Rishi Sunak is facing a growing clamour to come clean about the betting scandal engulfing Westminster after a fifth figure was drawn into the row.

Senior Conservatives were among those calling for candidates and officials to be suspended pending the result of investigations, while the prime minister was urged to get a grip on the drip-drip of revelations.

Labour wrote to the head of the Gambling Commission on Sunday evening urging the watchdog to name those it has placed under investigation “in the public interest”, warning that “ongoing speculation … is casting a shadow over the election”.

The scandal has escalated since the Guardian revealed nearly two weeks ago that Craig Williams, who was Sunak’s closest parliamentary aide, is being investigated by the watchdog for betting £100 on a July election three days before Sunak surprised the country by naming the date.

After being approached for comment by this newspaper, Williams said he “put a flutter on the general election some weeks ago” and the following day said he had made a “huge error of judgment”.

Five people linked to Sunak or the Conservatives have been identified as being part of the watchdog’s inquiries so far. They include Williams; the Tory candidate Laura Saunders and her husband, Tony Lee, who is the party’s campaign director; and Nick Mason, the party’s data officer.

An unnamed Metropolitan police officer who is part of Sunak’s close protection security team has also been arrested in connection with the inquiry into bets placed on a July election.

The Sunday Times reported this weekend that Mason had made several dozen bets before Sunak announced the 4 July date, each of which was worth less than £100 but which would have brought cumulative winnings of thousands of pounds. A spokesperson for Mason said it would be inappropriate to comment during an investigation but that he denied wrongdoing.

The Met officer was arrested on 17 June after the force was contacted by the Gambling Commission. He is the only person to have faced disciplinary action so far, although Lee and Mason have both taken a leave of absence from their roles.

Pat McFadden, Labour’s national campaign coordinator, urged the commission’s chief executive, Andrew Rhodes, to “make available the widest possible information about how wide the circle spreads”.

In a letter to Rhodes, McFadden said it was “in the public interest that the Gambling Commission makes public the names of other figures you are investigating”.

A gambling industry source said hundreds of bets on a July election were referred to the watchdog across the sector after the Guardian’s revelations about Williams, but “very few” of those were by people flagged as being “politically exposed”.

There were reports on Sunday that the watchdog is investigating other individuals linked to the Conservative party or government.

Sunak is under pressure to formally suspend Lee and Mason and to withdraw support from Williams and Saunders, who would be Conservative MPs if elected.

Robert Buckland, the former justice secretary, told LBC on Sunday: “Where you’ve got a police officer who’s been suspended, I think consistency should apply here.

“You’ve got employees and I’m sure there’s a mechanism which could allow their suspension, you’ve got candidates on the ballot paper – so it may be a matter for the whip to look at it once they’ve been elected and whether they take the Conservative whip, that might be a way to enforce discipline once elected.”

Anne Milton, a former Conservative MP and party whip, told Times Radio: “It confirms views about the fact that the Conservative party hasn’t upheld standards in public life. It’s not behaved well. There appears to be no leadership from the top.

“Suspension is the right thing to do while people are investigated. It’s harsh on people, if the allegations are found not to be true, but that is what would happen in any other sphere of work.”

Alistair Graham, the former chairman of the committee standards of public life, said the prime minister should be taking tougher action. He told the Guardian: “It’s right that he should because so far he has shown a lack of leadership. He keeps saying he’s very angry about it and doesn’t do anything. I would think that a minimum was to suspend them from their official roles in the Conservative party.”

In the Rochdale byelection earlier this year, Labour disowned its candidate over comments he had made about Israel and Jewish people. “I would have thought that it was similarly relevant for the Conservative party to do the same,” Graham said.

James Cleverly, the home secretary, told Sky on Sunday that he was “not in any way going to defend people who placed bets” but insisted it was only a “small number of individuals”.

Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, compared the row with the Partygate scandal. “It looks like one rule for them and one rule for us … That’s the most potentially damaging thing. The perception that we operate outside the rules that we set for others. That was damaging at the time of Partygate and is damaging here,” he said in an interview.

Sunak said last week he was “incredibly angry” about the allegations and that anyone who had broken the rules “should not only face the full consequences of the law but I will ensure that they are booted out of the Conservative party too”.

The Liberal Democrats called on Sunak to launch a Cabinet Office inquiry into the reports. Lib Dem deputy leader Daisy Cooper said: “This is now an all-out scandal at the heart of Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party.”

George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor, told his Political Currency podcast earlier this month that about 40 people knew the date of the election in advance.

