Newspaper headlines: EU ambassador's resignation dominates press By BBC News

Staff Published duration 4 January 2017

image copyright EPA image caption Sir Ivan Rogers has quit as the UK's ambassador to the EU

The Daily Telegraph speculates about what the government will do now that the UK's ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers, has stepped down.

"May to pick Brexiteer as our man in Brussels" is its headline

The paper has been told by senior Conservatives that ministers see his resignation as an opportunity to appoint someone who backs leaving the EU wholeheartedly.

The Telegraph says Number 10 had "lost confidence" in Sir Ivan, over what it describes as his "pessimistic" view of Brexit.

Under the headline "Our man in Brussels gave everyone a reality check", it suggest Sir Ivan was performing a vital function - trying to "tell it how it is, even if his political masters did not like the message".

"He was reportedly always happy to take no for an answer from Eurocrats," its leader says "when Britain desperately needed someone to fight our corner in Brussels".

There is anger in the Daily Mail about personal injury claims lawyers who advertise in hospitals.

Simon Stevens, who is head of the NHS in England, tells the paper they should be banned from doing so.

image caption NHS boss Simon Stevens criticised what are known as ambulance-chasing lawyers

He says the legal firms cost the health service more than £400m a year in claims for alleged medical blunders.

The Mail agrees that they should be kicked out.

Under the headline "Leeching off the NHS", its leader says allowing them to advertise in hospitals is "a grotesque act of self-harm".

The paper says that, by lunchtime on Wednesday, the bosses of Britain's biggest corporations will have already earned as much as the average person will be paid all year.

In its opinion column, the paper says "inflated rewards for the overpaid elite aren't even linked to ability or performance while most of the country grafts hard for a relative pittance".

Members of the French National Front are upset, according to the Guardian , about the apparent depiction of their party leader, Marine Le Pen, in the trailer for a new film called Chez Nous.

Front National vice-president Florian Philippot is quoted describing it as "scandalous" and expressing outrage that the film is being released in February, two months before the French presidential election.

But the director of Chez Nous, Lucas Belvaux, defends his work, saying it is not against the National Front but about "the populist message and how people relate to politics".

Finally, several papers report on the story of Stuart Wilson, an amateur archaeologist who bought a field in south Wales, dug it up - and found the remains of the ancient city of Trellech.

The Daily Express explains that, 12 years ago, Mr Wilson paid £32,000 for the field suspecting there might be something worthwhile buried there.

He has since found evidence of streets, foundations, and even a well.