Exclusive: Chloë Deakin tells how she wrote to Dulwich college master to argue against Farage’s nomination as prefect

It was 1981 and Nigel Farage was turning 17. He was already a figure of some controversy, as would become a lifelong habit, among the younger pupils and staff at Dulwich college in south-east London.

“I remember it was either in a particular English lesson or a particular form period that his name came up,” said Chloë Deakin, then a young English teacher, of a discussion with a class of 11- and 12-year-olds. “There was something about bullying, and he was being referred to, quite specifically, as a bully. And I thought: ‘Who is this boy?’”

Bardot titillated the world for five decades, but the controversy and voyeurism surrounding her shouldn’t overshadow an intriguing film career

• Brigitte Bardot dies aged 91

• A life in pictures

Bardot … there was a time when it couldn’t be pronounced without a knowing pout on the second syllable. French headline-writers loved calling the world’s most desirable film star by her initials: “BB”, that is: bébé, a bit of weirdly infantilised tabloid pillow-talk. When Brigitte Bardot retired from the movies in the mid-70s, taking up the cause of animal rights and a ban on the import of baby seals, the French press took to calling her BB-phoque, a homophone of the French for “baby seal” with a nasty hint of an Anglo pun. But France’s love affair with Bardot was to curdle, despite her fierce patriotism and admiration for Charles de Gaulle (the feeling was reciprocated). As her animal rights campaigning morphed in the 21st century into an attack on halal meat, and then into shrill attacks on the alleged “Islamicisation” of France, her relations with the modern world curdled even more.

In the 1950s, before the sexual revolution, before the New Wave, before feminism, there was Bardot: she was sex, she was youth, and, more to the point, Bardot was modernity. She was the unacknowledged zeitgeist force that stirred cinema’s young lions such as François Truffaut against the old order. Bardot was the country’s most sensational cultural export; she was in effect the French Beatles, a liberated, deliciously shameless screen siren who made male American moviegoers gulp and goggle with desire in that puritan land where sex on screen was still not commonplace, and in which sexiness had to be presented in a demure solvent of comedy. Bardot may not have had the comedy skills of a Marilyn Monroe, but she had ingenuous charm and real charisma, a gentleness and sweetness, largely overlooked in the avalanche of prurience and sexist condescension.

Batter says changing management would be ‘silly’ but questions remain over whether the current setup is producing the best players

In fairness to Australian cricket, it rarely sticks its head in the sand. On Sunday in Melbourne, when 90,000 fans should have been enjoying day three of the fourth Test, they put Matt Page, chief curator at the MCG, in front of the media to face a grilling over that casino of a two-day pitch.

Page was contrite, admitted his mistakes, and vowed to never repeat the 10mm of grass that, while designed to guard against hotter weather later in the match, delivered a second hammer blow to Cricket Australia’s finances this series. For all the public anger Stuart Fox, the ground’s chief executive, did not sound as if he was about to issue Page with his marching orders.

The new film adaptation by Saltburn director Emerald Fennell looks set to be provocative – but nowhere near as shocking as Emily Brontë’s original

The most astonishing thing about the first trailer for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is not the extreme closeup of dough being kneaded into submission. It’s not that in the lead roles Margot Robbie is blonde and 35, and Jacob Elordi is white, when Emily Brontë described Cathy as a teen brunette and Heathcliff as “a dark-skinned gypsy”. It’s not the gaudy splendour of the interiors – silver walls, plaster Greek gods spewing strings of pearls, blood-red floors and a flesh-pink wall for clutching and licking. It’s not Robbie’s gobstopper diamonds or her scarlet sunglasses or her stuffing grass into her mouth or the loud snip of her corset laces being slashed with a knife or her elaborately – erotically – bound hair as she contemplates multiple silver cake stands stacked with vertiginous fruit puddings. It’s not any of her dresses – the red latex number or the perfectly 1980s off-the-shoulder wedding dress topped by yards of veil half-wuthered off her head. Nor is it any of the times Elordi takes his top off.

