Madeline Grant

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.

‘When a Knight won his spurs in the stories of old, he was gentle and brave, he was gallant and bold.’ I wonder if Sir Keir Starmer ever sang the old hymn, podgy hands on crossed-legged knee when at primary school in the Stakhanovite front-lines of 1970s Surrey? Presumably not, given how ill-suited the epithets therein are to his demeanour. If there had been any doubt as to the nature of Sir Keir’s real character, today’s Prime Minister’s Questions laid them to rest. The PM droned on about how pleased and proud he was of Labour’s record on women MPs. Next to him, the Chancellor looked sadly at her feet It was always going to be a tricky session after yesterday's Welfare Bill Apocalypse.

That this government is bad at maths will not come as a surprise to many readers. Thus far, however, in its endless parade of resounding successes, this has been mostly confined to miscalculations on the economy. Now, though, government innumeracy seems to have spilled out into its Parliamentary arithmetic too. Despite having a landslide majority, Labour has managed to find itself, not quite a year into power, with a serious backbench rebellion on its hands. This is doubly impressive: not only is the government’s majority enormous, it is composed of an intake of infamously supine backbenchers, desperate for attention and promotion from No. 10. They make the 1997 Labour cohort look like The Few. To have provoked this lot into open rebellion is quite the achievement.

‘This government believes in equality and social justice,’ began Liz Kendall. Which government she was describing is anyone’s guess. I suspect that if you were to ask the general public what they thought the government believed in, ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ wouldn’t even make the top 100 printable responses.  The government were facing a backbench rebellion so great that even the cabinet – who, as anyone who has ever seen them give an interview can attest, have an appetite for humiliation which appears to be almost sadomasochistic – were having second thoughts Kendall was at the House for the start of a monumental climb-down: think Hillary and Tenzing in reverse.

Sir Keir has returned from his worldwide statesmanship tour. Barely the edge of a photograph went ungurned in, not a bottom went unkissed, no platitude went ungarbled. Now – lucky us! – he was back in the House of Commons for a good long crow about his achievements. As always, there was an obsequious toad ready on the Labour backbenches The PM began with the usual Starmerite guff production. The man is a veritable Chinese Power Station of pompous pollution. This, however, was more smug than smog. It began with a round-up of how crucial he’d been in every negotiation and discussion. ‘We’re following in the footsteps of Attlee and Bevan,’ crowed Starmer. Well, up to a point Comrade Copper. I mean, his cabinet hated each other too.

Sir Keir Starmer was in the Hague. I know, I know, you’d have thought they would have done Blair first. Sorry to get your hopes up, but the Prime Minister was in fact there for the Nato summit. He was doubtless bringing to bear all the soft power which the government had bought by paying to give away the Chagos. Ha ha. You heard it here first, Keir Starmer: geopolitical anti-Viagra. The main thrust of Ange’s answers was: ‘Yeah but no but the Tories’ Anyway, all this meant that the deputy PM was in the hot seat again. The first question that Big Ange faced wasn’t a question at all but the by now standard self-respect-immolation by a backbench Labour MP, the ceaselessly embarrassing Mike Tapp.

The day started badly for David Lammy. Well – we don’t know that for sure – it’s feasible that first thing this morning he won a great victory over his toothpaste tube, however his appearance on the Today programme wasn’t exactly a triumph. Asked by Justin Webb whether the US action was legal he told him that ‘we weren’t involved’. That’s the spirit: answer the question you want, not the question you were asked.  The Sage of Tottenham continued to manifest his dream interview rather than the one that was actually going on. We had a rather fun segue into the periodic table and percentages of uranium enrichment. ‘Oh Justin’, said Lammy at one point, ‘we’ve always been clear’. As a rainy day in Dundee.