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MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock says he will remain an independent after surrendering whip last week

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The former Reform UK MP James McMurdock has suggested he will permanently quit the party after receiving legal advice about his business conduct related to Covid loans.

McMurdock, the MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock, surrendered the party whip last week in anticipation of revelations in the Sunday Times, which claimed there were questions over loans totalling tens of thousands of pounds.

The tragedy’s mythic quality appeals to adapters the world over but the Japanese film-maker’s Ran, now rereleased, manages to solve the play’s problems

I have long had mixed feelings about King Lear. I admire its cosmic grandeur and sublime poetry but balk at its structural unwieldiness and dramatic implausibility: like Coleridge, I find the spectacle of Gloucester’s suffering “unendurable” and there is something gratuitously cruel about Edgar’s refusal to reveal his identity to his father. I’ve never regretted omitting it from my book The 101 Greatest Plays yet I still remember a shocked head of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford greeting me with the words: “I hear you’ve dropped Lear.”

Whatever my personal doubts, the play has a mythic quality that has appealed to dramatists, composers and film-makers including our own Peter Brook, the Russian Grigori Kozintsev and the Japanese Akira Kurosawa whose Ran is enjoying a rerelease to mark its 40th anniversary. Seeing Ran again after all this time was an overwhelming experience. It would be absurd to say it is better than Lear but it addresses many of the problems I have with Shakespeare’s play.

Dog stayed by his master, who was wedged in an 8 metre-deep crevasse, and was spotted by helicopter crew

A small pet dog is being hailed as a “four-legged hero” for helping to save his owner’s life after he fell down an icy crevasse in the Swiss Alps.

The Air Zermatt helicopter company credited the pint-sized pooch with drawing their attention to the location of the hiker, who was extracted and taken to hospital.