How to write a political sketch – with Madeline Grant
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As MPs depart Westminster for parliamentary recess, The Spectator's political sketch writer Madeline Grant joins Natasha Feroze and economics editor Michael Simmons to talk about how to sketch PMQs and why Keir Starmer makes for the best sketches. Also on the podcast, Michael Simmons looks at the promising FTSE at record high following Trump's trade deal with Japan and the gloomy national debt figures announced yesterday.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | One of the many perks of being a spectator subscriber is that you can now register to listen to our podcasts without adverts. |
| 0:05.8 | We know that it all sounds incredibly complicated, so we've made it easy as possible. |
| 0:09.0 | Go to spectator.com.D.K. forward slash ad free. Your step-by-step guide. |
| 0:18.1 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectators Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Natasha Froes and I'm joined by Michael Simmons and Maddie Grant. Now Maddie, we've got you on here to talk about your sketches. Normally today at around noon, which is at the time of recording, you'd be preparing for your political sketches because it's Wednesday and PMQs. |
| 0:38.5 | But before we get into that, we've got Michael, our economics editor here to talk about some pretty |
| 0:43.8 | gloomy national debt figures that you wrote about yesterday. Yeah, it's kind of depressing. |
| 0:49.0 | I was thinking the other day, it'd be nice to come on to this podcast to do like a good news story. |
| 0:53.6 | And not say Britain is broke. |
| 0:54.9 | Not say Britain is broke or Britain is doomed. I'm sort of running out of adjectives. But essentially, |
| 0:59.9 | this is the public sector finance figures which we get, which is like the borrowing, the tax |
| 1:05.4 | figures, etc. And it showed that, you know, as you would expect, given that last autumn, |
| 1:10.5 | Rachel Reeves |
| 1:11.1 | increased the national insurance contributions that we have to get from employers. And that bought |
| 1:17.0 | up the tax revenues. But you would think, so you would think that that would have, you know, |
| 1:21.9 | closed the deficit a little bit. But what actually happened was we ended up having to borrow |
| 1:25.9 | 21 billion pounds in June alone. And that |
| 1:30.3 | was largely driven by a doubling in the amount we're paying on debt interest. So not just |
| 1:36.2 | paying down the debt, you know, paying the interest that we've gathered on this debt that we've had, |
| 1:41.0 | we're, you know, piling up for years and years. And it's particularly |
| 1:44.9 | scary this debt because if you look at how other countries sort of handled paying for things |
| 1:50.8 | like the pandemic, handled paying for the energy price spikes after Russia invaded Ukraine, |
| 1:55.7 | a lot of them sort of paid slightly more for longer term debt that sort of wouldn't change. And we tried to do it |
... |
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