Name: XL gullies.

Age: First identified in March.

Appearance: Winged and dangerous.

Not more irresponsible dog breeding … wait, did you say “winged”? That’s right. XL gullies are “Britain’s HARDEST seagulls”.

“Britain’s hardest seagulls” should be a Ross Kemp show. Indeed; there is genuine drama to this story. A new breed of seagull is terrorising the country.

There’s no such thing as a seagull. OK, smartypants. We’re mainly talking about herring gulls. Britons believe they are getting bolder, fiercer and more successful at stealing our snacks. See, for instance, reports of a “jacked-up gargantuan”, “top-level boss” gull operating out of Liverpool city centre.

Yikes. How exactly is it operating? Carrying out laser-focused smash-and-grab attacks on people’s snacks (Greggs is reportedly its favourite).

Give me more incidents of gull crime. With pleasure. For a deep-dive report, the Daily Mail sent journalists to Margate in Kent and St Ives in Cornwall to walk around with chips and see what happened.

And what happened? Gulls ate their chips.

Astonishing. Are those towns chip-theft hotspots? No, XL gullies are everywhere. Reddit users have been comparing notes on no-go zones. Aberdeen gulls are “psychotic” and “absolutely ruthless”; mid-Wales ones are “pure evil”; Tenby gulls are “as big as turkeys”; Rhyl gulls “need Asbos”; and Cornish gulls are “pterodactyls”.

This is like a sinister avian version of the Beach Boys’ California Girls. Especially the “They knock me out when I’m down there” bit. (Southern gulls are “more willing to approach people”, according to preliminary results from a recent study by the universities of Glasgow and Plymouth.)

Are gulls actually violent? Not unless they’re defending their chicks. There are occasionally reports of minor injuries when they swoop to steal food – but it’s definitely chips they want, not blood.

It may not be a balanced diet, but isn’t this expected gull behaviour? Absolutely – and it’s our own fault. Gulls are “very intelligent … opportunistic and extremely adaptable”, according to the naturalist Dominic Couzens. Since people discard so much food, the gulls have altered their foraging strategies, including by helping themselves. It’s not crime, but rather “kleptoparasitism”.

Can anything be done? You can grass up gulls to various councils, or report interactions to researchers via Glasgow and Plymouth’s Gull’s Eye app. Liverpool has recently deployed a Harris hawk to try to deter the top-level boss and his capos. But like all wild birds, herring gulls are protected – their number is declining – so any retaliation against them is illegal. The best thing to do is stay out of their way (especially when eating chips).

Do say: “Increasing overlap between anthropogenic landscapes and wildlife habitats has given rise to more human-wildlife conflicts.”

Don’t say: “I wish they all could be California gulls.”

Rishi Sunak has confided to members of his inner circle that he is fearful of losing his Yorkshire constituency at the general election, the Guardian has been told.

The prime minister, who would be the first sitting leader of the country to lose his seat, told confidants before a Conservative rally on Tuesday that he thought the vote in Richmond and Northallerton was too close to call.

In 2019, he won the seat with a majority of more than 27,000 and 63% of the vote.

One source said: “He is genuinely fearful of a defeat in Richmond: the risk that it could be tight has hit him hard. He’s rattled – he can’t quite believe it’s coming so close.” Another source added: “He’s taken so much friendly fire from his own side I’m amazed he’s had the strength to keep going.”

A Conservative source flatly denied Sunak feared losing in his constituency, saying: “The PM is confident he will hold his seat.”

Mel Stride, a close ally of the prime minister, said on Wednesday that Labour was likely to win “the largest majority any party has ever achieved”.

Sunak is weighing a return to the financial services industry, whether or not he stays on as an MP, the Guardian understands. A former colleague has offered him office space in Mayfair in London – a hotspot for hedge funds. He has also discussed spending a greater share of his time in California, where he has a home, although he had no immediate plans to relocate there full time, sources said.

A Conservative source said Sunak had “no interest” in going back into financial services and planned to stay in Yorkshire “come what may”.

No incumbent prime minister has ever lost their seat, and only 12 serving cabinet ministers have lost their seats since 1974, according to the Institute for Government.

Polls have varied, with most suggesting Sunak should retain his seat even amid a landslide victory for Labour across the country. Savanta and Electoral Calculus analysis for the Telegraph suggested he could lose it, however.