The Conservative party would not be drawn on whether more of its officials or candidates were under investigation. A spokesperson said: “As instructed by the Gambling Commission, we are not permitted to discuss any matters related to any investigation with the subject or any other persons.”

A Gambling Commission spokesperson said: “Currently the commission is investigating the possibility of offences concerning the date of the election. This is an ongoing investigation, and the commission cannot provide any further details at this time. We are not confirming or denying the identity of any individuals involved in this investigation.”

Gunmen opened fire in two cities in Russia’s north Caucasus region of Dagestan, targeting a synagogue, two Orthodox churches and a police post and killing at least six police officers and a priest, officials said.

In the city of Derbent, gunmen attacked a synagogue, home to a Jewish community in the predominantly Muslim region. Russia’s state media Tass said the attackers also shot at two nearby Orthodox churches, killing a police officer and a priest.

Footage published on social media from Derbent showed a group of gunmen engaged in heavy fire with police.

Officials said the Derbent synagogue was set on fire and a clip from the scene appeared to show flames coming out of the building, which is listed as a Unesco heritage site.

In a separate shooting occurring simultaneously, a group opened fire on police in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, located about 75 miles north along the Caspian Sea coast. According to local authorities, at least one police officer was killed and six others injured.

A clip posted by Russian media from Makhachkala showed scenes of gunfire and a burned police vehicle.

The Russian interior ministry said in a statement that six police officers had been killed in the two shootings and 12 injured.

Officials in Dagestan appeared to confirm the shootings were linked.

“Tonight in Derbent and Makhachkala, unknown individuals attempted to destabilise the public situation. Dagestan police officers stood in their way. According to preliminary information, there are casualties among them,” Dagestan’s governor, Sergei Melikov, said on Telegram.

Russia’s investigative committee classified the shooting as a terrorist attack.

The motive of the shooters was not immediately clear. Russian media reported that two were killed by police.

Russia has experienced a series of Islamist terrorist attacks recently, prompting questions about whether its extensive security agencies have been distracted by the invasion of Ukraine and the internal crackdown on anti-war dissent.

In March, the Afghan branch of Islamic State, known as Islamic State Khorasan Province, claimed responsibility for the mass shooting at a Moscow concert hall, the deadliest terror attack in years, which left 139 people dead.

Last week, Russian special forces freed two guards and killed six men linked to IS who had taken them hostage at a detention centre in the southern city of Rostov.

Dagestan has also experienced a series of antisemitic incidents. Most notably, last year a mob stormed the airport in Makhachkala, searching for Jewish passengers arriving from Israel.

CCTV footage from Saturday shows the moment a Russian bomb hit a street in Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv, narrowly missing a pedestrian. The video shows the person walking away after the blast only a few metres away. The latest strikes killed at least three people and wounded 52 more. Ukraine is struggling with a new wave of rolling blackouts after relentless Russian attacks on energy infrastructure

Over the last eight weeks, a jury in Massachusetts has pondered whether 44-year-old Karen Read murdered her boyfriend, a police officer, in an act of domestic violence, or was framed by corrupt authorities trying to cover up the killing.

Read’s trial has captivated Boston residents’ attention and triggered a wave of conspiracy theories far beyond the city. At the center is Read, a suburban woman who worked as an equity analyst, and her boyfriend, 46-year-old John O’Keefe, a veteran Boston officer who was found dead in the snow on 29 January 2022.

Prosecutors have charged Read with hitting O’Keefe with her sport-utility vehicle and leaving him to die in a snowbank. She has pleaded not guilty to charges including second-degree murder, manslaughter while under the influence of alcohol and leaving the scene of a deadly crash.

Jury deliberations could begin by Tuesday, after prosecutors rested their case and Read’s attorneys began presenting theirs.

For two months, prosecutors have relied on myriad expert witnesses to support their contention that Read was responsible for O’Keefe’s death. But the defense has countered with a tale of police corruption, maintaining that a tightly knit circle of law enforcement officials framed Read.

O’Keefe was found dead in front of the home of Brian Albert, a recently retired Boston police officer who had hosted a house party in the suburb of Canton.

According to prosecutors, Read dropped O’Keefe off at Albert’s house following a night of drinking at a bar, struck him with her Lexus SUV and then left him to die.

But Read’s lawyers have argued that their client went out to look for O’Keefe after realizing he never returned from the party. They have asserted that Read sought help from two other women, who helped her find O’Keefe’s body outside Albert’s home before they called the police.

O’Keefe was pronounced dead hours later, having sustained multiple head injuries – including a skull fracture and brain bleed – as well as hypothermia, according to investigators.

