Thunderstorm alert issued as rain, lightning and hail set to batter parts of UK

Heavy rain, lightning and hail is expected to batter parts of the UK on Sunday as the Met Office issued a yellow warning for thunderstorms.

The alert came into force just after 8am and will be in effect until midday covering parts of Gloucester, Bath, Salisbury and Newport.

Forecasters warned of difficult driving conditions, a small chance of homes and businesses experiencing power cuts, being flooded or getting damaged by water, lightning strikes, hail or strong winds, and potential disruption to train and bus services.

A band of heavy rain and thunderstorms is due to move north across the affected area, with some places potentially seeing 30-40mm of downpour and frequent lightning and hail, according to the Met Office.

Meteorologist Ellie Glaisyer said: “It’s a very windy start for many of us out there this morning particularly across the west where we’ve seen some coastal gales and we’ll continue to see some very strong winds as we go throughout much of Sunday.

“A bit of a brighter start across eastern areas this morning, plenty of hazy sunshine on offer through the afternoon but further west a bit of a wetter picture.

“Some outbreaks of heavy, showery rain push their way northwards as we go through this afternoon.”

It comes before a total lunar eclipse “blood moon”, which is expected to be visible in parts of England and Wales on Sunday night.

The moon is to turn a deep, dark red – sometimes called a “blood moon” – as the Earth passes directly between the sun and the moon, casting its shadow across the lunar surface, for the first time since 2022.

Where skies are clear, the eclipse will be visible at around 7.30pm.

US Open ask broadcasters not to show any booing of Trump at final

The organisers of the US Open have asked broadcasters to refrain from showing any negative reaction towards Donald Trump during the US president’s appearance at the men’s singles final on Sunday.

Trump is expected to return to the US Open for the first time in a decade after accepting a corporate invite to a suite for Sunday’s final between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner at Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Trump is set to be shown on the big screen at Arthur Ashe Stadium during the national anthems, which precedes the start of the match, according to a report from Bounces.

But in an email to broadcasters, including Sky Sports and ESPN, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) asked for coverage to “to refrain from showcasing any disruptions or reactions in response to the President’s attendance in any capacity”.

Trump, who used to be a regular visitor to the tournament in New York, was booed during his last appearance at the US Open in 2015, which came a few months after launching his presidential campaign.

Enhanced security measures will be in place for the US Open men’s final, which starts at 2pm ET on Sunday.

In recent months, Trump has attended major sporting events such as the Super Bowl in New Orleans, the Club World Cup in New Jersey, where he bizarrely remained on stage for Chelsea’s trophy lift, and the Daytona 500 in Florida.

The 22-year-old Alcaraz said it is good for tennis to have Trump attend his final – and insists he will not be distracted by his presence.

“I think that it is a privilege for the tournaments having the president from every country just to support the tournament, to support tennis, and to support the match,” Alcaraz said after setting up a final against Sinner. “For me, playing in front of him … I will try not to think about it.

“I don’t want myself to be nervous because of it, but I think attending the tennis match, it’s great for tennis to have the president at the final. But on Sunday, my job is to play my best tennis and not let anything else get in the way.”

Alcaraz and Sinner are the first two players to meet in three consecutive grand slam finals in the same year in the Open era, having battled at the French Open final and the Wimbledon final this summer.

Sinner is the defending US Open champion and has won 27 matches in a row at the hard-court grand slams. The Italian defeated Alcaraz in four sets at Wimbledon to win his fourth grand slam title.

Alcaraz is out for revenge and will be looking to win his second US Open title. The Spaniard saved three match points to beat Sinner in five sets in the French Open final and will regain the World No 1 ranking if he wins his sixth grand slam title on Sunday.

Alcaraz defeated Novak Djokovic in the semi-finals on Friday. Sinner returned to the final by beating Felix Auger-Aliassime, and can become the first man since Roger Federer won five in a row between 2004 and 2008 to defend the US Open.

Everything you need to know about emergency alert drill sent to UK smartphones today

Britons are being urged to “keep their cool” ahead of a nationwide test of the emergency alert system today, which will see a message to mobile phones across the UK.

It will mark the second test of the national emergency alert system, after the first in 2023.

This is what you need to know.

Today, at around 3pm, mobile phones connected to 4G and 5G networks will vibrate and emit a siren sound for up to 10 seconds.

Mobile phone users will also receive a message making clear that the alert is a drill.

The government has used the system to issue real warnings five times, including in January during Storm Eowyn to warn people in Scotland and Northern Ireland about severe weather.

