Madeline Grant

‘What a fitting venue to be sat in – The People’s History Museum’. So began the introduction to Andy Burnham’s great descent from Mount Sinai to declare his programme for government. It was delivered by Bev Craig, Labour’s candidate to replace him as Manchester mayor. She delivered it in a tone and nasal burr which suggested she was announcing that a rail replacement bus service had been delayed.  His promise of ‘a new era of possibility’ was a lot of style – mingled with some inevitable Burnhamite sentimentalism: ‘hope in every heart and good growth in every postcode.’ It made me long for a gun in every hand and a cyanide capsule in every drawer  However, she was right – it was a fitting venue!

Parliament always has an otherworldly feel; it’s a world of gothic crenelations, of specialised language, of deliberate artifice. But something even less real has crept in recently. A deliberate indulgence by the governing class of mawkishness and sentimentality, just as the reality of the country they’re supposed to be governing turns grimmer and more violent. The two – the rise of violence and the dominance of mawkishness – are not unrelated.  Scarcely a week goes by without a minister hailing a victim or relative in the viewing gallery – sometimes for manifestly self-interested reasons We are entering day two of the fallout from Kemi Badenoch accusing Bridget Phillipson of being a ‘spiteful class warrior’ at PMQs.

The end of Sir Keir’s premiership, and especially his last few PMQs, was always going to be less of a swansong and more a prolonged squeal. The Prime Minister makes no secret of his hatred of even being in parliament, let alone answering questions there – if ‘answering’ is the right word for the mix of slogans, bluff and anger which make up his Wednesday lunchtime offerings. Who knows when his last will be, but it now won’t be long. I suspect he will not miss it. One person who will probably miss him is the Leader of the Opposition. There was a touch of sadness in Kemi Badenoch’s voice as she realised this would be one of her final skewerings of the Oinking One.

It was when Keir Starmer claimed never to have had a dream that I knew we were dealing with potentially one of the funniest prime ministers the nation had ever seen. Sure, some people would have been amused by the magnetism for calamity exhibited by Theresa May, the almost comedically unbelievable mendacity of Boris Johnson or the downright absurdism of Liz Truss, but a really funny prime minister is the one who demands to be taken seriously, and particularly one who is convinced that he has forced the British people to do so.

In the giddy rush to announce yet another ‘New Chapter’ in British politics – whose chapters these days seem to be about as lengthy and serious as those in a Biff and Chip book – there seems to have been a collective loss of sense as people hail Makerfield as a game-changer. This is at best wishful thinking, at worst, full on derangement. All Makerfield has done in the short term is to guarantee one of the silliest silly seasons for quite some time.  Once the enjoyable demise of Starmer happens there comes the probable Burnham win. It will not take long for this too to descend into farce We are in for a summer of unreality: Fear and Loathing in Downing Street, Labour in Wonderland. Two things seem likely to happen.

With Sir Keir in Evian busy taking what must surely be his last opportunity to stuff Lady Victoria’s hand luggage with G7 branded bathrobes and slippers, we had the great treat of a Lammy PMQs today. Except it isn’t really a treat any more. This parliament still has, potentially, three whole years to run, and yet it already feels zombified. Each week it goes through the motions, the same lame jokes, the same pointless questions, the same lingering sense of exhaustion and decay. It’s like the end of the French Third Republic but with fewer cigarettes and an even less impressive defence policy. They had the Maginot Line, we have the recycling of Dan Jarvis.

The House of Commons these days is hardly an inspiring place. There can be little denying that it is a shadow of the debating arena it was in the days of Gladstone and Disraeli. It’s not even what it was from the days of Cameron and Corbyn. Sir Keir replied that there was no evidence of two-tier policing, which in this day and age is increasingly like adamantly maintaining that the sky isn’t blue But on days like today, when the news is filled with the appalling reality of the policies cooked up there, it appears even more contemptible and trivial than usual. The banality of evil has never been so banal. The session started with an exchange between Mrs Badenoch and Sir Keir about welfare spending.

After months of back and forth, today the government finally released the latest tranche of the Mandy documents, which have become their own spin-off version of the original incriminating releases – a sort of Holby City to the Epstein Files’ Casualty. There are reams of them and, as some backbenchers pointed out stroppily in the Commons today, the government’s decision to release them late this afternoon hardly made it easy to garner much in time for questions to the Prime Minister’s Chief Secretary, Darren Jones, today. However, a cursory look at the content shows a mixed bag. Doubtless more will be revealed as a fine-tooth comb is applied. Some ‘revelations’ are eminently predictable – what journalists would call a ‘dog bites man’ story.

Today, in what will doubtless be just the first of many irritations inflicted on the unfortunate people of Makerfield, Labour launched their by-election campaign. The latest movement in what already feels like the 118th Brumaire of Andy Burnham.  The location he had chosen for the launch was a patch of irradiated tarmac; the sort of place criminals might take a mini fridge for an unceremonious fly-tipping. A van, parked on a slope, had a digital billboard attached, depicting a bizarre big-headed avatar of Burnham himself. It resembled a Funko Pop doll, the Japanese-inspired bits of plastic for which nerdy teenagers depart with obscene amounts of cash.  Next to the doll face was a plea: ‘Vote Andy for us’.

Has Sir Keir Starmer already checked out? There was a strange atmosphere in the House of Commons today. A sort of calm in the eye of the storm pervaded. The Prime Minister seemed more relaxed than he’d been for ages, perhaps finally resigned to, well, resigning. There are asthmatic sloths which could produce more fulsome cheers than Labour managed in the Commons Maybe he’s preparing himself for his future; as an avuncular guest on The Rest is Politics or on Arsenal fan podcasts? I can see it now, a more relaxed Starmer in an open necked shirt, jokes about being a Gooner, Mandelson forgotten. This is Centrist Dad Valhalla and Keir is at rest.

The Great North summit sounds like it should have been a peace conference attended by Peter the Great. Instead, it is actually a talking shop attended by Andy Burnham. Its logo is, appropriately, an arrow in the act of a U-turn. It was there that Burnham had come today to fire the starting pistol on his campaign to march on London. It happened on the same day that it was announced that Josh Simons had officially resigned the seat of Makerfield, thus paving the way for Burnham’s return. This meant that Burnham spent much of his speech shoehorning references into his speech about places in his would-be constituency while also trying to put forward a national plan for his premiership.