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Labour is a party disappointed by the people who vote for it and by the economy of the country it's running. thecritic.co.uk/the-...

And how will it do that? Healey, it turns out, has the kind of idea of work you’d expect from a man who has been active in politics since 1986. There were a lot of references to the coalmining heritage of his constituency, and even the more modern work he talked about was hard, manly toil like pipe-fitting, the sort of thing that involves bulging forearms and mucky overalls. Aside from his wife, the one woman he mentioned was Reeves, and she’s just lost her job.

It’s far from clear that the Chancellor has a handle on what the more modern bits of the economy look like. There are a million young people out of work, he said, and the solution he pointed to was shipbuilding apprenticeships. Do this year’s unemployed graduates actually want to go into shipbuilding? Are there enough ships for them to build? His first job, he said, was washing glasses at a pub, exactly the kind of work that has disappeared in the face of minimum wage and tax rises. On artificial intelligence, which has destro

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Who remembers Rachel Reeves? thecritic.co.uk/the-...

All Labour conference speeches are in constant danger of lapsing into self-congratulation. Did you know that the party founded the NHS? It did, actually. Healey didn’t manage to resist the temptation. He was less comfortable with trickier, more recent aspects of the party’s history. He was, after all, only standing there because of the failure of his predecessor. He gave the briefest of tributes to her work in the Treasury, which won a smattering of applause, and then added that “after 800 years, she will always be recognised as this country’s first ever female Chancellor.” The conference cheered at the thought that Rachel Reeves is only a decade away from being a tricky pub quiz question.

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Hopeless Healey: my SKETCH of a Chancellor who's rather better at despair. thecritic.co.uk/the-...

“I’m a proud optimist,” John Healey told the Labour Party conference, unconvincingly. Perhaps he is. Let’s imagine that, away from the cameras, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is known as the cheeriest chap in the office, spotting the silver lining on every cloud and for ever detecting blessings beneath their disguises. Unfortunately, the Almighty, displaying once again the sense of humour that holds the universe together, has bestowed upon Healey the demeanour of an undertaker who’s just learned his business has burned down.

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Hang on, I just need to check something from my automatic transcript of Healey's speech.

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 27/09/2026

And readers, HERE IS THAT TIE.

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Hope Against Hope: my SKETCH of Andy Burnham, your new boyfriend who's definitely not anything like your old boyfriend. thecritic.co.uk/hope...

“HOPE AGAIN.” The slogan is everywhere at Labour conference, greeting you as you walk in, on banners dangling from the ceiling, behind the speakers on the main stage, attached to the lectern. The more you see it, the more questions it raises: when was HOPE? What happened to it? How can we be sure it is back, AGAIN?

Labour members gathered in Liverpool regard these questions as too obvious to discuss. HOPE is back AGAIN thanks to the arrival in Number 10 of Andy Burnham, the one true heir to the throne of Labour. It’s probably a good thing that Keir Starmer isn’t here: there’s only so many times anyone can endure a slogan whose entire subtext is that they’re a failure. It would be like seeing your ex walking around in a t-shirt that read: “FINALLY WITH SOMEONE WHO ISN’T A MASSIVE DISAPPOINTMENT.”

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 25/09/2026

Sorry, @jamesomalley.co.uk, who? toys.jamesomalley.co.uk/mpchain/

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 23/09/2026

Ordeal By Rambling: my SKETCH of Andy meeting Donald. thecritic.co.uk/orde...

Our new prime minister’s tactics were of anyone enduring an unpleasant medical examination: try to get through it by thinking about something else. “It’s great to be with you and the team today,” Burnham told the president, in the least convincing tone of voice I’ve heard since my wife agreed to spend a Sunday evening watching Full Metal Jacket.

The good news, from a British diplomatic perspective, was that Trump is completely oblivious to the reactions of people around him. The prime minister could have been wearing a T-shirt reading “Trump Is A Chump” and the president wouldn’t have noticed. As it was, Burnham simply stared wistfully into the middle distance while Trump said what a great guy he was. “He’s a natural businessman,” the president slurred. “He gets it. He understands what he has to do.”

From a Number 10 perspective, this is great. Westminster journalists have an astonishingly resilient view that praise from a US president is the most important thing a prime minister can

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 22/09/2026

"Gonna sketch the Ed Davey speech, lads. I think there's a lot of interest."

