In your briefing today:

📣 Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer finally bowed to the inevitable and announced he would stand down as Labour leader and Prime Minister, leaving former Manchester mayor - and new MP - Andy Burnham all but certain to replace him.

On a day of drama in Westminster, Starmer offered a resignation statement outside 10 Downing Street as Burnham prepared to take a train from Manchester to London, cheered off by well-wishers and followed by a TV news helicopter. Burnham, arrived in the south, received a rousing welcome from fellow Labour MPs after he was sworn in.

It is not yet clear how he will be installed as Prime Minister: a challenger may emerge, with the Labour Party divided over the value of a contest. Burnham has been said to favour a handover in September, giving him time to prepare; he may not get that luxury. (Guardian)

📣 Former SNP Chief Executive Peter Murrell is to be sentenced at the High Court in Edinburgh today, after he admitted embezzling more than £400,000 from the party.

He is expected to face a substantial jail term after using the money to buy a range of goods, from the mundane to the luxurious, including toiletries, a car and a campervan.

Nicola Sturgeon, his estranged wife, has denied any knowledge of his wrongdoing over more than a decade, saying she was “deceived, betrayed and lied to”. (BBC)

📣 Today could be the hottest June day on record with temperatures in parts of the UK expected to rise above 35C. Today will mark the start of a warming period, with temperatures later in the week potentially reaching 40C, which could come close to the hottest-ever day recorded in the UK.

Rare red weather warnings have been issued for Wednesday and Thursday in parts of England, while Amber warnings are in force now across a swathe of the south. (BBC)

📣 A 36-year-old man has been charged with five counts of attempted murder “aggravated by reason of having a terrorist connection” after a series of attacks in Edinburgh. (Edinburgh Live)

📣 Teachers who have lost their jobs after a private school in South Lanarkshire closed have been told there’s no money left to pay their redundancy or remaining wages. (BBC)

📣 The Edinburgh International Festival is to be phone-free, director Nicola Benedetti has announced. (BBC)

📣 Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has been convicted of 18 counts of sex abuse, including a count of rape, committed against two women when they were children. The former Democratic Unionist Party leader will be sentenced in September. His wife, Lady Eleanor Donaldson, had faced a trial of the facts on mental health grounds: the jury found she had aided and abetted her husband's offending. (BBC)

📣 The US Department of Defence needs $80 billion, mostly to cover the cost of the US war against Iran, and is expected to make a formal funding request to Congress, where it could run into trouble. (AP)

📣 Three in five British 18-28-year-olds would vote to rejoin the European Union, a new poll says. (Guardian)

⚽️ Lionel Messi took all the headlines as the great man became the all-time record goalscorer at the World Cup, bagging a brace for Argentina against Austria in a 2-0 win. His goals ensure the champions qualify for the next round, and we all get to enjoy - for at least two more games - this wonderful player doing his thing. (Report & highlights)

⚽️ Tonight at the World Cup:

🗣️ There were a few memorable sights - and sounds - around Westminster yesterday. Bookending them: Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s resignation statement before the door of Number 10, at 9.34am, witnessed by a throng of journalists but only a small number of political friends - the last loyalists to be there at the end.

His speech was ruined by Steve Bray, the Brexit protester, who played Beethoven’s Ode to Joy down the street on a big sound system, upsetting many.

At the other end of the day - or, at least, mid-afternoon - the enormous selfie Andy Burnham took after being sworn in as an MP, the MP for Makerfield, surrounded by possibly hundreds of fellow MPs.

They included an anxious-looking Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, who - according to Quentin Letts - pushed herself to the front of the photocall amid some jockeying for the front row. “But then he stood right in front of her, and she was invisible”, he noted.

There are a few notable political obituaries: Andrew Marr certainly wins the prize (£) for the most vivid metaphor for Keir Starmer’s premiership:

“A man knocks on the door of a house. He feels well prepared for the evening ahead. He’s wearing a dinner jacket, bow-tie, shined black shoes and carrying a bottle of wine. He goes in. It’s an orgy, and everyone else is naked.”

Explains Marr further: “Which is only to say that Keir Starmer arrived for a career in politics unprepared for what a career in politics actually means.”

He was, says Marr, simply unprepared for a life in politics: “Accustomed, as in court, to being taken at his word and treated with respect, he found himself in a raucous, jeering environment where many assumed he was a compulsive liar, and a figure of fun.”

You almost start to have some sympathy.

Lizzie Buchan in the Mirror is kind to Starmer. “It was the hope that killed him,” she writes. “Keir Starmer swept to power on a wave of optimism as fed-up voters kicked the Tories out after 14 years. But the landslide that delivered a near-record Commons majority was the root of his undoing,” she writes.

“His Government made mistakes that led us to this moment. But deep public hostility towards him is out of step with what he has achieved. It is symptomatic of our divided times, the fracturing of two-party politics and the deep frustration of voters.”

At the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland is more cautious. “Historians will puzzle over this one,” he reckons. “They will scratch their heads at a PM who paid the ultimate political price, even though few could point to the single, obvious political crime he had committed.” (Freedland, instead, goes on to list a number of minor political… infractions?… which did for him instead).

There are no such qualms at the Morning Star, which finds plenty of ammunition with which to get stuck in to the man who did for Jeremy Corbyn. “If he has no single episode on his record as disgraceful as Tony Blair’s promotion of the Iraq war,” offers Andrew Murray, “Starmer has an accumulation of outrages over a much shorter period in office which will leave him forever despised in the labour movement.” It’s a piece that is shorter on insight than many, but vividly illustrative of the viciousness of the left’s internal politics.

The Economist offers a drier assessment of Starmer’s failings and a warning for the future Prime Minister Burnham. “Before he became prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer’s favourite weapon was disgust,” it notes: at Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn, the Tories.

“He never had a plan for what to do when the disgust turned back on him. And that, perhaps more than anything (such as his lack of charisma, his U-turns, his lapses in judgment) is what led to his resignation on June 22nd after less than two years in the job.”

He bequeaths a Labour Party “which is fractious and grumpy—and could be hard for Mr Burnham to control in the long run,” it notes.

“Sir Keir was not a great leader, but he could prove a tough act to follow.”

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