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Venezuela’s government made no mention of freeing jailed ex-president Nicolás Maduro during nearly two weeks of talks with the opposition this month, in the clearest sign yet that the regime has abandoned him to the US justice system.

Interim president Delcy Rodríguez in January called the US capture and exfiltration of Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores a case of “vile aggression”. Her brother, leader of Venezuela’s parliament, said they “will not rest” until he is released from a Brooklyn jail cell, where he faces drug-trafficking charges.

But Rodríguez’s US-backed government surprised the opposition by not even raising those demands during the five negotiating sessions, which concluded last week, several people present told the FT.

“Maduro and Flores simply do not exist at the negotiating table,” said one opposition figure. “They have erased them from history.”

The US government has backed Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice-president, since its commandos snatched the autocratic leader in a brazen night-time raid on January 3. In return, she has opened up the country’s vast natural resources to overseas investors, giving US companies access to its oil reserves.

The first round of negotiations with the opposition was intended to agree on steps for a new presidential election but yielded few concrete results.

The two sides focused on how to fund the recovery from June’s devastating earthquakes, demanding the repatriation of some $4bn of gold bullion stored in Bank of England vaults. They also agreed to start working to reform the justice system.

After the talks concluded, the government said it had released 131 political prisoners, though rights group Foro Penal said they could only verify that at least 78 had been freed.

But such a fate did not seem to be on the cards for Maduro, whom life-long revolutionary socialist Rodríguez once called Venezuela’s “one and only” president, analysts said.

As far as the government is concerned, “his fate is already sealed”, said Edward Rodríguez, a Venezuelan analyst and consultant. “They’ll let the case run its course while they focus on their only priority: survival.”

Rodríguez was initially forthright in demanding Maduro’s release straight after his capture as she consolidated the support of hardliners in the security services. But she has since replaced top military leaders with her own supporters, while powerful security chief Diosdado Cabello has also abruptly drawn closer to Washington.

Signs and billboards calling for the pair’s release were erected in cities across Venezuela in January; many have since been taken down. Pro-Maduro murals painted before his arrest have been scrubbed over. Just a handful of oversized portraits of the deposed first couple remain in Caracas.

Rodríguez, whose succinct public speeches mark a break with Maduro’s folksy and fiery diatribes, seldom mentions her old boss during public appearances — including in her speech after the talks ended.

But Maduro, the handpicked heir to the revolutionary socialist project of the late president Hugo Chávez, continues to inspire support from hardcore Chavistas, as supporters of the movement are known.

“I disagree with these talks, because Trump cannot be allowed to keep imposing things on us while the agreement does not even mention the president who was kidnapped,” said Ricardo García, a grassroots Chavista who, like many loyalists, believes Maduro was betrayed by members of his inner circle and handed over to US forces.

The negotiations have also been controversial among the opposition, including for sidelining its most popular leader, Nobel laureate María Corina Machado.

The Venezuelan government did not respond to a request for comment.

The chief economist at one of Russia’s largest state-run financial institutions has been fired after reportedly warning the country would lose a “war of attrition” against Ukraine and the conflict’s economic toll would trigger a major crisis.

Andrei Klepach, a former deputy economy minister, was dismissed from his job at state development company VEB on Sunday after comments he made earlier this year were reported in Russian-language media.

Klepach’s firing came after “a call from up high” to Igor Shuvalov, the former top economic aide to President Vladimir Putin, according to exiled independent Russian outlet The Bell, which first reported the news.

The move indicates the Kremlin has zero tolerance for dissent among its elites as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine drags on into its fifth year. Though many of Russia’s top business people, economic officials and economists are critical of the war in private, only a handful have spoken out against the conflict or left their jobs.

Klepach’s remarks at a conference in May, reported by the Moscow Times on Friday and widely cited in Russian media, were unusually frank for a prominent figure speaking in public but echoed concerns by the elite that have been widespread since the war’s early months in 2022.

“We are falling behind. We are losing technological and economic competition in the world [ . . . ] not just to China and the US, but in some respects Ukraine,” Klepach said. “We won’t win the competition in this war of attrition. We are under the illusion that everything over there will collapse. It hasn’t and it won’t. Our costs are growing.”

Klepach said Russia’s economy had begun to contract this year after a war-driven boom in 2023 and 2024 gave way to sharp cuts in investment and an industrial recession, which he partly blamed on the central bank’s high interest rates.

The war in Ukraine “has already gone on for longer than [the second world war] and there’s no end in sight for now”, Klepach said. “Both sides are intensifying their strikes, including on each other’s economy. Our losses from the Ukrainian armed forces’ strikes on our port, oil and gas, chemical, and logistical infrastructure are growing, and they’re already becoming a noticeable macroeconomic barrier to Russian economic growth.”

Klepach said the economic woes and tougher western sanctions would lead to a “social crisis [ . . . ] when nobody expects it”, likening it to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“I believe Russia won’t collapse but I am almost certain we will have a social crisis,” he said. “Our economy won’t crash, but our backwardness will intensify with all the ensuing consequences.”

The pessimism has grown further recently as Ukraine’s drone strikes and the Kremlin’s ballooning expenditure on the war have continued to damage Russia’s economy.

The Kremlin’s budget for the first seven months of this year ran a deficit of Rbs6.5tn ($76.5bn), equivalent to 2.8 per cent of GDP and close to double the planned deficit of Rbs3.8tn.

The growing hole in Russia’s state coffers has come from additional spending to fund the military, which the finance ministry has estimated could outstrip its own plans by as much as Rbs4tn.

The UK’s rail regulator has thrown out objections from Eurostar that allowing Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group to operate Channel Tunnel services would cramp its own expansion plans.

The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has granted Virgin track access rights to the high-speed line linking London with the tunnel, bringing the prospect of competition on rail services to the continent a step closer.

Virgin wants to break Eurostar’s monopoly by offering passenger services to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam from 2030. Last year, it received crucial access to the east London rail depot needed to maintain trains for the line.

Eurostar, which launched in 1994 and is owned by France’s state railway operator SNCF, had complained to the regulator that approving Virgin would not account for its own intention to expand services in the next decade.

It plans to spend €2bn on new trains, and says it wants to run services to Geneva and Frankfurt.

In its response to an ORR consultation on allowing Virgin access to the track, Eurostar had also questioned the capacity at St Pancras International, the terminal that both operators will use.

The regulator found that Eurostar’s expansion was only a “modest increase in capacity” compared with a new series of routes from Virgin. It also found no flaws in St Pancras’s own analysis of its capacity, which Eurostar has questioned.

The approval is “an important next step in bringing competition and growth to the market for international rail services”, said ORR deputy director Martin Jones.

Virgin said it welcomed the findings “and the opportunity to bring competition and Virgin’s award-winning customer experience to the Channel Tunnel”.

Details of Virgin’s planned services were included in the approval documents. These include six daily services to Paris in October 2030, rising to 10 in April 2031 and 13 from October that year. It aims to launch four daily services to Brussels in February 2031, and three to Amsterdam from October 2031.

Its plans do not include reopening Ebbsfleet or Ashford International, two Kent stations that had originally been part of the network.

The group still has to finalise its order for trains, which are being financed by infrastructure investor Equitix and private equity group Azzurra. It is also yet to gain approval for tunnel access and track rights on the European side of its potential routes. Talks on all three are well advanced, it said.

Jones from the ORR added: “While there is still more work to do, we are supporting Virgin and the wider industry to grow international services.”

