Keir Starmer has warned that Russia could reinvade Ukraine unless the US provides a military backstop for any peace deal, ahead of his meeting with Donald Trump in Washington this afternoon. The president threatened yesterday to slap 25% tariffs on the EU “very soon”, claiming the bloc was “formed to screw the United States”. The UK government has signalled it will back a second runway at Gatwick Airport. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander says she is “minded to approve” the £2.2bn expansion, which could see passenger numbers increase to 75 million a year by the late 2030s, up from 46.6 million in 2019. The American actor Gene Hackman has died at the age of 95 alongside his wife and their dog at their Santa Fe home. Police say there is no indication of “foul play”. Hackman won two Academy Awards for his roles in The French Connection and Unforgiven.

Not all our MPs are rotters

What struck me in the gripping new “whip-and-tell” memoir by former chief whip Simon Hart, says Libby Purves in The Times, is his depiction of Rishi Sunak. Hart portrays his old boss as a “proper gent” – a “refreshingly strait-laced” man who “tends to see the good in most people”. In one meeting, Sunak mutters instructions down the phone to a driver struggling to deliver his takeaway to No 10. When Sunak is gently told that, as prime minister, someone else could do that for him, he seems genuinely “rather hurt”. Rather than leaving his underlings to do the unpleasant phone calls – like sacking Suella Braverman – he insisted on doing it himself. “They were hardcore,” writes Hart. “And he would do every single one.”

This portrait of a “well-meaning head boy saddled with a disloyal rabble” is a reminder of something people often forget about our MPs: they’re not all rotters. Both parties contain plenty of “properly honourable” people, who shun the freebies and spend their time beavering away on boring-but-important committees. It’s dispiriting that it tends to be the “vacuous panache of a Boris Johnson” or the “amiable smoothery of a David Cameron” that most easily reaches the top. But occasionally “a decent soul rises”. John Major, who spends his time chairing charities rather than shamelessly enriching himself, was one. Sunak, who has “foiled the sneering prediction” that he would flee to California by staying in the Commons as a backbencher, was another. Truly, he is “a gentleman among knaves”.