In the headlines

Keir Starmer sought to save his premiership in the wake of his party’s disastrous performance in the local elections last week, acknowledging in a speech this morning that the government has “made mistakes” but reiterating his promise not to “walk away” from No 10. Labour MPs and union bosses continued to demand the PM’s resignation after the speech; backbencher Catherine West dropped her threat to trigger an immediate leadership contest, but said she still wanted the PM to stand down and called for an “orderly transition” in September. Donald Trump called Iran’s response to America’s 14-point peace proposal “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE”, as it reportedly fell short of American demands for a 20-year moratorium on Iranian nuclear enrichment. Meanwhile, Iran warned yesterday that any British or French ships sent to the strait would face a “decisive” response. Adolescence was the big winner at last night’s Bafta TV Awards, taking home a record-breaking four wins, including best actor (Stephen Graham) and best supporting actor (Owen Cooper). Other winners included The Celebrity Traitors and the BBC comedy Amandaland.

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Comment

The PM delivering his “underwhelming” speech this morning. Carl Court/Getty

Keir Starmer’s “Willy Wonka phase”

We are entering a week that will “define British politics for years to come”, says Tom McTague in The New Statesman: Labour MPs have finally – “and definitively” – concluded that Keir Starmer is not up to the job, and the conversation has turned from whether to remove him to precisely how to do so. What did for the PM in the end wasn’t last week’s local election results, which were only as abysmal as they were expected to be, but what Cabinet members felt was his “lamentable” response to them over the weekend: his “tone deaf” initial reaction; the absurd appointments of Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman; and today’s “underwhelming” speech, which didn’t impress MPs who saw a draft of it over the weekend. The dam holding backbenchers from moving against the prime minister has broken. “Labour stands on the precipice.”

Starmer has entered what many of his former advisers call his “Willy Wonka phase”, says Patrick Maguire in The Times: a world of “pure imagination”. Labour figures have been counselling the prime minister for months, in public and in private, to pack it in. Instead, he seems insistent on offering weary voters “another eight years of nothingness”; of learnt helplessness; of “pained and empty stridency”; of Guardian pieces “collapsing under the accumulated weight of their own clichés”; of ponderously describing problems rather than “using Labour’s landslide majority to solve them”. As one “near-suicidal” Labour MP asked after the appointments of Harman and Brown: “Are they high?” No wonder so many pretenders look at all this and think they’re in with a decent shot. “The prime minister has all but taken himself off the pitch.”

😡😬 What’s striking about Starmer’s plight, says Samuel Earle in The Guardian, is not that he is “viscerally hated” by some people, which was also true of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Boris Johnson. It is that he seems to be viscerally hated “across the board”. Not long ago, the spited Corbyn wing of the party was alone in its loathing for the PM. Now you’d be “hard-pressed to say which constituency hates Starmer the most”. For a PM who seems to value inoffensiveness above all else, that is “quite the achievement”.

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Design

Winners of this year’s Monocle Design Awards include Swiss Bank’s slick new headquarters on Lake Geneva, defined by thin, curved slabs with striking views; the French studio Waiting for Ideas’ aluminium turntable with its discreet dials; Dutch design brand Bothi’s simple, soft-touch lights; a recently renovated Haussmannian administrative building in Paris’s Place du Châtelet; a tennis facility rooted in West African traditions in Accra, Ghana; and the colourful “Suan San Pocket Park” in Bangkok, which offers a much-needed escape from the Thai capital’s concrete jungle. To see more, click the image.

The best years of your life

The Swedish rapper Yung Lean (us neither) has gone viral for his latest music video – a grim but mesmeric paean to the rigours of school. There’s plenty of unpleasantness, of course – heads flushed down loos; random boy-on-boy violence; innovative drug use and so on – but it’s oddly gripping, and richly rewards viewing in full, especially when you get to the extraordinarily choreographed school photo in the final third.

If you’ve been glued to social media in recent weeks, you may have seen it. But our bet is that, as a sensible grown up, you haven’t. So, you’re welcome.

That’s what makes The Knowledge so brilliant, and easily worth the piffling £4 a month we charge for it. You get the big stuff, obviously, but we also unearth treasures from the creative corners of the internet, while sparing you the horror of finding them for yourself.

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