There’s so much more to being a government than just working out how to rob middle-class people until they bleed all over their rags, which is what we’ll all be wearing after next Wednesday. There’s more than just giving the trade unions whatever they want or making yet more promises to build houses and ‘make the health service work again!!’, as if.

There’s the things they don’t teach you in opposition. Things they don’t teach you on endless fucking protest marches every time any company makes a profit. There’s the art of diplomacy.

And what that means in any practical sense is securing links with people you may not particularly like to ensure a better result for the nation. So ‘we’ have to deal with Macron. No-one likes him. And Erdogan, Mohammed Bin Salman, Ursula von der Leyen. Horrible people that we need to keep onside. Even though they’re horrible.

And Donald Trump. The most hateful one. And yet the most hateful person to be within 1% of the projected vote to be the next most important person in the world. He may win, he may lose. It’s ‘too close to call’ at this stage, just 2 weeks from ‘the day’. And Trump is not a big fan of Kier Starmer. Ok, no-one is, but Trump hates his politics and is not really keen on the man himself. Can’t blame him for the latter. Or the former either, really. So Starmer absolutely needs to have a relationship with Trump. Hopefully only until November 5th when Kamala wins the election, but maybe, just maybe, Trump wins.

David Lammy, now foreign secretary of our great nation, once called Trump a ‘neo-nazi sympathising sociopath’. Which is undoubtedly true. Yet now Loathesome Lammy may have to face The Orange One, as the representative of our entire nation. And that’s a hill to climb.

Labour are obviously more aligned with the Democrats, they share a centre-left stance. So the government are sending Labour members over to key US states to canvass and lobby. And sent two top Labour nobodies over for Kamala’s coronation as Good Queen Democrat.

Trump, inevitably has made a formal, legal complaint about ‘foreign influence’ on the elections, mainly to score a point over Harris.

And all this is well and good. As long as Harris wins. Because if she doesn’t Starmer, for all the alleged ‘behind the scenes’ friendship building, will be seen as ‘the enemy’ by Trump. President Orange. But no-one in the government has the forward thinking wherewithal to realise that they are burning bridges, big, important, ‘special relationship’ ones, so they can be seen to be overtly protesting about Trump, before the elections, and jumping onto any ‘slightly left’ bandwagon they can find in the world.

And for that, our whole government are my ‘tossers of the week’. A collective achievement, too precious to restrict it to individuals. But if I did, Sofia Patel would be the first name, followed by Morgan McSweeney and Matthew Doyle. David Lammy. Kier Starmer. Rachel Reeves, just because…

Happy Thursday

A xxxx