Robert Hutton

@roberthutton.co.uk

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Author, parliamentary sketchwriter and co-host of classic cinema love-in War Movie Theatre. Books about chaotic detectives, sneaky spies, and misleading words.

As the Burnhams climbed out of the car, there was a huge cheer. The hated Labour government had been overthrown, and a new era of peace and prosperity was being ushered in with a bright, fresh Labour administration!

Our new leader made his way up the street, shaking hands in triumph. Looking at the pictures, it was easy to forget that his presence there owed far more to the last guy’s failure than to anything Burnham had actually done. His victory was the result of Labour grabbing him out of desperation, rather than any massive public endorsement.

Perhaps that was why TV talking heads were talking about pressure for an early election. It’s not clear where this pressure is supposed to be coming from. Labour MPs certainly don’t want one, and neither do the Conservatives. Of all the new prime ministers we’ve had — and we’ve had a few lately — Burnham must be the only one to be greeted with a leader of the opposition begging him not to go to the country.

As Keir Starmer walked out of Number 10 for the last time, he was greeted by a huge cheering crowd. Wow, this guy is popular! He should consider running for office. “My work is done,” he told us, offering possibly the most misguided example of marking your own homework since George W Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” six weeks after invading Iraq. Although we shouldn’t be harsh: Liz Truss listed leading the nation in mourning the late Queen as her big achievement in office.

Starmer’s, as he pointed out yet again, was winning the election. The list of things done since then was slightly more vague. But again, Boris Johnson’s departing speech claimed credit for a high-speed train line to Manchester and a number of hospitals that still do not, as such, exist. At least Starmer could truthfully say that he was leaving “with a smile”. Was he also, as he claimed, going “with good grace”? Well, unlike Johnson, he managed to get through the speech without attacking the people who forced hi

With that, he was off to Buckingham Palace, where the band was playing a medley of Bon Jovi songs. Shot through the heart, and only himself to blame, he gave Labour a bad name.

But if Starmer was going out in a blaze of inglory, the rest of us were only halfway there. While the King conducted his exit interview in the Palace’s Chinese Dining Room (imagine having a different space to eat every takeaway) we had to hold on, ready or not, through the hour in which we were without a prime minister and living, as it were, on a prayer.

But compared to some of the speakers who followed, Young was Plato rolled into Demosthenes. Representative of the American contingent was Jack Posobiec, who had come to tell us about the stories the media doesn’t tell us about. In his case, it turns out the media hasn’t told him anything about life or politics in the UK. Watching him deliver lines that clearly get big rounds of applause stateside to total silence in London was fascinating. “I believe God has a plan for Donald Trump!” he declared. “It is only by turning to God that we can save the West,” he said, looking baffled at the silence that greeted him.

That wasn’t a problem for Matt Goodwin. He was described as a “veteran” of the Gorton and Denton by-election, which is a funny way to spell “loser”. Goodwin’s theme was that the British political class hates the British people. This would explain why he was so keen to get into parliament, because few people seem to hate Britain more than Goodwin. His speech attacked our police, our foreign policy, our schools and universities, and quite a lot of our people.

Which people? Well, as he closed, he told us what he wanted to see: “a nation that looks and feels like something we know and something our ancestors built.” That might have been a complaint about modern architecture, but is it possible there’s some other thing about the way that the nation looks which Goodwin doesn’t like? It did feel like we were getting to the heart of who we’re Saving The West from.

Nothing seems to become prime ministers like the way they leave the job. Margaret Thatcher’s final Prime Minister’s Questions saw her delighting in a final moment of combat. Tony Blair’s featured political insight and a nice turn of phrase. Boris Johnson’s was full of bitterness that his MPs had rejected his brilliance. And Keir Starmer’s? Much like the man himself, it was long-winded but good-natured, dignified but self-satisfied.

He was greeted by such a roar of approval that you might have thought Labour MPs liked him. Let’s just say they have all felt more warmly since he announced he was off. The event had the air of a retirement party where people have realised there’s no longer any need to complain about the way he keeps putting the wrong paper in the photocopier.

Even Kemi Badenoch was generous, something that doesn’t come naturally. “I wanted to make sure I got the tone right today,” she opened, in what I’m choosing to take as a knowing acknowledgement that this isn’t her s

Nothing seems to become prime ministers like the way they leave the job. Margaret Thatcher’s final Prime Minister’s Questions saw her delighting in a final moment of combat. Tony Blair’s featured political insight and a nice turn of phrase. Boris Johnson’s was full of bitterness that his MPs had rejected his brilliance. And Keir Starmer’s? Much like the man himself, it was long-winded but good-natured, dignified but self-satisfied.