Eurostar said the ORR’s approval “confirms the huge potential for growth in international rail and the ambition across the industry to bring more passengers to Europe by train”. The train operator said its focus “remains on delivering our own ambitious plans, investing in our fleet and carrying 30mn passengers a year”.

London St Pancras Highspeed, the company that owns the line and the station, said: “This is a significant milestone in opening up the next chapter of international high-speed rail. It paves the way for competition, more services, greater customer choice and new destinations, at a time when demand for international rail travel is set to grow significantly.”

BP has won a licence from Caracas to explore and develop a gasfield off the coast of Venezuela, in the latest sign that Big Oil is returning to the country after the US toppled its leader in January.

The British company will join Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and a Qatari company with links to the Trump family in the venture.

BP’s announcement on Thursday follows Venezuela’s award of a licence to Shell in June, seven months after President Donald Trump urged western oil majors to plough $100bn into the Latin American country.

“When you see big oil companies like BP and Adnoc entering Venezuela it really gives more credence to the idea that the current government and the arrangement that currently exists with the US have staying power,” said Schreiner Parker, analyst at Rystad Energy, a research group.

Trump last week told supporters in Nevada that the US had taken “billions and billions” of barrels of oil from Venezuela since American forces captured the country’s leader Nicolás Maduro in January. Washington quickly installed Delcy Rodríguez as the acting and interim president, who quickly ushered in a new hydrocarbons law in co-operation with the US.

Venezuela only produces just over 1mn barrels of oil a day. The FT calculated last month that the Trump administration had so far collected more than $13bn in revenues from Venezuelan oil it has seized.

The new BP licence marks the entry to Venezuela of XRG — the overseas investment arm of Adnoc, UAE’s national oil company — which is expanding overseas after the emirate exited the oil cartel Opec in May.

The third licensee, UCC Oil and Gas Holding LLC, is a private company owned by the Qatari-based business magnates and brothers Moutaz Al-Khayyat and Ramez Al-Khayyat.

Both XRG and UCC have courted the Trump administration. XRG’s executive chair, Sultan al-Jaber, presented Trump with a vial of Abu Dhabi’s crude last year, alongside pledges to boost the value of the UAE’s energy investments in the US to $440bn over the next decade.

The Qatari-Syrian Al-Khayyat brothers who own UCC attended Trump’s second inauguration and are partners with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in a proposed seaside development in Albania. UCC has recently begun expanding from construction into upstream energy and was recently also granted an oilfield concession in Libya without a competitive tender.

Washington has struggled to persuade international oil companies to invest in Venezuela following its capture of Maduro in January. Chevron, a long-term investor, is producing oil in the country. ExxonMobil has been cautious about returning and its chief executive Darren Woods described the country as “uninvestable” in a meeting with Trump earlier this year.

At its peak in the 1970s, Venezuela produced 3.5mn barrels per day but decades of corruption and mismanagement, coupled with US sanctions, have cut oil production to about 1.2mn barrels per day.

“We have finally managed to provide the necessary impetus for gas production in this extraordinary field,” said Rodríguez, who has received plaudits from Trump over her efforts to drum up investment in Venezuela, during an event to mark the new BP licence at the presidential palace in Caracas on Thursday.

Venezuela’s new hydrocarbons law, passed after the US attack in January, dramatically weakened the grip of the country’s state oil major PDVSA over the sector.

The US has responded by gradually unwinding sanctions on Venezuela and its oil industry that were imposed during the first Trump administration.

The licence awarded to BP and the other companies will let them develop the Loran Phase 2 gasfield, which is located off Venezuela’s north-east coast. It holds an estimated 4tn cubic feet of recoverable gas resources.

BP’s investment comes as it abandons a years-long green energy push and refocuses on oil and gas.

Parker at Rystad Energy said investing in offshore gasfields, rather than onshore operations in Venezuela, represented a “hedged bet on the country” and could allow them to liquefy and export the fuel through the Atlantic LNG terminal in neighbouring Trinidad and Tobago.

BP and Shell each own a 47 per cent stake in Atlantic LNG, with the remainder held by National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago. Operations have been constrained in recent years by a shortfall in feed gas.

Spain has hit back at Italy in an escalating immigration row by announcing that it would “reinstate border controls” on travellers arriving from its Mediterranean neighbour in the wake of the Ceuta migrant crisis.

In a sign of deepening EU divisions, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government said late on Friday that it would start to check the identities and documents of travellers arriving from Italy at Spanish ports and airports from midnight — less than three hours after its announcement.

The decision widens a rift between Sánchez, a pro-immigration leftwinger, and Italy’s rightwing prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who imposed similar border controls on travellers from Spain after last week’s migrant influx in Ceuta, one of Spain’s North African exclaves.

Ceuta, a tiny territory of 83,000 people, was overwhelmed by an estimated 72,000 migrants who swam and scaled border fences from Morocco to stream on to its streets on July 30. The episode sparked alarm across the EU about the territory’s borders being breached.

Most of the migrants, who included sub-Saharan Africans, were shepherded back to Morocco within 48 hours. But a few thousand remain in Ceuta, including 1,300 children, according to Spain’s youth minister. Spain and Morocco have blamed the episode on social media misinformation and human traffickers.

Madrid’s move at the height of the summer holiday season creates another barrier inside the EU’s Schengen free-travel zone, a crucial part of the bloc’s foundations that is supposed to allow passport-free travel between its member countries.

Spain did not mention Ceuta in its announcement but, taking a swipe at Meloni’s government, said it was introducing border controls owing to “the persistent irregular migratory pressure affecting” Italy.

Madrid insists that no migrant who arrived in Ceuta last week has made it into the Schengen area because additional passport controls for travel to mainland Spain are permanently in place.

The European Commission said on Saturday it had “not received any notification of temporary border controls from Spain”.

It reiterated that “illegal movement onwards to mainland Spain and Europe has so far been successfully prevented” and said further unauthorised crossings into Ceuta and “senseless tragic deaths” must be avoided. At least 82 people died attempting to get to Ceuta, according to the city authorities.

Meloni, who has prioritised curbing unauthorised immigration, threatened to “suspend” Spain from the Schengen zone. On August 1 Italy introduced random checks on travellers arriving from Spain in order to verify the documents of non-EU travellers.

“This is an extraordinary measure, adopted to protect national security and prevent possible repercussions for our nation,” Meloni said.

The move incensed Spain, which called it “unjust”, “based on spurious arguments” and “unprecedented in recent history”.

The Sánchez government had earlier on Friday urged Italy to end its border controls, suggesting they were driven by “domestic electoral considerations” and threatened “proportionate” countermeasures if they were not removed by Sunday.

Meloni’s office, which is watching a far-right former general eat into her coalition’s support base, responded by saying “Italy does not accept ultimatums or impositions from abroad regarding national security and border control”.

It said it would not reconsider its controls and alluded to unsubstantiated social media rumours, which it wrongly attributed to the Spanish government, of a possible new attempt by migrants to rush Ceuta on August 15.

A few hours later Spain announced its imposition of near-identical border controls, due to remain in place until September 7. Madrid said they would be carried out on a random basis and involve “checking travellers’ identity card or passport and nationality and, in the case of third-country nationals, their visa or residence permit”.

The Italian government made no immediate comment on Spain’s announcement.

Madrid has previously suggested that its record of curbing unauthorised immigration is better than Rome’s.

This year the number of unauthorised migrants arriving by boat in Italy has sharply declined. In the first seven months of this year 17,000 arrived by sea, down from 37,000 in the same period last year, according to Italy’s interior ministry

Andy Burnham has signalled he is willing to raise taxes to pay for a better elderly care system, saying that England’s current set-up is “as unfair as American healthcare”.

