Gareth Roberts

David Cameron is the king of the wishy-washy compromise. Cameron has never looked happier than when he appeared in the Downing Street Rose Garden in 2010 with Nick Clegg. There was something about being in that awkward Conservative-Lib Dem coalition that suited Dave. It was, of course, another attempt at compromising – by striking a desperate last-ditch deal with the EU that no one wanted – that sealed Cameron's fate. Now, he's back – but he isn't the only politician who has made a career out of sitting on the fence. Rishi Sunak's cabinet reshuffle shows that the current Tory Prime Minister also likes to try and please everyone, only to please no one.

Rishi Sunak’s decision to recall David Cameron from his shepherd’s hut has been hailed as a triumph by centrist dads. They’re convinced that axing nasty Suella Braverman shows that the grown-ups are back in charge. No . 10 insiders are pleased with themselves: one person working in Downing Street told the Sun that the PM’s phone was ‘inundated’ with texts from fellow world leaders welcoming the appointment. But come the next election, Sunak is in for a shock. The decision to axe Braverman marks the beginning of the end for the PM. Whatever the reason for the Home Secretary’s departure, most voters will see that she was forced out for speaking the truth. In an article for the Times, Braverman made the obvious and pertinent point that policing should be even-handed.

It'll be years before the Covid Inquiry reports back on what we can learn from the pandemic, but already there is one key lesson for us all: don’t write anything on WhatsApp that you wouldn’t want read out in court. The vividly-phrased WhatsApp messages published, and very memorably read aloud, as part of the inquiry have brought some much-needed mirth to our troubled times. There is something inherently very funny about posh people in court quoting bad language and repeating insults like 'useless f*** pigs'. Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, is one of those who carries the air of the headmaster’s study around with him. He has mastered the art of toneless reading out of offensive messages.

Little Britain is 'explicitly racist and outdated'. That's the verdict of viewers asked by Ofcom to watch a 2003 sketch from the hit BBC show. Back in the noughties, millions tuned in each week to watch the abominable David Walliams and Matt Lucas dress up as characters with names like Ting Tong Macadangdang and Bubbles DeVere. It's reassuring that, 20 years on, people appear to have finally found their senses and realised something that was obvious at the time: Little Britain isn't funny. But there's also something troubling about this revisionism of a show that many millions of Brits adored. The episode that raised alarm bells for viewers in the Ofcom survey featured Walliams as university admin officer Linda Flint.

There's no room for racism in Britain, we're told. EDI (equality, diversion and inclusion) initiatives and anti-racism strategies are everywhere. We're all familiar with the 'horror' of micro-aggressions and unconscious bias. We are forever on alert for dangerous racial ‘dog whistles’. And yet the last few weeks has exposed a troubling blind spot when it comes to tackling racism: it's clear that Jews don't really count. Hamas's attack – and the response from Israel – has unleashed a tide of hate on the streets of Britain. Posters of kidnapped Israeli children have been torn off walls. 'From London to Gaza, we’ll have an intifada,' demonstrators chanted during the Palestinian solidarity march this weekend. We've heard calls for 'jihad'.

Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, recently took a pop at immigrants who she accused of failing to ‘embrace British values’. But these newcomers to our shores might be forgiven for being confused about what these ‘values’ are. We live in a country, after all, in which misgendering someone can land you in hot water but chanting for ‘jihad’ on the streets of London is deemed acceptable. Britain is a place where we frequently express solidarity with victims of terror attacks and atrocities yet stay strangely silent on the plight of Israel after the slaughter of hundreds of its citizens. We hear talk of ‘values’ all the time but no one seems able to define them. Rishi Sunak told us last month that 20mph zones 'aren’t the right values of the British people’.