Conservative activists working in Sunak’s constituency had been particularly alarmed by a drop-off in support among the farming community, some of whom had cited challenges arising from Brexit to their businesses and a failure to control illegal immigration, sources said.

Sunak was a supporter of Britain’s exit from the EU, and his government has struggled in its efforts to discourage small-boat crossings in the Channel.

Activists fear that low turnout for the Tories, rather than just a swing to Labour or a groundswell for Reform, may prove to be the greatest risk for the prime minister.

Last month, the Guardian reported four sources’ claims that activists in Yorkshire had been diverted to campaign in Sunak’s seat. At that time, Conservative sources denied they had redeployed resources to try to bolster support in the prime minister’s constituency.

Broader efforts to support cabinet members’ campaigns are also under way, with activists diverted to the home secretary James Cleverly’s seat of Braintree, the deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden’s Hertsmere constituency, and the environment secretary Steve Barclay’s seat in North East Cambridgeshire. All were won, like Sunak’s, with majorities of more than 20,000 at the last general election.

Sunak has denied suggestions he would move to California after an election defeat. In June, speaking on the fringes of the G7 Summit in Italy, he said he would stay on as an MP for the full five years of a new parliament, even if the Tories lost the election.

UK fruit and vegetable production has plummeted as farms have been hit by extreme weather.

The country suffered the wettest 18 months since records began across the 2023-24 growing year, leaving soil waterlogged and some farms totally underwater. The impact on harvests has been disastrous. Data from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs shows that year-on-year vegetable yields decreased by 4.9% to 2.2m tonnes in 2023, and the production volumes of fruit decreased by 12% to 585,000 tonnes.

Scientists say that climate breakdown caused by the burning of fossil fuels is likely to bring more extreme weather to the UK, including more frequent floods and droughts.

Farmers said they were not able to plant due to the wet weather, and this is borne out in the statistics. The growing area of vegetables was down, falling by 6.5% to 101,000 hectares. A dry early summer in 2023 also did not help, as those who could not irrigate found it hard to plant.

Wet weather in the autumn and winter meant that the planted area of brassicas decreased by 3.1% to 23,000 hectares, leading to a 0.4% fall in broccoli yields and a 9.2% year-on-year fall in cauliflower volumes. Onions fared similarly, with volumes down by 13% and a fall in production area of 3.6%. So did carrots; their yields fell by 7.2%.

Farmers said the next government needed a proper plan for food security as the UK’s climate becomes less predictable, with more extreme weather hitting farms.

Guy Singh-Watson, the founder of Riverford fruit and vegetable boxes, said the data was a “wake-up call, showing the dire state of British horticulture”.

He said the next government must plan to safeguard food security. “We urgently need a long-term and legally defined plan from government – not just on the environment, but to tackle the exploitative practices of supermarkets and their suppliers.” he said. “It’s high time we reinstated honesty and decency in our supply chains.”

The chair of the National Farmers’ Union horticulture and potatoes board, Martin Emmett, said: “These stark statistics are sadly not a surprise. Recent shortages of some of the nation’s favourite fruit and vegetables shows we cannot afford to let our production decline and that we must value our food security.

“The UK horticulture sector has the ambition to produce more and is an area ripe for growth, but it needs investment from the next government to match our ambition by backing our horticulture strategy.”

Julian Marks, group chief executive of Barfoots Farms, told the Grocer: “The latest set of Defra stats highlight the challenges growers have faced in the last 12 to 18 months with weather-related risk and extraordinary levels of input cost inflation.”

He added: “Though inflation has eased somewhat recently, it hasn’t gone away and weather risks have intensified over the winter, with heavy rain affecting soils and the ability of growers to plant for the coming season.”

The UK government recently published its first official food security index, which described food security as “broadly stable”, and facing “longer-term risks” from climate change.

The issue is briefly mentioned in the manifestos for this week’s general election. The Conservatives pledged a UK where the “national, border, energy and food security are put first” and said they would introduce a legally binding target to enhance the UK’s food security.

Labour similarly said in its manifesto that “food security is national security” and that the party would “champion British farming whilst protecting the environment”. The Liberal Democrats have promised to put an extra £1bn a year into the farming payments schemes and pledged to introduce a “holistic and comprehensive national food strategy to ensure food security”.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was contacted for comment.

When she went viral in a video clip showing her coining the onomatopoeia “hawk tuah” to describe what intimate act reliably drives men wild in her experience, Hailey Welch thought about keeping herself hidden from the masses.

