Toby Neal on shutting down Reform, Keir Starmer becoming unpredictable and miserable children

It's a return of Dick Emery, riding on the back of the electoral success which has seen Reform take control of some councils including Staffordshire's and expand its slither of representation in Parliament.

To be precise, it isn't actually a return of Dick Emery, but his most remembered character. And if his name conjures up an image of the window trick, you are mixing him up with Harry Worth.

Dick sometimes dressed as a woman - we won't venture into that territory - and played (among others) a character called Mandy, whose catchphrase was "ooo, you are awful!"

The connection with Reform is that politicians of other parties, and various commentators and influencers, think that, ooo, they are indeed awful, and it is their default position in regard to anything they say or do.

Mandy's punchline was "but I like you!" delivered with a forceful one-armed push of the shoulder and a smile, so it is there we diverge, as in the Reform context the punchline (no pun intended) is "and we don't like you at all."

In coming months there are going to be lots of instances of how awful Reform are as they put into practice their policies, when Nigel Farage tells them what they are. Mandy is going to be very busy.

In fact, on a recent Any Questions? the Reform chap had not even got the phrase "rape gangs" from his lips before Labour's Lucy Powell jumped in to metaphorically punch him in the chops.

It was telling, because it was a reflex reaction grounded in a position that they are Reform and therefore the appropriate response is to shut down, invalidate, and cancel.

As a number of people have since pointed out, it is an attitude and instinctive reaction which led to a climate in which nobody could raise legitimate concerns about the issue without being immediately knocked on the head like a whack-a-mole, with the upshot that victims were failed by the system.

Let's spare a sympathetic thought for those whose leader was elected last year and now they don't know what he is going to do from one day to the next.

Trump? No, he is a model of predictability. It is the poor newly-elected Labour MPs who are on a rollercoaster ride. They had barely warmed the green benches when they found themselves ordered to vote in favour of taking away winter fuel payments for pensioners.

Every day Sir Keir Starmer looks in the mirror and says: "Who shall I be today?"

He's been a Churchillian war leader (offering troops for Ukraine), a peacemaker (talks with his EU friends and partners), a lock-em-upper (right wingers only need apply), a welfare cuts hardliner and, for this week, supporter of a crackdown on immigration.

Some Labour MPs are rumoured to have survived the cull of those of a more left-leaning persuasion. What are they to do? How much more can they take?

With the enfeebled Tories wearing an invisibility cloak - sliding, in Sir Keir's words, into brain-dead oblivion - the traditional enemy of Labour leaders sit behind him in the Commons.

His enforcers will be on the lookout for plots, and whispers in quiet corners of "our time will come".

A judge has warned two men found guilty of cutting down a non-native sycamore tree that they could face a "lengthy period in custody."

Years ago I visited Culloden and discovered that the moorland site was covered with the stumps of trees which had been planted over the historic battlefield by the Forestry Commission in an appalling act of vandalism.

You can take it as read that the Forestry Commission was never prosecuted.

While that pair committed a crime, I can't say I'm a fan of trees being allowed to grow on Hadrian's Wall, however good the photo opportunity. I know what the Romans would have done.

The more is done to make the lives of British children better, the more miserable they get.

According to a Unicef report, the UK ranks near the bottom of a global league table for child wellbeing and teenage happiness.

They are a generation who, compared with yesteryear, have everything, and yet suffer the most profound of deprivations - that of happiness and emotional contentment.