Keyword – None
Trefwoorden – None
Title – Tom Gauld on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey – cartoon | Books | The Guardian
Author – Tom Gauld
Link – Tom Gauld on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey – cartoon | Books | The Guardian
Publish date – Sun 21 Jun 2026 17.00 CEST
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/books/picture/2026/jun/21/tom-gauld-on-christopher-nolans-the-odyssey-cartoon

Keyword – US news
Trefwoorden – Chicago, Illinois, Trump administration, Donald Trump, US politics, US news
Title – At least seven people killed in Chicago shootings as Trump renews military call | Chicago | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/gloria-oladipo
Link – At least seven people killed in Chicago shootings as Trump renews military call | Chicago | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-21T23:07:26.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/21/chicago-shootings-trump

At least seven people have been killed and dozens injured in several shootings in Chicago since Friday, police said, with Donald Trump once again calling for military intervention in the midwestern city.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump questioned why Illinois’s governor, JB Pritzker, had not welcomed military deployment.

“Why isn’t Governor Pritzker calling me for help. I could make Chicago a safe City in ONE MONTH, in ONE YEAR, it would be one of the safest!!!” Trump wrote in a Sunday post. “D.C. went from one of the worst, to one of the safest cities in the U.S.”

In addition to Washington DC, the Trump administration has deployed national guard troops in Democratic-led cities such as New Orleans and Memphis.

Counter to Trump’s post, a recent study from the nonpartisan thinktank the Niskanen Center found that the national guard’s presence has had minimal effect on violent crime in DC.

Pritzker has repeatedly rejected Trump’s proposal to federalize national guard members in the state, suing to block the Trump administration’s deployment last year.

A representative of Pritzker did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment on Trump’s latest remarks.

While Chicago police data shows a slight increase in shooting incidents compared to the first half of last year, violent crime rates have generally dropped in the city over the past few years, in parallel with national trends.

Preliminary information shared by Chicago police indicate there have been at least two dozen shooting incidents since 5pm on Friday. At least 12 people in a crowd on a Chicago street suffered gunshot wounds on Friday evening after an SUV pulled up and two people inside started shooting, police said.

The eight men and four women in the group ranged in age from 17 to 47. They were being treated at four hospitals. Police said another man suffered unknown injuries and refused medical treatment.

Among those killed in this weekend’s shootings include a 33-year-old man, a 34-year-old man, and a 21-year old man, all in separate incidents. Officials have yet to publish the identities of most of the victims.

That shooting happened on Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the end of slavery in the US. Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson condemned the shootings in a post to X on Saturday.

“What should have been a night of celebration and community reflection for Juneteenth was shattered by a horrific act of violence,” said Johnson. “My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their loved ones….Violence has no place in our city, and those responsible will be held accountable.”

Earlier on Friday, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama welcomed the first visitors to his presidential center on the South Side. The star-studded opening included performances from musicians John Legend, Jennifer Hudson, Bruce Springsteen, and more. Joe Biden and George W Bush were also in attendance.

Trump was not invited to the center’s opening, Obama Foundation CEO Valerie Jarrett said, noting that the opening was to host supporters of Obama and celebrate the work it took to bring the center into fruition.

“We have said that if President Trump would like to come and take a tour, we’d love to show him this campus and show him all the magnificent things that we have to offer, both to the people who live here and the people who visit from around the world,” said Jarrett to NBC News.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

Keyword – Football
Trefwoorden – France, World Cup 2026, World Cup, Football, Sport, Kylian Mbappé
Title – Kylian Mbappé hungry for Golden Boot battle with Messi as he sings Les Bleus | France | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/paulmacinnes
Link – Kylian Mbappé hungry for Golden Boot battle with Messi as he sings Les Bleus | France | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-21T21:47:01.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jun/21/kylian-mbappe-hungry-for-golden-boot-battle-with-messi-as-he-sings-les-bleus

Kylian Mbappé is relishing a Golden Boot duel with Lionel Messi, the player he calls the “best of the best”, but has said his personal ambitions would be subordinated to those of the team when France seek to seal qualification from Group C with victory over Iraq on Monday.

