Giorgia Meloni is suffering from a “splitting political headache”, said Hannah Roberts on Politico (Brussels). Italy’s first female PM has enjoyed remarkable success since her election in October 2022. She has kept her Brothers of Italy party dominant in the polls; she has held together her coalition formed with two other right-wing parties – Lega (the League) led by Matteo Salvini, and Forza Italia (the party created by Silvio Berlusconi). Come September, she will be Italy’s longest-serving post-war leader. And she’s achieved all this by skilfully “pushing Italy’s post-fascist Right towards the political mainstream”.

This month, though, a figure has emerged who threatens to undo it all and drag the Right back the other way. Roberto Vannacci, a highly decorated retired general, formally launched a new hard-right, fiercely anti-immigrant party, National Future, in Rome last week.

It is rapidly gaining support: it already has 100,000 registered members; boasts eight MPs after a string of defections from the League and Forza Italia; and is polling at over 5%. Meloni’s headache is whether to keep him at arm’s length or bring him into her political orbit. So far she’s picked the first option, but if Vannacci’s popularity keeps rising in the run-up to next year’s general election, she may have to reconsider.

‘Incandescent’ and ‘disturbing’

Since the fall of Mussolini, Italy has produced a long line of populists, said Antonio Preiti on Linkiesta (Milan). But none has been “more incandescent, more aggressive, more disturbing” than Vannacci, nicknamed “Il Generale” by his legion of fans and hailed as a modern-day Julius Caesar by his colleagues.

The Afghanistan and Iraq War veteran’s controversial demand for “remigration” – the forced deportation of immigrants to their countries of origin – should come as no surprise. This is the man, after all, who made a name for himself in 2023 with his outlandish book “The World Upside Down”, in which he hit out at the “dictatorship of minorities”; claimed that black immigrants could never be Italian; and derided gay people as “not normal”.

That made him hugely popular, and prompted Salvini, the deputy PM, to ask him to join his Lega party to help revive its fortunes. But that gamble “backfired in a spectacular fashion”, said Nick Squires in The Daily Telegraph. Elected as an MEP for the League in 2024, he proved not a “pliant acolyte” but a thorn in its side. His new party is now wooing Salvini’s supporters.

‘Extremist passions’

The old soldier may have learnt to “move shrewdly” in politics, said Stefano Folli in La Repubblica (Rome), and he sure knows how to grab people’s attention. But can he keep up the momentum? Doubtful, said Lisa Di Giuseppe in Domani (Rome). He’s been conspicuously short on economic and foreign policy ideas, for a start. At his party’s inaugural congress this month, the 57-year-old gave little indication of strategy “beyond resentment, revenge and remigration”.

Vannacci is a man known for “extremist passions masquerading as common sense”, said David Allegranti in Quotidiano Nazionale (Bologna). Such policies as he has are designed to lure disgruntled right-wingers: plans to build more jails and to pay mothers to stay at home to free up jobs that “men can’t find”. His pitch at the conference was abundantly clear. “We represent the rejects and the scum, and we are proud of it,” he told party delegates.

Meloni must “behave like a statesman”, erect a “cordon sanitaire” around National Future, and ostracise this “latest adventurer” in Italian politics, said Mario Lavia on Linkiesta. It may result in her losing office to the centre-left, but for the good of the nation she needs to do it. Vannacci is no Mussolini, it’s true, but given half a chance he’ll corrode democracy with his pro-Russia and anti-EU rhetoric.

But would that isolation strategy actually work, asked Roberto Gressi in Corriere della Sera (Rome). It certainly hasn’t in the case of the National Rally in France or the AfD in Germany, both now trending in the polls. Sad to say there’s no easy way to slay the populist far-right crocodile.

Iran has become a “lose-lose issue” for Donald Trump, which is alienating his entire political base, said Zeeshan Aleem on MS Now. When he attacked Iran, he infuriated the isolationist wing of his coalition, who believed his promise that he’d start “no new wars”. Now, his scramble to end the conflict “is alienating the hawkish sector of his party”, who believe it amounts to a humiliating surrender.

One Republican senator described the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Trump last week as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades”. Texas senator Ted Cruz said Trump must be getting “very poor advice”. Critics are particularly outraged by the potential creation of a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran. Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen called the provision a “disaster”, likening it to offering the “Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany while the Nazis were still in power”.

Vance under fire

Furious as they are, many Republican hawks are still reluctant to criticise Trump directly, said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. So they’re turning their fire instead on the vice-president, J.D. Vance. “Trump effectively won the war and at the 11th hour Vance is negotiating his way to a loss,” raged one unnamed congressman to a Washington correspondent.

The president has done nothing to discourage such talk. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” he said, half-jokingly, of the peace deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.” The irony, said Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post, is that Vance opposed starting this war. Now it has fallen to him to sell the peace deal and serve as the fall guy when it goes sour. “You almost have to feel sorry for Vance. Almost.”

Face of peace

“Playing the part of Trump’s surrender monkey” will hurt Vance’s image in the short term, said Jonathan V. Last on The Bulwark, but few Republican voters are likely to remember any of this stuff in two years’ time if petrol prices are back to normal and Iran hasn’t tested a nuclear device. Vance will just be the guy who helped bring an unpopular war to an end.

He has certainly been happy to serve as the face of this peace agreement, said Adam Cancryn on CNN. He asked to play a leading role in the talks, rather than being pushed into it. Vance may get the blame if the deal blows up, but he has no doubt concluded that if the two sides return to an intractable conflict, his hopes of becoming president are probably scuppered in any case.

Reports of President Donald Trump’s total capture of the Republican Party may be premature. Faced with plummeting popularity and whack-a-mole crises, the president has clashed with some of the most powerful members of his own coalition: Senate Republicans.

Whether this conservative revolt becomes a logjam for the White House remains to be seen. As Republicans face midterm headwinds to keep their congressional majorities, is the nascent push for senatorial independence for real, or will Republicans once more adopt the MAGA party line?

‘Relationship appears to be fraying’

Trump has “enjoyed unbending loyalty” from GOP lawmakers for years, said NPR. But the “strength of that relationship appears to be fraying,” particularly as some “departing members feel more uninhibited to push back” and others begin to imagine a post-Trump Washington.

Senators whom Trump had “written off, alienated or even helped defeat” are now opting to support “Senate traditions over his political demands,” said Axios. And the president’s decision this week to cancel the planned signing of bipartisan housing legislation “further inflamed weeks of tumult” that have marked an “increasingly bitter relationship between” him and high-profile Republican senators, said The New York Times. While “lawmakers from both parties were shocked by the president’s decision,” many of them saw Trump’s canceled signing as an effort to “undermine the efforts of his own party to protect its congressional majorities” before the midterms.

Trump’s push for harsh voting restrictions, which he demanded as a prerequisite before signing the housing bill, is “colliding with a newly defiant Republican Senate” and sets up a “multifront battle” ahead of the midterms, said The Wall Street Journal. GOP lawmakers “have been deferential to the president to a point,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R - Texas), to the outlet. But that deference “doesn’t seem to have done any good.” Simply having endorsed Trump’s point of view in the past “doesn’t mean he’s going to support you,” added Cornyn, whose own reelection bid was scuttled by a Trump-backed challenger.

During a closed-door lunch on Wednesday, which Republican senators hoped would “clear the air” between them and Trump, the president instead “vented his frustrations with the senators for more than an hour, leaving them no closer to detente,” said Politico. Trump “said something negative about me,” in an attempt to “bully me from asking a question that I think the American people need to know,” said outgoing Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy to the outlet, after reports of an intense argument between him and the president during the meeting. “I’m not going to be bullied.”

Sacrificing principles at the ‘altar of Trump’

Senate Republicans that same day “proved yet again that their spines are made of pudding,” said The New Republic, after both Cassidy and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul bowed to White House pressure and flipped previous votes to kill a resolution limiting Trump’s Iran war powers. The waffling shows conservative lawmakers who “claim to have principles” will “gladly sacrifice them at the altar of Trump.”

It is unclear whether the vote will be “enough to appease Trump,” said The Associated Press. But blocking efforts to restrict the president’s war powers “was a clear signal” to Trump from senators who “still want to placate him.”

What happened

The Supreme Court, in a pair of 6-3 decisions written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, ruled Thursday that President Donald Trump has judicially unreviewable power to end temporary humanitarian protections for more than a million legal immigrants and can bar migrants from crossing into the U.S. from Mexico to request asylum. “Taken together,” the “two rulings expand Trump’s authority to implement his crackdown on immigration,” The Wall Street Journal said.

Who said what

The first decision cleared the way for Trump to end Temporary Protected Status for about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, many of whom “have lived and worked in the United States for decades and have American children,” The Associated Press said. The ruling is “expected to reverberate beyond those two communities, affecting approximately 1.3 million immigrants from 17 countries” who also hold TPS status, The Washington Post said.

Alito said the relevant 1990 law barred the courts from reviewing an administration’s decisions to revoke TPS, and he dismissed arguments that Trump’s many racially derogatory statements illegally tainted the decision. “Notably, Alito did not say what Trump’s statements were,” CNN said, an “omission liberal Justice Elena Kagan was quick to point out in her dissent.” Trump’s comments, including that Haitians eat dogs and cats, come from a “shithole” country and “probably have AIDS,” are “so repellent and racially inflected,” she wrote, “that the majority declines to put them in print.”

What next?

The justices have “one other signature Trump policy on immigration” to rule on this term, the Journal said: his “bid to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants.” That’s likely to come down next week.

A “dark money lobbying network” bankrolled by a major donor to Reform UK has been associated with “open advocates of far-right remigration”, said Byline Times.

Aerospace tycoon Richard Smith “owns 55 Tufton Street, the Westminster townhouse that houses a cluster of opaquely funded right-wing lobby groups”. One of these, the New Culture Forum, has platformed speakers who call for “mass deportations of ethnic minority British citizens”.

“A lot of the people who have come here legally, especially over the last 30 years, and those who have been born here, they don’t belong here,” Restore Britain campaign director Charlie Downes told the forum’s podcast, “Deprogrammed”, in August 2025.

As seen in the Makerfield by-election, Reform UK is being challenged on its right by Restore, which has advocated for “reverse mass migration”. Once a fringe, far-right concept, remigration is gaining traction not only in Britain but across the world.

What is remigration?

In general terms, it describes the process of an immigrant voluntarily returning to their country of origin, said Al Jazeera. However, in a far-right context, remigration has been appropriated as a “method of ethnic cleansing”, where “all non-white people are forcibly removed from traditionally white countries”.

The idea can be traced back to Nazi Germany of the 1930s, but it was revived by French novelist Renaud Camus’ “widely debunked” 2011 book “Le Grand Remplacement”, which advocated the Great Replacement theory.

Fifteen years later, the meaning of remigration can be “elusive”, said The Economist. The term is now “less a set of policies and more a catch-all term for a vision of Europe with its ethnic and cultural identity rid of what they call ‘Afro-Arab replacement migration’”. Proponents hope to capitalise on voters who feel “uneasy at the rapid scale of demographic change they witness around them”.

Is it becoming mainstream?

Social media is both driving and reflecting the rise in messaging around remigration policies. The idea gained “mainstream visibility” last year, said the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate. During 2025, there were 952,000 mentions of the term by 303,000 unique authors on social media – more than double the year before.

Support is also becoming more visible beyond online forums. In May, more than 500 activists and influencers congregated in Portugal for Remigration Summit 2026. “VIP guests” included former US Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino and Jared Taylor, editor of white supremacist magazine American Renaissance, said Politico.

“Several thousand” anti-immigration protesters took to the streets of Rome in mid-June in support of a citizens’ initiative bill named “Remigration and Reconquest”, said Deutsche Welle. The bill, which gathered the 50,000 signatures required for discussion in parliament, includes proposals to offer foreigners financial incentives to agree to what it calls voluntary repatriation, while incentivising Italian families to have more children.

Who is pushing for it?

Many European parties have outlined their support for remigration in their election manifestos, said the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate. These include the Austrian Freedom Party, Alternative for Germany, and Dutch parties Forum for Democracy and Conservative Liberals.

Others who have expressed interest in remigration include Flemish Interest in Belgium, Lega in Italy, Vox in Spain, Alternative for Sweden, the Finns Party in Finland, and Reconquête (Reconquest) in France.

But it has also found favour in the Trump administration. In November, the official X account for the Department of Homeland Security posted that “the stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear: Remigration now”.

Does it have support in the UK?

“Millions will have to go,” said Rupert Lowe at the official launch of Restore Britain in February. The party’s manifesto promises that a legally resident foreign national in the UK who is “unable to speak English, lives in social housing, claims benefits, refuses to work, fails to integrate, commits crime or actively hates our way of life” would be deported under a Restore government.

