Have you noticed the subtle shift in Keir Starmer’s demeanour? He seems genuinely at ease in himself, more relaxed, more summery, more… commanding. It could just be that there’s a World Cup on – or, more likely, that he’s decided to make the most of what many people believe are his final days in office.
“The prime minister is not demob happy,” says John Rentoul, “but he is demob defiant.” With the Makerfield by-election just a week away, our chief political correspondent believes Starmer will likely be out of No 10 within a month. John Healey’s unexpected resignation over defence spending has only moved the Doomsday Clock that bit closer to midnight.
Sonia Sodha insists we will miss Starmer – and his oddly “wooden and stilted” delivery, “as though he’s reading a scripted autocue to camera” – when he’s gone.
And it’s not just in Downing Street that there’s a sense of an ending. This week, it’s been even more loop-di-loop than usual in the White House. It was Sean O’Grady who spotted that Donald Trump is now taking “some extraordinarily long ‘blinks’ during public events”, when he’s not “rage-posting about the Pope” or inventing “a new kind of ceasefire, one where combatants are apparently permitted to continue firing, just in a more moderate manner”.
With Trump approaching his 80th birthday next week, he is “fading from public view… sliding into a twilight world”. Which is more than can be said for his best frenemy over in the Kremlin. Bill Browder, number-one Putin-watcher since his deportation from Russia for exposing rampant corruption and the theft of state assets, wrote this week in The Independent how he has never known the warmongering autocrat to look so frightened – “and a frightened Putin is a far more dangerous creature than a confident one”. He believes Putin is “ready to crack”.
Meanwhile, Robert Fox noted how he is cutting a decidedly odd figure in public – “hoarse of voice, and puffy of cheek” at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russia’s answer to the regular gathering of world economic bigwigs at Davos. His boasts about the Ukraine war soon being won also seemed “wide of the mark, too – quite wild in fact”. But, as the old saying now goes, as one door closes, another gets blasted from its hinges in a wave of racially motivated mob violence sparked by a knife attack.
In Belfast this week, cars and homes have been set alight, police officers injured and water cannon deployed – and, for those who remember the Troubles, not for the first time. For Mary Dejevsky, the violent public response has put the Irish border – the “largely unpoliced line between the republic and Northern Ireland” – back under the spotlight for the first time since Brexit. It has also “exposed glaring gaps in our national security”. For Belfast novelist Michael Magee, when the “barricades were set up, roads blocked, bins burned” and the “swirls of smoke drifted and faded, cloaking homes in a fine grey mist”, it was almost Proustian. “I wish I could say that this is not the Belfast I grew up in, but loyalist mobs rampaging through the city is nothing new.”
Until next week.
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