Prosecutors have pointed to forensic testing that showed strong matches among O’Keefe’s DNA, hair found on Read’s car bumper and DNA on its tail light. Tess Chart, a technology forensic DNA analyst, testified that according to mitochondrial DNA testing, she could say with 95% confidence that the hair found on Read’s car matched O’Keefe, CBS reported.

But Read’s attorneys have contested that evidence, with lawyer David Yannetti telling reporters: “It was planted on the vehicle – I mean, it was. You know the question is, how did that magic hair survive a 30-mile drive through a blizzard?”

Yannetti’s suggestions of police malevolence have received a boost from inappropriate text messages from the lead investigator in the case, Massachusetts state trooper Michael Proctor.

During his testimony earlier in June, Proctor acknowledged that he had called Read a “wack job” in text messages to friends, family members and his colleagues.

Proctor also admitted to texting his sister that he wished Read would “kill herself”, the Associated Press reported.

While on the stand, Proctor said that his text messages were a figure of speech, adding that “emotions got the best of me”. Despite apologizing for his language, Proctor maintained that his emotions did not influence his investigation into O’Keefe’s death.

Read’s lawyers insist the texts support their theory that closely related law enforcement officials framed their client.

Furthermore, during cross-examination by Read’s lawyers, Proctor acknowledged that he drank socially with Albert’s brother, Kevin Albert, a police officer from Canton. On the stand, Proctor testified that the two communicated about coordinating aspects of the case even though the Canton police department recused itself from the case, the Associated Press reported.

The first witness called by the defense on Friday was a snowplow driver who reported having seen “nothing” when he passed Albert’s house at about 2.45am the day O’Keefe was found. The snowplow driver, Brian Loughran, added that he did not see anything upon driving past the house again half an hour later, according to his testimony.

For their part, prosecutors have called on multiple first responders who reported hearing Read repeatedly say “I hit him” when asked what happened to O’Keefe. Among them was the Canton firefighter Timothy Nuttall.

Canton police officer Steven Saraf also testified that he recalled Read as being visibly upset. “This is my fault, this is my fault. I did this,” Saraf recalled Read saying, adding that she also asked multiple times: “Is he dead?”

Read’s legal team has asserted that she asked “Did I hit him?” rather than confess to having done so – and that the first responders misheard her.

Complicating the complex case even more are conspiracy theories that have been given air by social media users.

Aidan Kearney, a blogger with the moniker Turtleboy, has become a central spectator of the trial, frequently covering the case’s developments on his website TB Daily News, and rallying supporters behind Read.

According to an affidavit reported by CBS, Kearney and Read shared 189 phone calls in 2023, in addition to having communicated through the encrypted messaging app Signal.

Authorities charged Kearney in October with six counts of witness intimidation and one of conspiracy with respect to Read’s case. He has maintained his innocence while being ordered to stay away from those he allegedly has intimidated.

After Kearney’s arrest, the Norfolk district attorney, Michael Morrissey, condemned the “absolutely baseless” alleged harassment of witnesses in the case, saying: “Conspiracy theories are not evidence.”

A grand jury then indicted Kearney on 16 new charges in December, including eight counts of witness intimidation, three counts of conspiracy and five counts of picketing a witness.

“It’s clear that Mr Kearney is encouraging his minions, his followers, in the context of his blogs and YouTubes, et cetera, to continue to harass witnesses,” special prosecutor Kenneth Mello contended, according to CBS.

Read’s side is scheduled to resume presenting its case on Monday. She faces life imprisonment if convicted of murdering O’Keefe.

Associated Press contributed reporting

In 1944, the groundbreaking political economist Karl Polanyi published his radical magnum opus, The Great Transformation. In it, he accused influential liberal economists, including David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, of commodifying human beings and the environment in the name of the free market.

Their Industrial Age ideas, he argued, ushered in the barbarism and poverty that came with 19th-century globalisation and unfettered capitalism, and this led, in the 20th century, to far-right and far-left backlashes against the movements of socialism, individualism and liberalism that followed.

Today, The Great Transformation is lauded as a masterpiece and praised for its prescience by everyone from the former chief economist of the World Bank – the Nobel prizewinner Joseph Stiglitz – to shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves and the French “rock star” economist Thomas Piketty. Yet Polanyi’s status as a Hungarian-Austrian foreigner of Jewish descent and the postwar popularity of Keynesian economics meant his book’s prophetic insights were, for decades, rejected and neglected by mainstream academics and economists in Britain. Now, for the first time since the second world war, The Great Transformation has finally been published by a British publisher, with a new edition by Penguin Classics that came out last week.