Mbappé stepped into the full glare of the international media for the first time at this World Cup and handled the spotlight impeccably. From a defence of Ousmane Dembélé to the hot topic of the hydration break, France’s captain spoke in a calm and thoughtful manner. A more pugilistic role was reserved for his manager, Didier Deschamps.

“It is always a pleasure to be able to play in national team and there is nothing bigger than that for me,” Mbappé said, before a game in which he will earn a remarkable 100th cap for Les Bleus at the age of 27. “To reach 100 caps, that’s historic, to do it at a World Cup all the more so. So it’s a special match for me, but the thing that is clear in my mind is that we need to win in order to qualify.”

After his opening double against Senegal , Mbappé has 14 World Cup goals, two goals behind Miroslav Klose’s all-time record, one that was tied by Messi with his opening hat-trick against Algeria. “I knew Messi would go and score goals, he always does,” Mbappé said. “He is ahead of me but I will keep scoring to help our squad go as far as possible. When you score goals it helps towards breaking records, but I want to win the World Cup.”

Messi and Mbappé’s exploits both occurred during a remarkable 48 hours of goalscoring last week, with Harry Kane and Erling Haaland also making their mark at the tournament. Asked which of this cohort was the best, however, the Frenchman did not require time to think. “Lionel is the best of the four players it’s clear,” he said. “He is the best of the best with Cristiano [Ronaldo]. He’s shown over 15 years he has an amazing quality. For the rest, it’s a debate for journalists and fans. It’s good to debate but it’s not an issue in my head. I just try to show what I can do and show my ability on the biggest stage.”

Mbappé said he had already rewatched the Senegal game twice, once by himself and once with staff. He praised the performance of Dembélé, whose international form has been the subject of much scrutiny by French journalists, to the extent that, when later confronted with the same topic, Deschamps insisted the media were “very much on his back”.

“In the first half he was the best attacker, he made the play fluid,” Mbappé said “In the second half Michael Olise and I were decisive [in the opening goal] but Ousmane also contributed. If you see Michael’s pass, Ousmane creates the space. It doesn’t count in the stats, but it matters. He is the Ballon d’Or and everyone is on board.”

On the small matter of the compulsory drinks breaks, Mbappé was short but to the point. “Don’t ask the players about it, we’ll change our mind all the time,” he said. “If we’re up and it disrupts our play I won’t like it. If it’s hot, I’ll think it’s good.”

Keyword – Politics
Trefwoorden – Politics, Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham
Title – UK prime minister Keir Starmer announces resignation – video | Politics | The Guardian
Author –
Link – UK prime minister Keir Starmer announces resignation – video | Politics | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T09:00:40.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2026/jun/22/uk-prime-minister-keir-starmer-announces-resignation-video

Keyword – Television & radio
Trefwoorden – Television & radio, Culture, Podcasts
Title – Barack Obama’s gripping new show: best podcasts of the week | Television & radio | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/hannah-j-davies,https://www.theguardian.com/profile/alexi-duggins
Link – Barack Obama’s gripping new show: best podcasts of the week | Television & radio | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T06:00:52.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/jun/22/barack-obamas-gripping-new-show-best-podcasts-of-the-week

Pick of the week Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise

Who would have thought, back in 2008, that Barack Obama (pictured above) would become one of podcasting’s biggest movers and shakers? The former president is front and centre of this series on the post-slavery period in the US, a collaboration with Malcolm Gladwell for Audible and the History Channel. It’s slick and excellently researched, but it’s the calibre of conversation and careful dot-joining that make it so compelling. Hannah J Davies Widely available, episodes weekly

Tocqueville Road Trip

John Prideaux, the Economist’s US editor, embarks on a road trip to assess America’s democracy on its 250th anniversary. He’s following the 1831 tour of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, whose book is “the single most insightful thing ever written about the United States”. It’s a colourful way to wrestle with anxieties over whether it can survive Trump. Alexi Duggins Widely available, episodes weekly