But whether the concept has widespread appeal with the electorate is more doubtful. A YouGov poll in August last year found that 45% of Britons approved of “an immigration scenario whereby no more new migrants were admitted, and large numbers of recent migrants were required to leave”.

However, questioned on the specifics, respondents varied wildly; while 90% of those in favour supported the deportation of asylum seekers coming via small boat crossings, only 26% supported the removal of skilled migrant workers and even fewer supported expelling healthcare workers or foreign nationals who had taken British citizenship.

What happened

The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday that Michigan was not obligated to turn over confidential voter information to the Trump administration, siding with lower court judges in Michigan and eight other states where similar requests were blocked. In Boston, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper also permanently barred President Donald Trump from implementing most of an executive order seeking to overhaul how states run elections. The Constitution “does not grant the president any specific powers over elections,” she wrote in her ruling.

Who said what

Wednesday’s appellate decision was the “biggest setback yet” in the Trump administration’s effort to create its own nationwide voter roll, CNN said. That endeavor is part of a so-far unsuccessful “administration-wide push” by “Trump and his allies to find evidence of voter fraud,” The New York Times said. But they’ve run into “significant headwinds — and stern rebukes” — from “judges appointed by presidents of both parties,” including five Trump appointees.

What next?

A second election-related executive order Trump issued to create a national voter list and limit mail ballot “also faces multiple legal challenges,” The Associated Press said. Postmaster General David Steiner told a Senate panel on Wednesday that under a proposed Trump-ordered rule, the U.S. Postal Service would not deliver mail-in ballots to states that declined to turn over private voter data.

What happened

President Donald Trump on Wednesday abruptly scrapped a signing ceremony for a newly passed bipartisan housing bill, citing the Senate’s failure to clear the “desperately needed” SAVE America Act voting overhaul. His announcement on social media “caught lawmakers and some staff by surprise,” said The Washington Post. Republican leaders were “touting the housing bill at a news conference” and a flag-festooned stage was ready for him in the Capitol. Trump later fumed about the stalled voting bill during a contentious lunch with Senate Republicans.

Who said what

Trump was supposed to “spike the football,” but “instead, he fumbled,” Politico said. The signing ceremony “would have been a boon to Republicans desperate for campaign trail affordability wins,” and even “his own staff spent the morning taking a very public victory lap.” Trump is fixated on the voting bill, but rarely has one of his “late curveballs seemed as ill-advised,” said CNN.

It “makes no sense” that Trump would hold the housing bill “hostage” for legislation that “will never pass in this Congress,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters. But “there is a huge group of people who really appreciate what the president’s doing right now, and it’s the Democrat Party.”

What next?

Trump “does not need to sign” the housing bill, which will “become law” 10 days after he officially receives it unless he issues a veto, Politico said. But such low-key enactment would “deny Republicans a chance to crow at a signing ceremony.”

Andy Burnham may be on course to take over as prime minister in less than a month, but he “could wreck his administration before it begins with a poor choice of chancellor”, said The Times. If Labour hopes to drastically improve the economy, and curb borrowing and higher spending, it “must change course”. And “that criterion should immediately disqualify” the long-presumed frontrunner for the job, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.

The prospect of Miliband in the Treasury is already angering the unions and spooking the financial markets, so attention is turning to former health secretary Wes Streeting. He surprised many in Westminster by backing Burnham this week, sparking rumours that he’s struck a deal in exchange for not contesting the leadership.

‘Divisive choices’

There are “good reasons” why Streeting “would be a shrewd choice”, said Gordon Rayner in The Telegraph. Unlike Miliband, Streeting is “part of Labour’s future rather than its past, and is someone whom the City feels it could do business with”. He is also “without doubt one of Labour’s best communicators” and has the skills to construct a Budget telling the story of “how Labour intends to improve lives”. He would prepare the country for what’s to come, rather than “pulling economic policies out of thin air” or conjuring up “supposed budgetary black holes to justify them”.

Both Streeting and Miliband “would, in their own ways, be divisive choices”, said The Independent. Streeting is “deeply distrusted by the left of the party” while Miliband’s “hard line on net zero policies have made him a controversial figure”. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood could “emerge as the compromise candidate”, with the added benefit of providing the new PM with an opportunity to “get her out of the Home Office so he could tweak the immigration policy”.

‘Bulging in-tray’

Whoever enters No. 11 “will have a bulging in-tray”, said City A.M. A new chancellor will have to battle “calls for greater spending on defence”, as well as “manage expectations” on easing employment taxes. The triple lock on pensions is also high on the agenda, while calls for new wealth taxes “risk infuriating investors”. On top of that are potential nationalisation plans for “major utility firms” like Thames Water, and, of course, the “continuing fallout” from the Iran war.

There will soon be a changing of the guard in the United Kingdom, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced his resignation. But his likely replacement, Makerfield MP Andy Burnham, probably won’t have an easier time than Starmer did courting President Donald Trump. Burnham, a popular figure in the U.K.’s center-left Labour Party, has previously chided Trump and his administration. If he becomes prime minister, it could mark a turning point for American-British relations.

What did the commentators say?

When it comes to the White House’s view on Burnham, there has been no “immediate condemnation from the current administration,” said The Times. But “even if Burnham does benefit from a grace period with the president, his interventions on American politics are unlikely to endear him to Trump for long.” Similarly, the relationship between Starmer and Trump devolved soon after Starmer became prime minister.

Burnham has widely criticized Trump and right-wing U.S. politics. After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol, he “was scathing about British politicians who held their tongue to appease Trump,” said The Times. “Any U.K. politician who gave Trump the time of day should be ashamed right now,” Burnham said on X at the time. To “combat the rise” of the U.K.’s far-right Reform U.K. party, a Burnham premiership “may be tempted to more openly criticize Trump” with the “knowledge that the U.S. president is reviled by much of the British electorate,” said The Times.

Burnham will also have to reckon with a U.S. president who has “undermined British confidence by deriding British military sacrifices in Afghanistan,” said the Washington Examiner. Trump’s leaking of the announcement that Starmer “would resign and his simultaneously classless (if broadly accurate) criticism of Starmer’s policies further degrades U.S.-U.K. trust.” Burnham, or whoever the next prime minister is, must “be cautious,” as the U.K. is “heavily reliant on the intelligence, military and economic benefits provided by its American alliance.”

Overall, the “mood swings of Mr. Trump may be less of an issue for Mr. Burnham” than they were for Starmer due to the “timeline in America,” said The Independent. By the time a Burnham premiership gets fully settled, the 2026 midterms may have passed, and he will be dealing with a White House “entering the traditional ‘lame duck’ stage where power quickly ebbs away, not least because he cannot run again.”

What next?

Burnham could potentially enter office as prime minister by mid-July, but if there’s a contest for the position, the “election would likely drag on into September,” said The Associated Press. Either way, the U.K.’s likely next prime minister has urged caution against his country moving to be like the United States. “Politics is getting more polarized. And the path we’re on, if we are not careful, is a path toward the politics of the United States of America,” Burnham said during an event in the final days of his parliamentary campaign.

Burnham has also expressed dissent about the similarities between Trump and former Prime Minister Liz Truss, as well as Trump’s 2024 election victory. “The instability that Liz Truss brought to Britain, I think Trump is bringing to the U.S. and the world,” he told The London Economic last year. “Open your eyes to what could be really challenging and difficult issues and things that could polarize people further.”

What happened

Two federal judges in Texas on Tuesday sentenced seven anti-ICE protesters to 50 to 100 years in prison over a demonstration last July outside the Prairieland Detention Center during which one of the defendants, Benjamin Song, shot and wounded a police officer. Prosecutors won terrorism convictions after portraying the group as part of antifa, the decentralized movement of antifascist activists. An eighth defendant who wasn’t at the protest received 30 years behind bars.

Who said what

Prosecutors “described the case as the first domestic terrorism trial” that convicted “alleged antifa cell members,” the Fort Worth Star-Telegram said. “The defendants denied having connections to antifa.” President Donald Trump last year “issued an executive order declaring antifa a ‘domestic terrorist organization’ — a designation that does not actually exist under U.S. law,” The New York Times said. The “remarkably stiff penalties” handed down by the “staunchly conservative” judges signaled that, at least “in Texas, the courts would deal aggressively with ICE protesters,” especially those accused of antifa ties.

What next?

Lawyers for the eight defendants said they would appeal the sentences, as critics warned the convictions “could have wide-reaching impact on protests and First Amendment free-speech rights,” The Associated Press said. Eight other Prairieland defendants will be sentenced July 1.

What happened

All three leftist congressional candidates backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their New York City primaries on Tuesday, with two unseating incumbents. More moderate Democrats won elsewhere: Army veteran Cait Conley in New York’s competitive 17th District, former Rep. Ben McAdams in Utah’s newly redrawn 1st District and state legislator Adrian Boafo in retiring Rep. Steny Hoyer’s 5th District seat in Maryland.

President Donald Trump’s candidates won in two upstate New York Republican primaries. In South Carolina’s GOP gubernatorial runoff, his original pick, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, lost to Attorney General Alan Wilson, who Trump co-endorsed last week.

Who said what

Mamdani “made a big bet and emerged victorious,” becoming an “undeniable power broker in New York politics,” The New York Times said. Doctoral student Darializa Avila Chevalier toppled Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th District, while another democratic socialist, state assembly member Claire Valdez, trounced outgoing Rep. Nydia Velázquez’s pick to succeed her in the 7th District. In the 10th District, Brad Lander unseated Rep. Dan Goldman.

In two of Tuesday’s most expensive races, Micah Lasher defeated fellow state assembly member Alex Bores, Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg and anti-Trump pundit George Conway to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler (D) in New York’s 12th District, and millionaire Rep. April McClain Delaney (D) beat billionaire former Rep. David Trone (D) to represent Maryland’s 6th District.

What next?

The doubling of democratic socialists in the House, to four, will likely push the Democratic caucus to the left, the Times said, also “creating headaches” for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) as he seeks to become House speaker.

Another prime minister resigning from office adds to the “unprecedented instability in the modern history” of Britain, said an editorial in Le Monde.

Following his announcement on Monday, Starmer will still “seek to make his final mark on the world stage as a lame-duck prime minister”, said Politico. But a planned EU-UK summit on 22 July has been postponed amid indecision over Britain’s intentions regarding the continent.

With Starmer’s imminent departure, and many of the policies of his likely successor Andy Burnham as yet unknown, Britain’s instability is having tangible consequences on the world stage.

How was Starmer viewed?

“God save the king and this desolate land of the United Kingdom,” said Antonello Guerrera in La Repubblica. Since Starmer was elected in 2024, he has appeared a “robotic and insipid leader” on the domestic front. He has “always been a Hamlet: paralysed by indecision, doubt, and sunk by tragic ineptitude”. And on Monday, “the curtain fell”.

But, aside from being “humiliated” by Donald Trump on social media, many world leaders thanked Starmer for his service, including his “staunch ally” Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his “comrade” Emmanuel Macron, and Giorgia Meloni. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, paid tribute, saying: “It can take many leaders years to grow into the statesman you became in just two years.”

“Pragmatic, cool and rational”, Starmer embodied a strain of “anti-politics” and could get the job done without a fuss, said Enrico Franceschini in La Republicca. But these qualities were eroded by a “lack of charisma, the inability to communicate, and the limited political vision of a prime minister animated by good intentions but unable to implement them”.

Where did it go wrong?

“Beleaguered” Starmer’s tenure was “troubled” from the outset, said Euronews. From failing to declare gifts in the first few months of his premiership, to appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador, to numerous policy U-turns on “welfare reform, introducing digital IDs and scrapping winter fuel payments”: his time in office was “littered with controversy”.

Starmer was also “undone by economic stagnation” and “underspending on defence”, said Quentin Letts in The Washington Post. But perhaps the reason he stayed in power so long was that there was “no obvious answer” as to who could replace him.

Fundamentally, Starmer “broke his promise of stability” and “orchestrated constant changes of strategy”, said Claudi Pérez in El País. In his defence, he inherited a “poisoned chalice” of “stagnant” growth, but overall, like “bad tennis players”, he made “too many unforced errors”.

Is Britain an isolated case?

Since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016, No. 10 has become a “hot seat”, said Deutsche Welle. Whoever succeeds Starmer will be the seventh leader in that period, and will be “grappling with profound political, economic, and social problems”.

Before Starmer, according to Der Spiegel, the UK had “gambler” David Cameron, someone who tried to “pick up the pieces” in Theresa May, the “scandals”-ridden Boris Johnson, a “zigzag” six-week tenure from Liz Truss, and a leader of “negative momentum” in Rishi Sunak. Downing Street has become a “transit station”.