‘I don’t feel safe’ is the cry of students the western world over at the prospect of hearing terrifying opinions such as ‘there are two sexes’ or ‘your skin colour shouldn’t matter’. This bluff talk of ‘hate’, terror and even, incredibly but regularly, ‘trans genocide’, used to come over merely as pathetic and entitled. Singer Will Young telling the Labour conference that he was ‘terrified’ of the Tories winning the next election would, the week before, have been merely laughable. Coming days after the slaughter in Israel, it sounded unforgivably crass and narcissistic.

Big Brother is back – again. The show was axed by Channel 5 in 2018 but ITV has dragged it out of the grave. Watching the show's opening episode last night made me wonder whether we're trapped forever in a time loop with the big TV shows of the early noughties – Strictly, I’m A Celebrity, The Weakest Link – doomed to keep coming back. But where once they were exciting and fun, now they look exhausted. Big Brother 2023 comes with all the trappings of our age. Everybody on the first show last night talked in the customary over-excited mid-Atlantic screech of the 21st century. This won’t last, because it never does; one of the great sources of fun is watching these affectations drain away, leaving the contestants effing and blinding at each other like Wolverhampton fishwives.

When Boris Johnson won his eighty-seat majority, Labour looked to be destined to spend a decade or so in the political wilderness. But 'Partygate', the eventual defenestration of Boris plus the psychodrama of Truss and the fraught first year of Sunak meant that the tables turned. All of a sudden, dreary Keir Starmer – with his cardboard hair and his voice like the recently recreated Aztec death whistle, said to be ‘somewhere between a spooky gust of whistling wind and the scream of a thousand corpses’ – was not the lame duck Kinnockesque caretaker. Labour's leader became the shoo-in next PM. Now the numbers seem to be shifting again. A poll this week revealed that Labour's lead has shrunk to just ten points over the Tories.

Theresa May always had a camp appeal. The clumsiness, the dancing, the incredible squareness. Mrs Thatcher never took that crown – she had too much of a hard edge – though it was a surprise to me to discover that Australians and Americans saw only the hair and the handbags and made her that most tedious and reductive of things: a gay icon.  Bantering podcasts are now an essential part of public rehabilitation But unlike Thatcher, May had a dissociation from reality not only about trivialities but also about the really important stuff. Her recent declaration that she is ‘woke and proud’ is typical of her.

Liz Truss is back and she’s got a book to plug. ‘It will set out what we must do to counter the disastrous ideas of the global left,’ she told X at the weekend. Now, I think she’s right that there is a smorgasbord of disastrous ideas about in the modern West – net zero, increasing state power and general economic nuttery, and a whole host of barking cultural ideas about biological sex and race. But can these really be laid at the door of the left, and at a hypothetical global left?  I think these foggy notions come from a different place, and they’ve seeped in to all sides of politics. Yes, some have indeed risen from the sediment of people who think of themselves as left wing, or are routinely described as such.

The Office for National Statistics let a bombshell drop on Friday. Halfway down the first page of their grippingly-titled document ‘Impact of methodological and data improvements on current price and chain volume measure of quarterly gross domestic product (GDP), 1997 to 2021’, they slipped out this sentence: ‘Annual volume GDP growth in 2021 is revised up 1.1 percentage points to an 8.7 per cent increase; this follows an upwardly revised 10.4 per cent fall in 2020 (previously an 11 per cent fall).’ This dry text conceals the revelation that GDP is 1.7 per cent higher than they had previously reckoned. This meant that by the time the Omicron variant hit, the UK economy was actually 0.6 per cent above its pre-Covid level – not 1.2 per cent below, as had been thought.

Steve Barclay is appalled. A source close to the health secretary has told the Mail that he is ‘appalled to hear some NHS managers are failing to respond’ to a directive that told them not to let Stonewall write their ‘inclusivity guidance’. But fear not! He ‘will be discussing with officials what further steps to take’. Phew. Along the ministerial corridor, Kemi Badenoch says she would ‘never have guessed how much time I would spend looking at toilet policy,’ and that ‘increasingly, my job is spent legislating for common sense and stopping people determined to do destructive things’. What were the Tories doing while the institutions fell?