• Vatican Athletics has blessing of Italian Olympic Committee
• Priests, nuns and 62-year-old library worker among members

The Vatican has launched an athletics team with the aim of competing in international competitions – including the Olympics – as part of an agreement signed with the Italian Olympic Committee (Coni).

About 60 Holy See runners – Swiss Guards, priests, nuns, pharmacists and a 62-year-old professor who works in the Vatican’s Apostolic Library – are the first accredited members of Vatican Athletics. It is the latest iteration of the Holy See’s longstanding promotion of sport as an instrument of dialogue, peace and solidarity.

Over the years my friend Yolanda Corden, who has died aged 76, made an immense contribution to the welfare of children as a senior social worker in London and, latterly, Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire and Coventry.

She had a particularly strong impact in Hackney, where in the late 1990s she consolidated the council’s new, centrally based independent child protection unit, and at Gloucestershire county council, where she was interim head of children’s services (2003-04), transforming a badly functioning authority into one that performed well.

Reading Michelle Obama’s Becoming made me think – intermittently – about Philip May’s bins. As in: was that the last time we heard from him? And if so, is that solitary TV appearance, along with some tweedy churchgoing and posing with walking poles – to be his legacy as prime minister’s consort? Is that – with time plainly running out – it?

Failing some last-minute contributions, May has proved, from an entertainment, news and thus satirical point of view, a dismayingly unco-operative dud of a first spouse. And it’s not as if anyone anticipated amusement up there with Brigitte Macron’s state visit showstoppers, or Samantha Cameron in the fish shop or, earlier, Cherie Blair, in the days when she sized-up property with a conman and shared details of her fertility highs and lows.

Labour’s spokesman is taking us for fools. A party that stands up for working people cannot allow them to be hit hardest of all

It cannot be easy being Keir Starmer. A cerebral, rational lawyer with a forensic mind who entered politics just as populism was infecting it badly. A man used to executive authority, built more for government than opposition. With a place at the top table as shadow Brexit secretary but viewed on that issue, and much else, with considerable suspicion by true Corbynista believers in the leader’s inner circle. Having to forge a position that straddles the historic Euroscepticism of Jeremy Corbyn and the posh boy revolutionaries who surround him, the overwhelming pro-Europeanism of Labour members whom the leadership says it listens to, and the “will of the people” as expressed on one day in June 2016.

It was these competing pressures that led Starmer and Corbyn to arrive at a position defined as “constructive ambiguity”. In Theresa May’s disastrous election campaign, the ambiguity seemed to work well. Leavers sensed Corbyn was basically on their side. Remainers saw Labour as the only credible route to blunt May’s push for hard Brexit. The party was able to shift the focus to other issues, and allow the elephant in the room to fade into the background.

Aeron Davis has spent 20 years researching Britain’s elite, interviewing more than 350 leaders in business and politics. His conclusion? Their failings are not only damaging society, but undermining the foundations of the establishment itself

In his 2014 book The Establishment, Owen Jones explained how and why Britain’s unequal, class-ridden system would always prevail. It was written at a time when the elite seemed to be thriving, despite having recently helped to trash the global economy. After a few lean years for “Davos man”, bank debt had effectively been nationalised. No one in power had gone to jail, while most of them seemed to be getting richer and richer. As Jones explained, the establishment was as dominant as ever.

Developments since then have sorely tested that view. After the vote for Brexit, David Cameron and George Osborne were suddenly cast adrift, while the Bank of England and captains of industry found themselves wondering who to support. The Conservative party – their political party, the only one they had ever supported – was following a course of action they thought would wreck the economy. Sterling and the FTSE 100 index plummeted. Shareholders began revolting and bankers relocating.