But the rest of Europe is equally fractured, said Pérez in El País. Since the financial crisis in 2008, there has been a “collapse” of centrist parties in Europe. France has had seven prime ministers in the past eight years, and in Germany, Friedrich Merz’s popularity is “plummeting” and the “grand coalition is falling apart”. Further afield, the US’ “politics are a mess”.

Is the future brighter with Burnham?

The “charismatic” Burnham is a “rising star”, with “decades of experience in national and regional politics”, said DW. And he is perhaps the “last hope to counter the rising right-wing populists of Reform UK”.

The new MP for Makerfield provides a “glimmer of hope” for the UK, said Pérez in El País, not least because he is in favour of “resetting the relationship with the EU”. That is the “greatest reform this country needs”. It has been “plagued by a nauseating post-imperial nostalgia, an epidemic of fear, and a mediocre political class that has been hitting rock bottom for almost 20 years”.

Burnham “may well prove a more skilled rider”, said The Washington Post. But each of the last six prime ministers “arrived promising to be the exception to the merry-go-round of predecessors and unquenchable voter rage”. And he “won’t have much time to figure it out”.

The question of whether Keir Starmer would resign in the wake of Andy Burnham’s victory in Makerfield has been answered. But the “slower-burning question”, said David Aaronovitch in The Independent, is whether Nigel Farage’s grin can really “grace the doorstep of No. 10” after four by-election defeats in a row.

The “solidity of the anti-Reform tactical vote” in last week’s by-election has shown that people “don’t want” him as prime minister. Reform UK appears to be “on a downward slope”, and the expected arrival of a “doe-eyed” Andy Burnham in Downing Street could make life trickier yet for Farage.

What did the commentators say?

This latest by-election “exposed many of Reform’s weaknesses”, several of which “stem from serious flaws in Farage’s character”, said veteran by-election reporter Michael Crick in The Times. He runs the party “as a personal dictatorship”; he alone picked the out-of-depth Robert Kenyon as Reform’s candidate. “No serious democratic party” can be run that way.

In Makerfield, as in Gorton & Denton, there are those who so “detest him”, they were “breaking habits of a lifetime” to vote “ABF – Anyone But Farage”. He looked “fed up and exhausted” after it was over, and “it wouldn’t surprise me if he quits” before the general election, “perhaps claiming illness”.

He was also “beaten at his own game” by “Reform’s yet more evil twin”, Restore Britain, said Jonn Elledge in The New Statesman. Farage “now faces the same dilemma he once posed to the Tories: stand firm and lose votes” to the right, or “move right and alienate those closer to the centre”. Watching him “flail” is “extremely funny”.

Rupert Lowe’s “ultra-right splinter group” succeeded in mobilising “disaffected white working-class people” in a constituency where there was “support for the British National Party” 20 years ago, said Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper. Their “desire to give the Establishment – which now apparently includes Farage – a kicking seemingly knows no bounds”.

If Restore’s current polling holds up, “it could cost Farage victory in other constituencies” in a general election, political scientist Rob Ford told Politics Home. Reform would “really would like to be able to say X and Y seats are in the bag” but now there’s “this additional element of uncertainty”.

Makerfield was clearly “a setback” for Farage’s “ambitions of winning power”, said Nick Gutteridge in The Telegraph. But “there is no sign” within Reform’s ranks that “fatalism has set in”. One party source told me it’s like “the scene in the movie that comes just before the end, when it looks like the bad guy is resurgent and the hero has taken a knock” but “you’re actually just before the glorious victory”.

What next?

The morning after Reform’s Makerfield defeat, Farage appealed directly to those who switched from his party to Restore: “What do you want? We are the challenger party to the left in this country, and I would urge you to think again.”

But a new threat could emerge from within his own party ranks, said Aaronovitch in The Independent. If Farage’s waning popularity and “diminishing energy” mean he’s no longer up to “making a serious bid for power”, then “that quintessence of pushiness”, Robert Jenrick, will “have to do something about it”.

What began as a photo opportunity between two world leaders has spiraled into geopolitical acrimony. An escalating war of words between President Donald Trump and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni over who asked whom to pose for a photograph at the recent G7 conference now threatens to impact material relations between the Trump administration and Italy’s right-wing government. As Trump rages on social media over the photo flap, Meloni returns to Italy with an eye toward next year’s national elections — and the benefits of being seen standing up to an increasingly unpopular American president.

‘Developing rift’ with origins in the Iran war

Meloni is “clearly irked” at Trump’s “suggestion that she ‘begged’ him for a photo” at the recent G7 summit, said NBC News. While the prime minister “didn’t respond publicly” to other Trump barbs this spring, the “most recent clash, by contrast, quickly escalated.”

Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani “abruptly cancelled a planned trip” to the U.S. after calling Trump’s comments “serious and offensive” to the whole of Italy, said The Associated Press. “Italy and I never beg,” said Meloni in a video response posted to social media over the weekend.

The “continuing exchange” between the two leaders has “highlighted a developing rift between the two countries” stemming from Trump’s war on Iran, said the BBC. Trump and Meloni once enjoyed a “close political relationship,” with Meloni the “sole European leader” to have attended Trump’s second inauguration.

The binational relationship has “grown strained in recent months over the war in Iran,” said Axios, particularly after Italy “denied U.S. aircraft permission to land at its bases” in March. Trump’s relationship with Europe more broadly “had long been fraying” over the war with Iran, his trade policies and threats to annex Greenland, said the Los Angeles Times.

Still, while Trump took a “warmer tone toward other European leaders” at the G7 meeting as they “aligned behind his interim agreement” to pause fighting in Iran, “tensions again were expected to be on full display” at next month’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. Meloni’s pushback on Trump’s photograph claim is a “punctuation mark” on a growing trend among European leaders to speak against the Trump administration, said CNN.

Electoral opportunity ‘deftly utilized’

Meloni had been trying to “preserve some harmony” between herself and Trump “until this week,” said The New York Times. She has “sought some distance” from the president now, as their “friendship became a political liability among Italian voters.” Meloni is “doing poorly in Italy with her level of popularity,” said Trump on Truth Social. Now that the U.S. has allegedly “defeated Iran militarily,” he continued, “she wants to be friends again in order to get her ‘numbers up.’ No thanks!!!"

Trump may be correct that Meloni’s furthering of this feud is being done with an eye toward domestic Italian politics, said Fox News. The prime minister “must have calculated” that a “public row” with Trump “yields no tangible consequences other than an increase in her domestic and international standing,” said Mattia Diletti, a political science lecturer at Sapienza University of Rome, to the outlet.

Trump’s story is nevertheless “very difficult to believe,” said MS NOW. Not only has he “peddled similar absurdities before,” but “he’s not at all popular in Italy,” leaving Meloni “no political incentive to be seen with him.” Meloni’s pushback to Trump comes as the premier “gears up for a reelection battle,” in which her “close relationship” with Trump has become an “increasing political liability,” said the Financial Times.

Meloni faced a “setback in her grip on power in Italy” in March, after her government lost a battle over justice reform, said Time. Critics saw that defeat as a “barometer of how Italians perceived her closeness" with Trump, and how they have been “troubled by Trump’s globally destabilizing actions.”

Meloni “deftly utilized the opportunity” presented by the president in his photography blame-game to “distance herself from Trump,” said the Financial Times. Italian diplomats are “now working in overdrive,” hoping to “limit the fallout or deter Trump from retaliating against Italy.” Meloni’s “international policy is in tatters,” said former Italian NATO Ambassador Stefano Stefanini to the outlet. In reimagining Italian foreign policy moving forward, she “has to be careful not to appear to flip-flop.” Italians will “remember her closeness to Trump, so she has to tread this very carefully.”

What happened

Former Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham has emerged as the likely successor to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who announced his resignation Monday amid a revolt inside his Labour Party triggered by falling poll numbers and substantial losses in local elections last month. Burnham, who won a seat in Parliament in a special election last week, announced he would run for Labour leader before being sworn in.

Who said what

Starmer’s resignation “could have triggered a divisive leadership contest, but several Labour lawmakers said they now expected more of a coronation,” Reuters said. Burnham, 56, quickly “won the support of another potential leadership rival,” ​former Health Minister Wes Streeting, and no other potential candidates stepped forward. Following an “extraordinary month of deft political maneuvering,” Burnham “was treated like a celebrity” when he arrived at Parliament, with “television crews filming his arrival from helicopters,” The New York Times said.

What next?

Starmer will stay on as caretaker prime minister until Labour picks a new leader, a process starting with nominations opening July 9. If there’s a contest, the “election would likely drag on into September,” The Associated Press said. If it’s a “coronation,” Reuters said, Burnham could “enter office by mid-July.”

What happened

U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz, in a ruling unsealed Monday, threw out six federal subpoenas targeting Minnesota Democratic officials, including Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison. There’s “overwhelming evidence” that the “dominant purpose” of the subpoenas was to “coerce Minnesota officials into assisting” the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis and “to harass and retaliate against them for failing to do so,” Schlitz, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in his June 17 ruling. That’s a “blatantly unlawful and unethical use of the grand jury process.”

Who said what

The subpoenas were issued in January “amid a bitter political battle between the Trump administration and state officials” following the shooting death of Renee Good, The Washington Post said. The Justice Department has “struggled — without success — to identify a single plausible investigatory justification for the subpoenas,” Schiltz wrote. But they fit President Donald Trump’s “well-established history of using criminal investigations to retaliate against” his “political and personal adversaries.”

What next?

Schlitz’s ruling is the “latest rebuke by the federal judiciary of Justice Department efforts to aggressively implement” Trump’s agenda and improperly “target” his opponents, The Associated Press said. It also “raises questions about similar immigration-related investigations elsewhere,” Axios said.

What happened

The Senate on Monday approved legislation intended to lower the cost of housing by increasing supply, cutting regulations and limiting the number of single-family homes owned by large institutional investors. The bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed 85-5 and is expected to clear the House as soon as Tuesday.

It’s the “biggest housing bill in more than 30 years,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the Banking Committee. Committee Chair Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said the legislation will “help more Americans achieve the dream of homeownership.”

Who said what

The vote was a “rare bipartisan legislative achievement” as “lawmakers in both parties try to address housing costs in an election year,” The Associated Press said. The “final bill has received widespread support in the housing community,” both from landlords and “groups that advocate for tenants and low-income renters.” But “housing economists and researchers” expect it to have “little impact when it comes to bringing housing prices down,” The Washington Post said, though some provisions should “make meaningful progress toward improving supply and affordability.”

“There is no magic wand that will fix this crisis overnight,” David Dworkin, chief executive of the National Housing Conference, told the AP. “But this bill is a significant down payment on a long-term effort to make housing more affordable for all Americans.”

What next?

Senate approval is “expected to set the legislation on a glide path to President Donald Trump’s desk for signature as soon as this week,” Politico said.

Today marks 10 years since Britain voted to leave the EU. And ever since, “Westminster has been in a state of almost constant upheaval”, said Tom McTague in The Times. Six different prime ministers have struggled to deal with the realities of Brexit, in what has been “quite comfortably, the worst period of governance in Britain’s modern democratic history”.

Public opinion has decidedly shifted in the past decade. In 2016, we voted 52% to 48% in favour of Brexit, but now 57% of Britons think the UK was wrong to vote to leave the EU, according to a YouGov poll this month. And that includes 23% of Leave voters. A majority (59%) support a closer relationship with the EU but opinions are divided about exactly what that should mean.

What did the commentators say?

“Life in Brexit Britain is simply harder,” said The Economist. Since leaving the EU, we have “mostly failed to pursue the radical deregulation that small-state Brexiteers promised”. Many European rules have “stayed on the books”, including restrictions on Britons’ working hours and a fair few animal-welfare protections. Some estimates put the GDP-per-person “damage from Brexit” as high as 8% but “it would be churlish” to say leaving “has hurt everyone” when “puffins and lobsters are among the winners”.

A decent proportion of Starmer’s “nugatory” achievements in office “simply would not have been possible if we had stayed in the EU”, said Brexit campaigner Michael Gove in The Spectator. A steel tariff package, a cut in tariffs on “more than 100 foodstuffs”, trade deals with the US and India – not to mention gaining a “decisive edge in AI” outside of the EU’s Digital Markets Act – were all secured by “our Brexit freedoms”. People say Brexit is “tawdry and compromised” or even a “self-inflicted wound that makes seppuku look like keyhole surgery” but “we have taken back control”.

