You can always tell someone is in trouble when the Prime Minister calls an emergency press conference. A combined force of black cats and magpies arriving at your front door, bursting in and putting new shoes on your table while opening umbrellas inside would be less of a bad omen than Keir Starmer setting up a conference to say how proud he was of you.

The best you can say of the PM was that he looked slightly more comfortable fibbing to camera than his Chancellor did on the Sunday shows

This was exactly what he did this morning, summoning the press pack to a London nursery to discuss last week’s bin-fire Budget. Most of it was his standard fluff; ‘people worrying about the bills’, wanting to end ‘cycles of worklessness and dependency’, (obviously, it included an anecdote about how he knew what all of this was like because he’d been a child in the 1970s) when a Labour government was once again making all these issues worse by raising taxes, chucking money at welfare and making it more expensive to hire people. Even his........

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