The most astonishing thing is that the trailer says Wuthering Heights is “the greatest love story of all time”. Which is almost exactly how the 1939 Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon film was trailed – as “the greatest love story of our time … or any time!” Have we learned nothing? I am not talking about the fact that (like Oberon’s!) Robbie’s wedding dress is white, which is not period-correct. This has exercised many people on the internet. I’m more worried about the fact that almost a century since Olivier’s film, we are still calling it a love story – a great one! The greatest! It’s being released the day before Valentine’s Day! – when what actually happens is that Cathy rejects Heathcliff because she’s a snob, and he turns into a psychopath.

Zinging hospitality and heart-thumpingly good food

For reasons that may already be apparent, and that are currently playing on BBC One, I have spent much of 2025 watching people cook scallops and souffles in a windowless television location unit in Digbeth, Birmingham. MasterChef, despite being one of the most exhilarating jobs a girl can do, sucked up most of my waking hours this year, and made my free time extra-precious. So the very best restaurants I found this year – those with zinging hospitality and heart-thumpingly good food – became equally extra-crucial.

I’m talking about the likes of Tropea in Harborne, just down the road from the TV studio, and where I’ve spent a fair few Saturdays eating butternut squash arancini, fresh tagliolini and whopping great deep-fried salted cannoli. Over in Bristol, meanwhile, two absolute gems revealed themselves on the very same trip: Ragù and Lapin, both in Wapping Wharf and both in repurposed shipping containers, but entirely different creatures. Lapin I described as a “peculiar, meta, slightly earnest and definitely delicious” slice of France that serves asparagus with sauce gribiche, gnocchi Parisienne and, well, lapin itself whenever local hunters manage to bag some bunnies. Lapin will add caviar to any dish, if you ask for it, they play 80s French pop and serve a mint-green, menthe-over-club-soda diabolo for those French exchange school trip vibes. Ragù, meanwhile, may quite simply be one of the greatest dinners I’ve eaten this decade: crespelle in rich tomato brodo, artichoke fritti and chocolate budino with sour cherries and amaretti – flawless cooking in completely understated surroundings.

C of E faces dilemma as far right claims Christianity to push agenda that often clashes with gospel message

Gary made sure he got to Whitehall early for the “unite the kingdom” (UTK) outdoor carol service in the run-up to Christmas. After about 150,000 people turned up for the last rally called by Tommy Robinson in September, the leader of the anti-migrant far-right movement, he wanted to be sure of a prime position.

He needn’t have worried. About 1,500 people – perhaps 1% of September’s turnout – came to Whitehall to sing carols and hear preachers in the twilight of a mid-December day. Robinson had publicly insisted the event was a non-political celebration of Christmas; maybe that deterred some of movement’s more ardent activists.

Emmanuel Macron leads tributes to celebrated sex symbol who later embraced animal rights activism and an increasingly controversial political stance

• Brigitte Bardot: a life in pictures

• Peter Bradshaw on Brigitte Bardot – a zeitgeist-force and France’s most sensational export

Tributes have been paid to Brigitte Bardot, the French actor and singer who became an international sex symbol before turning her back on the film industry and embracing the cause of animal rights activism, who has died aged 91.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, wrote on social media that Bardot had “embodied a life of freedom” and “universal brilliance”. France was mourning “a legend of the century”, he said.

Ukrainian president will meet US president at his Mar-a-Lago home later today for their first in person meeting since October

The Ukrainian military said on Sunday that it hit the Syzran oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region in an overnight drone attack.

The strike caused a fire and damages were still being assessed, Kyiv’s General Staff said.

Company owners say bonus was unrelated to water business and complied with ban after pollution conviction

The former chief executive of Wessex Water received a £170,000 bonus from its parent company last year despite a ban on performance-related pay after criminal pollution failures on his watch.

Colin Skellett received a total of £693,000 in pay from the water company’s Malaysian-owned parent company, YTL Utilities (UK), including the bonus, according to its accounts up to June 2025.

Charities and MP Bob Blackman urge government to implement law to tackle scandal of ‘exempt’ accommodation

People are dying in unsafe accommodation and communities are being irreversibly damaged due to delays to a new law to clamp down on unregulated supported housing in England.

It has been more than two years since the Supported Housing Act, a private member’s bill brought by the Conservative MP Bob Blackman, that applies to England and Wales, was given royal assent but it has yet to be implemented due to delays in creating the regulations.