The referendum result “sent shockwaves across the world”, said Laëtitia Langlois, a French lecturer in British political studies, on The Conversation. But, rather than delivering greater social or economic prosperity, it triggered a “major recomposition” of the UK’s political landscape. It has “normalised and mainstreamed populist discourse” and contributed to “the erosion of the two traditional parties”. Divisions exposed by the referendum “created the conditions for culture wars” that map less easily onto conventional party politics and “continue to tear British society apart”.

“Little that most people care about has improved since 2016, while much has got worse,” said McTague in The Times. This past decade “has exposed a political class that appears unable to govern, sitting atop a state no longer fit for purpose”. We voted to regain control and “discovered our leaders couldn’t handle it”.

What next?

The UK “needs to move on from Brexit”, said the Financial Times’ editorial board. But that does not mean we should “ignore its consequences”. The best way to proceed is to move closer to the EU, stopping “short of rejoining”, through an “evolving, bespoke arrangement”. We cannot “rewind the clock” but we “can, and should, seek to regain more” of what we have lost.

The balance of opinion has certainly “shifted” against Leave since 2016, said Sunder Katwala in The Independent. But Britain faces “years of negotiation about how to have a closer relationship” with the EU again. I hope we can find “common ground”, instead of gearing up for “another uncivil war between our new post-Brexit tribes”.

Andy Burnham appears to be heading to No. 10 unopposed after Keir Starmer resigned on Monday and his main leadership rival rowed in behind him.

With the new PM set to be in place by the time Parliament returns from summer recess at the start of September, attention is already turning to who the key players could be in a Burnham government, and what their appointment says for its likely direction.

Ed Miliband

The energy secretary and former Labour leader has long coveted the role of chancellor and had been widely seen as the frontrunner to replace Rachel Reeves. He has been a “key champion of Burnham with the parliamentary party and shares the same desire for Labour to enact more radical change, from tax overhaul to public control of utilities”, said The Guardian.

Yet Miliband’s opposition to further North Sea oil and gas licences and strict adherence to net zero commitments, even as energy bills have rocketed, has made him increasingly unpopular with the trade unions and wider public.

Burnham “may have cooled on the idea” of appointing Miliband to the Treasury, said The i Paper, but expect him to get another big position in government even if he misses out on his dream job.

Wes Streeting

Another name being touted as a potential chancellor is one-time PM leadership rival Wes Streeting. The former health secretary, who resigned from Cabinet last month, has withdrawn from the leadership contest and decided to back Burnham, saying on X that the new MP for Makerfield is “committed to building an inclusive party that draws on the best of our political traditions”.

One of Labour’s best communicators, with a compelling personal story, but hailing from the right of the party, his appointment as chancellor or to another top Cabinet job could “align the competing wings of the party” and “show – or at least give the impression – that Labour is more united than voters think”, said Mauricio Alencar, politics and economics reporter for City A.M.

Louise Haigh

The former transport secretary was forced to quit just months after Labour took office in 2024 over a prior fraud conviction, but has now emerged as a “crucial power broker” on the backbenches for the party’s “soft left”, said BBC chief political correspondent Henry Zeffman.

She was “at the heart of the huge rebellion which scuppered the government’s welfare cuts in 2025”, led Burnham’s Makerfield by-election campaign, and is “in line for a big cabinet job”.

Miatta Fahnbulleh

The MP for Peckham has been one of Burnham’s most vocal supporters in Parliament. A former civil servant who ran the left-wing New Economics Foundation think tank, Fahnbulleh resigned as a junior minister for communities in the aftermath of the May local elections.

Hailing from the Labour left, she has “thrown her weight behind a number of highly controversial economic policies including imposing a wealth tax, nationalising several public companies across water and transport, rolling out further green financing and taxing other streams of income more”, said Alencar. Understood to be helping Burnham work on policy, she is a “rising star” in the party and has even been touted as a dark-horse bet for chancellor, in what would be a “radical break from Starmer’s premiership”.

Anneliese Midgley

Relatively unknown outside Labour circles, Midgley was elected MP for Knowsley, near Makerfield, only in 2024 but has been an “influential force in the Labour movement for much longer than that”, said Zeffman. She worked for both Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn in opposition and before that at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and Unite.

She is seen as a “plausible candidate” for chief whip or even political secretary in Downing Street, “not a job usually held by an elected politician”.

As rabid fans pack stadiums for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, some of the tournament’s most contentious issues are not about what the players say or do but what they wear. Several countries have put themselves in the crosshairs of political debates regarding their team jerseys, and in some cases FIFA has been forced to intervene.

Colombia

Colombia’s iconic yellow soccer kit became “embroiled in the country’s bitterly disputed presidential election, sparking debate over whether the yellow shirt should be used at political rallies,” said The Associated Press. Abelardo de la Espriella, the right-wing presidential candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump, turned the Colombian jersey “into his campaign’s official attire,” said The New York Times, with thousands of de la Espriella’s supporters donning the athletic wear.

Sen. Iván Cepeda, de la Espriella’s leftist opponent, “slammed his rival’s choice of apparel, accusing him of stealing a national symbol,” said the AP. But despite Cepeda’s anger, the sea of yellow jerseys seemingly propelled de la Espriella over the finish line, as he appeared to narrowly defeat Cepeda in the June 21 election, becoming Colombia’s president-elect.

Egypt

Egypt is playing in the World Cup with a major change to their uniforms, as their jerseys are “not bearing the stars commemorating their seven Africa Cup of Nations victories, following a reminder from FIFA,” said ESPN. The Egyptian national team typically wears jerseys emblazoned with the stars to “recognize each of their continental triumphs,” but such a display is not allowed by FIFA.

FIFA’s being involved in the stars’ removal marks a shift from normal procedure. Typically, the “accompanying of stars to commemorate historical honors on kits is at the discretion of national teams themselves, with different national federations opting to interpret the guidelines in different ways,” said ESPN. But for the World Cup, FIFA told the Egyptian team that stars may only appear on jerseys to “commemorate victories in the competition itself.”

Haiti

Haiti’s 2026 World Cup outing marked the team’s first appearance in the tournament in 52 years. Though the team was eliminated early, the jerseys generated plenty of buzz. The team was forced to alter their jersey design after FIFA “deemed certain elements to be too political in nature,” said The Guardian. FIFA’s issue was with the “shirt’s right hip, which depicted silhouettes inspired by the Battle of Vertières and the Haitian Revolution.” One of these silhouettes represented Haitian revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

Many supporters were angry that FIFA forced Haiti to adopt the change. FIFA’s decision is part of an “effort to discredit the Haitian Revolution,” and the “mere implication of Dessalines, standing alongside his fellow revolutionaries, was enough to elicit a backlash,” Julia Gaffield, a history professor at William & Mary College, said at The Conversation. Despite FIFA’s decision, the jersey has “become a fan favorite” and is still sold on the manufacturer’s website.

Mexico

Mexico is one of the three co-hosts at this year’s World Cup, but even hosts can spark drama. The nation’s iconic green jersey “brings back the Aztec calendar design that was popular in the 1990s,” said The Associated Press, but the manner in which the jerseys were made sparked an uproar among some indigenous Mexican artists.

The jerseys were “embroidered by hand by 150 Nahua women high in the mountains of central Mexico, in a tiny town called Naupan,” said The New York Times, but activists have accused the manufacturers of “exploiting the Nahua women while profiting off their image.” There are “murky details behind the Adidas collaboration with the artisans of Naupan,” Luz Valdez, a Mexican activist and influencer, said in a translated TikTok video. The artists were reportedly “not even allowed to use their traditional sewing method.”

What happened

President Donald Trump claimed on Saturday that “terrible Vandals” had sabotaged his $14.7 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leading to “multiple” arrests and requiring contractors to “drain much of the water” again for “necessary repairs.” Administration officials said at least five people have been arrested on vandalism charges, apparently for reaching into the algae-filled pool and touching or removing the peeling “American Flag blue” coating.

Who said what

Trump said on social media that his pool makeover had “worked perfectly” before people cut a “250 foot long gash” into the coating and “poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool.” He offered no evidence, and it “wasn’t immediately clear” how anyone could cut the new coating, which is “like a coarse coat of paint,” The Wall Street Journal said. But hydrogen peroxide, which National Park Service workers have been dumping into the pool to kill the algae, can “also be used as a paint remover,” and painting the bottom of the “warm, shallow” pool navy blue “may have had the unintended effect of making the water warmer, which can further spur algae growth.”

What next?

Trump posted Sunday that he had “inspected” the pool and “work will begin immediately.”

What happened

Abelardo de la Espriella, a right-wing lawyer with no political experience, declared victory in Colombia’s presidential runoff Sunday night. With 99.9% of votes counted from the election, de la Espriella had 49.7% while 48.7% went for leftist Sen. Iván Cepeda, who suggested he would challenge the result.

Who said what

A victory by de la Espriella, a dual Colombian-U.S. citizen who “transformed himself from sharply dressed Miami lawyer to populist in a soccer jersey and a straw hat,” would “return Colombia to conservative rule after four years under Gustavo Petro, the country’s first leftist president,” The New York Times said. It would also “advance Latin America’s broader shift to the right” in recent years. De la Espriella, endorsed by President Donald Trump, has “promised a heavy-handed approach to crime-fighting, including drug trafficking,” The Associated Press said. He vowed to end Petro’s peace negotiations with armed groups and “build mega-prisons.”

What next?

The winner, to be announced after a “final verified count, overseen by notaries and judges,” will begin a four-year term on Aug. 7, Reuters said. De la Espriella would likely have to “water down some of his proposals” due to the “closeness of the race” and the “divided Congress” in which Cepeda’s Historic Pact party has a plurality of seats in both chambers.

Keir Starmer announced his resignation this morning, saying he had heard the answer to the question as to whether he was the right person to lead Labour into the next election and would “accept that answer with good grace”.

The pathway from landslide electoral victory in 2024 to candidate for most unpopular prime minister of all time must be “one of the shortest honeymoon periods in British political history”, said Becky Morton and Brian Wheeler on the BBC.

What did the commentators say?

Shortly after becoming prime minister, Starmer boasted “that there would never be such a thing as Starmerism”, said Morton and Wheeler. But what he saw as a lack of ideological baggage ultimately translated – in the eyes of the public and many within his own party – to a perception that the prime minister “was, simply, not very good at politics”.

“There is something lame about him that Starmer has struggled from the start to shrug off,” said Ameer Kotecha in The Spectator. His lack of charisma was sold as a sign of the dutiful competence that was supposed to distinguish him from the perceived frivolity of the Liz Truss and Boris Johnson eras. But over the course of his premiership, the Starmer who has emerged “appears constantly at the mercy of events”, his occasional moments of “startling ruthlessness” somehow “even more unattractive than his mere ineptitude”.

Starmer “arrived for a career in politics unprepared for what a career in politics actually means”, said Andrew Marr in The New Statesman. The former director of public prosecutions went from courtroom to “cage fight”, and never managed to sell himself or his messaging “in a raucous, jeering environment where many assumed he was a compulsive liar”. In taking on the premiership of a fractured, stagnating Britain, he “chose a painful, treacherous path at an unusually difficult time”. If it “hasn’t worked”, it is “by no means all his fault”.

What next?

“The beneficiary of Starmer’s demise is all but certain to be Andy Burnham,” said Sonia Sodha in The Times. Burnham is “a warm and effective communicator” – but he must use that charisma to “strike a realistically ambitious tone” and sell the public on “hard truths” about the road ahead, rather than quick-fix solutions whose inevitable failure will only benefit populist parties.

A Burnham administration “will test the power of personality over policy”, said The New York Times. His allies pin their hopes on his talents as “an effective storyteller who can counter the inflammatory rhetoric of populist rivals” in a way that always eluded Starmer. But so far his vision for the nation has been confined to “sweeping generalities” that offer little insight into how he will address huge challenges like “economic stagnation”, public sector funding and “ascendant, anti-immigrant populism”.

Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said the picture for Labour has become so “bleak” that most party insiders will be happy if Burnham can simply “persuade people to give the party a second look”. But “if the sausage isn’t going to change, when it comes down to it, all he’s really offering is some sizzle”.

“Those who saw the video will not easily forget it,” said Rory Carroll in The Guardian. It showed an assailant sat astride his victim on a street in north Belfast, stabbing him in the face and neck, while shouting in Arabic.

Passers-by intervened to help Stephen Ogilvie, who was badly hurt during the attack last Monday; he lost an eye and suffered other injuries. And “the judicial system was fast”: less than two days later, Hadi Alodid, 30, a Sudanese refugee, was charged with attempted murder.

But long before that, said George Odling in The Times, the footage had spread around the world. Tommy Robinson, who was in Moscow, shared it with his two million followers on X/Twitter barely an hour after the attack, saying it showed an “invader trying to behead a man”. Elon Musk called on people to protest. Anti-immigrant activists in Northern Ireland were quick to latch on, posting meeting points for mass protests, and disseminating “hit lists” of migrants' homes and hostels.

