During Covid, it used to be asked what Boris Johnson the journalist would make of Boris Johnson the Prime Minister. The same must be asked of Keir Starmer: what would the onetime civil liberties lawyer make of the incumbent premier? Having halved the number of afternoon lobby briefings in a bid to control the narrative, the beady eye of Downing Street has moved on to fresh targets.

Now in the firing line is X, formerly Twitter. Labour MPs are horrified at what the platform’s AI tool, Grok, is producing when asked by users – including images of women involuntarily clad in indecent clothing. But Mr S cannot help but wonder if there is a degree of convenience about some of the criticisms of X, given that Musk has now become one of the staunchest critics around of Keir Starmer and his underwhelming government. After all, image generation models of OpenAI and Gemini partially undress people in exactly the same way as X….

At a lobby briefing of journalists this morning, Downing Street said it fully supports a ban on X if Ofcom decides to do so. The Prime Minister’s spokesman told hacks that:

Ofcom has a back stop power to apply to the courts to block services in the UK where they refuse to uphold our law. If Ofcom deems that to be necessary, they will have our full support.

Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna is among those warning that she would ‘sanction not only Starmer, but Britain as a whole’ if he bans X – even as Starmer’s spinner insisted that the UK is committed to free speech. Given the temperament of some of those making the running on Capitol Hill, he might want to check in with colleagues stateside…