Madeline Grant

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’.

I’m sort of in awe of Ed Davey. How does he still manage to wake up every day and, despite all the other challengers for the title, somehow knock it out of the park as the nation’s most embarrassing political leader? His address to the Liberal Democrat conference this week was a masterpiece. There he was, the Postmaster’s Friend, wedged into a pair of dad-chinos and reminiscing about his radical days at the college JCR. Davey is in some ways the perfect Lib Dem leader – an id for embarrassing middle-class England. If you cut him, he bleeds organic muesli and opposition to planning applications. He ticked every box in his speech. He evoked Liberal Britain’s prelapsarian Eden: the opening of the 2012 Olympics, complete with a prolonged panegyric to Mo Farah.

There was for a time the vaguest sense that things had got better since Andy Burnham took charge. That the insanity and inanity of Starmerism had finally bitten the dust. In some narrow respects this is true, yet in the sphere of foreign policy there remains a continuity idiocy which threatens to make Britain even more of an embarrassment than it already is. Key in this are two dismal figures: Luke Pollard and Jonathan Powell. The catastrophically unimpressive Pollard – the sort of defence minister you’d find with a sticker slapped onto his head in the middle aisle of Aldi – claimed on Sky News this morning that the best way to secure the British military base on Diego Garcia was to give it away.

Lisa Nandy’s media-round sounds like the sort of thing you might be signed up to if you failed to make the cut as a Newsround Press Packer. Unfortunately for us, it’s actually a key part of the government’s comms strategy as the Culture Secretary was sent out on to the airwaves this morning. Inevitably she was asked about the Piddington fiasco. The government is ‘listening’ to villagers in Piddington, purred Nandy, but is ‘not going to change our plans’. Nothing shows you’re ‘listening’ to people quite like doing the exact opposite of what they’re asking you to do.

Sequels to horror films can be a mixed bag. Some become classics in their own right, others fall into the category of things better left forgotten. Think Leprechaun: Origins. The House of Commons was back this week debating assisted suicide again. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the chamber, here we were, the same arguments in favour, the same cast, the same lingering air of horror. The quality was not good: this was Children of the Corn II territory. This was partly due to the Bill’s new sponsor. It is quite hard to imagine a downgrade from the Grim Leadbeater, but Dignity in Dying (the quondam Voluntary Euthanasia Society) had found it in the form of Lauren Edwards.

Today was Andy Burnham’s second Prime Minister’s Questions and also his last one for five weeks. The mini-recess for the extended exercise in masochism that is party conference season means Burnham will have gone a little over three months in the job while only answering questions twice. It’s quite hard to think of the last senior advisor to the crown to have faced so little direct Parliamentary scrutiny: the Munshi? The courtier in charge of wiping Henry VIII’s bottom? Merlin? There was no subject that couldn’t be unsubtly swerved towards this in an attempt to gain positive murmurings from the House Kemi Badenoch took advantage of this rare opportunity to subject Mr Burnham to questioning on perhaps the most important duty of any government – the defence of the realm.

John Healey had been sent to Coventry, something he will have to get used to after his budget next month, at least if he ever intends to use any form of business again. He was visiting ‘The Manufacturing Technology Centre’ which is the sort of vague, ‘Universal Exports’ style name for a company that might have, in past years, made people think Healey was a double agent. In the last ministry, Healey had certainly got a reputation as a man of action, of something of a hard man who was prepared to put his job on the line to get what he wanted. That reputation, as it becomes pretty clear that he won’t be giving defence the spending it needs despite resigning because he said it was so important, is in tatters. Healey needs a new brand and Coventry was the place for it.

It hasn’t been a glittering 24 hours for Reform UK. To lose one senior official might be regarded as misfortune etc. However there was no sense of impending doom at the Reform conference in Birmingham – indeed, in his speech Mr Farage obliquely referred to recent events as ‘a little local difficulty’.  These events are not like other conferences. They’re a strange fusion between political frustration and high camp. Think Liberace does the Battle of Orgreave. Speakers are announced with rock music and spotlights, the audience are bathed in a strange blue glow, making the NEC seem like a cross between a day spa and a level on the Crystal Maze.

There was a cautious cheer for Andy Burnham as he stood up for his first PMQs. MPs were perhaps cautious of a repeat of the day before when Burnham delivered the longest opening statement of modern times. Or maybe the PM’s summer of lying low just meant that some of the more intellectually challenged members had forgotten who he was. I think we have found the new ‘my father was toolmaker’ and it’s Andy’s patented Ena Sharples tribute act It may have been 16 years, but Mr Burnham was at his ease as he rose for the first question. Clearly circumlocution is a bit like riding a bike – it’s the preferred way to get anywhere in the Labour Party.

The legacy of the Victorians is everywhere; we depend on them for our sewage disposal, our railway networks, much of our infrastructure and housing stock. Even the hooded eyelids of our Royal Family mark them out as descendants of Victoria herself. The right often dwells on how far we’ve fallen from Victorian greatness – painting modern Britain’s existence amongst the physical debris of Victoriana as akin to living in the ruins of a superior civilisation, like mud-smeared Visigoths prowling around the remains of the Colosseum. Less discussed is how the Victorians are still very much with us.  ‘In the UK, both people must say “yes” to sex’, scolds one of the posters, which were handed out to asylum seekers. ‘This is called consent’.