OPINION

       Keir Starmer is spinning in the wind (Image: Getty)

       Keir Starmer’s desire to become prime minister meant he sat at Jeremy Corbyn’s side while many of his colleagues refused to do so. To succeed him, he made promises to Labour members that would get him the job, then ripped them up and made new promises that would get him through the door of No 10. He kicked out Corbyn and his acolytes and ruthlessly turned around the way his party was run to put it on a path to power.

       And all this for what? To take money off pensioners and people with disabilities while abandoning the Waspi women. To give away fishing rights and give away the strategically important Chagos Islands while also giving away billions of pounds of our money for the privilege. To drive family farms to the brink while hiking up taxes and heaping red tape on small business owners.

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       Perhaps most shockingly of all for a former director of public prosecutions, to make victims of crime feel cruelly ignored. Prisoners, including some serious offenders, will be eligible for release after serving just a third of their sentence under reforms announced on Thursday.

       Some serious offenders will be eligible for release after serving a third of their sentence. The howl of anger from those whose lives have been torn apart by some of the country’s most notorious criminals was impossible to ignore.

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       Sarah Everard's parents Jeremy and Susan said, with Justice For Victims activists: "It doesn't seem a serious effort has been made to understand what victims and families want when they should be at the heart of sentencing policy."

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       Glenn Youens, whose daughter, Violet-Grace, four, was killed in 2017 by a hit-and-run driver in a stolen car going 80mph in a 30mph zone in Merseyside, spoke to LBC after the announcement and his distress at the changes was harrowing. He told how her killer “played the system” and said the thought of the sentence being reduced to a third was an “insult”.

       Mr Youens made the excellent point that time off for “good behaviour” in prison is a completely misleading concept. All they are being asked to do is “act and live normally” and are “being rewarded for it”. “There’s too much of what is right for them and not what is right for victims,” he added.

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       Starmer has hidden behind the “difficult decisions” mantra for all of this but that’s not an excuse for making bad decisions. What does the prime minister stand for and who does he care about? It’s really not clear.

       But criminals feature high on the list of winners so far under Starmer, from the champagne cork-popping convicts let out early just two months into his premiership to those who will benefit from the latest watering down of jail terms.

       There are plenty celebrating Starmer’s premiership internationally. French fishermen, Mauritian ministers, American exporters, expensively-dressed eurocrats.

       At home, the big winners are train drivers and the increasingly radical junior doctors, who even after their 22% pay rise last year are coming back for more.

       Hero of the left Tony Benn split politicians into signposts who know what they stand for and show the way or weathervanes who only make decisions after consulting their aides. Starmer is clearly the latter, spinning in the wind.

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       Patrick O'Flynn – a legend of Brexit we will miss dearly (Image: Getty)

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       Many of you will have looked forward to Saturdays to read Patrick O’Flynn’s regular dispatches and will have wondered why they suddenly stopped in April. Patrick rang the team to say he was ill and needed to ease off from his writing commitments. On Tuesday, his family announced the devastating news that he had died aged just 59.

       Patrick was not just respected by those who worked with him but loved for his good humour. He has been described – absolutely fairly – as "the most influential British political journalist of modern times". Without him, the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union would never have found a home in the national press.

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       He persuaded the editor of the paper Britain should take back control long before the cause had taken hold. So committed to it was he that he quit journalism to work for Ukip and later became an MEP.

       He later returned to writing and his ability to filter out the latest fashionable thinking in Westminster meant Patrick was always able to capture the mood out in the country.

       I know you held him in as much high-esteem as we did. A great man and a huge loss for all of us.