Swingers

Journalist Catrin Nye tells the tale of a woman who joined a swinging website to please her husband – and says she had non-consensual sex with more than 100 men. It’s graphic, troubling and spares no detail, as Nye looks into swinging, including interviews with the men who do it. What she uncovers is not easy listening. Alexi Duggins BBC Sounds, all episodes available now

Here for the History

According to legend, a leaf drifted into Chinese emperor Shen Nung’s drink of boiling water in 2737BC and the cuppa was born. Tea is just one British tradition that historian Alice Loxton and the BBC’s Ben Henderson explore in this podcast – though the conversation soon turns to the violence and smuggling it provoked. HJD BBC Sounds, episodes weekly

Bone Valley

Rolling Stone writer Paul Solotaroff hosts the fifth season of the acclaimed true-crime strand, on the murder of a 12-year-old girl in New York State in 1995. While the circumstances of Josette Wright’s death are nightmarish, this is a careful, powerful investigation: says Solotaroff, this is a story that has “pierced the skin, and will not give me peace”. HJD Widely available, episodes weekly

Keyword – Football
Trefwoorden – World Cup 2026, England, World Cup, Football, Sport, Thomas Tuchel, Chelsea
Title – From Times Square to England squad: Trevoh Chalobah realises World Cup dream | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/davidhytner
Link – From Times Square to England squad: Trevoh Chalobah realises World Cup dream | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-21T18:00:36.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jun/21/from-times-square-to-england-squad-trevoh-chalobah-realises-world-cup-dream

T revoh Chalobah has always thought he would be part of an England World Cup squad. In July 2018, the Chelsea centre‑half even put it on the record. “One day … believe,” he posted on social media, alongside a picture of the World Cup trophy. He was 19 and had just joined Ipswich in the Championship on a season loan. The message has aged exceptionally well.

Despite his faith, Chalobah did not think it would be this summer. The chance had surely gone when Thomas Tuchel did not name him in his squad for the tournament in North America. He was close after a fine season at Chelsea, when he made a career-high 47 club appearances, but not close enough.

Everything changed last Monday , and if there is an arresting quality to the story it is because it takes in so much emotion while also offering a peek into the glamorous lifestyle of a footballer. The heartbreak belonged to Tino Livramento, who was forced to withdraw from Tuchel’s squad after sustaining a calf injury in training last Sunday.

Chalobah was on holiday with a friend in New York. He had been in Monaco the previous weekend for the Formula One Grand Prix before popping along the Côte d’Azur to Cannes, then heading to the Big Apple on the Saturday. The plan after that was to go to Los Angeles.

The funny thing was Chalobah did not see the message from Tuchel straight away. “I was in Times Square,” he says. “I’d gone to the shops. It was when I got back to my hotel I saw Thomas had texted but it was two hours before. I didn’t see the message for two hours. I wasn’t on my phone. I was just walking around.”

Call me – and fairly urgently – was the gist of the England manager’s words. “My heart just dropped,” Chalobah says. As in, it performed a flip. Because he knew. Tuchel was not reaching out for an idle chat. “I knew straight away,” the defender says. And so, shortly after, there was Tuchel on a video chat. “He was smiling and he said: ‘I have got some good news for you.’ I was just over the moon.”

His World Cup dream was realised and he could not help but repost his old tweet. “It has always been a dream and that day I decided to tweet it,” he says of the 2018 message. “I believed that one day, hopefully I’d make it. This is the No 1 moment of my career, especially because I didn’t expect it [now]. That is the beautiful thing. To get a call like that shows that when you think all is lost or it’s not going to happen … that tweet came true.”

Tuchel did tell Chalobah to “stay ready” when he named his squad and the defender tried to keep himself ticking over. Replacements for injured outfield players are permitted up to 24 hours before a team’s opening match; England kicked off last Wednesday in Dallas with the 4-2 win against Croatia .