Approximately 3.5 million people across Wales and south-west England received an alert during Storm Darragh last December.

A 500kg unexploded Second World War bomb found in a Plymouth back garden triggered a warning to some 50,000 phones in February last year.

Messages can be targeted to relatively small areas to pinpoint those at risk.

Some 15,000 phones were alerted during flooding in Cumbria in May 2024, and 10,000 received a warning during flooding in Leicestershire in January this year.

The system is designed for use during the most likely emergencies to affect the UK and warnings would also be transmitted on television, radio and locally by knocking on doors.

Pat McFadden, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, said: “On Sunday, September 7, we will hold a UK-wide test of the Emergency Alerts system to ensure it works when we need it most.

“It is a vital tool for keeping the nation safe when lives are on the line – and every minute matters.

“During Storm Darragh and Storm Eowyn, as millions faced dangerous extreme weather, I saw first-hand how effective it was at getting life-saving advice to at-risk communities in an instant.

“We do not use the system often, but like the fire alarm in your home, it is always on standby should we need to act.”

Yes, you can opt out of emergency alerts by going into your phone settings.

For iPhone:

To turn off emergency alerts on an Android phone:

Vaccine sceptic doctor uses Reform conference speech to link king’s cancer to Covid vaccine

Reform UK has been criticised for allowing a vaccine sceptic cardiologist to address its conference, where he claimed Covid vaccines may have caused the King and Princess of Wales’s cancer.

Health secretary Wes Streeting said it was “irresponsible” of the party to allow Dr Assem Malhotra to speak from the stage in Birmingham, where he made a series of claims about the pharmaceutical industry, politicians and the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Saturday.

Dr Malhotra, who described himself as a friend of controversial US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, said hundreds of studies showed the harms of mRNA vaccines and that they were interfering with genes.

“It may be a risk factor for cancer,” Dr Malhotra told the event at a talk titled Make Britain Healthy Again at the NEC.

He said: “Many other doctors feel the same way”, adding: “It’s highly likely that the Covid vaccines have been a factor, a significant factor, in the cancer of members of the royal family.”

Mr Streeting said: “When we are seeing falling numbers of parents getting their children vaccinated, and a resurgence of disease we had previously eradicated, it is shockingly irresponsible for Nigel Farage to give a platform to these poisonous lies.

“Farage should apologise and sever all ties with this dangerous extremism.”

Medical experts also criticised Dr Malhotra. Brian Ferguson, professor of viral immunology at the University of Cambridge, said the speaker had indulged in “meaningless pseudoscience”.

The link between the Covid jab and cancer has previously been dismissed by academics and oncologists after claims it had led to “turbo cancers”.

Prof Ferguson said: “There is no credible evidence that these vaccines disrupt tumour suppressors or drive any kind of process – biochemical or otherwise – that results in cancer.

“It is particularly crass to try to link this pseudoscience to the unfortunate incidents of cancer in the royal family and is reminiscent of the ‘died suddenly’ trope which attempted and ultimately failed to link the death of any young person to their vaccination status.

“This kind of outlandish conspiracy theory only serves to undermine the credibility of those spreading it.”

During his 15-minute speech on the final day of Reform’s conference, Dr Malhotra also said taking the Covid vaccine was more likely to cause harm than the virus itself.

He said: “What does that mean? It is highly likely that not a single person should have been injected with this. Nobody is immune to medical misinformation.”

He went on to say the World Health Organisation had been “captured” by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and urged for it to be replaced.

A separate fringe event at the conference on Saturday, also featuring Dr Malhotra, on behalf of the organisation The Together Association, said the UK should “leave” the WHO.

He hit out at health minister Stephen Kinnock, who had criticised Dr Malhotra in advance of his speech, calling him an “anti-vax conspiracy theorist”.

On the stage, he asked the audience: “Have you heard anything anti-vax or conspiracy theory so far here?”

He continued: “What do we do about this? I think it’s time to just say no, to all drugs that are being proved, unless they are independently evaluated. Everybody just needs to say no.

“Over the last few years, it’s very clear that, with the evidence, the drug industry are responsible for probably killing millions of people.

“The Covid vaccine, if one in 800 is a figure of serious harm, and you translate across the world from the best quality of evidence, then it means the Covid mRNA jabs have likely killed or seriously harmed millions of people across the world.”

Prof Ferguson said: “There are repetitions of often-used anti-vax tropes that have been extensively disproven.”

He said it was untrue that the drug industry, or Covid jabs were responsible for killing millions.

