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Keir Starmer has set down Labour’s Brexit red lines: if his party wins power, he will not take the UK back into the EU’s single market or customs union, nor will he restore freedom of movement with the bloc. Instead, in a speech today, he will pledge to ‘break down’ the ‘fatberg of red tape’ that Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal has created for British businesses and he will get the Northern Ireland Protocol working too. As the bulk of the UK’s political media credulously reports this preposterous posturing, interpreting it as a setback for pro-Europeans in Labour, presumably the expectation is that pro-Leave voters in marginal Red Wall seats will make their peace with the party and further turn against Johnson’s ailing Tory regime.

Tory MPs are exhausted. Speak to them and they just want all these scandals to go away. One normally cheerful backbencher told me they ‘have never been so depressed about politics’ and that most of their colleagues feel the same way. The Chris Pincher scandal is particularly grim. Regardless of whether No. 10 knew about any specific allegation or not, you can’t get round the fact that Pincher resigned in 2017 over unwanted advances and was then reappointed.

‘Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could,’ says Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park, ‘they didn’t stop to think if they should’. These, among the wisest of that fictional oracle’s many wise words, are what came to mind as I read of a whizzy new pan-European science project called Odeuropa. Historians and chemists in Holland, Germany, Italy, France and Slovenia along with colleagues at UCL and in Cambridge, have spent two years, apparently, working to synthesize the smells of the past.

Pride month means only one thing: the chance for corporations to embarrass themselves with the latest right-on social media stunt. This year it was the turn of Halifax, which took to Twitter last week to declare that 'Pronouns matter' alongside an image of its new-style staff name badge, featuring the words 'she/her/hers' underneath. Other banks quickly piled in, with HSBC heralding this 'positive step forward for equality and inclusion' as 'it's vital that everyone can be themselves in the workplace.