Not content with haemorrhaging MPs to Reform, Kemi decides to drive others into the arms of the Lib Dems

A minute’s silence for Kemi Badenoch. Thoughts and prayers welcome. The Tory party leader just can’t help herself. Every time you think that, just maybe, she is beginning to get the hang of the job, she comes up with something so deranged, so batshit that you can only sit back and admire the self-destruction. Almost as if she can’t bear any idea of success. Bewilderingly, sabotaging herself seems to be her default coping mechanism. Someone who can only find satisfaction in annihilating her own party. Sometimes you even wonder if she has ever been a Tory.

Like so much of Kemi’s behaviour, this was all totally avoidable. There was no need for her to do or say anything. With Keir Starmer away in China, this was a week off for her from prime minister’s questions. A slot she would delegate to the even more useless Andrew Griffith. Clearly Badenoch does not welcome any competition so Griffith might get the deputy leader job for good.

A new book and podcast tell the story of a 1 in 12, a venue that used community and artistic passion as bulwarks against poverty and grim politics. Its founders and key acts recall gigs, plays and pranks on the NME

“Things were getting grim,” says Gary Cavanagh, reflecting on Bradford in the early 1980s. “There was a hell of a lot of unemployment, and people were thrown on the scrap heap.”

Cavanagh was working for Bradford’s claimants union in 1981, helping the city’s poor and unemployed get benefits, when a government report stated that one in 12 dole recipients were defrauding the state. So he and some friends reclaimed this statistic – which they thought was ludicrous – as an identity. “We became the 1 in 12 Club,” he says.

If you’re wearing tight clothes and flashing your ankles, you may want to make some bold changes

Is your wardrobe cringe? Does it make you look out-of-touch and cause younger and cooler people to look upon you with pity? Do you really want me to answer that? Never mind, I’m going to anyway, so buckle up. Brutal honesty is very January, so I will give it to you straight. But before we get down to dissecting your wardrobe, two quick questions for you. Do you put full stops in text messages? Were you baffled by Labubus? If the answer to those two questions is yes, then I’m afraid the signs are that your wardrobe is almost certainly cringe.

Being cringe is essentially being old-fashioned, but worse. Being old-fashioned is what happens when you grow older with grace and dignity. Cringe is when you lose your touch while convincing yourself you are still down with the kids.

It’s just not cool to be wasted any more. But for a country shaped by booze, it does pose questions about what comes next

It’s November 2024 and my puritanical American children are attending their first autumn fair at their new English primary school. There’s a laser show and hotdogs and a raffle. There’s also a bar for the parents, which makes my two pull up short. Newcomers to this country experience many cultural differences but perhaps none as striking as this: “Is that alcohol?” says my child, scowling up at me like a tiny member of the Taliban. “At a school thing?” I’m two Baileys hot chocolates in at this point and give her a smile 10% broader than necessary. Yes, my darlings; welcome to Britain.

Or at least, welcome, possibly, to the last vestiges of how Britain once was. For a while now we’ve known anecdotally that people in this country are drinking less than they were. My own generation X is deep into middle age and many of us – save for the odd life-saver at a school event and the biggest occasions – have given it up. Where the anomalies fall more glaringly is in the generations below us, among young people whose behaviour differs from our own at their age. This week, official confirmation came in the form of a survey of 10,000 people commissioned by the NHS that found almost a quarter (24%) of adults in England had not drunk alcohol in 2024, an increase from just under a fifth (19%) in 2022.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

Reform UK has announced Matt Goodwin as its candidate for the hotly anticipated Gorton and Denton byelection. John Harris and Kiran Stacey discuss his chances. Plus, John speaks to Esther Ghey about why the government should back a social media ban for under-16s

When it comes to origin stories, comedians have some of the strangest – from performing for a £5 bet to getting back at their boss to making an unlikely pact with a friend

Not all standup comedians wake up one day and decide to be funny for a living. That wasn’t the case for John Bishop, anyway. He took up comedy to avoid paying a bar’s cover charge and to escape his failing marriage – a story that inspired Bradley Cooper’s new film, Is This Thing On? And Bishop is not the only comic with an unusual origin story. From impressing girlfriends to losing their voices, brain tumours to bad bosses – or not wanting to lose a £5 bet – British comics told us the reasons they became standup comedians and the lengths to which they went to get on stage for the first time.

Exclusive: MPs backing bill to use ‘nuclear option’ of 1911 Parliament Act if it continues to be blocked by Lords

Supporters of assisted dying will seek to force through the bill using an archaic parliamentary procedure if it continues to be blocked by the Lords.

The high stakes move – described by some backers as the “nuclear option” – would be the first time the 1911 Parliament Act has been invoked for a private member’s bill.

PM is first UK leader to visit China in eight years and hopes to strengthen bond with superpower amid uncertainty over US alliance

Keir Starmer will meet the Chinese president Xi Jinping on Thursday for historic talks he hopes will deepen economic ties at a time when some inside government fear the US is no longer a reliable partner.

The prime minister – the first UK leader to visit China in eight years – will hold a 40-minute meeting with Xi at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing before a number of cultural and business receptions.

US president says armada heading towards Iran is ‘prepared to fulfil its missions with violence if necessary’

The threat of war between the US and Iran appeared to loom closer after Donald Trump told Tehran time was running out and that a huge US armada was moving quickly towards the country “with great power, enthusiasm and purpose”.

Writing on social media, the US president said on Wednesday that the fleet headed by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was larger than the one sent to Venezuela before the removal of Nicolás Maduro earlier this month and was “prepared to rapidly fulfil its missions with speed and violence if necessary”.

Campaigners say government is letting landlords ‘drag their feet’ and ‘denying renters the most basic standards’

Labour’s promise to make private rented homes in England fit for habitation will not be enforced for almost a decade, a decision campaigners have described as “absurd”.

The timeline means landlords will have until 2035 to implement a new decent homes standard (DHS) in their properties, which will include “robust standards” to combat disrepair, damp and energy inefficiency.