Only the very foolish would make the mistake of underestimating Vladimir Putin.

Despite the Russian president's faintly ridiculous persona as some sort of supercharged Bond villain, the graveyards are full of people who found out the hard way just how ruthless and dangerous he is as an adversary.

The incident involving a Russian warship firing warning shots across the English Channel is just the latest example of his naked aggression.

It is increasingly clear that Putin is keen to flex his muscles and, recently, there have been repeated moves by the Kremlin to increase its military presence along the borders with Nato countries.

But it is likely that he felt sufficiently emboldened to carry out this outrageous stunt only 20 nautical miles from the Isle of Wight – albeit outside UK waters – due to the Government's failure to allocate proper funding and resources to Britain's defences.

At a time of almost unprecedented global uncertainty, Sir Keir Starmer has done absolutely nothing to safeguard the nation and protect the people who elected him to high office.

Instead he has simply buried his head in the sand and hoped for the best.

Nor have his Cabinet ministers been much better when it comes to recognising how vulnerable we are as a result of our depleted military might.

Of course, they're currently too busy positioning themselves for the post-Starmer era to worry about anything so trivial as an attack by hostile powers.

UK's business blues

It would hardly have required a clairvoyant's services to predict that Britain would become a worse place to do business under this Labour administration.

Down through the decades, the party has always had an attitude of inverted snobbery towards wealth creation and entrepreneurial spirit.

But even its fiercest critics could scarcely have guessed how badly things would turn out in the space of just two years.

Much of the blame lies with the hapless Rachel Reeves, who has gratuitously burdened employers with billions of pounds in extra costs.

If hikes in National Insurance payments weren't punishing enough for anyone struggling to keep a business afloat, there were increases to the minimum wage to make it even more difficult.

For good measure, the Chancellor also threw unnecessary and poorly timed workers' rights reforms into the mix.

The surprise here is not that Britain is now a worse place to do business. No, the real shocker is that it isn't in an even more lamentable state as a result of Ms Reeves's disastrous mismanagement.

Burnham's delusion

One of the greatest assets any human can have is self-knowledge – a keen understanding of our own strengths and weaknesses.

This is a quality clearly sadly lacking in Andy Burnham who, for reasons impossible to fathom, believes he has the intellect, the political wisdom, the force of personality and leadership skills to fill the office once held by Churchill and Thatcher.

On Wednesday Mr Starmer generously described his black T-shirted rival as a 'fantastic asset' and promised him a 'big role' in government.

Mr Burnham, who has already lost two Labour leadership contests to Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, would do well to listen and abandon his hubristic pursuit of power.

Otherwise the Daily Mail confidently predicts that, within a few short months, he will be even more unpopular than the man he's determined to replace.