“There are numerous, high-quality studies that prove the Covid vaccines, including mRNA vaccines, saved millions of lives,” he added.

“Evidence that mRNA vaccines have done more harm than good just does not exist and claims that they did do not stand up to scrutiny.”

Penny Ward, visiting professor in pharmaceutical medicine at King’s College London, said: “Dr Malhotra has provided his own interpretation of scientific evidence on Covid vaccines, but his view is not shared by the majority of medical practitioners.”

She said the WHO is staffed by clinical and scientific experts who “take very seriously their responsibilities to ensure the quality of information reviewed and advice given meets the highest ethical and scientific standards”.

“It is profoundly to be hoped that the Reform Party will do the same should they in future become responsible for the management of the nation’s health,” she added.

A Reform spokesperson said: “Dr Aseem Malhotra is a guest speaker with his own opinions who has an advisory role in the US government. Reform UK does not endorse what he said, but does believe in free speech.”

Jamie Borthwick axed from EastEnders after 19 years

Soap star Jamie Borthwick has been axed from EastEnders after 19 years on the BBC programme.

The 31-year-old actor portrayed Jay Brown, the foster son of Billy Mitchell, and was one of the soap’s longest-serving cast members, having arrived on Albert Square in December, 2006.

A BBC Studios spokesperson told reporters: “We can confirm that Jamie Borthwick will not be returning to EastEnders. We do not comment on individual matters.”

The Independent has contacted Borthwick’s representatives for comment.

Borthwick’s EastEnders exit comes after he was suspended by the BBC for using a disabled slur on the set of Strictly Come Dancing in June.

The actor had been set to restart filming for EastEnders this month following his suspension, according to the Mirror. However, Borthwick has now been dropped by the BBC altogether.

Borthwick , who competed in the 2024 edition of Strictly, was said to have made the offensive remark on a phone video while the Strictly cast were at the Blackpool Tower Ballroom last November.

The BBC said his language on the Strictly set was “entirely unacceptable and in no way reflects the values or standards we hold and expect at the BBC”.

In a statement at the time, Borthwick said: “I want to apologise sincerely and wholeheartedly for the words I used in the video showing my reaction to making it through Blackpool week on Strictly.”

Meanwhile, Warren Kirwan, media manager at disability equality charity Scope, said: “Attitudes and language like this are never acceptable.”

He added: “Mr Borthwick needs to reflect on what he said, educate himself and do better. We hope he takes the opportunity to get to know the reality of disabled people’s lives.”

Borthwick won the Strictly 2023 Christmas special with Nancy Xu, and won the best actor gong at the Inside Soap Awards in September of that year.

The actor rose to fame when he joined the cast of EastEnders as Jay Brown (then Mitchell) at just 12 years old. He won a British Soap Award for best dramatic performance from a young actor in 2008.

Borthwick made it through to Strictly’s Blackpool week when he returned to the series with his new professional partner Michelle Tsiakkas in 2024. The actor was voted off the BBC dance competition later in November, making him the ninth celebrity to leave the programme that year.

The funniest, strangest and best things from this year’s Fringe

The Edinburgh Fringe is a place where British eccentrics take centre stage and the country’s weirdest most wonderful talents get to explore the craziest outreaches of their creativity, whether it’s staging immersive theatre in a bathroom, or performing a show on a treadmill.

For all the silliness, though, there’s a seriousness to the whole thing: the Fringe is the breeding ground for Britain’s comedy trendsetters: The Mighty Boosh and The League of Gentlemen first found audiences here and the international phenomena that are Fleabag and Baby Reindeer got their first outings on the stages of the Fringe.

This year, as ever, the festival’s packed schedule sees Edinburgh veterans rubbing shoulders with dozens of emerging voices on the hunt for an audience, many of them willing to perform anywhere from the backroom of a pub to a book shop, or even a bathtub.

The summer of 2025 is looking like it’s going to be a particularly strong year for established heroes of the Fringe. Winner of the Edinburgh Comedy Award back in 2009, Tim Key returns to the Fringe with a new show Loganberry, likely to be informed, in part, by his recent experiences starring in the film The Ballad of Wallis Island and appearing as pigeon in Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17. Expect deadpan poems and much hilarity.

Following the success of her smash hit Channel 4 show The Change, about a menopausal woman rediscovering herself in the Forest of Dean, Fringe-favourite and 2013 winner Bridget Christie returns to Edinburgh with a work in progress at the Monkey Barrel. Also showing a work in progress is Ahir Shah, who has pedigree when it comes to licking a show into shape at the festival – when he did so in 2023, he won the main prize. Television presenter and podcaster Nish Kumar is back on his old stomping ground too with a new show Nish, Don’t Kill My Vibe at the Gordon Aikman Theatre.