“Polanyi is the most important thinker you’ve never heard of,” said Penguin editor Hana Teraie-Wood. “He was one of the first heterodox economists and one of the first – perhaps even one of the founding – environmental economists. He’s always been there, but he’s just never had his time in the sun.”

Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1886 and educated in Budapest, he was forced to flee Hungary by a proto-fascist regime in 1919, later becoming a prominent Christian socialist and journalist in Vienna. When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 and fascism took off in Austria, he fled again, this time with his daughter to London, where he became a British citizen and eked out a living teaching part-time for the Workers’ Educational Association. His lecture notes would prove the basis for The Great Transformation.

“He conceived most of the ideas for the book when he was living in the UK, and it was predominantly about the history of capitalism in England – and yet no British publisher has really taken him on before,” said Teraie-Wood. For years, he tried to get a job at a university in Britain, applying every­where from Oxford to Hull. “He had fantastic references from luminaries of the intellectual left but he wasn’t able to get the jobs that really, with his genius, he should have been a shoo-in for,” said Dr Gareth Dale, an expert on Polanyi who wrote the introduction to the Penguin edition.

He added: “I think there was some xenophobia and suspicion about him as an outsider, a foreigner with a funny-sounding name. There was probably prejudice, there was probably some antisemitism. And there was certainly some snobbery towards him. He should have walked into those jobs.”

In 1940, he was offered a fellowship at Bennington College in Vermont in the US and so emigrated there, where he wrote The Great Transformation and then took up a post at Columbia. “Like other brilliant Jews who fled their homelands under the pogroms and pressures of antisemitism and fascism, Polanyi fetched up on British shores – only to then transplant to America,” said Dale.

Polanyi had observed that, in the 1930s, wealthy Germans who saw the Nazi party as a “battering ram” against trade unions and socialists were persuaded to overlook Hitler’s antisemitism because it allowed the market system to flourish, Dale said. “In the same way that a lot of Americans who find Trump distasteful today will still vote for him, a lot of German elites said to themselves: we’re quite happy funding Hitler because his street fighters will help crush the trade unions, so that we can make more profits.”

Polanyi lost friends and relatives in the war, including his younger sister in the Holocaust. “The whole book is, in a sense, about fascism, something that Polanyi himself suffered from enormously,” said Dale. “This is why it has renewed, real relevance today.”

A man who got lost in California’s mountains for more than a week – after heading out on what he expected would be a hike of just a few hours – survived his ordeal by drinking creek water and eating wild berries, he told a local news station.

“I didn’t bring anything” besides a flashlight and folding scissors because “I thought I was doing a three-hour hike” on the way to work, Lukas McClish told KSBW for an interview published on Saturday.

McClish spoke out about his experience in the Santa Cruz mountains after about a half-dozen tourists in the Greek islands – including Americans – were either found dead or went missing upon setting out on hikes in unusually high temperatures across much of the world.

As McClish told it, the 34-year-old outdoors enthusiast from Boulder Creek, California, lost his bearings after beginning his hike the morning of 11 June. He had not informed anyone else of his plans, so it would not be until the afternoon of Thursday, 20 June, that the unkempt-looking hiker was found at the bottom of a remote canyon and rescued.

McClish spent much of the interim going up and down canyons, sitting by waterfalls and using his boot to collect water to drink and keep himself hydrated. He also sustained himself by collecting and eating berries, he said.

At one point, McClish said to KSBW, a mountain lion began following him – but the creature kept its distance and showed no interest in harming him. He said he would sleep on a bed of wet leaves, intermittently yell for help and think of what he would do to provide himself his next meal.

McClish described craving a burrito and a taco bowl constantly for the first five days of his disappearance. He thought “I might be in over my head” about five days in, but he never felt overly imperiled.

“I felt comfortable the whole time I was out there – I wasn’t worried,” McClish said to the news outlet. “I think it was just somebody watching over me.”

McClish’s family deduced something must have gone wrong when there was no sign of him on Father’s Day, which was on Sunday, 16 June. They reported him as a missing person to the local sheriff’s office, which mounted a search for McClish that involved dozens of law enforcement officers as well as first responders from around Boulder Creek.

“Some nights, I just had to trust God that he was going to be OK, and that was hard to do,” McClish’s mother, Diane, told KSBW. “Some nights when we would go to bed at night … I would worry about where he was, where he was sleeping and how cold he was and where he was if he was alive.”

The Boulder Creek area registered six days with highs above 80F (26.6C). The high on 11 June was reportedly 98F (32.2C), though for several days the low temperatures were relatively cold at less than 49F (9.4C).

