Madeline Grant

Sir Keir Starmer was away this week. Nothing new there of course; indeed, it seems the thing which will change least when he finally leaves No 10 will be his presence in Parliament. So today we had what might well be David Lammy’s final outing as Deputy Prime Minister. The Tories had done their customary rummage down the back of the sofa for someone to face him and pulled out James Cleverly. With attention diverted away from the party leaders, these are always good occasions for Members of the House of Commons to demonstrate just how crashingly unimpressive many of them are. Today’s offering was a veritable casserole of mediocrity.  Lammy and Cleverly were unimpressive themselves, clattering at each other in lumbering fight about early release of prisoners.

He probably won’t want to hear this but there is an air of General De Gaulle about Nigel Farage. De Gaulle came to define French politics through a mix of deliberate play-acting as being anti-establishment, a narrative of his own sacrifice and a series of exceptionally well-coordinated tantrums. Now, if that doesn’t sound familiar, I don’t know what does. Nobody could ever accuse Mr Farage of being under-dramatic Farage possibly hoped today was a ‘De Gaulle’s style moment. As the General was wont to do, Farage decided to circumnavigate the official investigations and the media and instead to broadcast directly to the general public.

‘What’s Big Ange up to?’ was a question Sir Keir Starmer had to ask himself basically every day of his premiership. The fact that the bigger threat came from a totally different Mancunian doesn’t mean that tracking Ange’s manoeuvres was a bad idea. Inevitably, having helped defenestrate her former boss, she’s now angling to work out the next job she’s going to be sacked from. In aid of this, she’d taken to the airwaves, standing in for the cursed James O’Brien slot on LBC.  This was Big Ange’s sunshine radio roadshow – it being her stated aim to be ‘really optimistic’, to shine a light on some ‘good news stories’ (for which read: policies she’d come up with). This was not an even-handed radio session.

The Prime Minister began today’s PMQs by wishing a ‘happy 78th birthday’ to the NHS. This is the sort of weird, abstract and inanimate thing he is comfortable showing affection for. What next? Happy Birthday to the Nuclear Deterrent, to the Protestant Succession? How will everyone be celebrating? Being left on a trolley for 48 hours? Perhaps by the time the NHS has turned 80, you’ll be able to get an appointment.  He has essentially painted a Burnham shaped tunnel on the side of a sheer rock face, failing to commit the requisite money to defence Next came a bit of – unexpected – mutual congratulation, courtesy of Sir Keir and Mrs Badenoch.

There are still people out there – with access to the full gamut of unblunted cutlery – who maintain that Sir Keir Starmer is one of the great public servants of our time, cruelly brought down by unfair events. One easy way to disprove this, in the unlikely event that this theory’s proponents are susceptible to appeals to reason, is by pointing to his government’s defence record. The person who was in charge of this department, John Healey, resigned rather than be held responsible for the total abandonment of the nation’s defences.  One of these Starmer defenders is Rachel Reeves. Or at least she is one of them now that it’s become clear Burnham will sack her as quickly as you can say ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’.

‘What a fitting venue to be sat in – The People’s History Museum’. So began the introduction to Andy Burnham’s great descent from Mount Sinai to declare his programme for government. It was delivered by Bev Craig, Labour’s candidate to replace him as Manchester mayor. She delivered it in a tone and nasal burr which suggested she was announcing that a rail replacement bus service had been delayed.  His promise of ‘a new era of possibility’ was a lot of style – mingled with some inevitable Burnhamite sentimentalism: ‘hope in every heart and good growth in every postcode.’ It made me long for a gun in every hand and a cyanide capsule in every drawer  However, she was right – it was a fitting venue!

Parliament always has an otherworldly feel; it’s a world of gothic crenelations, of specialised language, of deliberate artifice. But something even less real has crept in recently. A deliberate indulgence by the governing class of mawkishness and sentimentality, just as the reality of the country they’re supposed to be governing turns grimmer and more violent. The two – the rise of violence and the dominance of mawkishness – are not unrelated.  Scarcely a week goes by without a minister hailing a victim or relative in the viewing gallery – sometimes for manifestly self-interested reasons We are entering day two of the fallout from Kemi Badenoch accusing Bridget Phillipson of being a ‘spiteful class warrior’ at PMQs.

The end of Sir Keir’s premiership, and especially his last few PMQs, was always going to be less of a swansong and more a prolonged squeal. The Prime Minister makes no secret of his hatred of even being in parliament, let alone answering questions there – if ‘answering’ is the right word for the mix of slogans, bluff and anger which make up his Wednesday lunchtime offerings. Who knows when his last will be, but it now won’t be long. I suspect he will not miss it. One person who will probably miss him is the Leader of the Opposition. There was a touch of sadness in Kemi Badenoch’s voice as she realised this would be one of her final skewerings of the Oinking One.

It was when Keir Starmer claimed never to have had a dream that I knew we were dealing with potentially one of the funniest prime ministers the nation had ever seen. Sure, some people would have been amused by the magnetism for calamity exhibited by Theresa May, the almost comedically unbelievable mendacity of Boris Johnson or the downright absurdism of Liz Truss, but a really funny prime minister is the one who demands to be taken seriously, and particularly one who is convinced that he has forced the British people to do so.

In the giddy rush to announce yet another ‘New Chapter’ in British politics – whose chapters these days seem to be about as lengthy and serious as those in a Biff and Chip book – there seems to have been a collective loss of sense as people hail Makerfield as a game-changer. This is at best wishful thinking, at worst, full on derangement. All Makerfield has done in the short term is to guarantee one of the silliest silly seasons for quite some time.  Once the enjoyable demise of Starmer happens there comes the probable Burnham win. It will not take long for this too to descend into farce We are in for a summer of unreality: Fear and Loathing in Downing Street, Labour in Wonderland. Two things seem likely to happen.

With Sir Keir in Evian busy taking what must surely be his last opportunity to stuff Lady Victoria’s hand luggage with G7 branded bathrobes and slippers, we had the great treat of a Lammy PMQs today. Except it isn’t really a treat any more. This parliament still has, potentially, three whole years to run, and yet it already feels zombified. Each week it goes through the motions, the same lame jokes, the same pointless questions, the same lingering sense of exhaustion and decay. It’s like the end of the French Third Republic but with fewer cigarettes and an even less impressive defence policy. They had the Maginot Line, we have the recycling of Dan Jarvis.

The House of Commons these days is hardly an inspiring place. There can be little denying that it is a shadow of the debating arena it was in the days of Gladstone and Disraeli. It’s not even what it was from the days of Cameron and Corbyn. Sir Keir replied that there was no evidence of two-tier policing, which in this day and age is increasingly like adamantly maintaining that the sky isn’t blue But on days like today, when the news is filled with the appalling reality of the policies cooked up there, it appears even more contemptible and trivial than usual. The banality of evil has never been so banal. The session started with an exchange between Mrs Badenoch and Sir Keir about welfare spending.

After months of back and forth, today the government finally released the latest tranche of the Mandy documents, which have become their own spin-off version of the original incriminating releases – a sort of Holby City to the Epstein Files’ Casualty. There are reams of them and, as some backbenchers pointed out stroppily in the Commons today, the government’s decision to release them late this afternoon hardly made it easy to garner much in time for questions to the Prime Minister’s Chief Secretary, Darren Jones, today. However, a cursory look at the content shows a mixed bag. Doubtless more will be revealed as a fine-tooth comb is applied. Some ‘revelations’ are eminently predictable – what journalists would call a ‘dog bites man’ story.