Brown is said to be driven by moral anger but insiders suggest he may feel guilty for bringing Peter Mandelson back into government

Before Gordon Brown sent a draft of his 6 February comment piece on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal to the Guardian for publication, he asked friends whether he had gone too far.

The former prime minister had written that he found it “hard to find words to express my revulsion at what has been uncovered about Epstein and his impact on our politics” and the “time is overdue to let in the light”.

In 1990, Gary Williamson was 18, backpacking in Europe, when his vision began to fail. It was the start of a perilous journey

The first sign that something was wrong was the blurred text in the book Gary Williamson was reading. The problem with his vision had come on suddenly – the day before, it had been normal. Williamson thought perhaps he was tired, or run down. He was 18 and had arrived in Gibraltar after travelling through Europe for two weeks, sleeping rough and not eating or drinking properly. “I’ll go and get some water and something to eat. I thought: maybe it’s nothing. I’ll see how I am tomorrow. The next day, I woke up and it was bad again.” He remembers cautiously getting out his book to test his eyesight: “It’s actually getting worse. I can’t read it now. The lines were starting to blur.” He had relied on a map to get him that far. “I remember thinking: that’s going to become useless very soon. I need to work out what I’m doing.” He needed to get home.

It was 1990, and Williamson didn’t think to call home to ask for help. With no money left – he had made it to Gibraltar four days earlier with the intention to find work – he decided to hitch a lift, thinking a UK-bound lorry would be his best bet. He made it to the gates where the haulage lorries left the port, threw down his backpack by the side of the road and waited. None of the lorries stopped to pick him up. He was, he says, “panicking a little bit, thinking: what do I do? It was harder than I thought it was going to be.” Around 6pm, he gave up. He went back to where he had been sleeping, on a patch of sandy ground behind a sandwich stall over the Spanish border. Before he went to sleep, he wished that he would get a lift the next day, and that his eyesight wouldn’t be any worse. When he woke up, it was.

Reform is promising a ‘patriotic school curriculum’ – but what does that mean? In the end it comes down to submission to the leader

In September 2022, seven months into an all-out war in Ukraine that was only supposed to last a few weeks, Russian schoolchildren started compulsory patriotism lessons. Since then, Monday mornings have been set aside for “conversations about what is important” – a class on the glories of national history; western perfidy; the virtue of self-sacrifice for the Motherland; Vladimir Putin’s wise leadership.

Authoritarian regimes never trust people to love their country spontaneously. Organic national identity, the kind that grows without state cultivation, contains stories of dissent and cultural idiosyncrasy. Variety is subversive.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Monday 30 April, ahead of the May elections, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat Labour is under from both the Green party and Reform and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader of the party. Book tickets here

Father and daughter, Danny and Dani Dyer, are supposed to be reviving a caravan park that’s seen better days. Instead they’re mucking about and cracking infantile jokes – while the owners look desperately on

Like him or loathe him – I like him – Danny Dyer rarely misfires. The geezer “act” is an act only insofar as every celebrity is an act; he’s a more-than-competent actor and he has presented some decent documentaries (especially his most recent one, about modern masculinity). The Dyers’ Caravan Park, however, is a pile of rubbish.

The set-up is pretty simple. Danny loves caravan parks. He spent many happy holidays in them in his youth, surrounded by extended family and quickly made friends, enjoying “a sense of community that is severely lacking in today’s world”. So he has invested in such a park, the family-run Priory Hill in Leysdown-on-sea on the Isle of Sheppey, with the aim of reinvigorating it, the industry and bringing back “the great British holiday.” The six-part series will follow him and his daughter Dani through their first year at whatever it is they’re playing at.

At least the British gave us the perp-walk shots. But I fear that any Americans seeking real justice will have to wait, and wait, and wait

I can’t believe the cops didn’t max out the theatrics yesterday when taking Peter Mandelson to the police station to help with their inquiries. They didn’t even do that thing where they put their hand on top of the suspect’s head to ease him down into the back seat of the car. Absolutely no sense of occasion.

