Hapless Stephen Doughty was given the hospital pass of defending the PM over the ex-US ambassador’s appointment

Just what has Stephen Doughty done to upset Keir Starmer? Are there no limits to the prime minister’s contempt and hatred? Not that Steve is a total nobody. He’s not a run-of-the-mill backbencher. But he has risen as high as he is likely to go as a junior minister in the Foreign Office. Probably higher than Steve ever expected. Certainly higher than his mates expected. Put simply, Steve is a dependable plodder. Someone who can be trusted to do as he is told. To not ask questions. And yet for Keir he is just collateral damage. Expendable.

Not that this is how it will have been put to Steve. Rather, the prime minister’s outriders will have taken him to one side. A word in your ear. We’ve got a top-secret mission for you. Get this right and we can win the war. The future of the country is in your hands. The generals probably said much the same to the infantrymen on the morning of the Somme offensive. Though Steve would die many times over. The walking dead.

Robert Redford, who has died at the age of 89, began as a blond bombshell at a time when American cinema favoured grit, then turned into a supremely assured director and unlikely keeper of the indie flame

• Robert Redford, giant of American cinema, dies aged 89 – news

• Robert Redford – a life in pictures

As the 1960s turned into the 1970s, it wasn’t cool for star actors to be good-looking. The style was more a scuffed, grizzled, bleary, sweaty, paunchy and shlubby realness. The fashion was for leading men like Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson, Woody Allen. Even a very beautiful man like Paul Newman had a kind of rugged, daylit quality. But Robert Redford was very different. Here was a supremely beautiful movie star who went on to direct, produce and then be the guardian and gatekeeper of commercial-indie US cinema at his Sundance Institute. And he was always an outlier.

When movie audiences thrilled to George Roy Hill’s western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, they knew that in breakout star Redford they had an almost indecently attractive male, however much he might dress it down with buckskins and moustache, playing the devil-may-care outlaw Sundance Kid himself. His sardonic charisma and sexiness shone through. And when he cleaned himself up for other roles, teaming up again with Newman for the jazz age con-men caper The Sting in 1973, the effect was electric. Neatly trimmed and shaved, Robert Redford was just outrageously handsome, incandescently handsome, he was handsomeness on legs. His photograph was in the dictionary next to “handsome”.

After a tough week for Labour, Donald Trump is touching down for a state visit. Let’s hope the PM can stomach it

Quick update on Keir Starmer’s government of “national renewal”: having just lost his deputy and housing secretary over her failure to pay the required stamp duty, the prime minister has also lost his US ambassador over his known close association with a known paedophile sex trafficker. Hang on – he’s now also lost his director of political strategy for relating some dirty jokes about Diane Abbott.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of people think the solution to all this is Andy Burnham taking over, suggesting the current Greater Manchester mayor could run in a parliamentary seat that has only notionally become free because the previous Labour MP was suspended from the party after being found to have sent messages hoping a couple of constituents would soon be dead/“mown down”, and is now apparently “off sick”. On top of which, we’re having the Americans round. US president Donald Trump touches down in the UK tonight on the eve of the most hideously ill-starred dinner party since the vomiting scene in Triangle of Sadness. I don’t think the nation could possibly feel any more renewed.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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Lowles has spent his entire adult life organising against fascism, facing countless threats as a result. He discusses the street confrontations of the 80s, foiling a murder plot, Nazi satanists – and the urgent need for optimism and action

In 1979, a 10-year-old Nick Lowles saw a hard-right party political broadcast. Born in Hounslow in London, he had moved to Shrewsbury when he was seven: “A very white town. There was a British Movement march soon after we moved up there.” Theirs was a “small-P political household”. His dad was a social worker, his mum worked for various charities. “She was from Mauritius, and now on the telly, the National Front were saying they were going to send people who weren’t born in Britain home in six months. I was petrified that my mum was going to get sent home.” The ambient racism of 70s and 80s Britain permeated everything. “I just remember being scared,” Lowles says. “We used to go on holiday and I tan really easily. I was frightened of coming back to school too brown.”

