Doctors must feel the “pain” of strikes to stop them spreading, Wes Streeting has warned as a five-day walkout of up to 50,000 resident doctors (formerly known as junior doctors) begins today in pursuit of a 29% pay rise. The health secretary has instructed hospitals to cancel as few procedures and appointments as they can safely manage. Emmanuel Macron says that France will recognise Palestine as a state, becoming the first G7 country to do so. Benjamin Netanyahu says the decision “rewards terror” and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the French president “reckless”. The latest Gaza ceasefire talks have collapsed after US envoy Steve Witkoff walked out, accusing Hamas of not “acting in good faith”. A small island near Venice is going to become an oasis for residents wanting to escape the millions of tourists flocking to the city each year. The activist group Poveglia per Tutti will take over part of Poveglia island next month on a six-year lease, turning it into a “lagoon urban park” for Venetians only.

Farage’s summer “onslaught” on Starmer

A close ally of Nigel Farage received phone calls from three civil servants this week, says Tim Shipman in The Spectator, “asking how they might help Reform UK prepare for government”. It seems absurd: officially, mandarins won’t brief the opposition until six months before an election, in this case likely to be four years away. And Reform has just four MPs. But some in Whitehall understand how to get things done, and can see which way the wind is blowing. “They don’t want to lose their jobs,” says a Reform source, “but they want to tell us what’s going on.” MPs may have departed Westminster for recess, but the starting gun has been fired on a “highly consequential political summer”.

Keir Starmer’s government, holed up in No 10 trying to orchestrate a “vital reset” after a turbulent first year in power, is facing a “political onslaught” from Reform on crime. Farage’s six-week campaign, launched on Monday, promises “zero tolerance” policing, “nightingale prisons” and 30,000 new police officers. The Reform leader, whose intensity used to “waver” between elections, now regularly puts in a working day lasting from 4.30am to 11pm. “All his bodyguards are ex-SAS,” says a friend, “and they’re knackered trying to keep up.” Accusations that Reform is a “boys’ club” have been nixed by several crucial defections, most recently Conservative Laura Anne Jones, now the party’s first member of the Welsh Senedd. The expectation is that Reform will pick up thousands of seats in the Welsh, Scottish and local elections next May, and be the largest party in 2029. Does Farage really want to be prime minister? “I’m not sure,” says the friend. “But he feels: if not him, then who? He feels it’s his duty, and perhaps his destiny.”

👩 🇬🇧 The primary target of Farage’s crime campaign is a new electoral cohort the party calls “Mums for Reform”, says Patrick Maguire in The Times. These are middle-class, middle-aged women who are “exasperated by antisocial behaviour and anxious for their children”. Having won over the older white men of the English working class, Farage knows that “middle-class women in middle age are a growth market”. Expect to hear more about how lawlessness is “jeopardising women’s safety”. The link Farage wants to establish now is a “straight line between immigration, crime and female voters”.