He was greeted by such a roar of approval that you might have thought Labour MPs liked him. Let’s just say they have all felt more warmly since he announced he was off. The event had the air of a retirement party where people have realised there’s no longer any need to complain about the way he keeps putting the wrong paper in the photocopier.

What is Kemi Badenoch’s theory of Tunbridge Wells? In one of her many lengthy podcast appearances last week (we listen so you don’t have to), she laughed at the idea that the Liberal Democrats had cost her party the election. Her view remains the one she set out during the leadership campaign, that voters rejected the Tories because they had “talked right but governed left”.

It’s easy to see why this was a winning message in a party leadership contest: we just need to be truer to ourselves! Our ideas were good ones, but we were let down by wicked lefties Boris and Rishi! But it really doesn’t explain the swathe of Lib Dem seats in the Home Counties: half the constituencies in Surrey now have Lib Dem MPs.

“I have done nothing wrong,” Farage said. “I have not broken the law in any way at all.” The second statement, close observers will note, does not mean quite the same thing as the first. Had he broken Parliament’s rules? “The code applies to members in all aspects of their public life. It does not seek to regulate what members do in their purely personal lives.” Perhaps he is going to argue that you can take what you like from someone, so long as they call you “Daddy”.

That, for readers who haven’t been keeping up, is how George Cottrell, known around the Reform office as “Posh George”, refers to Farage. Cottrell is an extremely rich young man who served a jail term for wire fraud after meeting undercover FBI officers pretending to be drug dealers who needed help laundering money. If Cottrell’s name rings a bell, it might be because he has a new book out, the snappily titled How To Launder Money.

It was a report about undeclared gifts from Cottrell that sparked the latest round of questions about who exactly is paying for all the Reform leader’s champagne and houses. “The new attack from the media is that somehow I am a crook,” Farage said, in a clip that was in no way a hostage to fortune. “I am dishonest.” Look, that’s what he said. I just write it down.

He’s off again! I feel like I’ve spent most of my life covering Nigel Farage’s departures from parts of public life, and yet every time I turn around, he’s popped back up, complaining about the unfairness of it all. Tuesday’s resignation from Parliament wasn’t even a real one: he’s leaving to fight a by-election on the great national issue of our time: should Nigel Farage have to explain who’s paying him?

We should be clear that the question isn’t whether the Reform leader should be allowed to accept millions of pounds in gifts, work for a TV channel, promote financial investments or take tens of thousands in speaking fees around the world. All of that is completely allowed. The only question is whether he should have to tell the rest of us about it. For some reason, this wasn’t exactly how he put it.

Farage says he'll make "a statement on my future in public life" at 2pm.

All of this is, as I say, the kind of quite normal thing that any friend would do for another. Hutton might toss Oiky Ben a book he’s finished reading, and Oiky Ben might rent a five-storey house in Belgravia from which Hutton could work. Who keeps track of such things?

Far too much has been made of Ben’s habit of referring to Hutton by an affectionate nickname. After all, what could be more normal than one adult man calling another, to whom he is not related, “Daddy”? I assure you, such things happened all the time in the gulags where I spent my adolescence.

Then there is the matter of Oiky Ben’s so-called “conviction”. It is a sad thing when simply pleading guilty to fraud and going to jail is enough to see someone treated as a criminal. Which of us, after all, can honestly say we have not offered money laundering advice to undercover FBI agents? If a youthful mistake like that is enough to stop someone being able to buy things for a friend, then our public life will be a great dea

Readers will doubtless be aware that, following the “Cash-for-Quips” scandal of the 1990s, in which it emerged that a small number of humourists had managed to make a living out of writing jokes, political satire has been subject to a tight system of regulation, with gagmeisters required to declare all relevant gifts and donations. Over the weekend, the irresponsible gutter muckrakers of the Sunday Times published a deeply irresponsible report into Hutton’s relationship with a younger colleague known to all of us simply as “Oiky Ben”.

