Keir Starmer has to choose between winning a battle and winning a war: a rare moment of historic choice. It isn’t easy.

Our main security ally for over 80 years and the architect of the world structures in which Britain has operated since 1945 has gone rogue and cannot be relied on. I have lived and worked in the US, like and respect it, and am confident that its natural resilience and its institutions will return it, maybe not to where it was, but to a point where other countries can work with it normally.

But we face variations on the current theme for at least the next four years, even if its behaviour moderates after mid-term Congressional elections or, with luck, sooner, with Congress resuming its constitutional role as a check and balance to the Executive which it has abandoned for the moment.

Read more by George Fergusson

And we face immediate challenges with tangible adverse economic effects: apparently non-negotiable overall 10% tariffs, and probably more damaging ones on cars and pharmaceuticals. Less predictable effects arise from peculiar American efforts to tinker with our own systems. I have just heard of a university asked by a US agency to confirm that it has no diversity practices as a condition of........

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