Martin Ivens

Not so long ago “Centrist Dad” ruled the roost in Britain. Middle-class, middle-aged men who favor pragmatic social-democratic politics used to corner the market in public-service appointments and outward-facing corporate jobs. Post-Brexit, however, their “common-sense” views were no longer welcome. Their natural foes, right-wing populists and leftist social-justice warriors, came to the fore, disturbing the placid order of things.

US President Donald Trump has declared on his social-media website that Britain should “go get your own oil” from the Persian Gulf and sneers, “you’ll have to start learning to fight for yourself, the USA won’t be able to help you anymore.” His defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, mocks “the big bad Royal Navy” too. To judge by this warmup, the timing of King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s visit to Washington next month is unpropitious.

A good novelist, as Graham Greene put it, must have “a splinter of ice” in their heart. That’s true of successful and durable world leaders, too.

There are precedents for playing this gilt-edged diplomatic card with past monarchs doing their bit - even if it meant hiding the silver.

During his recent trip to the Persian Gulf, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer predicted that the Iran war would define his time in office, as much as the 2007/8 global financial crisis had for Gordon Brown and the pandemic for Boris Johnson. Unless Starmer puts on a convincing performance in the House of Commons on Monday and in days to come, his time in office may be defined instead by his worst self-inflicted error: the disastrous appointment of Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to the US.

A true leader should ensure his reputation is greater than his strength, to paraphrase the 16th century strategy-wrangler Niccolo Machiavelli. By sacking all those who failed to stop him making his disastrous appointment of Peter Mandelson as Washington ambassador, Keir Starmer has squandered that asset. His credentials as a straight-dealing technocrat were his A-game. Having sacrificed that, the prime minister has little to commend him to his Labour MPs — or the rest of us.

If Britain’s terrorism watchdog, Jonathan Hall, is right that antisemitism is “the biggest national emergency since Covid,” then the government has been slow to acknowledge the threat. Following Wednesday’s knife attack on two Jewish men in London’s Golders Green, Prime Minister Keir Starmer asked the country to “open its eyes to Jewish pain.” Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis rightly responded that “words of condemnation are no longer sufficient.”

The battle last week between the cheeky life-chancer Nigel Farage and the sober former state prosecutor Keir Starmer was never going to be much of a contest.

When a prime minister has their back against the wall and runs out of positive arguments for their survival, they have one last recourse: Project Fear and the threat that the price of getting rid of them will be so stratospherically high that no one but a wrecker would consider it.

The best case for Andy Burnham to replace Keir Starmer as leader of the Labour party and therefore UK prime minister is made by the old Tory enemy. In the House of Commons on Wednesday, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch fumed that Starmer’s rebellious MPs didn’t object to his policies: “They just want a better salesman.”