Starmer’s comment yesterday that Sunak didn’t “get Britain” got the terse response from No 10: “Rishi Sunak is as British as Keir Starmer”. Nothing like a culture skirmish for the first PMQs of the year…

Asked about whether the comment was a “dog whistle” on Times Radio this morning, energy secretary Claire Coutinho said only Starmer “will know what he’s implying“, adding “if that was the other way round and a Conservative politician said it about a Labour politician of colour, we’d have had no end of their confected outrage“. Coutinho finished with a flourish: “I’m certainly not going to take lessons about who gets Britain from a man who tried to stop foreign criminals being deported and who thinks one in a thousand women have a penis“. That should calm things down…