Aleisha Omeike says we have to get organised to fight the racism and misogyny that is on the rise in Britain, in response to an article by Rohan Sathyamoorthy

I read Rohan Sathyamoorthy’s piece (I thought I was growing up in a racially tolerant Britain. I now realise I was wrong, 7 September) and thought – “it’s not just in my head”. The far right isn’t creeping back. It’s marching in, boots on, flags waving, and people are clapping along like it’s Eurovision.

As a working-class woman of colour, I’m exhausted. Not just from the racism and misogyny, but from how normal it’s all starting to feel again. Like we’re rewinding to a time when public figures could say vile things about migrants, Muslims or “woke women” and still get invited on to Question Time with a smile and a fresh haircut. The vile attitudes that Rohan’s dad had to endure are resurfacing.

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Chris Rennard, David Ellis and Richard McNicol on revelations about the former prime minister’s conduct in office and commercial interests

You report on the considerable enrichment of Boris Johnson from contacts he made while he was prime minister and his claims from the public duty costs allowance (What are the Boris Files and what do they reveal about former PM’s conduct?, 8 September). The PDCA payments are not supposed to be for work done or staff or travel costs incurred by former prime ministers seeking to enrich themselves personally with business deals, speeches or books.

However, unlike with MPs, no breakdown of “costs” is published. How does the National Audit Office know that costs are fairly apportioned between whatever the duties of a former prime minister are supposed to be and the business activities of those MPs? How can Johnson’s three years as PM before being sacked, or Liz Truss’s 49 days in office, justify a lifetime allowance of £115,000 per annum?
Chris Rennard
Liberal Democrat, House of Lords

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Leaked files show public funds may have supported private deals. This corrodes public life. The National Audit Office should investigate

Boris Johnson’s Eton housemaster warned that he thought himself “free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else”. Decades passed, and Mr Johnson remained cavalier about following the rules. Propriety, even as prime minister, was disgracefully little more than performance. His post-office conduct suggests he still treats norms as optional.

Leaked documents from Mr Johnson’s private office, obtained by the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets and seen by the Guardian, raise grave questions about his adherence to standards – and whether public money has helped fund his post-premiership business empire. They centre on the public duty costs allowance (PDCA), an allocation meant to support former prime ministers’ public duties, not their profit-making ventures. Mr Johnson has received £182,000 through the scheme since 2022. But the documents suggest his staff has been working not just on public roles but also on global private deals. Mr Johnson calls the allegations “rubbish”.

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Readers respond to articles on the election of the new Green party leader

Zack Polanski’s sweeping victory as leader of the Green party opens significant opportunities for the Greens and the left more generally, as both the Guardian editorial (2 September) and George Monbiot recognise (Labour has succeeded only in strengthening Farage. The way is now open for Zack Polanski’s Greens, 3 September).

Polanski himself lays out his core policy story and says his party’s “central mission” is to turn its 40 second-place finishes in 2024 into Green MPs at the next election (This is the Green party’s moment – not Farage’s. As leader, I’ll offer real solutions to Britain’s problems, 2 September). But to get there he has to build popular movements and shed populist slogans. He’ll have to choose between grandiose rhetoric and realistic politics.

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The attempt to assassinate Hamas negotiators in the capital of a US ally was the act of a rogue government uninterested in peace

“Why does the PM insist on blowing up any deal that comes close?” despaired the mother of a hostage held in Gaza, following Israel’s airstrike in Qatar on Tuesday. For anyone who doubted Benjamin Netanyahu’s commitment to the forever war he unleashed after 7 October, the attempt to wipe out Hamas’s ceasefire negotiation team in Doha offered grim confirmation that peace – and the return of Israeli hostages – is low on Mr Netanyahu’s list of current priorities.

Just how close Hamas’s leadership was to endorsing ceasefire proposals backed by Donald Trump – which were being discussed in the capital of an established US ally – is unclear. However, Mr Netanyahu’s strike has ensured that its negotiators will not agree to sit round a table again anytime soon. Israel swiftly stated that the attack was in response to the Hamas-claimed shooting in Jerusalem on Monday, in which six people died. But it also occurred as the Israeli military ordered the complete evacuation of Gaza City, ahead of a full-scale invasion that will bring further death and destruction to a starving, traumatised population.

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Optimists cling to a faith in the old alliance, but the best we can achieve is an amicable divorce

Is the transatlantic rupture temporary or structural? Is Donald Trump the cause of the rift, or is the US president only a symptom of underlying trends? Optimists latch on to the hope that the stability we have lost can be restored post-Trump. Having spent the past few days in Washington, I doubt it.

Even in recent history, things were not quite so bad for the transatlantic relationship. The current tensions make the first Trump administration look like a walk in the park for Europeans. It is one thing to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump did in his first term. It is quite another to bomb Iran and give Israel the green light for its war against the regime.

Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist

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A sleepless night of doomscrolling led me to dunk my cherished kitchen utensils in bubbling water. The murky results were horrifying

Never am I so creative as when it comes to finding something to do instead of what I really should be doing. There’s nothing like a looming deadline to spark some crackpot ideas. So it was that something I’d read somewhere on the internet came back to me. A tip on cleaning wooden spoons. I’d come across it in the middle of a sleepless night when, contrary to the advice of sleep experts, I’d resorted in desperation to doomscrolling. Being quite attached to my wooden spoons, I resolved to do as suggested, a prospect so soothing that I was soon drifting off thinking happy spoon-cleaning thoughts. Honestly, whatever works.

And now it all came back to me. Stuff the deadline, I’m going to do the spoon stuff straight away. I gathered my entire stock of wooden spoons – 15 in total. As directed, I put them in my largest pot, filled it with cold water, and watched it come to a pleasing boil. Now, my spoon husbandry is second to none: after each use I vigorously scrub them before sticking them in the dishwasher. So I was looking forward to giving them a clean bill of health. Before long, as the bubbles rose to a boil, some unidentified bits and pieces began floating to the surface. Disappointing, worrying, intriguing. The instructions were to take the pot off the heat once the water had boiled and come back to it 20 minutes later.

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E Jean Carroll won her case, but in Trumpland the only sex offences that matter are committed by paedophiles with links to Democrats

On Monday, Donald Trump appeared in two, unrelated stories involving the sexual abuse of women. The first was a ruling by the US federal court of appeals, upholding an earlier judgment in which the president was found liable for $83.3m in damages for defaming the writer E Jean Carroll – a woman whom, it was ruled in civil court in 2023, had been sexually abused by Trump. On the same day, Trump’s alleged contribution to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s “birthday book” was shared by Democrats on social media in the form of a lewd drawing the president denied having made. The E Jean Carroll news caused no public inconvenience for Trump; the Epstein story went up like a mushroom cloud in what has become the most politically dangerous episode of his presidency.

What, exactly, is the difference then between the sexual abuse of E Jean Carroll, for which Trump has been found liable in a civil court, and the trafficking and abuse of victims by Epstein, in which there is no direct evidence of Trump’s involvement? For that matter, why does Trump’s record of gross references to grabbing women “by the pussy” and calling them “fat” and “ugly” elicit barely a shrug from supporters, while his friendship with Epstein, a man referred to in the press, variously, as the “billionaire paedophile”, the “paeodophile financier”, and, surely coming down the pike at some point, the “hell-based paedophile money manager”, has triggered not only fury among the Maga faithful but accusations of a Trump cover-up?

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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