Chalobah flew from New York to Kansas City, where England are based, and was there by the time the squad returned after the Croatia game. It has been a whirlwind – down to a detail about his boots. “I gave them away at the end of the season,” he says. “My sponsors were going to send me boots out [to the US] for me to do my own thing with a personal trainer. I was waiting for that to happen when I got to Los Angeles. I had to speed up the process when I got called up.”

Chalobah is fighting to acclimatise after missing England’s hot-weather preparation camp in Florida. He worked individually at first before taking part in his first full training session with the squad on Saturday. As Tuchel has said many times, adaptation is the name of the game.

“As athletes you always have to be mentally ready,” Chalobah says. “I was in a position where I was switching off and recovering and enjoying my holidays but I’ve been used to this last-minute stuff throughout my career so I was able to adapt.”

Chalobah has had to deal with upheaval. After Ipswich, he had further loans at Huddersfield in the Championship and Lorient in Ligue 1 and there has been uncertainty in more than one pre‑season about his future at Chelsea . It was most acute in 2024, when the club stripped him of his shirt number and consigned him to the so-called bomb squad of players they wanted to sell. They eventually loaned him to Crystal Palace. And yet they recalled him in January 2025 to answer an injury crisis. He is not a player willing to accept that a door is closed. He will always kick it back open.

“I know the player I am. I know how far I’ve come. I know what I’ve been through. So I can’t allow those moments to define who I am or have that disbelief. I have faith. In my career, I’ve always been coming in – maybe not seen as playing – but then I’m always managing to play. It starts in training. Just give my all, make sure I’m ready when called upon. I believe I can play a big part at this World Cup.”

Chalobah’s Christian faith is central to everything. “That’s what I build on,” he says. “No matter what happens, I know I have a foundation that I can lean on. Because of my faith, I know that those moments won’t define me. I just use them as fuel to always prove people wrong and I love it.”

Tuchel’s decision to give the call to Chalobah has been questioned. Why replace a full-back in Livramento with a central defender? Would Myles Lewis-Skelly or Lewis Hall not have been better? Then again, they are left-backs; Tuchel considered Livramento primarily as a right-back. What about Trent Alexander-Arnold? Or – if a centre‑half was needed – what about Harry Maguire?

Tuchel had reservations about Maguire’s ability to be an unselfish support player, which have not been dispelled by the Manchester United man’s vociferous reaction to his omission. The manager also said in March that he considered Chalobah to be ahead of Maguire “on the level of mobility”. Tuchel’s idea is that Jarell Quansah will provide cover at right-back, even left-back as well, while Chalobah will compete at right centre-half.

Tuchel believes in Chalobah. He gave him his Chelsea debut in August 2021 in the European Super Cup against Villarreal, which ushered in his breakthrough season at the club. He tried to sign him from Chelsea in the summer of 2023 when he was at Bayern Munich. “Yeah, he tried to bring me to Bayern,” Chalobah says. And the manager gave him his England debut against Senegal last June. It remains his only cap.

There was a moment as Chalobah reflected on the past week or so when he was asked whether his hotel in Los Angeles was refundable. “Yeah,” he said, with a smile. “I’m still trying to get my money back.” Another England appearance would be priceless.

Keyword – World news
Trefwoorden – Judaism, Religion, UK news
Title – ‘I’ve finally found God without all the extras’: behind the surge in people converting to Progressive Judaism | Judaism | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/aamna-mohdin
Link – ‘I’ve finally found God without all the extras’: behind the surge in people converting to Progressive Judaism | Judaism | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-20T13:00:02.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/20/surge-in-people-converting-to-progressive-judaism

For Elizabeth Arif-Fear, there was no single moment when she realised she wanted to be Jewish. “It was just a journey over time,” she says.