The UK prime minister said on Wednesday that he wanted to stop people having to sell their homes to pay for care, adding that reform would “require difficult decisions” on funding.

“If everybody on the NHS principle contributed a little, it would mean everyone could protect the majority of what they’d worked for,” he said, as he vowed he would not be deterred by “screaming headlines” about tax rises.

Labour has enjoyed a bounce in opinion polls since Burnham took over as prime minister last week. However, social care has long been one of the thorniest issues for UK politicians to tackle, with 22 failed attempts to reform the system in the past 30 years.

Burnham, who has said he is willing to spend “political capital” on the issue, on Wednesday positioned the overhaul of social care as a “test” of his premiership.

“I think social care in England is as unfair as American healthcare,” he said. “The vulnerable pay with everything, and it can completely leave them with nothing . . . common sense says that can’t be fair.”

The prime minister said he was asking Baroness Louise Casey, a longstanding government adviser, to bring forward a review on social care to next year as she began a large-scale “conversation” with voters on how to create a better system.

Burnham also said he wanted to pay social care workers a rate closer to that of NHS staff, bemoaning “poverty pay” in the sector.

The social care sector has suffered from chronic staff shortages for years as a result of funding pressures that have led to low pay, poor conditions and limited career progression.

Despite the closure of the post-Brexit visa route for care workers, providers are still heavily reliant on international recruitment, hiring 30,000 newly arrived migrants in 2025-26.

Noting how many people from foreign countries are caring for his father, who has dementia, Burnham said: “I want those carers to know we appreciate you, we appreciate what you are doing to support people here.”

He added that he would not exclude private care companies from the system but said it was essential to prevent “profiteering”, pointing to groups that take out money through “unnecessary and dangerous cost-cutting”.

Burnham said that, as well as raising pay for workers, he wanted to see more older people receive help. There are currently 1.9mn people who have needs that do not meet eligibility criteria for state-funded care.

He also said he wanted to protect people from catastrophic bills that wiped out their savings, with an estimated one in seven facing care costs of more than £100,000. People with assets of more than £23,250 receive no state help.

Burnham described ageing as a “roulette wheel”.

“It needs to be recognised that people can see everything they’ve worked for wiped out by the cost of care. Hundreds of thousands of pounds can just disappear paying for care,” he said.

“In an ideal world, I wouldn’t want anybody to have to sell their home to pay for care,” he added. “I think it’s a really awful process for those who live through it.”

In a sign that the prime minister still favours a centrally funded national care service free at the point of use, he said he would explore how to create such a system over time.

“You could do the fully fledged version or you could do a lesser version and you could do something in between, and then you have the question of how you pay for all of those options,” he said.

Previous attempts to reform social care have foundered on concerns about who will pay, including Burnham’s own previous attempt as health secretary in 2010, when a plan for a levy on estates was dubbed a “death tax”.

He said he had learnt that reforms should be tried well before an election and insisted he wanted cross-party agreement on the issue.

“You can have as many headlines as you like about this tax or something else,” Burnham said. “But when people are losing hundreds of thousands of pounds, everything they work for, well, what about them?”

Volodymyr Zelenskyy held talks with Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday amid growing confidence in Kyiv that the US president has become more supportive of Ukraine’s position.

The Ukrainian president’s advisers and a person close to the Trump administration said the meeting offered Zelenskyy his best chance since Trump began his second term to secure fresh military backing and revive efforts to end Russia’s full-scale war.

After the talks, Zelenskyy posted on social media: “A good meeting with President Trump @POTUS at the Oval Office. Thank you for everything we do together to protect the lives of Ukrainians and advance peace.”

He added that the two had “discussed licences for Patriot interceptor production and several other ideas”.

In a sign of how relations with Washington had improved, Zelenskyy said: “We also spoke about diplomacy . . . our teams will arrange the details of their further communication. I am grateful to the United States for its firm support.”

US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner have agreed to visit Kyiv for the first time as part of efforts to end the war, according to people familiar with Tuesday’s discussions in the Oval Office.

The talks mark a sharp shift from the tensions that once defined the relationship, with Zelenskyy privately crediting months of direct adviser-level engagement for changing Trump’s view of the war and Ukraine’s prospects.

His challenge, people close to both presidents said, was to convince Trump that backing Ukraine served US interests and to appeal to the president’s desire to be associated with success, an argument that has gained traction in recent months.

Zelenskyy told the FT ahead of the Nato summit earlier this month that Trump had lauded Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russia’s energy sector — the lifeblood of its war machine — saying it was “doing very well”.

Asked whether that would be enough to bring Trump firmly on to Ukraine’s side, Zelenskyy said he felt the American leader was now viewing the war in a new light.

“President Trump wants to be where there’s success,” Zelenskyy said. “That’s tied to many things — not only to his personality, but to the approaching elections, to his status, to his belief in how this war can be ended.”

Trump told Zelenskyy at the Nato summit in Ankara that the US would grant Ukraine a licence to produce Patriot surface-to-air interceptor missiles, agreeing to a significant request from Kyiv.

Zelenskyy’s most senior advisers told the FT that, for better or worse, he had always believed he was at his most persuasive with Trump when the two men were face to face.

Ukraine’s president has acknowledged how far relations have come since the disastrous Oval Office meeting in February 2025, crediting a brief encounter with Trump at Pope Francis’s funeral in St Peter’s Basilica on April 26 last year with helping to turn the relationship around.

Zelenskyy also planned to attend a memorial service for US Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch supporter of Ukraine who died suddenly on July 11, just hours after arriving back from Kyiv, his tenth visit to the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022.

After his meeting at the White House, Zelenskyy said he had “offered President Trump our condolences on the passing of Lindsey Graham”, adding that “he was a true friend of Ukraine”.

Some Republicans believe Graham’s death could nudge Trump closer to Kyiv’s side and help revive a bipartisan Russia sanctions bill that the late senator had championed in Congress.

The Zelenskyy visit comes at a politically tricky moment for both leaders. The Ukrainian president is under growing pressure at home after a sweeping reshuffle of his government and top military ranks, including the replacement of his popular defence minister and controversial army chief.

The moves were intended to inject new momentum into Ukraine’s war effort but have also raised questions about Zelenskyy’s judgment, just as Ukrainian strikes on Russian targets have appeared to shift the battlefield narrative in Kyiv’s favour — and catch Trump’s attention.

Trump entered the talks balancing competing pressures within his own administration. He has become more critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intransigence and more receptive to Ukraine’s military gains, but parts of his “America First” base remain deeply sceptical of long-term support for Kyiv.

One unlikely marker of that shifting debate is Laura Loomer, the far-right activist who remains in regular contact with Trump. Once a vocal opponent of US military aid who echoed Kremlin narratives, Loomer has spent the past week in Kyiv, meeting Zelenskyy and senior officials, studying Ukraine’s history and witnessing Russian missile attacks first-hand.

Her visit was embraced by Zelenskyy, senior government figures and energy executives, with officials even unearthing the birth certificate of her paternal great-grandfather, Pinkus Loomer, born in Vinnytsia, west-central Ukraine, in 1895, in the hope that her conversion will impress Trump.

She now argues that influential figures on the American right have been taken in by Russian propaganda — a change Ukrainian officials hope could further reinforce Trump’s increasingly favourable view of Kyiv.

There are signs the effort may be working. After Loomer interviewed Zelenskyy, Trump shared the exchange on his social media site, calling it “Very good!!!”

Tesla’s deliveries jumped 25 per cent in the second quarter, far exceeding market expectations, as rising fuel prices from the Middle East conflict boosted sales of its electric vehicles in Europe.

