Robert Hutton

ALT The Tory leader turned her fire on Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh: “She is only in the job because the Culture Secretary turned it down.” It was a reference to a stunning line in the FT that Burnham had originally offered the Energy job to Lisa Nandy, who had refused to leave the Department of Culture. This was startling because Nandy has spent two years showing no interest whatever in her brief and expressing vocal contempt for pretty much everyone involved in Britain’s £130 billion cultural sector. The best explanation for her behaviour is that she’s learned there’s treasure buried under the department’s offices, and she’s spending her evenings trying to dig it up.

ALT As Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions began, Nigel Farage was staring into the middle distance, like a man whose dream of running a Donald Trump-style kleptocracy was over before it had really begun. It was only hours since he’d confidently assured GB News viewers that they didn’t need to believe the lying American pollsters. After all, he’d said, Elon Musk was a very smart guy. He wouldn’t have wasted $450 million! In the rows in front of the Reform leader, the Liberal Democrats were ecstatic. There are countries closer to Britain than the USA, but none where the villains so helpfully dominate the internet and speak English. To look at Daisy Cooper, you’d have thought that every vote for James Talarico was really a vote to introduce proportional representation to Westminster.

ALT Shabana Mahmood rose, she said, to make “a statement on THIS government’s policy” on settlement for immigrants. The emphasis was intended to convey the Labour orthodoxy that the government led by Andy Burnham, in which Mahmood is a dynamic and forward-looking Home Secretary, is entirely different from the bad old government led by Keir Starmer, in which the Home Secretary was a total loser called Shabana Mahmood. Fortunately for the Home Secretary, she was far from the only person in the Commons attempting evasive manoeuvres. Reform’s complaint that immigration had been much too high under both main parties was somewhat undermined by being delivered by Robert Jenrick, an actual Tory immigration minister. A man with a measurable sense of shame would have declined to speak on the subject, but Reform doesn’t have any of those.

ALT What makes the show so compelling is that the players don’t know the whole story. Only those of us on the outside can see what’s really going on. While John and Andy run around shouting about how they have faithfully met their “fiscal rules” in the third year of the forecasts, on our sofas at home we know that this incantation is entirely meaningless. But people who’ve been on the show say that when you’re in the midst of it, it feels completely real. So much so that there are ongoing questions for the producers about safeguarding. Liz, who was a sensation of chaotic energy when she briefly appeared in 2022, is the most obvious example of someone who shouldn’t have been allowed to take part. She was last heard explaining her plan to colonise Mars. If the series has any value beyond entertainment, it’s for the insights it offers into human psychology, especially the way people convince themselves of narratives that are objectively nonsense. Take Kemi, from the current run. After the b

ALT We are one hundred days into the glorious rule of Andy Burnham. It was typical of this administration that the moment was marked by an awful lot of grand words and about a hundred very small tweaks to the tax system. You could drive the Oasis tour bus through the gap between the prime minister’s rhetoric and his actions. It doesn’t help that in John Healey, he has appointed a chancellor whose delivery is soporificat a level that is usually only available on prescription. Delivering his first Budget, he whispered into the microphone, not so much holding the chamber as lulling it. Other chancellors delivered pyrotechnics, whether it was Gordon Brown producing rabbits out of hats or Kwasi Kwarteng aiming his explosive-laden plane at the carrier deck and screaming “Banzai!” Healey’s approach is to bore opponents into submission.