Keir starmer

This morning, in a blaze of publicity, Royal Navy commandos boarded a sanctioned oil tanker in the English channel in a move that No. 10 heralded as a blow against Vladimir Putin's war machine. It's good, of course, that for the first time in the war the British government has followed the example of the French and finally taken action. However, the boarding of the 107,000 ton Smyrtos has much more to do with political theatre than with actually strangling Russia’s economy.  The boarding of the Smyrtos has much more to do with political theatre than with strangling Russia’s economy  Though you’d never know it from statements from No.10 or Labour ministers, transporting and selling Russian oil is not in itself illegal.

In America, important men don’t seem to suffer too much over their links to the late Jeffrey Epstein.Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick and Paolo Zampolli, among others, might regret their past friendships with the world’s most famous sex criminal. Certainly, they resent having to face pesky questions about it.But the story just rumbles on, darkly, a source of endless intrigue and gossip and conspiracy theories – sustained as it is by the occasional publicity jolt, such as last week when First Lady Melania Trump, apparently without the knowledge of her husband, decided to give a big public statement denying that she, er, something something Jeffrey Epstein.

It reminded me a little of that wonderful Christmas Day truce in the first world war, when the two sides briefly came together, put aside their homicidal enmities and played a game of football and sang carols. The venue was the Riverside Stadium in Middlesbrough, fittingly on Good Friday. Boro, then second in the Championship, were hosting my team, Millwall, third in the Championship. The end of the season was nearing. The tension was acute and pressing and unrelenting. Whoever won would be in pole position for automatic promotion to the Premier League. Not an empty seat in the ground, Millwall too having sold out their allocation of 2,100 tickets. A frenetic, hostile atmosphere, the sets of supporters howling their abuse at the other side. A Manichean divide – unbridgeable, surely?

I am becoming rather fond of Prime Minister Starmer’s major foreign policy announcements. In early January, after US forces swooped into Venezuela and took President Maduro to New York to face trial, Keir Starmer was keen to get straight out in front of the cameras. There he said that he wanted to stress that "the UK was not involved in any way in this operation." As though the whole world had been expecting to hear that the British armed forces were indeed central in snatching the narco-terrorist from Caracas. This week it was again Starmer’s turn to stand behind a podium, British flags behind him, and deliver another statement that absolutely no one thought necessary. Speaking about the US-led strikes on Iran, he announced solemnly: "I want to set out our response.