Madeline Grant

In the last 48 hours the government of Sir Keir Starmer has ended a link between the House of Lords and the Anglo-Saxon Witan by booting out the hereditary peers and beginning the process of removing the right to trial by jury which goes back to Magna Carta. He probably, genuinely, believes this to have been a good couple of days in the office. After this bout of constitutional vandalism, Sir Keir came to one thing he probably also wants to abolish but currently cannot: PMQs. Mrs Badenoch tried to ask him about fuel duty – Sir Keir, however, thought he had detected a change in Tory tone and policy on Iran and so decided to speak about that instead. The bottom line was that they were wrong and he – the great Nostradamus of foreign policy – was right.

‘I’d like to remind members of the need for good temper and moderation in the language they use in this chamber.’ Sir Lindsay Hoyle began PMQs with this rather pathetic appeal to respectful debate. Given the current relationship between the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition, it was a bit like a sincere request made to rain that it stop being wet.  The situation in the Middle East inevitably preoccupied questions. Why, asked Mrs Badenoch, were the US allowed to defend British interests and personnel, but the RAF were not. The Prime Minister loves these moments.

‘Mr Speaker, this government has the right economic plan for this country.’ It’s never a good sign for a sombre economic statement when your opening line gets a hearty laugh.  Rachel Reeves stood up to give a Spring Statement on the economy which might just as well have been a hostage video. The Chancellor’s delivery is redolent of the stop-start of traffic near a recent road accident. If you play certain Black Sabbath records backwards you get a more convincing and comforting delivery than Rachel Reeves talking about the economy. Reeves kept on talking about how the world was ‘increasingly dangerous’ and ‘uncertain’.

Politics students of the future – if there are any who can see the full length of study without recourse to industrial amounts of anti-depressants – will study the Gorton and Denton by election, which saw the Greens’ Hannah Spencer beat not only Labour but also Matt Goodwin of Reform. So they all appeared in the early hours of the morning for one of the last vestigial rites of functioning British democracy: the leisure centre humiliation. A visibly graceless Mr Goodwin stood there, looking like a waxwork of the acid bath murderer. The Monster Raving Loony man looked positively normal. The main thrust of Ms Spencer’s speech was that she offered ‘hope and a chance to do things differently’.

In the film Goodbye Lenin, a German family has to convince a fussy, old woman who is also a committed socialist that everything going on outside her window is fine and dandy when, in fact, the Iron Curtain has fallen, the entire lie on which her life was built has crumbled and that this is clear to anyone who looks outside for even five minutes. I often think that this must be the closest we can get to knowing what working for Keir Starmer is like. Sir Keir didn’t want to return to the subject, so inevitably we got yet another mention of Liz Truss Again at Prime Minister’s Questions today, Sir Keir was determined to present a narrative of perpetual economic sunshine warming a grateful and socially coherent nation, with tractor production reaching new heights.

Sir Keir got probably the biggest cheer he’s had all year at Prime Minister’s Questions today. Unfortunately for him, it came from the Tory benches. After all the Mandelson revelations, it now transpires that Sir Keir gave a peerage to his former director of communications (a chocolate teapot job if ever there was one), Matthew Doyle, despite knowing that he helped campaign for a convicted sex offender. To put it simply, becoming known as the nation’s premier employer of the associates of paedophiles isn’t a fantastic way to begin your weekly bit of scrutiny at work. Is there some sort of special nonce-adjacent job centre where Sir Keir goes looking for CVs? Who does he get to fix his sink? The late Cyril Smith? Is the ghost of Sir Jimmy Savile his odd-job man?

Ever wondered what Custer’s last stand would have been like if the dashing but judgement-phobic cavalry general had in fact been an adenoidal human rights lawyer? Wonder no more! The long-drawn-out fall of Sir Keir took another twist today as he tried to marshal his troops in a last desperate defence of his position. The cabinet have had to rally round Sir Keir by going to the monumental effort of copy and pasting a supportive tweet onto their official X accounts. While their social media posturing is all protestations of loyalty, I suspect that their WhatsApps read more like the burn book from Mean Girls. Except probably not as well-spelled.

It was always going to be a good one wasn’t it? There was almost a sense of guilt watching today’s PMQs. My fellow sketch writers and I felt like the people who slow down to get a good view of a particularly horrific pile-up on a dual carriageway. Confirmation of this came when the Prime Minister dispensed with his usual embarrassing self-congratulatory monologue at the start of PMQs and simply told the House he’d had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. One hopes that the latter category includes the Metropolitan Police. We started with a little hors d’oeuvre of Labour incompetence. A nondescript Scottish MP had been primed to talk about how the SNP were the enemy of the high street. ‘She’s a superb champion for Paisley’, droned Sir Keir in reply.