The party needs to move its campaign on from stories about factionalist infighting over seats – and get on with winning

Whatever your view of Diane Abbott, or your view of Keir Starmer, there has plainly been a serious blunder in Labour’s campaign when her treatment ends up leading the BBC news coverage and splashed across most front pages. Quite apart from the bad look, Labour’s big NHS day was blown away by a story on the fate of one MP.

First, remember this. Starmer has pulled off the near-impossible in a remarkably short time: returning Labour to electability after its worst crash in living memory. This miraculous recovery has required unflinching severity in dealing with antisemitism and a resolute “Labour has changed” message after Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. It was risky to expel the former leader – but he was extraordinarily lucky that Corbyn, with characteristic obstinacy, chose to rule himself out by refusing to accept the overall verdict of the independent Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). Had he accepted its judgment and offered a sufficient apology, he would probably still be a thorn-in-the-side Labour MP. If he wins as an independent, that’s a very minor embarrassment as Labour sweeps to power.

After 14 years of youth bashing, the Tories’ plan to ‘toughen up’ British teenagers might be just what it takes to bring them all out to vote

When the Tories reach the very bottom of their bad ideas barrel, they come up with a dead rat plan for conscription. The notion is so decrepit that those old Sir Bufton Tuftons who used to rise in the Commons to declare national service had made them the fine men they were today are long retired and mostly dead, six decades after conscription ended in the UK. It’s that never-ending Tory cry of youth hate: cut their hair, square-bash some discipline into them, bring back the lash! “Toughen up teenagers,” declared the unlikely defence secretary, Grant Shapps. If Tory campaign managers still need to secure their over-80s core vote, they really are in trouble.

This dying gasp is the exemplar of their 14 years of governing. Everything has been performative – all about announcements, not reality, and moving on before anyone queries outcomes or value for money. National service swept all the Tory front pages: job done. Marching 18-year-olds into a compulsory year of service marks Tory high command’s final abandonment of younger voters. They and their media inhabit the oldie planet of the ancients, every year limping further away from modern life on earth. David Cameron’s legacy project, the National Citizen Service, had its funding cut by two-thirds after attracting a fraction of its expected participants despite devouring 95% of all the youth service funding.

The mood is hyper and buzzy. Faced with this bedraggled PM, Starmer is warning his troops that the real enemy is complacency

Here is the one and only great service Rishi Sunak could perform for his country. Nothing so became him as the leaving of office, despite the deluge. The prospect of another six months of zombie government, everyone waiting and waiting for Labour, was an almost unendurable state of stasis. Everything he proposed only added to the smell of death and desperation in the air.

Labour’s team could scarcely believe their luck, pinching themselves as they watched their opponent dash for the precipice. They were so ready that they could press send on a video within minutes. The contrast between their leader so draped in flags and the wretchedly bedraggled prime minister was more than any campaign could dream of. Yet these six weeks will feel eternally long, a never-ending prime minister’s questions day after day until virtually every voter has been beaten into submission, mumbling the one-word slogans in their sleep: “change”, “stability”.

Britain’s jet set insist they will flee if they lose their benefits – but Labour should not be daunted at a time of such inequality

The Elite London, described as the city’s “most exclusive jet-set lifestyle event”, filled Wycombe Air Park with row after row of gleaming private jets, seaplanes, hovercrafts (with one for kids), helicopters, and supercars either the size of tanks, or flat on the ground like giant skateboards.

In hangar after hangar, the wares on sale last weekend were designed and priced for the super-rich, though possibly not quite for the cadres in this year’s Sunday Times rich list, which bills itself as “a celebration of aspiration”. A “truly bespoke” £30,000 safe had six permanently revolving wheels that keep your watches synchronised; they recently sold one to protect a household’s £1.3m collection of watches. A writing service offered an illustrated memoir of your life’s successes for £28,000. A monster Land Rover Defender, with its boot open to display champagne and a magnificent picnic basket, promoted educational advice: “Opening the door to the best boarding schools and universities.”