Mandelson the self-styled fixer-in-chief gives hopeless Kemi a helping hand | John Crace

The Tory leader usually misses the open goals, but after the US ambassador’s creepy letter to Epstein she went in for the kill

Some days you just have to write off. Keir Starmer might have guessed that this was going to be one of those days when he was woken up at 4am to be told that Russia had launched a drone attack through Poland. It was a time to count his minimal blessings. Principally that he wasn’t the French prime minister. That is a zero-hours contract job. You’re lucky to survive a three-month probationary period.

But even Keir can’t have been expecting to be thoroughly duffed up by Kemi Badenoch at prime minister’s questions. That’s just never been part of the script. The whole point of the Tory leader was that she had always been Keir’s strongest ally on a Wednesday lunchtime. Guaranteed to miss every trick. Miss every open goal. Only last week she had failed to land a significant blow when Angela Rayner was fighting for her political life. It was Kemi who kept Angela in a job for an extra day.