The MPs wanted Cleverly anyway but they shit the bed trying to engineer an easy opponent for him in the final two. He’s now said he’s not going to join the shadow cabinet, so while Badenoch has to deal with all the struggles of being LOTO, Cleverly will be on the backbenches, giving speeches to constituency parties, improving his reputation, sounding like some sort of experienced elder statesman to contrast with Badenoch.

A VONC to put Cleverly in charge seems very likely unless Starmer’s polling numbers really tank over the next few years.

Will the clocks still go back and forward an hour to help the farmers get up early though?

A recent migrant, identifying himself as ‘Nigel F from Clacton’, told reporters he was thrilled by his new life in Russia and the prospect of not having to see brown people at the shops or gay people on TV anymore.

Wait, how many 25 year olds in 2024 do you think remember the Mighty Boosh (2003-07), or Chicken Run (2000), or Who Shot Phil Mitchell (2001), or Caroline Quentin-era Jonathan Creek (1997-2000), or know people who were extras in the Harry Potter films (2001-11), or remember the Animals of Farthing Wood TV programme (1993-97), or spilled their drink on Miquita Oliver at a squat party in 2007 (2007)?

This is exactly my issue. I’m not against 20mph in urban areas, but 20mph limits on roads that are clearly designed for 30mph (or more) are a lazy solution. Every subconscious instinct of an experienced driver on these roads will be telling them to drive at 30 so they have to consciously focus on the speedometer to stay within the lower limit for prolonged periods, particularly with the proliferation of speed cameras we have in the UK - my fear in a 20 zone is often now that I’m going to cause an accident because I’m so focused on the speedometer and not the road.

The right solution is to actually turn these roads into 20mph roads (not 30mph with 20mph limits) through simple road design measures that will align drivers’ subconscious perception of the road with the speed the government wants them to drive at. I recognise that this can’t happen overnight but I see no effort by local or national government to even start investing in the set of changes needed to make 20mph sustainable. If these roads just felt like 20mph roads then people would be a lot less annoyed at driving within the speed limit and the government wouldn’t just be stoking up a massive political backlash that will end up returning them all to 30mph and abandoning all the road safety and air quality benefits that these policies are supposed to deliver for us.

Yes - that was the next sentence I wrote?

In 2017 his name was mentioned as a visionary comparable to the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) on a Star Trek episode set in the 2250s. It felt at the time that this line risked dating the episode but I don’t think anyone could have expected just how much he would go on trash his own reputation.

The only thing that saves this line is that we found out a few episodes later that the character who spoke it secretly came from the Mirror Universe - where he grew up Musk’s embrace of Nazism was probably seen as a virtue.

No, Russian bots lack physical form and hence aren’t able to turn up in person to in-person events. So there was probably one genuine radicalised thug in attendance.

You can’t just say ‘austerity’ every time a Chancellor decides not to spend even more money…

Government spending in the UK today accounts for 45% of GDP. The state that the Tories have bequeathed to Labour represents a significantly larger share of the UK economy than it did at any point in Gordon Brown’s decade as Chancellor. The state today is bigger than it was when the Atlee government left office. In fact the only post-WW2 years in which the state has been bigger than in the Sunak years were very briefly for a couple of years in the mid-1970s and then in 2009-11. The only people in this country for whom a state of today’s size is normal relative to most of their life experiences are toddlers who were born in the Johnson/Truss/Sunak era.

By all means argue for a more massive state if you like. But we’re not living in austere times.