It has been suggested by some that Oiky Ben is a member of The Critic’s staff, pumping out “hot takes” on the nature of modern Conservatism and attacks on Rory Stewart from a hide-out somewhere in Eastern Europe. But following an extensive shredding operation, I can confirm that although Oiky Ben is often seen at Critic events, he is simply an enthusiastic supporter of the magazine’s mission of taking Britain back to a more civilised age of gentlemen wea

Keir Starmer’s remaining time answering prime minister’s questions can now be measured in minutes, but no one could accuse him of making the most of it. On Wednesday he continued his habit of offering opening observations about the state of the world. These often have the air of a football team passing the ball around to run down the clock: you don’t begrudge a mention of the Venezuelan earthquake, but did we really need a shout-out for the 78th birthday of the National Health Service?

Apparently we did. Lib Dem MP Al Pinkerton had the first question. “Can I associate myself,” he began, “with both the condolences and also birthday good wishes to the NHS?” It will be a relief to the NHS that Al has associated himself with the good wishes for its 78th birthday. Though we shouldn’t laugh: it’s possible the health service is in a mess because it’s been sulking since everyone forgot its 77th birthday.

With his plans still opaque, it was tricky for Badenoch to attack them, so she was vague. We learned that she’s a devolution sceptic, but it’s hardly a surprise that she doesn’t trust distant mayors to run things: she pretty clearly thinks that everyone who isn’t her is an idiot.

Someone asked about her comparison of Bridget Phillipson to a member of the Gestapo. “She’s putting ideology above the welfare of children,” Badenoch explained. “That’s what that reference was about.” It’s not that this is incorrect in its description of what the Gestapo did, but it’s somewhat… incomplete. We were left wondering whether, somehow, Britain hasn’t discussed the Second World War enough.

But this was a mere amuse-bouche to the comparison that was to come. Why had she compared Ed Miliband to the Nigerian dictatorship? “My childhood was spent in Nigeria. Nigeria is an oil -producing country that never had any electricity,” Badenoch explained. “Why? Because it had bad policies from military dictato

“We need to change politics, and we need to do it now!” Andy Burnham announced, to loud applause. Well, we need to do it in three weeks, anyway. Britain is currently in a weird penumbra period. Keir Starmer has resigned as Labour leader and yet continues as prime minister, announcing defence plans and anything else he can push out the door. There is only one candidate to replace him, yet we have to sit through nearly a month of Labour just checking that no one else wants the job. It’s a fitting end to Starmer’s time in office that it involves sticking rigidly to a procedure that serves no purpose.

In the meantime those of us anxious for what the future will hold can pore over Burnham’s speech in Manchester on Monday. The location was a conscious choice: for decades there have been accusations that Britain is too London-centric. Burnham proposes to fix that by making it Manchester-centric, which will be a huge relief to everyone in Newcastle.

At this, Reeves looked close to tears, managing a small forced smile as Starmer sang her praises in reply. If the prime minister may be within sight of the point where losing office is a relief, the chancellor is still some distance away. Badenoch punched the bruise, listing Reeves’s failures with some pleasure, before moving on to the other Tory hate figure, Ed Miliband. Not everyone would have the ironclad self-confidence to attack measures to tackle climate change on a day when schools were closed by heat, but the Conservative leader is untroubled by doubt.

Starmer interestingly offered no words of support for Miliband. Perhaps he’s still stung by his former ally’s role in his expulsion. “The test for every prime minister,” he said instead, “is handing over the country in better shape than you found it. I know I could do that, which is more than can be said for her predecessor, her predecessor’s predecessor, and her predecessor’s predecessor’s predecessor.” And, frankly, either of

We are all now connoisseurs of these events. David Cameron toddled off humming a happy little tune, aware that he’d left a bit of a mess, confident that was someone else’s problem. Theresa May choked up, broken personally and politically by her effort to deliver something she believed to be a terrible idea. Boris Johnson seethed with resentment at the unworthy backstabbers who had betrayed their glorious God-King. Liz Truss seemed in shock at the suddenness of it all, which was fair enough. Rishi Sunak, with typical sure-footedness, announced an election from the inside of a car wash.

Starmer? His rhetorical range was, as ever, “headmaster disappointed about Year 10’s antics in the science labs”.

He came out with his wife Victoria, and they exchanged brave smiles before he approached the cameras. “Walking up this street two years ago was the proudest moment of my life,” he said, perhaps hoping that we would all think about what we’d done.

