Rachel Reeves was visiting a gardening club for the retired. ‘Do you come here every week?’ she simpered at some pensioners. No, but plenty of people wish you did. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was here to announce a U-turn on winter fuel allowance and so chose this almost comically soft-ball context to do so. It was frankly miraculous that nobody mistook her for a badly-pruned conifer and tried to bed her in.

Elsewhere, a man who gave off the aura that he really could bury you under a patio was giving a speech at Port Talbot. Nigel Farage was still all grins as he described the Chancellor’s humiliating climb-down, but there was a hint that, as the Psalmist puts it, some iron had entered into his soul. This was no more Mr Nice Nige.

‘The Labour government are in a state of absolute bli

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