A week that highlights Britain’s stark choice

TRUE, she is not the country’s most inspiring public speaker. It is also undeniable that some of her difficulties are of her own making – not least, her loss of an overall majority after her botched election campaign last year.

But there’s a certain dogged, tenacious integrity about Theresa May that commands huge respect overseas – and even among her more fair- minded opponents at home.

It is this that has kept her going, in defiance of countless pundits’ predictions, through her party’s civil war over Brexit and many other storms that might have sunk a lesser politician.

This week, her qualities were on display at their best, as she outlined the meticulous police investigation into the attempt on the lives of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, the murder of Dawn Sturgess and the poisoning of Charlie Rowley.

Speaking passionately, but without hyperbole, the Prime Minister laid the blame where it belongs – at Vladimir Putin’s door – while proving she fully understands the terrifying threat to the international order posed by a gangster Russian state.

It’s a message that has resonated round the free world, with countries such as the US, Germany, France and Canada rallying to join her condemnation of the Kremlin.

Now contrast her resolute leadership with the weasel words of Jeremy Corbyn, who couldn’t bring himself to denounce Mr Putin. This was despite overwhelming evidence that the Russian president sent assassins to commit murder on our soil – with enough lethal nerve agent, security services believe, to kill 4,000 people.

This, of all moments, was also the week Mr Corbyn’s closest ally, John McDonnell, chose to declare he would not fire nuclear weapons to defend the UK, while adding for good measure that Karl Marx’s Das Kapital is the book that has influenced him most.

Add the anti-Semitism scandal and the leadership’s lifelong flirtation with terrorist enemies of the West, and can you blame Labour’s patriotic core voters if they wonder what is happening to their party?

It is not often this paper agrees with Tony Blair, whose own role in swelling the ranks of the hard Left through his moneygrubbing association with serial abusers of human rights cannot be exaggerated.

But it is hard to argue when he says Labour has undergone ‘profound change’ under Mr Corbyn – and that moderates may find it impossible to win the party back.

Just how profound that change is can be seen in the way Momentum activists are tightening their grip on local parties, passing votes of no confidence in MPs who oppose the hard Left – in one case allowing footage of an internal meeting to be broadcast on Iranian state-sponsored TV.

Indeed, the wonder is why a party so at odds with the instincts of decent British voters is ahead of the Tories in some polls.

Here, there’s a clear message for Mrs May. Nobody doubts her integrity, sense of duty or determination to defend our values.

But if she’s to see off the threat from the hard Left, she must urgently address the unfairnesses raised by the Archbishop of Canterbury this week, when he highlighted the plight of young people unable to afford homes and families struggling to get by.

The Prime Minister came to power on a promise to help the Just About Managing. On her success or failure in achieving this will depend whether she stands or falls. TEN years after taxpayers bailed out RBS, it emerges that the bank has closed 1,423 branches, ripping the commercial heart out of communities. Meanwhile, a Mail study finds lenders are cheating savers out of £2.7billion a year by refusing to pass on increases in interest rates. Isn’t there a huge gap in the market for a bank that takes its social responsibilities and duty to customers seriously?