Then the rumor circulated that the photogenic blonde in the video with the thick southern drawl was actually the daughter of a humiliated religious leader. The attention had caused the woman to be fired from her education job, another rumor claimed. And social media users started creating fake accounts with photos of her.

Welch changed her mind about keeping a low profile and came forward for the first time Monday on the Plan Bri Uncut podcast, dispelled everything said about her before as falsehoods – and detailed how the clip has upended her life, ranging from cameos alongside celebrities to offers from strangers to buy a sample of her spit.

“It’s a hit or miss what comes out of my mouth – I just talk out of my ass,” Welch told podcast host Brianna LaPaglia. “The one time I say something like that, of course there’s a camera in my face.”

The 21-year-old had just quit social media and was working in a bed spring factory in her Tennessee home town when she learned she had achieved a level of internet virality that provided a relatively pleasant distraction for a country grappling with climate change-fueled extreme weather as well as another contentious presidential election cycle.

It stemmed from an 11 June Instagram video posted by YouTubers Tim & Dee TV that showed a street interview in Nashville, Tennessee, with two women whose names were not revealed. As KnowYourMeme.com noted, Welch was asked, “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy everytime?”

She replied with a giggly, obvious oral sex allusion, saying: “Aw, you gotta give him that hawk tuah and spit on that thang – you get me?”

In short order, the clip reverberated across the digital world, well beyond the pun-driven memes that are the lifeblood of social media. One of the countless notable instances involved a country song about the exchange that was purportedly created with artificial intelligence – and turned out to be quite the ear-worm, in the opinion of many.

Readers treated New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper to its own moment of virality by headlining an article about the city’s NBA team acquiring a former Atlanta Hawks player with the words, From a Hawk to a Pelican.

Eventually, amid an obsession among some to learn who the girl in the infamous video was, clues about Welch’s identity began to trickle out. And by late June, she had penned a merchandise deal with the company Fathead Threads for hats emblazoned with the wet-sounding phrase she immortalized.

The company had reportedly hawked more than $65,000 worth of merchandise almost immediately – though on Tuesday owner Jason Poteete told the Guardian that Fathead Threads was so busy trying to meet demand for its wares that there had not been time for him to calculate a precise tally of the sales, which are being split with Welch.

On Monday, Welch said “the guy [who] makes my hats” received an offer to pay $600 for her to spit in a jar and send it to the interested party.

“That’s just disgusting, is it not?” Welch told Plan Bri Uncut, likening the overture to those interested in buying the used underwear of social media influencers whom they find attractive. “And I was like, ‘Should I do it?’ Then I was like, ‘Naw, don’t do that.’”

By Saturday night, Welch was singing on stage with country star Zach Bryan. Four-time NBA champion and television commentator Shaquille O’Neal was on X two days later bragging about having taken pictures with her. She now has a publicity team.

Yet, perhaps inevitably, the disinformation trolls came out of the woodwork. Posts claimed that Welch’s father was a preacher who had been mortified by her scandalous behavior. Others said she was a school teacher whose naughty language cost her her post.

All of that was as false as the “kind of creepy”, fake social media accounts containing stolen photos of Welch that prompted her to take off her veil of anonymity once and for all, she explained on Plan Bri Uncut.

Welch said her parents think “it’s so funny” that a video of her has had the internet in shambles for much of the summer. “They know how I am,” Welch remarked.

Nonetheless, she also suggested that she looked forward to a time when her 15 minutes of fame had run out.

“I don’t really want that to be, like, my image,” Welch told LaPaglia regarding the hawk tuah craze. “I just – I don’t see that being, like, my thang, you know?

“I don’t want to be known as that.”

Like most people, I’ve never had a particularly intimate relationship with my feet. They get me places and occasionally give me blisters, and that’s about it. I regard them as roughly on a par with my elbows – un-glamorous but mainly functional. That is, until I discovered them on Wikifeet.

If you’re not already familiar with Wikifeet, think of it as an online directory of celebrity foot pictures, lovingly maintained by a volunteer army of foot fetishists. I stumbled across it in 2022 while trying to Google a photo that somebody had taken of me at a fashion industry event. There I was, or rather there were my feet: on a kink website that gets 20m views a month. I had naturally assumed that journalists were not the target focus of a celebrity fetish website, given that I have yet to star in a James Bond film or become an Estée Lauder brand ambassador. Unfortunately, it seems like anybody who does a mildly public-facing job is considered fair game, and a few podcasts and brief TV appearances were enough for me to qualify.