The 37-year-old interfaith activist was born Christian, then converted to Islam and was Muslim for 14 years, before realising that that faith was also not the right fit. Eventually, she found the answer she had been searching for in Judaism . “I feel I’ve finally found God without all the extras,” she says. “Without Jesus, without Muhammad.”

Arif-Fear is part of a “surge” in the number of people converting to Progressive Judaism, a movement that represents about a third of British Jews . Figures shared with the Guardian show adult conversions rose from 78 in 2020 to 183 in 2025.

“There has been a lot of antisemitism and anti-Jewish feeling in the last three or four years. So you would have thought this is the last time that people would want to identify with the Jewish community, and yet, we’ve had a surge,” says Rabbi Jonathan Romain, convener of the Reform Beit Din, the rabbinic court for Progressive Judaism, and former rabbi of Maidenhead synagogue.

Romain says that, until recently, most converts did so for “romantic reasons”: they had Jewish partners and wanted to unify family life. But he believes the recent rise has been driven by three additional factors: the Covid-19 pandemic, the expansion of religious education in schools and DNA tests.

“We’ve found several times people have said to me, ‘Somebody gave me a DNA test as a Christmas present and it turned out I was Jewish,’” he says. “For some people, that’s just a matter of information. But other people, it intrigues them, or maybe it even answers something deep inside them.”

For Arif-Fear, what drew her towards Judaism was its progressive elements, and a culture in which questioning and debate were encouraged. “What really inspired me was the diversity and the pluralism in it,” she says. “I learned that you could be atheist and Jewish, and then they had Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Liberal, and that was really intriguing and inspiring for me.”

She adds: “So that inclusivity, that kind of dialogue, that questioning. It was just a really welcoming space. It’s LGBT-friendly, there are female rabbis, all of that. And people that were really proud of their faith but also felt very British at the same time.”

Romain says converts are increasingly coming from more diverse backgrounds. “Whereas beforehand it was largely white British, now because Britain is so multicultural, it’s very common to have people, who may have come from Romania or Portugal or Korea,” he says.

There are also notable numbers of LGBT people converting as Progressive Jewish communities can be more welcoming than other religious spaces.

For Debbie Collings, 65, conversion was about reclaiming something she had been born into. She had been raised Jewish until she was 16, but later left the faith. She found herself moving back towards it after caring for her ill father, who asked if she would be able to find the graves of his great-grandparents.

Collings found the gravesites, overgrown with grass, on a rainy day. “I just stood and looked at the graves and I went, ‘Oh my God’,” she says. Her great-grandparents had fled pogroms in Russia, she adds, and they and their children went on to make a huge contribution to Britain. “And now we – our generation – have rejected it.”

She left wanting to find out more about her family and Judaism. Like other converts and returnees, she spent a year in classes learning more about the religion and community, before having an interview with Romain and others on the rabbinic court and receiving confirmation that she was Jewish.

She describes stepping back into synagogue as a return to her roots. “I go in there and for me it’s like this peace just comes over me,” she says. “And it sort of fills a big gap that I didn’t really realise was missing until I started to explore it again.”

And, she adds, “if I die tomorrow, I know I can be buried in a Jewish cemetery”.

Amanda, who did not wish to give her last name, grew up in a Christian family and was a devout follower of the gospel before she began to question it. She felt people had failed to answer her growing issues with the New Testament, and the more she got to know people within Judaism, the more she felt she belonged.

She had often heard adults who converted to Christianity say, “‘I felt full of the Holy Spirit’,” but she did not feel that when converting to Judaism. “It just felt normal, like it should have been. Like it always was, if that makes sense,” Amanda says.

Her daily life hasn’t changed much: she never ate pork or shellfish, she says. The biggest change is “having gone from Sunday to Saturday,” she says. “Now, I forget that the world carries on on the Saturday.”

She particularly enjoys preparing for shabbat. “At the end of the day, when you light your candles and you just collapse on the settee, you think, ‘Oh, phew.’”

