Eliot Wilson

We are a day short of Sir Keir Starmer marking 11 weeks as prime minister. His first 76 days have not been easy ones, and it is striking how often they have been dogged by relatively minor stories which have nonetheless contrived to make the new occupant of Downing Street look out of touch, high-handed or even slightly grasping. The most recent brickbat is a report that Starmer’s chief of staff, Sue Gray, earns more than her boss, receiving a salary of £170,000. The mechanics of this have been clumsy: shortly after Starmer took office, he signed off on a shake-up of pay scales for special advisers which was, in truth, long overdue.

Last week was electric with anticipation. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, visited London for a UK-US 'strategic dialogue', then he and Foreign Secretary David Lammy both travelled to Ukraine to meet with political and military leaders and discuss the ongoing conflict. Heading in the other direction was the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, who made for Washington DC with his outgoing national security adviser, Sir Tim Barrow, to meet President Joe Biden and hold talks on the global situation. By accident or design, the government allowed speculation to grow that the United Kingdom and the United States were close to an announcement that they were lifting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western-supplied munitions like the Anglo-French Storm Shadow cruise missile.

It is easy to become frustrated when politicians make statements that are blindingly obvious. Sometimes, however, it can be a useful corrective, a reminder of fundamental truths that commentary can obscure. Russia started this conflict. Russia illegally invaded Ukraine. Russia can end this conflict straight away. To reiterate, it was Russia who started this in the first place. They caused the conflict, they’re the ones who are acting unlawfully. These remarks to the media by Keir Starmer yesterday were prompted by Vladimir Putin.

President Joe Biden has hinted that the United States may shortly lift the restrictions it has placed on Ukraine’s use of long-range weapons. Until now, the US has forbidden the Ukrainian armed forces from using ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles to strike targets far beyond the border with Russia; this policy has been mirrored by the United Kingdom, which limits how the Storm Shadow cruise missiles it has supplied can be used. This change in policy, if it does materialise, is overdue, but welcome. ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles give Ukraine the ability to hit targets hundreds of miles away: the former has a range of around 190 miles, the latter more like 250 miles.

Labour's House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill to the Commons – which was presented today and will have its first substantive debate at second reading later in the autumn – is simple: it essentially ends the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the Lords, tying off what some will see as a loose end of Sir Tony Blair’s 'stage one' reform of the upper chamber in the House of Lords Act 1999. That legislation offered a compromise to opponents. At the end of 1998, Blair had concluded a secret deal with the leader of the Conservative peers, Viscount Cranborne, for 92 hereditary peers to remain in the Lords as an interim measure.

Jeremy Corbyn has teamed up with four other MPs elected as independents at the general election to form an 'Independent Alliance'. This, the former Labour leader was quick to point out, makes the new group the joint-fifth largest in the Commons, sharing that accolade with Reform UK and the Democratic Unionist Party. But in the battle for attention in parliament, Corbyn and his colleagues are going to be disappointed. What is the point of the Independent Alliance? Labour's majority of nearly 180 means that Corbyn's alliance won't give Keir Starmer sleepless nights, even if the group has already reached out to the seven Labour MPs who were suspended from the parliamentary party for six months after voting in favour of a abolishing the two-child benefit cap.

Keir Starmer is making a big mistake by cancelling the appointment of one of Britain’s top generals as national security adviser. General Gwyn Jenkins, the ex-vice-chief of the armed forces, was picked for the role by Rishi Sunak in April. Jenkins is a widely-respected military man and was a perfect choice for the job. But Starmer has reportedly axed Jenkins’s appointment and opted instead to re-run the application process. We can only guess at the motivation, because Downing Street has made no official announcement Jenkins is, technically, entitled to apply a second time.

The contest to be the next leader of the Conservative party, which has six entrants and will last until November, by necessity involves a great deal of reflection. It could hardly be any other way, in the wake of the party’s worst defeat in its 200-year history: every aspirant is right to understand that there can be no realistic hope of recovery without understanding how Conservatives came to such a calamitous and precipitous failure.

John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, is a distinguished broadcaster whose career spans seven decades, from interviewing the exiled King Mutesa II of Buganda to covering the post-Gaddafi civil war in Libya. Like any of us, however, he is not immune from a poorly considered opinion. This week, on Twitter, he stumbled awkwardly over the notion of recruiting former Afghan soldiers into the British army: The British Army is in serious need of recruits. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of highly motivated, SAS-trained Afghan soldiers who want to join up — but can’t because British officialdom insists they have to live in the UK for five years first. Not very sensible, surely?

