Madeline Grant

Maybe it’s being heavily pregnant but certain phrases just immediately elicit a deep emotional reaction in me these days. One such phrase is “Louise Haigh, First Secretary of State”. Am I meant to laugh, or am I meant to cry? Perhaps we’re supposed to do a bit of both. Anyway, today we saw part of the fruition of that statement as Haigh stood up to answer Deputy Prime Minister's Questions while the Great Triviality was in the Caribbean. On the subject of the Prime Minister, I suspect this will be the last time he allows his First Secretary of State to stand in for a while The Tories – after a bizarre period of allowing a pot luck system to decide who deputises for Mrs Badenoch – have settled on Alex Burghart as their deputy leader proper.

A treat for fans of funeral pyres in the Commons today as Shabana Mahmood gave her much anticipated statement on changes to Indefinite Leave to Remain for migrants. After taking a supposedly hard line under Sir Keir, the arrival of the Great Triviality into Downing Street – accompanied by Miatta Fahnbulleh, Paraffin Powell and Big Ange, all of whom are said to be less than impressed with the Home Secretary’s past tone, has seen Shabana melt from hardliner to marshmallow. The statement majored on ‘fair play’. Mahmood claimed to be achieving this by altering the financial and time requirements to earn indefinite leave. It was originally the case that she wanted to make 15 years the number required for ILR: but today, for care-workers, this plan was scrapped.

The Budget is without doubt one of the most overrated days in British politics. Now that we are entirely at the mercy of foreign lenders, Saudi and Chinese investors, frightened Labour backbenchers and our own suicidal accumulation of debt, the idea that the British state’s economic conception of itself is anything more than a tragicomic fiction is laughable. Yet Budget day remains part of the elaborate amateur dramatics that constitute domestic politics. It is also, crucially, a key mechanism by which the government can make the lives of savers, taxpayers and those still brave enough to run a business significantly worse. Today began with the usual theatrics – John Healey, who is privately considered to be a remedial chancellor, posed with the red box on Downing Street.

Another week and another PMQs: Mr Burnham and Mrs Badenoch haven’t really had any major zingers yet, preferring a sort of boring pas de deux. One gets the sense they’re still sizing each other up. Mrs Badenoch decided to lead with congratulations for the Prime Minister as the government finally approved the Jackdaw oil field after years of politically expedient dithering and judicial meddling. It was a surreal moment. The Tories cheered the announcement of a government policy, while the Labour benches were muted. Lucy Powell would have looked happier had she trodden in dog muck.

The first question at PMQs was something which may not go away: Andy Burnham’s engagement with Manchester City – now firmly on the footballing naughty step – during his time as Mayor of Manchester. Fellow Mancunian Lucy Powell scowled ominously, like a rejected prototype of the Chucky Doll, as it was implied that the New Jerusalem might not have been as squeaky-clean as its MPs have been trying to suggest. Louise Haigh did a kind of panto grimace at any who dared question Burnham. Emily Thornberry squatted and heckled insufferably throughout, bellowing the words ‘donations’ and ‘Russian money’ in the manner of a seagull In his answer, the Prime Minister insisted that nobody from the club had raised any legal problems with him.

It was back to the future in the House of Commons today. After their weeks of backslapping and self-delusion, MPs were back in parliament and indulging in a full-blown nostalgia overload. That’s right – traumatic for those of us who had to report on it and downright tedious for everyone else – the Brexit wars were back.  Burnham had spent the last week focused on foreign affairs, including a trip to the UN. But he’d also found time to go on the Rest is Politics podcast for a cosy fireside chat with the Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose of Centrist Broadcasting Delusion.

I swear that every year the introductions to leaders’ speeches at party conferences become more and more of a circus. Gone are the days of a weird music hall song by Jim Callaghan or a butchered Python joke by Mrs Thatcher, today we get a whole cavalcade of strangeness before the leader has even stepped on stage. So it was today as Mrs Badenoch addressed the Tory faithful. We were treated to Chris Philp and Nick Timothy as a sort of Tory Home Affairs Bill and Ben. Then a shadow cabinet beauty parade; an oxymoron for the ages, up there with ‘the integrity of Lord Mandelson’. As they all trooped out one by one, there were huge cheers for newcomer Katie Lam and for unlikely conference darling Lord True.

Day three of the Tory conference. A giant drone hung over the stage for the afternoon’s session on defence. Plenty of giant drones were hungover in the audience too. We heard from a Ukrainian politician who lamented that we lived in an era where ‘force of law’ had been replaced by ‘law of force’. Unfortunately, Britain is a country which has yet to learn that lesson itself.  This was the grand unveiling of new shadow foreign secretary Tom Tugendhat; not a man known for his shy and retiring nature. There was some bottom-crawling to be done by the new recruit: ‘Kemi has shown that she is absolutely brilliant… You chose well, conference, you really did.’ There was much guffawing at this; Robert Jenrick has been one of the punchbags of conference.

It was a big day for the Tory conference. There was a real celebrity in town. Normally the sort of famous people who choose to come to party conferences are people for whom the credulous adulation of showbiz wasn’t enough and so they go to the bit beyond the bottom of the barrel and look to politics for their ego highs: think the supremely dislikable Izzard.  Yet in Birmingham today was someone – though not without his controversies – who is actually liked by the British public. As a sign that the shadow rural team think they have a chance of beating Labour’s scorched earth policy for the countryside, we had a fireside chat with none other than Jeremy Clarkson.

You have to feel sorry for the people of Brighton. No, seriously. In the last two weeks they’ve been subjected not just to a deluge of Lib Dems but now also the entirety of the Green party. Even for the residents of Britain’s progressive Mecca – or should that just be Mecca – that might be a bit much. Today was the opening of the Greens’ conference. Sian Berry spoke first, with a deranged rant about the A23 and ‘showing arses’ to fascists. If we thought we’d had the full gamut of patronising nonsense, we were wrong: Hannah Spencer was on next. ‘I want to make sure that there are more people like me in Parliament,’ she cooed, which might well have been a threat. There’s at least something faintly naive about Spencer’s breathy nervousness.

There were many reasons why John Ruskin hated Rococo. The overly decorated style was a bête noire for the great architectural critic because he thought it the supreme example of excess and by its excess it concealed its true meaning. We are in an era of British life which I can only think of as ‘late Rococo incompetence’. The excess of bad news, government ineptitude and baffling decisions made by the state is now so great that we are struck dumb, incapable of meaningful reaction. The news cycle abounds with evidence of this tidal wave of depressing or destructive acts. The sheer number of hideous stories has desensitised us.

Labour are in Liverpool and, as their conference reached its apogee, I was put in mind of John Lennon. What could an entitled pseud, who preached tolerance and kindness while being intensely venal and malicious in his personal life, possibly remind you of in today’s Labour party, I hear you ask? Well, specifically what came to mind was Lennon’s hatred for particular, mawkish and sentimental parts of the Beatles’ oeuvre which he called ‘Paul’s Granny S***’. Think Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer or When I’m Sixty-Four. Andy Burnham specialises in mawkishness, mass-produced sentimentality and ‘be kindism’.