You know when you've been Stanley Chow-ed

Hard to believe that on Monday morning Keir Starmer was still prime minister. A week is a long time in clichés etc etc. Speaking of long times, we’re off to watch The Odyssey later, which breaks my rule about how a film should only be 90 minutes long, and my general antipathy towards anything with wizards, aliens, zombies, ghosts or people with hairy feet. Greek mythology is just the original sci-fi, no? Anyway, wish me luck.

WE LEARNED… that is just what I look like: “I think it was the roundness of your head … was the first thing that sprung to mind.” Stanley Chow, a Manchester-based artists, is not a man to mince his words

“And you got like a Tin Tin haircut. So I try to kind of like add those bits in, you know. You know, your ears aren’t the smallest ears.”

I’m aware of this. But what could I say. Stanley nailed me in his caricature.

“I tried to be respectful,” he explained on 5 Live. “But also it was like because of your comedy background, and also as a broadcaster, there’s light and shade in terms of your kind of the personality that you project. And for some reason, the only person I was thinking was like Blackadder.”

Hmm. That’s taken me back to a childhood of being compared to Mr Bean. Stanley specifically had Rowan Atkinson as Captain Blackadder in Blackadder Goes Forth. One of the greatest performances in one of the greatest shows? I’ll take that.

Stanley has created portraits of so many famous faces, boiling their likeness down to just the core elements, yet instantly recognisable. You’ll have seen the Andy Burnham cartoon caricature, he used it in his Makerfield by-election campaign, and before that when running for Greater Manchester mayor.

So I think this means I’m going to be prime minister, right?

WE LEARNED… we are experiencing a higher than normal volume of prime ministers, please hold the line: I have been having a battle with a website which I apparently subscribed to when trying to order a taxi in Italy. Three times I ordered a cab, three times it said “no availability”.

Trying to get the £49 subscription (and a separate one which has absurdly been taking 10p every Wednesday) has involved getting cross with a customer services chatbot.

Having had “Camille” insist at one stage she was a real person, I then asked “her” chatbot who the prime minister was (treating the chatbot like someone coming round from anaesthetic or a stroke).

WE LEARNED… another door opens: The peril of working from home is making sure you have taken everything with you: laptop, charger, notebook, replica of the office door.

Andy Burnham arrived in No10 North in Greater Manchester to be greeted by the famous black door which stands in Downing Street. The replica was made by the artist Jason Bruges who worked on a project in 2015, which culminated in a“digital double”, with “an array of sensors and display lighting reveal a silhouette capturing the moment anyone passes by and through it”. It’s not clear if that was the one the PM was posing with, and they just didn’t plug it in.

The original door in Downing Street is not original at all. The one that stands there now is solid steel, and was installed in 1991 after the IRA attack on Number 10 in which a mortar exploded in the garden while John Major was having a meeting in the cabinet room at the back of the building.

Here is an amazing video of the letterbox flapping as the air whipped through the building by the force of the explosion.

The original wooden door, thought to date back to Robert Walpole, now stands in the Churchill War Rooms around the corner, which is well worth a visit.

It hasn’t always been black either: from 1908 to 1916, when Herbert Asquith was prime minister, it was painted dark green.

I would make a joke about Andy Burnham repainting it red, but the Daily Mail did that as an April Fool in 2006.

WE LEARNED… it’s modern life Jim, but not as we know it: What’s in a name? This week Jim Murphy, just about the only veteran of the Brown/Miliband era of Labour politics not be given a job, made a claim:

“I think he’s probably the only, the second Prime Minister in our country’s recent history, where the use of his first name will be ubiquitous.”

Boris was the other one he had in mind. Which got me thinking of others: Maggie, maybe? It was always more likely to be “Blair” not “Tony”. “Cameron” not “Dave”. “Truss” not “Liz”. Rishi probably did have some purchase (if only because it rhymed with Dishy).

Not that Jim was endorsing this approach to our national leaders.

“I don’t enjoy the forced informality of modern society.”

Which I’ve been laughing about all week.

WE LEARNED… the lobby rules (at least in the mind of the lobby): The arrival of a new PM also provides an opportunity for a new stand-off between the new comms operation, and lobby journalists. There have been complaints about the lack of hourly press conferences and ubiquitous sitdown interviews (despite the new PM bizarrely inviting newspaper political editors in for a quick chat on Monday, instead of getting one with his reshuffle).

Anyway it prompted me to ask on Newsnight on Friday: Do lobby journalists need to get over themselves?

Answers on a postcard/in the comments.

But it did prompt The Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley to remind us:

“I mean Ted Heath when he first became Prime Minister went six weeks without any kind of interaction with the media whatsoever.”

WE LEARNED… Angela Rayner is in her serious era: If the PM hasn’t been doing lots of interviews, his new cabinet have. On Thursday I went over to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to interview the new/old housing secretary, Angela Rayner. She is pleased to be back, she says, having “unfinished business” since being forced to resign over her stamp duty bill last September.

There were various lines out of the interview, including not paying back her severance money, and some confusion about the PM’s promise of the “biggest council house building programme since the post-war period" relying on when you think the post-war period ended.

But what struck me, having interviewed Rayner several times in opposition, is that she was less willing to have fun, more buttoned-up, more serious. Towards the end of our time, I asked about the announcement on help for pubs and clubs, wondering if she had a favourite growing up. She paused, deflected. You might think it daft to ask, a waste of time, but it’s exactly the sort of thing she would have answered before.

(It was to me that she once revealed her favourite cocktail to be Venom – a lethal mix which, according to her recipe, includes: a bottle of Absolute vodka, a bottle of Southern Comfort, ten bottles of Blue WKD and a litre of orange juice.)

“I really feel like, seriously, like the public, they don’t care whether I’m vaping or not. They care about whether I’m doing my job and looking after them. I know it’s light-hearted to talk about what club did you use to visit, and do you vape or not. But seriously, the people out there, are like, Angie, I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in, are you going to deliver on the promises you promised us? And that’s where my focus is.”

She may well be right. It’s just quite a change from her approach before government. And when we have a prime minister whose brand is built on retaining that light-hearted connection with voters, it will be interesting to see if his housing secretary is a case study in keeping a personality once you’re in power.

WE LEARNED… when was the last stable government: Imagine we went for, say, five years with the same prime minister. Not just that, the same deputy prime minister, chancellor, business secretary, communities secretary, work and pensions secretary and Europe minister. For FIVE years. Well we did once, all the way back in 2010-2015, during the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition. The awkwardness of reshuffles meaning they chose, to a large extent, to leave things alone.

I discussed this, and other things, with Nick Clegg, in an interview which covered tuition fees, austerity, AI, social media and whether he would advise anyone to go into politics today. You can watch the whole thing here

WE LEARNED… it was come dressed matching the former deputy prime minister week:

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