My profile featured photos of my feet going back nine years, on a surf holiday with friends. Then the ultimate insult: after scouring my social media accounts for any pictures of my exposed feet, the anonymous users of Wikifeet had rated me a deeply average score of 3.5 out of 5 – a whole one and a half stars less than Knives Out actor Ana de Armas. According to Wikifeet, this makes my feet merely “OK”.

Sexualising my lower digits was bad enough. To be given the equivalent of a pat on the head and be told “nice try” was an indignity too far. My inner perfectionist kicked in: “If I must have foot perverts looking at my toes, I want them to like them!” I fumed to a friend. We agreed that while I would ideally not be on Wikifeet at all, the second choice would be to have a perfect Wikifeet rating.

I have nothing against people with a thing for feet, which I roughly view in the same way I do bungee jumping: I can theoretically see why you might be into it, but it’s just not for me. But the idea of faceless people staring at my feet – maybe zooming in on my toenails, which I’ve never managed to trim in an even line – made me feel extremely self-conscious. I began cropping my feet out of photos. Slingbacks became my best friend at summer weddings. At one point, I even debated if leather strappy fishermen’s sandals were too risque. Were they basically bondage harnesses for toes?

I fully acknowledge this is ridiculous, since I have no understanding of what makes a “sexy foot” in the same way I have no idea what constitutes a “good-looking elbow”. (I’m guessing that being bunion-free doesn’t quite cut it.)

Still, I was rankled by my disappointing rating enough to post about it on Instagram. “Just OK?” I questioned in faux outrage. When I checked back a week later, my ranking had gone up to four out of five, garnering me a respectable “nice feet” tag. Clearly, some people following my Instagram were already on the site – I just hoped that it wasn’t anybody I knew in person.

Later on, I discovered that – contrary to my assumption – women actually make up 22% of Wikifeet’s audience. Call me sexist, but the idea of women appreciating my feet made me feel a little less creeped out, mainly because I presume women might be more likely to look approvingly at my feet out of sisterly spirit. After all, we were subject to the same oppressive podal beauty standards, albeit ones I still find incomprehensible.

While I know that changing my appearance to avoid the gaze of the internet’s No 1 foot fetish site is a faintly ludicrous and pointless enterprise, I now feel less embarrassed about it given that I am perfectly on trend – gen Z also hates getting their feet out, apparently, according to Vice.

It helps that a user left a highly complimentary comment that read “incredibly attractive long feet and long toes on a very funny, intelligent lady”, which at least makes me think that some of these nameless people on the internet also appreciate my personality (thank you, @Feetgrinder). Two years on, I’m able to see the funny side of being on Wikifeet. I’ve even got my eye on a pair of fishermen’s sandals for an upcoming holiday. Don’t expect me to post them online, though.

Beloved by Shakespeare and the Beatles, the blackbird and its sweet song have captured the imagination of Britons for centuries.

But now the songbird is facing decline, and the British public has been asked to contribute to a survey by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) to find out why.

Their numbers have plummeted in Greater London and southern England at rates not seen in the rest of the UK.

It is thought the bird is suffering from Usutu virus, first detected in the UK in London in summer 2020. This disease is potentially fatal to blackbirds and is thought to be spreading across south-east England. It was first identified in South Africa and has spread across mainland Europe.

The growth of the disease has been attributed to climate breakdown; native UK mosquitoes can transmit the virus when it is warm outside.

Blackbird numbers in London fell 50% in 2020 compared with 2019. Numbers recovered somewhat, but are still about 32% lower now than in 2019. Overall, their numbers have decreased by 18% UK-wide since the 1970s due to factors including habitat loss.

Their numbers were already decreasing slightly in London before the arrival of the virus, so scientists want to know if there is anything else contributing to their decline and what can be done to help.

Dr Hugh Hanmer, a senior research ecologist with BTO, said: “Blackbird numbers have been decreasing in Greater London for some time. However, from 2020 they started declining more strongly, which coincided with the detection of Usutu virus. There is now evidence of a wider decline in southern England, not seen in other UK regions.

“The BTO survey seeks to understand why this change is happening and to identify any link to the emergence of Usutu virus. By better understanding how blackbirds use our gardens, we hope to halt the declines.”

Researchers want to see if there are similar patterns in other large cities in the UK and if there are differences between rural and urban areas.