Romain says that sense of community is one of Judaism’s strongest draws. “There’s an enormous sense of camaraderie. In this world that is becoming increasingly polarised and lonely, because the local pubs are closing, high streets have collapsed, you can’t go to a post office anymore, you order everything online and you work from home, there’s that sense of human kindness and human contact,” he says.

“That’s something religions in general can offer, but Judaism in particular is very good at.”

The numbers of converts remain modest, in part because Judaism is not a proselytising faith. But Romain says that is central to its outlook. “There is a Jewish saying – this time I can quote – which says that if anyone tells you he loves God but he doesn’t love his neighbour, then you know he’s lying,” he says.

“It’s all very well keeping kosher, or saying Hail Marys, or genuflecting, and fasting. But it’s no good if you’re then unpleasant to the person standing next to you.”

Keyword – Politics
Trefwoorden – Keir Starmer, Politics, Labour party leadership, UK news, Labour
Title – Frozen by the challenges of power: how Starmer turned triumph into tragedy | Keir Starmer | The Guardian
Author – Peter Walker
Link – Frozen by the challenges of power: how Starmer turned triumph into tragedy | Keir Starmer | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T08:45:29.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2026/jun/22/frozen-by-the-challenges-of-power-how-starmer-turned-triumph-into-tragedy

Few would describe him as a dramatic man, but Keir Starmer’s political career has been almost Shakespearean in its trajectory: a mere 11 years to enter parliament, lead Labour to an election win many assumed was impossible and then, inside the final two years, throw it all away.

His demise is, of course, a reflection of an unprecedented era, one in which voter loyalties were atomised, a two-party hegemony fractured into five, and for the first time ever Labour faced a coherent threat on its left as well as its right.

Perhaps no one could have steered the party through all this. But even Starmer’s closest allies and supporters will accept that he was very much at fault. No modern prime minister has looked so well-suited to the job on paper and been so fundamentally inept in practice.

“Starmer didn’t know what he was doing in three ways,” said Anthony Seldon, the historian who has written biographies of every PM from John Major to Rishi Sunak.

“Firstly, he never worked out what the job was – what does the prime minister do? Secondly, he never knew what he wanted to do, above all not on economic policy. And thirdly, he didn’t know who to appoint.

“Once you’ve got those three things happening it’s never going to work. It’s just a question of how quickly the wheels come off.”

As a precis this might sound harsh. But it is difficult to counter the wider sense of a politician adept at winning the Labour leadership and then guiding the party to victory, before becoming frozen by the endless choices of power, hiding behind an ever-expanding lexicon of missions, goals and plans for change.

This chasm between campaigning and governing was noticed, with alarm, by some working directly with Starmer in the final days before Labour’s election triumph of July 2024, a landslide in seats if not the popular vote.

One staffer recounted asking why they had not yet seen a plan to govern, to be told that there did not appear to be one. “After the win we expected some sort of blitz of major policies. Instead, we just had the PM going round meeting mayors on a UK tour. There were a lot of people saying: ‘This can’t be it. This isn’t how you do politics.’”

Some put at least part of the blame for this botched beginning on Sue Gray, the veteran civil servant who was Starmer’s chief of staff, another example of a highly capable person in the wrong job for their talents.

Others say the fault was more Starmer’s for failing to adapt his approach from an opposition leader trying to rebuild a party after the disastrous 2019 election to inevitable prime minister-in-waiting, which meant he arrived in No 10 without a plan.

David Runciman, the political scientist and author, said: “Starmer thought he faced an uphill struggle, and the real task was discipline and just maximising what could be extracted out of the next election.

“But in fact, from about halfway through that parliament – basically from the moment Liz Truss appointed Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor – Labour were going to win the next election, whatever happened. They had two years to prepare, and did not prepare.”

Gray was soon replaced by Morgan McSweeney, who had masterminded Labour’s unexpectedly rapid post-Jeremy Corbyn renaissance, but was equally unsuited to the role, and whose primary legacy was the disastrous appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington.

