Digested week: Tom Tugendhat is a serious politician. What’s he doing in a Reform-lite Tory frontbench? | John Crace

MondayIt’s the end of summer and Kemi Badenoch chose to mark the occasion with a reshuffle of her shadow cabinet. Her aim is apparently to get the Tories match fit in case Andy Burnham calls an early general election, but the vibes are much more rearranging the deckchairs on a sinking ship. After all, when the gene pool of talent is that small, there’s not much you can do. James Cleverly got the ball rolling by announcing he was planning to be the Conservative candidate for London mayor in two years’ time. He may have his work cut out. London is a liberal, multicultural city and unlikely to be won over by a party giving up on net zero and the European convention on human rights.Cleverly’s replacement as shadow housing secretary is Katie Lam, who was only elected two years ago but has been desperate to attract attention by consistently saying the most offensive thing she can think of. This may not end well. Priti Patel’s departure as foreign secretary was no great surprise as she has always been a liability, but Kemi’s decision to appoint Tom Tugendhat in her place did raise eyebrows. Tom has always been from the One Nation side of the party and Kemi didn’t seem to realise that when he said: “If I had known Kemi was this good I wouldn’t have stood against her,” he had merely been joking. He is at least a serious politician in the way Priti never was, but you also can’t help wondering if he is really signed up to Kemi’s Reform-lite Tory agenda. Still, Tom has never been one to shy away from going to war with anyone, so he and Kemi will have something in common.That just leaves the change of shadow chancellor. It goes without saying that Mel Stride had always been endearingly hopeless, but the choice of Andrew Griffith to take over is bewildering. The Tories always like to play up Griffith’s career in business, but what the rest of the country will be focusing on is that he was the co-author and defender of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget. So maybe his economic judgment is not that sound after all. It should also be remembered that Griffith was Boris Johnson’s “net zero business champion” in 2020; something he and Kemi are also hoping to forget. Maybe the key to understanding Griffith is that he is just a career opportunist who doesn’t really believe in anything. In which case he may fit in just fine.Tom Tugendhat, the new shadow foreign secretary. Photograph: Toby Melville/ReutersTuesdayOne politician who won’t be hurrying back to Westminster for the start of the new parliamentary session is Keir Starmer. He has just announced he is standing down as an MP. The only recent former prime minister to remain a backbencher and regularly turn up to debates in the Commons was Theresa May and she cut a somewhat sad figure. Her attendance was impressive but she never appeared to have any friends. Just sitting by herself, lost in her own thoughts. What Keir is thinking now is anyone’s guess. We don’t all get the summer we were hoping for – I certainly didn’t – but Starmer’s must have been borderline surreal. It must be so hard for a prime minister to learn to switch off. One day you’re the centre of attention with constant demands on your time, the next you’re a virtual ghost. A person of little importance. Most former prime ministers have a tormented shadow to them, even years after they have left Downing Street. As if they still can’t believe that the voters or their own MPs have rejected them. Keir will have been expecting to have spent the last six weeks on constant alert. Dealing with world events and travelling the country to convince everyone he was actually working. A prime minister needs to be visible, or their enemies assume they are skiving. Instead, his phone will have gone quiet with no one making any demands on his time. The fear of missing out must have been intense.He might have wished Burnham well in public but in private he wouldn’t have been too sad if Andy was struggling just a little bit. Just about all we did hear about Keir during the break was that he had donated a copy of Tom Baldwin’s biography of himself to the No 10 library. Which felt, somehow a little desperate. Somewhat tragic. Why not break with tradition and leave a work of fiction? Rebecca; or The Age of Innocence. Something that just oozes class. But instead, like many prime ministers, he couldn’t resist giving a rose-tinted version of his deeds that will never be read by anyone. It will survive to collect dust. Which only goes to show that with many politicians, it really is all about them.We don’t all get the summer we were hoping for – but Keir Starmer’s must have been borderline surreal. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty ImagesWednesdayMost of us go through life collecting bits and pieces. What others might call clutter. Items that shape the identities of our homes. Starting with the basics. Tables, chairs, beds, chest of drawers, kitchenware, that sort of thing. Then books, televisions and sound systems. But what happens to all this when we die? How much will remain? In my mother’s case, the answer was almost nothing.My mum died last year at the age of 101, her last seven years spent in a care home as her Alzheimer’s prevented her from living on her own. So the house she and my father – he died in 1999 – had bought for their retirement years earlier had to be sold to pay for her care. My sisters and I spent several weekends going through the contents prior to the sale, trying to work out what to keep and what to do with the rest. Almost everything went to a house-clearance firm. We had no use for the beds or the furniture because we all had our own already and didn’t have the space for any more. It was all rather melancholic. There were several items my mum had inherited from her parents that she had always said were quite valuable. We