Mme Pelicot’s innate dignity shines through, as she explains why she waived her anonymity – after her husband drugged her so that dozens of men could sexually assault her

It’s hard to judge an interview with Gisèle Pelicot in the normal terms. Let’s start with the easy bit: Victoria Derbyshire is the ideal interlocutor. The co-presenter of Newsnight has a kind of steely warmth that meshes well with the innate dignity of Mme Pelicot – as she is called throughout – while they walk unflinchingly through her terrible story.

Her “descent into hell” began on 2 November 2020 when the local police called her and her husband, Dominique Pelicot, to the station. They believed it was to do with his recent arrest for covertly taking pictures underneath the skirts of three women in the supermarket. It was not. In the course of that investigation they had found on his laptop thousands upon thousands of videos and photographs accumulated over a decade of his wife unconscious and being raped by strangers.

Big investment in coaches and kit – £5.8m in the last cycle – has paid off despite lack of facilities and snow at home

According to UK Sport, 3,500 people have signed up to audition for their skeleton Talent ID programme in the past three days, an extraordinary surge of interest in what has never been what you might call the most accessible sport.

It is all after Matt Weston and Tabby Stoecker won Great Britain’s 10th and 11th Olympic medals in the sport, continuing a lineage that reaches back to 1928, when it was the winter sport of choice for the most reckless of a set of aristocratic adventurers. The 11th Earl of Northesk won bronze ahead of his teammate, and the pre-race favourite, Lord Brabazon of Tara. It is some legacy. After a century of competition, skeleton is the only Winter Olympic sport in which Britain lead the all-time medal table.

He left school at 15 and worked as a scaffolder. Then success on New Faces launched him to stardom – and he’s been a panto and musicals sensation ever since. So what made him write a comedy about two men waiting?

Gary Wilmot has had many lives. A children’s TV presenter turned variety show host turned panto marvel turned musicals sensation, Wilmot has now turned his hand back to playwriting. His London debut is a comedy about two men, waiting. One is chill, the other restless; both become bonded by the wait. Very Samuel Beckett, isn’t it? The men could be Vladimir and Estragon, no?

“Funny you should say that,” Wilmot says, sitting at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, the theatre above a pub in London that is staging While They Were Waiting, in which he also stars, opposite Steve Furst. Soon after the play was commissioned, he was asked if he had been influenced by Beckett’s existential play Waiting for Godot. He’d never seen it but it just so happened there was a production in the West End starring Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati. Wilmot went, saw it and left nonplussed. “I thought, ‘There’s a reason I’ve never seen this. I haven’t got a clue what’s going on.’”

As her Women’s prize-winning novel heads to the Oscars, we rate the author’s best work – from tales of new motherhood to a life-affirming memoir of mortality

The ghost of a previous lover is always a challenge, particularly if you (mistakenly) believe that she’s actually dead. This is the unenviable situation for Lily, the protagonist of O’Farrell’s second novel, who is swept off her feet by dashing architect Marcus and in short order moves in with him. Lily takes his assurances that her predecessor Sinead is “no longer with us” to mark a more permanent absence; in fact, Sinead has simply been thrown over, and it is in the details of the collapse of her relationship with Marcus that the novel most engages. Hints of the gothic ghost story deepen one of the main takeaways, which is that Marcus consists almost entirely of red flags.

After JD Vance’s frontal attack in Munich last year, the US secretary of state’s tone seemed almost soothing. That’s just a new Maga trap

The good news from the Munich Security Conference is that there was no dramatic deterioration in the transatlantic relationship. After the shock of last year’s event, when JD Vance stunned the audience with a frontal US attack on Europe’s liberal democracies, the seemingly more conciliatory tone struck by Marco Rubio was greeted by many present, including Wolfgang Ischinger, a veteran German diplomat and the conference chair, as “reassuring”. Indeed, the US secretary of state got a standing ovation in the room – a gesture perhaps more of relief than of adulation. But is the Trump administration’s message to Europe really any different now from that contained in Vance’s assault 12 months ago? What traps are being laid and what lessons should Europeans draw?