Eventually, people heard McClish’s screams for help, the Santa Cruz county sheriff’s office said in a statement. The agency used several drones to find McClish in a densely wooded area. First responders equipped with off-road vehicles were then able to get to him, bring him to safety and reunite him with his family, the sheriff’s office said.

The sheriff’s office noted that McClish had no major injuries.

Local fire department chief Mark Bingham told the Santa Cruz Sentinel that McClish’s resourcefulness was remarkable.

“About 10 days he survived in the wilderness, essentially, drinking out of the creek and eating wild berries,” Bingham said. “For the most part, he was disoriented and lost and surviving off of the land, which is pretty impressive to say what a tough individual he … is.”

Diane McClish told KSBW that she was grateful not only for the first responders, but also for her community’s residents, many of whom had supportive words for her after the Santa Cruz sheriff’s office announced the search for her son.

“I had … people come to me and tell me how much they love my son and how they just hoped that we would find him,” she told the news station. “I didn’t realize that so many people in this town love Luke.”

A floating pier built by the US military for seaborne humanitarian deliveries to Gaza has proved itself to be fragile in the face of rougher seas than expected, and the future of the whole $230m project is now in question.

The pier has been usable for just 12 days since it began operations on 17 May. On most of those days the assistance arriving by sea has had to be left on the beach as there have been no trucks to distribute it to warehouses in Gaza, because of lack of security.

The scheme has fallen far short of initial expectations. When he announced it in his state of the union speech on 7 March, Joe Biden said the temporary pier “would enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day”.

It took more than two months to put together the two structures required, a floating dock anchored a few miles out to sea and a floating pier to be attached to the Gazan coast. About 1,000 soldiers and sailors and a small flotilla of ships were involved in the construction, including a Royal Navy landing ship, Cardigan Bay, which provided accommodation.

Over the entire course of the pier’s operation so far, however, only about 250 truckloads of food and other humanitarian assistance (4,100 tonnes) have arrived by the planned maritime corridor, less than half of what would cross into Gaza in a single day before the war. Much of the aid that has arrived so far is stuck at the foot of the pier on a marshalling yard established on the beach.

Since 274 Palestinians were killed by Israel Defense Forces in the course of a hostage rescue mission on 8 June, the World Food Programme (WFP) has suspended the convoys that were supposed to take pallets of aids from the marshalling yard to warehouses and then to the 2.3 million people of Gaza under bombardment and facing famine. The WFP says its security review is still in progress.

The seas in the eastern Mediterranean have been choppier than expected and the pier (known by the US military as the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, JLOTS) has been less robust than the Pentagon planners predicted. The JLOTS floating structure is designed to work in conditions up to “sea state 3”, defined by waves of 0.5 to 1.25 metres. It was hoped it would endure through the spring and summer until September, but it was badly damaged in a storm on 25 May, and the sea has been unseasonably choppy since then.

After repairs at the Israeli port of Ashdod, it came back into operation on 8 June but lasted a day before deliveries were suspended for another two days. On 14 June the pier was dismantled and towed to Ashdod again as a precaution against stormy seas.

It was put back in place on Wednesday and since then has been used to offload about 4,160 tonnes of aid, but there have been reports that, because of its vulnerability to weather and high seas, it could be dismantled once and for all ahead of schedule, as early as next month.

“They just miscalculated,” Stephen Morrison, a senior vice-president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. “They didn’t fully understand what was going to happen with the weather … So the DoD [Department of Defence] walks away, humiliated in a fashion.”

The Pentagon admits the challenges the JLOTS plan is facing but denies that a decision has already been taken to take it down early.

“We have not established an end date for this mission as of now, contrary to some press reporting on the matter,” the chief spokesperson Maj Gen Patrick Ryder, said on Thursday.

The pier was intended as a means of getting aid ashore independently of Israel to the besieged and devastated coastal strip, after the Biden administration became frustrated with the lack of access for relief supplies through land crossings.

Most aid workers involved in the Gaza emergency effort say that any relief is better than none but they voice concerns that the spectacular, expensive effort has distracted energy and attention from political pressure on Israel to open the land crossings fully to trucks, by far the most effective means of delivering food.

Ziad Issa, the head of policy and research at the British charity Action Aid, said that the amount of humanitarian aid arriving in Gaza had dropped to fewer than 100 trucks a day on average in the first half of June.