got an expert in who told us they were all cheap reproductions. My grandmother had been ripped off. All we kept were a couple of pictures, some personal effects and a few small items to furnish her new room at the care home.When she died, we had 10 days to clear out her room and almost all of this went too. Her clothes, her chair and a few books that she had never read because of her dementia. The only things that really remained of value to us were her photograph albums. These were her memories. The last surviving physical links not just between us and her, but between her and our father, between her and her parents and grandparents. Many of these photos I had never seen while she had been alive.In generations to come, not even these will remain when people die. Everyone’s photos will be on their phone or laptop. My mum never held with either. We gave her a mobile about 20 years ago but she always refused to use it so there was no point ringing it. So more than a century of a life well lived reduced to almost nothing. Just a few precious keepsakes that mean everything but are of little financial value. And when my sisters and I die, our mum will die again. Dust to dust.ThursdaySign reading ‘Lake Ontario, now and always’, unveiled by Ontario premier Doug Ford. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/ReutersThe naming wars have been hotting up. First Donald Trump declared he was renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Then, during one of his regular hissy fits with the Canadians, he changed the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America by presidential decree. You can sense a theme emerging. And earlier this week he was openly fantasising of calling the strait of Hormuz the strait of Trump. Just imagine having so much narcissism and so little imagination.Not so long ago, the Donald came close to calling Greenland America, so there’s no way of really knowing where this one is going to end. Why not call the Atlantic Trump Ocean and the Pacific America Ocean? It’s odds on that he will demand that part of the moon will be named after him when Nasa lands astronauts back on the lunar surface in a few years’ time. Weirdly, many Americans think this behaviour is quite normal.In a spectacular display of presidential brown-nosing, Google even marks the changes on its maps for a US audience. Google Lake Ontario in the UK and you get Lake Ontario (Lake America). You’d have thought a better response would be to just ignore the president and wait till he went away. Canada has tried being rational. It explained the lake had been called Ontario since the 17th century, long before the USA and Canada existed in their current forms, and was an Iroquoian word meaning “beautiful lake”. All this was far too complicated for The Donald. So now the Canadians have upped their game by putting up giant Lake Ontario signs by the lake, only for Trump to post a video of himself kicking over the sign and replacing it with Lake America. It’s like dealing with a five-year-old.So maybe we’d all be better off treating him like one. At least we’d all have more fun. The Canadians could start by renaming the US half of Lake Superior as Lake Inferior. Mark Carney could sign that off in a day and then Google would be obliged to make the changes on its maps. Maybe. But we could all join in. Burnham could rename the US the United States of Greater England. Pretend independence had always been a big mistake. The perfect 250th anniversary present.FridaySuranne Jones as Amy Silva in Vigil. Photograph: Mark Mainz/BBC/World ProductionsThis time of year always makes me feel depressed. The days getting shorter, the weather colder. Most years, this can be offset a little by the start of the Premier League football season. This autumn, not so much. Despite having spent more than a third of a billion pounds on new players, Spurs are at the bottom of the table. Played two, lost two. Goals scored, nil. At least you have to admire the consistency. Yet again we have a manager who is calling for patience, that it will come right in the end. Maybe it will, but it doesn’t feel like it at the moment.Still, on the plus side, we have the new autumn TV schedules with the broadcasters having waited until we had all stopped enjoying ourselves outdoors before giving us something half decent to watch. The current onscreen battle in our house is between the BBC and ITV. Vigil versus Trigger Point. Suranne Jones v Vicky McClure. Two dramas on to their third and fourth series respectively that are dominated by badass women tasked with saving the world. We are a lot further into Trigger Point than we are into Vigil, but that’s only because ITV has put the whole series up on its streaming site. And I am loving both in a particularly mindless kind of way. As much for the nonsense as the drama. The entire plot of Vigil depends on the security services turning to the same two Scottish policewomen, who just happen to be in a relationship and have seamless childcare, every time the country is on the verge of war. We are currently both in Scotland and Svalbard, where everyone seems to have a secret to hide.Trigger Point is even wilder. Two bombs go off in central London and no one seems to bat an eye, as all attention is on the one that Vicky has defused. Almost all bombs seem to be neutralised by cutting the red wire. If someone else tries to defuse a bomb then they will almost certainly get blown up. Meanwhile there is a member of the security services who couldn’t be overacting to look suspicious any harder if she tried and no one seems to notice. Thank God for Vicky, or we’d all be screwed.Digested week in pictures‘Read my lips. We will never start a foreign war.’ Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP‘You’ll never believe who is paying for all this.’ Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA‘That’s one in the eye for the monarchy.’ Photograph: Adrian Dennis/WPA Pool/Shutterstock