What I’ve done is take the duty of prime minister seriously.” Is this actually the beginning of something, where we don’t have to pore over polls and say, “Reform are doing well, ergo Reform must be making sense, ergo we must all be more like Reform?” Too early to say, we can but hope.
Unless, of course, you mean history as recent as last week, and Donald Trump’s refashioning of Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the real dictator; in which case, why not just say, “the load of last week has been considerably heavier, since last week happened”?.
Various journalists raised this in the press conference later in the day, and whatever you think of that “tough choice” - Ed Davey doubtless spoke for many, when he said that it should come from frozen Russian assets and taxing super-wealth rather than the most ravaged countries on earth - it was stunningly unexpected, again, to hear a Labour politician say what they should have been saying since forever.
Before noon, we were in a world where the prime minister was about to ride two horses all the way to the US - the horse that supported Ukraine, and the horse that was happy to see a “peace deal” devised by Putin and bloviated by Trump.
Yes, it’s true, President Trump thinks we should do more, and I agree with him.” Ok, strictly speaking, it did not answer the question, but it was still deft: it could flatter a dumb adversary, which Trump certainly is, into thinking he’d won, without surrendering anything real, in terms of values.
