David Behrens

If the Prime Minister can’t rely on what his civil servants are telling him, why should anyone else trust them? That’s what all the self-flagellation over Peter Mandelson’s US Ambassadorial appointment boils down to.

As we approach the local elections, which party leader is looking most vulnerable? It’s not who you think. It would take a more adventurous gambler than me to risk money on Sir Keir Starmer leading Labour to the next ‘proper’ poll in 2029 – but as for losing his job this summer as his many critics predict: it’s not going to happen.

A ping on my phone from the NHS alerts me to the news that this is Dying Matters Awareness Week – an opportunity, apparently, to encourage open conversations about death and bereavement in the hope of breaking down taboos.

The Cabinet may have been falling apart as surely as a sideboard with the screws missing, but for a blessed 15 minutes on Tuesday evening there was no news. As far as the BBC was concerned, nothing was happening in the world that couldn’t wait.

Say what you like about the USA but they managed to engineer a publicly-funded transport project to the moon. We couldn’t even manage one to Manchester Airport. HS2 – yes, the rail line that was supposed to connect the North to London just a bit faster than the existing one already does – will not only terminate at Birmingham but will cost more than Nasa’s £69 billion Artemis II mission, the Government confirmed this week.

The harm done by cigarettes is something we can get our heads around; it’s been drilled into us for years. So if we suspected our children of chain-smoking in their bedrooms we’d have something to say about it, pretty darned quick.

Even in their darkest hour, Henry Nowak’s family conducted themselves with decency and dignity. What, though, of the mob that gathered outside Southampton police station to ‘avenge’ his murder?

Americans are famously obsessive about being bigger and better than everyone else at pretty much everything and that now includes, it appears, hypocrisy. Well, to what else could you credit the memo from the US Embassy in London suggesting that our ban on social media for under-16s would threaten free speech and the viability of California’s tech industry?

Unless you have in mind the past participle of stirring from sleep, ‘woke’ is a dreadful word. It should in any case be ‘woken’ but that’s not the sort of thing they teach you in schools these days, apparently.

Bishops and elders have assembled in York this weekend for the General Synod, the legislature that calibrates the nation’s moral compass. It is entirely as fusty as you might imagine. The House of Commons is a Tupperware party by comparison.