While Starmer is very obviously a different politician to Boris Johnson, the two share similarities, notably the repeated and fruitless changes to their top teams, followed by a creeping realisation that the problem was actually not the aides, but the man at the centre.

In another echo of the Johnson era, paper trails from the appointment of Mandelson showed Starmer as almost more of a figurehead than a boss, the decisions made elsewhere, with the PM acting as chief rubber-stamper.

One Labour official says Starmer has always been keen to devolve considerable authority and leeway to trusted aides, a tendency that served him well when leading the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and then as opposition leader.

They added: “But government is different, and that system has not worked. It becomes very hard to get consistency, because you end up with different people with different views, with quite a lot of power and no real reason for them to align around one vision.”

Others disagree. One ally who worked very closely with Starmer as prime minister described him as not just hard-working but effective.

They said: “He’s not Obama in his presentational skills, but then almost no one is. But he did have a lot of other talents for the job, most of which the public never saw. If you want a presentational genius mixed with all that, you might be waiting a long time.”

Much of Starmer’s work, the ally said, was based on his central belief in fairness. Others, however, argue that a key reason for his failure was the lack of an obvious political belief system.

“A core philosophy is the thing that holds you together when it’s falling apart,” Runciman said. “Margaret Thatcher was the exemplar of this. But with Starmer, I couldn’t see it, and it never emerged.

“If your reason for being in government is ‘We’re more competent than the other people’, that doesn’t work when the shit hits the fan.”

In one key way, Starmer is quite different to the four post-Brexit occupants of No 10 under the Tories. Theresa May, Johnson, Truss and Rishi Sunak were all somewhat unusual characters, whether awkward, borderline misanthropic, tunnel-visioned to the point of crankery, or detached and peevish.

In contrast, everyone who knows Starmer speaks about his fundamental normality – with his lower middle-class suburban background and fondness for football and the pub, he could have been created for a focus group – as well as his sociability and rich network of friends, many of them outside politics.

It is to the intense frustration of virtually everyone who has worked with Starmer that, despite all this, his public reputation is of someone not just boring and robotic but also out of touch and – thanks to the knighthood conferred for his CPS work – very possibly quite posh as well.

Friends and colleagues regularly express bafflement that the person they know as open, thoughtful and often funny in private, seems to freeze up whenever a microphone or camera emerges, despite years of hopeful coaching.

Starmer has always been a slightly curious politician. He was already 52 when he entered parliament, but with such a glittering career he was immediately tipped as a future leader. It took a few months to reach the frontbench, the shadow cabinet soon after.

This was, of course, under Corbyn, a bruising experience Starmer later recalled as like playing for a football team doomed to relegation: you tried your best, but the reality was impossible to escape. He considered resigning several times but felt his Brexit brief was too important to abandon.

When Corbyn resigned after the catastrophic 2019 election loss, Starmer was initially not the favourite, with observers assuming Labour members would stick to the left and pick Rebecca Long-Bailey.

But a combination of a highly organised campaign and Starmer’s now infamous 10 policy pledges, taking in left-leaning ideas such as public ownership of utilities and ending student tuition fees, helped him win with ease. And here began what some would see as the golden phase of his political career, albeit one where the seeds of his downfall were already visible.

Most people in Labour assumed Starmer was a Neil Kinnock or John Smith, someone who would do the hard yards of turning around a moribund and toxic party, but never make it into power. And for a while that looked highly possible.

Little more than a year after becoming leader, Starmer briefly considered quitting after Johnson’s Conservative party, buoyed up by a Covid “vaccine bounce”, took the ultra-safe Labour seat of Hartlepool in a byelection. A national polling gap Starmer had painstakingly pulled back suddenly expanded again to a near-20 point Tory lead.

But fortune was to be on Starmer’s side. Johnson combusted, before Truss wrecked the Conservative brand beyond the limited repair efforts of Sunak. Much as the circumstances of the 2019 election could have been designed to benefit Johnson, so it was in 2024 for Labour.

