Monday

Theresa May, take note. Emmanuel Macron’s personal ratings may be falling, but the French president is still box office gold. In its first three days, the new Élysée Palace gift shop sold more than £300,000 of Macron tat, ranging from postcards of the smiling president selling at a bargain €2 to three gold bracelets engraved with the words “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” for a cool €250 each. Also available are the usual assortment of T-shirts, mugs and key rings – not to mention a box of seven red, white and blue macaroons. With doubts over just how long the British prime minister will remain in office – though the Tory party conference programme has her optimistically down to give a two-and-a-half-hour closing speech entitled General Election 2022 – it’s surely now time for May to cash in while the going is still good. Though videos of her finest performances at PMQs and limited edition copies of her Amanda Wakeley leather trousers might be hard to shift, there must surely be a huge market for other memorabilia. Postcards of her sitting alone at a EU summit personally signed by the Four Pot Plants would fly off the shelf. As would T-shirts with slogans like “strong and stable”, “no magic money tree” and “nothing has changed”. Call it the Brexit dividend.

Tuesday

How times change. Just four years ago, newspapers and news broadcasters would go mob-handed to the Lib Dem conference. Now the media centre more closely resembles a ghost ship and those journalists that were in Brighton struggled to get their stories into print. Vince Cable was so concerned his leader’s speech would be totally ignored – we all kind of know where he stands on Brexit – that his advisers briefed everyone the night before that he would be saying the words “erotic spasm” in the hope of getting some passing attention. Unfortunately, when his big moment came, Vince rather fluffed his lines and blurted out “exotic spresm” instead. Which got him the headlines. Just not the ones for which he had hoped. Still, one thing about the Lib Dem conference that doesn’t change is that the party members are always unfailingly friendly – and usually willing to think the best of their leaders even when they privately think they might be a bit useless. Although not always so privately. One of the traditions of every conference is the Glee Club, at which members get to have a sing song and vent their true feelings. Fair to say that Vince’s call for a “march of the moderates” and for the party to be led by someone who isn’t necessarily a Lib Dem haven’t gone down that well. This year, there were two emergency submissions. The first was: “My old man’s a moderate / He wears a moderate’s hat / He used to be on Strictly / He lost it by a lap.” The second, sung to the tune of Men of Harlech, went: “Follow still the Vince who leads us / Soggy but not into Jesus / His reforms they do no please us / Making zero sense.” Both witty and funny. You won’t find this kind of dissent tolerated at either the Labour or Tory conferences.

Wednesday

It’s beginning to dawn on many UK farmers that the British government might not be quite so clued up as they had been led to believe. Not only do they now doubt that the current levels of subsidies they receive will continue post-Brexit, they also worry that their needs for seasonal workers to pick vegetables and soft fruit have not been fully understood. The latest cause for alarm has been a video produced by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to promote its vision for post-Brexit agriculture. It’s all very nostalgically rustic, with fields of barley rippling in the wind and glorious sunsets. A vision of mellow fruitfulness. Except for one thing. Some sections of it were filmed overseas. As the magazine Farmers’ Weekly has observed, the scene in which Defra promise that farmers can expect less red tape was actually footage of an inspector visiting a Slovenian cattle shed, while the section on British farmers being rewarded for improving air and water quality was filmed on a German farm. To complete the hat-trick of errors, the part where Defra promise kick-backs for farmers who try to prevent climate change was accompanied by a framer planting a Bonsai tree. We pay these people.

Thursday

The TV chef Jamie Oliver has revealed in a magazine interview that he has installed a spy app on his teenage daughters’ phones so that he can keep track of them at all times. “If one of them says ‘I’m going to Camden Town’ and I can see she has gone to Reading then we have a problem,” he says. I can’t help feeling that Oliver’s control freakery is a recipe for paranoia. After all, surely any halfway tech-savvy teenager will know how to switch off the location finder when it suits their purposes? At which point Oliver will go into full meltdown, unsure of whether his kids are just fed up with being watched or are off getting wasted somewhere they shouldn’t. Now that both my kids are well into their 20s and are comfortable telling us what they actually got up to in their teens, I feel profoundly relieved that I didn’t know. Ignorance was, if not bliss – as I never stopped worrying when our children were back later than they had promised – at least tolerable. I also like to believe that our children benefited from our laissez-faire approach as it indicated that on some level we did trust them to behave more or less sensibly. Oliver might be better advised to install some spy apps in the kitchens of his own restaurants. The last meal I had in a Jamie-themed diner was almost inedible.

Friday

I’ve always liked to think of myself as a relatively sharp TV viewer. In the past, I’ve sailed through countless multi-stranded series and kept up with relative ease. But I feel I might have met my match with Bodyguard. The first three episodes were a breeze: a thoroughly enjoyable, if barely credible, drama, but in episode four I began to struggle and by last week’s penultimate instalment I had to admit to my wife that I literally had no idea what was going on any more. To my relief, she said she too was hopelessly lost. There were just too many potential conspiracies going on that it became almost impossible to remember who all the characters were and who was supposed to be on whose side and my head was completely scrambled. Had the Muslim terrorists actually been working for MI5 all along? Were even MI5 still working for MI5? Was it the official wing of MI5 that was working with the Tory party to blow up Julia Montague or had the Tory party been infiltrated by the provisional wing of MI5? Were the police really the police? To add to the confusion we had an unseen mastermind who had predicted David Budd would try to kill himself and had replaced his bullets with blanks, leaving our bodyguard hero to run his own undercover operation while his colleagues tried to avoid mentioning his head wound or that he was quite seriously deranged. This is not to say I’m not totally hooked. Though I’m not counting on things becoming much clearer in Sunday’s final episode.

Digested week digested: “Your Chequers plans are unworkable.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Red rhino: ‘And I thought I looked ridiculous.’ Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA



