Donald Trump told Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday that if he doesn’t accept Vladimir Putin’s terms for ending the war then Russia will “destroy” Ukraine. The White House meeting repeatedly descended into a “shouting match”, says the FT, with the US president tossing aside maps of the Ukrainian front line and insisting Zelensky surrender the entire Donbas region. The Metropolitan Police are investigating claims that Prince Andrew asked one of its officers to dig up dirt on his late accuser Virginia Giuffre. In her posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, which is released tomorrow, Giuffre claims she had sex with the prince on three separate occasions, including once with Jeffrey Epstein and approximately eight other young women. The Mongolian wrestler Hōshōryū Tomokatsu won the Grand Sumo Tournament at the Royal Albert Hall last night. After five days of fighting – during which the assembled rikishi ploughed through 700kg of rice, 1,000 packets of miso soup and 400 bottles of soy sauce – the 150kg 26-year-old beat his 191kg opponent in a crisp 10 seconds.

Labour is the party of the middle class

For years, says Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times, Labour’s policy was to keep as quiet as possible about Brexit. But all of a sudden Rachel Reeves says the reason taxes are going up, when she specifically promised they wouldn’t, isn’t that her last set of tax rises knocked the stuffing out of the economy, but because “the impact of Brexit is severe and long-lasting”. Keir Starmer is at it too, using his conference speech last month to attack the “Brexit lies on the side of that bus” and denounce the politicians who “lied to this country, unleashed chaos and walked away after Brexit”. After years of silence on the “B-word”, what’s changed?

It isn’t just that Labour has run out of other excuses. It also represents a “long-overdue accommodation with electoral reality”. Labour thinks of itself as the party of the workers, but really it has always been an “alliance between the organised working class and the progressive middle class”. Today, the progressive middle class entirely dominate, while unions say their members are “deserting for Reform en masse”. The data is striking: if the vote were restricted to households earning over £70,000 a year, Labour would romp home at the next election. The latest polling shows Reform winning handily among those who attended comprehensive and grammar schools but lagging Labour by 13 points among the privately educated. What Labour’s anti-Brexit turn reveals is that they accept they have lost the workers and are now desperately trying to hang on to their new “core vote”: centrist dads who listen to The Rest Is Politics and get all huffy about “racist, populist, Brexiteering old Nigel”.