Hardly any assistance is being distributed around the strip because of the appalling security conditions. The main access point from Egypt, the Rafah crossing, has been closed since it was captured by the IDF on 7 May, at the start of a major offensive on Rafah city. Some trucks have been diverted to the Keren Shalom gate in southern Israel, but the roads leading into Gaza from Keren Shalom have proved extremely dangerous.

“It’s unsafe for aid workers and trucks to move because of the ongoing bombardments on Gaza,” Issa said. The IDF declared a “tactical pause” last Sunday to allow an aid corridor through southern Gaza, but Issa said: “We haven’t seen any difference since these tactical pauses have come in place.”

The IDF is not the only threat to aid delivery. Aid trucks driving through Gaza have been repeatedly held up by armed gangs, who are increasingly powerful in the ruined streets of Gaza’s cities as the war goes on.

The UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, relied on Palestinian police for the security of its aid convoys, but the police were treated by the IDF as an arm of Hamas and therefore legitimate targets. In their absence, there is a security vacuum.

The Israeli government also refuses to deal with Unrwa, which is by far the biggest relief agency in Gaza. In its place, the US government persuaded the WFP to distribute food arriving by the pier. The WFP did not respond to a query on when it might resume road convoys to and from the pier.

“They were sort of pushed to the front of the stage by the US to be the partner on the ground,” Morrison said. “They were very uneasy and very reluctant … They just didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of this craziness and the security on the ground is horrible.”

“We are deeply grateful for the UN’s work to get assistance to the people of Gaza in this increasingly volatile and dangerous environment and appreciate their dedication to ensuring the safety of their staff and those they aim to reach with assistance,” a spokesperson for the US Agency for International Development said.

“We continue to press the Israeli government to facilitate the transport of aid shipments by land and sea, accelerate inspections, open up all avenues of access, and facilitate safe movements of aid convoys within Gaza so humanitarians can get aid directly and effectively to those who need it throughout Gaza.”

Given all the problems at the land crossings, the Biden administration is reluctant to give up entirely on the JLOTS pier. “With need in Gaza growing as well as the extreme insecurity that is making onward distribution from Keren Shalom in particular incredibly difficult for humanitarian organisations, the maritime pier is a critical additional conduit for aid deliveries,” a US official said.

Anyone who has read him will know that the historian Nikolas Pevsner was not a man much given to excessive praise. But even he was inclined to sigh at the sight of the Grand Hotel in Scarborough. In his series of architectural guides, The Buildings of England, he describes the hotel, which was completed in 1867, as wondrous, a “High Victorian gesture of assertion and confidence”. Believing no other building in Britain had as much to say about a certain kind of 19th-century ambition, in his perambulation of the Yorkshire town, he instructed readers on no account to miss the magnificent view of the hotel from the harbour.

And it’s true. Stand on the beach below and look up – perhaps while eating a choc ice – and the Grand really does look marvellous: a gigantic confection of towers and balconies that recalls a French chateau. From this vantage point, it isn’t hard to imagine the poet Edith Sitwell drinking cocktails in its ballroom (the Sitwells owned a holiday villa in Scarborough); to picture Winston Churchill, who once stayed in one of its suites, lighting a cigar at the bar.

But if its exterior is ever splendid, its interior, by contrast, is now a sorry sight. Since 2004, the Grand has been owned by the budget chain Britannia, and its reputation in the town – as well as on Tripadvisor – has become so woeful the Conservative mayoral candidate for York and North Yorkshire, Keane Duncan, vowed during his ultimately ill-fated election campaign to use public money to buy and restore it if he was elected. Once the height of luxury, its baths furnished with two sets of taps, the better that guests might be able to recline in both fresh and health-giving salt water, in 2024 it is shabby and neglected, with corridors that smell vaguely of baked beans. Some rooms cost as little as £37 a night.

It was the English who invented the seaside resort – the Scots and the Welsh followed later – and Scarborough, arguably, is where it all began. Indeed, we may think of it as the bucket and spade holiday in all its long history in microcosm. In the 17th century, people began making therapeutic claims for a spring in the cliffs of what was then a fishing town, a development that would lead, in turn, to the invention of sea bathing as a curative, and on the back of this it eventually became the very grandest of spas, the destination of choice for mill owners and steel and coal magnates in need of a holiday (the Sitwells made their money in iron and coal). When the Grand was built, on the spot where Anne Brontë died (she visited Scarborough in the hope of easing her tuberculosis), it was the biggest hotel in Europe, if not the swankiest.

