FlyTheNest

Peace talks in Russia
The Kremlin said it was “no closer” to a breakthrough over Ukraine after President Trump’s envoy and son-in-law were made to wait several hours for their meeting with President Putin

Keir Starmer came to office light on policy, with a campaign strategy cribbed from a 1997 Tony Blair playbook which itself had been drafted in reaction to Labour’s traumatic defeat in 1992. For want of the courage to win a difficult argument over taxes, Starmer and his shadow chancellor bound themselves with pledges best suited to help Neil Kinnock beat John Major in a hypothetical rerun of an election 32 years previously.

Maybe the US constitution will withstand assault by Maga authoritarianism and a reliable transatlantic partnership can be restored. Maybe the model of rules-based, globalised free trade that suited Britain’s economy isn’t lost for ever. Just maybe. But also maybe the fall of American democracy is a looming geopolitical shock equivalent in scale to the collapse of the USSR.

It would be reassuring to think the prime minister is measuring that risk. It feels likelier he is just hoping bad things won’t happen. In that respect, Starmer’s foreign policy and Reeves’s budgets do form a doctrine of sorts. They are as one in claiming to deal with the world as it is, while their actions plead in vain for restoration of the world as it once was.