Labour's first month in power has shown us just how much damage Keir Starmer will do

As we edge closer to a whole month of Labour government, the horror show continues at pace. This week we have witnessed multiple spectacles in the House of Commons from the Chancellor's screeching U-turn on whether she knew the true position of the nation's finances to Angela Rayner's anticipated unveiling of a charter for the destruction of the British countryside.

Let’s take the Deputy Prime Minister first. Toughing it out at the Despatch Box, telling MPs Whitehall knows best on house building, reintroducing full-on socialist-style housing targets that will hammer local councils up and down the land. As if that was not enough, she wants to change the NPPF (National Planning Policy Framework) to delete protections for land used in food production and even change the definition of greenbelt to enable development on it. This will undoubtedly challenge our national food security, destroy the natural beauty of our countryside and devastate rural communities like the one I am fortunate enough to represent in Buckinghamshire.

The Deputy PM was quick to throw around the term NIMBY – I have always preferred ‘local patriot’ – trying to claim any MP seeking to do their job of representing their constituents' worries, concerns and interests was somehow anti-growth. Meanwhile she rigs the system so that heavily urban areas, like London, do not have to build as much.

The trouble with that approach is as many of the new Labour MPs sitting behind her, often on wafer-thin majorities, begin to see just how unpopular Rayner’s policies will be on the ground, she may find herself eating a huge slice of humble pie – or, who knows, calling them NIMBYs too.

There is definitely trouble ahead on this one.

But the award for the shiniest brass neck of the week surely must land with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Before the election, she herself admitted that, unlike previous incoming Chancellors, she would be unable to arrive at the Treasury claiming not to know the state of the nation's finances because we have the OBR. Yet this week she did just that, claiming a £20billion black hole. A total farce, used as a smokescreen to make political choices on eye-watering public sector pay increases, coupled with battering pensioners by taking away the Winter Fuel Payment.

You literally could not make it up.

Turns out that scrutinising this Government may be an easier task than first anticipated. The trouble is, they’re going to do a lot of damage in the process.