Days on from Donald Trump and JD Vance’s Oval Office ambush of Ukraine’s president and the outrage shows no signs of abating. If anything, the revulsion is growing.

In the Sunday politics shows, as in the weekend papers and websites, there was unanimous agreement that something fundamental had happened in the last ten minutes of a 50-minute press conference, though it was not exactly clear what.

On the left, right and centre, forces that can usually be relied upon to oppose each other were united in condemning the verbal assault on Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Deeply troubling and completely unacceptable,” said Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney. “My heart went out to him,” said Tory leader Kemi Badenoch of President Zelensky. The Prime Minister, meanwhile, went for “Nobody wants to see that.”

It was an odd formulation of words by Sir Keir Starmer, even by his stilted standards. But he stuck to it in an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, using it more than eight times.

The phrase was fitting in that it said nothing while giving the impression of saying something. More importantly for Downing Street, it was in keeping with the peacemaker role in which the Prime Minister has cast himself.

As Piers Morgan, one of Kuenssberg’s panellists put it, Starmer has had his best week since taking office. The Prime Minister who could not put a foot right suddenly looks not so........

© Herald Scotland