At least Starmer’s party had won. Of Nigel Farage, there was at first no sign. The Reform leader remains in hiding, fearfully peering around the curtains in case he should see a journalist asking about the many millions in his bank account. Think of it as the Grifter Protection Programme. Helpfully this also gets around questions about whether Reform has peaked.

He did pop up after breakfast, releasing a proof of life video from a field in a secret location. It would be interesting to see him do an entire general election like this, perhaps holding up copies of that morning’s Daily Mail to refute the rumours that he had fled the country or was in a coma.

There are places in Britain that are north of Manchester, Andy. The single most irritating thing about Andy Burnham’s Professional Northerner shtick is that it’s predicated on the idea that Manchester, a flourishing city 160 miles from London, is somehow an utterly alien culture that no one south of Birmingham can comprehend. On Wednesday he even released a video of himself reading the poem “Anthem of the North”. Tony Blair was brought up in Durham and went to school in Edinburgh — both places that would view Manchester as “The South”. Gordon Brown was from Fife, even northier. Neither of them did this.

NIGEL FARAGE — AN APOLOGY. Last week, I noted that since The Guardian revealed that he’d accepted a £5 million “gift” from a crypto-billionaire, the leader of Reform has carefully avoided places where people might ask him questions. In response, I find I’m now being shunned by Reform: when shame-vacuum finance spokesman Jenrick spoke on Monday morning, I was the only sketchwriter not invited.

To some journalists, the discovery that they were no longer going to have to attend events with Richard Tice would be a source of profound relief. Such hacks might take it as a compliment to have so riled the not-at-all fragile people who run Reform that they enacted petty revenge. But I am not that kind of writer. Goodness no.

So I would like to take this opportunity to say that I apologise for ever implying that Farage might be scared of questions. Quite the opposite: the leader of Reform is a giant among pygmies, a vigorously healthy man of tremendous moral and physical courage who has only

Of the Reform leader there was no sign. It is now 50 days since the once unavoidable Farage has held a press conference. By an astonishing coincidence it is 42 days since the Guardian revealed that Farage had received a £5 million gift from a crypto billionaire. Farage has claimed that he needs the money to pay for his security, which seems to be largely devoted to ensuring no one can ask him how he funded his various houses.

Tice was asked about this. Was Nigel frightened of scrutiny? “Nigel Farage is not scared!” Why had he gone to ground? “It’s part of actually showing that Reform has talent across the whole board,” Tice claimed, not entirely convincingly. (Farage would later hold a pseudo-press conference up in Makerfield, with invited journalists whose scrutiny included asking the Dear Leader if he agreed that Brexit was a good thing, that Andy Burnham was a bad thing, and that Rupert Lowe’s Restore Party was the worst thing of all. It didn’t scream “brave”.)

“Alot of people had given all sorts of opinions,” Kemi Badenoch told us, discussing the horrible murder of Henry Nowak. “Some have tried to score political points.” Not something the Conservative leader was going to do. Far from it! Though we would learn that she did in fact have some opinions, and indeed was about to argue that the teenager’s death proved she had been right all along.

I don’t want to make it sound like Badenoch was being cynical. Her speech on Tuesday morning at the Institute for Government opened with a description of how shocked she had been by the case, and we should take her at her word. It is simply that, by happy chance, the Tory leader always finds that whatever just happened has proved her right. Her self-confidence is ironclad. Had she been in charge on the Titanic, she would still have been insisting that the iceberg had come off worse as the waters closed over her head.

Yes, hunter-gatherers do have a sustainable lifestyle, so long as you think infanticide is fine.

In Parliament on Wednesday we got a rare treat: a live sighting of Nigel Farage. Like the great bustard, Farage was once ubiquitous in Britain, holding constant press conferences to reveal policies that would subsequently be recanted, sometimes at the actual event announcing them. Biologists debated this behaviour: was it a mating signal, or a desire to mark territory? Whatever the reason, the hearty Farage chuckle seemed as much a part of national life as a batting collapse or a Eurovision disappointment.

But in recent weeks, Farage has almost completely disappeared, hunted close to extinction by journalists asking questions like: “hang on, five million quid?” and “define ‘gift’?”. Suddenly the Reform Party leader could only be seen in protected spaces — soft interviews with sympathetic hacks, or his own social media feed — and then only rarely. Even after his party’s local elections triumph, when his usual behaviour would have been a strut through the Sunday morning interview shows

“I’ve seen people laughing about it,” she went on, reproachfully. Damn right you have. Times are desperate on these islands, and we have to take our pleasure where we can. Laughing at the SNP has long been close to a crime. We forget now, but the first time we encountered populism here was during the independence referendum of 2014, when Sturgeon’s mentor Alex Salmond would invite fanatical supporters into press conferences to boo journalists whose questions he didn’t like.

