Madeline Grant

Ed Davey’s speech at the Lib Dem conference began with a darkened stage on which you could just about make out outlines of people and quotes by and about him booming over the sound system. Like most things the Lib Dems do, it felt a bit like a self-consciously modern re-interpretation of Shakespeare by a group of earnest undergraduates. Two Gentlemen of Verona set in a Detroit smack den, Othello but everyone has feline HIV, that sort of thing. Davey is a very immodest man with a great deal to be immodest about Onto this stage Davey emerged. And there was light. It turned out that the amorphous shapes were actually the Lib Dem MPs who sat there in the dark. Suddenly we were subjected to them in full technicolour: it looked like a very po-faced game of ‘Guess Who?’.

How do you solve a problem like B Johnson? It has troubled the Conservative party since his departure, not least as they presumably do not relish the idea of him going down in history as the last person ever to win them a majority. Interestingly, Labour rarely mentions him, preferring to resurrect Liz Truss again and again. Ironically it has since become clear that they are guilty of many of the things they once criticised Boris for doing; the same love of freebies, a certain economy with the truth, and, inevitably, not knowing that the best time to go was yesterday and the second-best time is today.

We’re back again in the House of Peers this week as they once again give a leaden beating to Leadbeater’s suicide bill. Even when discussing matters of life and death, there is something very reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan about the place. The most famous G&S operetta set in the House of Lords is, of course, Iolanthe – when Parliament is taken over by a group of incompetent fairies. I’m saying nothing. Falconer slumped there, a face like a constipated toad throughout Again, the House was full. Perhaps aware that some of the most convincing criticism of the bill both in the Commons and Lords had come from women, today its sponsor Lord Falconer had surrounded himself with a rotating cast of female Fabian prunes for moral support.

There is just something innately funny about seeing Keir Starmer and Donald Trump together. Two men so obviously different; in character, interests, ability and shape, forced together by circumstance. Watching them at the press conference today was no exception. They put me in mind of Bialystock and Bloom from The Producers: the bombastic Broadway shyster and his hapless sinusitis-suffering goon. First, for their ‘business roundtable’, they sat together behind a comically small table inside a marquee, which made them look like an unlikely scoring partnership at a village cricket match or as if they were signing the registers at a low-budget gay wedding. Alternatively, they looked a bit like they were appearing on a Radio 4 panel show. I can think of a title: Don’t mention Mandy!

Despite the Prime Minister presumably going to bed each night, trotters crossed, eyes screwed up and wishing hard as if trying to reanimate Tinkerbell, the Mandelson scandal is not magically going to go away. Indeed, today MPs were granted an extensive chunk of parliamentary time to discuss it. Unsurprisingly, the PM swerved this particular treat. Given how things are going he really ought to be ringing round publishers to see if any of them want his memoirs. I wonder where the serialisation will be? It’s a good job the Beano is still publishing. There was no sign of the Foreign Secretary either. Today the boy who stood on the burning deck was, once again, Foreign Office junior minister Stephen Doughty.

In fairness, I suspect plenty of Tory MPs are looking for reasons to get out of party conference this year. East Wiltshire MP Danny Kruger – who this afternoon appeared at the Faragean elbow to defect to Reform – has probably found the single best, if drastic, get-out-clause available.  Kruger isn’t the first MP to tread this path of course, but because of his character and standing within the party he leaves, this defection isn’t like the others. Nadine Dorries has probably fallen out with more people before breakfast than most of us will manage in a lifetime. Andrea Jenkyns seemed to have defected with the sole purpose of finding an audience for her questionable singing talents.

‘This was Parliament at its best’, so went the inane and factually incorrect mantra of Kim Leadbeater as her Assisted Dying Bill made its way through the House of Commons. It did so on the back of intense duplicity about its safeguards by its sponsors and by the simple fact that the vast majority of MPs are intellectually unimpressive and suckers for anecdote over evidence. The House of Lords was always going to be trickier ground for this Bill The House of Lords was always going to be trickier ground. Their Lordships have their failings but they are less likely to be moved by the highly manipulative campaigns from pressure groups which have accompanied the bill.

Statute 343.36 in the US state of Minnesota reads thus: ‘No person shall operate, run or participate in a contest, game, or other like activity, in which a pig, greased, oiled or otherwise, is released and wherein the object is the capture of the pig’. I hope, for the sake of the integrity of their state laws, no Minnesotans were watching Prime Minister’s Questions today. There was one little piggy very much at large, greased and squealing, trying to avoid capture. Its name? Sir Keir Starmer, KCB. It started badly. The first big bad wolf to come a-knocking was Dr Luke Evans. He did so in a calm and collected manner, simply listing all the scandals the government has successfully crammed into the last 12 months. It was less a question and more a coroner’s report.

It’s always nice when the muses of tragedy and comedy seem to be working in perfect sync: nowhere is this truer than the Labour deputy leadership contest. It would genuinely be difficult to relate how many people have indicated that they are standing for the role so unceremoniously vacated by Big Ange. Candidacies have come and gone like a thief in the night. There are bugs which breathe the sweet air of earth for only 24 hours which have longer lifespans than some Labour deputy leadership bids. Quite possibly higher IQs as well. Clearly a consensus has arisen that, with a greying man in his sixties as their dear leader, it is necessary for his deputy to be a woman.

Reform had clearly planned the Campest Show On Earth for their conference this year. Sparklers, club anthems and strobe lights: imagine Sir Keith Joseph was in charge of your primary school disco and you get a sense of the vibe. Unfortunately for the budding impresarios of Reform, they were upstaged. Just as their conference was starting, the inevitable happened and Big Ange called it a day. In many ways, the Deputy Prime Minister and Reform have a lot in common: a working-class support base, an obvious contempt for the smoking ban and finances which are best left, er, unscrutinised. Still there was room for only one headline and the reshuffle got it. Many true blues had apparently turned turquoise.

Imagine a school assembly run by the most boring narcissists imaginable. Right – you’ve come close to picturing the first parliamentary business questions after recess. Lucy ‘Paraffin’ Powell, the woman who can always make a bad situation worse, began with a list of all the MPs who had married, had children, or otherwise managed not to out themselves as perverts over the summer break. Inevitably this was accompanied by self-back-patting on how much more family-friendly parliament was under Labour. Well, it increasingly resembles a crèche, of that there is no doubt. I pity Jesse Norman, one of the unambiguously impressive and intelligent MPs left in parliament. He has to suffer Powell’s clattering platitudes as he tries to ask her questions.

It was taxes that eventually did for Al Capone. And Spiro Agnew. And Judy Garland. So now the taxman’s bell tolls for Big Ange – who has often presented herself as a sort of mix of all three of those figures. The hard-partying working-class girl turned union bruiser turned second most powerful politician in the land.  Scandal has become second nature to Labour ministers, to the extent that they now have a sort of standard issue hangdog look to wear in Parliament which indicates to the world that bringing up their bad behaviour is actually not very #BeKind, and so when you think about it, they’re the real victims. Ange deployed this to great effect as she shuffled into Prime Minister’s Questions today. She earned herself a pat of sympathy from Lucy Powell.

The Green party’s leadership announcement was live streamed using a phone which seemed to be wrapped in clingfilm and held by someone who appeared to be suffering from delirium tremens. You may not have realised that the Greens were electing a new leader. You may not even have realised that they have a leader at all – in fairness, until recently they didn’t, opting instead for a bizarre job-share arrangement whereby they had a sort of weird progressive hydra of ‘spokespeople’. Leadership for the polycule era.  The core argument against taking the Greens seriously is any engagement with the party itself There is an argument that says we ought to take the Greens more seriously.