Madeline Grant

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.

It’s Groundhog Day, the theme of the film where Bill Murray is destined to repeat the same day over and over again. It was also a terrible day for Labour – of course that doesn’t narrow things down either – you could be reading this at any point over the next three years and it’ll still be true. Bill Murray woke up every day to ‘I Got You Babe’, we woke up to a remix of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ and the immolation scene from Götterdämmerung. There was a ghost in the room: the Paedo’s Pal, Captain Underpants himself, the Lord Mandelson! Still, even by the standards set in the field of repeated shoddiness by the current government, Monday really was a bad day for Labour.

David Lammy’s last appearance at PMQs resembled a multi clown-car pile-up: both tragic and hilarious. Indeed, it was such a disaster that one wondered whether Lammy would ever be allowed near PMQs again. However, Sir Keir’s obvious contempt for being in the country even a second longer than he has to had got the better of him once more and, while he’s making sure that president Xi has the cleanest shoes of any despot, we were treated to another Lammy PMQs. It was a pretty lame effort all round. Neither man really asked, nor answered questions Opposite him was Shadow Business Secretary Andrew Griffith, who unfortunately has the demeanour of a depressed mortgage broker.

A doe-eyed Andy Burnham has appeared looking sad across media outlets, hurt that he has been politically outmanoeuvred by Sir Keir Starmer. Burnham has positioned himself both as the wronged victim of Starmer’s Stalinist instincts and the only hope for a foundering party to find its popularity again. A cross between Bonnie Prince Charlie and Bambi’s Mother. ‘To decide is to divide’, Mr Alexander said. We were in deep Blairite doublespeak territory now Appropriately, for what seems to resemble a community theatre production of Macbeth, the government wheeled out a Scottish MP for the media round.

One of the least successful operas in history received a revival at Westminster this week. ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’ – the woman without a shadow – tells of betrayal, moral weakness and a mad emperor, all taking place around a group of southern islands, and was not a hit for Richard Strauss. Its revival at Westminster had a new title, however: ‘The Man with No Shame’. Inevitably, given the news, the Chagos featured heavily at PMQs, as did the situation in Greenland. The betrayal of south sea, or rather Indian Ocean, islands, no longer seems to be the preserve of opera, or even operetta, but instead the active policy of the man squatting in Downing Street. ‘The future of Greenland should only be decided by the people of Greenland’, began Kemi Badenoch.