Newspaper headlines: Minister Jo Johnson quits to spend less time with family By BBC News

Staff Published duration 6 September 2019

image copyright Reuters image caption Mr Johnson gave a speech at a police training academy in Wakefield following his brother's resignation

Jo Johnson's resignation is reported on most of the front pages.

"Johnson suffers fresh setback as brother quits government," is the headline in the Financial Times The i goes with: "PM defiant as brother walks out".

The Daily Express leads with that defiance - its headline quotes Boris Johnson's words during his visit to Wakefield yesterday: "I'd rather be dead in a ditch than delay Brexit."

The Guardian says the resignation appeared to severely rattle the prime minister as he gave his speech to a police training academy. The Spectator website says the speech was chaotic and rambling, lacking any clear theme or confidence.

For the politics.co.uk website, he looked shambolic and dishevelled, and struggled to complete his thoughts. It was, the website adds, a PR disaster that nearly matched Theresa May's Conservative Party conference speech two years ago. A Daily Telegraph columnist says he had an Alan Partridge episode.

According to the leads in the Times and the Daily Telegraph , Labour plans to block a general election until the prime minister has secured an extension to the Brexit deadline.

The Telegraph says Labour and the SNP have agreed to withhold support for an election before 19 October - the date by which Mr Johnson will have to have secured a further Brexit extension.

The paper adds that some senior Labour figures want a delay until November so that Brexit will already have been extended by the time Britain goes to the polls.

The leader column in the Financial Times has a damning assessment of Labour's economic policies and warns that voters who may soon have to decide whether to back the party in an election should be in no doubt what they would be opting for.

It says Labour's agenda is untried and radical - with no precedent in Europe, beyond a rapidly aborted Swedish scheme.

It is a one-way bet, according to the paper. At worst, it says it would destroy investor confidence and usher in economic disaster. At best, it would be an expensive wasted opportunity to solve the country's problems.

There is frustration and dismay at England's performance in the fourth Ashes Test - on the day that the Australian batsman, Steve Smith, scored a double century.

The Mirror describes the team as flops and urges them to show real steel. For the Daily Mail , they have been flat, sloppy and shambolic - and a headline goes on to call them village idiots. England seem determined to hand the Ashes on a plate to Australia, the paper complains.

The Sun says England need another Ben Stokes miracle to save the series.

image copyright Getty Images image caption The modern myth of the monster gathered pace in the 1930s but this famous 1934 photo was later revealed to be a fake

Finally, could the Loch Ness Monster be a giant eel? It's a question many papers are asking this morning, after one of the largest scientific studies of the loch.

According to the Telegraph , scientists from New Zealand extracted DNA samples at different depths all over the loch, to find what lay underneath, and found a surprising amount of eel DNA.