The US carmaker delivered 480,126 vehicles in the three months to the end of June, up from 384,122 in the same period last year and well above analysts’ forecasts of 404,000.

Tesla lost its crown as the world’s biggest electric-car maker to China’s BYD last year amid a consumer backlash against chief executive Elon Musk’s political activism.

But its sales in the UK and Europe have recovered with new registrations increasing 57 per cent year on year to 118,068 units during the first five months of 2026, according to European car industry body Acea. Still, its 2 per cent share in the region remained below BYD’s 2.3 per cent share.

Despite the strong recovery in the latest quarter, BYD remained ahead of Tesla with the Chinese group selling roughly 867,000 electric vehicles in the first six months of the year, compared with 838,149 vehicles for Tesla.

Tesla formally ended production of its premium S and X models earlier this year as Musk pivots the group’s focus and investments to robotics and artificial intelligence.

Tesla will continue to sell its Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, while Musk has said the company is working on a new version of its Roadster sports car. Tesla also began mass production of its long-awaited Semi Truck in April, as it seeks to accelerate the shift away from diesel trucks.

“Tesla has not surprised to the upside to this degree in a while, a healthy sign the auto business is here to stay,” said William Blair analyst Jed Dorsheimer.

Improving demand in Europe as well as in China has helped offset Tesla’s weak performance in the US, where sales have been hit by the end of EV tax credits and President Donald Trump’s rollback in regulations to cut vehicle emissions.

Ahead of the announcement, data group Cox Automotive had forecast Tesla’s sales in the US declining by 20 per cent year on year in the second quarter.

In April, the Netherlands became the first European country to approve the use of Tesla’s full self-driving technology — which still requires humans to sit in the driver’s seat and pay full attention despite its label.

With sales of its EVs facing intense competition from Chinese as well as western rivals, Tesla is betting its future growth on the global expansion of its autonomous robotaxis, although only a small number are operating in Texas.

Despite the strong delivery data, Tesla shares fluctuated on Thursday, falling about 7 per cent after rising nearly 2 per cent.

Andy Burnham will scrap the Labour government’s digital ID scheme in a “reset of priorities” after he becomes prime minister on Monday.

The incoming premier said on Saturday that he would ditch the programme as part of a drive to “focus on the daily priorities facing people across the country” with the money saved to be spent on ordinary people.

His spokesperson said that Burnham wanted to be “improving everyday life” rather than spending money on expensive schemes through an over-centralised model of government.

The Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog, had estimated the digital ID scheme would cost £600mn a year.

“All the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it is most needed such as helping with the cost of living,” the spokesperson said. “This government is determined to bring power back to communities, instead of hoarding it in Whitehall.”

Sir Keir Starmer approved the controversial ID plans last September as part of a drive to combat illegal migration. He was encouraged by his Labour predecessor Sir Tony Blair and former Conservative leader William Hague.

Darren Jones, first secretary to the prime minister, promised the new system would become the “bedrock of the modern state”.

But in the face of a large public pushback, including a petition against the policy that attracted more than 3mn signatures, Starmer was forced to drop plans to require workers to sign up to the programme.

Instead, by the time ministers launched a public consultation this year, they were trying to promote digital IDs as a way to drive reform in public services such as welfare payments, childcare entitlements and local government.

The ID would only be mandatory for right-to-work checks and not for access to any public services, they clarified.

The decision will probably disappoint organisations such as ThinkLabour and the Tony Blair Institute, which had both backed the scheme. But the policy was opposed by the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and civil liberties groups such as Big Brother Watch and Liberty.

The Labour government of two decades ago tried to set up a digital ID system but it was scrapped by the Tory-Lib Dem administration that took power in 2010. An estimated £4.6bn was wasted on that failed scheme.

Ironically it was Burnham himself who was the junior Home Office minister responsible for implementing the Identity Cards Act 2006.

The incoming prime minister’s decision was signalled last autumn when he told the Labour conference that he was not keen on new digital IDs. Asked if he supported the policy, he replied “not yet”, citing his own experience of trying unsuccessfully to push through ID cards.

“I was the ID cards minister under Blair, which is 20 years ago . . . I’m not kind of arguing against the principle. I was very pro, actually, I thought there was a real clear case for it,” he said in September.

“But . . . I think there’s a risk of an opportunity-cost situation here where something can consume a huge amount of time and actually doesn’t come through.”

His spokesperson said on Saturday that the Labour government would continue to crack down on illegal working.

There will still be mandatory right-to-work checks for all employers, which can be carried out digitally, the spokesperson said. Those will be extended to gig economy and zero-hours workers through Labour’s border security, asylum and immigration bill.

No one can tell whether Andy Burnham will be a more successful occupant of Downing Street than his recent ill-fated predecessors. Britain’s most consequential postwar prime ministers were Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher, and few predicted their success.

But they were working within the grain of history. In 1945, the country demanded from Labour the type of radical change it was suited for, so that “homes fit for heroes”, promised in 1918 but never delivered, would become a reality.

In 1979, following the wave of strikes during the “winter of discontent”, the public sought from the Conservatives a less interventionist state and tighter constraints on trade unions.

For Burnham, in contrast, the current needs of the country conflict with the instincts of many Labour MPs and probably his own as well.

More than half of Labour’s MPs — 231 of 411 — entered parliament for the first time in 2024 after campaigning against “Tory austerity”. Yet a new form of austerity is what the country now needs if the unsustainable level of borrowing is to be brought down and resources shifted to defence.

Instead Sir Keir Starmer’s mantra was change. He sought extra funding for the NHS, more teachers, more police, net zero, easing the cost of living and ending austerity — all to be paid for by “turbocharged” growth, which, sadly, has not occurred.

He was removed because Labour MPs wanted the government to speed up the pace of change, not because they wanted to alter its direction.

To Starmer’s mix, Burnham now adds municipal socialism and fiscal devolution. Powerful mayors are unlikely to prove models of fiscal restraint. They will want to spend on reconstruction projects as Burnham has done in Manchester. They will strain the statutory restrictions on tax raising and borrowing to the limit.

Labour’s leitmotif is to improve the lives of the underprivileged. Its strength lies in its humanity. But its weakness is its over-optimism and spending money that is not there.

This is not new. In August 1931, Labour’s first prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, facing a flight of capital, failed to persuade his cabinet to cut spending. The party split and found itself in opposition for 14 years.

“Let’s go with Labour” Harold Wilson urged voters in 1964, hoping that by boosting demand, he could raise the rate of growth. In 1966, however, Labour hit the buffers and imposed a wage freeze. After devaluation in 1967, there were massive cuts in public spending.

In 1974 Wilson had a second innings, but seemed to have learnt nothing, borrowing to pay for food subsidies, price controls and Danegeld to the trade unions to preserve the “social contract”. In 1976 the IMF demanded spending cuts.

Chancellor Denis Healey had denied that such measures would be unpopular. “At the Labour clubs you’ll find there’s an awful lot of support for this policy of cutting public expenditure. They will all tell you about Paddy Murphy up the street who’s got 18 children, has not worked for years, lives on unemployment benefit, has a colour television and goes to Majorca for his holidays.” Plus ça change.

But the cuts were unpopular with Labour MPs and ministers. Healey and subsequent prime minister James Callaghan had to convince not only the left of the party — Michael Foot, Tony Benn and Barbara Castle — but also the Keynesians, led by Anthony Crosland, author of The Future of Socialism, the bible of social democracy. Callaghan succeeded only through extraordinary political skill.

