As a Traitors obsessive, Gamble is in his element hosting its hugely popular companion show, Uncloaked. He discusses keeping the show’s secrets, edgelord comics and how he became known as a ‘mega wife guy’

Ed Gamble does not like seeing himself on screen. “I know a lot of comics who struggle with watching themselves,” he says. “No one should be having to look at their own face so much. It feels simultaneously arrogant and also the most self-flagellating thing you can do.”

Unfortunately for him, he is inescapable. Gamble presents the BBC’s wildly successful companion show to the Traitors, The Traitors: Uncloaked, along with the hugely popular podcast Off Menu, with the comedian and current Celebrity Traitors contestant James Acaster.

The government says it can transform the state with AI, but it is no match for the resulting stream of machine-generated slop. And we all pay the cost

Another morning, another avalanche of emails. Even after a guilty cull, my inbox is sitting at well over 7,000, but lately I’ve started subscribing to the Quentin Crisp theory of housework: why bother, when after four years or so you stop noticing the accumulating dust? Empty inboxes just fill up again anyway.

In theory, email was supposed to save hours of meetings, phone calls and standing over photocopiers. Instead, we just spend hours deleting stuff people wouldn’t have bothered telling us if it had meant picking up the phone, but which they can now spam to their entire database at the click of a button. The glorious ease and convenience of being able to reach the world in seconds came, we now know, with the inconvenience of them being able to reach you right back.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Over the past decade, Hungary has been a beacon for the ‘postliberal’ right, with pro-Trump thinkers making regular pilgrimages to Budapest. Now Orbán is gone, how will the movement adapt?

• A longer version of this article first appeared in The Drift

Espresso Embassy, a third-wave coffee shop in Budapest’s diplomatic and governmental quarter, is where visiting reporters and academics come to talk politics. On the way in for my morning coffee on 18 March, I passed a poster for Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party that had been vandalised with a marker pen: “the safe choice” had become “the certain way to get fucked”. From across the cafe, I spotted the American journalist and historian Anne Applebaum locked in conversation, possibly with a source. I heard someone exclaim: “Just like Mussolini!” It was election season in Hungary.

It was also a couple of days before Cpac Hungary, a satellite event of the US-based conservative conference. As members of the international right arrived in town, the notorious Orbánist thinktank known as the Danube Institute was hosting an event called On Censorship, Tolerance, the Left and God. The official line would be: bad, good, bad, good.

While the party’s MPs went into hiding, it was left to its failed byelection candidate Matt Goodwin to defend it

It was the dog that didn’t bark in the night. After Sunday night’s ITV exposé of widespread racism and misogyny within Reform, you might have expected one of its MPs to have taken to the airwaves on Monday morning to defend the party’s honour. To try to persuade viewers that the real problem lay with the journalists who couldn’t stop themselves from investigating Reform rather than the fact that the party’s bigotry was endemic.

Instead, we got nothing. Every Reform MP was otherwise engaged. Were too busy having breakfast. Nothing from Nigel Farage. Nothing even from Robert Jenrick. Maybe he realised he had crashed and burned a few days earlier by suggesting it was just one of those things. One of life’s little mysteries. The BBC was riddled with paedophiles and Reform was awash with racists, said Honest Bob. No big deal. Every organisation had its crosses to bear.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
With its helpless rowers, naked river-crossers and snowbound tea-drinkers, this magnificent series is a warning to put your faith in the essential and enduring

The giant wave’s foaming white summit spreads high over the heads of the helpless souls huddled in their long thin boats, crackling into what look like many sharp claws. It is a monster, hungry to swallow human flesh. But beyond it, over the wild water, soothing the terror of those in peril on the sea, is Mount Fuji – a solid cone of hope and solace. The mountain, not the wave, is the hero of this masterpiece, as it is the hero of all the prints in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s stunning exhibition – the first in Britain – of the complete Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

When you look closely here at three different, superb impressions of Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa – widely known today as the Great Wave – your mental picture of this icon is shattered by the violent onrush of water. In reproductions the wave just seems beautiful, an elegant curl of blue and white. But here, to paraphrase Tennyson, it is nature, blue in tooth and claw. The wretched people are the emotional heart of the picture, their imminent risk of drowning its whole point.

Twenty years ago, if a pregnant woman had asked for a C-section because of her fears over poor staffing levels, midwives would have thought she was over-anxious. Now, it seems like a depressingly realist position

The classic way to outrage someone who’s pregnant is to touch their stomach without asking. I would never do that and it never, back in the day, happened to me – but I always thought, as outrageous as it might hypothetically be, that it also stood as a vivid analogy for the generalised social intrusiveness you get while you’re visibly pregnant. Endless questions about how you’re feeling, when you’re due, what hospital you’re going to, whether it’s a boy or a girl, how much time you have off. I hated this interrogation 20 years ago, but now I do it on a reflex; some driving force of human fellowship makes me want to know. I realised mid-sentence, asking a stranger about hospitals – and replying “That’s a great hospital, my sister had her kids in there” – that it must be even more grating than it was in the 00s. My nieces are 19 and 21 now, and that great hospital, unless it’s magically unconnected to the rest of the NHS, has probably changed quite a lot.

The NHS Alliance has announced that up to 20 of the country’s 155 smaller, consultant-led maternity units, mostly in rural or coastal areas, might have to close, since their safety is in question. The problem – which will seem very pressing and obvious to anyone about to give birth, yet quite abstract and manageable to anyone who isn’t – is that those areas aren’t teeming with alternatives. There are women in Devon whose maternity hospital has been temporarily closed, whose next nearest hospital is 53 miles away. Do they even encourage people to write a birthing plan any more? Because nobody’s, surely, would start: “First, I’d like to spend 90 minutes in a car, yelling at my birthing partner.”

Exclusive: Undercover footage of Dan Jukes raises fresh questions about Reform leader’s statement that £5m gift was for security

Nigel Farage undermined his own claims that a £5m gift was for security when he referred to the money as a reward for Brexit, according to one of his closest aides.

The apparent admission came in undercover footage seen by the Guardian in which Dan Jukes says that it is “priced in” for Farage to profit from politics.

Exclusive: Utility seen as ‘litmus test’ of PM’s promise to bring ‘essentials of life’ under public control

Andy Burnham has told officials to rip up their plans for how to fix Thames Water and present him with more radical options for what to do with the stricken company.

In an early test of his promise to bring “the essentials of life” under public control, the prime minister is urging his advisers to go back to the drawing board and create a new list of policies for the utility.

Interior minister concedes police ‘lost control’ of weekend protests as PM vows to restore public order

Partial curfews have been issued for a number of French cities, including parts of Paris, after the government admitted police had “lost control” during violent weekend protests around the country.

Sébastien Lecornu, the French prime minister, said after an emergency cabinet meeting on Monday he was “fully resolved to restore public order” and had called for “local and partial” curfews if needed. There was “no question” of imposing a full curfew on entire cities, he said.

Transport hub will offer through trains between Leeds and Manchester with ‘turn-up-and-go’ service

A new railway station will be built in Bradford to “transform how people travel across the north”, the government has announced.

The station will be at the heart of the Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) scheme, built on the current Bradford Interchange site but allowing through trains between Leeds and Manchester.