Silly season is dead. Politics has entered a strange new era

Politicians disappear in August, in the usual run of things, and for those of us who follow them about for a living, these are the times to kick back, stretch out and gracefully hand the news reporting duties on to panicked others. Welcome to silly season. Somewhere, in a safari park, an elephant will be eating giant grass-flavoured ice lollies. A donkey will be being mistreated on a foreign beach. World record-breaking vegetables will be grown and photographed. Each of which, for the Westminster hack, is not our problem.

But those days, unfortunately, are gone. It’s true that a politician has not been spotted within a 200-yard radius of the Palace of Westminster in the last three weeks, but events are livelier than ever. The new prime minister has been round all four corners of the world and, to be blunt, there is a major crisis coming.

These long, curiously inclement days are the hyper-extended night before battle. Westminster knows it has a major confrontation on its hands that will begin the second parliament returns. Labour, the Greens, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, the Change UKers, the Independent Group and a large cluster of Remainer Tories are playing raw politics, essentially to work out who leads who into the fight, and who will carry the flag, however briefly.

The new government, itself a reboot of the Vote Leave organisation, is aggressively ramping up preparations for an election, announcing policies, hammering out its chosen soundbites with repetitive certainty.

The preparations, frankly, are going to go on too long. At current rate, both armies will be exhausted before they have even engaged with each other. As for who wins, anybody’s guess is as good as anyone else’s. The only certainty is that politics never, and I do mean never, travels along the path expected or predicted.

Yours,

Tom Peck

Political sketch writer