Madeline Grant

Yvette Cooper managed to say ‘let me be clear’ twice, in a couple of minutes during her interview with Nick Robinson on the Today Programme this morning. For seasoned Labour-watchers, the phrase ‘let me be clear’ was one inherited from the grand panjandrum of political deceit – Tony Blair himself – and is almost always an indicator that the person saying is it about to be as unclear as possible. They might as well walk around with the phrase ‘I’m lying’ written on their foreheads in red paint, so obvious an indicator of incoming deceit it is. If these are the grown ups, then send in the clowns The Foreign Secretary was on the radio in part to try and explain away Labour’s growing China problem.

Prior to Kemi Badenoch’s arrival the Conservative party played us recordings of her voice piped over dramatic lift muzak. Conference seasons are always bizarre – gatherings as they are of remarkable sub-species of people who look at British politics and think ‘wow, that’s exciting’ rather than ‘oh God, what now’ (and I include myself in this category). It isn’t showbusiness for ugly people, it’s trainspotting for maniacs. Yet by the standards of conference weirdness, the soundtrack aside, Mrs Badenoch was, well, quite normal.  As she arrived on stage in person she seemed genuinely surprised by the warmth of the welcome.

Robert Jenrick has been walking a tightrope. Over the course of the Conservative party conference he has been having to navigate the tricky situation of playing both the prince over the water and the loyal lieutenant to Kemi Badenoch. Mr Jenrick so far has played his cards very well. He is successfully channelling both Bonnie Prince Charlie and Blondin, the man who pushed a wheelbarrow over Niagara Falls. Or even David Miliband meets Stan Laurel. Today was his most difficult performance yet. Be too bland and he’d join the legions of Tories who might have been king – destined to join the Rab Butler-Jeremy Hunt memorial club.

What is the purpose of Mel Stride? I don’t ask this to be personal I just genuinely don’t know. In some ways it’s a problem for all shadow chancellors: the Treasury is the most practical of departments, the opposition can only theorise about it. The economy ought to be the only trump card the Tories have left. They’re essentially in a game of strip-poker wearing only their socks and with one ace left – namely, the fact that the economy is going to tank even more when people learn the true extent of Rachel Reeves’s incompetence at the Budget. Meanwhile Reform’s spending plans might as well have been typed up in Babylonic cuneiform. They bear as much relation to reality as a Beckett play transcribed by a baboon.

The voice of Keir Starmer echoed round the Conservative party’s conference hall. ‘Free of charge digital ID’ chanted the disembodied Dalek. If people had come hoping to escape the Grand Adenoid then hard luck. Kemi Badenoch’s welcome address to the Tory faithful began with a dystopian video compilation of some of the Labour government’s ‘greatest hits’ since entering office; channel crossings up, gangs distinctly un-smashed. A useful reminder that, whatever D:Ream might have promised us, things can always get worse.  The feeling at this conference is like a family gathered round a bedside awaiting an imminent demise.

‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’. So wrote Dr Johnson. Sadly for the good Doctor he was an avowed Tory and so, according to the rules of Labour conference, a de facto evil and probably racist monster. Alas, if only the Labour party had heeded the great moralist’s words, we might have avoided the clatteringly embarrassing display that was the Prime Minister’s speech today. As delegates arrived they were handed British, Welsh and Scottish flags. Even a few St George’s flags were fluttering – look away now, Emily Thornberry! Alas, no Northern Irish ones; presumably Lord Hermer thinks they’re against international law. No. 10 had been briefing the press that Starmer was going to make a big open appeal to ordinary British patriots.

In German they have a concept whose equivalent is sorely needed in discussion of British politics: ‘anti-talent’. It means exactly what it sounds like – the opposite of talent, something any given person is uniquely ill-suited to doing.  The Chancellor criticised ‘the nagging voices of decline’, which, when you’re standing a matter of inches away from Sir Keir Starmer, is either very brave or very stupid Labour has an innate ability to recognise and reward anti-talent, by putting the very people least suited to run departments in charge of them. While Yvette Cooper is in charge of charming our foreign allies, Rachel Reeves, who is increasingly becoming the Florence Foster Jenkins of gilt yields, runs the Treasury.