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 20/09/2026

I can't get over how visibly insane he is these days. This is like reading a note from your great aunt who insists she used to be married to Winston Churchill.

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 18/09/2026

Extraordinary Correspondence: coming June 2027. A new game is afoot.

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 16/09/2026

When trying to decide how to house asylum seekers, it may not be a useful idea to do it on the basis of which places were good locations from which to launch a bombing war against Germany 80 years ago.

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 14/09/2026

Bad Money After Bad... My SKETCH of Today in Nigel's Millions. thecritic.co.uk/bad-...

Aspectre is haunting British politics, the spectre of Bad Money. Economists will tell you that money is fungible, that one pound coin indistinguishable from the next, but economists have never had to go on the Today programme and explain why their political party should be allowed to accept large donations, while a rival one shouldn’t.

To explain a little, Bad Money is the money that your political opponents receive, typically from “coffers”. It is entirely different from Good Money, which is what your own side gets. Good Money will have been “hard-earned”, either by care workers or entrepreneurs. It does different things, too. Bad Money buys policies that benefit the party’s “paymasters”. Good Money, on the other hand, has been selflessly and generously given in the hoping of building a Greater Britain.

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 09/09/2026

The prime minister reveals his secret identity: Captain Conciliator, who confounds foes with his reasonableness. thecritic.co.uk/capt...

There were a lot of things that might have come up at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday: the gangs of thugs roaming Portsmouth and Dover, whose most recent intervention was to mistake Pakistan’s cricket team for asylum seekers; the threat that artificial intelligence will wipe out humanity; the questions of who exactly is putting money in Reform’s bank accounts. In the end we ignored all these in an anaemic session that both sides will claim as a win and quickly forget.

Andy Burnham’s approach seems to be to act as a simple northern fellow who thinks we can solve everything if we all pull together. He is Captain Conciliator, who flies around the nation being even-handed, zipping off double quick if it looks like someone might ask something tricky. Possibly the goal is to drive Kemi Badenoch mad with his reasonableness. But will his enthusiasm for finding points of agreement withstand the crucible of Westminster politics? Will it create new problems?

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 08/09/2026

On Andy Burnham's sudden bout of shyness. thecritic.co.uk/sanc...

The close of his statement was an appeal to our better natures. If we were going to ask Israelis and Palestinians to live side-by-side, he said, Britain also had to be a place where “people of all faiths and none have a right to live without prejudice or fear.” Listening to him was Andy Burnham, who has been strangely absent from our public debate for the last few days. In August, we couldn’t move for social media clips from the prime minister, standing on a ladder to discuss his first job, or sitting in a pub to rate bar snacks. But faced with masked thugs trying to shut down British ports over the weekend, Burnham seems to have lost the password for his phone. For a decade now, Britain has had a series of leaders apparently paralysed by the fear that if they say that racism is bad, they’ll be voted out. It would be nice to get one who had a slightly higher opinion of us.

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 08/09/2026

Sanction Impossible: my SKETCH of Today in debating the Falklands and then Israel. thecritic.co.uk/sanc...

“The Argentinians can smell weakness.” Oliver Dowden was doing his best to sound menacing, like a veteran of Goose Green whispering his story before drawing on a cigarette. Unfortunately, Dowden has been cursed with a high-pitched voice that is better suited to complaining that the froth on his cappuccino is limp, so the response to his warning about Johnny Argie’s nefarious ways was an undeserved snigger.

The House of Commons was discussing a subject on which it turns out every MP agrees: the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands. Those of us who don’t follow Argentinian politics closely can tell when the government there is in trouble from the number of angry headlines about Las Malvinas. Although it turns out that Javier Milei is far from the only politician to see what he wants in the Falklands. Over the course of 45 minutes, we were to learn that the islands prove the need to stay close to America, to distance ourselves from America, to rebuild our armed forces, and to impose sanc

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 07/09/2026

One of these things is not like the other...

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 07/09/2026

It's less a political party, more a fan club. thecritic.co.uk/nigel-and-th...

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 05/09/2026

Lee Anderson had a lunchtime riff about how much he'd enjoyed the violence meted out on one of Friday's protesters. thecritic.co.uk/nigel-and-th...