Before nightfall the following day, protesters had closed arterial routes around Belfast, said The Economist. Petrol bombs were then thrown at police; a bus and police vehicles were set on fire; 12 officers were injured. But foreigners were the real targets. Doors were kicked in, cars and homes torched. Ugandan care workers, Indian IT professionals and a Middle Eastern supermarket were attacked, said Sky News. A family with a young child had to be evacuated in an armoured police car as their home went up in flames. In Glengormley, a mob targeted a hotel that housed asylum seekers.

‘Migration back door’

The violence was “disgusting”, said The Times, but the “clichéd condemnation” that followed failed to acknowledge the root cause: immigration. “The general perception is that legal and illegal immigration is out of control, that Britain is a soft touch”, and that millions are being spent on refugees who can pose a real danger to UK citizens. The issue now poses an “explosive” threat to “national stability”.

This case also exposes another huge hole in our borders, said David Frost in The Daily Telegraph. Alodid had travelled to Northern Ireland via Paris and Dublin. It's unclear how he was able to fly to the Republic, without a visa; but once there, because of the Common Travel Area, he was able to enter Northern Ireland without passing through immigration controls. When anyone from any country who can get into Ireland can get into the UK, “we have a migration back door”.

It is “asinine” to accept the far-right claim that these riots were an expression of serious concerns about immigration, said Séamas O'Reilly in The New Statesman. An alleged crime by a single Sudanese man in no way explains or justifies rioters “carrying out a pogrom against every migrant or non-white person” they can find. We would never see attacks on white British people as a legitimate response to murders committed by white Britons. For those of us who always find such justifications dubious, it's revealing to see them deployed in Northern Ireland, “where immigration barely exists”. Only 3% of its population belong to an ethnic minority. Net international migration, from 2001 to 2023, reached just 62,000 people in a country of two million; there are currently about 2,400 refugees.

Disturbing new politics

In fact, the “chilling thing” is how familiar last week's riots felt, said Michael Magee in The Independent. “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 to us.” Most, if not all, of the rioting took place in unionist areas; instead of contested parade routes or flag disputes, the “orchestrated violence” was directed at a new enemy: immigrants and asylum seekers.

The awful thing is that “immigration riots work”, said Max Jeffery in The Spectator. The Roma whose homes were burned in Ballymena in County Antrim last year have not returned. The asylum seekers and immigrants attacked last week will likely move away.

We are seeing a disturbing new politics in Britain, said Jason Okundaye in The Guardian, stoked by the smartphone and social media. The public is now consistently fed a stream of shocking, graphic images – such as the footage of a dying Henry Nowak, or of Stephen Ogilvie being attacked – which previously would have been seen only by investigators or in a courtroom. Politicians of the hard-right exploit these to foment rage and disorder, pushing a narrative of a UK invaded by third-world criminals.

Yet it would be wrong to blame everything on social media, said Janice Turner in The Times. It's hard to ignore the many “vicious, unprovoked” crimes committed by refugees, particularly those fleeing extreme violence – in, for instance, Sudan or Afghanistan. Jonathan Hall, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, noted last week that refugee rights can conflict with “national security”. Britain needs to grasp this issue, “or get used to riots”.

What happened

President Donald Trump on Wednesday scuppered plans by Senate Republicans to quickly confirm his nominee for director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton. Posting on social media from the G7 summit in France, Trump said he was canceling Clayton’s confirmation hearing, hours before it was set to begin, until the Senate confirmed his former lawyer James McDonald as U.S. attorney in Manhattan. “To add a slight bit of intrigue,” Trump said, he won’t sign a reauthorization of FISA’s lapsed Section 702 spying tool until the Senate approves voter-eligibility legislation that lacks the votes to pass.

Who said what

Trump’s “extraordinary” dictates make it “more likely that his temporary pick for the intelligence job,” housing official Bill Pulte, takes over Friday, The Associated Press said. Democrats balked at reauthorizing Section 702 if Pulte became acting DNI, and senators had been “rushing to get Clayton confirmed by the end of the week, to get ahead of Pulte’s scheduled start,” The Wall Street Journal said. Pulte is an unqualified “sycophant,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said, and Trump is “undermining our ability to produce the results that he wants.”

What next?

Trump is “presumably happy for the highly partisan Pulte to have access to powerful spying tools for 210 days,” The Washington Post editorial board said in an op-ed, as Senate Republicans decide “how much humiliation they are willing to tolerate.”

What happened

Republican lawmakers in Georgia on Wednesday rejected Gov. Brian Kemp’s (R) push to redraw the state’s political maps to erase one or two Democratic congressional districts before the 2028 elections. Kemp had called the special legislative session expressly so Georgia would join other Southern states in breaking up majority-Black districts after the Supreme Court gutted the last main pillar of the Voting Rights Act.

Who said what

Wednesday’s decision “marked a setback for both Kemp and President Donald Trump,” who started the national redistricting war to improve GOP odds of keeping control of Congress, The Associated Press said. Georgia Republican legislative leaders “cited a desire for a more methodical process that included greater input from voters and a better understanding” of the legal challenges, The New York Times said. But the redistricting retreat followed “weeks of mounting pressure from Democrats, voting rights groups and even some uneasy Republicans who warned that reopening redistricting could energize Democratic voters” in the increasingly competitive state, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said.

What next?

Kemp and other Georgia Republicans vowed to push ahead with the redistricting bid. The Supreme Court “left no doubt that we would need to draw new maps,” Senate President Larry Walker III (R) said at a news conference. “The question was when.”

What happened

President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding to open the Strait of Hormuz, allow Iran to sell oil on the global market and start unfreezing its assets. The deal also kicked off 60 days of negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program and “at least” $300 billion for Iran’s “reconstruction and economic development.”

The text of the 14-point agreement was read to reporters by a U.S. official, and Iran later released a similar version. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, a key mediator, said the agreement was in “force with immediate effect.”

Who said what

The truce will mostly “restore the status quo before the war,” The Associated Press said. However, the text suggests Iran might “negotiate some permanent way to exercise sovereignty” over the strait, including new shipping “fees,” after 60 days, said The New York Times. The Iranians have “emerged from a confrontation with the world’s most powerful military” intact and “with much to celebrate.”

“Everything we sought to achieve through military action, we obtained several times over through negotiation,” Iran’s lead negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said on state television. The deal is “very strong,” Trump told reporters at the G7 summit in France. “Most people seem to be very happy.” Critics, including many Republicans, are “stupid and bad people,” he said. But “if I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs.”

What next?

Instead of the planned signing ceremony in Geneva on Friday, Vice President JD Vance and other Trump envoys will “attend three days of negotiations with their Iranian counterparts,” The Wall Street Journal said.

If Andy Burnham wins today’s Makerfield by-election, Wes Streeting won’t be letting him have a clear run at No.10. “For the avoidance of doubt, for the umpteenth time, I will be standing” for the Labour leadership, he told Politico.

Rumours are swirling that Andy Burnham “is preparing to launch an immediate leadership challenge against Keir Starmer” if he secures his return to Westminster, said The Times. His team are “confident that the challenge could be uncontested”, and are already “drawing up plans for what his first 100 days in government would look like”.

But the former health secretary is determined to spoil any Burnham coronation. He claims to have the backing he needs to enter any leadership contest, and made a major speech earlier this week setting out his own economic plan for government.

What did the commentators say?

Streeting’s speech was impressive, said City A.M. editor-in-chief Christian May. “In under an hour,” he displayed “more intellectual flair and more interest in economic growth than Rachel Reeves has offered in two years” and “certainly offered more than Burnham appears capable of”. He represents “a chance to revive this country’s economic fortunes and repair our frayed social bonds. Labour MPs and party members should seize it.”

Streeting has “had a good week” but he faces a “formidable set of obstacles” even to becoming a candidate in any leadership race, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. He may “in theory” have the support of the 81 Labour MPs he needs to make it onto a leadership ballot but “it is not clear they will be willing to back” his “long-shot” bid if it would “blot their copybook with Andy Burnham, the likely winner in a contest”.

Streeting’s poll ratings “have worsened since he resigned a month ago” and many in Westminster “have already written off” his leadership hopes, said The i Paper’s policy editor Jane Merrick. His allies argue that he will “make up ground” once a contest is underway: with “TV debates and hustings giving equal airtime to all candidates”, his “pitch to succeed Starmer” will be more widely heard. He talks about wanting the contest to be a “battle of ideas” about policy; “he is still regarded by many in the Labour Party as generational talent” but this will be “an uphill struggle” for him.

What next?

Right now, Streeting is “performing poorly with the Labour membership”, pollster and political strategist Scarlett Maguire told The i Paper. It is difficult to see him overcoming “the deficit he’s built up relative to” his potential leadership rivals. He would be trounced in a head-to-head battle with either Burnham or Starmer, according to a Survation/LabourList poll of Labour Party members.

But it may be that Streeting already has his Plan B up and running. It was telling that his speech this week was all about economics. “It was very much a pitch for the job of chancellor in a Burnham government,” said John Rentoul in The Independent. If Streeting can’t have “the top job”, then that’s the ministerial responsibility he would like most.

What happened

Federal law enforcement officials on Tuesday said they disrupted a plot to attack last weekend’s UFC cage match at the White House with explosive-laden drones and “snipers,” after an alleged plotter’s mother called local police. FBI Director Kash Patel disclosed on social media that “multiple” arrests had been made in a “multi-state operation.” Hours later, the Justice Department announced five suspects had been arrested in Ohio, Nebraska, Missouri and California.

Who said what

The mother of the Ohio suspect, 19-year-old Tycen Proper, told police that her son had been communicating online with “ex-military and Christian-based” people who “expressed ultra-religious and antigovernment sentiments,” according to an FBI affidavit. Proper allegedly said the attack on the UFC fight was meant to “jumpstart” a revolution. The charging documents “outlined a plot ambitious in scope” but “left less clear that the conspirators had the means to carry it out,” The New York Times said.

What next?

Secret Service officials are “angry” with Patel for having “prematurely posted” news of the arrests, CNN said. The Secret Service led the “ongoing” investigation “from the beginning,” Deputy Director Matthew Quinn said at a news conference. And to “maintain the integrity” of the investigation, “we chose not to leak it.”

What happened

Voters in Georgia, Alabama and Oklahoma on Tuesday picked nominees for governor and Congress. All three Senate candidates endorsed by President Donald Trump won their Republican primaries. But his pick for Georgia governor, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, lost to billionaire Rick Jackson, and Trump’s gubernatorial choice in Oklahoma placed a close second and will advance to a runoff.

In Washington, D.C., city council member Robert White Jr. won the Democratic primary to succeed retiring 18-term Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D). Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George had a large lead in the open mayoral race as of Wednesday morning.

Who said what

In deep-red Oklahoma, Rep. Kevin Hern won the GOP primary to fill the Senate seat vacated by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Rep. Barry Moore won Alabama’s Republican runoff to replace Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R). And in Georgia, Trump-backed Rep. Mike Collins defeated former football coach Derek Dooley in the GOP runoff to face Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) in a pivotal battleground Senate race. Ossoff had “worked quietly for months to undermine” the more moderate Dooley, The New York Times said.

But Jones’ loss was a “major upset” for Trump, Politico said, and proved that “an endless stream of cash” can “overcome the power” of his endorsement. Jackson, a health care tycoon, personally “supplied most of the $100 million-plus that his campaign has spent to persuade Republican primary voters to overlook Trump’s advice,” The Associated Press said.

What next?

Trump, who “loves to boast of the win-loss record of his endorsed candidates,” is considering endorsing both Republicans in South Carolina’s June 23 gubernatorial runoff, The Washington Post said.

What happened

Hungary’s parliament on Monday approved a constitutional amendment barring prime ministers from serving more than eight years in office. The amendment, which passed 135 to 50, was “written to apply retroactively,” effectively blocking former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán from returning to power, Politico said.

Who said what

The amendment, pushed through by Prime Minister Peter Magyar’s Tisza party, also “paves the way for the dissolution” of tools created by Orbán to consolidate his power, Reuters said, including a Sovereignty Protection Office that “stigmatized opposition figures and journalists” and public trust foundations that transferred valuable “state assets” to Orbán’s political party and allies. The legislation was part of Magyar’s promised “crusade for ‘regime change’” after 16 straight years of Orbán rule, Politico said, but would also put a “significant limit on Magyar’s own power, as he vows to restore liberal democracy in Hungary.”

What next?

The bill now goes to President Tamás Sulyok, an Orbán appointee who has refused Magyar’s calls to resign. Sulyok “could attempt to block the measure,” said Ukrainian outlet United24 Media, but Tisza’s two-thirds parliamentary supermajority “has the power to override a veto.”

