The Labour Party will today fire the starting gun on the race to replace Angela Rayner as deputy leader. Left-wingers including former transport secretary Louise Haigh and high-profile Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy are expected to stand, says the FT, potentially exposing deep splits in the party over issues including Gaza, welfare reform and wealth taxes. David Lammy will remain deputy prime minister regardless of the result. Russia has launched its largest aerial attack on Ukraine since the start of the war, striking a major government building in Kyiv for the first time. Donald Trump has threatened tougher sanctions on Moscow following yesterday’s attacks, which killed four people and injured more than 44. A Norfolk whisky distillery has produced England’s first 18-year-old single malt in more than 100 years. The English Distillery is releasing 60 bottles of “Cask 001” for a whopping £3,000 each. “This isn’t just whisky,” says Andrew Nelstrop, who runs the family business, “it’s history in a bottle.”

Keir Starmer’s pathological insecurity

Last week I came to an uncomfortable realisation, says Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. This Labour government is “just as terminally dysfunctional and directionless” as the Tory one that preceded it. The “pettiness and authoritarianism”; the performatively cruel rhetoric on immigration; the empty sloganeering. All with the “constant rebooting” to jumpstart what is, clearly, a “broken machine”. At least with the Tories it was clear why the government was on the rocks: the party was spent, Brexit had “run out of steam”, and Boris Johnson and Liz Truss had incinerated any public goodwill. “What’s Labour’s excuse?”

Keir Starmer and his team have a “pathological insecurity” that voters don’t believe they’re sensible, grown-up moderates. So they’ll do anything they can to show that Labour is “hard enough” – banning Palestine Action, talking tough on migrant removals, hugging the flag – while continuing to purge their ranks of progressives. (Last week’s cabinet reshuffle shifted the party even further rightward.) What we have, in other words, is a government driven by “how it looks and sounds rather than what it wants to achieve”. The irony is that all their right-wing posturing rings hollow – when Labour pushes the likes of austerity and closed borders, it feels inauthentic, “the product of triangulation and focus groups”. So increasingly, Labour is becoming a party with “no natural constituency”: the people this stuff is meant to appeal to will always be more at home with parties more naturally on the right, while the Labour true believers feel scolded and betrayed. How apt that a government led by “the sinkhole that is Keir Starmer” – a vacant leader with no core political beliefs – should be exposed for its “lack of conviction”.