Starmer had nonetheless prepared his party with a ruthlessness well-known to some, including former colleagues on the receiving end, but surprising to others, most publicly as he sought to rid Labour of antisemitism and a public sense that this had been tolerated under Corbyn.

Within weeks of becoming leader he sacked Long-Bailey from his shadow cabinet over a reposted tweet. A few months later, Corbyn lost the party whip . Hundreds of members were suspended or expelled.

Under the guidance of McSweeney, who moved from the controversial Labour Together thinktank to the helm of Starmer’s leadership campaign and then charged with planning for an election, the party was firmly shunted away from Corbyn’s leftwing populism, the 10 pledges largely forgotten.

As a way to reshape a party, it was undeniably effective. But the zeal with which McSweeney and his allies purged, demoted, sidelined or otherwise demeaned those on Labour’s left – “punching hippies” as the parlance has it – arguably left Starmer with a sometimes shallower authority.

This relentless campaigning focus also, as it turned out, helped the process of creating a party hellbent on winning power but not especially clear about what to do with it.

This is a slight oversimplification. Starmer’s Labour has delivered some quite radical, and pre-planned, policy ideas, for example the improvements to workers’ and renters’ rights, plus some advances decided on in office, such as the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap.

But from almost the first week, the government was plagued by own goals, beginning with a damaging row over election freebies and followed by a series of policy missteps and U-turns, notably on welfare changes and cutting pensioners’ winter fuel allowances.

There were also failings in the efforts to counter Reform UK, with tough language on migration culminating with Starmer’s reference to an “island of strangers”, an apparently accidental echo of Enoch Powell. While this did little to slow down Nigel Farage’s party, increasing numbers of voters shifted to the Greens, feeling they were actively unwanted by Labour.

If Hartlepool was a signpost of Starmer’s early struggles, another byelection, in February this year, showed how far his party had fallen again, with the Greens overturning a 13,000 Labour majority in Gorton and Denton, Greater Manchester.

Some things were not Starmer’s fault. He would not have chosen the re-election of Donald Trump, let alone the US-Israeli attack on Iran delivering an unexpected blow to an economy showing signs of life.

At the same time, handling Trump and the delicate global situation is one of the few areas where Starmer has obviously performed well and won credit . He first gained Trump’s affection – how he did so, Starmer admitted in private, was a mystery even to himself – before weathering the insults with dignity.

But for all that Labour MPs could point to such successes, or to Starmer’s decency and diligence, the numbers became stark. Labour polled as low as 17%, sometimes in fourth place. Starmer’s personal ratings were so dire that only Truss saved him from being the most unpopular PM in modern polling history. Focus group descriptions included a “jellyfish” and a “doormat”.

It is less than two years since the relaxed, energised prime minister gave his first Downing Street press conference after the election, joking that he was still getting lost in his new workplace and promising a mass of policies.

Labour had been planning for months, he promised, using the phrase “hit the ground running” three times within a minute.

If there ever was, in fact, a cohesive plan for government, it fell apart at virtually the first contact with reality.

The deeply bruised party so carefully rebuilt will have to start all over again. Starmerism, if it ever existed, will be buried, swiftly and decisively.

With his project at an end and Andy Burnham waiting in the wings, Starmer seems likely to be remembered, Runciman argues, as someone weighed down with the burden of a huge majority he never quite knew how to use, and who never properly made the transition from being a good opposition leader into No 10.

Runciman said: “I think the thing that will really stand out, the thing that makes his premiership different from all the others, is the mismatch between what looks like the scale of authority and legitimacy that ought to be conferred by a thumping majority parliament, and the complete absence of actual authority and legitimacy in practice.

“The majority was almost a curse for him. I think he would have had a more successful premiership with a smaller majority.”

According to Seldon, Starmer will be remembered as the fourth Labour PM after Attlee, Wilson and Blair to win a landslide election, but the first to do pretty much nothing with it.

He said: “He is this decent, hard-working, serious-minded figure, who could have made it – but critically, fatally, didn’t have the ability to learn how to do the job.”