Host Emmanuel Macron is expected to pull out all the stops for this week’s G7 summit to prove that this gathering of the world’s richest democracies still matters in an age of strongman politics.

In one of his last big diplomatic set pieces before his presidential term winds down next year, Macron “will seek to paper over divisions” between Donald Trump and the other six leaders, said Euronews. Top of the agenda will be trying to “forge common positions on how to end the war in Ukraine”, on the resumption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and on “the development of safer technologies”.

What did the commentators say?

The summit is being held in the alpine spa town of Évian-les-Bains. The last time the G7 met here was in June 2003, when the US had invaded Iraq despite “the strident objections of France and Germany”, said Mark Landler, France editor of The New York Times. Then-US president George W. Bush “got chilly handshakes” but he worked hard with the other leaders “to maintain the veneer of like-minded countries uniting to confront the perils of an unruly world”. Two decades later, it’s the same town but another American war in the Middle East, and any “veneer” of unity has been “stripped away”.

The G7 is “a forum created to solve geopolitical crises but it was excluded from the US-Israeli planning for war” with Iran, said Flavia Krause-Jackson, Bloomberg’s Europe editor. And it was ignored by the US in both the diplomacy for and the timing of the peace deal, which Trump announced the day before the summit, with the signing taking place after it ends.

The truth is that while, collectively, the G7 nations – France, Italy, Germany, the US, the UK, Canada and Japan – might account for 45% of global GDP, individually, few would count as one of the world’s “biggest or indeed most powerful economies”, said Jonathan Moules in the Financial Times. And Trump would clearly rather play geopolitics with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping than waste time building consensus with leaders he views as weak.

For their part, Canada and Europe “no longer view the US as a partner on key issues such as climate change and security”, said Landler in The New York Times. And some even see America as a “threat”, given Trump’s “deepening disdain for Nato” and his repeated pursuit of Greenland. Across the group, there are “diverging opinions” on “how far to pull away from the US” but that’s certainly the direction of movement.

What next?

Expectations of what this three-day summit can achieve are “already low”, said Clea Caulcutt on Politico. “Despite all the efforts of the French presidency, the G7 format has lost much of its relevance,” an EU official told the website.

“They will talk, but I’m not sure anything will come out of it,” said a former French official. And even if it did, “any gains secured could be fleeting” with such a mercurial US president. In the end, it’s really all about keeping up appearances. As one European diplomat put it bluntly: “It will be a success if there is a family photo.”

What happened

President Donald Trump celebrated his birthday by hosting a UFC mixed martial arts cage match on the South Lawn of the White House on Sunday night. He kicked off the spectacle by saluting a military flyover alongside UFC chief Dana White on the Blue Room balcony, and ended the night watching fireworks from inside the blood-splattered cage.

Who said what

Using the White House lawn for a “violent sporting event sponsored by light beer and cryptocurrencies was overwhelmingly unpopular, garnering the support of just 31% of Republicans and 11% of independents in a Reuters-Ipsos poll,” The Washington Post said. But the spectators, which included at least nine Cabinet secretaries, “reveled in the unabashed masculinity of the scene,” The Wall Street Journal said, “cheering on fighters as they bloodied each other’s faces.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the fights as a “gift to the American people.” But it was “streamed exclusively on Paramount+,” a subscription service whose “owners have close ties to Trump,” the Journal said.

What next?

Trump “sought to tie the fights to larger celebrations” of America’s 250th anniversary, The Associated Press said. But the event “was so geared toward himself” that fellow G7 leaders “pushed back” their summit in France so he “could attend his cage-match party and then fly to Europe” overnight.

Rifts within the Labour party look set to fracture along new lines, as a Labour MP says she’ll reintroduce the highly controversial assisted dying bill.

Lauren Edwards, MP for Rochester and Strood, has said she will use her second place in the Private Members’ Bill ballot to bring forward the same Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) bill Kim Leadbeater introduced last year. The original bill was narrowly voted through by the House of Commons but fell in April after running out of time to clear the House of Lords because of the huge number of safeguarding amendments tabled.

“By bringing exactly the same legislation, Edwards is threatening to trigger rarely used powers to override peers’ objections should they refuse to pass it again”, said the BBC. Under the Parliament Acts – only used seven times in the past century – a bill that has been voted through by the Commons in two consecutive parliamentary sessions can pass into law without the Lords’ approval.

What did the commentators say?

The original bill, on which MPs were give a “free vote” according to conscience, caused deep divisions in Parliament. And as Edwards makes her new move, her fellow Labour MPs are also “at each other’s throats” over their party’s future direction, said The Independent. Last time round, Keir Starmer voted in favour of the bill and one of his potential leadership contenders, former health secretary Wes Streeting, voted against. “Andy Burnham’s position is not clear”.

Labour MP Ashley Dalton, who has cancer, is “deeply concerned” that the bill is returning. “Voters put us in power to reduce the cost of living and fix the NHS,” she told The Independent. We debated this “deeply divisive and flawed” bill for over a year but its supporters did not “listen or to make the necessary changes”.

Supporters of assisted dying “insist” the bill only failed because “a handful of peers blocked it”, said Hannah Barnes in The New Statesman. “They are ideologically opposed to the principle,” Sarah Wootton of campaign group Dignity in Dying told the magazine. In response to fears that vulnerable people could be coerced into taking their own lives, she said current criminal law requires “no systemic exploration” of whether a terminally ill person who takes their own life has been coerced to do so. “I don’t see how you can argue that having greater scrutiny, transparency and regulation” won’t protect people “more than the status quo”.

Yet “blaming a handful of peers for the bill’s demise ignores the concerns that were raised by others before debate even began”, said Barnes. There were numerous worries from across the political spectrum “about the bill’s lack of pre-legislative scrutiny and the absence of detail about how assisted dying would work in practice”. There was no support from “the medical royal colleges”, nor from “any major disability charity or organisation”.

I support the right to die but not this legislation – because it only “covers a vanishingly small number of people”, whose needs could really “be met via decent palliative care”, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. It is designed for a person who has six or less months to live, is of sound mind and wishes to die without pain or uncertainty. But “when I talk to people about” assisted dying, most of those who “want the right” are those who do not want “to spend years in expensive, suspended animation while their dementia costs eat away at everything they’ve worked for”. But this legislation “is precisely designed not to provide for people who do not wish to have a slow death via dementia”. I fear politicians are “much more squeamish about that aspect of wanting the right to die than the average British person”.

What next?

Some doubt that the legislation would even pass the House of Commons this time. If it doesn’t, it would hardly be “a surprise, given that Leadbeater’s legislation passed its Commons Third Reading by just 23 votes”, said The Spectator. “That means only 12 MPs would need to switch from support to opposition for it to fall.”

Edwards has claimed she does not want the bill to be forced through and is open to making changes. “There undoubtedly are lots of peers who have tabled sensible amendments, and they should be considered in the usual way,” she told BBC Radio 4. “It’s all about following the proper democratic processes that we have.”

A few hours after the result of the Brexit referendum was announced, the then UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, appeared on ITV’s “Good Morning Britain”, said Laëtitia Langlois on The Conversation. To general astonishment, he said that a key pledge of the campaign – to divert the £350m that Britain was sending to the EU each week to the NHS instead – would “probably not be delivered”. Call it the start of a decade of national “Bregret”.

Many voters would dispute that summary, said Philip Aldrick and Dan Hanson on Bloomberg, though polls show a majority of Britons are now in favour of rejoining the EU. Economists, meanwhile, are still squabbling about how much Brexit has cost. Bloomberg’s latest estimate, of between 2% and 4% of gross domestic product, is conservative compared with some calculations of 6% to 8%. Cambridge University’s pro-Brexit economist Graham Gudgin puts the damage at 1%. Whatever the figure, the experience of UK businesses has been largely negative, rendering the promise of greater sovereignty a farce.

‘More red tape than ever’

Brexit hasn’t proved the “abject catastrophe” that some thought it would be at the time, said Jeremy Warner in The Daily Telegraph. You can point to some continuing success stories – the City of London is one – and there is “evident relief in the tech sector that the UK is not part of the oppressive regulatory regime the EU is establishing for AI”.

What’s more, there are plenty of other, unrelated reasons for Britain’s current malaise. But Brexit has meant “more red tape than ever” and – worse – has “acted like an energy-annihilating black hole”, inducing “a paralysing effect” on the economy.

‘Big bang’ reversal unrealistic

Some Brexiteer economists reckon that “over the years, the positives will build”, which they may, said Richard Partington in The Guardian. Some also argue that “Brexit was botched”, which is clearly true. But it’s also redolent of the “real communism has never been tried” response to the dystopia of Soviet Russia: it ignores the basic reality.

Meanwhile, the world has moved in a “Brexit-hostile direction”, said Martin Wolf in the FT. In 2016, the idea of “global Britain” was not quite as absurd as it is today, “with globalisation in retreat, the US unreliable, Russia at war in Europe and China even more autocratic and mercantilist”.

That said, a “big bang” reversal of Brexit is unrealistic. As Heraclitus said “you cannot step into the same river twice” – and another referendum would be “highly divisive and re-embittering”. The answer is to emulate Switzerland’s patchwork of treaties that cover the most important parts of the relationship. The UK must get close to its European partners again, “bit by careful bit”.

Presiding over America’s 250th anniversary celebrations should have been an easy win for Donald Trump, said David Frum in The Atlantic. “He is a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas.” But the president’s plans for Washington DC are shaping up to be “a fiasco”. They were set to include a series of concerts on the National Mall; but almost all of the acts scheduled to headline the 4th of July weekend have pulled out, complaining that what they’d been told would be a non-partisan event had turned into something else.

An irate Trump said that “instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear”, he’d bring the “Number One Attraction anywhere in the World”: himself.

‘Threadbare’ celebrations

Celebrations will officially kick off this Sunday, Trump’s 80th birthday, with, of all things, a series of Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial arts bouts in an arena at the White House. Are Americans ready for this, asked Jack Crosbie in Rolling Stone: “bloody cage fights” on the South Lawn?

Back in 2024, a friend told me that he was voting for Trump in part because he couldn’t bear the thought of Kamala Harris and the Democrats presiding over the 250th anniversary. He had a point, said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review. Just imagine. “It would have been a year-long lecture with 4 July a day of solemn reflection and recrimination.” As it is, though, we’re still not getting much of a celebration, just another Trump rally, and some cage fights; even the remarkable collection of musical “has-beens and one-hit wonders” assembled – Vanilla Ice is the headliner – has begun to fall apart. While the semiquincentennial party will still be special to Americans, “it will feel far more threadbare than it has any right to be”.

Insatiable ego

It’s a shame, said Max Burns in The Hill. America’s bicentennial, in 1976, also came at a tense time. America was “only beginning to process the traumas of the Vietnam War”. President Ford had recently faced two assassination attempts in a month. Yet the country still managed to unite to celebrate.

Trump has ruined America’s 250th birthday by making it all about himself, with his vainglorious architectural schemes, his cage fights, his plans for a new $250 note bearing his image. His insatiable ego has made it impossible for anyone who isn’t a diehard Trump fan to enjoy what should be a shared cultural moment. “Oh, well – maybe we’ll get it right for the tricentennial in 2076.”

What happened

The Supreme Court on Thursday night rejected Alabama’s emergency request to proceed with the execution of convicted murderer Jeffery Lee using nitrogen gas, despite lower courts finding the method unconstitutionally cruel. Three conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — said they would have allowed the scheduled execution to proceed. Lee, convicted of killing two people in a pawnshop in 1998, would have been the ninth inmate killed by nitrogen hypoxia since Alabama pioneered the oxygen-starvation method in 2024.

Who said what

The Supreme Court’s decision “capped an extraordinary legal back-and-forth over the humaneness” of nitrogen hypoxia, The Associated Press said, and handed “at least a temporary, rare victory for opponents of capital punishment.” It is “highly unusual for the Supreme Court to stop an execution at the last minute,” The New York Times said, and this aberration “potentially sets the stage for a broader legal battle over the constitutionality” of the controversial execution tool.

What next?

Alabama is “prepared to do whatever is necessary” to see Lee’s “lawful sentence carried out,” state Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement. Lee’s legal team urged Gov. Kay Ivey (R) to “restore the jury’s verdict of life without parole,” which the trial judge overruled using a since-abolished override option.

What happened

President Donald Trump on Thursday named Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton to replace Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Trump picked Clayton after a “revolt from lawmakers” over his choice of housing official Bill Pulte as acting DNI, The New York Times said. Pulte’s appointment “derailed the congressional reauthorization of one of the government’s most powerful surveillance authorities.” The House left town earlier this week after rejecting a three-week extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires at midnight Friday.

