Olly robbins

Somewhere in the vast array of documents the Cabinet Office has gathered on the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador in Washington, there is a text message which Keir Starmer sent the night before he made the announcement. ‘You’ll be brilliant in challenging circumstances,’ he told Mandelson. ‘And after many years of our discussions, we get to work together side by side. I really look forward to that.’ The message was leaked after one of Starmer’s most difficult weeks in charge, a week which senior civil servants believe proves, once and for all, that the Prime Minister himself will never be brilliant in challenging circumstances.

Throughout the leadership contest, Liz Truss has been all too keen to paint herself as a Brexit queen, keen to slay the dragons of Brussels. Yet Mr S has been doing some digging into the Foreign Secretary’s past and it transpires she was rather more of a Europhile than previously revealed. Truss even headed up a pro-EU group that backed the Maastricht Treaty while a student at Oxford University doing PPE. Despite being a late convert to the Brexit cause, the PM-in-waiting was once an active Liberal Democrat and pro-European. As a blue stocking girl in the mid-1990s she was a key player in the federalist Oxford Reform Club, even being snapped alongside Theresa May's controversial EU negotiator Olly Robbins when the pair were students.