Transmission of mosquito-borne bird diseases is likely to increase as climate breakdown accelerates, according to BTO researchers. Using this survey, they hope to find out how to slow and hopefully stop transmission, so bird populations are not wiped out as new diseases come to the UK’s shores.

It is hoped the survey will help BTO scientists better understand how blackbirds use different types of garden, how successful birds are at rearing young, which factors may influence the risk of disease transmission and how all these factors differ at different levels of urbanisation.

Blackbirds are widely loved because of their complex song, which is very mellow and almost sounds as if it is in a major key. They deliver low-pitched, flute-like verses and are able to mimic each other, and other birds.

The BTO survey is open until October.

The US has sent back 116 Chinese migrants in the first such “large charter flight” in five years, the Department of Homeland Security has said.

“We will continue to enforce our immigration laws and remove individuals without a legal basis to remain in the United States,” homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement.

The flight, which happened over the weekend, comes amid intense political debate ahead of the US presidential election over the issue of Chinese immigration.

The department said it was working with China to “reduce and deter irregular migration and to disrupt illicit human smuggling through expanded law enforcement efforts”. It did not respond to questions about how long the migrants had been in the US.

The department said it was working with China on more removal flights in the future but did not give a timeline for when the next one would happen.

In recent years, the US has had a difficult time returning Chinese nationals who do not have the right to stay in America because China has resisted taking them back. Last year, the US saw a surge in the number of Chinese immigrants entering the country illegally from Mexico.

US border officials arrested more than 37,000 Chinese nationals on the southern border in 2023, 10 times the number during the previous year.

Chinese migration has increasingly become a rallying cry for Republicans and former president Donald Trump who have raised suspicions about why Chinese migrants are coming to the US.

Asian advocacy organisations are concerned the rhetoric could encourage harassment of Asians, while migrants themselves have said they’re coming to escape poverty and repression.

Earlier this year, the US and China resumed cooperation on migration issues. The Chinese government has said it is firmly opposed to “all forms of illegal immigration”. In a statement in May, China’s US embassy said the country’s law enforcement was cracking down “hard on crimes that harm the tranquility of national border, and maintained a high pressure against all kinds of smuggling organisations and offenders”.

Earlier this year, a charter flight carried a small but unknown number of deportees to the north-eastern Chinese city of Shenyang, according to Thomas Cartwright of Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that tracks deportation flights.

Homeland security officials did not say how many people were on that 30 March flight, but the Gulfstream V aircraft typically has a seating capacity of 14. It also made a stop in South Korea before heading back to the US, Cartwright said.

The announcement of the weekend’s large charter flight comes amid efforts elsewhere to shut down key routes used by Chinese migrants to get to the western hemisphere.

On Monday, the US announced that it would cover the costs of repatriating migrants who enter Panama illegally, under a deal agreed with the Central American country’s new president who has vowed to shut down the treacherous Darién Gap used by people travelling north to the US.

Also, as of 1 July Ecuador in effect reinstated visas for Chinese nationals after the South American country said it had seen a worrying increase in irregular migration.

Ecuador was one of only two mainland countries in the Americas to offer visa-free entry to Chinese nationals and had become a popular starting point for Chinese migrants to then trek north to the US.

This match had an epic ­quality throughout and was decided by a moment that will enter ­Turkey’s football folklore.

They were ­clinging on to their lead amid rain, smoke, ­excruciating whistles and a ­barrage of Austrian pressure when ­Alexander Prass looped a long, deep cross towards the far post in hope rather than expectation. It arced to ­Christoph Baumgartner, who had pulled away from his man and hung high in the Leipzig sky, and the next thrilling act seemed set. There was little wrong with the header, directed downwards and skipping sharply up. How Mert Gunok, the Turkey goalkeeper, reacted to paw the ball up and wide is a thing of wonder and, after one last corner was seen off, the celebrations could start.

Gunok joined his teammates partying in front of the Turkey support, decibel levels surely ­exceeding anything heard in Germany all summer. At the other end a ­tearful ­Baumgartner, who could have scored a hatful, had to be consoled by a member of Austria’s staff.

Unbridled triumph on one side and, opposite, a sense of sporting tragedy. A dose of revenge, too: much as Vincenzo Montella had attempted to play it down beforehand, he and his players had been desperate to ­settle a score after the 6-1 thrashing they received in Vienna just over three months back.