You can’t meet terrifying politics except with politics of your own, he realised in his teens. How to Defeat the Far Right is Lowles’s memoir-cum-manual, telling the story of how Hope Not Hate, the anti-fascist campaign group, came into existence in 2004. There is no other organisation like it, in its range of actions and independence of spirit. It does a lot of data (polling and analysis) but also a lot of community organising; it infiltrates fascist spaces, online and off, to subvert their plans, and it organises counterprotests. It is connected to institutional politics, though its influence waxes and wanes – Lowles is a good friend of Gordon Brown’s, but doesn’t feel especially heeded by the current government.

People in the Shropshire town have been left cut off and frustrated by the collapse of public transport

• UK public has paid £200bn to shareholders of key industries since privatisation – study

The city of Birmingham lies just over 40 miles north-east of Ludlow, but to the 10,000 residents of the quiet Shropshire town, it may as well be on the moon.

“You can’t get a bus to Birmingham today, it’s impossible. It is really just up the road, our big regional centre but there are no buses. How ridiculous is that?” said Philip Adams.

It was the place to be through the 1980s, a nightclub where Johnny Rotten and Kim Wilde rubbed shoulders with the Beastie Boys and, er, Mel Smith. David Koppel’s new book captures it all

Exclusive: London mayor says US president has ‘perhaps done the most’ to encourage far right

• Londoners must show Trump we reject his politics of fear | Sadiq Khan

Donald Trump has arrived in the UK on Tuesday night to a barrage of criticism from Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, who has accused the US president of doing more than anyone else to encourage the intolerant far right across the globe.

In what will be considered to be a direct challenge to Keir Starmer’s government to take a more robust stance towards Trump, Khan said the president’s use of the military in cities and targeting of minorities was “straight out of the autocrat’s playbook”.

Redford achieved huge critical and commercial success in the 60s and 70s with a string of hits including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Way We Were and The Sting, before becoming an Oscar-winning director

• ‘The incandescently handsome star who changed Hollywood forever’: Peter Bradshaw on Robert Redford

• Robert Redford – a life in pictures

Robert Redford, star of Hollywood classics including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and All the President’s Men, has died aged 89.

In a statement, his publicist Cindi Berger said the actor died on Tuesday at his home “at Sundance in the mountains of Utah - the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved”.

IDF says advance aims to ‘dismantle Hamas’s grip’ as UN report says Israel has committed genocide in territory

Israel unleashed its long-threatened ground offensive in Gaza City on Tuesday, sending tanks and remote-controlled armoured cars packed with explosives into its streets, in defiance of international criticism and the findings of a UN commission that it was committing genocide in the Palestinian territory.

“Gaza is burning. The IDF is striking terror infrastructure with an iron fist,” Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, wrote on X as the attack was launched in the early hours of the morning, adding: “We will not relent until the mission is completed.”

Tyler Robinson makes virtual court appearance charged with seven counts including aggravated murder; next court date set for 29 September

• Full report: Kirk suspect charged with aggravated murder by Utah prosecutors

• Texts, plans and a confession: prosecutor lays out startling details in Charlie Kirk shooting

Under-fire FBI director Kash Patel will confront Senate Democrats at a congressional hearing at 9am ET, likely to be dominated by questions about the investigation into the killing of Charlie Kirk, as well as the agency’s role in reviewing the files related to the Epstein case, and recent firings of senior officials who have accused Patel of illegal political retribution.

His appearance before the Senate judiciary committee represents the first oversight hearing of Patel’s young but tumultuous tenure. Most recently he has faced criticism for his actions and social media posts during the Kirk shooting investigation, which have raised questions about his experience and judgement, including being seen as “grandstanding” with regards to his own role, and prematurely (and wrongly) announcing on X that the suspect had been caught.