Labour’s “interminable plans for constitutional reform” boil down to two things, says Rod Liddle in The Spectator: abolishing the House of Lords and devolving power to “the regions”. But really, we want much, much less authority given to local government. “They should be allowed to empty our bins and that’s about it.” Decentralisation might be “laudable in theory”, but wait until you see “the kind of deranged bastards who will be wielding these new powers”. Take Ben Fitter-Harding, the Conservative leader of Canterbury City Council: he intends to divide the city into five zones, and only allow cars to travel between the zones via a ring road. All this pointless, “fascistic” plan will do is increase carbon emissions, by vastly increasing journey times.

“Europe’s leadership couple”, France and Germany, have “taken to sleeping in separate bedrooms”, says Paul Taylor in Politico. The gulf between the two countries can be seen in everything from “geopolitics to defence, energy policy and public finances”. At a recent Paris meeting, Olaf Scholz rebuffed Emmanuel Macron’s pitch for a joint trip to China to present a “united European front” to Xi Jinping. Germany’s leader instead travelled to Beijing with a “posse of industrialists” eager to cut deals, in open defiance of Macron’s hawkish stance. But that’s just the latest in a long list of “grievances about each other’s infidelities”.