Downing Street not aware of Matthew Doyle’s support for Sean Morton when peerage was granted, minister says UK politics live – latest updates Downing Street was not aware that Keir Starmer’s longstanding communications chief had campaigned for a paedophile when his peerage was announced, a minister has said. Matthew Doyle, who stepped down as the No 10 head of communications last March, was suspended on Monday from the Labour whip in his new role in the Lords after it emerged that he had campaigned on behalf of a friend who had been charged with possessing indecent images of children. Continue reading...

Labour has removed the whip from Matthew Doyle, Starmer’s former director of communications, who only recently became a peer Georgia Gould, an education minister, has been the government voice on the airwaves this morning. In an interview with Sky News, she said that when No 10 announced that Matthew Doyle was being made a peer in December, it did not know that he had campaigned for someone who was subsequently convicted of paedophile offences. There’s an investigation going on. We’ll wait for that to conclude. But the prime minister said on Monday night that we want to ensure the highest standards in public life. He’s gone back and looked at this appointment. He’s taken action to withdraw the whip. We’re taking it incredibly seriously. And Keir Starmer is somebody who has spent his whole career putting people into prison, And this is his lifelong work. It is deeply important to him. And no one is harder on themselves than the prime minister. But he’s clear that things need to change. Vetting has to be better. Continue reading...

• Medal table | Live scores and schedule | Results | Briefing • Follow us over on Bluesky | Get in touch! Mail Tanya Hello and welcome to day five day of winter action in Milan and the hauntingly beautiful Italian mountains. There are eight gold medals up for grabs today, mostly on the slopes. They go for glory in the high-stakes men’s Super G (giant slalom) and the men’s Nordic combined (a 10km cross-country race and ski-jump), while Australia’s Jakara Anthony defends her title in the women’s Moguls (more ski-ing, this time racing down a steep course of jumps, turns and aerial trickery). France’s Lou Jeanmonnot guns for her second gold of the games in the women’s biathalon (cross-country skiing and rifle shooting). Continue reading...

Based on a 2000 novella, this sweet animation follows a young girl who wakes from a vegetative state on the verge of feral, but begins to bond with others after an intervention by her grandmother This tender and sweet animation from film-makers Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han is an involving, poignant study of early childhood; how fragile it is, and how strong you feel yourself to be to have outlived or surpassed it. It is based on the autobiographical novella The Character of Rain by Belgian author Amélie Nothomb, published in 2000. Loïse Charpentier voices the role of Amélie, a little girl living in Kobe, Japan, with her Belgian family in the late 60s; mum, dad and older brother and sister. Until the age of three, she was in a persistent vegetative state, but was miraculously jolted free of it by a terrifying earthquake; yet she emerges quarrelsome and almost feral, to the despair of her parents. That is until her elegant grandmother Claude (Cathy Cerda) comes to visit and gives her a piece of narcotically delicious white Belgian chocolate, which causes Amélie to bloom into a lovely, biddable child who adores her Japanese nanny Nishio-san (Victoria Grosbois). Continue reading...

European Commission president says: ‘We have the second largest economy in the world, but we are driving it with the handbrake on’ European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen insisted this morning that the EU needs to “tear down” the economic barriers that prevent it from becoming “a global giant” and deepen its internal market, as she kicked off 48 hours of intensive discussions on the bloc’s economy. A number of EU leaders will meet today at an industry event in Antwerp, before they meet again tomorrow morning for a pre-summit discussion ahead of an informal summit proper later that tonight. Continue reading...

Updates from the R. Premadasa Cricket Stadium in Colombo Start time is 3pm local/8.30pm AEDT/9.30am GMT Any thoughts? Email James All good things come to those who wait? Australia finally get their T20 World Cup campaign underway in Colombo today. The Aussies are the last side to make their tournament bow and will come up against an Ireland side they don’t really have much experience of playing – the two sides have only met twice in T20Is and just once in all international cricket since 2016. Ireland will be looking to put on a strong showing after a rather disappointing first match against Sri Lanka where they squandered plenty of opportunities to get something out of the game – dropping a host of chances and letting the match slip with bat and ball when they had the chance toput the hosts under real pressure. Continue reading...

