From surgeons to senior civil servants, even the most decent people can make disastrous mistakes. But these gaffes require honesty

Gabriel Weston made a mistake at work this summer. It doesn’t define her – she was and is a well-regarded NHS surgeon and author – but it was serious enough, as she explained in an extraordinarily candid series of Instagram and Substack posts this month, to prompt an investigation that left her feeling “ashamed and alone and really quite nervous”. Whatever went wrong in the operating theatre was bad enough to be classed a “never event” (something that should never be able to happen if the process is working properly) and triggered a nagging anxiety that she might somehow do it again, unless she figured out where she had unexpectedly gone wrong.

It’s a fascinating insight into a process that most people never have the courage to talk about openly. But it also highlights why it’s so hard in practice for doctors and other professionals to acknowledge and learn from mistakes – as every public inquiry into every public scandal ends up recommending, only to repeat it all over again after the next one – rather than close ranks and cover up. Weston says she only spoke up out of frustration with what she saw as her employers’ failure to support her (she had asked to reduce what she considered an overloaded operating list to take some pressure off, which she says has now happened, leaving her full of praise for the hospital’s ultimate response). Judging by the responses to her posts, she’s not alone.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Though times are hard and days are dark, the former PM’s latest book reminds us of the fun to be had when a figure is so ridiculous but cannot see it

In these times of social and political division, it’s worth doing a quick audit of what keeps us together. Where, as we fight over what constitutes “wealth” and whether or not to go back in on Brexit, are the key sites of consensus? The Celebrity Traitors and the gloriousness of Nigella on Bake Off may offer one area of unity; you can say the words “David Attenborough” to any sample of the population and elicit exactly the same murmur of approval. But, as the recent history of the internet shows, the most forceful bonds are those forged against, rather than in favour of, something. With that in mind, let’s turn to our old friend Liz Truss.

It’s an unusual position, isn’t it, wondering if we might owe a debt of gratitude to the former prime minister who, after tanking the value of the pound in 2022 and otherwise carrying on with the efficacy of someone stopped at random in the street and given the keys to government, is widely regarded as the worst ever to have held office. Truss has a book out this week, her second since leaving office, entitled Bank Job: A Short Book on How the Bank of England Broke the Bond Market and Brought Down the Government, and on the evidence of its early reception, it seems likely to prove even more successful in uniting disparate communities of Britain than her previous volume, Ten Years to Save the West.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

She’s back with another book – and it’s a lot like the last one. Our sketchwriter spares you the 100 pages

HI!!! It’S mE Liz. THe TrUssTER. GueSS wHat? I’vE oNLy GOnE aND RiTTen anOTHer BoOK. IT’s called The NUT JOB. IMaGIne!!!. And iT’S DefiNATly tHE mosT ImPORtanT BoOk iN ThE EntIRe uniVErSE. ThE Wun NOWun wanTs yOU to Reed. PartLY BecOz ItS ThE SaME aS tHe laST WuNN. BuT MAInly BECoz tHE BLOBB iZ tryINg tO SileNCe mE.

FaKt ONE. I tried to get CHATgpT to RigHT this for me. But it replied that while AI was a useful tool for WriTTing all kinDs of ConsPIRacy theories, even it had standards. Not Even IT coulD CoME up wiV SomeThinG ThiS BaD.

The prime minister previously said that he wanted a debate on how Britain can establish a closer relationship

Speaking at his rough sleeping summit in Downing Street this morning, Andy Burnham expanded on the claim he made on Good Morning Britain about tackling rough sleeping being cheaper than ignoring the problem. (See 11.13am.)

He said:

We’ve also got to be conscious when we speak to the rest of the country, the taxpayers of this country, that actually to leave people sleeping rough has financial consequences. It doesn’t work for anybody and it doesn’t work for the public purse, because if you leave people in a position where they are in and out of A&E, and in and out of a hospital bed, that doesn’t make sense for anybody.

There is a rock-solid business case to do something to end homelessness, to put people on a path to recovery, so that they can contribute once again. And that should be the thinking that we take to this conversation.

Burnham is throwing another £432m at a problem he failed to solve in Greater Manchester. Under Labour, rough sleeping has hit record highs – yet their answer is always more taxpayers’ money and more empty promises.

[John] Healey must use his budget this week to cut taxes for working people, get the ballooning benefits bill under control, and stop pushing up energy prices.

John Healey is expected to confirm on Wednesday that the full state pension will rise by £489 to £13,036 – equivalent to 3.9%.

However, the rise will push about one million people on low incomes who rely on the state pension above the £12,570 personal allowance threshold, meaning they would be dragged into paying income tax.

