Once upon a time, back in those halcyon days before unexplained back pain and the whole world looking like that cartoon with the “this is fine” dog, the upcoming weekend would have marked the start of silly season. Parliament is in recess, the country is winding down for the summer: normally, the news would have gone to the beach.
Silly season has not been what it once was for some years now. At the height of the Brexit crisis, it felt as if politics never stopped, no matter how much everyone involved may have wanted it to. Then Boris Johnson took over, and the sort of nonsense stories that would once have only been rolled out during August began to form a central plank of the government comms strategy. This year, while there are many adjectives it’s tempting to attach to the stories currently emanating from Westminster in a sort of viral aerosol of news, “silly” isn’t among them.
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