Despite the adoring support from Elon Musk and Donald Trump, Javier Milei’s radical-right free-market nightmare is unravelling, and the people are beginning to score major victories against the government in the streets and in elections, reports BEN HAYES

“MING vase strategy” is another pundit cliche — like “big-tent strategy” or “grown-ups back in charge” — which tries using recently made up SW1 “common-sense” lore to narrow political possibilities.
The theory is Keir Starmer is applying a “Ming vase strategy,” which means avoiding risk at all costs so Labour’s poll lead doesn’t smash to the ground.
The phrase first surfaces in 1996, when the Guardian reported Roy Jenkins likened Tony Blair’s attitude to his poll lead like “a man carrying a delicate Ming vase across a polished museum floor: one slip and it crashes.”

It is rather strange that Labour continues to give prestigious roles to inappropriate, controversy-mired businessmen who are also major Tory donors. What could Labour possibly be hoping to get out of it, asks SOLOMON HUGHES

Keir Starmer’s hiring Tim Allan from Tory-led Strand Partners is another illustration of Labour’s corporate-influence world where party differences matter less than business connections, writes SOLOMON HUGHES

MBDA’s Alabama factory makes components for Boeing’s GBU-39 bombs used to kill civilians in Gaza. Its profits flow through Stevenage to Paris — and it is one of the British government’s favourite firms, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES

SOLOMON HUGHES asks whether Labour ‘engaging with decision-makers’ with scandalous records of fleecing the public is really in our interests