Madeline Grant

I am going to shock Spectator readers and say something in praise of the government. There is one area where they are genuinely, consistently impressive, precise even. Received wisdom states that an institution is generally either malign or incompetent. The Starmer ministry time and again hits the absolute sweet spot where it can reasonably be regarded as both by the maximum number of people possible. In the House today we turned to a classic of this genre of cock-up: the cancellation of mayoral elections. As everyone knows, cancelling elections is always a sign of a good and healthy government.

You always know it’s going to be a good PMQs when things start with Ian Lavery. After a winding and angry monologue about things being grim up north – Holden Caulfield meets Ken Loach – Lavery, with supreme comic timing, asked the Prime Minister if there was much to look forward to on the horizon. Doubly funny was that Mr Lavery, a man so aggressive in his basic delivery that he makes an XL Bully look like a maiden aunt, managed to make this sound like a threat. Though, frankly, given the government’s track record it may as well be. Starmer's pomposity came back to bite him as Mrs Badenoch mocked him Up stood Sir Keir for his weekly clucking.

King John placing his seal on Magna Carta 810 years ago is widely held to be a low point for the monarch and a boon for the rest of us. Now all those centuries later his work is about to be undone by none other than David Lammy who arrived in the House today to announce the partial abolition of trial by jury. The Sage of Tottenham makes an unlikely tyrant; his air is of someone who should be losing control of a children’s birthday party somewhere. Yet John wasn’t exactly a man of steel either – though he at least had a sort of animal cunning. We have gone from Lackland to lackwit.

Wantage may seem an unlikely birthplace for England’s greatest gift to the world. Yet as well as being the site of King Alfred’s birth, it gives its name to the legal code of the 990s, in which Aethelred the Unready laid down the right of an Englishman to be tried by a jury.  Fast forward a millennium or so and Lammy the Unavailable seems to be determined to smash that right. Robert Jenrick had asked an urgent question of The Sage of Tottenham, but Lammy couldn’t even be bothered to turn up. ‘Do we need to send out a search party to Savile Row?’ Jenrick asked, referencing a past excuse of Lammy’s. I suspect a local soft play might have been a better bet.

Rachel Reeves has been speaking to the newspapers trying to sell her Budget, which given her communication abilities is a bit like asking King Herod to do your babysitting. The Chancellor of the Exchequer appears to be getting the excuses in early; it’s almost as if she, like everyone else, knows that next week’s announcements will be a catastrophe. The thread that comes through the article is that the country is somehow being punished for the Chancellor’s teenage insecurities Reeves’s big message is that she’s been ‘underestimated all her life’. A humbler person might wonder why everyone has consistently assessed her to be not up to the job rather than assuming that the judgement of everyone ever has been wanting.

One must say this for the Home Secretary, she is a Parliamentary Pugilist. While the general demeanour of the government in which she serves has a Sir Robin the Chickenhearted attitude to parliamentary spats (one can imagine the adenoidal cry of ‘Run Away’ ricocheting around No. 10 every Wednesday), Shabana Mahmood seems to enjoy a fight with all and sundry. Nobody epitomises the arrogance and intellectual expiration of the Labour party better than Stella Creasy She had fun at the despatch box earlier this week, trolling Green MPs into lengthy tantrums. There was unfinished business for the Home Secretary from one particular bout. Step forward Max Wilkinson, the smarmy Lib Dem spokesperson who has the air of a Hare Krishna, radicalised by excessive lentil consumption.

With the country looking forward to Rachel Reeves’s big moment next week – in much the same way you would look forward to root canal treatment or a trepanning – it was no surprise that this week’s PMQs focused on tax and leaks. That the government seems to conduct policy formulation by Chinese Whispers is only half the irritation. The other half is how angry they get when this is pointed out. The Prime Minister acts genuinely hurt when anyone brings up the actual state of the country ‘Every week she comes along and speculates and distorts,’ yelled Sir Keir when Mrs Badenoch dared mention the disastrous Income Tax U-turn of last week. The Prime Minister acts genuinely hurt when anyone brings up the actual state of the country.