In the Trusster’s latest appearance, she says Blair and Brown had a plot to dismantle civilisation and the Tories were part of the woke establishment

Some things you can set your watch by. Like every time small boats are in the news, the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, will manoeuvre himself in front of a camera to suggest that all male migrants are either murderers or rapists. Probably both.

But some things feel older than time itself. Like Liz Truss trying to persuade the world she was right all along. Most former prime ministers leave Downing Street relatively quietly. Lord Big Dave, the Maybot and even Boris nurse their grudges in private. Rishi lives in semi-retirement – almost a recluse – and only attends parliament when it suits him. Keir has been almost totally airbrushed out of history in a couple of months.

Podcast is now on YouTube site of Mike Graham, fired from TalkTV after racist post appeared on his Facebook page

• UK politics live – latest updates

When Liz Truss launched her podcast last year, she declared it would bring a “counter-revolution” to take on the “deep state”, which, she said, “tried to destroy” her.

The revolution, however, has not yet arrived. Truss, whose stint as UK prime minister abruptly ended after her disastrous mini-budget crashed the economy, has so far failed to find a wide audience in her media career.

In first PMQs clash with Kemi Badenoch, prime minister rejects comparison to Liz Truss’s government

• UK politics live – latest updates

Andy Burnham blamed the Conservatives’ legacy for leaving the UK vulnerable to market turmoil, in his first prime ministers’ questions clash with Kemi Badenoch, as the UK’s borrowing costs climbed further.

The Conservative leader compared the market pressure on Burnham’s second day to Liz Truss’s mini-Budget. But the prime minister said it was the Tories’ failure to address the UK’s growth and debt which meant the economy was exposed to market shocks.

Sanae Takaichi’s blueprint to inject £1.7tn and double economic growth leaves many investors fearful

International investors are asking where Japan’s prime minister will find the ¥370tn (£1.7tn) of extra cash that she wants to invest in 17 industrial sectors by 2040.

Such is the scale of spending by Sanae Takaichi’s coalition government that many in her own party fear she is about to blow up the Japanese economy, triggering a Liz Truss-style economic shock.

Former 49-day PM helms a Conservative Political Action Conference that’s a far cry from the glitzy US version

Liz Truss has given us all so much in recent years. A mini-budget. A laugh a minute 49 days in office. A new monarch, after the queen decided enough was enough and died two days after Liz began her Airbnb stay in Downing Street. And now she has given us one thing more. She has imported the US Conservative Political Action Conference to the UK.

And like all things Liz, it’s predictably a bit shit. In the US, CPAC is a full glitz Trump fest where all the champions of the far right go to strut their stuff and sell their merch. In Liz’s hands, it’s an altogether more drab affair with little interest from the audience. A going through the motions by C-list speakers who are well past their sell-by dates and have been saying the same things for years. Everyone would have had more fun and more surprises if the conference had been AI generated. There again, with Liz you can never be too sure.

Seit Jahren tritt Count Binface da an, wo Mächtige kandidieren. Natürlich, er bleibt chancenlos. Wobei, neulich in Makerfield waren die Tories nur knapp vor ihm. Doch was sind Zahlen angesichts eines moralischen Siegs.

From Cameron’s Brexit exit to Starmer’s Burnham bow-out, half a dozen PMs have gone. So who’s the best of the bunch?

The UK has had six prime ministers in the last 10 years – with a seventh likely to be in place by as early as mid-July.

John Crace ranks those who have been booted out of Downing Street between 2016 and 2026.

Das Vereinigte Königreich wird nach dem Rücktritt von Keir Starmer den siebten Premierminister in zehn Jahren bekommen. Was ist bloß los in diesem Land?

British love of silliness comes to the fore when politicians stand shoulder to shoulder with satirical rivals

When world leaders are elected, it is usually a solemn moment, but when the Labour party veteran Andy Burnham found out he had won the Makerfield byelection, increasing the likelihood he could become the next prime minister, he was standing next to a man with a bin on his head.

The newest Labour MP was also flanked by a man in a fox costume. Robert Pownall, the founder of the campaign group Protect the Wild, decided to run as a fox in order to demand an end to trail hunting.

Reform had previously suggested Farage would be ‘steering clear’ of event, modelled on US conservative gathering

• UK politics live – latest updates

Nigel Farage will be headlining at an American conservative summit brought to the UK by Liz Truss next month alongside hard-right speakers, despite his party previously suggesting he would be “steering clear”.

The Reform UK leader has announced he will speak in July at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which claims it wants to “save Britain, save the west”.

