It is radical to love a body that the world says is wrong – and I love mine completely

This body is a genetic mistake, a pitiable stare, the scan on a mundane Tuesday lunchtime with a doctor speaking in hushed tones by the bed.

It is glorious too, thanks. It is deep-in-the-bones laughter at 2am with people who love you; only strangers care that it is sitting in a wheelchair while doing so (“Have you got a licence for that thing, sweetheart?”). It is straight-As, promotions and beating expectations as much as the odds. It is being buckled over from the pain, clutching a public toilet bowl, pills and dignity rattling at the bottom of a handbag. It is sex, fevered goosebumps and kisses to the skin like magic. It is warm summers with friends, sunshine on bare legs and 90s dance music ricocheting through the air. It is fucking knackered.

Energy bills are not increasing because of feeble environmental levies – the solution is a tax on the oil giants

Why are the most extreme Tory MPs so influential? The European Research Group pressed for the hardest of Brexits, and the government gave it what it wanted. A similar faction, the Covid Recovery Group, lobbied for the removal of public health measures, and again succeeded. Now the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, featuring some of the same characters, demands the abandonment of effective climate policy, and is clearly gaining ground.

Why? Because the Conservative party has long been drawn towards its extremes. It is pulled this way by the gravitational force of dirty money. This is a result of the pollution paradox. The paradox proposes that the most antisocial commercial interests have the greatest incentive to buy political favour, otherwise they would be regulated out of existence. So politics comes to be dominated by them.

Many of those rightly criticising Carr’s grotesque joke have been guilty of whipping up hate against this persecuted group

Comedy is a barometer of popular attitudes. What people deem funny, and what they feel is acceptable to laugh at, tells us a lot about society. After the comedian Jimmy Carr “joked” that the Nazis’ industrialised extermination of Europe’s Roma population was a “positive”, several Tory ministers decided that a line did actually exist in public discourse, and that this time it had well and truly been crossed.

Carr’s comments were “abhorrent and they just shouldn’t be on television,” declared the culture secretary and newly minted tribune of the oppressed, Nadine Dorries. The health secretary, Sajid Javid, denounced Carr’s “horrid” joke and called for audiences to boycott him.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

The pandemic gave us the chance to rethink our education system, so why do we persist with this pointless ritual?

Two years ago, I prayed that the government might make permanent the cancelling of GCSE exams because of Covid. This wasteful, costly, cruel and pointless ritual of teenage evaluation could at last be binned; schools could revert from being testing machines to actually educating children.

No such luck. This week, thousands of young people will start their “mocks”, driving through to exams beginning in May, then results in August to prepare for further examination at A-level. For some, half a year will have been spent being measured. Ever since Michael Gove abolished continuous teacher assessment, the exam hall has become the high temple – or torture chamber – of schooling, the great God of metrics rules.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

The wealthy ghouls who fund the Tory party expect their quid pro quo – and this legislation will deliver it

To adapt Ronald Reagan’s adage, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’ll set you free.” Every time this government says freedom, it means freedom for someone other than you.

Seeking to distract us from his own pursuit of freedom during lockdown, this week Boris Johnson announced what he calls a Brexit freedoms bill. Its purpose is to accelerate the removal of EU rules from our legislation, and to “cut £1 billion of red tape for UK businesses”.

With some of Sue Gray’s findings published, what will the implications be for Boris Johnson? Our experts give their view

In any normal political climate, the Sue Gray report should be a final word. It is not short on statements that should condemn the prime minister, confirming the facts that have been out in the public domain for weeks now. Twelve parties – all but four of those that took place – are under criminal investigation. One of those, and this is not a passing detail, took place in the prime minister’s own flat. While the rest of the country was negotiating the fine technicalities of what constitutes a breach of the rules, in some instances pondering whether to sit on a bench in the park or not, these parties seem to suggest that No 10 and civil service staff, under the eye of the prime minister, believed they were exempt.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

As we wait patiently for Sue Gray to wrap up her inquiry into various alleged lockdown parties at Downing Street, the Met police have launched their own investigation. Heather Stewart and Jonathan Freedland discuss the potential fallout from it all. Plus, Aamna Mohdin looks into alleged Islamophobia in the Conservative party

Wealthy companies are using the facade of ‘nature-based solutions’ to enact a great carbon land grab

There is nothing that cannot be corrupted, nothing good that cannot be transformed into something bad. And there is no clearer example than the great climate land grab.

We now know that it’s not enough to leave fossil fuels in the ground and decarbonise our economies. We’ve left it too late. To prevent no more than 1.5C of heating, we also need to draw down some of the carbon already in the atmosphere.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

When Keir Starmer was blocked from talking about the Queen, it highlighted a convention that has no place in the 21st century

With Boris Johnson reeling, the House of Commons was a stormy place at prime minister’s questions last Wednesday. The impact on the prime minister’s fate was minutely scrutinised. As a result, a separate exchange during that session has had less attention than it deserves.

