Starmer looks confident on the world stage – but he is walking a tightrope

There was a time when a beleaguered British prime minister would have walked over hot coals to get a hug from President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Boris Johnson travelled all the way to war-torn Kyiv to put his arms round the Ukrainian President, as Partygate raged back home. Whenever things were looking particularly bad for the then PM, he would pick up the phone to Zelensky and make sure that a read-out was sent out by Downing Street as soon as possible.

Even on the night he left Downing Street, he and his aides were in a huff that Tory backbenchers didn’t seem to have the same perspective as them, complaining that Zelensky had been speaking to him from a bunker while bombs fell – as though this meant Johnson’s own mistakes could be overlooked. Keir Starmer’s poll ratings are about as catas