That Keir Starmer would continue the Conservatives’ full-throated support for Ukraine was never in question. But, at the UN Security Council yesterday, it became clear that his reason for doing so is slightly different from the Tories. He delivered a bullish, impassioned condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Flanked by David Lammy and the UK’s ambassador to the UN, Barbara Woodward, he called it “illegal” and the “greatest violation of the UN charter in a generation”. It's worth quoting the Prime Minister in full: “I wonder how Russia can show its face in this building – 600,000 Russian soldiers have been killed and wounded in this war. And for what?  The UN Charter, which they sit here to uphold, speaks of human ...

The advert for Apple’s latest iPhone is one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in a long time. Superficially it’s a cheery little scene: a family gathers around the grave of a recently deceased goldfish, which the father makes a clumsy attempt to eulogise. He gets its name wrong and struggles to explain what made the fish special. His young daughter looks on sadly, but her older sibling ­– played by Bella Ramsey of Game of Thrones and The Last of Us – opens the Apple Intelligence app and types “Kristy with her fish, sad vibes”. Cutting their father off, they put the phone on top of the animal’s grave and a slideshow of pictures of the young girl ...

With just three weeks left to run in the Tory leadership contest, Michael Gove will slip into the editors' chair at the Spectator to take his pick of the contestants. He has been appointed by the hedge fund tycoon Paul Marshall – who pumped millions into GB News and owns UnHerd – after his purchase of the Spectator for £100m earlier this month. As editor of the Conservatives' parish magazine, Gove will be, as one insider said, "extraordinarily influential" as to which candidate members – who make up a significant proportion of the title's readers – vote for when the parliamentary party whittles the choice down to two. Just weeks ago the leadership contender Kemi Badenoch said she was "not controlled" by Gove at a hustings ...

If you listened only to Keir Starmer and his team of ministers, you might come away with the impression that this year's party conference was a total win for the party. According to the cabinet and loyalist MPs, over the course of the week the government managed to change the narrative and restore optimism. Today’s vote by members to reverse the cut to the winter fuel payment complicates this otherwise nice line. On the final day of proceedings, when many delegates, journalists and even the prime minister himself had dispersed from Liverpool’s ACC, this highly anticipated motion and its subsequent loss is a sure sign that Downing Street has still somehow underestimated how politically salient the row is. That they ...

The whole world waited to see whether Joe Biden would stumble. He was walking to the podium at the UN General Assembly floor to deliver what could be his last foreign policy speech as president. Days before, Biden had an awkward moment when he got mildly confused on stage with President Modi. Incidents like these meant his audience at the UN was perhaps listening for the slip-up, not to what he said – the problem which the Democrats belatedly realised doomed his candidacy.  Biden admitted that this was the “last time” he would address the room. His tone was avuncular. He shied away from the Manichean rhetoric about a fight between democracy and autocracy which has long animated his speeches. Instead, ...

Last year’s Labour conference speech saw Keir Starmer transformed - in a shower of fairytale glitter, thanks to the efforts of an errant protester - from an opposition leader to a Prime Minister in waiting. This year’s speech necessitated a similarly impressive magic trick, albeit one of a different flavour. As my colleague George Eaton wrote this morning, Starmer needed to use to today to “recast his image” and add definition to the new Labour government, while also injecting some hope and optimism into the doom and gloom narrative he’s settled into over the summer. Rachel Reeves made a start yesterday, with a quite literal change of tone (she was smiling so emphatically you could hear the renewed positivity in her ...

Volodymyr Zelensky understands that time and American political capital are not on his side. As the Ukrainian president arrived in the United States on 22 September, at the start of a critical week of diplomacy, he recorded a video message on board his plane. “This fall will determine the future of this war,” Zelensky said. He is not wrong. Ahead of another long winter, Russia is systematically bombarding Ukraine’s power infrastructure, and slowly advancing towards the strategically important city of Pokrovsk, an important road and rail hub in the eastern region of Donetsk. The Ukrainian military has seized hundreds of square miles of territory in the Kursk region of south-west Russia, but they need more ammunition and troops to hold the ...

The party conference after a landslide general election victory should be a joyous affair. Not that I ever had that experience myself, but in 2010 my party was back in government after 13 years, albeit in coalition. The election result had fallen short of expectations but that was behind us. There was a sense that ours was the conference that mattered, where proper announcements would be made of policies that would be actually implemented. The activists could celebrate victory, the ministers could celebrate power. In contrast, Labour’s conference in Liverpool after a resounding general election victory is less of a celebration than it might be. Most governing parties get a honeymoon period in which their poll rating, and that of their ...