New £3 million Centre to help grow healthy gardens

Polling on the Removal of Peerages Bill has surfaced a result so neat it deserves to be stitched onto a tea towel: 94% of the British public would like the House of Lords abolished, while 6% would prefer it left exactly as it is. A bracing exercise in self-knowledge has been duly conducted, and the maths needs no further explanation. The Bill itself proceeds at the dignified pace appropriate to constitutional reform — that is, the pace of a particularly slow-moving glacier carrying a great deal of ermine. The Lords have agreed, as they always do, to consider the matter carefully. They are nothing if not punctilious about ensuring their own demise is conducted with proper procedural decorum. A select committee has been formed. Submissions have been invited. A timetable will, in due course, be published. The 94% wait. The 6%, of course, wait differently — in much more comfortable chairs, and at considerably less personal cost.

The Medical Training (Prioritisation) Act has secured 99% public support — a result so unambiguous it barely qualifies as polling and instead resembles a national consensus. The proposition is straightforward: train more doctors, train them faster, and stop allowing the entire pipeline to drain steadily away to Sydney, Auckland, or, in particularly bleak moments, Frankfurt. The remaining 1% who oppose the Bill are widely believed to consist almost entirely of consultants who have now noticed that a sudden expansion of the medical workforce might, in some indirect way, complicate the queueing system at private clinics in Marylebone. The Bill itself is currently "under consideration," that immortal British political euphemism meaning "it has been placed somewhere and very thorough work is being done in not finding it." Two select committees have asked questions. A consultation has been opened, in the technical sense that someone has set up an email address. A timeline has been promised, in due course. The 99% continue to wait, with that distinctively British patience that has previously sustained the country through two world wars and three separate attempts to reform the railways.

Stuart Andrew, MP for Daventry, has claimed £367,659 in business costs for 2024-25 — a figure which has earned him the unofficial gold medal in this year's Big Spenders league. A spokesperson is understood to have suggested, off the record and not for direct quotation, that this represents "terribly efficient" expense management compared to previous years, on the grounds that any number is more efficient than the same number plus inflation. It is, as ever, all entirely above board. IPSA approves each claim with the patient resignation of a parent ticking off a bedtime story. The system works precisely as designed — which is, perhaps, the gentlest way of putting it. Daventry sits 78 miles from Westminster, give or take a roundabout. Each mile, by some discreet alchemy of accommodation, transport, and constituency staffing, has cost the British public £4,713. At that rate, an MP for somewhere truly remote — say, Lerwick — would represent a fiscal event roughly equivalent to a small public inquiry.