The failed status quo and the OBR are holding us back from investing in ways that will transform the UK for the better. I can address that from the backbenches

• Louise Haigh is Labour MP for Sheffield Heeley

The events of the past week have been heart-wrenching for the labour movement. Angela Rayner is not just a friend, she is a trailblazer: proof that whatever your start in life, you can rise to the very top through hard work, grit and a government that is willing to fight on the side of working people. She has been an inspiration to so many and a true force of nature. Our party and our government will be poorer without her around the cabinet table.

I am deeply grateful for the encouragement I have received from party members, colleagues and friends in recent days about the deputy leadership. To be considered a possible successor to Rayner is truly humbling.

Louise Haigh is Labour MP for Sheffield Heeley

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Toronto film festival: The two stars are knockouts in Chloé Zhao’s poignant adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel with a stirring tearjerker ending

Maggie O’Farrell’s lauded 2020 novel Hamnet is a dense and lyrical imagining of the lives of William Shakespeare’s family, full of interior thought and lush descriptions of the physical world. It would seem, upon reading, near impossible to adapt into a film. Or, at least, a film worthy of O’Farrell’s so finely woven sensory spell. Film-maker Chloé Zhao has attempted to do so anyway, and the result is a stately, occasionally lugubrious drama whose closing minutes are among the most poignant in recent memory.

Zhao is a good fit for the material. She, too, is a close observer of nature and of the many aching, yearning people passing through it. But she has previously not made anything as traditionally tailored and refined as this. The humbler dimensions of her films The Rider and Nomadland are missed here; Hamnet too often gives off the effortful hum of prestige awards-bait.

The prime minister’s new chief secretary has been out and about trying to calm the storm after Angela Rayner’s exit

Don’t Panic! Don’t Panic! Over the weekend the newly promoted Darren Jones, Keir Starmer’s very own Keir Starmer tribute act, was out and about on the airwaves trying to convince everyone – himself included – that the government was not in crisis.

What do you mean, chaos, he said time and again as the questions kept on coming. Each time sounding slightly more chippy. He’s not a man who takes kindly to even a hint of mockery. Darren takes Darren extremely seriously.

Can one really relax while being prodded by large robotic arms?

I am alone in a dimly lit room, splayed face down on a table. Megan Thee Stallion’s Mamushi is bumping from a speaker, and on a large screen, two white circles roam up and down an outline of my body.

Am I at an exclusive German sex club at 2am?

The UK’s ambassador to Washington may believe the US president is merely a ‘risk taker’, but that doesn’t represent my point of view – and it probably doesn’t represent yours. That’s why we must make our voices heard

Is it ever the right time to worry about what Peter Mandelson has just said? Given he is so famously allied with the darkness, and the government is beset by more urgent problems, everywhere, it feels as if Mandelson should cut us a break and just say inoffensive things, or ideally, nothing. Instead, the ambassador to the US made a speech on Sunday to the Ditchley Foundation. Of Donald Trump, he said: “The president may not follow the traditional rulebook or conventional practice, but he is a risk taker in a world where a ‘business as usual’ approach no longer works.” According to Mandelson, those of us arguing for a pivot away from the special relationship are guilty of “lazy thinking”.

Some things are so depressing that they make themselves urgent, just by resting their boot upon your spirit. “Traditional rulebook or conventional practice” – I guess, by that, Mandelson means the traditional rule of law, where you don’t deport people without due process, to countries they weren’t even born in, or detain four-year-olds in the middle of cancer treatment. Or maybe he means the “conventional practice” of thinking genocide is bad; we live in a world where that belief has apparently been overturned, replaced by an AI mock-up of what Gaza would look like cleansed of its remaining inhabitants.

His grandparents survived the Nakba and he fled Assad’s Syria. Khalil is no stranger to political persecution, but not even Trump’s crackdown can silence him

When a history of resistance to the lurching authoritarianism of Donald Trump’s second presidency is written, it could well begin on 11 April 2025, inside a small immigration courtroom in remote, central Louisiana.

It was there, in the early afternoon, that a slight young man dressed in a blue uniform jumpsuit spoke calmly but directly to the new administration – away from the gaze of television cameras and 1,000 miles (1,610km) from his friends and family. Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and Palestinian organiser, had been arrested a month earlier – snatched from the lobby of his Manhattan apartment building as he returned home with his wife. Now, detained in the small town of Jena, he sat before a judge who had just ruled that he was eligible to be deported from the United States purely for his political views.

Exclusive: Leak exposes how former leader has used publicly subsidised office to manage commercial interests

A trove of leaked data from Boris Johnson’s private office reveals how the former prime minister has been profiting from contacts and influence he gained in office in a possible breach of ethics and lobbying rules.

The Boris Files contain emails, letters, invoices, speeches and business contracts. They shine a spotlight on the inner workings of a publicly subsidised company Johnson established after leaving Downing Street in September 2022.

Johnson lobbied a senior Saudi official he had met while in office, asking him to share a pitch with the petrostate’s autocratic crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, for a firm he co-chairs.

The ex-PM received more than £200,000 from a hedge fund after meeting Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro – contrary to statements he was not paid.

While in office, Johnson appears to have held a secret meeting with Peter Thiel, the billionaire who founded the controversial US data firm Palantir, months before it was given a role managing NHS data.

In an apparent breach of Covid pandemic rules, Johnson hosted a dinner for a Tory peer who financed a lavish refurbishment of his Downing Street flat, a day after the second national Covid-19 lockdown came into force.

Leaked documents appear to show Johnson used political contacts in commercial approach to crown prince

Boris Johnson recently approached senior Saudi officials he had met when he was prime minister to pitch the services of a consultancy firm he claimed “could be useful” to the petrostate’s autocratic crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, leaked files suggest.

Johnson, who resigned from government in 2022, appears to have led the newly formed company’s efforts last year to persuade the Saudi government to hire it to provide advice on reducing carbon emissions.

Johnson’s office sent invoice to hedge fund manager, which was paid, weeks after meeting Venezuelan leader last year

• Revealed: how Boris Johnson traded PM contacts for global business deals

From a private jet somewhere over the Caribbean Sea in February last year, Boris Johnson called his old political adversary David Cameron, then the foreign secretary, to notify him of a visit.

Johnson had taken a day out from a family holiday in the Dominican Republic for an unlikely meeting with the leftwing president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, a man whom Johnson, when in office, had likened to a “dictator of an evil regime”.

Apparent meeting with David Brownlow is one of several potential further lockdown breaches revealed in Boris Files

Boris Johnson hosted the Tory peer who funded a lavish refurbishment of his Downing Street flat for dinner the day after the second national coronavirus lockdown came into force in an apparent breach of the rules, leaked files suggest.

David Brownlow, who provided £58,000 to cover some of the cost of the renovations, which included £2,260 worth of “gold” wallpaper, joined the then prime minister in the small dining room at No 10 on Friday 6 November 2020.