Burnham faces pressure on migration distribution as heatwave grips Britain

The Prime Minister is chairing an emergency Cobra meeting as extreme heat spreads across the country, with the Mirror reporting he has floated a ban on disposable barbecues to reduce wildfire risk.

But it's migration policy drawing the sharpest questions. The Express is running polls asking whether middle-class areas should be compelled to house more migrants, while GB News argues vape shops have become crime hotbeds and the government is only scratching the surface. The Independent carries a story on New Zealand's PM surviving a leadership challenge weeks before an election - a reminder that parliamentary arithmetic can shift quickly.

The house angle: every Prime Minister arrives with a plan to spread the costs of migration more evenly across postcodes. The question is never the principle - fairness sounds unanswerable - but the mechanism. Who decides which areas can absorb new arrivals, and on what data? The polling suggests the policy is meeting resistance not because people oppose help for those who need it, but because they doubt the state's capacity to match supply to demand without simply declaring the issue solved.

What to watch: whether the Cobra meeting produces new wildfire prevention measures, and whether the migration distribution policy moves from principle to published criteria. The gap between a fair-sounding policy and a workable one is where governments lose the room.