A year ago, Vance accused Europe of succumbing to the alleged tyranny and censorship of woke liberals and losing sight of the cultural bonds that link the two shores of the Atlantic. His attack baffled European leaders, who, while often prone to navel-gazing about their internal struggles, do not consider restrictions on free speech a primary concern. The US vice-president shocked Munich by insisting that Europe’s biggest threat was the woke “threat from within”, even as he endorsed far-right nationalists including Germany’s AfD. The insult was so deep that this year the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, used his opening address to issue a blunt warning about American unilateralist values, declaring that “the culture war of the Maga movement is not ours”.

Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist

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The maximalist adaptation of the gothic romance shows great interest in production design but very little in character

It does not take long into Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s English lit classic, for one to detect the film-maker’s true faith. It is not to the challenging and beloved gothic novel of emotional repression and inheritance; as with many other cinematic adaptations, Fennell dispenses with the unruly latter half of the book, along with most of its conventions. In Fennell’s emphatically maximalist vision – she has explained that the quotation marks in the film’s marketing are a note of humility, to her singular and limited interpretation – the tortuously connected Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) swoon about the Yorkshire moors in extravagant, anachronistic formalwear, flagrantly unbound by period decorum.

Over three features, the English writer-director has demonstrated a penchant for sticky visuals; arguably the most-discussed scene from 2023’s Saltburn, her discourse-driving sophomore feature, involved the licking of cummy bathwater from the drain. Wuthering Heights is not to be controversially out-soaked. In closeup, sweat beads and drips down a spine; snail slime indolently streaks a window; freshly poured pig blood mucks Cathy’s dress. Desire, less suggested than enforced, stains everything. Early in the film, just after the abrupt ageing of Cathy and Heathcliff from boundless children (played by Charlotte Mellington and Adolescence’s Owen Cooper) to unspecific adults, Elordi’s brooding, beastly Heathcliff catches Robbie’s blonde Cathy, furiously horny after a bit of light voyeurism, pleasuring herself against the windswept rocks. She tries to hide her hand in her dress; he picks her up by the bodice strings, and licks her fingers clean.

The government was warned by its lawyers that such a move could be illegal as it pledges an additional £63m to help councils with reorganisation

In his Q&A with journalists, Keir Starmer was also asked to respond to a report by the BBC’s James Landale saying he is looking at plans to raise defence spending to 3% of GDP by the end of this parliament. In the past Starmer has just said that he would like to do this at some point in the next parliament.

In his reply, Starmer said that at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend he was arguing that the UK, and Europe as a whole, needs to “step up”.

We want a just and lasting peace, but that will not extinguish the Russian threat, and we need to be alert to that, because that’s going to affect every single person in this room, every single person in this country, so we need to step up.

That means, on defence spending, we need to go faster.

British women in Spain and Greece face ‘huge problems’ entering UK because of differing surname rules

New rules requiring British dual nationals to show a UK passport when entering Britain are “discriminatory” against women, campaigners claim.

From 25 February, British dual nationals are required to present a British passport when boarding a plane, ferry or train to the UK, or attach a new document, a “certificate of entitlement”, which costs nearly £600, to their second passport.

PM says ‘we need to step up’ but sources clarify that is unlikely to mean spending 3% of GDP before next election

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has said Britain “needs to go faster” on defence spending, though any increase to military budgets in this parliament would probably not be as high as the £15bn suggested in an overnight report.

At a press conference in south-west London, the prime minister was asked to comment on a BBC report that No 10 wanted to increase the defence budget to 3% of GDP by 2029.

Prime minister says action will be taken on young people’s social media access in ‘months, not years’

• What social media restrictions has Keir Starmer announced?

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has pledged action on young people’s access to social media in “months, not years”, while saying this did not necessarily mean a complete ban on access for under-16s.

Speaking at an event in London after the government promised to extend the crackdown to AI chatbots that place children at risk, Starmer said the issue was nuanced and that a ban was not definite, noting concerns from charities such as the NSPCC.