In the headlines

Keir Starmer has told his cabinet he will fight on. Around 80 Labour MPs have publicly called on the prime minister to stand down and more than 90 have come out to back him. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper were reportedly among those privately urging Starmer to set an orderly timetable for his departure, but no cabinet members directly challenged the PM at Downing Street this morning. Zack Polanski has admitted to living on a London houseboat and probably failing to pay the correct council tax, despite previously claiming the canal craft wasn’t his primary home. The Green Party leader apologised for the “unintentional mistake” and said he had now “taken steps” to pay any tax he may be found to owe. A hearing aid that solves the “cocktail party problem” of not being able to pick out a single voice in a noisy room has shown what US researchers described as “unbelievable” results in early trials. The devices monitor brain activity to detect which conversation the wearer is trying to follow, then amplify that voice while quietening the others.

Comment

Mark Carney (L) and Anthony Albanese: re-vitalising the centre left. Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty

Politics isn’t as hard as Starmer makes it look

As Keir Starmer hangs on in Downing Street, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, he can at least console himself that he is not the only leader hated by the electorate. Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor, is “terminally unpopular”; so too Emmanuel Macron. Donald Trump was disliked even before he sent his bombers into Iran. Their predecessors were no more popular: think of Rishi Sunak, Olaf Scholz, Joe Biden. Each of the last four US presidents has had an average approval rating under 50%. Is it really possible that all these leaders, in all these countries, are useless? “What bad luck voters are having.” The real issue, surely, is public expectations. In rich and established democracies, “what people want from life goes up until no conceivable government can provide it”.

I’ve spent much of my life telling people governing is hard, says William Hague in The Times, but Starmer makes it look “almost impossible”. It’s not. Look at Canada and Australia, which have political systems similar to ours and are currently governed by the main centre-left party. Mark Carney has revitalised Canada’s liberals, winning three recent by-elections and earning personal approval ratings of 54%. Australian PM Anthony Albanese won re-election with a record majority last year and still polls well ahead of the opposition. It helps that both men are competent chief executives – they don’t appoint scandal-prone ambassadors or fire top civil servants to save their own skins. But more important, they govern from the centre: tax breaks to incentivise growth; continued fossil fuel production while boosting renewables; tough immigration policies. Neither leader is perfect and their administrations won’t last forever. But they have realised that “small changes are insufficient”, and voters are rewarding them for it. Labour MPs, take note.

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Photography

Popular Science has picked out 18 of the silliest finalists from the Comedy Wildlife Awards, including a bird with grass on to its face on a windy day in Yorkshire; a bridled guillemot chomping the head of its friend; a caring gorilla giving her baby a big sloppy kiss; a duck standing on a fence appearing to smoke on a crisp morning; a frog seemingly baptising an unwilling convert in a pond in Maine; and a young leopard whispering in his sister’s ear. To see more, click the image.

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