Madeline Grant

In fairness, I suspect plenty of Tory MPs are looking for reasons to get out of party conference this year. East Wiltshire MP Danny Kruger – who this afternoon appeared at the Faragean elbow to defect to Reform – has probably found the single best, if drastic, get-out-clause available.  Kruger isn’t the first MP to tread this path of course, but because of his character and standing within the party he leaves, this defection isn’t like the others. Nadine Dorries has probably fallen out with more people before breakfast than most of us will manage in a lifetime. Andrea Jenkyns seemed to have defected with the sole purpose of finding an audience for her questionable singing talents.

‘This was Parliament at its best’, so went the inane and factually incorrect mantra of Kim Leadbeater as her Assisted Dying Bill made its way through the House of Commons. It did so on the back of intense duplicity about its safeguards by its sponsors and by the simple fact that the vast majority of MPs are intellectually unimpressive and suckers for anecdote over evidence. The House of Lords was always going to be trickier ground for this Bill The House of Lords was always going to be trickier ground. Their Lordships have their failings but they are less likely to be moved by the highly manipulative campaigns from pressure groups which have accompanied the bill.

Statute 343.36 in the US state of Minnesota reads thus: ‘No person shall operate, run or participate in a contest, game, or other like activity, in which a pig, greased, oiled or otherwise, is released and wherein the object is the capture of the pig’. I hope, for the sake of the integrity of their state laws, no Minnesotans were watching Prime Minister’s Questions today. There was one little piggy very much at large, greased and squealing, trying to avoid capture. Its name? Sir Keir Starmer, KCB. It started badly. The first big bad wolf to come a-knocking was Dr Luke Evans. He did so in a calm and collected manner, simply listing all the scandals the government has successfully crammed into the last 12 months. It was less a question and more a coroner’s report.

It’s always nice when the muses of tragedy and comedy seem to be working in perfect sync: nowhere is this truer than the Labour deputy leadership contest. It would genuinely be difficult to relate how many people have indicated that they are standing for the role so unceremoniously vacated by Big Ange. Candidacies have come and gone like a thief in the night. There are bugs which breathe the sweet air of earth for only 24 hours which have longer lifespans than some Labour deputy leadership bids. Quite possibly higher IQs as well. Clearly a consensus has arisen that, with a greying man in his sixties as their dear leader, it is necessary for his deputy to be a woman.

Reform had clearly planned the Campest Show On Earth for their conference this year. Sparklers, club anthems and strobe lights: imagine Sir Keith Joseph was in charge of your primary school disco and you get a sense of the vibe. Unfortunately for the budding impresarios of Reform, they were upstaged. Just as their conference was starting, the inevitable happened and Big Ange called it a day. In many ways, the Deputy Prime Minister and Reform have a lot in common: a working-class support base, an obvious contempt for the smoking ban and finances which are best left, er, unscrutinised. Still there was room for only one headline and the reshuffle got it. Many true blues had apparently turned turquoise.

Imagine a school assembly run by the most boring narcissists imaginable. Right – you’ve come close to picturing the first parliamentary business questions after recess. Lucy ‘Paraffin’ Powell, the woman who can always make a bad situation worse, began with a list of all the MPs who had married, had children, or otherwise managed not to out themselves as perverts over the summer break. Inevitably this was accompanied by self-back-patting on how much more family-friendly parliament was under Labour. Well, it increasingly resembles a crèche, of that there is no doubt. I pity Jesse Norman, one of the unambiguously impressive and intelligent MPs left in parliament. He has to suffer Powell’s clattering platitudes as he tries to ask her questions.

It was taxes that eventually did for Al Capone. And Spiro Agnew. And Judy Garland. So now the taxman’s bell tolls for Big Ange – who has often presented herself as a sort of mix of all three of those figures. The hard-partying working-class girl turned union bruiser turned second most powerful politician in the land.  Scandal has become second nature to Labour ministers, to the extent that they now have a sort of standard issue hangdog look to wear in Parliament which indicates to the world that bringing up their bad behaviour is actually not very #BeKind, and so when you think about it, they’re the real victims. Ange deployed this to great effect as she shuffled into Prime Minister’s Questions today. She earned herself a pat of sympathy from Lucy Powell.

The Green party’s leadership announcement was live streamed using a phone which seemed to be wrapped in clingfilm and held by someone who appeared to be suffering from delirium tremens. You may not have realised that the Greens were electing a new leader. You may not even have realised that they have a leader at all – in fairness, until recently they didn’t, opting instead for a bizarre job-share arrangement whereby they had a sort of weird progressive hydra of ‘spokespeople’. Leadership for the polycule era.  The core argument against taking the Greens seriously is any engagement with the party itself There is an argument that says we ought to take the Greens more seriously.

How many resets does it take to make a doom loop? In another attempt to work out what the problem with his government is – and with all the mirror salesmen in the capital presumably on holiday – Keir Starmer has done another mini-reshuffle. ‘Phase two of my government starts today’ he says in a fatuous video clip, deploying that nasal whine which you had probably mercifully forgotten over the recess.  The image of the PM squeezed into those gimpy little shorts postmen wear is not one that anybody wants Obviously all this isn’t actually phase two but probably closer to phase 14. This time it’s involved the mass import of people from a thing called ‘The Resolution Foundation’.

There are few more irritating features of the modern apparatchik’s lexicon than ‘lived experience’. It implies the existence of some ‘unlived experience’ which is an impossibility. That said, I’m perfectly prepared to believe that members of the current cabinet know what it is to be zombies. Yet, in at least one area, the ‘lived experience’ tautology is more than just an irritation, but a serious problem: education.  Bridget Phillipson has repeatedly shown her disdain for people who are actually at the forefront of educational attainment, arrogantly dismissing those with real expertise. One of her advisers told a newspaper recently that Ms Phillipson ‘didn’t need any lectures’ about education because ‘she’s lived it’.

I wonder how No. 10 decides which minister is up for the ritual humiliation of the Today programme each morning. Russian roulette? An elaborate lottery? A competition – last person to spell out ‘TOOLMAKER’ using alphabetti spaghetti? Either way, today’s lucky victim for the airwaves was Home Office minister Dan Jarvis. The Minister made a noise like a soul escaping the body ‘Let’s speak to someone who should know what’s going on in the Home Office,’ began presenter Emma Barnett, ominously. Someone enter the word ‘should’ into the Mr Universe competition: for here it was doing a lot of heavy lifting. Mr Jarvis made an audible gulp as he was introduced as somebody who knew what he was talking about.

There are not, as far as I know, any Italian top-flight poker players. Italians are hardly renowned for their ability to suppress their facial expressions or conceal what they’re really thinking. In this regard they are unusually well-represented by their Premier, Giorgia Meloni. Her visible hatred of Emmanuel Macron is often conveyed through withering stares Upon becoming Italy’s prime minister in 2022, Ms Meloni was written off by the bien-pensant Anglophone press as a far-right extremist, destined for her rag tag coalition to crash like so many Italian governments before. Contra this narrative, she took her seat beside president Trump at the leaders' round table in Washington DC yesterday.

Not since Barack Obama held a press conference dressed as the Man from Del Monte has a suit played such a critical role in US politics. But there it was, after the spring press conference incident, President Zelensky arrived in Washington DC wearing a suit. The YMCA-loving Trump administration is hardly batting off the accusations of campery given its fixation with menswear. Still, Zelensky came, as did all of Europe.  All the handshakes went off without a hitch, although the size difference meant that the visuals were slightly more redolent of panto than high diplomatic drama. Zelensky handed a letter from his wife to the First Lady, thanking her for her intervention on behalf of Ukraine’s missing children.