Six of the Best 712

"During last month’s election campaign, I made the most important political decision of my life. I resigned from the Conservative Party, for whom I had stood as a parliamentary candidate in 2015, to join the Liberal Democrats." Azi Ahmed explains why she is proud to be a Lib Dem newbie.

Jay Rayner was asked to a meeting by Michael Gove so that he could share is expertise on the implications of Brexit for our food supply. He declined, but this is what he would have said.

"The council’s advisors were clear that if planing guidance had been applied strictly then the council could have demanded over 1000 more affordable homes. They choose not to." George Turner dissects Wandsworth's mishandling of the Battersea power station project.

Mark Collins on the extraordinary bonfire of paperwork that accompanied the end of the British Empire.

Alexander Star examines Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on America.

"It occurs to me that watching the women’s game now is rather what it must have been like watching the men’s game in the earliest days of the modern era (in the 1870s and 1880s) : predominantly medium pace bowling and spin, well-pitched up, with the batsmen playing off the front foot with a straight bat." Backwatersman is variously ecstatic, bewildered or indifferent watching the Women's World Cup.