We expect our MPs to lead by example. Not scoff at voters making the agonising choice between heating and eating as they fill their faces.
Yet that is exactly what they are doing by allowing 2.6 million of their taxpayer subsidised unwanted dinners to go uneaten.
Today we reveal how Parliament has dumped 1.23 million kilos of leftover food over the last six years, enough to fill 153 skips.
If MPs piling on the pounds had an ounce of decency they would have rolled up their sleeves and taken one of those skips down to the Westminster foodbank less than a mile away.
Yet as desperate parents worry over how they will feed their children as they fearfully await Friday’s energy cap announcement, MPs will not even return to Parliament to offer a helping hand.
While Tories obsess over their leadership contest, the Government gives up on governing, and Boris Johnson suns himself abroad, millions are skipping meals to make ends meet.
Just when the nation is in need of proper leadership we have a zombie government run by living-dead ministers who know that in two weeks a new PM will consign them to their political graves.
Hard up families need an energy price freeze now. A grip on inflation now. Fair wage settlements now. And for their MPs to get their snouts out of those overflowing troughs now.
Putin high alert
The Army’s top NCO is telling soldiers they should prepare their loved ones for conflict with Russia.
It is a chilling warning from Warrant Officer Paul Carney. No family could reasonably have expected the blood of their sons and daughters to be spilt on European soil again.
But six months on from Russia invading Ukraine that is a real, if remote, possibility.
Mr Carney is thinking the unthinkable because we cannot be sure what is in Vladamir Putin’s mind.
No one expected the First World War either but 36 days after a relatively minor terrorist incident the destruction which claimed 20 million lives began.
Experts say the war in Ukraine could finish by the end of the year as Putin runs out of troops for what he billed as merely a “special operation”.
We hope and pray they are right. But we must remember that different experts told another generation the First World War would be over by Christmas, too.
Buzzers off...
The world’s most unlikely TV quiz show success University Challenge celebrates its 60th anniversary next month. So to get you in the mood here’s your starter for No10 and no conferring: Who is the most useless Prime Minister in living memory…?
