Dutch parliamentary candidate wrongly arrested for being ‘vegan streaker’

The Telegraph paywall defeated the judges' effort to read most of the story, but that newspaper still wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Thank you to the reader who nominated it.

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Blue Labour has become a destructive fantasy with little to say about the challenges of the country in which we live, says Marc Stears, who was one of the founders of the movement: "Everyone probably wants to reindustrialise, but we know that there is no future for the UK economy without a vibrant service sector. Everybody similarly wants strong defence. But there is no military alliance to be found in which the UK and Ukraine should be allied against France and Germany."

Eliot Higgins is not impressed by a report from the Cato Institute that claims public concern about misinformation is overblown: "The danger isn’t just that people believe lies. It’s that entire communities can become locked into belief systems that cannot be challenged - where loyalty replaces evidence, and disagreement feels like betrayal. That doesn’t merely distort truth; it breaks trust. When this happens at scale, it isn’t just bad information - it is a breakdown in how society makes decisions. We lose the ability to deliberate, to find common ground, to hold anyone accountable."

Brian Merchant has been collecting stories from tech workers at TikTok, Google and across the industry about how AI is changing, ruining, or replacing their jobs.

"Articles discussing the report offer lots of different answers as to why this happiness gap exists: better health care, high-trust culture, less pressure to excel academically. But when I asked parents and children in the Netherlands why they thought their children were so happy, they all had one answer: Dutch parents value giving their children independence, possibly above all else." Mary Frances Ruskell responds to a UNICEF report that suggests Dutch children are the happiest in the world.

"Attachments to places are how we make sense of the world around us. When these places are threatened, so too are our own places within the world": Ben Lockwood on the importance of mapping the meaning of forests in a time of destruction.

Caroline Davies visits an exhibition that explores Charles Dickens' love of the theatre and highlighs the dramatic impact of his works.

Teach-In: In the Summernight

The 1975 Eurovision Song Contest was not a classic. I remember the British entry, Let Me Be the One by the Shadows, as a tired song by a tired band, and the title of the winning effort from the Netherlands, Ding-a-dong, tells you all you need know about it.

Yet I have always remembered a different song by the winning band Teach-In. In the Summernight had already been a hit for them in a few countries, and the fact that I heard it at all suggests it was released or re-released in the UK later in 1975. If so, the song failed to trouble the singles chart.

It's Europop with a touch of the Caribbean, but in those days that still meant steel drums rather than a reggae rhythm.

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"Who's going to campaign for him in October? Who's going to stuff leaflets, who's going to give old ladies a lift to the polling station, who's going to stand in rainy high streets saying "vote Tory"? Not a single Conservative councillor, who will either have lost their seats five months previous or have scraped through by pretending not to have anything to do with That Lot In Westminster." Fleet Street Fox argues that Sunak has no choice but to go to the country in May.

David Gilbert says a Russian disinformation campaign is deploying everything from high-ranking lawmakers and government officials to lifestyle influencers, bloggers, and powerful state-run media outlets to stoke divisions in the United States around the Texas border crisis.

John Lewis-Stempel hails William Cobbett as the grandfathers of self-sufficiency: "Self-sufficiency, autarchy, backyard farming — call it what you like — is a venerable British tradition. Once upon a time governments even sponsored self-sufficiency via Smallholdings Acts authorising acquisition of land for those wanting to grow their own."

"One young reader wrote to him of Tess, 'I wonder at your complete understanding of a woman’s soul.' Hardy’s discontented wife Emma wondered at it too. She observed, 'He understands only the women he invents - the others not at all.'" Norma Clarke reviews Paula Byrne's new book on Thomas Hardy and women.

You think we're hard on our politicians now? In 1672, reports Vlad Moca-Grama, the Dutch ate their prime minister's liver.

The Smell of Water on a remarkable survival: "York Minster ... possesses a remarkable treasure, a carved stone in a quiet corner of the crypt, a remnant from the lost Romanesque church that once existed on the site. The carving depicts the descent of souls into hell via a cauldron, it also has the best name for a stone ever, it’s called The Doomstone."