For all the tried-and-tested performers who pretty might guarantee laughs, one of the real joys of the Fringe is to be found in taking a risk on an up-and-coming comedian in the hope you stumble across a star of the future.

In some cases that might mean checking out a Fringe first-timer like Toussaint Douglass, who makes his Edinburgh debut with his hotly-tipped show Accessible Pigeon Material, which promises to be joyfully absurd and very pigeon-heavy in terms of content. Or popping in to see if promising young talents can pull off that tricky second album: having scooped a Best Newcomer gong at last year’s Fringe, Joe Kent-Walters is reprising his gloriously demonic working men’s club owner, Frankie Monroe, at the Monkey Barrel Comedy venue (Cabaret Voltaire).

Also keen to build on a promising start will be Leila Navabi, a television writer from South Wales, whose 2023 musical comedy show Composition included a song about having her ears pierced in Claire’s Accessories. This year, she’s back with Relay, which blends jokes and songs to explore her attempts to make a baby with her girlfriend and a sperm donor.

Whether they’re promising young tyros or established names, for many comedians the creative freedom and outright silliness of the Fringe has them coming back time and time again. Take, for example, Ivo Graham whose show this year is called Orange Crush and is described by the man himself as “a show about hats, haters and hometown heroes, from a man who promised everyone he loved that he wouldn’t do Edinburgh in 2025, but then came back anyway, because he simply had to do this show.”

If you are planning to join Ivo in Edinburgh to soak up the comedy chaos in person, don’t forget provisions. The average Fringe day involves walking 15,000 steps, climbing 43 hills and sitting through at least one show in a sauna-like attic with no ventilation. So, pack accordingly: a bottle of water, a sturdy fan and a packet of Maynards Bassetts Wine Gums or Jelly Babies to keep your blood sugar and national pride intact. Nothing says “I’m here for the arts” quite like chuckling through a late-night experimental mime while chewing on a Jelly Baby’s head.

Now you’re in the know, don’t forget to set the juice loose with Maynards Bassetts – grab a bag today!

The agonising task of identifying Ukraine’s thousands of war dead

Ukrainians in forensics suits unloading thousands of bodies of their fallen countrymen from refrigerated vehicles makes for a depressing spectacle.

But in the three and a half year long war between Russia and Ukraine, the repatriation of the dead might be one of the rare, all-too-brief moments of co-operation between the two warring countries.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, has a caseload of 154,200 people missing from both sides of the frontline as of August, whose fate or whereabouts remain unknown, It is expected it will take decades for families to receive answers about their loved ones.

According to the ICRC there have been over 50 incidents of mass repatriation throughout the conflict to date. On average, the group receives 1,000 bodies a month, with workers given the grim task of trying to identify them so their families can finally be given peace.

A deal brokered in Istanbul between the two warring sides during the summer – one of the few positive outcomes of the US-organised peace talks to date – saw Moscow return significantly more – some 6,000. This repatriation, which took place in June, was so large that they had to receive the bodies by trains.

Niamh Smith, a forensic specialist working in Ukraine for the ICRC, said the exchanges of fallen soldiers are usually silent, respectful affairs.

“Nobody is standing around chit chatting,” says Ms Smith, who is usually in the truck during the transfer. “It’s almost like a ballet in that everybody is so well tuned and well versed in their role.

“It goes very smoothly and that could not happen without the full cooperation of both sides,” she says. “It’s a very human experience. Nobody can deal with that and not come away feeling… affected.”

In Odessa, where Ms Smith is based, the ICRC helped to assist in developing a field mortuary after they ran out of storage for bodies. Train carriages have been adapted and refrigerated in order to accommodate the large number of bodies they’re receiving.

Each body received by a mortuary is assigned a unique 17-digit reference number encoding the date of arrival and the institution that took them.

The bodies are then examined by teams made up of forensic specialists and police investigators, who take notes and photographs, looking out for any marks, scars or tattoos, Ms Smith explained.

Clothing is removed, logged and photographed as part of the process before sampling is done for DNA testing and the bodies are stored awaiting comparison and identification.

Every single instant of identification has its own timeline, with some taking months. The database of family samples plays a vital role in the process as it offers a point of comparison.