Day one of the Labour conference – oh frabjous day! The annual gathering of people who hate each other just a little bit more than they hate themselves was underway. You really do wonder where they find some of these characters.  Sir Keir arrives in Liverpool as the least popular PM in history. Worse than Liz Truss or Boris Johnson at their nadirs, worse than Lloyd George when he did all his lady diddling, worse than Neville Chamberlain. I bet the ghost of Lord North is absolutely over the moon. Mr Starmer is a road traffic black spot of a PM.

‘The Global Progress Action Summit’ is exactly the sort of event Keir Starmer loves. It’s a sort of Blairite seance, where all the ghouls of a dead liberal order are summoned and live again to spend 24 hours doing their favourite thing: bloviating. It’s a pretty cast-iron rule that an organisation with two words for physical movement in its title will in fact be an impotent talking shop. It was to this appalling gathering that Sir Keir – a man who famously prefers Davos to Westminster – had trotted to announce the introduction of ID cards. This little piggy had gone wee wee wee all the way to his spiritual home; a soulless conference centre, to unveil a policy he’d long been gagging for.

Ed Davey’s speech at the Lib Dem conference began with a darkened stage on which you could just about make out outlines of people and quotes by and about him booming over the sound system. Like most things the Lib Dems do, it felt a bit like a self-consciously modern re-interpretation of Shakespeare by a group of earnest undergraduates. Two Gentlemen of Verona set in a Detroit smack den, Othello but everyone has feline HIV, that sort of thing. Davey is a very immodest man with a great deal to be immodest about Onto this stage Davey emerged. And there was light. It turned out that the amorphous shapes were actually the Lib Dem MPs who sat there in the dark. Suddenly we were subjected to them in full technicolour: it looked like a very po-faced game of ‘Guess Who?’.

How do you solve a problem like B Johnson? It has troubled the Conservative party since his departure, not least as they presumably do not relish the idea of him going down in history as the last person ever to win them a majority. Interestingly, Labour rarely mentions him, preferring to resurrect Liz Truss again and again. Ironically it has since become clear that they are guilty of many of the things they once criticised Boris for doing; the same love of freebies, a certain economy with the truth, and, inevitably, not knowing that the best time to go was yesterday and the second-best time is today.

We’re back again in the House of Peers this week as they once again give a leaden beating to Leadbeater’s suicide bill. Even when discussing matters of life and death, there is something very reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan about the place. The most famous G&S operetta set in the House of Lords is, of course, Iolanthe – when Parliament is taken over by a group of incompetent fairies. I’m saying nothing. Falconer slumped there, a face like a constipated toad throughout Again, the House was full. Perhaps aware that some of the most convincing criticism of the bill both in the Commons and Lords had come from women, today its sponsor Lord Falconer had surrounded himself with a rotating cast of female Fabian prunes for moral support.

There is just something innately funny about seeing Keir Starmer and Donald Trump together. Two men so obviously different; in character, interests, ability and shape, forced together by circumstance. Watching them at the press conference today was no exception. They put me in mind of Bialystock and Bloom from The Producers: the bombastic Broadway shyster and his hapless sinusitis-suffering goon. First, for their ‘business roundtable’, they sat together behind a comically small table inside a marquee, which made them look like an unlikely scoring partnership at a village cricket match or as if they were signing the registers at a low-budget gay wedding. Alternatively, they looked a bit like they were appearing on a Radio 4 panel show. I can think of a title: Don’t mention Mandy!

Despite the Prime Minister presumably going to bed each night, trotters crossed, eyes screwed up and wishing hard as if trying to reanimate Tinkerbell, the Mandelson scandal is not magically going to go away. Indeed, today MPs were granted an extensive chunk of parliamentary time to discuss it. Unsurprisingly, the PM swerved this particular treat. Given how things are going he really ought to be ringing round publishers to see if any of them want his memoirs. I wonder where the serialisation will be? It’s a good job the Beano is still publishing. There was no sign of the Foreign Secretary either. Today the boy who stood on the burning deck was, once again, Foreign Office junior minister Stephen Doughty.