Starmer’s first big test

During the election campaign, Keir Starmer confessed to taking Friday nights off. ‘I’ve been doing this for years – I will not do a work-related thing after six o’clock, pretty well come what may,’ he told a radio host. But one month into his premiership, and the Prime Minister is struggling even to take his pre-planned summer holiday.

Claims that Labour’s decisive victory would make the UK a pocket of stability in a polarised world now look hubristic. Starmer leads a country that others such as Australia and Malaysia are warning their citizens not to travel to. Meanwhile he is engulfed in a very public Twitter spat with tech billionaire Elon Musk. As if in response to No. 10’s concerns about the role of social media in fuelling the disorder, Musk has shared some of the most incendiary videos to his 193 million followers and declared civil war in the UK to be ‘inevitable’.