After 14 years of Tory rule, the Guardian’s parliamentary sketch writer thought he had seen it all.Westminster would surely tick along nicely once Keir Starmer’s party took over.How wrong he was...

I feel I should probably start with an apology.A few days after the 2024 general election, I wrote that it felt as if the grownups were back in charge.It wasn’t as if I was carried away by the vision of Keir Starmer or the charisma of Rachel Reeves.More that I felt we had regained a basic level of competence.That politics would become business as usual rather than the breathless psychodrama of the past 10 years.

You could go to bed at night relatively confident that the country would be more or less recognisable when you woke up.There would be no more mad people doing mad things as we raced through five or six news cycles in the course of a couple of hours.And part of me was a little concerned.Because what is good for economic stability and social justice isn’t necessarily good for a sketch writer.Dull, well-intentioned politicians putting in place dull, well-intentioned policies, and a government that is ticking over more or less OK, do not necessarily make for great entertainment.

So what would I write about?It turns out that I needn’t have worried.For the last year of the Conservative government, it felt as if Westminster was demob happy.There was no real jeopardy.Everyone knew what was coming next.There would be a general election at some point in 2024 and the Tories would lose.

Not because there was a great outpouring of love for Starmer’s Labour but because after 14 years of austerity, Brexit, Partygate and Liz Truss, everyone was sick to death of the Conservatives,People wanted change,So nothing the Tories did in that final year was of any real consequence,We could all sit back and enjoy the ride while having a laugh,It was Rishi Sunak’s bad luck to be prime minister in the dog days of a Tory government that had long since run out of ideas.

Most politicians, Sunak included, are control freaks.They like to think they can make a difference, can bend reality to their will.But the one thing they can’t control is their own space-time continuum.If a politician is very lucky, he or she might get one shot at Downing Street in their lifetime.But it won’t necessarily be at a time of their choosing.

Sunak’s time came when even someone as naturally entitled as he is could see he was bound to fail,And yet he couldn’t turn down the job,Better to have been a rubbish prime minister for two years than not to have been prime minister at all,At least some people might recognise him in 10 years’ time when he joins the ranks of ex-prime ministers at the Cenotaph for the Remembrance Day service,Which is more than anyone could say for Truss.

Credit to Sunak: he did at least try.Inside a prime minister desperately trying to manage a Tory party lurching ever further to the right, there were the occasional glimpses of a decent person trying to get out.He was, though, the embodiment of Samuel Beckett.Fail.Fail again.

Fail better.Almost everything he tried fell apart in his hands.There were his five pledges.“Judge me on them,” he said.And we did.

Only one of them – to halve inflation – was delivered.And that one had very little to do with him.The fall in inflation was more a global trend from which he benefited.Nothing defined Sunak more than his exit.Walking out of Downing Street in a torrential downpour to call the election.

Having forgotten to bring an umbrella.Anyone sensible – me included – had remained indoors and watched the announcement on TV.No point in all of us getting drenched.Most people even missed the speech as an anti-Brexit campaigner was playing Things Can Only Get Better through a loudspeaker just outside the Downing Street gates.Things Can Only Get Wetter more like.

Then there were the D-day commemorations in which Sunak left the veterans on the beaches.And the No 10 betting scandal over the date of the election, in which one of his closest aides was implicated.It was as if the Tories had a death wish and were actively trying to lose the election.Someone should have told them they didn’t need any extra help.Come polling day, Sunak looked dazed and confused, as if he couldn’t wait for it all to be over.

The results came as a relief.Gone and almost certainly soon to be forgotten.The first inkling that the new Labour government might also be accident-prone came early on with the freebies row.Starmer had campaigned on the slogan that Labour would be squeaky clean.No more Tory sleaze.

Starmer helping himself to a few suits and extra pairs of glasses and Reeves enjoying corporate hospitality at a Sabrina Carpenter concert might not be up there with Partygate or dodgy PPE contracts, but it was not a good look.As head of the first Labour government for 14 years, Starmer knew he would be under scrutiny from the media.This was Politics 101.And yet he and the chancellor couldn’t resist.When most of the country was still struggling with low growth and a cost of living crisis, they were getting the perks.

One rule for them, another for us.It was a similar story a year or so later when Angela Rayner was found not to have paid the correct stamp duty on a flat in Hove.Now I’m sure the trust arrangements were complicated, but you would expect a deputy prime minister and housing secretary to go the extra mile to make sure everything was correct.That error cost Rayner her jobs and took one of the few Labour politicians who can connect with Labour voters out of the frontline.Just when she was needed most.

Then there were the policy announcements and the budget,A Labour government that didn’t look much like the Labour government that voters had given a landslide majority,There was a lack of confidence in the administration,As if all its energy had been spent on winning an election it was always going to win, and no one had thought of what they would do when they were in office,The removal of the winter fuel allowance.

The pointless fight with the farmers over inheritance tax.The welfare bill designed to remove payments to hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people.A bill that was then hollowed out because of backbench rebellions while the government tried to pretend that nothing had really changed.The increasingly rightwing rhetoric on immigration.The “island of strangers” speech.

The fanfare surrounding the return of one asylum seeker to France only for him to find his way back to the UK within a month,All this rather drowned out what good news – hospital waiting lists coming down – there was,It seemed as if Labour was lurching from one crisis to the next,The cabinet reshuffle in which ministers who Starmer had thought had been doing a rubbish job were promptly given another one,Failing upwards.

Mostly, though, you couldn’t escape the feeling that Starmer just wasn’t very good at politics.That No 10 had no control of the news grid and were waking up each morning just as surprised as we were that the country was falling apart.Take next week’s budget.Little more than two weeks ago, Reeves was giving a surprise press conference inside Downing Street at 8.10am – something almost unheard of.

“I want to be clear with the country,” she said.Only she was anything but, as she couldn’t bring herself to say the one thing she had come to say.We were supposed to deduce via interpretive dance that she was planning to break a manifesto promise and increase income tax by 2p.Only it turns out that was a false start.Scrub the previous 10 days of briefings.

Because now Reeves has changed her mind.Right hand, meet left hand.Having said she was going to do what was right for the country and not the party, she has now realised she would rather do things the other way round.Then we had the absurd spectacle of No 10 briefing journalists that everything was going so well that Starmer was going to fight off any leadership challenge from Wes Streeting.For reasons best known to themselves, Downing Street thought this made them look hard.

It was only the following day they realised they had created a totally unnecessary shitshow and tried to deny they had anything to do with it.Starmer promised to come down hard on whoever had done the briefings.In time he will have to sack himself.But for now he is happy to believe it was divine intervention.The worst game of Westminster No-Cluedo: Keir Starmer in the Cabinet Office with the career suicidal tendencies.

It increasingly feels as if the government is doing all this solely for my benefit.To give me something to write about.I’m not complaining.Though you may well be.But never let it be said that the Tories aren’t doing their bit to liven up British politics.

Since the election they seem to have positively embraced their own descent into irrelevance.However unpopular Labour are with the public – current opinion polls have them on less than 20% – the Conservatives can still go lower.For now, at least, Kemi Badenoch is still their leader – she has been in post for just over a year – and looks relatively secure.Not even Robert “Honest Bob” Jenrick is mad enough to want to become leader given the current state of the party.At least, I don’t think he’s quite that mad