Digested week: Recession, a shabby state of affairs – and a wait after a fall

A trip to A&E and more awards for actors while MPs struggled to hold an adult debate on Gaza

There was a time not so long ago when Rishi Sunak used every available moment to talk about his Five Promises. Now he has gone rather quiet on the subject. Presumably not unrelated to the fact that four of them are dead in the water. Only the promise to halve inflation has been kept, and that is the one over which he had no control. The latest promise to die a slow death was the one to grow the economy. Last week the UK fell into a recession of two successive quarters of negative growth. “Um,” said Jeremy Hunt. “It’s not a real recession. It’s a technical recession.” A message to Jezza. Stop digging. A recession is a recession. Now you might have thought the government would have been keen to update parliament about this latest turn of events at the earliest opportunity. To let us know they had a plan to get the country out of recession. But not a bit of it. So when the Commons returned after the February recess, Rachel Reeves had to table an urgent question to ask Hunt to explain what was going on. Only there was no sign of the chancellor. Jezza had a dancing class booked that he couldn’t move. Nor was there a sighting of his No 2, the hapless Laura Trott. She is still getting remedial lessons in understanding debt after being humiliated by the BBC’s Evan Davis. So it was left to the lowest of the low, Bim Afolami to take the hit. AKA Dim Bim. He might never recover. First he tried to say that growing the economy had never been part of the plan. A recession was just a cunning way of dealing with inflation. Mmm. That wasn’t the way Rishi had explained it. In the end all Dim Bim could do was to say that a recession wasn’t ideal and the Treasury would try and do a bit better. Worst of all, he had to cope with the Labour frontbench openly laughing at him for 45 minutes. There is no worse fate for a minister.