KEIR Starmer promised pain and pain he delivered.
We had been summoned to the Rose Garden of Downing Street for an audience with the Prime Minister.
You may remember the Rose Garden: it's where Nick Clegg and David Cameron pretended to be best mates as they announced the beginning of the coalition government.
Or maybe you remember it better as the backdrop of Dominic Cummings’s bizarre press conference when he attempted to excuse breaking lockdown rules because he was performing an eye test by driving to Barnard Castle.
Perhaps you may also recall pictures of Downing Street staff lounging around there enjoying wine and a cheeseboard, flouting social distancing rules while the rest of the country was cooped up indoors to stop the spread of Covid.
That Rose Garden.
It’s lovely, really. There is a pond, a nice wee patio (of aforementioned cheese and wine fame) and lots of flowers. There was once a vegetable garden pioneered by the Browns during their time in Downing Street, but it wasted away under the Camerons.
As we arrived we were told to hand in our phones, like we were being herded into an exclusive nightclub – or a party hosted by an eccentric aristocrat with odd proclivities.
We gathered around in the garden, waiting for the Prime Minister to show up. There were too few chairs. I remained on my feet throughout.
Labour bods also assembled some civilians that Starmer had met on the campaign trail before the election so they could suffer through his first set-piece press conference since coming to power.
I found myself standing beside a statue, which I later learned was devised by the great English modernist artist Barbara Hepworth (above) and called Hollow Form with Inner Form.
As a fellow journalist leant on the piece, probably worth somewhere in the region of a couple hundred thousand pounds, I examined it and thought it looked a bit like a model of a decaying tooth you might find in a dentist’s office.
The kind where bits come away so they can show you exactly where your gnashers are rotting and exactly where they are going to stab you with big bits of metal to fix it, for a fee not short of what it might cost to start your own modern art collection.
Speaking of rot, here comes the Prime Minister and he’s about to talk a lot of it.
Sorry, I mean about it.
He wanted to hack away at the rot left by the last lot, and talked about the rot left in practically every bit of the state. Starmer seemed to barely stop himself from calling them rotters, too.
On and on he droned, piling misery on top of misery – and what’s more? That’s right, more misery further down the line, when his Chancellor Rachel Reeves (above) delivers the Budget in October.
She’s expected to douse the etiolated husk of what’s left of the British state in petrol then set it alight with a box of matches as she screams “growth” over and over.
As the sun bore down on me, I began to regret the choice of a wool suit and wondered if the fate of the public sector wasn’t one I fancied for myself.
Thankfully, I was spared further thoughts of self-immolation as Starmer wound up the questions and began to make some chit-chat with the civilians sitting in the front row.
Reunited with our phones, we made our way back to parliament. Pain was generally agreed to have been the most interesting line from the whole thing.
It was also the most fitting.
