Wantage may seem an unlikely birthplace for England’s greatest gift to the world. Yet as well as being the site of King Alfred’s birth, it gives its name to the legal code of the 990s, in which Aethelred the Unready laid down the right of an Englishman to be tried by a jury.

Fast forward a millennium or so and Lammy the Unavailable seems to be determined to smash that right. Robert Jenrick had asked an urgent question of The Sage of Tottenham, but Lammy couldn’t even be bothered to turn up. ‘Do we need to send out a search party to Savile Row?’ Jenrick asked, referencing a past excuse of Lammy’s. I suspect a local soft play might have been a better bet.

This might be the most Starmer government thing ever; overturning something enshrined in Magna Carta because a quango of lawyers told th

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