In the week that saw students mostly but far from all whooping for joy over their A-level results, it’s worth asking how well our new government’s been performing in its first few weeks. Our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports there are plenty of gold stars, but a fair few must-do-betters as well.
Spare a thought first off for Sir Keir Starmer, who promised to keep family life as normal as possible, only to have his teenage kids doubtless screaming blue murder over their cancelled hols in the sun.
That was on the back of the racist riots that broke out across Britain in the wake of the crazed murder of four little girls in Southport.
The Prime Minister, as the nation’s former chief prosecutor, knew exactly what to do, and did it without fear or favour.
Of course the decent peoples’ counter protests played their part. But it was Starmer’s public shaming of the thugs and getting hefty jail terms meted out at pace that stopped them in their tracks.
Full marks for that then, though this no-nonsense response did throw into sharp relief two Tory legacy issues. Prison overcrowding and the lamentable state of the court system.
Put them together and it’s not to be wondered at that the hooligans who took to the streets thought they could do so with impunity.
The other problem thrown up by the riots is just how easy it was to whistle them up via hate-speech and misinformation on social media.
Grappling with that lot will take far, far longer. And successful outcomes are far from guaranteed.
Since taking over Twitter and renaming it X, Elon Musk has lopped off safeguards designed to prevent the spread of untruthful and evil material.
Nor is he minded to let these caveats get put back on, judging by the way he’s laid in to Starmer, in what looks like a series of pre-emptive strikes.
Little wonder he’s got it in for any government with leftward leanings, given the slavish devotion he’s bestowing on Donald Trump.
Anybody who listened to the two men’s online ‘conversation’ last week – love-in would be nearer the mark – would have been dazzled by what he let The Donald get away with.
Quite apart from learning that the fascist dictators running Russia, China and North Korea are actually pretty cool dudes, they’d have discovered that the climate crisis does have its upside.
This because rising sea levels caused by melting glaciers would have the advantage of creating ‘more oceanfront property’. Yep, that was ok too.
No great surprise that Labour MPs are deserting X in droves, and that a former top executive at Twitter has said the only way to bring Musk to heel is to bang him up.
Not that any of that’s going to make a ha’porth of difference. The reality is Starmer has got a fight on his hands there, which he can’t really afford to lose.
He’s also got a looming battle with unions, over pay.
The last government fronted up to them and faced something that started looking increasingly like a general strike before most of them caved in.
But not so the train drivers. And the three-year no-strings-attached deal that’s been agreed could hardly fail to have a knock-on effect. Both with other rail workers, and doctors.
Though the Tories can claim with some justification that they did most of the heavy lifting, neither side can truthfully deny that on this front ministers are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.
And Labour are liable for extra stick because of their party’s historic and ongoing links with the union movement.
That’s not to say life for the depleted residue of Conservatives is a bundle of laughs either, mind.
So far the leadership contenders have been sensible enough not to slag one another off, presumably because they’ve clocked that the last government’s circular firing squad was not a good look.
But they won’t exactly have been cheered by last week’s IPSOS survey that showed three in five voters don’t care who gets the top job.
There’s also been research by the pollster YouGov that suggests the average age of their supporters is now sixty-three, way, way up on what it was at the last election.
Still, it’s not like their not terribly successful former leader Liz Truss seems minded to take any notice of anything.
She got in a total snit during a speech last week when a banner was unfurled behind her that riffed on the Daily Star’s ongoing gag about how her lifespan was outstripped by a lettuce.
It also carried the line: ‘I crashed the economy.’
This, she insisted as she flounced off, is ‘not funny’, later adding: ‘Far-left activists disrupted the event … Would we see the same reaction if the activists were far-right?’
Given that the overwhelming majority of economists, and the city, are agreed that she did indeed crash the economy, it’s hardly fair to accuse the gibe of stemming from the far left.
It’s also notable that material posted online by far-right activists has included calls for mosques to be burned down, with the people inside them.
Of course this is not to suggest Ms Truss was intentionally drawing that parallel, but it is to be borne in mind that she was chosen to lead the Tory party by its members.
Which suggests it’s worth a line at the bottom of their exam submission: ‘Must do better.’
But it’s not like even the cleverest people don’t get in a muddle about things, for an awfully long time, sometimes.
Case in point, the altar stone slap bang in the middle of Stonehenge.
It was logical to assume that it came from Wales, the same as the other great slabs making up the monument.
But now it seems there’s conclusive proof that it was brought five hundred miles from a different place altogether. Northern Scotland, no less.
It’s all down to a newish technique called geological fingerprinting. And, according to UCL researcher Robert Ixer: ‘This is a genuinely shocking result.’
I should coco, added Aberystwyth Uni’s Professor Richard Bevins, given that the findings dissed what had been thought by boffins of all stripes, for the last hundred years.
Calls to mind an old but unanswerable question: Which of us got where we are today – by not being wrong?
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