For all the talk of coups, this much is clear: without a strong vision, Labour will face a fresh crisis of legitimacy

Will he still be there to see in the next new year? Noise about Keir Starmer’s durability quietens with MPs being away from Westminster’s tearooms and murmuring corridors, but WhatsApps zing to and fro just as busily: should he stay or should he go?

Any party that has fallen so far, so fast would doubt its leader. At minus 54%, Starmer has been declared the “most unpopular PM ever”, a title also held at one time by each of his four predecessors. Given how little Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Starmer have in common, whoever comes next may join their “most despised” club in this time of anti-politician volatility.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

From writing lists to taking a walk, it can be possible to gain clarity and perspective, even when faced with the most daunting tasks

• Sign up here to get the whole series straight to your inbox

“Perfection,” the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once wrote, “is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” The Little Prince author was talking about elegance in design, but it’s not a bad principle to apply to having a productive day. Rather than thinking about how many things you can cram in, perhaps it’s better to ponder how few you really need to do, and focus on doing them really well.

Where do you start? With a list, obviously. To the chronically overstressed, taking the time to handwrite all the stuff you already know you need to do can feel like a waste of time, but it’s always worth the effort. “You can’t prioritise tasks if you feel overwhelmed,” says Graham Allcott, the author of How to Be a Productivity Ninja, “but you can be totally overloaded and still not feel overwhelmed. The key to this is getting all the various things you have to work on out of your head so you can start to make sense of them. Get a piece of paper, and write on it all the things you need to make progress on, all the stuff that feels unfinished, everything you care about that isn’t done. It will take you longer than you think, but the very act of getting it all out of your head will help you get clarity, perspective and a sense of control.”

From Carrie Bradshaw cleaning up mess in And Just Like That to Kim Kardashian’s zero-star clanger and Bonnie Blue’s sexcapades, here are the biggest duds of 2025

Where to begin with the love/hate Sex and the City spin-off? The show was plagued with woeful writing, cringe-inducing character development (justice for Miranda!) and just 71 seconds of fan-favourite Samantha. But for a moment there, as the third series started, it looked like And Just Like That had finally hit its stride. Then came an episode all about Seema’s natural deodorant. No wonder creator Michael Patrick King announced that this would be the final series. It ended on a bum note; the closeup of Miranda’s toilet flooded with poo was just way too symbolic. Still, there’s no denying that fans have had a hoot dissecting every single “wtf?” episode. And as Carrie – a single woman once more – danced around her palatial townhouse to Barry White’s You’re The First, The Last, My Everything, who didn’t let out a little sob?

Since Zack Polanski took over as leader, the party has doubled its membership and its four MPs want to take on Reform’s anger and build community spirit

“Someone has to be out there making the narrative for social security. Someone has to fight the corrosive attitudes to people on benefits,” says Siân Berry, who has just finished her first year as a Green MP in the House of Commons.

She is speaking to the Guardian in her Brighton constituency office, formerly occupied by the legendary Caroline Lucas who flew a lone flag as the only member of parliament for the Green party for 14 years.

From Stanley Tucci’s imperious tech titan to Lex Luthor’s distractingly hot CEO and Elon Musk-esque blowhards, films this year took us inside the billionaire mindset

Between the slash-and-burn US government reboot led by a dank meme fan and the relentless pushing of AI by venture capital-backed blowhards, 2025 has felt like peak obnoxious tech bro. Fittingly, jargon-spouting, self-regarding digital visionaries also became Hollywood’s go-to baddies this year in everything from blockbusters to slapstick spoofs. Spare a thought for the overworked props departments tasked with mocking up fake Forbes magazine covers heralding yet another smirking white guy as “Master of the Metaverse” or whatever.

With such market saturation, the risk is that all these delusional dudes blend into one smarmy morass. It felt reasonable to expect that Stanley Tucci might sprinkle a little prosciutto on The Electric State, Netflix’s no-expense-spared alt-history robot fantasia. As Ethan Skate – creator of the “neurocaster” technology that quashed an AI uprising then turned the general populace into listless virtual-reality addicts – Tucci certainly looked the part: bald and imperious in retro Bond villain wardrobe. But even the great cocktail-maker couldn’t squeeze much out of sour existential proclamations such as: “Our world is a tyre fire floating on an ocean of piss.”

Our cartoonist looks back at the big stories and memorable moments as we wave farewell to another year in football

• David’s favourite cartoons of 2025 | Buy one here

• And his latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now

Eurostar “strongly advise” passengers to postpone their journey to a different date, after a problem with the overhead power supply in the Channel tunnel and a failed Le Shuttle train

• Tell us: have you been affected by the Channel Tunnel rail disruption?

European stocks have hit a record high today, ending a strong year on the front foot.

The pan-European Stoxx 600 index has risen by over 0.2% this morning to 590.65 points, a new peak.

The Euro area and UK economies proved more resilient in 2025 than we anticipated. US tariffs weighed on exports and real GDP growth in Q2 and Q3, but domestic demand has generally been more robust than we anticipated.

As a result, Euro area and UK GDP growth, while still underperforming the US this year, have turned out higher than in our forecast at the end of 2024.

Khalil Dawas was thought to have been recruited from Israeli jail but large parts of his story remain shrouded in mystery

On Tuesday 14 October, Hamas handed over four bodies to Israel as part of an exchange of the dead under the US-brokered Gaza ceasefire.

Israeli forensic experts soon confirmed the identities of three of the bodies, but they said that one did not belong to them. Hamas insisted that the fourth man was an Israeli soldier.

Foreign secretary says due diligence procedures were inadequate amid storm over activist’s past tweets

Yvette Cooper has launched a review looking into “serious information failures” around the case of a British-Egyptian activist welcomed to the UK despite his past tweets now called “abhorrent” by the government.

Keir Starmer said he was “delighted” by Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s arrival on Friday but a political storm erupted after social media posts from a decade ago were unearthed including some in which the activist had called for Zionists to be killed.

Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha responds to claims by Moscow of a strike on home in Russia’s Novgorod region

Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has echoed Donald Tusk’s optimistic tone regarding talks on ending the war in Ukraine.

He posted to X to confirm there had been “another round of consultations” with “European and Canadian partners”. It is not clear who was in the meeting.

Peace is on the horizon, there is no doubt that things have happened that give grounds for hope that this war can end, and quite quickly, but it is still a hope, far from 100% certain.