Aunty Matter

🚨 WATCH: Keir Starmer says he won’t give a resignation timetable if Andy Burnham wins the Makerfield by-election

The substance of the piece did not persuade me. “Have these people never read, say, The Feminine Mystique, which exhaustively cataloged the despair of mid-century stay-at-home mothers?” Well, Other Helen, since you asked…

Shakespeare’s Odyssey: the fight for heroism never ends. Project 39 continues with Troilus and Cressida - Act 2, Scene 3. Ulysses is advising a sulking Achilles, who has been ignored by the Greek leadership after being manipulated into jealousy of Ajax. Ulysses’ argument here is clear: time will devour all achievements, so you must fight to remain current. His argument has taken on an ironic significance recently. Ulysses is the Latinized name of Odysseus, who is currently seeing his own fame tampered with by Hollywood in Christopher Nolan’s film. Some critics have suggested that Shakespeare presents the Greek world as more amoral, abstract and cynical than the Roman world. This is perhaps due to the influence of Virgil, who presents the Trojans as the good guys and progenitors of the Romans. Ulysses is played by Morgan Watkins

For the second year running, the National Audit Office has been unable to sign off the UK's Whole of Government Accounts. The auditor could not form an opinion on whether the figures were free from material misstatement. This has only happened twice in the WGA's entire history. Both times in the last two years. The reason for this is local audit. Just 1% of councils and other local bodies published audited accounts on time for 2022/23. By the time the NAO went to compile the Whole of Government Accounts, only 10% of English councils had submitted reliable data. For 2023/24 that fell to 4%. £73 billion of public sector spending in the latest WGA sits unaudited. Net debt and net income are out by tens of billions. The Chair of the Public Accounts Committee called the UK public finances "virtually a closed book." You have to ask yourself how bad the real picture is. This is not a technical accounting story. The state has lost the ability to verify its own books, at the moment that verification matters most. The OBR forecasts against data the auditor cannot verify. The Treasury sets fiscal rules against it. Gilt markets price sovereign risk against it. We argue about headroom. We argue about debt sustainability. We argue about tax envelopes. The numbers underneath those arguments aren't even signed off. The auditor general has said so. Twice. How bad are the public finances? We don't know. The OBR doesn't know. The Treasury doesn't know. The people sitting in Number 11 don't know. That's the real story. What a mess.

If Burnham wins, a million low skilled migrants will be allowed to stay and get British citizenship in the next few years. And he won’t stop the boats. Instead he will put them in bedsits on your street. To pay for it all? He’ll have to hike your taxes.

Sunday essay up! Panda La Terriere reports back from The Future of Theatre Conference 2026 and finds an industry in a strange bind.