Madeline Grant

I wish I’d invested in lecterns back in the day. They have become a fixture of British politics of late, a symbol of the chaos and incompetence that has marked our government for some time. Every time our leaders fall short, the podium is wheeled out and a ‘reset’ or resignation is announced and the whole cycle of malice and incompetence begins again. Good for the lectern producers, exhausting for the rest of us. Starmer’s podium is a white plastic number, a little like an upside-down bathroom bin. It appeared not outside Downing Street but in an anonymous room with some wonky Labour branding in it. Here – in a suitably Wernham Hogg like setting – Starmer was going to ‘make the speech of his political life’ or, we might add, death.

In fairness to Keir Starmer, it took some nerve to turn up and tell deflated Labour candidates what had gone wrong at the local elections when even David Lammy, not a man known for his awareness of his immediate surroundings, had admitted that one of the most regular problems on the doorstep was the Prime Minister himself. Yet this was precisely what he did. Having Keir Starmer turn up to your Labour post apocalyptic pity party is a bit like being hit by a car only for the person who ran you over to come to your funeral and give a lecture on road safety. It would have been reasonable for Starmer to stay blockaded in No. 10, having taken a sizeable number of sausages, sorry, hostages and only communicate via Darren Jones and a megaphone.

Oh dear, it’s all looking a bit glum for Zack Polanski. A string of headlines about both him and his party has been less than flattering. It’s beginning to twig in some quarters that the Greens aren’t just a cuddly group who want to make sure that nature gets a fair hearing – sort of like the National Trust, but less left-wing. Rather, they appear to be a much more extreme political force. There can be no doubt that Mr Polanski has been transformative for the Greens – it is under his leadership that they have metamorphosed from run-of-the-mill lentil-botherers into a sort of Home Counties Hezbollah. Marrying Maoism to the Mullahs ought not to work electorally, but hey, it’s 21st-century Britain, so nothing ought to surprise us.

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?