Reform’s conference really is unlike any other party’s annual gathering. First, the crowd is much bigger and far more enthusiastic. Labour and the Tories would love to be able to pull off some of this glitz. But the striking thing about Friday, the first day of the conference, was how little content there was. It was largely pantomime, jollied along by David Bull and Lee Anderson, the party’s answer to Buttons and Widow Twankey. The big news story was Nigel Farage signing an imaginary treaty with Jordan Bardella, the leader of France’s National Rally. (His party changed its name in 2018 — apparently you’re only allowed to call it the National Front if it’s from the Vichy region. Otherwise it’s sparkling fascism.)

Farage’s speech on the Friday evening was interrupted by at least four female protestors, each of them swiftly bundled out. The official security people were pretty rough, but in at least one case, elderly party members — one of them with a walking stick — took matters into their own hands, grabbing at a woman and pulling her hair. On stage, Farage laughed. His catchphrase when faced with criticism flashed up behind him: “BORING BORING BORING BORING.” It’s quite possible that under the lights he couldn’t see exactly what was happening below him, but Lee Anderson, speaking on Saturday after apparently seeing a video of this, proposed a whip-round to buy one of the attackers a new walking stick. With his next breath, he was warning about the hordes of foreign men waiting in Calais to do violence to British women, ignoring the dangers from the pensioners right there with us in the hall.

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 05/09/2026

As we crawl through the political jungle, we come upon a mysterious group of primates, ruled by an aging alpha male called "Nigel". thecritic.co.uk/nige...

All party conferences make the observer feel like David Attenborough, peering through the undergrowth at some ecosystem that exists by its own mysterious rules. See the busy termites of Labour, with their factions and their composite motions, or the great hippopotami of the Conservatives, bellowing strange noises that convey some mysterious meaning only they can comprehend. And over here we find the primates of Reform, dominated by an aged alpha male, “Nigel”.

Nigel rules his corner of the jungle with an iron fist, monopolising access to both attention and to precious resources such as champagne and oysters. The other males in the troop seem aggressive when approached, baring their teeth and waggling their bottoms at strangers, who are always presumed to be hostile. But in the presence of Nigel, they immediately become submissive, bowing their heads and repeating whatever comes out of his mouth.

For a while, this troop was led by “Richard”, a tall male who spent much of his time en

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 05/09/2026

How could an associate professor in divinity at Cambridge be expected to know that lying is bad? thecritic.co.uk/mone...

Ah yes, James Orr. A lot of us had been hazy about what it is exactly that associate professors in a divinity department do all day. It doesn’t seem to involve a lot of work: Orr is often to be seen at Reform events in London, which take up the whole morning even for those of us with offices down the road. Now we know he was also sipping cocktails while discussing ways in which wealthy foreigners might be able to get round the laws that ban them donating to the party.

The associate professor of divinity was filmed explaining to an undercover reporter that so long as everyone kept their mouths shut, there was no way that the authorities would ever find out. Orr spent four years as a postdoctoral fellow in theology, ethics and public life at Oxford, and it would be fascinating to know at what point he developed this theory of What the Electoral Commission Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Them. Perhaps he was off sick the day they opened the gospel of Luke: “What you have said in the dark will be h

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 04/09/2026

That money never even rested in my account! Nigel Farage struggles to explain the latest cash scandal. thecritic.co.uk/mone...

“I’ve got a statement here,” Nigel Farage began, unfolding a piece of paper. That’s how bad things were: the great off-the-cuffster had been handed a line to which he was required to stick. It was like Miles Davis announcing that he would be playing a medley of elevator music.

We were in Birmingham, at the conference of Reform, the greatest political party that money can buy. Last year, the conference was disrupted by a scandal over Angela Rayner, which meant the focus shifted to the Labour government. This year the party was taking no chances about losing the spotlight and had brought along its own scandal.

The Channel 4 report the previous evening had thrown the entire event into chaos. At 7am the story was denounced as a put-up by a far-left outfit, the videos edited. At 8am Farage had lost his closest aide, Dan Jukes, and his policy chief, James Orr. At 8.15am they were on a brief suspension, and by 9am Farage was explaining that they were mere “contractors”. I know thee not, you

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 04/09/2026

"Only Nigel can save ze Breeteesh people."

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 04/09/2026

Ironically, explaining the importance of Jukes to Farage actually *would* take ten minutes on the doorstep.

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 03/09/2026

Very much here for any moves to throw off the Norman yoke.

