Brown is said to be driven by moral anger but insiders suggest he may feel guilty for bringing Peter Mandelson back into government

Before Gordon Brown sent a draft of his 6 February comment piece on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal to the Guardian for publication, he asked friends whether he had gone too far.

The former prime minister had written that he found it “hard to find words to express my revulsion at what has been uncovered about Epstein and his impact on our politics” and the “time is overdue to let in the light”.

After a decade at the top, the Bake Off winner is reclaiming her career and refusing to soften her edges. She discusses racism, gaslighting – and why comfort food is more important than ever

In a food world where the trend is for protein and weight-loss injections and sugar is the supervillain, Nadiya’s Quick Comforts seems somewhat contrary. There are golden syrup dumplings. There is a chapter devoted to deep frying, with cheese balls and ingenious deep-fried cannelloni.

“If I could write an entire book on deep frying, I absolutely would,” says Hussain with a laugh. “This is how I cook, this is how I eat, this is how I show love to my family. Everything in there is stuff that my kids absolutely love.” It’s about balance, she says – there are also lovely recipes for soothing plant-based dal and delicious noodles – because “I think anything that’s an extreme version of itself is dangerous”.

In 1990, Gary Williamson was 18, backpacking in Europe, when his vision began to fail. It was the start of a perilous journey

The first sign that something was wrong was the blurred text in the book Gary Williamson was reading. The problem with his vision had come on suddenly – the day before, it had been normal. Williamson thought perhaps he was tired, or run down. He was 18 and had arrived in Gibraltar after travelling through Europe for two weeks, sleeping rough and not eating or drinking properly. “I’ll go and get some water and something to eat. I thought: maybe it’s nothing. I’ll see how I am tomorrow. The next day, I woke up and it was bad again.” He remembers cautiously getting out his book to test his eyesight: “It’s actually getting worse. I can’t read it now. The lines were starting to blur.” He had relied on a map to get him that far. “I remember thinking: that’s going to become useless very soon. I need to work out what I’m doing.” He needed to get home.

It was 1990, and Williamson didn’t think to call home to ask for help. With no money left – he had made it to Gibraltar four days earlier with the intention to find work – he decided to hitch a lift, thinking a UK-bound lorry would be his best bet. He made it to the gates where the haulage lorries left the port, threw down his backpack by the side of the road and waited. None of the lorries stopped to pick him up. He was, he says, “panicking a little bit, thinking: what do I do? It was harder than I thought it was going to be.” Around 6pm, he gave up. He went back to where he had been sleeping, on a patch of sandy ground behind a sandwich stall over the Spanish border. Before he went to sleep, he wished that he would get a lift the next day, and that his eyesight wouldn’t be any worse. When he woke up, it was.

Reform is promising a ‘patriotic school curriculum’ – but what does that mean? In the end it comes down to submission to the leader

In September 2022, seven months into an all-out war in Ukraine that was only supposed to last a few weeks, Russian schoolchildren started compulsory patriotism lessons. Since then, Monday mornings have been set aside for “conversations about what is important” – a class on the glories of national history; western perfidy; the virtue of self-sacrifice for the Motherland; Vladimir Putin’s wise leadership.

Authoritarian regimes never trust people to love their country spontaneously. Organic national identity, the kind that grows without state cultivation, contains stories of dissent and cultural idiosyncrasy. Variety is subversive.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Monday 30 April, ahead of the May elections, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat Labour is under from both the Green party and Reform and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader of the party. Book tickets here

Father and daughter, Danny and Dani Dyer, are supposed to be reviving a caravan park that’s seen better days. Instead they’re mucking about and cracking infantile jokes – while the owners look desperately on

Like him or loathe him – I like him – Danny Dyer rarely misfires. The geezer “act” is an act only insofar as every celebrity is an act; he’s a more-than-competent actor and he has presented some decent documentaries (especially his most recent one, about modern masculinity). The Dyers’ Caravan Park, however, is a pile of rubbish.

The set-up is pretty simple. Danny loves caravan parks. He spent many happy holidays in them in his youth, surrounded by extended family and quickly made friends, enjoying “a sense of community that is severely lacking in today’s world”. So he has invested in such a park, the family-run Priory Hill in Leysdown-on-sea on the Isle of Sheppey, with the aim of reinvigorating it, the industry and bringing back “the great British holiday.” The six-part series will follow him and his daughter Dani through their first year at whatever it is they’re playing at.

BNPL can be a fee-free way to manage cashflow for an essential purchase but keep track of the payment schedule

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) is a form of credit that lets you spread payments for everything from clothes, jewellery and white goods to concert tickets, hotel rooms and takeaway meals.

In the past five years, MPs’ attitudes in the House of Commons towards immigration have swung harder to the right than at almost any other time in the last century

Labour and Conservative MPs are speaking in a more hostile way about immigration than at almost any other time in the last century, the Guardian can reveal.

An unprecedented analysis of 100 years of parliamentary speeches has shown a sharp shift to the right on the issue – with the biggest swing from positive to negative attitudes coming in the past five years.

President hails ‘turnaround for the ages’ but offers few policy pledges and repeats jibes against ‘crazy’ Democrats

Donald Trump proclaimed his first year in office a success at the State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, even as his presidency is dogged by low public approval ratings before November’s midterm elections in which voters could hand control of Congress back to his Democratic opponents.

The annual address to a joint session of Congress came after months of turmoil for the Republican president, including a crackdown on immigrant communities in Minneapolis that resulted in the deaths of two US citizens, and faltering progress on his campaign promise of lowering the cost of living.

Ofgem cap drops by 7% to £1,641 a year for consumers’ average gas and electricity costs

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Annual energy bills will fall by £117 for millions of households from April after Rachel Reeves’s plan to cut £150 a year from bills was partly foiled by rising costs.

The energy regulator Ofgem’s quarterly cap will fall by 7% a year for the three months from April to £1,641 for the average combined gas and electricity bill in Great Britain, from £1,758 under the current January-March cap.

Former Labour grandee’s arrest over his links to Epstein came after Met police informed he was preparing to fly to British Virgin Islands

Peter Mandelson condemned the police for his arrest on Monday and claimed he was only taken into custody because detectives had wrongly believed he was about to flee the country.

In a remarkable rebuke to the Metropolitan police, lawyers for the former peer challenged the force to provide the evidence to justify their actions, insisting it was prompted by a “baseless” suggestion that he was planning to move abroad.