Keir Starmer’s director of communications resigned this morning, putting further pressure on the PM after the departure of his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, yesterday. Tim Allan, a veteran of the New Labour years, said he wanted to “allow a new No 10 team to be built”, while McSweeney claimed “full responsibility” for advising Starmer to appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador. A Hong Kong court has sentenced the pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison, following the 78-year-old British citizen’s conviction for colluding with foreign powers under the territory’s controversial national security law. Six of Lai’s colleagues from his now-shuttered newspaper, Apple Daily, were also sentenced to terms ranging from six to 10 years. The Met Office is launching a major upgrade to its forecasting system which will allow it to predict light rain showers with more accuracy. A new “supercomputer” will also be able to better forecast cloud coverage, which could help to reduce delays at airports where low clouds and fog can disrupt operations.

Morgan McSweeney’s resignation was inevitable, says Tim Shipman in The Spectator, but that doesn’t make it any less of a political earthquake. Keir Starmer would never have been Labour leader or prime minister without his right-hand man. And while McSweeney is “far from blameless” in this government’s many failures, he did more than anyone else in Downing Street to get Labour to “come to terms with the views of the people they seek to serve”. Many among the so-called “soft left” in his party would seemingly rather “change the electorate than meet them where they are”.

McSweeney is “one of the half dozen best political minds I’ve come across in 25 years of writing about politics”. As good with polling as he was with message-making, he was, sensibly, always interested in what his opponents were up to and why. That’s not to say the Northern Irishman is a “candidate for sainthood”. He showed far too little interest in policy before the election and he was late to learn about the ways of Whitehall. But he chose to work with Starmer because he felt, rightly, that the former director of public prosecutions was the best man to defeat the hard left and make Labour a viable party for government again. Elevating this “adenoidal, uncharismatic, self-righteous, pedestrian figure” to Downing Street was McSweeney’s great triumph. The impossibility of giving the PM the tools and political instincts he needed to succeed is his great tragedy.

🤷‍♂😬 McSweeney’s departure should relieve pressure on Starmer, says Kiran Stacey in The Guardian, but only in the very short term. Leadership speculation is already at “fever pitch”. And with Labour facing defeat in the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election and “heavy losses” in the subsequent local elections, the PM no longer has his lightning rod for backbenchers’ dissatisfaction. In the words of one MP: “Keir has nobody left to blame.”