In the 20th century, its popularity grew, though its demographic changed somewhat, workers now mingling with the middle-classes (they stayed in the North Bay rather than the genteel South Cliff). More employers had begun to make paid holidays available to their workers, and on their precious days off those who could afford to headed for the coast. Here were fairgrounds, warm-hearted (or not) landladies, and formal gardens. When it rained, there were plenty of places to shelter – in 2020, the Victorian pergola-style shelter in South Cliff Gardens was listed by Historic England. When it was sunny, there was swimming – or, for those who preferred it, the chance to watch other people swimming. According to the historian of the English seaside, John K Walton, in 1926, a newspaper reported that in a single morning at Scarborough’s South Bay Pool, about 3,500 people had paid sixpence each for the privilege of merely “spectating”.

So what changed all this? It’s a truism that inexpensive foreign holidays did for places like Scarborough in the late 20th century, and in the late 1970s, many resorts did indeed begin to decline. By 1981, the cost of package holidays had plummeted and more main holidays were taken abroad than at home. But we need to be cautious here. The deprivation we see in seaside towns – 12 neighbourhoods in Scarborough are among the 20% most deprived in the country – has multiple causes, not all of them connected exclusively to the decline of domestic tourism. Ten million people still visit Scarborough every year (for comparison, Blackpool is the third most deprived local authority in England, yet in 2022, it had 20 million visitors, an increase even on pre-pandemic years). We continue to love to be beside the seaside – and as some resorts focus on regeneration, this is set more and more to be the case. In Hastings and Margate, among other places, culture has been deployed in an effort to achieve this; Arts Council England recently awarded Blackpool a grant of £225k a year to develop its famous illuminations.

Holidaying at the British seaside is still, of course, an unpredictable business, and the weather and bad hotels are only the start of it. The news is full of reports of the raw sewage being dumped in the sea at popular beaches – in 2023, there were 31,000 such discharges across the UK’s designated bathing sites, the equivalent of 228,000 hours – and the climate crisis is wreaking its own destruction, buildings sliding from cliffs, and cliffs sliding into the sea. Thanks to heavy rainfall, erosion is a growing problem. Last Easter, part of the cliff at West Bay in Dorset crumbled like a sandcastle, 4,000 tonnes of rockfall disappearing into the water below (it is lucky no one on the beach that day was killed).

But against such things we must set the fact that by staying in the UK, we don’t contribute to global heating (no need to fly) – and the special beauty and joy of the British seaside. People returned to it during Covid, when they had no other choice, and many remembered then how much they liked it. Though things were already shifting: new hotels; new restaurants, some run by those escaping from London and other cities; the sense that not all resorts need resemble a photograph by Martin Parr – even if we are still a long way from the days when Wallis Simpson chose to visit a smart hotel in Felixstowe to escape the abdication crisis (the hotel in question, I learn from Madeleine Bunting’s book, The Seaside, is now converted into flats).

Thirty-six per cent of the British population lives within 5km of the sea, and 63% within 15km – and this is (or it should be) our great, good fortune. I’ve taken to hopping on the train to Eastbourne, having bagged a deal on a bed at another Grand Hotel (this one, wrapped in white stucco, resembles a wedding cake, and it’s where Debussy wrote La Mer). Eastbourne has a modern art gallery, The Towner, where you can see good paintings by Sussex artists such as Eric Ravilious, and lots of hipster bakeries. But it also maintains its more traditional attractions: a gold-domed pier, a turquoise-topped bandstand, a promenade with candy-coloured beach huts (my only sadness is that its old, family-run ice-cream bar, Fusciardi’s, has been sold).

Our Victorian and Edwardian resorts are an extraordinary legacy, and I’m always surprised by how little they’re valued by some. If we were a different kind of country – less snobbish, more proudly confident – Blackpool would be more akin to, say, Deauville, in Normandy, France, which is to say, deeply treasured and considered rather chic. Everyone in Britain would know about the circus below the ballroom of the Blackpool Tower, the tiled ring of which fills with 42,000 gallons of water in less than a minute for its finale (this is thrilling).

People want change, if not gentrification precisely; but they also want some things to stay the same. As Travis Elborough writes in Wish You Were Here, his fond history of the British seaside, because most of us first visit the seaside as children, Fab ice lollies and penny slots tend to have a powerfully Proustian effect on our adult selves. As a child, my granny took us to Withernsea, on the Lincolnshire coast, to Bridlington, and to Morecambe, where we stayed at Pontins (RIP) and played a lot of crazy golf. They were happy times – though happier, perhaps, in memory – and thanks to this, whenever I’m at the coast now, some small part of me is always hoping to recreate them, even as I moan about white bread and crab sticks. I want to eat my fish and chips outside; I will have a Flake 99, not a Magnum; I gaze longingly at helter-skelters, wondering if I’m too old to have a go.

