Not a good week for the government. On Monday came the reshuffle. Sunak made the best of a bad job. Bringing back Cameron was a genius if for no other reason it displaced news that he had fired the vile Suella Braverman. Not only had the former Home Secretary disgraced her office, seemingly having no regard for her responsibilities, but she was actually useless in achieving anything. For Sunak, not a great moment. If you sup with the devil, you have to accept the consequences…

Cameron brought back as Foreign Secretary; a bold move but the jury’s out…

The overall switch to moderate conservatism is welcome but it is too little and too late. As Matthew Parris so shrewdly observed in The Times: ‘…in yet another stand-off with yet another lunatic on the party’s right, there’s no accommodating these people. They will come for you. In the end, they will always come for you.’ Braverman’s resignation letter so proves this point. The damage has been done.

As for Cameron, he arrives with baggage. Clearly a heavy weight but success in foreign affairs from his time as PM was distinctly patchy (Libya?). You can subsequently add the Greensill affair. More importantly, a back to the future moment hardly aligns with the earlier message of Sunak being the ‘change candidate’, admittedly always a long shot after 13 years of Tory rule.

Then we move to Rwanda. A more unpleasant policy is hard to imagine. And the fuss over the Court ruling declaring the government’s deportation policy illegal and Sunak’s response undoes any tack to the centre he tried to achieve with the reshuffle. It all feels like the proverbial rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic. Sunak is a competent PM, but he has arrived too late to undo the damage of his predecessors and, frankly, looked hollowed out at PMQs on Wednesday. Who could blame him.

Turning to Labour, it was not a brilliant week either. 50 MPs, including eight on the front bench, defied Starmer’s line on the Middle East conflict by demanding a ceasefire from Israel. It stores up potential trouble for the future, but not now.

The voters have made their mind up. It is anyone but the Tories who have continued to self-destruct even under Sunak. A relatively minor Labour spat does not matter. It is game over for a deeply split Conservative Party, which no longer knows what it stands for except a general air of unpleasantness in their public discourse.

Politics is exhausting in the US. Election cycles are non-stop and and then there is Trump… The media are obsessed with him and it is almost as if the more an outlet is hostile to him, the more obsessed it gets. There is wall to wall coverage of Trump on CNN for example, particularly as he is currently starring in a New York courtroom production, and politics here has become a permanent psychodrama. But one senses that voters are tired of it all. Except for hard-core MAGA supporters who have captured the Republican Party, there is a hidden consensus one suspects, that whatever the dissatisfaction with Biden, Trump is unfit to be President.

Earlier in the week a New York Times poll showed Trump ahead of Biden in 5 out of 6 swing states. It got much coverage. But what got less coverage was that if Trump gets convicted, those numbers look very different.

And then there were State election results this week which were a huge victory for the Democrats predominantly driven by a desire to protect abortion rights. The Democrat governor was re-elected in Kentucky, Democrats took control of the General Assembly in Virginia which will block any reform to State abortion laws and, in Ohio, voters passed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion access. If the Republicans can’t win now, when can they?

Finally, to add insult to injury, ex-Trump, five largely irrelevant candidates, all in their own way, defined by Trump, debated why they should be the Republican presidential nominee. Oh dear. Except perhaps for Nikki Haley, the quality was dire. Trump has drained the Republicans of any talent.

The quality of Republican candidates plummeting under the malign influence of Trump…

Amidst all this noise, it is worth taking a reality check. Whatever voters’ views about Biden and his age, Trump is simply too toxic to be a winner. He is facing multiple legal cases and even if he became President, he can’t pardon himself from a State conviction. Incredibly a Presidency run from jail is a bizarre possibility.

It may be a rash prediction, but one feels Trump won’t even make it to being the Republican nominee (watch Nikki Haley), but if he does he will be defeated by Biden. Why America has to choose from two candidates with a combined age of 160 is a topic for another blog but sanity will prevail if that is the final choice.

After that, what the media fills their air time with in a post-Trump world is anyone’s guess.

The Covid enquiry is unfolding gruesomely. The chaos, lack of strategy, general poison between those who were meant to keep the country safe and disregard for the fate of older people in particular is shocking. But add to that a PM going AWOL in the run-up to the pandemic and then the Downing Street parties during it, and it is a shameful exposure of attitudes and behaviour at the highest levels of public administration.

A horror show at the top of government…

As this week unfolded, it actually got worse. ‘Nicknamed ‘Party Marty’ for organising a bring your own booze gathering in Downing Street, Martin Reynolds, who headed the private office of the Prime Minister, described planning for a Covid type pandemic as ‘grossly deficient’ but couldn’t explain why he didn’t chase down Johnson when he disappeared for 10 days in February, presumably to write his book on Shakespeare. Meanwhile, he appeared confused about why his future WhatsApp messages to senior colleagues were mysteriously set to disappear, failing to provide any valid explanation. Yesterday, in a display of breathtaking narcissism, we heard Matt Hancock, the former Health Secretary, now turned celebrity TV wannabee, wanted a final say on who lived or died from Covid if health resources needed to be rationed.

If no crimes have been committed, we should change the law. On show so far has been a shocking dereliction of duty, incompetence, and a failure of anyone in the system to take responsibility for mistakes made. Third-rate politicians, second-rate civil servants, and no responsibility taken either by earlier senior figures such as former health ministers or chief medical officers to explain why we started this pandemic so unprepared.

Sweden, which mostly didn’t lock down has completed its Covid enquiry.

Ours will go on for years until everyone has forgotten its purpose in true British governance style.

We have yet to hear directly from Johnson, Sunak et al, but it hardly matters. You can forgive the British public for believing nobody will be held accountable. They are used to it. No one was held accountable for the crash of 2007/8, which wreaked so much havoc on the economy as a whole and disproportionately on people at the bottom of the economic pile. Mounting cynicism of the governing class in its wake partly led to Brexit.

The only silver lining of this very dark cloud is the fate of Boris Johnson. We have all met people like him. Glib, superficially charismatic, a believer that rules were to be obeyed by “little people,” not themselves, he attained a position he was never suited for. This enquiry has and will continue to finish him politically. For that reason and that reason alone, it is probably just about worth it.