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 02/09/2026

Keir Starmer was a permanently disappointed headmaster, but Andy Burnham is the worst kind of teacher: the one who thinks he can be your mate. thecritic.co.uk/the-...

Here we learned that Burnham isn’t the only leader who can be wrong-footed by fairly obvious questions. “They are laughing!” Badenoch complained of the Labour benches, resorting to her catchphrase of panic. “I don’t know why they’re laughing!” This is of course very much part of the problem. If Burnham has persuaded himself that Starmer’s chief problem was that he didn’t wear t-shirts, Badenoch continues to be certain that the reason the Tories lost the last election was that the voters were idiots.

For now, both are in their comfort bubbles. The Tory leader is happy to tell herself that if you’re explaining your shadow chancellor’s part in the biggest political failure of recent history, you’re somehow not losing, and Burnham is busy assuring the sixth form that they can call him Andy. “Positivity, Mr Speaker!” he actually said at the end of one answer. It’s all very well, but it doesn’t pay the bills.

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 02/09/2026

WHAT ABOUT PEOPLE WHO ONLY HAVE MINOR QUESTIONS, ANDY?

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The promotion of Katie Lam to the Shadow Cabinet is all the excuse I need to remind you of my exclusive look at her new musical: "West Side Tories" thecritic.co.uk/west-side-to...

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One of the biggest problems writing about Clarke's war is that the most important things he did were also, as he himself said, very, very tedious. Though actually this is why magic was a useful lens: effective stage magic involves painstaking preparation and endless practice.

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Yes, I agree about wheezes in general, especially on Mincemeat, while very much holding a candle for Dudley Clarke and the idea that a very big lie told for a very long time can make a difference.

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 27/08/2026

The "false going" map, which may or may not have changed the course of anything.

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Enjoyable evening celebrating the launch of @jonnelledge.bsky.social's amazing new book, "31 Inventions That Built Our World". Part of it spent talking to someone who said "I know who YOU are," but turned out to be under the impression I was someone else. I never found out who.

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 25/08/2026

I mean, it doesn't *not* sound like her. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 23/08/2026

Cleaning out a drawer, I come across an ancient notebook. Includes... * Notes on David Cameron's opposition office (first two pics) * Reminder to buy a "snot-sucker" for a baby who is now 20. * An interview with Westminster outsider Andy Burnham (third pic).

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In order to watch GB News got the sketch, I seem to have signed up for news emails. They're all like this.

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Exciting moment at the Oval as the entire crowd's mobile phones all start going off at once to warn us we're in danger of wildfires.

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EVERYONE STOP BEING MEAN TO ICKLE NIGEL! thecritic.co.uk/sulking-towa...

Even Reform’s press officers sensed that this strop was making their fearless leader look a little bit of a whiny baby, so they let it be known that the police had warned of a “credible threat” to Farage’s safety if he attended the count. Not another one!

Obviously there are people out there who wish Farage ill, some of them seriously unhinged, and several of them not Robert Jenrick. And yet it’s hard to escape the thought that a lot of Farage’s security threats arrive at convenient moments, like when he’s being asked to explain how that five million quid got into his bank account, or when the bins need putting out. Essex Police, unhelpfully, denied having warned Farage of this. Perhaps the police force that issued the warning goes to a different school.

Over on GB News, The Channel That Backs Our Nige, the hosts were doing their best to take all this seriously. “He’s got more votes than he got in 2024!” one of them enthused. Triumph!Was it, though? Is 63 per cent a good number in the most Reform-friendly seat in the country, when your only rival is a man with a bin on his head?

Farage’s disappearance suggested that he at least didn’t think so. The word came down that he’d cancelled a speech he’d planned for mid-morning, too. The result, GB News told us, “shows that Reform has matured”. Which was odd, because you could hear the toys being thrown out of Farage’s pram from a hundred miles away.

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Sulking Towards Victory: my SKETCH of Nigel Farage, Bad Winner. thecritic.co.uk/sulk...

The thinnest material in the world is graphene, a honeycomb lattice of carbon that is a single atom thick. The second thinnest, we learned on Friday morning, is Nigel Farage’s skin.

Seriously. How fragile do you have to be to sulk through your own election victory? There are peaches that bruise less easily than Farage’s ego. Had not enough people voted for him? Watching the rolling news in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un could be heard muttering “mate, get over yourself”.

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This is fortunate, as the winner is unable to speak.

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