Madeline Grant

If you hadn’t heard of Rushanara Ali until her resignation yesterday, then good for you. If you still hadn’t until now, even better. With her departure British politics is robbed of one of its most promising minnows.  With Ali’s departure, British politics is robbed of one of its most promising minnows The former homelessness minister is an absolute standard-issue Starmerite apparatchik. PPE at Oxford, followed by a stint as a Parliamentary researcher, then a fruitful career milking the ‘human rights’ cow for all it was worth. She’d already quietly resigned from her building safety brief when it turned out she had been in receipt of sponsored trips courtesy of Saint-Gobain, one of the firms implicated in the catastrophe at the Grenfell Tower.

There’s no rest, they say, for the wicked. Nobody, however, ever deigns to inform us what amount of downtime will be allocated to the incompetent. If the presence of Rachel Reeves in Wales this afternoon is anything to go by, they don’t get a great deal of rest either. In the midst of the summer holidays, our Playmobil-haired Chancellor had donned her hardhat and inflicted herself on Wales. As she stomped around Port Talbot it was hard to know where the plastic ended and the human began. Nothing Reeves says bears even the tiniest semblance to reality On the back of an interest rate cut, the Chancellor was proudly trumpeting – or perhaps that should be tromboning as she has a developed a sort of nasally baritone, like an animate common cold – Labour’s economic competence.

One of the symptoms that something has truly shifted is unrest in unlikely places. The sleepy heartlands of middle England suddenly becoming not so sleepy but angry and active. Few places have a greater claim to fit the latter description than my home county, Warwickshire.  A stone’s throw away from my grandparents’ old home in North Warwickshire is a village called Meriden – so called because it claims to be the geographical centre-point of the country; the middlest of middle England. It is solidly, stolidly small-c conservative – not radically so. The MPs for the Warwickshire parliamentary constituency were generally Tories of the county variety.

The Trump Golf Course at Turnberry in Scotland looks like a middle-ranking complex for assisted living. It is all plastic double glazing, unfashionably bright flowers and ornamental balls. It was to here that Ursula von der Leyen and now Sir Keir Starmer had been summoned by the president to pay homage during the Donald’s golfing tour. Mr Trump appeared on the steps of his plastic palace, while Sir Keir and Lady Starmer emerged from their Land Rover to the sound of a piper. I can’t say what he was playing. Traditional options include the Skye Boat Song or – appropriately – Cock o’ the North. Knowing Mr Trump it might well have been the YMCA.

The origin of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes is difficult to pin down: could it be 19th century Denmark or 14th century Spain, 13th century India or the 500s BC in Greece? Perhaps the fact that all of these cultures and times are viable options confirms the truth of it: never underestimate the capacity of those in power to believe their own nonsense. One of the inherent problems with the government’s strategy to ‘educate’ people out of their concerns about immigration is that the narrative it requires is based on myth, not history British politics is an excellent example of this.

When French General Bosquet watched the 600 men of the Light Brigade charge helplessly into the Russian heavy artillery at Balaclava he muttered ‘c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre’. Well, history repeats first as tragedy then as farce. And so today, those words came to mind as I watched Rachel Reeves prepare to charge into the grapeshot offered by the House of Lord’s economic affairs committee. Only without the ‘c’est magnifique’ bit. Perhaps Reeves' plan is to bore the markets into submission: after all, the stock exchange can’t crash if everyone’s asleep Behind the Chancellor sat a boy in a lanyard bearing the legend ‘work experience’. One got the sense that it almost would have been kinder to let him have a crack.

Sir Keir Starmer has a sausage problem. Stop sniggering at the back. Not only was there his infamous slip demanding that Hamas ‘return the sausages’, but there is also the fact that he increasingly resembles a great British banger: pink-skinned, spitting and whistling when grilled and filled with all kinds of rubbish. Sir Keir has become the Sausage King of Westminster and today – at the House of Commons liaison committee – he was due a spell on the barbecue. Part of the problem for the Sausage King is that he’s managed to wind up a fair few of the select committee chairs who make up the grilling committee: quite an achievement given that almost all of them are his own MPs.

It was clearly hot in the House of Commons today. The Lib Dem benches were a sea of pastel colours, light pinks and summer suits. They looked like the LGBTQIA+ sub-committee of the Friends of Glyndebourne. Which, in many ways, they are. Rachel Reeves, in contrast, was wearing severe black, as if she were going to a funeral. Presumably for the economy. The picture painted by the PM is of an unrecognisable nation Members on the Labour backbenches fanned themselves with order papers and squirmed. Given that these are people who give the impression that they are kept in tanks needing only a coco fibre brick, a heat lamp and the odd handful of dried locusts to keep them going, then it must have been warm.

In the Fifth Circle of Dante’s Inferno, the damned are cursed to bob on the surface of the Styx, scrapping and fighting with each other for eternity, constantly stuck just at the point when the waters threaten to submerge them forever. Artists have attempted to recreate this – from Botticelli to Doré – but none have come quite as close to depicting it as Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch manage in the House of Commons each week. There is a particular way Starmer spits out the phrase ‘manifesto pledges’ that gives his face the appearance of two cheap sausages in a food processor We all know the cycle by now. The Tory leader asks about spending and the Prime Minister rants about the economic record of ‘the party opposite’.

Today’s Urgent Question in the House of Commons about the state of the economy was dominated by two people who weren’t there: Liz Truss and Rachel Reeves. One wouldn’t expect Truss to be present; after all she lost her seat last year and is presumably busy on some important project elsewhere. Perhaps working on her list of ‘people who destroyed me’ – always just missing the most important name on it. The problem is that Sir Keir is now even less popular than Truss was at her nadir Truss is constantly invoked by Labour and today was no different. This is presumably in a crude attempt at subliminal messaging to get the public to remember how much they hated the Tories. The problem is that Sir Keir is now even less popular than Truss was at her nadir.