Do you yearn to hear Starmer condemn Trump? If so, you're going to be disappointed

What fresh hell will Donald Trump unleash next? The question quivers on the world’s lips, but Sir Keir Starmer thinks it a fool’s errand trying to guess the answer. The prime minister has told colleagues not to waste any time on feverish speculation about the intentions of the US president.

- Andrew Rawnsley

This is sensible counsel after 10 days in which Typhoon Orange has wreaked havoc in global markets. His tariffs were so sweeping and so breathtakingly dumb that the hit list included a cluster of barren islands near Antarctica. Was his notoriously thin skin once pricked by an insolent penguin? Were the highest US tariffs in more than a century an ego-gratifying instrument to get other leaders to beg for mercy by “kissing my ass”? Are tariffs designed to be a revenue-raiser cunningly disguised as an economy-wrecker? If the aim, as some claim, is to reindustralise America, creating the conditions for an inflationary slump is a strange way to go about it.

Members of the Trump regime have offered no consistent explanation for such wantonly ruinous and self-destructive acts. After days of insisting that there would be no retreat from any of it, he did back off, at least temporarily, from a lot of it. Sir Keir is correct. Trying to attribute logic to the US president’s reckless impulses or to make predictions about what he will do next is a waste of nervous energy. It is safer, if scarier, to proceed from the assumption that the only certainty about Trump's world is instability.

Faced with a craziness so alien to his own nature, what's a prime minister who prides himself on his rationality to do? Sir Keir has elected to be the calm voice urging cool heads in the raging storm. That is a product of his temperament and what he takes to be good politics. When the seas are so alarmingly choppy, the last thing the passengers on HMS Britannia want to see is their captain with a sweaty brow and panicky eyes.