Sturgeon may have been more likeable, but she similarly surrounded herself with people who were unlikely to challenge her. Perhaps had she been a little more willing to hear disagreement, she might have achieved more. But instead she kept her husband on as chief executive of the party she was leading, and ignored people who resigned over its finances.

Although when Sturgeon sees remarks like that, she knows what she thinks. “I’m just going to say it, there’s a deep misogyny in that,” she explained. “If the leader in question had been a man and it had been women in their lives who’d done bad things I don’t think those kind of commentary pieces would be written.” Well, maybe. Unless it turns out that Victoria Starmer has bought a Winnebago with stolen Labour Party cash, we simply can’t know whether that would lead to the odd critical article about her husband.

“Look, I understand that question.” Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister of Scotland and leader of the SNP, was preparing to explain why she hadn’t noticed her husband buying a campervan. Or a coffee machine that cost a grand. Or a coffee machine that cost two grand. Or another coffee machine that cost two grand. Every marriage is at some level a mystery to outsiders, but most of us think we’d notice if our spouse were gearing up to open a mobile branch of Costa.

It was very decent of her to understand why people were asking how it came to be that she hadn’t noticed her house beginning to resemble a Saudi prince’s third home, with games consoles stacked next to Mont Blanc pens and a £2,600 salt-and-pepper grinder set. It was especially decent as it would turn out that anyone asking that question hates women. Over the course of Sturgeon’s hour-long interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, we would learn that only Sid The Sexist thinks that husbands and wives discuss small matters l

As Keir Starmer rose to begin Prime Minister’s Questions, an alarm sounded through the House of Commons: “WARNING! PRIME MINISTERIAL JOKE IS APPROACHING.” A clerk in a high-vis vest ran along the front bench putting out orange cones. Up in the gallery, we donned hard hats and secured loose items.

“Mr Speaker,” Starmer began, as around him Labour MPs tightened their seatbelts, held hands and offered silent prayers. “It would be remiss of me not to comment on one of Manchester’s great heroes moving on after almost a decade.” This joke had been cast in iron in Britain’s last remaining foundry, and shipped down the M1 on a low loader at speeds never exceeding 25 mph. A team of Downing Street wheezemasters in dayglo vests were now signalling as a crane lowered it into position. “WARNING! PRIME MINISTERIAL JOKE IS APPROACHING.”

The Labour leader took a breath. “So, let me congratulate Pep Guardiola on all his success at Manchester City.” Boom! As the dust cleared, we looked about to check

This is my final column in this slot, as I’m stepping back to give more time to writing books. I wrote my first film review, for Edinburgh Student, in 1993, and, when I got the chance to do the job again, 30 years later, I was delighted.

Much had changed in the interval. In earlier days, distributors were desperate to be reviewed, sending us invites to local screenings in the post. Nowadays critics are the enemy. Many of the screenings I attend are packed with influencers, who can be relied upon to gush on the socials. Grumpy gits wondering if the third act worked aren’t wanted.

Perhaps the industry can be forgiven for a defensive crouch. Ticket sales remain 30 per cent down on pre-pandemic levels. Covid, and then the writers’ strike, wrought havoc with production. I can remember several months where I worried there would be nothing to write about.

But I’m stubbornly optimistic for the art form. Months like this one, where I can pick out two new films that are simply excellent, c

Indeed so reluctant are the Great Men of Brexit to discuss their triumph that none of them had turned up on Tuesday. There was a time when an event like this would have featured at least one of Farage, Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg. The best this lot could do is John Redwood. It was like one of those reunion tours of 1970s bands that, following a court case, feature only the members whose names you had forgotten.

Frost spoke after Campbell Bannerman. He too was baffled by Farage’s lack of enthusiasm for discussing whether making it harder to sell things to France had been quite the economic triumph we were promised.

He recalled the morning after the 2016 referendum. “We need to recapture some of that sense of excitement,” he said. He was clearly not at the Vote Leave press conference I attended, where Johnson and Michael Gove had the air of men who had never expected the cursed monkey paw to actually grant their wish.