Contrast the furious reaction to Rachel Reeves’s ‘mansion tax’ to the response offered to those living with real housing injustice: indifference

The new “mansion tax” announced by Rachel Reeves in last week’s budget is estimated to affect around 165,000 property owners, and on current trends the British media is forecast to have interviewed every single one of them by the end of the year. How else to explain the chorus of squeals we’ve been exposed to from the impoverished victims of Esher and Pimlico, whose only crime was to own a house worth over £2m in an era of egregious wealth inequality?

We hear, for example, from Philippa in Kensington, who tells the Telegraph that the new council tax surcharge on her two small mews houses will “wipe me out”. We hear from Paul, who owns a £2.5m house in Cobham, who tells the same newspaper that the move has wreaked havoc with his retirement plans. We hear in the Times from a property investor called Mark in Wimbledon, whose £9.5m house has been on the market for over a year, and gripes that he has had “almost no viewings in the last five or six months”. The Sun, for its part, evokes the spectre of “grannies being forced to sell up”, and condemns the levy as “a back-door way to seize chunks of family homes when hard-working Brits pass away”.

Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Now he’s free of the BBC, he’s gone combative. He drives a horse and cart through a piece of Dominic Grieve sophistry, and tries his best to skewer the institution based around a jewelled velvet hat

Settling down in front of David Dimbleby’s new three-parter, and looking at that confrontational title, you wonder why the question it asks is not debated more often. Dimbleby himself has trailed the series by worrying aloud that during his stint as a BBC staffer he was part of an organisation that didn’t challenge the monarchy robustly enough. But retirement means the shackles he wore when he was the corporation’s top politics presenter have been loosened.

The opening episode cleaves closest to the titular question – parts two and three are more like “Is the Monarchy a Giant Ponzi Scheme?” and “Are the Monarchy Personally Repellent?”, respectively – with its theme of how much power the monarchy has and how it wields it.

Laying a table well is one of the best ways to make guests feel relaxed and cosy. Queen of tablescaping Laura Jackson’s advice? Forget the stiff old rules and have fun with it

A feast is not just about food. Just to sit at a table surrounded by the faces of your people: nothing beats it. A feast is about togetherness, whether there are two people at the table, or 16. The primal joy of good food taps into something even more fundamental than hunger; if food is a love language, a feast is a big hug.

Is it sacrilege to say that being a host matters more than being a cook? Not to disparage the skill of the chef. Quite the opposite, it takes skill to make really good gravy, concentration to remember to take the cake out of the oven before it burns, and years of experience to time a roast to come together at the right moment. It takes no skill to fold a napkin and light a candle, yet with a beautifully laid and bounteously laden table, the night feels special before dinner is served, which takes the pressure off.

Investment was not enough to save the courts, said the justice secretary. At least, not the amounts he was prepared to put in

Spare a thought for David Lammy. Not so long ago he was foreign secretary. His dream job. Turning left on boarding planes to go to meet his counterparts around the world. An important player in global geopolitics. Then he found himself out on his ear. Replaced by Yvette Cooper, who had been booted out of the Home Office for being perceived to be soft on asylum seekers.

But at least Yvette got to fail upwards. Lammy just found himself downgraded to justice secretary. A department that has been unloved, downgraded and underfunded for years. Worse still, David now finds himself being forced to advocate policies the old David Lammy never once dreamed of himself making. Even as foreign secretary he would have been shaking his head in disapproval. Yet needs must.

The rising star has made her debut film, Dreamers, a semi-autobiographical love story set in an immigration detention centre. She talks about fleeing persecution in Nigeria – and what she learned from French new wave

Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor had a little wobble when she stepped on to the stage after the screening of her debut feature, Dreamers, at the London film festival. The Nigerian-British director’s film is a love story set in an immigration detention centre. It had already premiered in Berlin earlier this year. But showing her semi-autobiographical film to a home crowd in London felt exposing. “I suddenly had this feeling: Oh my God, everyone can see me. Everyone knows everything about me.” She laughs.

Gharoro-Akpojotor has built a reputation as a rising star producer. Her company Joi Productions makes films telling black, female and gay stories. (“All of the above, sometimes individually.”) Her credits include Rapman’s Blue Story and Aml Ameen’s romcom Boxing Day, and she is currently working on Ashley Walters’ directing debut Animol.

Anthropic’s chief scientist says AI autonomy could spark a beneficial ‘intelligence explosion’ – or be the moment humans lose control

Humanity will have to decide by 2030 whether to take the “ultimate risk” of letting artificial intelligence systems train themselves to become more powerful, one of the world’s leading AI scientists has said.

Jared Kaplan, the chief scientist and co-owner of the $180bn (£135bn) US startup Anthropic, said a choice was looming about how much autonomy the systems should be given to evolve.

None of the former officers named by the IOPC will face disciplinary proceedings because they have all retired

• Timeline: decades seeking justice and change

The families of those who died in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster have said it is a “bitter injustice” that no police officer will ever be held accountable for a catalogue of failings set out in the final report of the police watchdog after a 14-year investigation.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) found that 12 police officers, most of them senior, would have faced disciplinary cases of gross misconduct if they were still serving.

Exclusive: George Cottrell ‘gave control’ of gambling accounts to syndicate headed by Tony Bloom, the owner of Brighton & Hove Albion FC

George Cottrell, a close associate of Nigel Farage and a key figure in Reform UK’s inner circle, acted as a front for a major gambling syndicate that was “given control” of his betting accounts, a high court document alleges.

Cottrell acted as a stalking horse for a syndicate involving one of the world’s most successful gamblers, Tony Bloom, it is claimed in the public documents, filed at the high court.

Exclusive: New laws will also curb questioning and aim to stop complainants being discredited over previous reports

Rape victims will no longer be depicted as serial liars in courtrooms in England and Wales as part of the biggest shake-up “in a generation”, the Guardian can reveal.

New measures will stop the “profound injustice” of victims being questioned, sometimes without warning, about past rapes that they have reported to the police, said David Lammy, the justice secretary.

Kremlin aide says Ukraine crisis is no closer to resolution after Witkoff talks, as Russian president accuses European powers of sabotaging peace

Russia and the US did not make progress toward a peace deal for Ukraine during their talks, a senior aide to Vladimir Putin has said, hours after the Russian president issued threats that Russia was ready for war with Europe.

In remarks to Russian media, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said that after a five-hour meeting with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the two sides were “neither further nor closer to resolving the crisis in Ukraine. There is a lot of work to be done.”