Under the Geneva Convention, both sides are obliged to search for and recover the remains of the fallen on the battlefield and mark places where they might have been kept or buried. But when it comes to returning human remains, this comes down to requests that both sides must agree to.

One of the key takeaways for Ms Smith is “how respectful everybody is and how it is a completely joint effort. You have got parties from Russia, parties from Ukraine, all working simultaneously to make this transfer happen.”

Having taken part in 11 repatriations, says these exchanges make her feel hopeful despite the tragic circumstances.

“You see the humanity that everybody is taking care of these bodies and they’re handled very respectfully,” she said. “That is my biggest takeaway, the human aspect of everybody working together to achieve getting these people home to their families. That’s the end goal.”

Ms Smith’s 31 years as a forensics specialist has seen her work for the Metropolitan Police and Interpol, as well as in South Sudan, the Middle East and even working on mass graves in Libya.

After moving to Ukraine in February 2024, this is the first time she has worked in an active conflict zone where the violence is ongoing. Her first ever repatriation, which took place last summer, was stayed with her.

As the convoy of military vehicles, ICRC trucks and refrigerated lorries travelled through four separate Ukrainian villages on the way back from a body exchange, she saw people kneeling on the side of the roads with Ukrainian flags on show.

“They were openly weeping and throwing flowers under the trucks as they go past to pay respects to the dead who are coming home,” she says.

“They don’t know who these individuals are, they don’t individually know who’s in the trucks, but they just know that they’re the sons or the brothers or the husbands of somebody and they’re coming back having lost their lives.”

As well as accompanying the repatriations, Ms Smith helps support Ukraine’s medical legal system to recover and identify combatants killed in the conflict as the number of missing people who may have been killed in action continues to rise.

“The numbers that they’ve been dealing with is huge, but of course they’re overwhelmed and so we try and support that,” she says. “Nowhere is equipped for three and a half years of consistent bodies in high numbers.”

Pat Griffiths, ICRC Spokesperson in Ukraine adds: “As of August 2025, the ICRC has a caseload of 154,200 people from both sides of the frontline whose fate or whereabouts is unknown. Behind each of those cases is a family seeking answers.

“Many have been waiting for months, if not years, for news. Some families may eventually receive confirmation that their loved one is being held as a prisoner of war. Others may eventually receive the worst news possible: confirmation that their loved one has been killed.

“But that wait can take years, and some may never receive an answer at all. And that’s why the work of forensic teams is so important. Working to identify the human remains that have been recovered or repatriated is painstaking. It’s hard work, it’s slow, and it’s expensive.

“The fact that the remains of so many of those who have been killed still need to be recovered or repatriated before the work to identify them can begin only extends the time horizon.

“Our experience in conflicts around the world tells us that the work to identify all those who are unaccounted for could be measured in decades, not just years.

“Every unidentified person is a missing person. Somebody somewhere is waiting and hoping to get news about that person and that’s why our role within the support of the identification is so important.”

The London-born teen becoming Britain’s first millennial saint

Saint-making in the Catholic Church – or canonisation as it is called – is traditionally a drawn-out, opaque process with the successful candidates who have emerged from it in recent times usually worthy but unsurprising long-dead clerics and nuns. That is why Carlo Acutis joining their heavenly ranks has caught the attention of so many.

London-born, raised in Italy, this tech-savvy, deeply devout teenager tragically died aged just 15 from leukaemia in 2006. Pope Francis’s decision in 2024 to approve his canonisation saw him labelled “the first millennial saint”.

As with many of the late Pope’s bold, breaking-with-precedent decisions, this one appeared to be based, in part at least, on a realisation that the Church feels alien and irrelevant to many young people because of its outdated stance on sex before marriage, women’s equality and same-sex relationships.

Holding up Acutis as a role model – which is part of their job description – is therefore showing a sceptical young audience that Catholicism isn’t only for the old and the conservative. If in doubt of the symbolic power of Carlos Acutis, take a look at the stained-glass window featuring him that was installed in 2022 in St Aldhelm’s Catholic Church in Malmesbury.

Unlike the medieval bishop in vestments and carrying a crozier in the window next door, he is depicted dressed in standard 2006 teenager garb, with a digital watch and a phone strapped to his rucksack. In other words: very ordinary, very now, yet simultaneously the Church has decided through its canonisation process someone extraordinary by dint of his religious devotion and his “heroic virtue” in living his short life as “a servant of God”.

These are the key qualities for any saint in Catholicism’s famously lengthy rulebook. Francis had planned to preside at the canonisation ceremony last month (the latest of 900 saints he had made during his reign, 813 of whom came from the 15th century), but it was postponed as the seriousness of the health problems that led to his death became apparent.