More importantly than any tit-for-tat, Turkey are in the quarter-finals. Their wild, highly strung roadshow will career to Berlin for more appointment ­viewing against the Netherlands and ultimately they deserved to go through. Montella’s players were out on their feet in those dying moments, their opponents’ appetite to run, run and run some more finally threatening to wear them down.

But they were tough, technical and composed when it mattered for the majority. The occasion had been billed as a clash of Turkey’s emotion and Austria’s mechanised drills, yet the end product should be framed as a triumph for Montella. He packed the centre of the pitch and, in the first half at least, it meant Austria could not quite execute their usual swamping job. Even in the absence of their captain and heartbeat, Hakan Calhanoglu, they were able to execute their game plan and bite hardest when it mattered.

In the afterglow of a match this gloriously pulsating, though, discussion of tactics may be for the birds. It was ­bedlam from the beginning, six Austria ­players hurtling into the opposition half from kick‑off and Gunok having to smother at Marcel ­Sabitzer’s feet almost immediately. Their propensity to score early goals is well documented so the only surprise was that, when one came, it was Turkey who profited. Proceedings were still well inside the opening minute when ­Turkey won a corner, the defender Kaan Ayhan whirling his arms to work the crowd into a higher state of frenzy in case that were possible.

Arda Guler swung the ball in from the right side and the delivery completely flummoxed Austria’s defence, almost creeping straight in before Baumgartner blocked on the line. He could only clear against Stefan Posch at point-blank range and the ball was goalbound once again until Patrick Pentz scooped clear. That reprieve lasted a millisecond: Merih Demiral smashed the loose ball in and Turkey were ahead after 57 seconds.

The promised level of chaos had already been hit. Baumgartner shot just wide straight afterwards and saw Demiral somehow divert a corner from in front of him on the line: he had hoped for a triumphant outing at the stadium he calls home, but he and the rest of Austria’s Red Bull school were ultimately consigned to look on as Turkey turned it into theirs.

Further half-chances arrived for Baumgartner and Philipp Lienhart but Turkey looked increasingly comfortable as the interval neared. Confident, too: the outstanding Guler offered a flourish in attempting to beat Pentz from halfway, the ball sailing wide. Demiral, a centre-back who approached his tasks in each box gladiatorially, missed a good headed opportunity but atoned soon enough.

Austria had ripped into the second period, Ralf Rangnick rolling the dice with two changes and seeing Gunok block from Marko Arnautovic after they had finally shown some subtlety in the middle. The giant substitute Michael Gregoritsch headed wide and Konrad Laimer shot waywardly before the sting arrived from the same one-two as before.

Guler was pelted with plastic cups as he shaped to take another corner but was undeterred from whipping in another gorgeous delivery that Demirel converted emphatically after rising above Kevin Danso.

Game over? Not here. It never quite seemed likely and Gregoritsch, jabbing in after Stefan Posch had headed on yet another set piece, set up an exhilarating finale. Turkey squandered chances on the break but the luckless Baumgartner, beating Gunok to the ball on one occasion, missed two headers and Austria’s siege could not break through.

Then Gunok had his biggest moment of all. Rangnick was asked whether the save reminded him of Gordon Banks. “That is correct,” he said, leaving any other sentiments to float in the air. For Turkey and their relentless contingent, the atmosphere is now thick with awe and promise.

Robert F Kennedy Jr has responded to an allegation that he sexually assaulted an employee by stating: “I am not a church boy,” as scrutiny grows over his long-shot run for the presidency.

The independent candidate, who is seen as a threat by both the Biden and Trump campaigns, made the statement after his former babysitter told Vanity Fair that Kennedy assaulted her at his home in 1998.

Eliza Cooney, who worked for Kennedy and his then wife as a live-in nanny at the family’s home in Mount Kisco, New York, said Kennedy touched her leg at a business meeting and later appeared shirtless in her bedroom before asking her to rub lotion on his back.

A few months later, Kennedy blocked Cooney in the kitchen “and began groping her”, Vanity Fair reported. Cooney told the magazine that Kennedy touched her inappropriately.

“My back was to the door of the pantry, and he came up behind me,” Cooney said.

“I was frozen. Shocked.”

The assault was interrupted, Cooney said, when a male worker entered the kitchen.

Asked about the sexual assault allegation on the Breaking Points podcast, Kennedy said: “The [Vanity Fair] article is a lot of garbage.”

He added: “Listen, I have said this from the beginning. I am not a church boy. I am not running like that.