In a globalised world, when the markets lose confidence, the government must take remedial measures. Since Starmer’s government has allowed public sector net debt to grow to nearly £3tn, and balked at even modest welfare reforms that would have made a small improvement to the debt figures, it would not be surprising were the markets to lose confidence once again.

The current state of the public finances is unsustainable. Burnham may put them on a sustainable path. But it is possible we may face them being brought under control by the IMF, perhaps after an economic crisis as in 1976.

Can Labour escape its past? A history that, as the American novelist William Faulkner reminded us, “is never dead. It is not even past.” Can Burnham really exorcise Labour’s inheritance? The odds are against him.

This week 10 years ago the British public voted to leave the EU. Since then the UK economy has continued to stagnate. Greater trade barriers with the country’s largest trading partner, successive shocks (some global, others self-inflicted) and the persistent failure to deliver meaningful pro-growth reforms have all played a part.

Against the downbeat backdrop, the campaign to rejoin the EU has gathered momentum: 55 per cent of Britons now support reversing the June 2016 referendum vote. However, rejoining is not the economic antidote many appear to think it would be. If anything, it would risk entrenching the nation’s drift.

For starters, regret isn’t a mandate for reversal. A decade on, there is still little consensus on how an optimal UK-EU relationship should look, even within the Leave and Remain camps.

Defining “rejoin” would be tortuous. Research by John Springford and Anton Spisak at the Centre for European Reform finds that returning to just the customs union would only undo a fraction of the economic damage caused by exiting. But returning to the single market would involve difficult political trade-offs, such as accepting free movement, paying money to the bloc and rule-taking.

Even if some form of EU return were endorsed via a referendum or election platform, executing it would require a bureaucratic and negotiating heft that Brexit showed Britain does not have. The bloc will probably be inflexible in any such talks. And with anti-EU sentiment still strong, any settlement may not endure.

In sum, the rejoin movement promises to revive fraught debates, divert parliamentary attention and foment another lengthy period of uncertainty for business and investors.

Then there are the broader questions of timing and value. The bloc’s economic growth has been turgid. Brussels has frequently shown itself to be too slow to respond to shocks and enact reforms, whereas Britain can be more nimble on regulation and trade deals. For instance, while hefty rules weigh down on the EU tech sector, UK start-ups are currently swooping up close to half of Europe’s venture capital funding.

Pursuing a return to the EU, therefore, involves significant opportunity costs, not least the diversion of political attention from domestic economic reforms that could do more to raise living standards and growth. After all, many Leave voters felt “left behind” by free trade and movement. Brexit did little to address this, but nor would years spent trying to reverse it.

What policies could UK politicians prioritise instead? They could bolster regional growth, for instance by decentralising more powers from Westminster and giving local areas greater ability to raise and retain revenues. This has contributed to Manchester’s revival.

They could make it easier and cheaper to build infrastructure, in part by shifting towards a zonal planning system that preapproves areas for development. Think-tank Britain Remade finds that eliminating the added cost of building UK transport infrastructure relative to European peers, for example by cutting regulation, would give the country £41.5bn more to spend over five years. (That’s enough to fit out several key cities with a tram network and address major road and rail bottlenecks.)

UK industrial electricity prices — which are among the highest in the rich world — could be reduced by speeding up the approval of nuclear and renewable energy projects and grid connections. For businesses this would directly help make up for the cost competitiveness Britain lost with the EU because of higher trade barriers.

The country could also aim to get a greater share of the population into work through welfare reforms, prioritising treatment over benefits for illnesses and introducing broader training support.

These are just a small sample of growth policies UK parliaments could focus on over the next decade. Still, based on approximations, including from the Office for Budget Responsibility, Office for National Statistics, OECD and PwC, even modest projections of these measures would more than offset the estimated hit to the UK’s long-run economic growth rate induced by Brexit.

This does not mean the UK should give up on improving economic ties with the EU altogether. However, efforts to reopen the broader Brexit question would become another distraction that absorbs political bandwidth and prolongs uncertainty, compounding the past lost decade of progress on the domestic growth agenda.

For now, the priority is not to revisit the decision of 2016, but to tackle the longstanding weaknesses that sapped the British economy long before it.

Sir Keir Starmer has refused to quit as prime minister to make way for Andy Burnham after his by-election victory in Makerfield, taking a defiant stance as he warned that a leadership contest could “tear apart” the Labour Party.

Starmer used a call with Labour staff at lunchtime on Friday to urge colleagues to “pull together” after Burnham’s success and avoid “plunging our party and our country into chaos by turning on each other”.

Earlier on Friday, the prime minister insisted he would fight the outgoing Greater Manchester mayor to keep his job. “If there is a contest then yes, I will run, I will stand,” he said.

Burnham’s overwhelming victory in the Makerfield by-election has turbocharged his campaign to topple Starmer, paving the way for him to return to Westminster and become Britain’s seventh prime minister in the past decade.

Speaking after winning a 9,231 Labour majority over Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Burnham made it clear that he would now be marching south on Number 10: “I do say to my own party: this is a final chance for change.”

The contest in Makerfield, a white working-class seat between Manchester and Liverpool, could prove pivotal in British politics, as Burnham showed his party that Labour can still beat Reform in its traditional heartlands.

For Farage’s party it was a serious setback, with the far-right nativist Restore Britain party starting to eat into its vote.

The result saw Burnham secure more than half the votes cast with 24,927, Reform’s Robert Kenyon 15,696 and Restore’s Rebecca Shepherd 3,111. At 58.7 per cent, turnout was unusually high for a by-election, following an intense Labour campaign.

The result, declared in The Edge exhibition hall within yards of the famous Wigan Pier, will reverberate across a political system that has appeared constantly on the edge of crisis since the Brexit vote almost exactly 10 years ago.

Many Labour MPs, despairing of Starmer’s stumbling leadership and dismal poll ratings, believe Burnham will make voters look again at their party. The former Labour minister and outgoing mayor is a strong communicator and advocate of “business-friendly socialism”.

In a victory speech on Friday morning, Burnham rejected “trickle-down economics”, called for re-industrialisation and a “Buy British” approach to public procurement in Whitehall.

“This is our last chance for change and we are going to take that opportunity and we are going to lay out a new path for Britain,” he said. “We have an opportunity to turn the tide.”

The UK’s borrowing costs have climbed higher since Friday’s open, with the 10-year gilt yield up 0.08 percentage points to 4.83 per cent. Yields rise as prices fall.

But the moves were not just down to UK political developments. Higher than expected UK borrowing figures published on Friday have weighed on gilts, while the postponement of peace talks between the US and Iran has fanned inflation worries.

Burnham, a Treasury minister in Gordon Brown’s Labour government, has tried to reassure bond markets during the campaign that he will stick to the government’s fiscal rules.

He will take his seat at Westminster next week but his team expects him to talk to Starmer over the weekend to try to persuade the prime minister to set a date for his exit.

Louise Haigh, a former cabinet minister who has been managing Burnham’s campaign, told the BBC she hoped Starmer would reflect on the by-election result and local election results from six weeks ago. “I hope that he will consider an orderly and managed transition.”

At just after 6am, Starmer said on social media: “Congratulations, Andy Burnham, Labour’s new MP for Makerfield. Voters chose Labour’s campaign of hope and optimism over division and hate.”

He later claimed that the result was “a really, really good outcome” and that the Labour victory in Makerfield had shown that Reform was “on the run.” He added: “The tide is turning.”

Most Labour MPs believe that Starmer, one of the most unpopular prime ministers in polling history, will struggle to head off the insurgency from Burnham.