Former chancellor also tells Hay festival ‘good riddance’ to Tory MPs defecting to Reform

Sajid Javid said that supporting Liz Truss in the Conservative leadership contest that ultimately made her prime minister was his “biggest mistake in politics”.

Speaking at the Hay festival in Wales while promoting his memoir, the former chancellor, who is no longer an MP, said there were friends in the Conservative party he remained in contact with.

May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and now Starmer: each one was brought low for a reason. But what if the deeper problem is the office itself?

They were times in which prime ministers seemed to be on their way out as soon as they’d arrived. The big strategic decisions the country faced were ducked or postponed. The public finances repeatedly wobbled, yet efforts to rationalise the tax system faltered in the face of vested interests, including farmers. Reforms to social security were trumpeted before being diluted. The whole business of politics was animated by rancour and rivalry, rather than practical action. All the while, populists waited in the wings.

This is not a sneak peak into a future history book about today’s Britain, but a description of the French fourth republic, which staggered after a difficult birth in 1946 until 1958, when the exhausted regime ceded the authority to create a new order to Gen Charles de Gaulle, effectively putting itself out of its misery.

Distracted, listless and unambitious – the PM’s true form has finally emerged. But whatever comes next must end this ruinous cycle

Finally, belatedly, an honest portrait of Keir Starmer has been allowed to form. It’s been a hell of a journey. At first he was sanctified as the Labour saviour, finally arrived. That gave way to pleas that he was essentially a good sort, new to politics and in need of time. Now an impression is emerging that he is, in fact, quite a bad egg. To quote a brutal recent summation from a Labour insider speaking to Politico: “Lots of people think Keir Starmer is a good man who is out of his depth. Wrong. He’s an asshole who’s out of his depth.”

The charges are now coming thick and fast. He cannot manage teams. He throws people under the bus to save his own skin. He cannot do the job. The whole Peter Mandelson affair, the latest instalment of which is the revelation that Mandelson failed his security vetting, and that Starmer claims not to have been told of this, has at least come with one silver lining. As his own ministers distance themselves from him and give up the ghost on live television, even loyal stalwarts can’t sustain their tedious, misguided speculation that he might be rebooted and come good. The broad conclusion is that Starmer is now beyond rehabilitation, and his fate only a matter of time. So what now?

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

Who needs critics when the Reform man is so adept at patting his own back – and that’s easy to do in publishing: there’s a sales list for everyone

‘She’s produced a bestseller!” panted the Spectator. “Liz Truss’s new book has been out for less than 72 hours and it’s already sold out on Amazon.” Thus began the fairly widespread British media hallucination that the 45-day PM was once more igniting the nation with her 2024 book Ten Years to Save the West. In the end, Truss’s book sold 2,228 copies in the UK in its first week, which placed it at No 70 in the “bestseller” charts . The next week it had fallen back to 223, comfortably obliterated by any number of cookbooks, novels, self-help titles and sticker books, none of which had enjoyed anything like its level of publicity. You hear a lot about AI hallucinations, but rather less about the hallucinations suffered by journalists all on their own.

So, then, to the furore over the academic/recent Reform candidate Matt Goodwin’s new book, which I find at least as high-stakes for our culture as that courtroom battle between Gwyneth Paltrow and the – I think? – retired optometrist who accidentally skied into her.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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Exclusive: Reform UK will be ‘steering well clear’ of CPAC event in July, source says, as will senior Tories

Nigel Farage will snub a major conference of US conservatives that is being brought to the UK by Liz Truss.

The short-lived former prime minister, who was accused of crashing the economy, was chosen by the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to lead a version of the event in the UK in July.

It’s awkward, nobody seems to know what is going on, and the president’s thumb is at half-mast. It’s almost a metaphor for diplomatic relations between the US and the UK

When Liz Truss tweeted a photo of herself standing next to Donald Trump, she captioned it “right about everything”. All that effort, all that security clearance and long-haul travel and whatnot, to reach the pinnacle of proximity to your spiritual leader, and that’s the best she could come up with? It was bafflingly lame. And yet the least confusing thing about this scene were the words.

What exactly is going on in this photo? Truss clearly knows where she is, because she’s grinning with a kind of victorious serenity, as if she’s finally achieved the plaudit she knew all along was hers. At the same time – not wishing to be unsisterly – she doesn’t appear to have brushed her hair, so it doesn’t feel like this photo opportunity was in anyone’s diary. It looks like a selfie you’d catch when you run into your favourite contestant from The Traitors on your way through an airport. No time to worry about your grooming; it’s the chance of a lifetime, every second counts.