Only with a positive vision can Starmer lift Labour out of the weeds

Just over a week on from Keir Starmer's latest pronouncements about immigration, plenty of people on his own side are still gripped by a queasy sense of fury and disappointment.

- John Harris

His aides and allies will now try to gladden left-liberal hearts by emphasising gains from Monday's UK-EU summit, and the prime minister's remodelling of Brexit. But the acrid cloud over Starmer will surely remain, and with good reason.

Whatever the context - and whether or not he was consciously echoing Enoch Powell - his suggestion that Britain risked becoming an "island of strangers" sounded like a horribly calculated provocation. The insistence that the government was set on closing "a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy and our country" was even more brazen. So was the suggestion after years of "a one-nation experiment in open borders... the damage this has done to our country is incalculable". That last claim, in fact, might have been the worst of the lot: a shameful example of a prime minister reducing a story replete with complexity and nuance - and raw humanity - to cheap and nasty hyperbole.