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Madeline GrantCity A.M. |
The first question at PMQs was something which may not go away: Andy Burnham’s engagement with Manchester City – now firmly on the footballing...
It was back to the future in the House of Commons today. After their weeks of backslapping and self-delusion, MPs were back in parliament and...
I swear that every year the introductions to leaders’ speeches at party conferences become more and more of a circus. Gone are the days of a weird...
Day three of the Tory conference. A giant drone hung over the stage for the afternoon’s session on defence. Plenty of giant drones were hungover in...
It was a big day for the Tory conference. There was a real celebrity in town. Normally the sort of famous people who choose to come to party...
You have to feel sorry for the people of Brighton. No, seriously. In the last two weeks they’ve been subjected not just to a deluge of Lib Dems but...
There were many reasons why John Ruskin hated Rococo. The overly decorated style was a bête noire for the great architectural critic because he...
Labour are in Liverpool and, as their conference reached its apogee, I was put in mind of John Lennon. What could an entitled pseud, who preached...
I’m sort of in awe of Ed Davey. How does he still manage to wake up every day and, despite all the other challengers for the title, somehow knock it...
There was for a time the vaguest sense that things had got better since Andy Burnham took charge. That the insanity and inanity of Starmerism had...
Imagine, if you will, King Charles in the Deep South. The aesthetics are easy enough: it doesn’t take much to picture His Majesty in crumpled linen,...
Lisa Nandy’s media-round sounds like the sort of thing you might be signed up to if you failed to make the cut as a Newsround Press Packer....
Sequels to horror films can be a mixed bag. Some become classics in their own right, others fall into the category of things better left forgotten....
Sequels to horror films can be a mixed bag. Some become classics in their own right, others fall into the category of things better left forgotten....
Today was Andy Burnham’s second Prime Minister’s Questions and also his last one for five weeks. The mini-recess for the extended exercise in...
John Healey had been sent to Coventry, something he will have to get used to after his budget next month, at least if he ever intends to use any form...
It hasn’t been a glittering 24 hours for Reform UK. To lose one senior official might be regarded as misfortune etc. However there was no sense of...
There was a cautious cheer for Andy Burnham as he stood up for his first PMQs. MPs were perhaps cautious of a repeat of the day before when Burnham...
Andy Burnham was at the government despatch box for the first time in nearly 17 years, having had the sort of carefree summer that one would normally...
Madeline Grant has narrated this article for you to listen to. Sometimes I wake up in the night disturbed by dreams of James Bond. Surely, you might...
The legacy of the Victorians is everywhere; we depend on them for our sewage disposal, our railway networks, much of our infrastructure and housing...
Sometimes I wake up in the night disturbed by dreams of James Bond. Surely, you might say, that’s the point of him; a man of such raw sex appeal...
The Clacton by-election was finally over. Even by the standards of August news stories, it had grown pretty stale pretty quickly. The result was never...
The Clacton by-election was finally over. Even by the standards of August news stories, it had grown pretty stale pretty quickly. The result was never...
The Church of England can always be relied upon to walk into a room just as everybody else is leaving. The question of whether we have reached ‘peak...
Summer is a time for fleeting joys. Be it friendships, romances or hilarious stories about charlatan academics at the University of Cambridge: these...
The Church of England can always be relied upon to walk into a room just as everybody else is leaving. The question of whether we have reached ‘peak...
What do Nigel Farage, gender-critical feminism, masculinity, generalised homophobia and GB News have in common? All have been blamed in the past week...
It’s amazing how far a prime minister can get just by not being Keir Starmer. There’s considerable political success to be had in simply reversing...
A brass fanfare; a wide establishing shot of five men in three-piece suits, seated in a library of leather-bound tomes – this is Harold Macmillan...
Big Ange is back. From a sketchwriter’s point of view I have to say that this is marvellous news. Rayner is actually an exceptionally old-fashioned...
The Liberal Democrat party of Russia and the Liberal Democrat party of the United Kingdom are not, on the face of it, natural bedfellows. Google...
A brass fanfare; a wide establishing shot of five men in three-piece suits, seated in a library of leather-bound tomes – this is Harold Macmillan...
As coronations go, this was a particularly flat one. Instead of Zadok the Priest we were treated to New Order. To nobody’s surprise Andy Burnham was...
As coronations go, this was a particularly flat one. Instead of Zadok the Priest we were treated to New Order. To nobody’s surprise Andy Burnham was...
‘You’ll miss him when he’s gone!’ Lots of people have said this to me. It’s true I have had the dubious privilege of sketching Sir Keir...
Sir Keir Starmer was away this week. Nothing new there of course; indeed, it seems the thing which will change least when he finally leaves No 10 will...
He probably won’t want to hear this but there is an air of General De Gaulle about Nigel Farage. De Gaulle came to define French politics through a...
‘What’s Big Ange up to?’ was a question Sir Keir Starmer had to ask himself basically every day of his premiership. The fact that the bigger...
The Prime Minister began today’s PMQs by wishing a ‘happy 78th birthday’ to the NHS. This is the sort of weird, abstract and inanimate thing he...
There are still people out there – with access to the full gamut of unblunted cutlery – who maintain that Sir Keir Starmer is one of the great...
‘What a fitting venue to be sat in – The People’s History Museum’. So began the introduction to Andy Burnham’s great descent from Mount...
Parliament always has an otherworldly feel; it’s a world of gothic crenelations, of specialised language, of deliberate artifice. But something even...
The end of Sir Keir’s premiership, and especially his last few PMQs, was always going to be less of a swansong and more a prolonged squeal. The...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The House of Commons these days is hardly an inspiring place. There can be little denying that it is a shadow of the debating arena it was in the...
After months of back and forth, today the government finally released the latest tranche of the Mandy documents, which have become their own spin-off...