Madeline Grant

Last week, the body of an 18-day old baby girl was found in Westminster, in desperately sad circumstances. The baby’s mother has since been charged with her murder and stands accused of throwing her daughter out of a third-floor window. Five days later, and a few streets away, the House of Lords voted to approve the Crime and Policing Bill – including the controversial amendment, Clause 208. Proposed by the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, Clause 208 would decriminalise self-administered abortions after the 24-week limit. The new legal position is that whatever a woman does to end her own pregnancy, at whatever stage, is no business of the criminal law. Should a mother decide to abort a full-term or late-term infant at home, the state will, essentially, be indifferent to that.

When a fully greased Sir Keir Starmer is finally bundled, squealing, out of Downing Street, one wonders what he might turn his hand to by way of work to keep a roof over his head? I suspect his time as a lawyer doesn’t bear repetition and he’s hardly going to be asked to do after-dinner speaking. Perhaps he could mimic other PMs and turn to writing. I suspect, though, it will need to be children’s books that help him pay the bills. Boys and girls across the country could be delighted by stories with titles such as The Mysterious Expenses Claim, The Majority that Vanished and The Mandy, the Paedo and Me.

Downing Street’s briefing room increasingly looks like a municipal crematorium. It is a depressing feast of cheap teak and black edges. Other countries announce major foreign policy decisions in front of reminders of their glorious past or signs of their present strength. President Macron recently gave a speech in front of a nuclear submarine. Sir Keir gave today’s looking like he was about to announce a non-denominationally specific period of quiet reflection whilst someone played a MIDI file of ‘Time to Say Goodbye’. The crematorium analogy of course invites a subsequent question: is he the undertaker or is he the corpse? One suspects a bit of both.

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.