If the prime minister follows through on his vow to fight for his job — his name would automatically go on to the ballot paper — it would set up a potentially bitter and divisive contest.

If Burnham succeeds, he would be the UK’s seventh prime minister since the country voted 10 years ago to leave the EU, following David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and now Starmer.

Starmer will now hold talks with ministerial colleagues and senior MPs to see if he has the support to carry on. One senior cabinet minister said: “The view among some colleagues is that it’s over.”

The minister added: “You’ll start to see resignations in the coming days. I’m sceptical that Keir can carry on.”

Another minister said: “I don’t see how he can fight on — it will be embarrassing.”

Starmer is seen by colleagues as a stubborn and proud man. Some will urge him to set a date for his departure around the time of Labour’s conference in September to give him time to secure a legacy and exit gracefully.

The UK-EU summit, now set for July 22, could be seen as a significant moment for Starmer, who could exit saying he was repairing some of the damage of the 2016 Brexit vote.

Starmer loyalist Steve Reed, housing secretary, urged Burnham to pull back from challenging the prime minister. “Nobody wants to see a big battle inside the Labour Party,” he told the BBC. “The public don’t like psychodrama in their politics.”

There were two other by-elections held on Thursday, both in Scotland. The Conservatives achieved a shock victory over the Scottish National Party in Aberdeen South, while the SNP held on to the Arbroath and Broughty Ferry seat.

In Aberdeen South, the Scottish Conservatives won a Westminster by-election for the first time in more than 50 years. The party took the seat from the SNP, fighting on a campaign to reinvigorate North Sea oil and gas drilling.

Sir Keir Starmer has insisted he will fight for his job if he is challenged for the Labour leadership, as Reform UK and Labour insiders claimed Andy Burnham was facing a “tight” race in his bid to return to Westminster this week.

Starmer, speaking at the G7 summit in France, struck a defiant note ahead of Thursday’s Makerfield by-election, telling his rivals — including former health secretary Wes Streeting — to back off and let him get on with governing.

“I’ve been very clear throughout this that we won a significant general election result in 2024 with a mandate to bring about change,” the prime minister told Times Radio. “I’m not going to walk away from that so I will fight if there’s a challenge. I don’t think there should be a challenge.”

Labour’s campaign in Makerfield, a predominantly white working-class seat in Greater Manchester, is quietly confident that Burnham will win on Thursday and fend off Nigel Farage’s Reform party.

But some Labour insiders who have campaigned locally are less sure. One said: “I’m less confident than the general vibe, both in the campaign and in the polls. It feels to me like we might be 4-5 points ahead and anything can happen to a lead of that size.”

Reform’s hopes have been dented by a strong showing locally of the nativist Restore Britain party, but Farage’s party has not given up hope of pulling off a shock victory.

“We’re in with a shout — it’s going to be tight,” said one Farage ally. Another senior Reform figure who has campaigned in Makerfield said Burnham’s rise looked “inevitable” but added: “What matters as ever is turnout on the day. I note rain is projected — will that dampen the ardour?”

In a sign that Reform has not thrown in the towel, Farage is said by his team to be preparing to campaign in Makerfield on Wednesday and Thursday; normally party leaders do not want to be personally associated with a likely defeat.

Bookmakers have Burnham as heavy odds-on favourite to win the seat, which was vacated by former Labour MP Josh Simons to clear the way for the Greater Manchester mayor to return to Westminster. Reform’s candidate Robert Kenyon is typically around 4-1 with bookies.

Burnham’s team hopes that Starmer will set an orderly timetable for a transition to a new leader if the former cabinet minister wins in Makerfield, rather than fighting for his job and triggering a potentially lengthy leadership contest.

However, Streeting believes that Burnham should be thoroughly tested in a leadership contest and opinion polls suggest that the mayor’s popularity has been falling since he emerged as a prospective prime minister.

In YouGov’s latest favourability poll, Burnham has a net favourability rating of minus 11, with 30 per cent of Britons liking the would-be leader, versus 41 per cent who dislike him. Before mid-May his favourability score was positive.

Yet Burnham is still much more popular than Starmer, who has a net favourability rating of minus 46. YouGov’s poll gives Streeting, who quit the cabinet last month, a minus 38 favourability rating.

Streeting on Tuesday insisted that he had enough MP backers to stand and vowed to force a contest, as he argued that Labour must stop being “squeamish” about competition.

The former health secretary said “the tax burden in Britain is too high” and that Labour must not “deter the wealth creators from this country” as he argued his party should defend internationally competitive UK industries.

Despite promising a “wealth tax that works” through equalising capital gains and income tax, Streeting said reliefs would be “more generous to genuine entrepreneurs”.

“As taxes on wealth go up, and as the public finances allow, I would want to see taxes on employment coming down,” he added.

In a speech setting out his economic plan, which will be seen by some as a pitch to become the next chancellor, Streeting signalled his disagreement with Burnham, who last month said that the past four decades had “given us wide inequality”.

Streeting said: “I don’t believe we’ve sat through 40 years of neoliberal failure.” He added: “There is a real risk that a Labour leadership contest becomes a Dutch auction of the most expensive and popular pledges to appeal to the party faithful at the expense of the British people.”

The UK would be “cold-shouldered” by “wounded” EU member states if it applied to rejoin the bloc, says the man who presided over its exit process.

Jean-Claude Juncker, former president of the European Commission, told the FT: “I don’t think [rejoining] is possible. Because all of us, we are wounded to some extent by this . . . historic step the British have taken.”

“A majority of European governments would cold-shoulder this, because the British are very close to the US, whereas the US is not very popular for the time being inside the European Union,” he added.

Ten years on from the UK’s vote to leave the EU, and with Sir Keir Starmer under pressure to quit as prime minister, many centre-left politicians see reversing Brexit as a radical agenda that could invigorate progressives.

Lord Spencer Livermore, a UK Treasury minister, recently said rejoining the EU was an “inevitability”. Some European heads of government, including Spain’s Pedro Sánchez and Poland’s Donald Tusk, have said they would welcome such a move.

But Juncker said the favourable terms the UK had as an EU member would no longer be available. They included an opt-out from adopting the euro and the Schengen borderless travel zone, as well as a budget rebate.

“If Britain would start by saying, ‘We want our money back’, we would say, ‘There is no money there’.”

A deal given to former prime minister David Cameron to try to sell the idea of staying in the EU during the June 2016 referendum campaign, which allowed reduced social security payments for EU citizens living in the UK and an opt-out from a commitment to “ever closer union”, would also not be renewed, he said.

“I don’t think that [an application to rejoin] would go through like a letter in the post,” said Juncker, a former prime minister of Luxembourg.

He also doubted that Starmer’s successor would back rejoining because of the “vivid counter-reaction” it would provoke in Britain.

Juncker became a virtual hate figure for many Brexit supporters, who saw him as exemplifying high-handed Brussels federalism. He said Cameron told him not to take part in the 2016 referendum campaign on the assumption that his pro-European intervention would repel Remain voters.

“So I didn’t say a word during the campaign . . . although I should have done this because [Brexit architect Nigel] Farage and others spread so much wrong, fake news.”

Now 71, and still using an office in the Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters, he said he believed in the nation state, not a federalist EU. He admitted that Brussels had made mistakes by proposing unnecessary red tape, alienating London.

Soon after he took office in 2014, for example, he was presented with a plan to harmonise regulations on toilet flushing across the bloc. He vetoed it, saying “I will not start my mandate with toilets”.

He said that the UK’s departure had been a loss to the EU because the country had brought “common sense” to European discussions.

