Michael Simmons: Labour must go further and faster in the North Sea. Approval for the Jackdaw extraction platform could come as early as Tuesday, Michael Simmons suggests, with Rosebank following later. The natural gas extracted from its wells will be vital for our energy security, Simmons says, warning that ‘Rejecting these projects would kill our North Sea industry for good… the effects on business and investor confidence in the UK would be catastrophic’. Ed Miliband once called Rosebank climate vandalism, while Miatta Fahnbulleh, his successor as environment secretary, was once firm about no new drilling. But public attitudes are changing, with even Nicola Sturgeon bemoaning how long the decision has taken. Britain needs cheap energy: we should extract ‘every last drop of oil and pocket of gas’ as fast as possible, as well as investing in renewables. Letting these projects drag on is a luxury Britain cannot afford. It’s time to just start oil.

Tim Shipman: Alpha Romeo. Cabinet Secretary Antonia Romeo, Tim Shipman reports, once suggested a plan for civil service reform was ‘a Ford, when [she’s] more of a Ferrari girl’. As cabinet secretary, Romeo is now arguably accruing more power than any of her predecessors. When Andy Burnham entered No. 10, she secured a seat in the Prime Minister’s outer office, the first time a cabinet secretary has ever sat there. Visitors to her office note she drinks from a ‘Bossing it’ mug. Romeo is establishing a review to reform the civil service, telling her colleagues it’s the ‘last-chance saloon’. Danny Kruger of Reform UK warns that this is the ‘thin end of a wedge’, suggesting Burnham has been ‘bamboozled’ into letting her consolidate her power. Others believe the move is to pre-empt the outcome of the judicial review into Ollie Robbins’s dismissal, with one source telling Shipman that Romeo fears he might have to be given his job back.

Tali Fraser: Labour’s war on the middle classes. ‘The socioeconomic duty (SED) might not sound sexy’, Tali Fraser admits, but it is ‘the tool the Labour party plans to use to ramp up its attack on the middle classes’. Described by its creators as ‘socialism in one clause’, Andy Burnham is enacting a law introduced ‘in the dying days of Gordon Brown’s premiership’ but put on hold by the coalition. It requires public services to favour equality of outcome not equality of opportunity, meaning they would have to ‘consider things like postcodes and parental backgrounds in decision-making’. ‘Middle England could see cuts to bin collections, library services reduced and potholes left unfilled because the money has been diverted elsewhere,’ Fraser warns. As one official tells her, the end result will be ‘a massive waste of money and resource’. A former Whitehall official fears that the SED could ‘intensify protests and demonstrations over unfairness in public services’; Labour are sleepwalking into catastrophe.

Natasha Hausdorff: what counts is international law, not emotive vocabulary. Natasha Hausdorff believes that there are few phrases in international affairs repeated with greater confidence or subjected to less scrutiny than ‘illegal Israeli settlements’. The problem ‘is not just that this is political rhetoric masquerading as law’, but, she suggests, it ‘is in fact contrary to real international law properly applied’. The settlements argument rests on the assumption that Israel is the occupying power in foreign territory. International law cannot be one thing for Israel and another for everybody else. A ‘rule selectively (and incorrectly) cited whenever Jews build houses across an armistice line, which is not and never was a border, is not the application of law, but political posturing’. This is an attempt, she suggests, ‘to whitewash the real illegal building in these disputed territories by the Palestinian Authority’. This is ‘how the weaponisation of international law contributes to Jew-hate’.

Amol Rajan: I can finally say what I really think. Amol Rajan says he can ‘now asseverate opinions that a fortnight ago would have got me sacked’, for instance ‘Dominic Cummings was right’. He agrees that Britain needs to tackle the Blob, overhaul the civil service and get entrepreneurs and scientists into government. Rajan believes the ‘central challenge of our age is the gap between what the people need and what politics delivers’. On Today, he had been ‘screaming inside’, wanting to say ‘Britain is about to get a century of change in a decade’. Now that he’s on YouTube, he can. Rajan has also been trying to raise the alarm on our national debt, believing ‘it should be recast as a moral monstrosity’. He has never struggled with impartiality and has zero regrets about his time at the BBC. Today is ‘no den of wokeness’, he avers. He hopes to still be ‘championing the BBC a decade from now’ – and that there will still be a BBC to champion.