When I started out in Westminster in 2001, the parliamentary lobby was a very hierarchical place and the press gallery still had a dining room. We young pups would gather several times a week on the lobby table and listen attentively to the war stories of lobby legends like Phil Webster, Trevor Kavanagh, Michael White, Andy Grice and David Hughes, then the political editors of the Times, Sun, Guardian, Independent and Mail.

Some fondly recalled being told off by Margaret Thatcher or watching Labour’s battles with Militant in the early Eighties. The consensus view, however, was that the peak time for political chaos (and by extension political journalism) was the period of John Major’s premiership after Black Wednesday, an era of plotting, infighting, power struggles and chaos. ‘We’ll never see another time like that again,’ one of the greybeards ventured.

After a week which shows that yet another government has decided to gaze in Major’s direction and say: ‘Hold my beer’, the temptation is to reflect that Britain’s political class has surely delighted us more than enough.

Since last Friday, Keir Starmer has lost his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, his director of communications, Tim Allan, got rid of his Cabinet Secretary, Chris Wormald (by mutual agreement we are told. I’d mutually agree too if sent on my way with £260,000 in my back pocket, as Wormald has been). And that’s before we mention that the leader of Scottish Labour, Anas Sarwar, thinks Starmer should resign.

Beyond the obvious – that 2026 is doing its best to compete with 2019 and 2022 for political drama (1992 eat your heart out) – what have we learned this week?

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Palestine Action and the problem with human rights law

‘Islamism is strangling society like a snake’: an interview with Boualem Sansal

1. The Prime Minister has bought himself some timeIn Ed Miliband’s words, the Labour party, particularly the cabinet, ‘looked over the precipice’ on Monday afternoon and did not like what it saw: a........

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