Who said what

Before Pulte’s elevation, lawmakers “were close to assembling a bipartisan coalition” to reauthorize Section 702 after months of “difficult” negotiations “over surveillance reforms,” said Axios. Clayton’s nomination “garnered praise from both parties in Congress,” The Washington Post said, even though he also lacks the “extensive national security expertise required for the position by law.”

Clayton would be a “terrific DNI,” said Rep. Jim Himes (Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. But “there’s really not a negotiation” on Section 702 “until the president backs away from Bill Pulte — and that is a near-unanimous belief” in Congress. Trump told reporters he still plans to make Pulte acting DNI “for a little while” starting June 19.

What next?

The Senate Intelligence Committee scheduled a June 17 confirmation hearing for Clayton. The House is “not expected to vote again until June 23,” Politico said, “effectively ensuring” that Section 702 remains “stuck in limbo.”

As the UK reels from anti-immigration protests, its neighbours on the continent are driving through a massive overhaul of their migration and asylum rules.

From today, all 27 EU states must follow a single set of rules on border screening and asylum procedures that include expanded detention and fast-track removal powers. The new Pact on Migration and Asylum will be backed by a shared digital database, and the establishment of “return hubs” outside EU borders for failed asylum-seekers. The aim “is to end a patchwork system where someone arriving in Greece faces an entirely different legal reality than someone arriving in Germany”, said Euronews.

It’s unclear what knock-on effect these stricter, uniform EU rules will have on UK asylum claims and irregular arrivals. But some are already warning that it could make Britain more attractive to migrants – just as tensions around immigration rachet up.

What did the commentators say?

There is “growing recognition” that, to curtail “the rise of hard-right parties” across the continent, “centrists must be able to show that they are responding to their citizens’ concerns about ­increasingly uncontrolled immigration”, said The Times’ editorial board.

The EU’s new goal is to “reduce irregular arrivals, speed up procedures” and “limit the number of people who fall off the radar” within the bloc, said Politico. Member countries that “receive the most migrants” will also get more support, either in the form or cash “or the relocation of migrants from one country to another”.

But the new deportation rules “will enable what more than 80 human rights organisations call ‘ICE-style’ detection, raids, detention and offshore return practices across Europe”, said geopolitical analyst Shada Islam in The Guardian. One MEP “quite rightly calls the pact a ‘legal arsenal serving a xenophobic ideology’”. All the talk of control and deterrence hides “what the European Network Against Racism calls an ‘imagined whiteness’, a political construct that defines who naturally belongs to Europe and who remains a permanently suspect outsider”.

The impact on the UK “is likely to be uneven”, said the UK in a Changing Europe think tank. It’s possible that, if Europe is rejecting asylum claims more quickly, “some rejected applicants may attempt onward movement toward the UK”. But “stronger” border enforcement in the EU may reduce overall “movement towards the north”.

No, more illegal migrants may now “look to Britain, which has no returns deals and weaker defences”, said James Crisp, Europe editor of The Telegraph. “One such weakness is the soft border with Ireland.” We can’t harden that border without threatening the Good Friday Agreement and Brexit treaties. Keir Starmer could use his much-vaunted EU reset negotiations “to pitch for an EU-wide migrant return deal” but that would mean “agreeing to European Commission migrant quotas”, which “could be politically suicidal”.

What next?

The ambition of the EU pact “is already running into reality”, said EuroNews. Member states are not signing up to anything like their share of asylum-seeker relocations, “with Hungary and Slovakia committing to none.”

For the UK, the “more realistic” approach is to push for greater intelligence sharing and more cooperation on migration, said The Telegraph’s Crisp. Both “Northern Ireland and Ireland are struggling to adapt to the challenges of modern migration”, so if everyone wants to “preserve and protect a common travel area that has lasted more than a century, they need to find a way to ensure its safeguards are still fit for purpose”.

“Women are angry. Vexed. Livid. FUMING,” said Helen Coffey in The Independent. And women in Britain are "apparently the angriest in Europe”.

According to the latest Hologic Global Women’s Health Index, nearly one in four of us feel rage, compared with one in seven on the continent. The annual league table (based on polls of more than 76,000 women) revealed a “remarkable upsurge in fury”; rates of anger were 47% higher than the previous year, while levels in other European countries “remained fairly stable”. The UK dropped to its lowest-ever position, from 41st to 48th out of 142 countries in just a year.

This “fall from grace” of the world’s fifth-largest economy by GDP is “little short of a disgrace”. But given the medical misogyny, the crisis in women’s health and gynaecological care, significant gender pay gap, and relatively high rates of femicide, it’s “depressingly unsurprising”.

‘Lack of hope’ and profound pessimism

I might account for all that rage “all on my own”, said Deborah Ross in The Times. Only 27 of the 2,300 paintings owned by the National Gallery are by women – “you’ll be in and out in a flash”. Less than 3% of reported rapes result in charges. About a third of women have experienced sexual harassment or assault on public transport. Only 3% of venture capital goes to female founders. Male screenwriters have “sewn up all the television factual dramas”, so we are “spared a woman’s take on real events”. Care and domestic labour “still fall disproportionally on women”. Women are more likely to have their pain “dismissed by doctors”. Three women are still killed by men every week.

One in four women in England and Wales has also been raped or assaulted, said Emily Lawford in The New Statesman. Many have also been radicalised by Israel’s war in Gaza (and the government’s “apathy”), or the Jeffrey Epstein revelations.

Polling by Merlin Strategy for The New Statesman found that women aged 18 to 30 are 26 percentage points “less likely to feel positively about capitalism than young men”. They are also “much more pessimistic about the future”.

A “significant majority” feel isolated, ignored by the two main political parties, and fearful of Reform, but few seem to believe that voting Green will make a difference. And people they interact with online “reinforce their beliefs”; the femosphere both “reflects young women’s disaffection and perpetuates it, radicalising them further”. A profound “lack of hope” and pessimism has emerged over the past decade. “How could they not be angry?”

Lack of perspective on ‘how far their sex has come’

Actually, women in the West have never had it so good, wrote gender historian Zoe Strimpel in The Telegraph. They have an “overflowing cup”: the right to education, to choose whether to have children, to work, to keep our salary, and to “demand freedom from male coercion and violence”. A woman just flew past the moon, and “nobody even batted an eyelid”. Of course there are problems, and (sometimes violent) misogyny persists, but if Western women “want to make their mark”, there is very little stopping them.

These “furious young women”, with rights that women of the past “could only have dreamed of”, are channelling their anger into “false, often malign causes”, squandering their power. They seem to “lack any perspective on where they are now, and how far their sex has come”.

But “even those who are winning the game want to overthrow it”, said Jack Davey in The Critic magazine. The internet is “abuzz with the topic of ‘angry young women’”, but the ones I’ve met aren’t angry – they’re politicised. Gen Z women are “by far the most left-wing demographic in the country”; even the most privileged “want radical change”. That’s because, unlike young men’s problems, young women’s are “far less tangible”.

Most of these so-called “angry young women” are far more reasonable than the online caricatures, and “far more willing to compromise than polling would suggest”. But get used to them: angry young women are “here to stay”.

Swiss voters will decide this month whether to limit the country’s population to 10 million people. Critics say the anti-immigration measure could upend Switzerland’s economy.

The June 14 referendum has been “likened to a ‘Swiss Brexit,’” said Reuters. The right-wing Swiss People’s Party asserts that migration-driven population growth is “driving up rents and crime,” as well as pushing roads and other local infrastructure “to the limits.” They are selling the measure as a “sustainability initiative.” But opponents from the business community fear the measure would “limit Switzerland’s access to skilled labor and damage relations with the European Union.”

Foreign residents now make up 28% of the population, growing Switzerland’s population from 7.3 million to 9.1 million over the last quarter-century. Some residents are feeling the squeeze. “More and more people are living in the same space," Swiss banker and parliamentarian Thomas Matter said to Reuters.

Dismantling the ‘openness that has made the country rich’

The proposed cap features “two main measures” to curb population growth, said The New Yorker. One would impose “restrictions in the areas of asylum and family reunification” if the population exceeds 9.5 million. The other would terminate the right of European Union citizens to “work, study and live” in Switzerland if the population exceeds 10 million, a target that could arrive as soon as 2033. That would “rupture” Swiss relations with the EU and represent a dramatic shift for a country known as one of the “most cosmopolitan nations in Europe.”

Business leaders say those measures would also damage the Swiss economy. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, employs “5,000 foreign workers from 85 countries” in Zurich, said Seeking Alpha. Pharmaceutical company Roche employs thousands more. The country “cannot meet the need for bright minds on its own,” Roche CEO Severin Schwan said to shareholders earlier this year. The EU is more than a source of workers for Switzerland’s businesses, said Seeking Alpha. It is also the “biggest export destination” for Swiss products, and that business could dry up if the referendum passes.

The measure would “dismantle the openness that has made the country rich,” Joseph de Weck said at The Guardian. Switzerland’s diversified economy “keeps salaries high and income inequality comparatively low.” But there is “resentment that not everyone is getting their fair share of the pie” amid “sky-high rents and increasing urbanization,” said Bloomberg. The country should “put on the brakes before things get out of hand,” said Zurich bike shop owner Roland Meyer to the outlet.

‘Voters don’t like immigrants’

The vote reflects a “broader European trend” of right-wing parties “capitalizing on anxieties surrounding immigration, housing and public services,” said The Independent. That is creating a dilemma for EU governments. Their “rich economies” need workers to create wealth, Alan Beattie said at the Financial Times, “but their voters don’t like immigrants.”

Polling shows that “supporters and opponents are neck and neck,” said SWI, a Swiss news agency, with 52% opposed to the initiative and 45% in support. Swiss voters “vote with their wallet,” retired dentist Jan Kedzior said to Bloomberg. If the measure does pass, said the outlet, lawmakers “may try to water it down later to limit any economic fallout.”

What happeed

Consumer prices rose 4.2% last month from a year earlier, the highest inflation reading since April 2023, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Most of the increase was due to rising fuel prices. But the “higher energy costs are rippling through the food supply chain,” affecting beef, coffee and produce, The Washington Post said. Asked about the rising cost of living, President Donald Trump “took a surprisingly optimistic tack,” The Associated Press said. “I love the inflation,” he told reporters.

Who said what

Trump’s take was “unexpected” given that voters rank the economy “as a top concern — and have given Trump low marks on that issue” after he’d pledged in 2024 to “quickly vanquish inflation,” the AP said. “His argument now is that higher prices are solely a function of the Iran war” and that “relief is already on its way” because of a “secret mission” that he said had already moved 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. “As soon as this war is over,” he told reporters, prices will drop “like a rock.”

What next?

Despite Trump’s claims, efforts to reopen the strait “have so far stalled” and oil disruptions are already baked in through 2026, Reuters said.

What happened

Bill Gates told the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday he made a “grave error in judgment” by ever meeting with Jeffrey Epstein but “never witnessed nor had any indication” of his “ongoing criminal conduct,” according to his opening statement. As Gates appeared for his closed-door testimony, The New York Times published new details on the White House’s “freakout over the Epstein files.”

Who said what

Gates met with Epstein between 2011 and 2014 to discuss global health fundraising, the Microsoft founder said, and later discovered he “was working to use information about my infidelities — in addition to many lies that he layered on top — to pressure me to re-engage with him.” Gates said his extramarital affairs had “nothing to do with” Epstein, but the “unsuccessful” blackmail effort “shows some of the ways he tried to leverage his interactions with me to further his agenda.”

The Epstein scandal “consumed and often paralyzed the highest levels of the Trump administration” last summer, the Times reported. President Donald Trump “wanted the whole thing buried,” but Vice President JD Vance “wanted to release all the files,” including “nipple-related documents” and other “unsubstantiated material” about Trump.

What next?

Following the Times report, the White House is “abuzz over the leak about leak control,” said Axios.

Police have deployed water cannons to quell another night of violent protests in Belfast, and “civil war predictions seem to be increasing by the hour,” said John Harris in The Guardian.

Despite the family of stabbed Belfast man Stephen Ogilvie insisting that “unrest is not welcome”, online figures including Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson have fuelled anger, promoted protest, and are pushing the idea of a civil unrest – not only in Northern Ireland but also in the rest of the UK. Online fury is starting to have tangible consequences in the real world.

What did the commentators say?

This is not the first time “far-right figures” have used “incendiary language” to target ethnic minorities and migrants, said Shane Raymond in The Journal. Violent disorder in Southampton after Henry Nowak’s murder, “weeks of riots” last year in Northern Ireland, and the Stockport riots in 2024 were all triggered online. Misinformation, snowballing quickly on social media, played a large part in this week’s Belfast protests: there were even claims that the victim was a child, and had died from their wounds – that “was shared by an Irish county councillor”.

