James Heale: can Reform see off the threat from Restore? ‘Nigel Farage has always prided himself on being able to see off any threat from his right flank,’ according to James Heale. But now he faces Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain. Restore’s ‘strategy is simple: use Farage’s playbook against him’. ‘For some supporters, Lowe represents the embodiment of an old-fashioned 1980s-style Tory’ – in their eyes, ‘a more respectable choice than the shop-soiled Farage’. Restore’s new members ‘are a mix of the dejected and rejected’. Boosted by American video game streamers and Elon Musk, Lowe ‘is now a prominent figure on the American right’, with Farage ‘seen as an outmoded figure by some Gen Z and Gen Alpha MAGA types’. Restore activists have swamped Makerfield. Labour is keen to talk up the party to split the right-wing vote. ‘Good for us in this election, very bad for the country,’ says one aide. ‘If Rupert Lowe hands Andy Burnham victory,’ notes Heale, ‘there will be a bitter irony in Reform’s defeat.’

Tim Shipman: the missing Mandelson messages. It is ‘curious’, Tim Shipman suggests, that Darren Jones ‘was spared direct embarrassment’ when overseeing the release of 1,500 pages of documents relating to Peter Mandelson. ‘The Spectator was informed in mid-April that messages between the pair were likely to emerge.’ With Jones’s messages ‘apparently deleted’, Shipman is happy to oblige with ‘a few of them’. ‘You’ve been doing such a great job and you worked wonders with Trump. I’m so sorry about today’ – sent when Mandelson was sacked. ‘It doesn’t fill you with confidence’ – Jones’s response to Mandelson suggesting the government’s growth plans were in the hands of Angela Rayner, Jonathan Reynolds and Rachel Reeves, then Jones’s boss. According to Jones, Reynolds told a meeting on industrial policy that he was taking a different approach to Port Talbot’s nationalisation ‘because that’s what the unions want’. Jones was also keen on Reynolds’s job – the ‘perception’, he suggests, was that the Department for Business and Trade was ‘not firing on full cylinders’.

Michael Simmons: don’t blame neoliberalism for Britain’s woes. Listen to the ‘men and women making the weather in British politics now’, Michael Simmons suggests, ‘and you’d imagine that neoliberals were the horsemen of the apocalypse’. But criticisms of neoliberalism ‘in no way reflect the reality’. ‘In the decade between 1995 and 2005’, when neoliberalism ‘was arguably at its untrammelled peak’, ‘average incomes for working-age families grew by 35 per cent’. Instead, the ‘decline in living standards dates from the point when the state started swallowing more of our income again’. Since the financial crisis, we ‘have had massive interventions’, while our ‘tax system is hardly a neoliberal construct’. Factor in ‘all the benefits’ and ‘income inequality is the lowest it has been since the 1980s’. Neoliberalism, for Simmons, ‘stands falsely accused’, while the ‘real culprit is a political culture that has brought about the replacement of aspiration with dependency’. Our problem is ‘not too much neoliberalism’ but ‘that we stopped progress in its tracks’.

Peter Frankopan: the real ‘Thucydides Trap’ Beijing and Washington must avoid. According to Peter Frankopan, the ‘Greek and Roman world still commands a special place in public consciousness’; leaders from Mark Carney to Xi Jinping keep quoting Thucydides –  specifically, the historian’s comment in his Peloponnesian War that ‘it was the rise of Athens and the alarm that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable’ – the so-called ‘Thuycdides Trap’ of conflict between major and rising powers.  The relationship between the US and China seems a clear example, but not all scholars ‘are as enthused or convinced by the merits of the model of traps that inevitably snap’. Frankopan suggests that ‘war did not stem from the direct competition between Athens and Sparta’ but ‘from the behaviour of other states that caused friction between the two’. The cities ‘were dragged into confrontation by the ambitions and miscalculations of others’; the lesson is that the ‘impulse’ for war ‘may not come from Beijing or Washington but from somewhere in between’.

Maureen Lipman: why I’ve had to hire my own security. Maureen Lipman has ‘been opening a play’. Despite rehearsals in which she ‘forgot not just [her] lines’ but the names of her children, her marital status and ‘reason for living’, ‘the show went like a rocket’. But Lipman is ‘forced by government inaction on anti-Semitism to hire security for the tour’. ‘A few bigots in Aberdeen have been campaigning to get the show cancelled’ because of Lipman’s support for Israel. Online, a doctored version of the show’s poster has been circulated which shows her with ‘horns and a pitchfork’. Meanwhile, ‘the kidnapped Ukrainian children remain brainwashed in Russia’ and ‘35,000 Iranian kids are slaughtered’. But ‘no Jews, no news’. Lipman has also been ‘doing a speed-awareness course’ or trying to, since the accompanying videos ‘failed to synch up properly, so the whole thing looked like a dodgy crime report from Tajikistan’. Fortunately, the Aberdeen show was more successful: ‘Once again, Hadrian’s Wall fulfilled its purpose to keep the barbarians out.’