In the headlines

Downing Street is braced for a leadership challenge after allies of Wes Streeting told The Times and BBC he is preparing to resign and trigger a leadership election as soon as tomorrow. The Health Secretary’s spokesman refused to deny reports that he told confidants he is “going to go for it” after his 16-minute confrontation with Keir Starmer at No 10 this morning, before the King’s Speech. Britain will deploy drones, fighter jets and a warship as part of a multinational mission to re-open the Strait of Hormuz. Defence minister John Healey said the UK would dispatch autonomous mine-hunting equipment, Typhoon jets and the HMS Dragon, capable of shooting down ballistic missiles, to secure freedom of navigation in the waterway. Our taste for vegetables may begin before birth. Researchers from Durham University gave mothers either kale capsules or carrot capsules during their final months of pregnancy and found that the resulting children were more likely to react positively to the vegetable they had been exposed to in the womb.

Comment

Dreaming of No 10. Andy Burnham and Angela Rayner at the 2021 Labour conference. Jeremy Selwyn/Getty

Starmer: Labour’s worst option, except for all the others

Britain has a “masterpiece new entry” for the dictionary of political quotation, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. As a Labour MP said of the party’s leadership options: “We have to face up to the fact that every single one of them is f***ing useless.” Endless repetition of the catchphrase “I get it” means the “only thing people will be interested in many of this lot getting is hantavirus”. Then there’s the talk of Keir Starmer’s “exit timetable”, when what they really want is the “spreadsheet King Lear” on the “first train to Eff Off Forever”. But what’s the alternative? The shop-soiled Andy Burnham, veteran of two failed leadership bids, losing to Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn? People say: “different times”. Same guy though.

What’s alarming, says Stephen Pollard in The Spectator, is that all the candidates, bar Wes Streeting, favour policies that make Liz Truss look like a “model of good economic sense”. Consider the bond market: the interest rate on 30-year government borrowing has hit a 28-year high of 5.81%, “simply at the thought of what will likely replace Starmer”. But hey ho, say Starmer’s challengers, in the new “post-Starmer magical realist world”, global bond markets will just have to “fall in line”. What? Short of stealing from bond traders – thus turning the UK into a banana republic – or discovering an “actual magic money tree”, it will be interesting to see how they manage this. And any future leader will dance to the tune of barmy Labour MPs, who refused to shave a paltry £5bn off our £334bn welfare bill, believing, quite madly, that the bill is “not big enough”. Dire as Starmer is, he is the dam holding back “utter insanity and economic meltdown”.

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Food and drink

Instagram/@Cynarspritz

The latest aperitif for sophisticated types is the “Cynar spritz”, says Elena Clavarino in Air Mail. First sipped in Padua in 1948, the muddy brown, faintly medicinal drink is made from even quantities of prosecco, soda water and the artichoke-derived bitter liqueur Cynar. It is said to be more grown up than Aperol but more “approachable” than Campari. It was everywhere at Venice’s Biennale this week, with one famous Florentine bartender describing it as “the spritz for people who want to look interesting”.

How things change

Eleven years ago today, Keir Starmer posted a picture of himself sitting in the House of Commons for the very first time, alongside two other Labour newbies, Wes Streeting and Catherine West. In the past week, West threatened to trigger a leadership contest and Streeting is widely assumed to be plotting an imminent coup.

Our esteemed editor is on holiday today, but a similar photo exists of him and our deputy editor on their first day working together. Makes you think….

Whether you think there should be a Knowledge coup or not, you should subscribe. Not just for the top headlines and big stories, but the brilliant little nuggets, like the photo above, that you wouldn’t get anywhere else. There really is no better way to be better informed, and more interesting, than everyone else. No matter who’s in charge.

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