I take time out from “A manifesto for Lord Mandelson”, my blog series on trade and other relations with the US, to comment on President Trump’s proposal to impose tariffs of 25% on imports of steel and aluminium. Unofficial briefings have it that the UK intends to refrain from retaliation. So it should, for the following five reasons:

There is a point at which our idea of how the world works and how we think it could work comes up against how it does work. This is where ideology meets reality.

This shouldn’t be this difficult for people to understand: The NHS is nearly a fifth less effective than it was before the pandemic despite a £30bn funding boost, official figures show.

Today it is 50 years since Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party — and took it, and the UK, in a completely new direction.

If anyone had tested the market for plastic bottles with non-detachable tops, as now required by EU countries and the UK, they would rapidly have discovered that it was not going to work.

This is wildly wrong: Britain’s “increasingly complex” tax system is costing businesses £15.4bn a year just to comply with, the public spending watchdog has warned.

Recently, Tim Worstall wrote for the Adam Smith Institute a short article titled ‘Privatise the NHS!’ He writes: ‘Our suggestion here would be that The Guardian undertake that difficult task of trying to employ that mythical beast - the journalist with a grasp of numbers.’

The Prime Minister has announced support for the building of several small modular reactors (SMRs) to boost the UK’s supply of nuclear energy.

What was striking was that it also split along another fissure: Collins’s possible motives. It was OK, some felt, to use a surrogate if you have infertility problems. But not in order to keep your figure, help your career, or because pregnancy is taxing and you are rich enough to outsource it.

Apparently people are building houses where houses are not sensible to build: More than 100,000 new homes will be built on the highest-risk flood zones in England in the next five years as part of the government’s push for 1.5m extra properties by the end of this parliament, Guardian analysis suggests.

Last week, the US Senate confirmed Scott Bessent as Donald Trump’s new Treasury Secretary. Trump — never one to resist a good tag line — was reportedly sold on Bessent after hearing about his economic strategy, dubbed “3-3-3”.