Sam Leith

I don’t know about you, but I had an odd sort of election. The bits that I thought were going to thrill and excite me did not; and the bits that I thought couldn’t thrill and excite anybody made me feel quite emotional. That is, I gave up on the live coverage at about half two in the morning. Not even the prospect of watching Liz Truss get her cards seemed as appealing as a few hours’ kip. The 1997-style jubilation I might have expected to feel, as a representative of those keen to give Labour a shot at governing, just wasn’t there.  But the following day, as announcements of ministerial and cabinet posts trickled out, I felt genuinely buoyed up. You may – we may – dislike the ideological slant of some of these appointments.

In his first speech from the Downing Street lectern, Sir Keir Starmer was setting out to reaffirm those qualities that won him the election. That was a relatively low bar to clear – he just had to give the impression that he was neither a crook nor a maniac – and he cleared it with ease. Here was a solid, sensible, ostentatiously humble speech delivered with persuasive but unshowy emotion.  Starmer was punctilious about showing grace in victory. Just a few days ago, he was deriding Rishi Sunak as a selfish chancer who had enriched himself 'betting against Britain' in his financial career; today, he was keen to 'pay tribute' to the outgoing PM’s 'dedication and hard work', and to the 'extra effort' that will have gone into earning a place as the first British-Asian PM.

Who says Britain is no longer a Great Power? To those of a declinist cast of mind, it must stand as a rebuke that, even with everything else on his plate, Vladimir Putin still regards our elections as worth interfering in. And, what’s more, those elections are so important that the Aussies are taking enough of an interest in them to consider that Russian interference newsworthy.   Russia may be trying to influence our elections, which as I say is flattering and all, but they aren’t trying very hard At the same time as it’s heartening that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation considers this a big deal it’s also, I suppose, a little dismaying that our own Broadcasting Corporation didn’t seem to notice. But there we are.

Poor old Rishi Sunak. You would have to have the proverbial heart of stone not to feel, at least, a bat-squeak of pity for the man at this stage. First there was that poignant press conference in the rain, then the D-day kerfuffle, the flock of sheep in Devon who snubbed him when he tried to feed them, the series of ill-advised visits to chocolate teapot factories and pubs called things like ‘The Last Chance Saloon’, and now this...

We have different approaches to tidying up, my wife and I. It bothers her very much that the house we share with three chaotic children is so untidy. Over the years unsightly, useless, out-of-date items accumulate in every room: incomplete jigsaws, dried-out paints, barely-played boardgames, broken furniture, too-small and obscurely stained clothes, collections of shells and pebbles, or that vibration-sensitive fluffy penguin which flaps its stubby wings and blares out a tinny version of 'Rock Around the Clock' when a spider stamps its foot anywhere within a kilometre of it.   My fantasy, when the clutter gets intolerable, is to have a clear-out in which everything that doesn’t spark joy goes into black bin bags and thence to the dump. She cannot quite bear to do that.

Let’s be fair. It wasn’t Rishi Sunak’s fault it was raining. But it was, a bit, his fault that as someone who has ‘never been prouder to be British’, and so is presumably familiar with the way weather works in this country, he didn’t take one look at the lead-grey sky and make a contingency plan. That contingency plan could have been waiting 24 hours. It could have been delivering his speech indoors. It could have been – I don’t know – getting someone to stand a few feet away with a brolly, just in case.