Marseille beaten 5-0 by PSG and 3-0 by Club Brugge De Zerbi joined as head coach in 2024 after Brighton exit Roberto De Zerbi has left Marseille in the wake of a 5-0 thrashing at the hands of Paris Saint-Germain. The nine-time French champions said on Wednesday that they had ended “their collaboration by mutual agreement.” The heavy loss Sunday at the Parc des Princes restored PSG’s two-point lead over Lens after 21 rounds, with Marseille fourth. De Zerbi’s team also endured an embarrassing 3-0 loss at Club Brugge two weeks ago that resulted in Marseille exiting the Champions League. Continue reading...

Austin Appelbee told authorities he was ‘really scared’ after swimming 4km in rough seas to get help for mum and two siblings “We got lost out there,” 13-year-old Austin Appelbee tells the triple zero operator, after swimming 4km in the rough, open ocean and running 2km to save his family. The operator asks how long it is since he set off. Continue reading...

The medals stacked up for the Scandinavians and Johannes Høsflot Klæbo basked in his main-character era Day four of the Milano Cortina Games, and one question is starting to feel a little rhetorical: how do you stop Johannes Høsflot Klæbo? Short answer – you don’t. You just race for second and hope he smiles at you on the way past. On Tuesday, the Norwegian cross-country phenomenon did what he has been doing all week: made world-class athletes look as if they were chasing a mirage. Technique? Flawless. Tactics? Ruthless. Power, speed and a hill-climbing gear that seems to defy physics? Check, check and check. Klæbo cruised through the sprint classic rounds, detonated the field on the final climb and skied away with his second gold of these Games and his seventh gold overall, putting him just one shy of the all-time Winter Olympic record. Continue reading...

Plus: a perfect hat-trick of assists, more almost-one-club players and Oxford’s penalty drought Mail us with your questions and answers “In their Champions League match against PSV Eindhoven, Bayern Munich made four substitutions in the 62nd minute,” writes Stephan Wijnen. “The four players entering the pitch together had a combined estimated value of €265m (Harry Kane, Michael Olise, Serge Gnabry and Alphonso Davies). Is this the most expensive combined substitution ever?” Before we go any further – a player’s estimated value is not an objective measure, but using transfer fees doesn’t necessarily work, with some players moving for no fee (Kylian Mbappé, for example). Like Stephan in his question, we are going to use Transfermarkt’s valuations in a bid for consistency, and will focus on the value of players coming on. Can you do any better? Email us with your answers Continue reading...

The clamour for change is growing on the south coast and the pressure is growing on the Seagulls’ young head coach When Paul Barber referenced “growing fan impatience across large parts of the football landscape” in his programme notes before Sunday’s game against their arch rivals Crystal Palace, the Brighton chief executive must have feared what was to come. The clamour for change on the south coast that began as a murmur last spring after Fabian Hürzeler’s side had collected one point from four Premier League matches and been knocked out of the FA Cup in the sixth round has been steadily building ever since. Despite recovering from a slow start to this season, a second successive December without a victory has been followed by more disappointment in the first few weeks of 2026 to heap pressure on the German head coach’s slender shoulders. Continue reading...

England head coach warns against conceding penalties and intensity drop-offs before Six Nations visit to Murrayfield England’s players normally look forward to a Calcutta Cup examination at Murrayfield with about as much enthusiasm as a trip to the dentist. At best it tends to be uncomfortable, at worst it’s grip-the-chair-and-pray time. And that’s before they are wheeled out into the freezing rain and the hygienist produces a set of bagpipes to enhance the experience even further. So it was more than a little unnerving to listen to Steve Borthwick talking about his team’s genuine enthusiasm for what lies in store. Never mind all the recurring pain they have endured in Edinburgh in recent years, with three defeats in their past four visits. This time they are heading north in a strikingly different mood, flashing the kind of confident pearly white smile usually reserved for Love Island contestants. Continue reading...

What if loving your child is destroying you and all you want to do is escape? That’s the nightmare Byrne faces in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The star and its director reveal why backers were scared If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, for which Rose Byrne just won a Golden Globe, is unmistakably a horror film. And yet how can it be? It’s the story of a mother, Linda, with a very sick child. You never see the child, only the outlines of the anxious medics. You never find out what’s wrong with her, only that it involves a feeding tube. Linda is going steadily crazy, because who wouldn’t? On paper, this is a painful yet heartwarming tale of love and adversity. Instead, it is claustrophobic and vertiginous. It sometimes has the panic-attack surrealism of an anxiety dream, and other times is so real you can barely look directly at it. I’ve never seen the maternal condition drawn as a trip to the abyss. The only film I’ve seen that’s anything like this is Eraserhead. “I was very influenced by that film,” writer and director Mary Bronstein says, carefully. She’s a fascinating conversationalist, frank and open but watchful. Byrne is more reserved. Both are darkly funny, all the time. They look Hollywood-polished, in this central London hotel, but fair play, they’ve just come out of a photoshoot. “Eraserhead is about a type of parental anxiety that only men can have,” Bronstein says. “And this is a film about a parental anxiety only a woman can have. In Eraserhead, he can leave and that’s his angst. Linda cannot leave. That’s hers.” Continue reading...

