Mark Andrews: Students in the battlefield, the Turner Prize, and why things are looking Shaky for the PM

David Davis, the former cabinet minister and ex SAS reservist, reckons the Government ought to solve the problem of our threadbare army  by recruiting students, who can do their training during the long summer holidays.

I fear Mr Davis may be a little out of touch with the modern student lifestyle. Training would begin at midday,  obvs, to give them chance to watch Homes under the Hammer first. And they would probably want to do it online, so there would be no need to get out of bed. There would need to be a safe space flor them to retreat to every time the Sgt Major questioned their parenthood,  they would require a gluten-free diet in the Naafi, and expect the enemy to issue a trigger warning before mounting an attack.  

As an idea for boosting army numbers, it is a non-starter. As the basis of a sitcom though.... 

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Meanwhile, the Prime Minister announced what was emphatically not an early 'reset' or 'relaunch' of his government after five months in charge, but was rather the announcement of six new milestones and three foundations, plus the seven pillars of the growth mission . They follow on from the five missions, announced last year, and the six first steps for change announced in June. I'm confused. How can there be six milestones to measure progress on five missions? Or are there six milestones for each of the five missions, making it 30 in total? And is the growth mission the only one to have seven pillars, or do all five? That's 35 pillars and only three foundations. You do wonder whether things might get a bit rickety.

I think what we really need is something to make all this a bit simpler, a bit more memorable, easier for us ordinary folk to understand. Maybe boil it down to six key pledges, missions, whatever he wants to call them. And then engrave them into a marble stone in the rose garden at Downing Street, so we don't forget.

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My other concern about the PM is that he doesn't use nearly enough construction metaphors. I'm all for fixing the foundations, and making sure there are enough pillars of growth, but if you merely paint over the damp walls rather than removing the plaster, you end up with civil servants sitting in their tepid baths of managed decline.

Once that happens, he won't have time to fix the shingles, or time to fix the floor. There'll be no time to oil the hinges, nor to mend no window panes. And he'll need his house no longer, getting ready to meet his fate.

And put like that, the PM's future does look a bit Shaky.

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Congratulations to Jasleen Kaur on winning the 2024 Turner Prize, beating off stiff competition from, er, no-one you will have heard of. She was presented with the prize at a ceremony at London's Tate gallery.

Accepting the award, Jasleen said she hoped her work would 'echo the calls of the protesters outside' who had called for the Tate to cut its ties with 'organisations complicit in what the UN and ICJ are finally getting closer to saying is a genocide of the Palestinian people'.   

Judges praised her 'ability to gather different voices through unexpected and playful combinations of material... locating moments of resilience and possibility'. They said it showed  'how we might live together in a world increasingly marked by nationalism and division'.

By the way,  her entry was an old Ford Escort with a big doily on top.