Jawad Iqbal

Kylian Mbappé, one of football’s biggest stars, has made an abject apology after being dropped by Chinese brands for apparently joking about the country’s former ruler Mao Zedong in an online video. Mbappé, who plays for Real Madrid and captains the French national team, is a big name in China: his face features on Chinese train station billboards and posters, as well as a range of products. He made the mistake of appearing to refer to the revered Mao in less than complimentary terms. You don’t need to be a historian to know that Mao was mad and bad, a dictator whose oppressive rule led to mass starvation, but his Communist Party successors don’t like anyone pointing this out.

Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s Home Affairs spokesman, is making quite a name for himself as someone who provokes rage across the political spectrum on an almost daily basis. He appears to operate in a political fantasy world, in which he alone has the answers to problems that have defeated everyone else. His latest 'solution', focusing on the small boats crisis, is that the Royal Navy and Royal Marines should use 'lethal force' against smugglers operating boats in the English Channel. 'If people smugglers resist, our boys will be authorised to use lethal force. We will take our country back,' he declared. For added emphasis, using Trumpian capital letters, he said marines would be given a simple order: 'DO NOT LET A SINGLE INVADER REACH OUR SHORES.

Donald Trump has opened up the prospect of America being drawn into a wider Middle East conflict, effectively a second front in the ongoing war with Iran. The US president said he is “going to look at” joining Saudi Arabia in the battle against the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen. It follows the Houthi missile attack on the King Khalid international airport in Riyadh which killed 12 people and injured 309 others. One of the 12 dead is known to be an American. There may be more US casualties among the severely injured. The attack on the airport has reignited fears of a wider regional escalation. The Saudis, despite their enormous oil wealth, cannot fight, let alone win, their war against one militia force “We may.

Hands up anyone who knows what happens now that Manchester City have reportedly been found guilty of nearly all of their 115 alleged breaches of Premier League rules. It is tempting to think that the good guys have won, justice done, and the football cheats put in their place. Well, hold that thought, because this saga still has some way to run. This explosive and controversial case has been conducted in private, with all involved sworn to secrecy, and there is much that remains unknown. There has been no official confirmation of the verdict, but nor has there been any denial of the widespread reports.  The legal process is believed to have racked up costs in excess of £100 million pounds so far.

It has to go down as one of the strangest public encounters between a senior British politician and, well, a nobody who is apparently big on social media. Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary, was stopped in the street in New York by an influencer, Feroz Khan, in a brief and seemingly spontaneous interaction – one that just happened to be filmed and then posted all over social media. Miliband was there for the UN general assembly but apparently more than happy to chew the fat with a perfect stranger. Khan’s shtick on social media is to conduct impromptu interviews with people he stops in the street with fawning remarks and soft-ball questions. 'Excuse me, you have an amazing outfit,' Khan coos as Miliband passes by (please pass the sick bucket). 'What do you do for a living?

Andy Burnham, who has built a political brand based on being open and approachable, has been duped by a prankster pretending to be a top aide to Donald Trump. He has been messaging back-and-forth with someone posing as Susie Wiles, the chief of staff to the President. No verbal conversation is understood to have taken place in these mysterious text exchanges, first reported by Politico. They began before Burnham became PM and continued after he took office on 20 July.  One official source described them as being ‘of no significance’, but No. 10 would not disclose whether any sensitive information had been disclosed.

Labour’s decisive victory in the Greater Manchester mayoral election is a bad result for Reform UK and the Green Party. No amount of political spin can disguise the truth that both parties came into this contest with high hopes – only to fail spectacularly.  The numbers tell their own story. Labour’s Bev Craig won 47 per cent of first-preference votes, with Reform UK way behind on 21 per cent and the Greens in third on 12 per cent. The contest took place under the supplementary vote system, meaning that, as no candidate achieved more than 50 per cent, voters’ second preferences were counted. When this was done and other parties eliminated, Labour’s share rose to 66.3 per cent and Reform UK’s to 33.7 per cent.

The Greater Manchester Police force has made a jaw-dropping admission. It says it failed to check vital information contained on the Manchester synagogue attacker’s phone – even though he was arrested twice before he carried out his terror attack last year. Jihad al-Shamie was shot dead by police on 2 October last year during the attack at the Heaton Park synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Two worshippers were killed. Sir Stephen Watson, the GMP chief constable, said he was ‘deeply sorry’ after admitting the phones of the terrorist were seized twice in the months before he carried out his attack: ‘In conducting an internal review, it became apparent that GMP had seized al-Shamie’s mobile devices, at the point of each arrest.

Andy Burnham’s new government, barely 24 hours in power, is in danger of collectively losing its marbles. The fault lies largely with the new PM who appears unable to shake off the habit of a lifetime of being all things to all people, and eager for cheap applause whenever the opportunity presents itself. How else to make sense of the unseemly haste with which he reprimanded two senior cabinet ministers for a poor joke about the early prisoner release scheme? A public and humiliating rebuke handed out for the ‘crime’ of a joke in poor taste. Stupid and insensitive, maybe, but nothing more. What is politics coming to? Is this a free country or is it a place where any public misstep deemed inappropriate must result in immediate public recantation of the most demeaning kind?

Andy Burnham will become Prime Minister today – the seventh leader of the country in the last decade. It is a case of all hail the new messiah, who promises to build “a new politics” ( the eternal empty vow of every politician when taking power) but this time with a shiny new twist. Burnham, who oozes a desperate desire to be liked, will lead a government focused on good vibes and the fantasy of a mythical Labour paradise lost, rather than anything grounded in the harsh political realities of today. His approach to power boils down to trusting his instincts (those vibes, again), based on the delusion that he has a special connection with ordinary voters.