But he defended the deal he struck with Cameron before the 2016 campaign, which also allowed limits on free movement. He still has a letter from the former UK premier thanking him and saying it would allow him to campaign for Remain in the Brexit referendum. Cameron hardly mentioned the achievement during the campaign, however.

Juncker said he always believed the Leavers would win.

“The British never felt at ease in the European Union. [Previous governments] were explaining to the British public that Britain was there for economic reasons.”

Juncker’s main aim throughout the Brexit negotiations was to ensure unity and to deter other member states from leaving.

“Given the marvellous result of Brexit, I don’t think that anyone is inspired by this move,” he joked.

“What happened since [Brexit] in Britain was foreseeable because all the lies which were told during the campaign are revealing themselves as having been lies and nothing of the expected advantages from the exit of Britain has happened.”

One unexpected memento in Juncker’s office is a photo of him with Farage, taken when the UK politician was a member of the European parliament.

Juncker said he had a “fair and respectful” relationship with Farage, now leader of rightwing populist party Reform UK. “I will remember him as a tough guy, a good debater and as a liar,” he added.

Sir Keir Starmer is poised to water down Britain’s ambitious electric car sales targets by allowing motorists greater freedom to buy hybrid options, although the government will stick to its pledge to end the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030.

The UK prime minister is set to launch a consultation into the changes following conversations with industry leaders, business secretary Peter Kyle and trade union bosses concerned about job losses in the sector from stricter green targets.

The current zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate requires 80 per cent of all new cars sold in Britain to be all-electric by the end of the decade, with hybrid cars making up the other 20 per cent.

But Starmer has signed off a plan to reduce the electric cap to 50 per cent, with hybrid cars — which run on a mix of fossil fuels and electric — making up the other 50 per cent.

Ministers are not dropping the promise to phase out the sale of new internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles by 2030 as set out in Labour’s 2024 general election manifesto.

Meanwhile, the government will also keep 2035 as the cut-off point for the sale of hybrids, after which only fully electric vehicles will be sold in the new-purchase market.

The ZEV mandate only applies to newly produced cars and has no impact on older cars or second-hand vehicles already on the road.

Labour’s plans to once again shake up the ZEV mandate come despite the party previously criticising the former Tory government for undermining the sector by “chopping and changing” the rules.

But Starmer felt obliged to act after automotive executives warned that the policy would force them to reduce investment in the UK.

Some manufacturers have struggled to hit EV targets without offering heavy discounts or buying carbon credits from rival manufacturers such as Tesla and BYD.

One government figure described the current mandate as “exponential”, saying that although EV sales were rising they were struggling to keep pace with the trajectory of the mandate. “This is all about flattening the pathway,” they said.

There has been a rise in EV sales, particularly as the conflict in the Middle East pushed up the price of fuel. In the first five months of the year, EVs made up 24 per cent of new car sales in the UK, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, compared with 21 per cent in 2025, but the figure is still below the 33 per cent required by the government.

Industry executives had warned that many carmakers would not be able to meet the sharp rise in targets in the next few years despite some flexibilities introduced last year.

One industry executive said the change in trajectory would “ease the pressure” while calling for more clarity on what would count as hybrids.

Two other industry executives said further more moderate options to weaken the EV targets were also still on the table.

A government official said Kyle had been pivotal in the change of policy, having worked closely not only with industry executives but also with Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite the Union, to tackle the issue.

Graham last week called for the targets to be “radically reduced”, saying the mandate was “significantly contributing to the loss of automotive jobs in Britain”.

The government had been due to conclude a review of the ZEV mandate in early 2027 but Starmer, whose premiership is under threat, appears to have brought it forward as part of what could be his final burst of activity in office.

Proponents of the targets have warned that changing the government direction at a time when EV sales are rising could confuse consumers and penalise companies that have invested heavily in shifting away from the combustion engine.

Greg Jackson, chief executive of Octopus Energy, criticised the government for choosing “short-termist incumbent lobbying instead of the long-term future of industry.

“The fossil fuel market is shrinking globally and our best hope is to speed up development of electric vehicles, not go the other way,” he added.

James Alexander, chief executive of the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association, said investors needed certainty to fund the rollout of new vehicle charging infrastructure.

“Any attempt to water down these targets could send warning signals to these investors about the government’s long-term commitment to electrifying our transport network,” he said.

The author argues that instead of Britain attempting to rejoin the EU in its prior position, which they deem as unlikely and unnecessary, that Britain may instead negotiate a bilateral patchwork of treaties similar to Switzerland. In doing so Britain would re-enter the single market, customs union, free trade areas, and various other EU programs like science, education, defence, and finance.

The author argues that it would be less politically toxic than rejoining without a referendum, and put Britain in a better position to rejoin as a full member in the future.

Though I am personally in favour of a multi-speed Europe and British autonomy, I do not believe the EU would be willing to negotiate such a system with Britain at present. The author also seems to downplay the political toxicity of freedom of movement; the sudden loss of immigration control would very likely supercharge Reform and the Tories even further.

Looking to Sir Tony Blair for policy specifics has always been a waste of time — like looking at a painting by Turner and complaining you aren’t being given photorealism. Blair’s genius, back when he was in government and now, has always been his ability to see and articulate the big picture.

When he came into office, and made Alan Milburn a junior minister, he did so with the simple instruction that “we need a health policy”. He didn’t sit and devise the detail of what became New Labour’s health policy, but he grasped the broad outline of what they needed.

When Blair talks about his party’s present difficulties, a similar dynamic is at work. On the big picture, he is surely correct: Labour are in trouble because they did not think deeply enough in opposition, and in government they have talked a great deal about being pro-business while being precisely the opposite.

This is bad for the country and for their election prospects, not least because if we don’t see significant economic growth pretty soon then the second half of this parliament will be even more painful for Labour than the first.

What is missing from Blair’s criticism of Sir Keir Starmer is any acknowledgment of his own good fortune in becoming prime minister after Margaret Thatcher and John Major, rather than in the wake of the long procession of failed prime ministers Britain has had since David Cameron lost the Brexit referendum. Starmer’s Labour inherited a dishevelled public realm — a problem that it is well within its comfort zone to fix — but also a tax system badly in need of reform and an economy growing sluggishly. Neither issue is Labour’s natural focus.

As a case in point: a couple of months ago, a Labour minister told me that they thought Canary Wharf in London’s Docklands was “corporate” and “hollow”. This took me somewhat aback, I have to admit, because the context was me saying that I had grown up close to there. (I did not reply by saying I had always thought the part of the country they represent was grasping for subsidies from the capital, but I nearly bit my tongue in half in avoiding doing so.)

The remark was doubly surprising because I was under the impression that the Labour government’s number one priority was growth. Yet here was someone who had become a minister of state, but whose first thought about a place that is a hub for both financial services and the life sciences — two sectors at the heart of Britain’s comparative advantage economically — is that it is too “corporate”.

I shouldn’t have been shocked, however, because Labour’s commitment to growth comes with a dizzying number of caveats. This is not an exhaustive list, just those I have noticed: Labour’s number one mission comes with the proviso that it be “felt across the nations and regions”; that it be “inclusive”, “green” and “good”; that it not rely on immigration and not be too concentrated in the core cities. I’m sure there are more.

The Blairite argument was always that the Conservative victories of the 1980s were avoidable with the right choices — that Labour governments could have pursued both the turnaround in public services they presided over from 1997 onwards and the economic transformation wrought by Thatcher and Major. As Blair argued in his final conference speech as prime minister, the old forced choice between efficiency and compassion had been shown to be a false one.

