It is not often a member of a hereditary monarchy is left looking more of a democrat than an American President, but such was the position as Prince William and Joe Biden made their way home from foreign visits.

After a tour of the Caribbean marked by protests and missteps, Prince William issued a statement saying the visit had brought into sharp focus questions about past and future relationships in the Commonwealth.

“In Belize, Jamaica and The Bahamas, that future is for the people to decide upon,” said the prince.

Meanwhile, in a speech in Warsaw, President Biden said of Vladimir Putin: “For God’s sake this man cannot remain in power.”

As the White House scrambled to make clear that Mr Biden was not calling for regime change, the UK Government decided on its line, as advanced by Nadhim Zahawi, Education Secretary and, for yesterday only, minister for the Sunday shows.

It was “for the Russian people to decide how they are governed” said Mr Zahawi, but suggested they “would certainly do well” to have someone who “is democratic and understands their wishes”.

“That’s up to the Russian people and it is only the Russian people that can make that decision. I suspect most of them are pretty fed up with Putin and his cronies and the illegal war,” he told the BBC’s Sunday Morning show.

The Sunday shows, like the newspapers, divided their attention between a range subjects, from the Biden comments to the second anniversary of the pandemic. On Sunday Morning, Sophie Raworth spoke to Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the US President. Dr Fauci said the world “needs to keep an eye” on whether the new Omicron BA.2 variant is leading to increased hospital admissions.

He said it was “quite correct” to be seeing Covid-19 cases increase around the world in light of the strain’s greater transmissibility and the relaxation of restrictions, while immunity tends to wane.

“The important thing that we need to keep an eye on is that it doesn’t appear to be associated with any increase in severity in the form of increased hospitalisations.”

Asked if the world no longer needs to worry about coronavirus, he said: “No, I’m not saying that at all.

“Whenever you get any surges, particularly of this virus that has given us so much trouble, I would never say don’t worry about it. What I’m saying is that we have to observe it carefully, we have seen this uptick and I believe there is an explanation for the uptick.”

On what next winter will look like, Dr Fauci said it was “really unpredictable. This virus has fooled us so often. We really don’t know and I think anyone who says they’re going to predict with any certainty what’s going to happen in the winter I think, is a bit of a stretch”.

The weekend’s most fascinating interviews turned out to be not with a serving minister but a politician who stepped back from frontline politics some time ago. Labour MP Dame Margaret Beckett, the first woman to be Foreign Secretary, announced her retirement from her Derby South constituency at the next General Election.

A Minister under four Labour Prime Ministers, she served as acting leader of the party after John Smith’s death in 1994, going on to run for the leadership only to be defeated by Tony Blair.

While Sophy Ridge asked Dame Margaret about any plans for the future (the MP was renowned for her love of caravan holidays with her husband Leo, who died last year), the focus of a Today show interview on Saturday was on her 48 years of being an MP and Minister.

Dame Margaret, 79, discussed the sexism she faced in the Foreign Office as a holder of one of the great offices of state in the 1990s.

“I regarded that as their problem rather than mine,” she said: “There were people in the Foreign Office I understand who thought that.”

While she led the party temporarily, Labour members have never elected a woman as their leader, unlike the SNP, the Tories, who have done so twice, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens.

“There’s so much luck in politics,” Dame Margaret said.

“It was just never the right person at the right time.”

Among those paying tribute was Angela Rayner, current deputy leader, who said: “So many years of dedication to public service and to better politics. What a woman and what an inspiration Margaret is to us all.” Party leader Keir Starmer hailed Dame Margaret as a “trailblazer”.