And you know, they really may as well have had one. Misconduct in a public office is such an archaic old law and so incredibly difficult to prove that it may well be that you have already seen the high-water mark of law-adjacent consequences for both Mandy and Andy. The perp walk is the punishment. No offence to the highly esteemed Metropolitan police and the various other forces who’ve found the rare grooming-gang scandal they can be arsed with, but it’s hard to get past the deep-rooted suspicion that they are just looking busy. But look, we got one iconic royal photo out of it and a clip of Mandelson over which you could wonder absentmindedly, “Is this honestly the first time he’s been arrested? I must be having a deja vu because it hasn’t happened before, yet it feels so weirdly familiar. For whatever reason.” Anyway, allow me to reiterate that both of the men mentioned in this paragraph deny any wrongdoing.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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Forget fear of public speaking. A lot of people now shy away completely from speaking to anyone in public. But if we learn to do this it’s enriching, for ourselves and society

It started with two incidents on the same day. In a fairly empty train carriage, a stranger in her 70s approached me: “Do you mind if I sit here? Or did you want to be alone with your thoughts?” I weighed it up for a split second, conscious that I was, in effect, agreeing to a conversation: “No, of course I don’t mind. Sit down.”

She turned out to be an agreeable, kind woman who had had a difficult day. I didn’t have to say much: “I’m sorry to hear that.” “That’s tough for you.” She occasionally asked me questions about myself, which I dodged politely. I could tell she was only asking so the conversation would not be so one-sided. Some moments are for listening, not sharing. I sensed, without needing to know explicitly, that she was probably returning to an empty house and wanted to process the day out loud. I didn’t feel uncomfortable, as I knew I could duck out at any moment by saying I needed to get back to my phone messages. But instead we talked – or, rather, I listened – for most of the 50-minute journey. I registered that it was an unusual occurrence, this connection, but thought little more of it. A small part of me was glad this kind of thing still happens.

Former Labour grandee’s arrest over his links to Epstein came after Met police informed he was preparing to fly to British Virgin Islands

Peter Mandelson condemned the police for his arrest on Monday and claimed he was only taken into custody because detectives had wrongly believed he was about to flee the country.

In a remarkable rebuke to the Metropolitan police, lawyers for the former peer challenged the force to provide the evidence to justify their actions, insisting it was prompted by a “baseless” suggestion that he was planning to move abroad.

President hails ‘turnaround for the ages’ but offers few policy pledges and repeats jibes against ‘crazy’ Democrats

Donald Trump proclaimed his first year in office a success at the State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, even as his presidency is dogged by low public approval ratings before November’s midterm elections in which voters could hand control of Congress back to his Democratic opponents.

The annual address to a joint session of Congress came after months of turmoil for the Republican president, including a crackdown on immigrant communities in Minneapolis that resulted in the deaths of two US citizens, and faltering progress on his campaign promise of lowering the cost of living.

Richard Tice echoes Donald Trump with pledge of ‘great repeal act’ and ‘tight quotas and significant tariffs’

Unions and renters’ groups have criticised Reform UK after the party’s business spokesperson, Richard Tice, pledged to introduce a “great repeal act” that would abolish Labour legislation on workers’ rights and protection for tenants.

In his first speech since being appointed by Nigel Farage to a portfolio covering business, trade and energy, Tice promised a bonfire of regulations, including an end to net zero targets and a new push for home-produced shale gas using fracking.

Education leaders and MPs say government needs to be careful about mental health impact on leaders and teachers in already overstretched sector

Teachers and schools face “a huge ask” implementing the government’s special needs proposals affecting hundreds of thousands of children, according to education leaders and MPs who otherwise gave the plans a cautious welcome.

Under the plans unveiled by Bridget Phillipson, mainstream schools in England will assess pupils with special needs and draw up individual support plans (ISPs), creating a potential workload burden before the changes take full effect in 2029-30.