politically tenable or strategically wise,” says the newspaper.

“The watershed was Anthropic’s announcement of Claude Mythos on April 7th,” it says. “The model-maker’s latest creation is so startlingly good at finding software vulnerabilities that, in the wrong hands, it would threaten critical infrastructure, from banks to hospitals.”

Instead of putting Mythos on general release, Anthropic chose to release it only to around 50 big firms in computing, software and finance, so they can boost their defences.

“Time is short,” says the Economist. “Two years ago, during the Biden administration, discussions about regulation were largely about AI’s potential risks. Today its capabilities are already alarmingly powerful and growing more so with every release.” (The Economist (£))

🗣️Alastair Campbell spots the beginning of the end of populism with the defeat of Victor Orban in Hungary.

“This is a country of fewer than ten million people, yet Sunday night’s results were being followed closely all around the world, including by the most powerful people in the world, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin chief among them.

“Viktor Orbán lost badly. So did they. So did Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Alice Weidel’s AdF in Germany, and all who felt their hard right populism cannot be defeated, and that European liberal democracy has had its day.” (The New World (£))

🗣️A new feminism is rising across Britain, says Emily Lawford, who invites us to “meet the Angry Young Women”.

While the “manosphere” has been well-documented in recent months, less has been written about what women are doing, which, for a growing band of female influencers, is “a mirror image of the content made by male influencers” - which is to say left-wing, not right-wing, but just as radical. The political divide online reflects a gender divide in real life: the magazine also presents research which sets out, in stark terms, a growing negative view of men among young women, differing views on the economy and politics.

“[Women] are also much more pessimistic about the future – their own, and everyone else’s. They also feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them,” writes Lawford.

“While this ‘femosphere’ spans a range of tones, much of it reinforces this hostility towards men: there are misandrist dating coaches who urge women to reject men altogether, and more explicitly progressive content creators who cover global and domestic politics.” (New Statesman (£))

🗣️The Spectator also focuses on the young, and specifically “the property squeeze crushing the young”. John Power’s concern is not purely about the traditional worry of high house prices: it’s the fact those high house prices are now falling, fast, especially in London. That’s trapping “thousands” in negative equity, facing huge bills to unwind what has turned out to be a huge financial mistake: buying a property.

Why is this happening, after years of soaring prices? A confluence of factors, from housing reform putting off buy-to-renters to to international elites choosing to buy elsewhere. Leasehold flats are increasingly unpopular, too, because of the charges they bring, and the loss of control they imply. The cladding scandal, stamp duty and misaligned government aid: all of that doesn’t help, either.

And things are about to get worse, warns Power. Interest rates are likely to go up to tame inflation caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz: those sudden increases are raising fears of a housing meltdown, with house price falls across the UK of up to 5% this year alone.

“The spread of negative equity may create a new and increasingly aggrieved political constituency,” suggests Power. “Millennials who did everything they were told are now discovering that the rungs on the ladder lead down as well as up, and that they are poorer after being sold a false promise. (The Spectator (£))

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