It is possible to have some sympathy for the Defence Secretary John Healey, despite the irritating self-serving mantra of Rachel Reeves that the Conservatives have left a £22 billion fiscal ‘black hole’. Healey, generally a straightforward and sensible politician, has inherited a department with huge cultural problems, and real financial issues. In March, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee revealed that the MoD’s Equipment Plan for the next decade had a deficit of £16.9 billion, though some have suggested it may be more like £20 billion. Spending is out of control, wasteful, and unrealistic.

It's hard to keep track of Elon Musk. The X/Twitter boss has been busy taunting 'TwoTierKeir' Starmer over his handling of the UK riots, asking 'What the hell is going on?' in Britain. Musk has also launched legal action against a group of advertisers and major companies – including food giants Unilever and Mars – accusing them of unlawfully agreeing to 'boycott' X. 'It is war,' Musk said. Musk's bomb throwing delights his fans, but this legal action is a mistake Although Musk's bomb throwing delights his fans, this legal action seems like a mistake. The billionaire is a passionate advocate for free speech and must know that, even if – as seems unlikely – he wins this case, he can't force anyone to advertise on X. So what is Musk trying to achieve?

The British Army’s Field Army Threat Handbook has warned soldiers of potential Russian espionage at UK sites where Ukrainian military personnel are being trained. Possible methods identified include 'the use of remotely piloted aircraft systems, mobile and foot surveillance, virtual and physical approaches to training providers and interest from investigative journalists'. This is a threat we should take seriously, but it should also serve to clarify the United Kingdom’s current adversarial relationship with Russia.

On Friday night, I watched the news with a sick heart. I watched masked men in Sunderland throw bricks and beer cans at the police and chant racist slogans. I recognised the setting. I grew up in Sunderland: I spent 15 years of my life there and still have family there. I was in Keel Square, where the disorder began, in the early hours of New Year’s Day this year. There is no justification for the violence we have seen in towns and cities across the country this week. To attribute it to the tragic murder of three young girls in Southport on 29 July is mistaken, misleading and grotesque, weaponising the devastating loss their families have suffered for an extremist political agenda.

Nigel Farage was elected as MP for Clacton by a solid margin of 8,405. Four other Reform UK candidates were returned, and the party won 4.1 million votes. This surely was the beginning of a great change, the breaking of the mould of right-wing electoral politics. Farage spoke excitedly of creating a ‘bridgehead in parliament’ and said his party was ‘coming for Labour’ while it let the Conservatives ‘tear themselves apart’. Yet four weeks after the election, has the House of Commons proved disappointing for its new boy? There has been plenty of news for Farage to attach himself to. The Just Stop Oil protests at Heathrow enraged him, leading him to describe the group’s activities as ‘domestic soft terrorism’.

As the Conservative leadership contest gets underway, the various candidates are busy talking up their differences. But most of the candidates – from Kemi Badenoch to Robert Jenrick – hold one thing in common: they realise that the Tory party needs to change if it is to recover from its electoral wipeout. A key part of its catastrophic defeat was a fundamental failure of effectiveness and probity in government. But the party is already in danger of making the same mistake in its choice of next leader. Jenrick achieved the extraordinary distinction of being dropped from the cabinet before he turned 40 We all know that trust in politics and politicians has collapsed.

The new cabinet cannot be accused of laziness. John Healey, secretary of state for defence, has just been on a 48-hour tour of France, Germany, Poland and Estonia, all of them important military allies in different ways, trumpeting the new government’s ‘Nato-first’ defence policy. The highlight of Healey’s breakneck trip was his meeting with the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius. The two men have much in common: born 30 days apart in 1960, they worked as political advisers before achieving elected office. Both are solid, reliable, unshowy centrists within their parties. And on Wednesday, these two workhorses agreed a joint declaration on enhanced defence co-operation between the United Kingdom and Germany.

Keir Starmer has been in office for less than three weeks, but his government has spent an unusually large amount of time and energy on matters in Northern Ireland. With his newly appointed secretary of state, Hilary Benn, the Prime Minister visited Belfast within days of kissing hands, despite a schedule which also included the Nato summit in Washington. The administration faces a number of pressing problems in Northern Ireland which carry substantial price tags as well as powerful symbolic importance. Harland and Wolff was one of the great icons of Protestant industrial Belfast When Starmer and Benn met Northern Ireland’s first minister, Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin, one of the first issues to be discussed was the redevelopment of Casement Park in west Belfast.

While this new government’s approach to many issues – the NHS, prisons, China policy – seems to start with a ‘review’, a re-examination of defence policy seems reasonable. New Labour launched a Strategic Defence Review shortly after taking office in 1997. The coalition did a defence review in 2010, and David Cameron’s Conservative government undertook a review in 2015. On 16 July, the Ministry of Defence announced the details of the latest Strategic Defence Review. The headline is that, for the first time, it will be conducted by outsiders rather than government officials.