Sam Leith

Several hundred years ago, in the 2014 film 20,000 Days On Earth, Ray Winstone asked Nick Cave: ‘Do you want to reinvent yourself?’ Cave, looking out from his sunglasses, replied: ‘I can’t reinvent myself.’ ‘Do you wanna?’ ‘I don’t want to either. I think the rock star’s gotta be someone you can see from a distance. You can draw them in one line… They’ve got to be godlike. It’s all an invention. But it happened early on for me.’ On the handful of occasions over the years that I’ve seen Cave from a distance, he has been just that sort of figure – one a deft cartoonist would draw with one line: ski-jump nose, Sesame Street eyebrows and a swept-back bob of jet-black hair like Wednesday Addams after Uncle Fester chopped off her pigtails for a prank.

‘Standing in my kitchen in Suffolk after a quiet New Year's Eve, I scanned my newspaper for clues as to what might be lurking around the corner.’  So run the opening words of yesterday’s first extract of Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid. 1 January. New Year’s Day. And our hero – modest, unassuming, but eternally vigilant, eyes always scanning the horizon – is on duty, even when most of us are nursing a foggy head.   Of course, we know now what this man of destiny didn’t know then: that the ‘news-in-brief story about a mystery pneumonia outbreak in China’ that catches his eye is the harbinger of the vast global story that is to change all of our lives.

The Cursed Ratio strikes again. Twitter users have voted 52-48 in favour of Elon Musk allowing the return of Donald Trump to the website, causing the gnashing of a great many progressive teeth in the airless no-space of the internet. The kicker to this is that – psych! – the former president almost immediately announced that he had no interest in returning to the site in any case. A pyrrhic victory, then, for Little Elon in his Struggle Against the Eunuchs, but still.   I’m no fan of Trump myself. I’d love to see him doing a sullen perp-walk in an orange jumpsuit, and I dearly hope one day to witness such a thing. But it strikes me that having him back on Twitter might not be the worst thing in the world should he deign to rejoin it.

'Politics,' as the old quip has it, 'is showbusiness for ugly people.' That quote was minted in the good old days when there was, at least implicitly, some clear blue water between the two things: it intended to draw an arch point of comparison between two quite different spheres of activity. Politics was momentous, solemn, and consequential; showbusiness was vain, silly and inconsequential. The quip points to a sneaking sense that, secretly, those in the former realm were actuated by less high-minded concerns.   These days, there is less and less sense, either among the general public or the practitioners of either art, that any such distinction exists. Both are now simply vehicles to attain the infinitely fungible currency of fame. That’s a slippage too far.

As Home Secretary, on the whole, you’ll want to stay on the right side of the law, right? I mean, you’re in charge of the police, the prisons, national security, immigration and all that sort of thing. Your portfolio is definitely what might be termed law-adjacent or, on Tinder, ‘law-curious’. On the principle of leading by example, you might be expected to comply not only with the letter but with the spirit of the law. So it is not a little concerning that in the matter of Manston asylum processing centre Suella Braverman is accused of knowingly breaking the law as a matter of policy.  I know: compassion for traumatised and penniless refugees isn’t part of the brief.

Once again, 357-odd Conservative MPs have complete control over what happens next in this country. There are three questions that each of them will be urgently considering. One is: what’s best for the country? The second is: what’s best for the Conservative party? The third is: what’s best for me personally? It will not have escaped the attentive student of recent Tory politics that these things do not always point in quite the same direction. So, question one. The country, poll after poll now tells us, wants rid of the whole shower of these blue-rosetted bozos as soon as is humanly possible. It seems to follow from that – even if the rules allow you to dodge it – that calling a general election would be the right thing to do for the good of the country.

It is not easy to feel sorry for Liz Truss. She has a deeply unattractive streak of vanity – when in the Foreign Office, she seemed more interested in posing for the official photographers who trailed her round than she did in building relationships with the places she visited. She campaigned hard and sometimes dirty to obtain a job for which she was manifestly out of her depth. Once in that job, she exercised power with peremptory arrogance. She rewarded people who had sucked up to her, cast out anyone who had spoken up for her rival, and allowed experienced civil servants to be hoofed ruthlessly out of their jobs.

Quite the scoop in yesterday’s Sun. An anonymous cabinet minister has briefed the paper that to secure Britain’s economic future, we need a baby boom. The birth rate has fallen from 2.93 children per woman in 1964 to 1.58 today. We have an ageing population, and a shrinking workforce, and something must be done. 'We need to have more children,' says this minister. 'The rate keeps falling. Look at Hungary – they cut taxes for mothers who have more children.' And, indeed, they do. In Viktor Orban’s fiefdom you’re let off income tax for life if you manage to squeeze out four or more kids.

Liz Truss has, if nothing else, been working on her delivery. Her first speech to conference as Prime Minister was only about seventy per cent as stilted as usual. She occasionally, though just occasionally, sounded like she was speaking to the audience rather than reading something off an autocue. She remembered to smile. She even had a go at pointing matily into the crowd when she was saying nice things about her 'dynamic new chancellor' or her 'fantastic deputy prime minister'. And – which was the most she could have hoped for – she got through it without dropping any sort of clanger. The speech itself, perhaps deliberately, was a hopelessly dull effort: a compendium of exhausted buzz-phrases chunked into groups of three or strung together with laborious anaphora.