Acutis will be canonised today by Leo XIV in a ceremony at the Vatican. His link to the new pope was hailed by a popular American Catholic priest podcaster, David Michael Moses, who upped the ante by telling his 330,000 YouTube followers that Leo has a special connection with the teenager.

The bond between the two rests, Moses enthuses, on the fact young Carlo did his secondary education at the Leo XIII Institute in Milan. “What are the chances,” he says in his folksy way, “that the school he’s attending when he dies was named after Pope Leo XIII, the predecessor of our new Pope Leo XIV, the pope that Leo XIV says inspired him to choose the name? How cool is that?”

And there is more. “If that wasn’t enough, listen to this quote from Carlo Acutis. ‘I offer all the suffering I will have to suffer for the lord, for the pope, and for the Church.’”

It might not pass muster as a watertight argument in a court of law, but in the Vatican, the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, which has been in charge of saint-making for centuries, assesses evidence in a very different way.

Acutis, the boy now also referred to as “God’s Influencer”, was born in 1991 in west London and baptised in Our Lady of Dolours parish in Chelsea. His Italian mother Antonia and half-Italian, half-English father Andrea moved to Milan six months later and raised their only child there. Early on, his banker parents say, he showed a particular empathy and social conscience, saving up his pocket money to hand over to good causes that helped the poor, or standing up for those bullied at his school.

But it was the always present religious dimension in him that was so unusual in an age where church attendance, especially among the young in Italy, is in steep decline. When on family holidays at Centola in southern Italy, little Carlo would wander over as a child and join the group of old women who gathered each day to say the rosary on the beach. And it was Carlo who insisted on the family going to church each Sunday. Before that, his parents had been pretty much lapsed from the religion of their own upbringing.

As a teen, he would cook food and deliver it to those who were homeless and on the streets of Milan. He became a catechist aged 12 in his local parish of Santa Maria Segreta, preparing younger children for their first communion. Next, the skills he mastered early with digital and computer technology saw him producing the parish newsletter and compiling and updating a public website that collected all reported miracles around the world attributed to the Virgin Mary and the Eucharist.

It is all the more remarkable that he did all this while limiting himself to one hour a day on screens, his mother later stressed. When diagnosed with incurable leukaemia in 2006, he told her, “I die happy because I didn’t spend any minutes of my life on things God doesn’t love.”

For some parents, a child self-limiting to an hour of screen time per day would count as a miracle in itself, but the Vatican has a higher bar. To be declared a saint, there has to be evidence presented that praying to the candidate had precipitated two separate miraculous events.

In 2020, the Vatican department in charge of canonisation published evidence that prayers directed to God via Carlo Acutis had cured a Brazilian youngster, Mattheus Vianna, from a rare disease. Pope Francis accepted these findings, reached after interviewing around 500 people, including medical experts who, it was said, could come up with no other plausible explanation.

Then, in 2024, another report accepted that prayers made to Acutis had spared the life of a young woman in Florence who had had a bleed on her brain that doctors had said would kill her. There will, of course, be sceptics who question the science that leads to these conclusions, including many Catholics, who struggle to make sense of the randomness of these divine interventions when so many other tragedies occur each and every day.

Others, too, point to the cost of the Vatican process of discernment, which has to be met by those putting forward the candidate. Pope Francis did move – in line with his wider embrace of what he referred to as “a poor Church, for the poor” – to cut these charges, but they remain considerable. It may explain why usually only religious orders can afford to immortalise their brethren or sisters. Or the occasional wealthy family.

Antonia Salzano, Carlo’s mother, would add another miracle to the list. She was in her forties when her son died, and assumed she would never have another child. One night, he appeared to her in a dream and told her she would have twins. And, at 44, she did.

Quite how the Vatican could verify that as true is hard to imagine, but getting too wrapped up in the process risks missing the point. The Church gets many things wrong about human beings, but it also gets a lot right, including that we do respond well to role models being held up in front of us to emulate. It was doing it long before the advent of social media.

Moreover, there is an argument that connects the cult that has grown so quickly in recent years around Carlo Acutis with those others of his generation who, a recent survey by the Bible Society reported, are returning to the pews in surprising numbers. Perhaps the Church isn’t quite so old-fashioned and otherworldly as we like to think.

Peter Stanford is a former editor of the ‘Catholic Herald’. His book ‘Gaudi: God’s Architect’ will be published next spring by Hodder