Madeline Grant

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.

One of the traditions of the state opening of Parliament is that the Yeomen of the Guard search the cellars of the Palace of Westminster for evidence of plots to blow up the government. Frankly they could have looked anywhere in SW1 and found that. Just about the only person who seemed to be enjoying it at all was, bizarrely, Starmer Other traditions were maintained as opposition and government MPs made their awkward shuffle to the Lords. One Labour MP shouted ‘not now Andy’ when Black Rod banged on the chamber’s door. Kemi and Sir Keir looked smiley for the cameras and pretended that they don’t loathe each other. Meanwhile James Cleverley was chatting to Wes Streeting; perhaps exchanging notes on leadership bids.

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.