Politics

Russia’s new crop of conscripts are a desperate, dejected bunch. A photograph showing an Orthodox priest blessing these men as they headed off to fight from the settlement of Bataysk in the Rostov region summed up their hopelessness. The names of such little known Russian localities must – to an English reader – all merge into one. They are simply over there, in Russia, where the suffering it has inflicted on a neighbouring country has finally come back to haunt it. But I know where Bataysk is very well. It is a dull suburb of Rostov-on-Don, a city where I lived for four years – a kind of nothing village of one-storey villas,

Keir Starmer has spent the hours since his successful conference speech lapping up the praise from party members, frontbench colleagues and business. He had the air of a man who had hit his stride when he appeared in the broadcast studios this morning, ridiculing questions about whether he was a bit boring by saying ‘if I came on and said I’ve done a bungee jump, you wouldn’t say “oh great, now we’ve got the prime minister we need”.’ You could hear his eye-roll as he said ‘bungee jump’ into the Today programme microphone. Starmer’s success this week has been to cement Labour as a party worth listening to But his

Neither the Danes nor Nato have made a direct attribution for yesterday’s pipeline damage. But the fingers are pointing at Russia. The thinking goes that Putin was trying to trigger panic in the energy markets by showing that there’ll be no rapid resumption of gas supplies to Europe and by demonstrating how vulnerable this energy infrastructure is. The UK would struggle to get through this winter without energy rationing if, for example, the interconnectors and gas pipeline from Norway were disrupted Now, given that Russia has turned off Nord Stream 1 for maintenance, the damage to the pipeline will have little immediate impact. But if it is the beginning of