“I said in my … I had a very, very rambunctious youth. I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if, if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.

“So, you know, Vanity Fair is recycling 30-year-old stories. And, I’m not, you know, going to comment on the details of any of them. But it’s, you know, I am who I am.”

Asked if he was denying that he assaulted Cooney, Kennedy said: “I’m not going to comment on it.”

The Kennedy campaign did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.

Cooney said she kept the alleged assault secret until the #MeToo movement prompted many women to come forward with stories of abuse in 2017. She told her mother, and after Kennedy announced his campaign for the presidency in 2023, Cooney told two friends and a lawyer, Elizabeth Geddes. Geddes did not respond to a request for comment.

Kennedy, 70, initially ran against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination before launching a campaign as an independent in October of last year.

As the son of Robert F Kennedy, the US senator for New York who was assassinated in 1968, and the nephew of John F Kennedy, who was assassinated while serving as president in 1963, Kennedy’s campaign drew widespread attention but has been littered with controversies.

In July 2023, a video surfaced of Kennedy making false claims that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack Black people and white people while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, while Kennedy has also claimed that wifi causes “leaky brain”.

He has also linked antidepressants to school shootings, and in 2023 he claimed that chemicals in water are making children transgender.

Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, is polling at 9.1% of the national vote, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average, and is highly unlikely to win the presidency.

But both the Biden and Trump campaigns fear he could pull votes away from them in key states. Kennedy will be on the ballot in Michigan, a crucial swing state that the president won by 150,000 votes in 2020, and is working to gain ballot access in Wisconsin, which Biden won by 20,000 votes.

It’s day 19 in the Euro 2024 Haus. Cristiano Ronaldo has finally pared his entire on-field performance down to a series of viral reaction memes. German police are to be given tasers and sniper rifles to deal with a raised threat of beaming, selfie-grabbing children whose parents need to have a look at themselves. And a formal investigation is under way into whether Jude Bellingham grabbing his imaginary balls really is a private joke among his friends or an insult to Slovakian manhood.

In fact only one of these statements is demonstrably true at the time of writing. But it does raise many other lines of inquiry. What kind of investigation is this exactly? What kind of friends are we talking about here? And what is the chance any sanction for breaching “decent human conduct” (Uefa translation: racism, arguably no; dick gesture, zero tolerance) will be delayed until after the tournament’s second most famous man is safely packed off somewhere else?

But from an England point of view Uefa is right in at least one sense. Some kind of investigation is required, and it should definitely centre on Bellingham.

To date England’s performances have resembled an extended experiment into the limits of audience discomfort, before dissolving into a frenzied screwball comedy for the final half-hour against Slovakia. As the players spend the week in Blankenheim grooving whatever training process has led to this outcome, it seems increasingly clear that the way the manager has used Bellingham is key both to the current state of confusion, and to the chances of resolving it.

During Ronaldo’s time at Juventus it was said that he provided a solution to the problems he created. It would be unfair to apply this to Bellingham. But his use so far by Gareth Southgate is undeniably a factor in the team’s faltering rhythms, the dilution of pre-existing strengths, and the confusion in central midfield. Is there time to fix this, ideally while also keeping those extraordinary moments of grace?

It seems clear two weeks in that Southgate came to Germany with a squad he didn’t really understand. There is a case that his biggest problem at this European Championship is he has forgotten he isn’t a very good manager. When he remembers this he becomes a much better one.

Instead fate has presented him with Cole Palmer, Trent Alexander‑Arnold and above all Him, Who Else, this endless store of destabilising charisma. At the end of which Southgate has the look of a man who went out after work in his suit, headed on somewhere else, and eventually found himself dancing awkwardly on a podium at a celebrity rave called BMBED and still wondering where to put his briefcase.

England’s balance is shot, with too many bodies crowding the same forward positions, too few in the deep controlling spaces. The midfield is a mess, despite having had all those games since Qatar to find a method. It has been surprisingly poor prep for a manager who is all about planning. But Southgate does deserve some sympathy here. The lure of Bellingham is key to this state of dissonance, to the late shift of shape and balance. And Bellingham is undoubtedly a very strange, sui generis footballer at this stage in his career.

Bellingham wins games. He looks brilliant while also playing terribly. His performances are uneven. What is his position exactly? He’s not a central midfielder at this level, something Carlo Ancelotti managed by playing him at the front of the team. It has been suggested in Spain Bellingham lacks the stamina to play elite-level central midfield right now. But then, playing central midfield for Real Madrid is a peak career goal. When Luka Modric was 21 he was still at Dinamo Zagreb.

