Madeline Grant

There was a veritable ‘last day of school’ vibe in parliament as it was prorogued in anticipation of the King’s Speech in May. Though, to be fair, I’m not sure many schools – not even Eton – have quite the same concentration of shady characters as Westminster does these days. It’s the traditional time to review the parliament, for governments to look back over the year of successes they’ve had. Quite aside from the obvious fact that the vista from the Treasury bench in the House of Commons is akin to a first class view of an accident black spot, the problem with any review of PMQs for this parliament would be that almost all of it has looked and sounded the same.

The slow political death of Sir Keir Starmer continued again today. Westminster must increasingly resemble a torture chamber for the Prime Minister. He’s probably looking forward to next week and his party’s evisceration at the local elections as a moment when he might be blessed with the sweet release of career oblivion. In the meantime, we get to watch the intervening thousand cuts. Talking of people visibly enjoying things, it’s very hard to think of someone who has greater job satisfaction in the world today than Emily Thornberry. The chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee increasingly resembles a tribute act to herself. Today she vamped in wearing a sensational get-up with a faintly gothic air.

Sir Keir Starmer is now approaching a whole week with his head in the sand. One can imagine the plaintive ‘meep, meep’ noise echoing from the Downing Street sandpit during the wee small hours. After being laughed at on Monday and then savaged on Tuesday, today brought the challenge of getting through PMQs while pretending that it was business as usual and – crucially – that the Mandelson business was still somebody else’s fault. Of course, this necessitated waging a pretty rigorous war against the obvious. But if anyone is capable of a pig-headed refusal to look reality in the face then it’s Sir Keir.

Ding ding! Round two – or is it round 22? – of the Mandelson saga was underway in the Foreign Affairs Committee. Sir Olly Robbins was going to give his side of the story.  There was a narrative that the past Tory government was at war with the civil service. In fact, it seems that for all its presentation as a government of sensiblism, Labour are the ones decimating the upper echelons of the Sir Humphrey class. I suspect senior mandarins are diving into doorways every time a bus comes down Whitehall at speed, lest Sir Keir arrive to throw them unceremoniously under it. Fresh from beneath the wheels of the Number 12 to Dulwich Library was Sir Olly. He was polite, he was put together.

You can always tell it’s going to be a good day in the Commons when the government spin operation happens before a Prime Ministerial statement. Clearly predicting a bloodbath, No. 10 tried to trot their lines out early. We were told that Sir Keir had inadvertently misled the House, in response to which we would see an angry Starmer. This is meant to sound out of character, incongruous somehow – like ‘jolly Bridget Phillipson’, 'honest Bob Jenrick' or ‘competent David Lammy’. To be fair, it does sound incongruous that Starmer is angry at the Mandelson affair, but in the same way that ‘man with box of matches and 47 gallons of propane angry that his house exploded’ might sound incongruous.

Handbags at noon! It’s always nice to watch Sir Keir Starmer descend into the sort of incandescent fury that living under his government induces from most people on a daily basis. The absolute standout moment of today’s PMQs was one not caught by the cameras but a behind-the-scenes bit of piggy rage from the PM. Sir Keir Starmer's anger when Lindsay Hoyle told him that it wasn’t 'leader of the opposition’s questions' was visible. But it was after the session, when a puce-coloured Starmer had an argument with Hoyle that the real joy was to be had, culminating in his flouncing out of the chamber. As he did so, he shot the Speaker an absolutely filthy look. Get her! All this had, in fairness, been prompted by Kemi Badenoch.

‘Samantha Niblett’s Summer of Sex’ sounds like something that the police would have shut down during the grubbiest era of Soho peep shows. Not so: it is – just as the world teeters on the brink of geopolitical collapse – an actual initiative by a Labour MP announced today. The dignity-phobic South Derbyshire MP Samantha Niblett has launched a campaign to make 2026 the ‘summer of sex’, calling for ‘more open, inclusive, lifelong sex education’. Niblett wants to have ‘a national conversation’ about pleasure, including the benefits of masturbation, and said she intends to ‘talk about sex all summer’. Never has the case for earplugs been more compelling.

There’s an entire glorious genre of photos that we might tentatively entitle: ‘Keir Starmer standing in front of people who visibly loathe him.’ His trip to the Gulf this week means we can add military personnel to the list of people who’ve been subjected to these grey reluctant photobombs, alongside oil workers, school children and the cabinet. Starmer claiming some active part in the Iran ceasefire is like the cast and crew of The Clangers wanting credit for the Artemis moon mission Sir Keir’s latest trip is a masterpiece in ambulance chasing.

British history is littered with elections and Elections. The first type, common or garden elections, are fought with prosaic issues at their core. Readers might remember the 2001 general election, which saw such pressing topics as the fate of Kidderminster hospital pushed to the fore. The 1865 general election was also considered uneventful by contemporaries. Even contests nominally involving major changes can be just ‘elections’. The tedium of 2024, featuring cynical electoral bribery, with the result a foregone conclusion and the stated policy platforms of the two main parties largely similar, is a prime example. What, then, are the other type: the Elections?

PMQs last week was embarrassing: not a single answer to a single question. The bar then was low – yet still today was, if not just as bad, still incredibly unimpressive. Mrs Badenoch began by asking a very simple question about new drilling in the North Sea. Sir Keir claimed that this was not his responsibility, but the responsibility of the secretary of state, meaning – as many suspect – that Ed Miliband has more control over the levers of power than his boss.  ‘He’s the prime minister!’ bellowed Mrs Badenoch. Opposite her, Sir Keir put his head in his hands, thus ironically mimicking exactly how most people feel when they see him. The argument about North Sea oil and gas continued. Sir Keir insisted he couldn’t act due to the magic spells of legalism.

Rachel Reeves was in the House today, responding to the war in the Middle East. That as a statement alone has an air of innate tragicomic potential to it: like Igglepiggle responding to Spanish Flu.  Despite the gravity of the situation, it was more of what we’ve come to expect from Reeves. She did her standard park and bark in the Commons, delivering everything by means of a permanent earnest glottal stop. Like a monoglot tourist in a foreign bar, she makes the mistake of thinking that saying things loudly and slowly will somehow make them effective.

‘I don’t want to raise levels of public anxiety.’ Believe it or not, these words came out of the mouth of Sir Keir Starmer. If they were true, one would expect him to announce he was off to live as a hermit in the Hebrides, rather than continue to chair meetings of Cobra. Yes, in the midst of the continuing crisis in the Middle East, the Prime Minister was answering questions from the liaison committee, mostly made up by his own MPs. He has previously had tetchy sessions here, but today he was on the receiving end of some seriously soft-ball questions on foreign policy. MPs questioned him in such a pathetic and fawning manner that they made the woman who screams the news on North Korean TV look like Jeremy Paxman.