This is a “new type of civil disobedience”, said Finn McRedmond in The New Statesman. Northern Ireland’s “sectarian angst” has been replaced by a simmering resentment shared throughout England and the rest of the British Isles. It is “all connected now”: the “new atavistic rage of our time” is binding “north and south, east and west” in a “more straightforward form of ethnic conflict”.

Social media is being used to recast Britain as a “violent dystopia”, said Harris in The Guardian, and “smooth the path to power of some of the most terrifying politicians Britain has ever seen” – including “king of the civil war genre”, Nigel Farage. A vision of Britain in perpetual crisis is fed into “algorithmically curated video feeds” of fighting and riots. Politicians need to understand what people are seeing on phones “so overused that their screens are full of cracks” – “much like their owners’ understanding” of what is still a “largely stable country”.

Claiming we are on the verge of a civil war is “not only unconvincing, but potentially harmful”, said Jonathan Portes of the UK in a Changing Europe academic think tank. Throwing the term around “distracts from underlying issues”, contributing instead to a “more polarised and less constructive political environment”. Yes, “trust in institutions has declined”, but “this is neither new nor unique to the UK”. What is new is the rhetoric of crisis emerging from “fringe spaces” to “mainstream commentary”. This “exaggeration” is not “harmless” but “protest is not insurgency, and polarisation is not civil war”.

What next?

“It’s past time to moan about values and tolerance,” said The Times’ editorial board. Keir Starmer has condemned the Belfast protests but his “bemused and drifting government has done nothing to tackle the root cause”: a perception, however erroneous, that legal and illegal immigration “is out of control”.

Some suggest the solution is an end to the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland but that’s a “keystone” underpinning the Good Friday Agreement. What’s needed is “more intensive cooperation” with Ireland, and above all, Starmer needs to recognise the “explosive dimensions of immigration” and its “exploitation” by bad actors. Failure to do so would be a “national security risk”.

What happened

A federal audit released Tuesday detailed waste, neglect and deadly abuse at ICE’s largest immigration detention facility, Camp East Montana in Texas. The Government Accountability Office’s report attributed most of the camp’s “significant, pervasive issues” to ICE and the Army awarding an expedited $1.3 billion contract to a company with no experience running detention facilities. The mismanagement was found to have“created unsafe conditions that contributed to detainee deaths and suffering” and “millions of wasted tax dollars,” The Associated Press said.

Who said what

ICE wasted up to $11.5 million on meals and other services before the first detainees arrived at the desert tent camp in August, the report said, and a guard lost a loaded firearm that was never found. Three detainees have died in custody, and in the case of Geraldo Lunas Campos — ruled a homicide by the medical examiner — the contractor failed to provide ICE with required use-of-force reports, and evidence “was missing or destroyed.”

What next?

“Camp East Montana needs to be shut down, the contractor investigated” and “the crime of destruction of evidence referred to law enforcement,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) said in a statement. A Homeland Security Department spokesperson said that “far from closing, Camp East Montana is upgrading” under a new contractor.

What happened

The House on Tuesday gave final approval to $70 billion for ICE and Border Patrol using a budget reconciliation process that bypassed the need for any Democratic votes. The bill passed 214-212 along party lines. The Senate narrowly approved the bill last week. The funds are expected to pay for President Donald Trump’s migrant crackdown through the rest of his term.

Who said what

The bill’s passage capped “months of bitter gridlock that began in late January” when Democrats demanded reforms to ICE after agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, The Wall Street Journal said. This was a “major victory” for GOP leaders, The New York Times said. But “what began as a measure that unified Republicans eager to support” Trump’s hard-line deportation campaign had “devolved in recent weeks into a political albatross.”

The legislation “got sidetracked” over the $1 billion request for Trump’s White House ballroom and by thwarted bipartisan efforts to block his “politically toxic” $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, The Associated Press said. The ballroom funds were “scrapped,” but like the $140 billion Republicans gave ICE and Border Patrol last year, this new $70 billion “will come with virtually no strings attached.”

What next?

Trump was expected to sign the package into law on Wednesday.

What happened

Primary voters in Maine, South Carolina and Nevada on Tuesday set up key races that could determine which party controls Congress after November’s midterms. Democrats chose Maine oyster farmer and combat veteran Graham Platner to challenge Sen. Susan Collins (R). Republicans picked House candidates for Maine and Nevada seats they hope to flip, and Democrats chose Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford to take on Gov. Joe Lombardo (R).

A week after California’s primary, The Associated Press projected Tuesday night that Republican Steve Hilton beat Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer for second place in the gubernatorial race and will face Democrat Xavier Becerra in the general election.

Who said what

On a busy primary night, Platner’s “character test” was the “main event,” USA Today said. And despite recent “embarrassing revelations about his personal life,” he “cruised to victory.” In his victory speech, Platner “openly acknowledged” he has “repair work to do,” the AP said.

South Carolina’s GOP gubernatorial primary was the “latest test of President Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican electorate,” CNN said, and while his endorsement was “helpful,” it wasn’t a “slam dunk” for Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, who failed to get 50% and faces a June 23 runoff. On the other hand, Trump “appears to have ended the political career” of Reps. Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman, said Reuters, as both gave up their House seats to run for governor and fell far short.

What next?

California has come under fire for its slow vote-counting, the AP said, but the “final results for Maine could take even longer” thanks to its ranked-voting system.

Kemi Badenoch’s call to scrap equalities guidelines for police and other public bodies has opened up a new front in the culture wars amid tensions over the death of Henry Nowak and riots in Belfast sparked by a knife attack by a Sudanese asylum seeker.

The Tory leader said the landmark Equality Act 2010 does offer a valuable “shield” against discrimination. But the Public Sector Equality Duty, which places an active requirement on public bodies to demonstrate the promotion of equality, had become a legal “minefield”, she said. It should be repealed “in its entirety”.

What did the commentators say?

Comparisons have been made between Henry Nowak and George Floyd, “but a more accurate precedent” for the murder of 18-year-old student Nowak would be the case of Stephen Lawrence”, said Andrew Doyle, the author of “Free Speech and Why It Matters”, in The Washington Post. That “horrific crime led to a much-needed overhaul of police practice” characterised by institutional racism.

Today, UK policing suffers from a “different form of institutional bias, which prioritises group identity and the tenets of diversity, equity and inclusion over impartial and rigorous law enforcement”. Nowak’s death “should lead to a similarly urgent reappraisal”.

By “incubating” diversity, equality and inclusion guidelines in the public sector, Labour and the Conservatives have “presented Reform UK with an open goal”, said The Times. With the Makerfield by-election coming up on 18 June, Nigel Farage has “weaponised the Nowak case”, alleging institutional “anti-white prejudice” and a “two-tier” justice system, giving fresh impetus to Reform’s calls to scrap the Equality Act entirely.

Keir Starmer is “right” to claim that Farage is “playing politics with a tragedy” but the PM “downplays genuine concerns about politicised policing”. In this febrile political atmosphere, it is Badenoch’s “common sense” approach that “emerges from this debate with most credit”, said The Times.

Badenoch’s response “should be commended for its sensible and responsible tone”, said The Independent. While suggesting improvements to the Equality Act, her speech “was in effect a strong defence of the principles behind it” and has Farage’s “simplistic slogans on the run”.

Given the recent “attacks on transgender rights” in the UK, “it is perhaps not surprising that the equalities consensus is all but dead now even with race”, said David Maddox in The Independent. Farage’s colourful rhetoric wins headlines but he remains a “policy vacuum”, so Badenoch has “spied her opportunity” to take the lead in “a policy arms race on the right of politics to own the culture wars agenda”.

What next?

Badenoch’s intervention has turned the “once uncontroversial” public sector equality duty into the “new battleground in Britain’s culture wars”, said Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian. She linked equality guidelines to the Bank of England’s decision to replace historical figures on banknotes with images of British wildlife.

But experts in equality law say many of the examples cited by critics “misunderstand its purpose and how it operates in practice”. They stress that the duty “does not require public organisations to provide a particular service or introduce a particular policy”.

Human rights barrister Karon Monaghan said the attack on equality guidelines in the public sector fuelled the right-wing attack on anti-discrimination provisions more broadly, including the Equality Act. “Do we want a society where women can be paid unequally, where black people can be told they can’t have a job, where disabled people can’t get into work?” she said.

With Farage and now the Tories expected to make scrapping “woke” equality rules a major part of their campaign at the next general election, “we may get our answer” then, said Mohdin.

What happened

Progressive Los Angeles city council member Nithya Raman placed second in the city’s mayoral primary race and will face Mayor Karen Bass in a runoff election, The Associated Press projected Monday. Republican reality TV personality Spencer Pratt was initially in second place after last week’s election but lost ground with every vote update, and Raman overtook him over the weekend. Pratt’s slide to third place is “not possible,” President Donald Trump claimed on social media. “Rigged Elections!”

Who said what

In California’s “notoriously slow vote-counting process,” Republicans typically vote in person and Democrats mail in their ballots, which get counted later, the AP said. These “fleeting Republican leads are common enough to have a name — the ‘red mirage,’” The New York Times said. And this year, with the Democratic gubernatorial field in flux until the end, the election was “primed to create even more of a red mirage” than normal.

“There has been no evidence of impropriety” in Los Angeles, a “deep-blue city” that “hasn’t had a Republican mayor in more than two decades,” The Wall Street Journal said. But by “escalating allegations of election fraud in California,” Trump and his allies are “turning to a playbook they have used previously to sow doubt about election results,” including his 2020 loss.

What next?

Trump’s baseless “Democratic scam” claims “gave an unusually clear preview of how he could greet any disappointing results for his party in November, when control of Congress is at stake,” the Times said.

Henry Nowak would “still be alive today” if Britain and Europe had “stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants”, said J.D. Vance on X. The “proper response – the only response – is righteous anger”.

The “most outspoken member” of an “evangelistic” administration, Vance’s ire does seem to have a “particular focus on the UK”, said The Times. He has commented on protests around abortion clinics, and told Keir Starmer that there have been “infringements on free speech” in Britain.

Vance is now using the Nowak murder to “bolster” his narrative of Britain as a “once powerful nation” “pandering to liberalism”. This could just be a reminder for American voters that the Republican Party retains an “uncompromising approach to wokeism, borders and policing” in the upcoming mid-terms. But if Vance is anointed successor to the Maga movement, comments such as these could be a sign of things to come.

What did the commentators say?

“J.D. Vance is wrong to intervene in the controversy around the murder of Henry Nowak,” said The Telegraph in an editorial. That said, “there is a good deal of hypocrisy on show”: Labour Remainers had no issue with Barack Obama “intervening” in the Brexit debate, and have had “no compunction about condemning Donald Trump over domestic US policy. “Inevitably, politicians welcome foreign interference only if it suits their arguments”, when “it would be far better if each stayed out of the other’s business”.

Vance was “surely right” to call out the “politics of self-hatred” in the British justice system, said Ameer Kotecha in The Spectator. It is “perfectly legitimate” for the US to comment publicly on what is happening in the UK. The government’s reaction, arguing he has “crossed a red line of diplomatic protocol”, has been hypocritical and “frankly pathetic”.

Britain is just as guilty. For instance, the Labour Party sent 100 activists to campaign for Kamala Harris in 2024. “Rather than engage in shameless pearl-clutching, Starmer’s government should listen to what our closest ally is telling us.”

Interventions like Vance’s are “deepening the split between the Trump administration and Britain’s Labour government”, said Dominic Green in The Wall Street Journal. The division is inherent. Where Vance sees a mission to “stabilise values and societies after decades of self-inflicted confusion”, Britain sees “Bible-bashing and race-baiting”, and hears “only atavistic calls to the wrong kind of identity politics”.

This “political opportunism” against Britain goes far deeper than the vice president, said James Schneider in The New Statesman. “The exploitation of Nowak’s death is of a piece with a clear US state strategy, one which turns Europe into a source for American rhetoric.” Vance talks about Britain “not as an equal, but as a provincial outpost of the imperial system, nominally independent and permanently available for correction”.

What next?

Vance’s stance could have implications for the next election on this side of the Atlantic, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. If Vance remains in the White House as vice president, “or even as Trump’s successor” after the US elections in 2028, it’s hard to imagine him “standing idly by” when the UK goes to the polls, likely in 2029.

At best, the reaction to the Nowak intervention shows us that “plenty of Britons still reflexively dislike being lectured by Americans”. Yet, it has also warned us “not to take our political sovereignty for granted. Sooner or later, we may need to defend it.”