Wildfires that left 23 people dead were made about three times more likely by global heating, researchers say The climate crisis inflamed deadly wildfires that left 23 people dead in Chile and devastated forests in Argentina that host some of the world’s oldest trees, scientists have found. The hot, dry and windy conditions that enabled the fires to blaze across huge areas in January were made about three times more likely by global heating, researchers from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium found. Continue reading...

Hull KR are the team to beat again, tough times are ahead for promoted trio and Leeds might be back to their best The former Super League champions are back after a 12-year absence, and Bradford have had to rebuild their squad for a full-time return to the top flight after being a part-time operation in recent years. Most of that recruitment was done late in the day owing to promotion not being confirmed until October, meaning their first year back could be a difficult one. Continue reading...

Qatar still has infrastructure from 2022 World Cup Ahmedabad, India likely to be other host candidate Qatar’s bid to host the 2036 Olympic Games has received a boost with the state-owned broadcaster beIN Sports concluding a media rights deal for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. It is understood that beIN has won the rights to broadcast LA 2028 in the Middle East and north Africa (Mena) region, with the contract signed by the International Olympic Committee president, Kirsty Coventry, and the beIN chair, Nasser al-Khelaifi, over the last few days at the Winter Games in Milan Cortina. Continue reading...

Trump adviser Peter Navarro says ‘we have to revise our expectations down’ because of US deportation programme Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy. It’s non-farm payrolls day! The eagerly-awaited US jobs report is out today, and the White House has been trying to moderate expectations. We have to revise our expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like. When we were letting in 2 million illegal aliens a day we had to produce 200,000 a month for steady stay. Now 50,000 a month is going to be more like what we need. Wall Street, when this stuff comes out, they can’t rain on our parade, they just have to adjust for the fact that we’re deporting millions of illegals. The next steer for rate setters will be US non-farm payrolls data due later today. Forecasts are for an increase in hiring from 50,000 in December to 70,000 in January. That’s still a relatively light number, but anything lower could see markets gain more confidence in the scope for three rate cuts this year. Changes to the benchmark are also in play today, which are expected to see hiring rates for last year revised downwards. Our US economists see nonfarm payrolls coming in at +75k, with the unemployment rate staying at 4.4%. Remember as well that today’s report will include the annual benchmark revisions to payrolls, which could rewrite some of the trends over recent history. We already got the preliminary number in September, which said that payrolls were -911k lower as of March 2025. However, that number can be different from the preliminary release, and last year’s preliminary benchmark revision was -818k but the final number was a smaller -589k, so not as negative as first thought. 1.30pm GMT: US non-farm payrolls for January (previous: 50,000; forecast: 70,000) 5.30pm GMT: Bank of England policymaker James Talbot gives speech Continue reading...

An immersive account of how the inhabitants of a liberal city – including the author’s father – survived fascism In December 1941, the Nazi authorities received a letter from a soldier complaining that, on his recent leave in Berlin, he had been thoroughly disgusted by what he saw. While his comrades were dying at the front, plenty of young men appeared to have dodged military duty and were now to be found carousing in Berlin’s packed bars. The women were no better: husbandless but flush with ration coupons purloined from soldiers on leave, they were busy gorging themselves. “If Berlin were Germany,” huffed the complainant, “we would have lost this war years ago.” Berlin had always been a case apart. The legacy of the wild Weimar years – all that artistic and political radicalism, not to mention louche living – had continued under the Third Reich. The city remained defiantly itself and, despite the efforts of high command, mulish about being told what to do. That, at least, had been the situation in 1941. Continue reading...

Lengthy delays in compensation are ‘emblematic’ of what many relatives of migrant workers go through in the Gulf kingdom, say rights groups When Mohammad Arshad fell to his death while constructing the first new stadium for the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia, one of the main stadium contractors, the Belgian construction multinational Besix, promised it would take immediate steps to ensure all end-of-service and insurance payments were, “handled in a timely and respectful manner”. Almost a year later, Arshad’s family say they have yet to receive either. Continue reading...