OK, so what are Bellingham’s outstanding technical attributes? He has been compared to Zinedine Zidane, but the Frenchman was always the best passer, dribbler and touch-player on any pitch. Currently Bellingham’s superpower seems to be belief, fearlessness, ball-grabbing game-changing arrogance, the power of personality. Which is fine. But how do you channel that into a careful, system-built team?

Plus the things Bellingham offers are deceptive. What he gives you is delicious, consumable moments. He gives you the football equivalent of the Maillard reaction, as defined by the French chemist Louis‑Camille Maillard to describe the process in cooking whereby heat is applied to a certain kind of starch, to create crackle, flavour, salt, juice, good stuff.

This is what we try to create, what we crave. It is what furiously literal-minded men on the internet with blowtorches and chemistry books have now fixed on as the key basis of cooking. The fashion for the seared, smashed burger patty is basically a Total Maillard overload, all flavour, all crisped surface area.

And Bellingham is this modern, moreish thing in football form. He’s Maillard made flesh, always trying to create moments, flavour, the key and decisive ingredient in the dish, and often succeeding. But it has made his performances seem strange at times, that search for flavour a little overwhelming to the rest of the pot.

Bellingham produced the best pass of England’s Euro 2024 campaign, the deep through ball to Ollie Watkins against Denmark. He scored a brilliant header and a brilliant overhead kick. For 40 minutes against Serbia he played like Hamlet, Elvis Presley and Paul McCartney playing all the instruments on Let It Be. Make a clipped-up reel of this and you might imagine Bellingham was out there twirling these Euros on his finger. But he is also part of their instability, and in a way that isn’t entirely his fault.

First, England are emotionally unbalanced by Bellingham. In some ways this team are quite bland, quite mild, lacking in loud, dominant energy. In this context Bellingham is just an overload of alpha energy. No one else is filling the room like this, or drawing the cameras. Bellingham could probably use some boundaries, some competing energy, someone else to be Big.

Instead he seems able to say and do whatever he wants, to go on about learning from Madridismo (the eye-rolling from Catalan journalists at this was a great tournament moment), to make Harry Kane dad-celebrate with him, to do his ball-grabbing stuff then go all over social media explaining it. Here is a 21‑year‑old who could probably do with something to push against.

More to the point the team are unbalanced tactically. The transformation of this late England iteration into a Bellingham vehicle is probably the worst thing that could happen to Southgate. Here is a manager who has never really loved midfield, or had great midfielders to work with. He wants stability and balance in there. With, say, prime Jordan Henderson in place, England might be pootling through with their usual efficiency.

Instead Southgate has Spider‑Man, the Wolf of Wall Street, an attention supernova. With Bellingham, England’s ceiling is much higher. But they have a more difficult, more tantalising energy to manage. It is too late to change this now. For Southgate the only real option is keep hanging on to the rising balloon, to trust in the Jude‑shaped universe.

But it has been handled poorly. The 4-2-3-1 formation came late, with idea of incorporating Bellingham into an area where England are already well covered. The midfield choices behind him have been baffling. Alexander-Arnold, Kobbie Mainoo and Conor Gallagher are totally different players: a statement passer, a calm recycler and a man who appears to be being chased by a tiger. This is guesswork in action. Bellingham has suffered as a result, looked lost like everyone else, but still provided moments of rescue.

It is surely time to provide some more substance. With the courage to shift Bellingham deeper, to play 4-3-3, to add another defensive body in midfield, Southgate may even be able to create some genuine structured freedom. All creativity comes from a solid base. Mainoo was England’s best midfielder against Slovakia because he offered control. There needs to be more of this.

The current chaotic version has been bad for Southgate’s England. It isn’t great for Bellingham either, who becomes the roaming saviour figure, the moments man, and who is vulnerable to all this, vulnerable to his own power, out there in the brightest of lights, hostage to the way the world will hunger after him.

He needs to be protected. At times Bellingham can sound like he has swallowed a high-performance podcast archive, but this is not the same as being genuinely hardened to the pressure of this very new and violent public existence. He remains just as vulnerable as every other prodigy. He needs control, boundaries and in practical terms another deep midfielder to fill those spaces. Less flavour more fibre. This sounds like a healthy recipe for everyone.