MDMA, before it was called ecstasy, was going to be called empathy, having been devised as a marriage counselling drug. The theory was that it would amp up your compassion and dial down your threat response to the degree that you’d be able to hear the truth with an open heart.
Then it turned out to be better as a party drug and was criminalised, and maybe it’s all for the best, but just once I would love to hear PMQs with everyone on E. Because a lot of what Rishi Sunak said on Wednesday was probably true: Keir Starmer, if he wasn’t Labour leader, probably would enjoy going back to being a lawyer. He probably did get a lot of satisfaction from successfully defending people’s human rights. “I would have thought that, out of everybody, [Starmer] would be the most grateful,” Sunak said of his – always subject to revision – plan to hold an election later rather than sooner. And isn’t that, if you think about it for five seconds, most likely true? Say what you like about the Labour leader, he’s no seat-of-the-pants merchant.
