The director worked with theatre colossus Tom Stoppard on two smash hits. Here, he remembers their heated rehearsals, the night they stayed up watching Jaws – and the last four cigarettes they smoked together

Tom was my hero from the night I first saw Travesties in 1979. I was 15. The older kids at school did a production of it and I was spellbound; it was glamorous, sensual and completely incomprehensible. I wanted to know everything about this cool, obscure playwright. I started in the school library with the Encyclopedia Britannica. Then I read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (incomprehensible) and then I read a third of Jumpers before giving up (totally incomprehensible).

As an English Lit student in the mid 1980s, I studied Stoppard and found his work slightly less incomprehensible. But in 1993, I saw the original production of Arcadia and felt that same spell I’d felt as a child. Let’s call it art. And beauty. And words spoken from a stage like no one else. A couple of years later, my first play, Dealer’s Choice, had just opened at the National Theatre and Tom was on the board. Someone told me: “Stoppard saw your play and mentioned it in some speech to donors as a good example of new writing at the NT.” A week or so later, I met him at a drinks do. He approached me. He approached me. All hair and suit and cigs and warmth. He gave me a hug and told me I was a proper young playwright.

Keir Starmer may be keen to move on from the budget megashambles, but chaos is hardwired into his party

Freud has a word for it. Thanatos. Up till now it’s been tempting to give Labour the benefit of the doubt. That being in opposition for 14 years has made them ring-rusty. That they’ve forgotten how this government thingy works. Hadn’t quite realised they were supposed to be in charge.

But now it’s beginning to look like Labour has a death wish. Not that it doesn’t quite know how to run the country, more that it is hell-bent on self-destruction. This isn’t a matter of incompetence: it’s a deliberate act of self-sabotage. Almost as if it doesn’t quite believe it deserves to be in office, or is too self-conscious to be in power. The opposition benches are its safe space.

A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar
On Tuesday 2 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back with special guests at another extraordinary year, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here

The Bonfire of the Insanities by John Crace (Guardian Faber Publishing, £16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

‘I spent the 90s with Pam – clubbing and partying in the way those times demanded. What I saw was a truly groundbreaking artist, and a life marked by independence, courage and kindness’

• Pam Hogg, fashion designer with a rock’n’roll spirit, dies at 66 – news
• Pam Hogg – obituary

There are people who live life to the full, then there’s Pamela Hogg. Pam’s tenure on this earth is a trawl through just about every significant cultural and creative moment in the UK over the last 30-odd years. One of our most groundbreaking artists, Pam was a colourist of Warholian proportions, creating art to be hung on the body rather than the walls of a gallery. She was a punk who provocatively mashed up gender and sexual stereotypes. Fashion was the art form that freed her imagination, and her success was due to her talent and drive being greater than her disdain of the conformist industry and the gatekeepers surrounding it.

I sat in St Joseph’s hospice in London by her unconscious but serenely beautiful figure – as if she’d made her exit into another work of art – telling her that her jam-packed life was characterised by creativity, independence, courage and kindness. “Hoggy, you left absolutely nothing on the table.”

They wrestled steel beams, hung off giant hooks and tossed red hot rivets – all while ‘strolling on the thin edge of nothingness’. Now the 3,000 unsung heroes who raised the famous skyscraper are finally being celebrated

Poised on a steel cable a quarter of a mile above Manhattan, a weather-beaten man in work dungarees reaches up to tighten a bolt. Below, though you hardly dare to look down, lies the Hudson River, the sprawling cityscape of New York and the US itself, rolling out on to the far horizon. If you fell from this rarefied spot, it would take about 11 seconds to hit the ground.

Captured by photographer Lewis Hine, The Sky Boy, as the image became known, encapsulated the daring and vigour of the men who built the Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest structure at 102 storeys and 1,250ft (381m) high. Like astronauts, they were going to places no man had gone before, testing the limits of human endurance, giving physical form to ideals of American puissance, “a land which reached for the sky with its feet on the ground”, according to John Jakob Raskob, then one of the country’s richest men, who helped bankroll the building.

The Irish politician was targeted in 2022, in the final weeks of her run for office. She has never found out who made the malicious deepfake, but knew immediately she had to try to stop this happening to other women

When Cara Hunter, the Irish politician, looks back on the moment she found out she had been deepfaked, she says it is “like watching a horror movie”. The setting is her grandmother’s rural home in the west of Tyrone on her 90th birthday, April 2022. “Everyone was there,” she says. “I was sitting with all my closest family members and family friends when I got a notification through Facebook Messenger.” It was from a stranger. “Is that you in the video … the one going round on WhatsApp?” he asked.

Hunter made videos all the time, especially then, less than three weeks before elections for the Northern Ireland assembly. She was defending her East Londonderry seat, campaigning, canvassing, debating. Yet, as a woman, this message from a man she didn’t know was enough to put her on alert. “I replied that I wasn’t sure which video he was talking about,” Hunter says. “So he asked, did I want to see it?” Then he sent it over.

The husband and wife team cook up a winter storm with lamb shoulder, dauphinoise and brown sugar meringues – just don’t ask them who’s doing the cleaning up

When I first started seeing Mattie, there was a constant dinner party at his mum’s house,” recalls pastry chef Ravneet Gill. “There were loads of people there all the time, being fed with massive bowls of home-cooked food and a big block of parmesan.” There was an open-door policy, with pastas and roast meats on heavy rotation, confirms her now-husband and fellow chef, Taiano. And it’s this sentiment that has carried through to the couple’s restaurant, Gina, which opened in Chingford, east London, earlier this year, a process they documented in their newsletter, Club Gina.

Named after Taiano’s late mother, it is very much a neighbourhood joint, Gill points out, with the food – from pithiviers and vol au vents to Gina’s pasta with tomato sauce, half a roast chicken with little gems and aioli to share on Sundays, and slabs of “Ravi’s” chocolate cake – an extension of how the couple like to eat.

Richard Hughes departs after investigation into how official forecaster accidentally published budget 40 minutes early

Richard Hughes, the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, has quit after the findings of an urgent inquiry by the watchdog into how it inadvertently published Rachel Reeves’s budget 40 minutes early.

Hughes wrote to the chancellor and to Meg Hillier, the chair of the Treasury select committee, last week to apologise after the OBR uploaded its documents setting out the details of the budget before Reeves began to speak on Wednesday.

Ukrainian president says focus remains on security guarantees, maintaining sovereignty and territory

UK prime minister Keir Starmer is delivering a major economy speech this morning.

You can follow all the key lines on our UK live blog with my colleague Andrew Sparrow, but there’s a particular line of argument that will no doubt reasonate in Europe, too.

“Let me be crystal clear, there is no credible economic vision for Britain that does not position us as an open, trading economy.

So we must all now confront the reality that the Brexit deal we have significantly hurt our economy and so for economic renewal, we have to keep reducing frictions.

Agreement also calls for NHS to increase net price it pays for new medicines by 25%

• Business live – latest updates

The UK government has sealed a deal with Donald Trump guaranteeing that zero tariffs will remain on the imports of UK pharmaceuticals into the US and commits Britain to higher spending on NHS drugs.

The agreement, announced on Monday, secures continued investment by UK pharma companies in the US and will create jobs in the US, the Trump administration said.

Five days of strike action over jobs and pay to take place from 17 to 22 December

Resident doctors in England will go on strike for five days before Christmas as part of a dispute with the government over jobs and pay.

The doctors, formerly called junior doctors, will take action from 7am on 17 December until 7am on 22 December. It follows similar strike action between 14 November and 19 November.