Madeline Grant

The Great North summit sounds like it should have been a peace conference attended by Peter the Great. Instead, it is actually a talking shop attended by Andy Burnham.

Has Sir Keir Starmer already checked out? There was a strange atmosphere in the House of Commons today. A sort of calm in the eye of the storm pervaded.

Burnham listed a lot of things that are wrong with the country – the care system, rail ticket prices, the housing ladder.

Peter Murrell is a strangely shiny man. He has the air of an undertaker who’s been siphoning off the corpse…

After months of back and forth, today the government finally released the latest tranche of the Mandy documents,

Starmer said there is no evidence of two-tier policing, which is increasingly like adamantly maintaining that the sky isn’t blue

This parliament still has, potentially, three whole years to run, and yet it already feels zombified.

This parliament still has, potentially, three whole years to run, and yet it already feels zombified. Each week it goes through the motions, the same lame jokes, the same pointless questions, the same lingering sense of exhaustion and decay. It’s...

In the giddy rush to announce yet another ‘New Chapter’ in British politics – whose chapters these days seem to be about as lengthy and serious as those in a Biff and Chip book – there seems to have been a collective loss of sense as people hail Makerfield as a game-changer. This is at

It was when Keir Starmer claimed never to have had a dream that I knew we were dealing with potentially one of the funniest prime ministers the nation had ever seen. Sure, some people would have been amused by the magnetism for calamity exhibited by...