But the Starmer government has shown that, in practice, it can’t make that call. Even when Labour talks about a “hard choice” on the economy, that choice involves cutting government spending — reducing someone’s benefits, say — rather than changing who it taxes and how. Faced with a country visibly needing both an economic turnaround and an improvement in public services, this government’s instinct is to make the former harder in the service of the latter.

It should have been obvious long before Labour took office that you cannot have a state that meets the desires of the many paid for by increasing taxes on the few. As well as inheriting a state that did not meet the requirements most British people have of it, they inherited a tax base too narrow to fund it. What is more, taxation was already starting to sap the UK’s growth and competitiveness. But although that insight is one you can find within the Labour Party, it is not one that has been a central feature of Starmer’s government. And nor will it be central to the government of whoever replaces him.

Did Victory Day signal defeat? The symbolism of the scaled-down military parade held in Moscow on May 9 was stark. The Kremlin decided not to risk the customary display of tanks and heavy equipment on Red Square for fear of strikes by Ukrainian drones. The decision illustrated that Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” had not only failed to defeat Ukraine. The Russian army was now at risk in Moscow itself.

Unable to deliver victory after four years of all-out war, the Kremlin had sought to at least insulate Moscow and Saint Petersburg from the consequences. But the war has now reached the Russian capital. Security concerns have led to frequent closures of Moscow’s main airports and shutdowns of mobile internet. Generals have been assassinated on the streets of the capital. Fuel prices are rising across Russia because of successful Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries.

For Russia, as a whole, the costs of the conflict have been staggering and tragic. Anne Keast-Butler, the head of Britain’s GCHQ intelligence agency, said recently that almost 500,000 Russians have been killed in the conflict — and many more have been grievously wounded. That is an obvious threat to the future of a country whose population was already declining before the war.

If a glorious victory was just around the corner, those costs might seem bearable. But Russia has now been fighting in Ukraine for longer than the Soviet Union fought Germany in the second world war. It has still failed to conquer the whole of the Donbas and, in April, the Russians actually lost territory.

This dire situation is now producing visible signs of dissent within the Russian elite, including some openly questioning the war. One much-discussed piece appeared recently in the establishment publication “Russia in Global Affairs”. The article argued that the goal of eliminating the pro-western government in Kyiv was “fundamentally unattainable” since it would require the occupation of the whole of Ukraine. It suggested instead that a negotiated peace would be in Russia’s interests.

Russian history suggests Putin should be worried — not just about the progress of the war but about his own position. Russian military setbacks have often led to radical changes of political direction in Moscow. Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 contributed to popular unrest and moves towards a constitutional monarchy. Failure in the first world war formed the backdrop to the Russian Revolution. The removal of Nikita Khrushchev as leader of the Soviet Union in 1964 was closely related to his perceived failure in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The endless Afghanistan war was an important part of the malaise that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Those precedents suggest that failure in Ukraine could easily lead to the downfall of Putin, who is now 73 years old. But identifying the precise mechanism for his removal is much harder.

Public protests or conventional politics seem unlikely to succeed. There were big anti-Putin protests in Moscow in 2011-12, 2019 and 2021, which were met with mass arrests and violence. Charismatic opposition leaders tend to end up dead or in exile; Boris Nemtsov was assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015. Alexei Navalny died in prison in 2024 — almost certainly murdered. There are elections for the Russian Duma in September, but the result is not in doubt.

Men with guns have a better chance of toppling Putin than unarmed civilians. The 2023 uprising led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner group, was the closest Putin has come to losing power since he became president of Russia in December 1999. But the mutiny failed and Prigozhin died in a not very mysterious plane crash shortly afterwards. Since then, Putin has ensured he has tight control over all armed forces in the country.

Nonetheless, a split within the Russian elite still seems the most likely way of getting rid of Putin. What would be needed is a critical mass of people who agree the war is going badly and that Russia needs it to end. These people would also understand that negotiating a peace with Ukraine — and a rapprochement with Europe — would be much easier if there were a new face and fresh thinking in the Kremlin. Indeed European governments should now be doing their utmost to get that message across in elite circles in Russia.

Translating elite discontent into an effective move to get rid of Putin is, however, no easy matter. It would probably require somebody near the top of the current system, with loyal troops behind him. But, as Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center points out, the current elite “are all handpicked loyalists, beneficiaries of the current confrontation, with tons of kompromat on them as a deterrent, not on speaking terms with each other enough to conspire [and] all on western sanctions lists for many years”. Under the circumstances, sticking with Putin may still seem like the safer option.

It is certainly tempting for exiles and outsiders to allow their judgment of Putin’s future to be swayed by wishful thinking. The obstacles to his removal remain formidable.

And yet it is increasingly clear that Putin has put his country on an unsustainable course in Ukraine. And to borrow a phrase that is popular in financial markets — “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

The price tag for High Speed 2 has jumped by about £20bn and its completion has been delayed until the 2040s after an extensive review by the chief executive of the project, the British government has admitted.

Heidi Alexander, transport secretary, told MPs on Tuesday that the new rail line from London to Birmingham would now cost up to £102.7bn compared with a previous estimate of about £80bn and that trains will run at slower speeds.

Alexander blamed the rising costs of the project on the past Conservative government, saying her predecessors had failed to negotiate value-for-money deals or keep a lid on soaring costs.

“HS2 became a symbol of this country’s decline . . . that is the shocking legacy of the last government,” she said. “If this seems like an obscene increase in time and costs, it is because it is. If I seem like I’m angry, it is because I am. I am angry on behalf of taxpayers and communities.”

She gave a revised range of cost estimates for the completed project from £87.7bn to £102.7bn in 2025 prices.

The FT first revealed almost two years ago that the upper estimate for the project’s cost would be £80bn in 2024 prices, equivalent to £83bn in 2025 prices.

When it was first drawn up in 2010, ministers expected the London-Birmingham line to be completed by 2026. More recently the timeline slipped to 2033. But now the first trains running between Birmingham and Old Oak Common in west London are not expected until between 2036 and 2039. HS2 said the first piece of track would not be laid until 2029.

The link between Old Oak Common to Euston in north London — and the connection to the West Coast Main Line from Birmingham — would now not be in place until as late as 2043, the government admitted.

The revised figures follow a 15-month review conducted by HS2 Ltd’s chief executive Mark Wild.

A map showing the current plan for HS2

Although the new cost estimate includes the redevelopment of Euston station, there is still uncertainty over the final price as there is no agreed plan for the design or construction of the London terminus.

The project was supposed to connect London to Leeds and Manchester in a Y-shaped route, but the previous government slashed it to barely half of its original length to save money as costs escalated. It remains the most expensive railway per mile of track in the world.

The government confirmed that HS2 would run at 320km/h, down from the planned 360km/h, and said this would be cheaper as there is no existing track to test trains at the higher speeds in Britain.

Alexander said this measure had knocked off “up to £2.5bn” from the estimated bill and would still be 30 minutes quicker than the current times between Birmingham and London.

Ministers were so worried about criticism of the rising cost of HS2 that they commissioned an internal review into whether it would be better value for money to abandon the scheme, despite having already sunk £40bn of taxpayer money into it.

Wild had concluded that scrapping the scheme and remediating all the land would cost a figure in the same ballpark as pushing ahead with the project. He said it would cost £33bn to £58bn to cancel the scheme against £47bn to £62bn to finish it off.

“When faced with such a difficult inheritance, I could have chosen to cancel the project and remediate the construction undertaken so far,” Alexander said. “The costs of doing so are considerable and could cost as much as completing HS2, and would result in no lasting benefit.”