Eliot Wilson

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.

When the agenda for this week's Nato summit in Washington DC was announced, one of the items on it was funding for the alliance. This was no surprise: the need to financially supporting Ukraine since the Russian invasion in 2022 and the possibility of a second Trump presidency leading to a lower US commitment have brought the issue of money into sharp focus. It transpires that the new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is urging his fellow Nato leaders to increase their levels of defence spending, but he may find that his moral authority is shaky. The subject of defence spending is one which has bedevilled the alliance for years.

Next summer, David Lammy will celebrate 25 years as a Member of Parliament. At 51, he has just been appointed Foreign Secretary after three years shadowing the role. Despite rare and valuable ministerial experience, he is an unlikely candidate for Britain’s chief diplomat. His first pronouncements as foreign secretary stress change: ‘a reset on Europe, a reset on our relationships with the global south, and a reset on climate’. We will have not only resets but ‘gear shifts’, whatever that might mean: ‘gear shifts on European security and on global security, given all the problems that we’re seeing in the Middle East’. It is very Starmerist to treat change as a destination rather than a journey.

When Rishi Sunak stood in the rain in Downing Street to announce a general election on 4 July, he made a speech which was unusually personal. Looking back on his steep rise to power – five years ago he was not even a cabinet minister – he spoke of the challenges the country has faced and how they have affected him. Seeing how people responded to the pandemic, he said: 'I have never been prouder to be British'. The Prime Minister knows this is a weak point for him The Prime Minister knows moments like this are a weak point for him.

Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky's five-year term is up, but he's staying put. Unsurprisingly, some of Zelensky's critics – and the Kremlin – have questioned his legitimacy. But Zelensky, who marked five years in office on 20 May, is right not to step down. The idea that, as a result, there has been some unprecedented outrage against democracy simply doesn’t stand up. It is impossible to conduct a free, fair and representative presidential election The practical problem in holding an election is obvious. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its occupation of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014 gave it control of 16,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory.

Sometimes life comes at you fast. Barely 18 months ago, Sir Keir Starmer, beginning to scent general election victory in his future, pledged to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected chamber as part of a project to 'restore trust in politics'. By Tuesday this week, the Labour leader in the upper house, Baroness Smith of Basildon, could make no firmer a commitment than keeping an 'open mind' to the possibility of phasing out the remaining 92 hereditary peers. That seems like quite a journey. Labour’s plans have gradually diminished since 2022 House of Lords reform is in some ways the ultimate parlour game for constitutional obsessives. It has a familiar and well-worn charm: it is, after all, more than 100 years since H.H.