Monday

One of the more depressing signs of ageing is the frequency with which unsolicited mail offering me a first viewing of an exclusive new retirement village drops through the letterbox. Today I got one for a development in Clapham where I could “experience an independent lifestyle in a secure environment”. Needless to say, the brochure went straight in the bin but I am now starting to worry that the advertisers know something about me that I don’t, and that sooner or later a brochure will arrive and I will think, “You know what? That’s just what I’ve always wanted.” The kiss of death. Another sign of getting on a bit is that Prince Charles at 70 no longer feels so much older than me. In my 20s, Charles felt as if he was from a different species, let alone generation. Now, at just eight years older than me, he feels almost a kindred spirit; in ageing body parts, if nothing else. It must be weird reaching an age at which most people have retired and knowing that you have yet to really start your main job. The Queen’s refusal to abdicate is becoming increasingly baffling. Most people in their 90s would both fancy easing up a bit and also want their child to be fulfilled. But the Queen just plods on. There must be more to it than duty. Either she must truly believe Charles would make a hopeless king or part of her believes that without being queen she has no sense of purpose. It’s a question no royal biographer has ever satisfactorily answered.

Tuesday

Every cloud has a silver lining. The afternoon was shaping up to be a humiliation for the de facto deputy prime minister, David Lidington, who had drawn the short straw of trying to argue the government’s case for why it didn’t need to provide MPs with the legal analysis of its Brexit negotiations in a binding debate brought by the Labour party. Lidington is one of the more gracious and reasonable members of Theresa May’s cabinet and it rapidly became evident that he didn’t believe a word of the case he was being asked to argue. He ended with a plaintive plea that if the opposition were just to forget the whole thing, he was sure he could find a way to let MPs see some of the legal advice at some point or other. This call was not heeded however, and with the Eurosceptic Conservatives of the European Research Group and the DUP voting with the opposition, the government and Lidington were left in a state of severe embarrassment. Then salvation. News broke that the UK and the EU had agreed a draft Brexit withdrawal agreement and Lidington’s defeat in the Commons barely got a mention. In fact things got so frenetic that Reuters accidentally reported that two government ministers had resigned and the pound promptly fell. Mind you, if it had been Chris Grayling’s resignation that had been misreported the pound would have soared.

Kylie to Charles: ‘And what do you do?’ Photograph: WPA Pool/Getty Images

Wednesday

In a counter-intuitive report, the investment firm Brewin Dolphin reports that, far from children being helped out by the Bank of Mum and Dad, more than a third of those in their 20s and 30s are offering financial support to their parents. To which I can only say, bring it on. My two children, aged 26 and 23, show no signs of feeling in any way obliged to make financial contributions to the cost of my lifestyle. There again, the fault could well lie with me and my wife for calling them the wrong names. ValueMyCV, an algorithm developed by the website Adzuna, can calculate how much you are likely to earn based on their first names. My daughter Anna can expect to make £30,522 and my son Robbie should be on £32,413. To which I again say, if only. Their prospects would have been immeasurably improved if I had called them both Ed. Eds make £61,362. The highest earning woman’s name – still only 318th on the overall list – was Liz at £38,792. I guess the Queen bumps that average up a bit. Still, Anna and Robbie could have done worse. Paiges only earn £20,190 and Reeces make £22,952.

Thursday

Days like these seem to be coming round ever more frequently in Westminster. There must be entropy in the air. It began with the news that a junior minister no one had heard of was quitting a job no one knew he had. Then Dominic Raab resigned as Brexit secretary on the grounds that the deal the Brexit secretary had negotiated was rubbish; quickly followed by Esther McVey trying to sign on for universal credit. Good luck with that. By the end of the day, three more ministers, anonymous even to their close relatives, chose to step down. In the meantime Theresa May put in a marathon three-hour stint at the despatch box in the Commons – probably the only place she could guarantee she would still be prime minister – defending the indefensible. She knows that everyone knows her deal is worse than remaining in the EU and nothing like what she had promised the Brexit fantasists and yet she carried on trying to sell something she couldn’t even sell to at least 10 members of her cabinet. All that her deal has going for it is that it isn’t quite as bad as no deal and it’s clear there is no parliamentary majority for either. And yet she went on. And on. Most people would have needed the afternoon off after a punishment beating like that, but shortly after 5pm she was back giving a press conference in which yet again she had nothing to say. She was there because she was there. Nothing had changed. She would carry on to the bitter end. It was like the final scene from the cult film RoboCop where the anti-hero keeps going while his armour is steadily blasted away under heavy fire. There’s something almost admirable in her stubbornness, in her refusal to engage with reality. But as a strategy, it’s doomed.

Friday

The outgoing executive chairman of the Football Association, Richard Scudamore, has said he is “embarrassed” that the 20 Premier League clubs are so grateful to him they are each stumping up £250,000 by way of a leaving present. Though not so embarrassed that he refused to accept. Whatever happened to the usual whip-round, leaving card and a John Lewis voucher? It now seems that some people are better off leaving their jobs than actually doing them. The Persimmon boss Jeff Fairburn got his P45 after his £75m bonus became a “distraction”: a distraction from some of the other excessive payouts at the building company. And only this year, at a time when there is a massive hole in the pension pot of Royal Mail workers, the chief executive, Moya Greene, was awarded a £1.3m payout for deciding that the time had come for her to leave. Not for being sacked, just because she had had enough of doing a job for which she was already well remunerated. To add insult to injury, the Royal Mail decided Greene’s successor, Rico Back, who was already working for one of its subsidiary firms, needed a £5.8m sweetener for the pain of being promoted. So I’m putting the Guardian on notice. When I do eventually go, I’m not accepting anything under seven figures.

Digested week, digested: Unity in disunity