Back-of-an envelope calculations by Kemi Badenoch, Mel Stride and Nigel Farage are nothing but political fever dreams

You would think we were in the final three months of a general election campaign, not three and a half years out. Everywhere you look there’s a party leader giving a press conference. Demanding attention from a public that just wants to be given a break.

Even the news channels are losing interest. Sending along a reporter more on the off-chance someone says something idiotic, than in any expectation of anyone committing hard news. Well, anything more idiotic than usual. This far out from an election we’re just dealing in political fever dreams.

Bringing her black-belt screen presence to the role of Elphaba, Erivo leads a fine cast in a zingily scored conclusion to the hit origin story

Director Jon M Chu pulls off quite a trick with this manageably proportioned second half to the epic musical prequel-myth inspired by The Wizard of Oz – and based, of course, on the hit stage show. It keeps the rainbow-coloured dreaminess and the Broadway show tune zinginess from part one, and we still get those periodic, surreal pronouncements given by the city’s notables to the diverse folk of Oz, those non-player characters crowding the streets. But now the focus narrows to the main players and their explosive romantic crises, essentially through two interlocking love triangles: Glinda the Good, Elphaba the Wicked and the Wizard – and Glinda, Elphaba and Prince Fiyero, the handsome young military officer with whom both witches are not so secretly in love, as well as possibly having feelings for each other.

Jeff Goldblum is excellent as the Wizard, who pretty much becomes the Darth Vader of Oz: a slippery carnival huckster who is realising that his seedy charm is corroding his soul. Jonathan Bailey pivots to a much more serious, less campy, more passionate Prince and Ariana Grande is, as ever, delicate and doll-like as Glinda, though with less opportunity for comedy. But the superstar among equals is Cynthia Erivo, bringing her black-belt screen presence to the role of Elphaba, and revealing a new vulnerability and maturity. Elsewhere, Marissa Bode returns as Nessarose, Elphaba’s wheelchair-using half-sister; Ethan Slater is Boq, the Munchkin working as her servant; and Michelle Yeoh brings stately sweetness to the role of the Wizard’s private secretary Madame Morrible.

Australia have big injuries and concerns over their top order: if England start well in Perth they can win back the Ashes

It’s the Ashes in Australia and that is a series England have become used to losing, so much so that even Jimmy Anderson, the greatest English Test wicket‑taker of all time, has the home side as favourites. But if Australia have ever been there for the taking, it is now. Looking at how the two sides are shaping up before the opening game I feel punchy about England’s chances: the team are strong, settled, and I think that if Ben Stokes plays all five Tests they will win the Ashes and win them comfortably. I can’t remember ever being so confident before an away Ashes.

That confidence is based on a strong group of seamers and a top seven that have now played a lot of Test cricket and have a lot of runs under their belt. They will look at an opposition that will be without the injured Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood in Perth and fancy their chances of racking up runs. Once you do that, you’re bossing the game.

It’s not just Melinda French Gates. Many divorcees in their 40s to 60s are glad to be free – their male exes, less so

Name: Divorcees.

Age: Usually middle-aged, roughly between 45 and 65.

The great potter explains why he turned his decades-long fixation with Axel Salto – maker of unsettling stoneware full of tentacle sproutings and knotty growths – into a new show

Potter and writer Edmund de Waal, a dark silhouette of neat workwear against the blinding white of his studio, is erupting with thoughts, all of them tumbling out of him at once. He is giving me a tour of the former gun factory on a London industrial estate gently disciplined into architectural calm. It has work stations for his staff (it’s quite an operation); store rooms; and a main space nearly empty but for some giant black lidded vessels he made in Denmark, as capacious as coffins. At either end, up discreet sets of steps, are the places of raw creation. One, with its potter’s wheel, is where he makes; the other, with its desk and bookshelves, is where he writes.

He opens a door to the room housing his two mighty kilns, its back wall lined with rows of shelves with experiments in form and glaze, and tells me of his irritation when people comment on the sheer tidiness of the whole place. “It’s porcelain,” he says with passionate emphasis. Dust and dirt are the enemy. Potters, he points out, “have struggled for hundreds and hundreds of years to keep things clean so that they don’t blow up in kilns, or don’t bloat or don’t dunt or all the other myriad things that can happen”. He is old enough, he says, to have had the kind of potter’s apprenticeship that involved the endless sweeping up of clay dust. Dust is the traditional bringer of potter’s lung – the chronic condition, silicosis. Clouds of dust surround any pottery-making endeavour, if you’re not careful.

The perfect pillow is out there, whatever your sleep style. We put 10 to the test, including a budget buy that costs less than a posh pint

• The best mattresses, tested

Pillows, like mattresses, are personal things. What represents one person’s idea of heaven can signal a horrible night’s sleep for someone else. This makes reviewing them challenging, but also strangely rewarding – with no objective benchmarking software to fall back on, the reviewer must use their brain power alone to establish who might get on well with a pillow – and who won’t.

That’s exactly what I’ve aimed to do, testing different pillows of different heights, firmnesses and materials, so that you don’t have to. The good news is you don’t need to break the bank to get your hands on one of the best options because one of our top picks will set you back just £14 for a pair.

Best pillow overall and best memory foam:
Otty Deluxe Pure pillow

Best budget pillow:
Fogarty soft cotton back-sleeper pillows

Bafta-winning director among contemporaries urging contrition and apology from Reform UK leader, who denies the allegations
Portrait: Tom Pilston

It is the hectoring tone, the “jeering quality”, in Nigel Farage’s voice today that brings it all back for Peter Ettedgui. “He would sidle up to me and growl: ‘Hitler was right,’ or ‘Gas them,’ sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers,” Ettedgui says of his experience of being in a class with Farage at Dulwich college in south London.

Ettedgui, 61, is a Bafta- and Emmy-winning director and producer whose credits include Kinky Boots, McQueen and Super/Man: the Christopher Reeve Story.

Dan Jarvis gives Commons statement after MI5 alert about LinkedIn profiles of Amanda Qiu and Shirly Shen

MPs and peers have been told they face “a covert and calculated” attempt to recruit parliamentarians through two LinkedIn profiles linked to the Chinese intelligence service.

After MI5 issued an espionage alert on Tuesday, saying that two people were operating on LinkedIn to obtain “non-public and insider insights”, the security minister, Dan Jarvis, told MPs the effort was focused on those “with access to sensitive information about parliament and the UK government”.

Home secretary urged to explain statement that asylum admissions will start at ‘a few hundred’ people

Shabana Mahmood is facing demands for compassion and clarity after it emerged that only a “few hundred” asylum seekers would initially be permitted to come to the UK under three new schemes for refugees.

The home secretary had justified a series of hardline policies – such as the deportation of families and the confiscation of assets from claimants – by saying she would work with the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) to open “safe and legal” routes for “genuine” claimants.

‘Politically realistic’ for UK to make financial contribution so it can access European single market, Irish minister says

The UK must pay into the EU budget for future participation in the European single market in electricity, it has been confirmed, in what could become a major test for the post-Brexit reset.

Ireland’s Europe minister, Thomas Byrne, said EU member states had decided the UK should make a financial contribution for closer ties: “Ireland wants to see Britain getting the benefit of closer engagement with the European Union.