“We’re living the dream,” a minister jokes.
Labour might have to rely on black humour over the next couple of weeks.
Each day brings a vast set of elections closer – local tests in England, and national ballots in Wales and Scotland – votes that another cabinet minister frets “will be a disaster”.
We’ve been travelling around Wales this week, and Scotland last week, talking to the politicians vying for power, and the most important people of all – the public who’ll make the choice on 7 May.
Just when Labour needs to be going hammer and tongs in a campaign, instead, almost every day brings fresh embarrassment to the prime minister over his decision to give Lord Mandelson one of the finest jobs in the land – our man in Washington.
Ructions in Whitehall. Rancour in Labour. A sense the government doesn’t seem to have a grip. How big is the impact in Wales and Scotland of Sir Keir Starmer’s woes?
“It’s just so huge,” says a senior Labour MP who’s been knocking on voters’ doors in recent days.
But these elections aren’t remotely all about the government’s recent horror show – we’ll come to that in a second.
Voters will decide who makes important devolved decisions affecting the lives of millions of people – the kind of schools kids go to; the standard of the care patients receive when they are sick; even income tax rates.
Both the Labour administration in Cardiff and the SNP government in Edinburgh have been in charge for a remarkably long time – Labour since 1999, the SNP since 2007. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that voters we met in both countries expressed a similar level of disillusion with the status quo, frustration with a patchy track record on public services, and a sense devolution itself has not been all it was cracked up to be.
The two countries are poised to make very different decisions on what’s next.