Whether you want the basic safety net or complete rescue package, the bill depends as much on what’s needed as what is included It is not a legal requirement to have breakdown cover – it is a safety net to ensure you are not left on the roadside if something happens to your vehicle. But you should be aware of all of the policy’s limitations when you buy one. Continue reading...

From grown men eating ice cream – gasp! – to Noël Coward sweating in the desert and a baseball team without pants – a new exhibition celebrates images from the era-defining magazine Continue reading...

A transformative conservation project encompassing East Anglia’s large but secluded Fritton Lake has high-end hospitality and nature-rich experiences at its heart The scene is entirely black, white, grey and silver. It is cold, unusually dark and a film of ice is forming on the lake. I’m sitting in an unlit wooden sauna, alone, in immense silence. The only noise is the soft ticking of the stove as the heat rises. Across the water are ghostly silver birches and dark pines. Above them, Orion’s Belt shines bright. This vivid experience feels like midwinter in Canada, Finland or anywhere else about 60 degrees north. So it’s bizarre to know I’m a few miles south-west of Great Yarmouth. Fritton Lake is an anomaly. Like the Broads to the north, this deceptively big, sinuous lake was largely created by medieval peat-digging, but it’s nothing like its Norfolk cousins. Set in a sandy, hilly landscape of heaths and pines, the northernmost outpost of the wildlife-rich strip of sandy heathlands running up the Suffolk coast, the lake is deep and two miles long but so hidden by trees that many people don’t know of its existence. Continue reading...

PM and global climate action advocate looks set to secure another victory despite voter concerns over cost of living and crime Barbados prime minister and global climate action champion, Mia Amor Mottley, is on course for a third consecutive term in office, forecasts suggest, as voters head to the polls on Wednesday. Mottley is the country’s first female leader since its independence in 1966, and her strong international advocacy for climate action and support for small and vulnerable nations have made her an influential and popular global and regional leader, experts say. Continue reading...

Jermyn Street theatre, London Jerome Kilty’s fusty two-hander charts the cantankerous and flirtatious relationship between the playwright and actor Mrs Patrick Campbell When Jerome Kilty was stationed in London with the US army during the second world war, he doorstepped George Bernard Shaw. The octogenarian playwright, he recalled, “received us cordially”. Kilty went on to become an actor and playwright himself, and Shaw inspired his biggest success – this 1957 two-hander drawn from the author’s ardent if unconsummated correspondence with Mrs Patrick Campbell, the original Eliza in Pygmalion. Campbell’s magnificence is lost to memory, while Shaw’s plays slide from the repertory. Why bother with their antique sparring? This revival depends on feeling performances by Rachel Pickup and Alan Turkington as two outsize personalities skirmishing between courtship and combat. At Jermyn Street theatre, London, until 7 March Continue reading...

Nine-year-old Lamia is obliged by her school to bake a birthday cake for Saddam Hussein, and meets a series of vivid characters as she shops for sanctioned ingredients There’s a terrific charm and sweetness in this debut from Iraqi film-maker Hasan Hadi, a Bake Off-style adventure about a little girl in early-90s Iraq required by her school to make a birthday cake in Saddam Hussein’s honour, despite sanctions and the consequent shortage of every single cake-making ingredient. Hadi is a former Sundance Lab fellow and his film lists Hollywood heavy-hitters Chris Columbus and Eric Roth among its executive producers – who may just have induced Hadi to sprinkle some old-fashioned Tinseltown sugar into the mix. The moment when the little girl gazes at her reflection in the river is surely inspired by The Lion King. Among the largely nonprofessional cast is the unselfconsciously excellent Baneen Ahmad Nayyef as nine-year-old Lamia, whose greedy teacher gobbles the apple she has brought to school for her lunch. This blowhard announces that the class must draw lots for which of them will bake the Saddam cake; it falls to Lamia. In addition, her pal Saeed (Sajad Mohama Qasem) – who has a crush on Lamia – has to supply the fruit for this party, on which only the teacher will be gorging himself. Lamia sets off into town with her grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) on a desperate shopping expedition, carrying her pet cockerel, Hindi, who gives a great animal performance and whose unpredictable crowings clearly forced the actors to improvise lines around him. Continue reading...