“Please, please can you teach Keir Starmer, some German, Denis. We love him in Germany and if he could speak a little German he would be such a political super-star!”

The appeal was from a German woman in Brussels, a key political fixer for the centre-right CDU party of Angela Merkel, Helmut Kohl and Konrad Adenauer.

Rishi Sunak is heading a government of chaps -- privately educated men. More than 60% of his team comes from fee-paying schools, and three-quarters of them are men...

A decade ago the French Socialist Party won the presidency, formed a government, and seemed in the saddle. The French left has spent more than half of the last 40 years in power – a better record than Labour in Britain or the Social Democrats in Germany.