In one of his questions, Keir Starmer began talking about the contrast, widely highlighted in the media beforehand, between the Queen sitting alone, obeying Covid rules at her husband’s funeral, and staff at No 10 ignoring the rules while partying with colleagues the previous evening.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Nato’s treatment of Russia almost guaranteed a chauvinistic reflex. The way forward is to implement the Minsk settlement

The movement of troops round the Ukrainian border now clearly heralds a crisis. Russia’s level of provocation is grotesque, but nothing on the ground poses any strategic threat to Britain or any other western government, or even to Europe’s security as a whole.

Ukraine’s relations with Russia have been fraught since the toppling of the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in a coup in 2014. The country is split. When Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine rebelled, it was aided by Russia. Moscow seized Crimea. The longstanding ties with Russia were one reason why Nato left Ukraine out of its reckless post-Soviet rush to advance its security boundary as near as it could to the Russian border during the 1990s.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Whether it’s the monarchy, the union or the BBC, today’s Tories are trampling on the values they once claimed to cherish

Just because Boris Johnson approaches every issue thinking only of Boris Johnson does not mean we have to do the same. Even the crisis that now engulfs the prime minister, and sees his fate hang on Tory MPs’ reaction to a Sue Gray report that could come next week, is not only about him. It’s tempting to see it that way – to look for the roots of the partygate scandal in Johnson’s arrogance, entitlement and narcissism – but it’s a double mistake.

As a matter of politics, it’s unwise because it would allow the Conservatives to ditch Johnson, pick a successor and claim to be a new government exorcised of its demon, with no need for the electorate to turn to Labour. But it’s also wrong.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Best known for starring in Atonement and Suffragette, the actor has now turned to writing and directing with a spine-chilling film. What possessed her?

I meet Romola Garai in a velvet-sofaed establishment in central London, which feels radically incongruous. Not because one wouldn’t expect to find an actor of nearly 20 years on such a sofa, but because an hour before, I’d been forcing myself to watch the gory centrepiece moment of her new horror film, Amulet, which marks a dramatic departure into writing and directing.

Amulet lulls you into a fragile sense of security with its arthousey tension, beautiful, subtle performances and lingering shots of decaying wallpaper. When it explodes into body horror – toilets birthing hideous, hairless newborn creatures, a prelude to the worse gestations to come – well, you’d be tempted to cover your eyes if it wasn’t all so horribly compelling.

Johnson won’t save his skin by threats of war with another ailing populist, and Putin will not be stopped by the west

Nothing in politics is as dangerous as a populist in trouble – unless it is two populists in trouble. Today we have Britain’s Boris Johnson and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, both with plunging popularity ratings and both desperately in need of a distraction. There is no distraction as enticing as war.

War across Ukraine’s conflict-ridden Donbas region is now said by western strategists to be just round the corner, imminent and possibly inevitable. President Biden clearly expects Russia to “move in” on Ukraine. The UK’s chief of defence staff, Tony Radakin, said that a Russian invasion could trigger conflict on a scale “not seen in Europe since world war two”.

I was mourning my mother as Downing St partied. But even I can’t blame this morally bankrupt prime minister alone

On the last Sunday before the 2019 general election, the Sunday Times cast its vote. “Mr Johnson is regarded with some suspicion by voters,” its editorial admitted. “He has an on-off relationship with the truth,” often preferred “bluster to grasp of detail”, and had a “colourful private life more typical of a French president”. Nonetheless, the paper urged its readers to put a liar, a bullshitter and a renowned moral incontinent in charge of the country. In making this argument, it was joined by the vast majority of national newspapers, and by the end of that week they got their wish.

Over the past few days, those very same papers have discovered that a liar, a bullshitter and a moral incontinent runs the government. They are, naturally, horrified.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

The Conservatives tends to choose the opposite of what they have just rejected. But don’t write off the populists

Boris Johnson’s fall is not yet a fact. But it grows more likely by the hour. The hue and cry resumed at full throttle on Wednesday morning. Then Christian Wakeford, Conservative MP for the “red wall” marginal of Bury South, who had been the regional chief of the Back Boris campaign in 2019, defected to Labour. Thirty minutes later, David Davis quoted Leo Amery (who was quoting Oliver Cromwell) telling Neville Chamberlain in 1940: “In the name of God, go.” No leader can indefinitely survive these levels of assault.

Assuming it now takes place, there are two important things to keep in mind about the 2022 Conservative leadership election. The first is that the many twists in this extraordinary story may not have all been exhausted. Experience of recent Tory leadership contests suggests that we should expect the unexpected.

I have not ‘overcome’ anything, but I am happy and hopeful. Chronic illness is sometimes described as a form of grief, but I prefer to think of it as beginning the next stage

Four years ago, I caught the flu – and I am still stuck in bed, struggling to breathe. A bit like those with long Covid now, I developed postviral fatigue after a short illness. You could say I was into viruses before their mainstream second album.

Born with a muscle weakness, I was already familiar with the fragility of the human body. But the overnight change, post‑flu complications, hit me like a truck. In the early days, stuck on a ventilator and barely able to move, my brain was so traumatised that I thought my bedroom curtains were on fire. I didn’t even have curtains.

The activist and acclaimed author of Ain’t I a Woman and All About Love has died. Here, leading contemporaries pay tribute to her

• A life in quotes: bell hooks

• bell hooks, author and activist, dies aged 69

British journalist and author of the bestselling Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race