T

here is one statistic so extraordinary about Armistice Day I struggle still to compute it. We are all taught at school how the guns fell silent on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

But it was only a couple of years ago I learned that the death toll for the morning of 11 November 1918 when the commanders knew the fighting would cease at 11am was greater than both sides would go on to suffer in Normandy on D Day, 1944. As the journalist and historian Adam Hochschild puts it, The war ended as senselessly as it had begun.

Of course, politicians never made unbelievably harmful or stupid decisions ever again... Speaking of which, the truly incredible element of the Tory-sleaze-news-cycle-that-will-never-end is how easily it could have been avoided if Boris Johnson had simply accepted the judgement of the Committee on Standards.

Indeed, as Newsnights Lewis Goodall points out, one way to measure time is that onEarth 2, Owen Paterson is now roughly a quarter of the way through his suspension.

Now for the health of our parliamentary democracy, it is perhaps a good thing the Prime Minister erred in the way that he did. Sunlight really is the best disinfectant. But it is unclear when this story will run out of fuel. There are a lot of MPs with a lot of second jobs...

The secret to Matildas success? She doesnt take any s***

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