A few years ago, I dragged my husband to Filey, Scarborough’s traditionally more genteel neighbour (in a desperate effort to make it sound alluring, I told him it was where Margaret Drabble and her sister A S Byatt holidayed as children). It was off season. The day was grey, and the wind howling. The only possible thing to do was to find a caff, order tea and toasted tea cakes, and to listen in to the Alan Bennett-style conversations that were going on all around us. Naturally, I loved every second.

Bridie, you’re a millennial – tell me about your socks

Oh Gabs, you could ask me what beauty I saw in the world on this glorious blue sky morning, or how my relationship is with my mother, or what rage is in my heart. But no, everyone wants to talk about millennial socks.

I actually wear great socks. Heavily influenced by my little brother, I’ve worn Uniqlo crew socks for years. Which are actually “zoomer socks”. But I have loved ankle socks as well, and that is the foghorn that signals I’m a millennial apparently.

Wait, I’m just trying to wrap my head around the concept of “millennial socks” – which you now tell me are just ankle socks – and now you’ve introduced the concept of “zoomer socks”. Are they merely coloured crew socks or is there more to it?

Millennial socks are small socks that stop at the ankle, or even the ones you can’t see at all above the shoe (I loved these!). Zoomer socks are generally crew socks – any sock pulled up high. They invented them (citation needed). Also, I think they’re actually called gen Z socks – my beloved zoomer colleagues are always telling me that only millennials say zoomer.

OK, so millennials love ankle socks – good to know. But why is Jennifer Lawrence being called “brave” by Vogue for stepping out in “millennial socks”?

Ah, I think because one of the most tragic things you can be in some corners of the internet is a woman in her 30s dressing herself with no regard for a trend.

Oh no, what about a woman in her 40s?

I don’t believe they exist.

So, ahem, the long and short of it is that gen Z have pulled their socks up?

Ha! They’ve also moved their hair part to the middle, millennials favour the side part. And they’re wearing enormous pants – skinny jeans are definitely out. Also high-waisted jeans are a millennial relic. Gen Z are wearing pants that hang off their hips.

Wait, I wore pants that hung off my hips!

Ssshh, ssshhhh. This is the first time in history that any of this is cool. And it will stay cool forever. There definitely won’t be articles in 10 years calling a 35-year-old zoomer “brave” for wearing crew socks.

With temperatures hovering around 0C this week, leaving ankles across pre-Y2K generations practically frostbitten, I have been wearing crew socks instead of ankle socks. This Xennial is accidentally cool now.

Voters in Temecula, California, have ousted the local school board president who thrust the political body to the forefront of rightwing culture wars by seeking to eliminate discussions of race and gender identity from the classroom.

Joseph Komrosky on Thursday lost a recall vote with 51% of voters favoring his removal.

Temecula – a predominantly white city of 100,000 residents – was a hotbed of the culture wars that conservative Americans have mounted in an attempt to censure how schools teach racism, gender and American history.

In June of 2023, Komrosky presided over the Temecula school board’s banning of critical race theory – which examines how racism was embedded into American law – as well as attempts to purge elementary school textbooks of any reference to Harvey Milk, the gay politician from San Francisco who supported LGBTQ+ rights before his 1978 assassination.

Komrosky first joined the board in November 2022. Since then, the school board has forced out the district superintendent and passed a parent-notification policy requiring schools to tell parents if students go by a gender different from what they were assigned at birth.

Komrosky has called critical race theory a “racist ideology” that uses “division and hate as an instructional framework in our schools”. He and fellow school board members then voted to reject California’s social studies curriculum over its inclusion of references to Milk, whom Komrosky described as a “pedophile”.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, threatened to impose a $1.5m fine on the district for not adopting the curriculum, though Komrosky and the school board vowed to find a way to circumvent doing so while adhering to state mandates. The board also initiated another controversial vote to limit which flags can be displayed on school grounds.

The unflattering public attention drawn by the controversies Komrosky’s actions ignited incited the recall election against him.

The recall vote was conducted on 4 June with final results released on Thursday. Among 9,722 ballots tallied, 4,963 supported the recall. The recall election turned out 45.1% of registered voters in Temecula.

Komrosky told the LA Times he is inclined to run for the school board again given his slim margin of defeat in the recall.

“Given the narrow margin, I will likely run again in the November 2024 general election,” Komrosky said. “If not, it has been an honor to serve the Temecula community, and I am proud to have fulfilled all of my campaign promises as an elected official.

“My commitment to protecting the innocence of our children remains unwavering.”