Two Tier Keir Starmer and Rachel Wrecking Ball Reeves hit embarrassing low

The only things collapsing faster than the UK economy are the personal ratings of the Chancellor and her hapless boss, Two Tier Keir. Keir Starmer now has the lowest satisfaction ratings of any Prime Minister in history and Rachel Reeves is the most unpopular Chancellor of the Exchequer ever. That's some record!

To add to her accomplishments, "Wrecking Ball" Reeves has also managed to choke off the property market with her array of punitive taxes - such as her removal of stamp duty discount for first-time buyers, her 5% surcharge on stamp duty for second homes and the threat of an additional sales tax on houses over £500k.

I don't know how many of you have tried to sell your house under Reeves' reign, but it's a nightmare. House prices are dropping like a stone and last month 20% of completed sales fell through. So, when I heard Steve Reed, the new Secretary of State for Housing - having had to replace Angela Rayner after she dodged £40K of stamp duty - saying he would deliver Labour's pledge of building 1.5 million homes in this Parliament, I honestly didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Poor "City Steve" is sounding increasingly tetchy during interviews. You can understand why, though. He thought he'd dodged the "farm tax" bullet when he was moved from the department of Farming and Rural Affairs the other week, only to discover he'd landed on a more deadly political landmine at Housing.

Spluttering Steve didn't want to admit at the Labour Party conference at the weekend that Labour is nowhere near delivering the 1.5 million homes promised at the General Election. He even refused to say how few had been built since Labour came into power.

In fact, it seemed in his interview on GB News, he didn't even know. The answer is 117,000 - almost half what the Tories had left office delivering. Instead, Steve announced more fantasy figures - this time saying Labour will spend £39 billion (money we don't have) to build 300,000 social and affordable homes.

There is no wonder housebuilding is at such a low ebb with Reeves increasing employers' National Insurance Contributions and the minimum wage - a double whammy leading to more people out of work - plus Ed Miliband with his loony left net zero targets and inflated energy costs making concrete, steel and bricks more unaffordable.

The result is the cost of completing a new home has risen by 17% since 2022, according to Zoopla, outpacing a 1% increase in average sale prices over the same period.

Things are likely to get worse not better as builders brace themselves for a wave of new costs from the Building Safety Levy - a tax on new residential projects to fund repairs for existing buildings - to the proposed Future Homes Standard.

Poor old City Steve hasn't a chance of meeting Labour's housing targets, something housing developers have repeatedly told this government. But instead of listening they keep announcing fantasy targets.

No wonder trust in this government is at an all-time low.

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Does anyone care that Colin Firth's ex-wife, eco-fashion campaigner Livia Firth, has handed back her MBE medal and torn up her MBE certificate after King Charles hosted President Trump's state banquet? No, me neither.

Had anyone even heard of her eco-fashion brand, Eco-Age? I certainly hadn't and it seems it closed last year. I'm guessing she was just looking for a bit of cheap publicity for her new eco agricultural business, so it doesn't suffer the same fate.

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I agree with former Ofsted boss Baroness Spielman when she said schools need to focus on academic and extracurricular activities and not be "therapeutic institutions" for children.

She has identified that the obsession with "identifying negative emotions" is having a detrimental effect on children, and many of these "wellbeing" classes are in reality leading to "decreased life satisfaction".

So how about this for a bit of common sense? Instead of asking children to focus on problems and things to be unhappy about, why don't they instead invite them to focus on maths and English and discover hobbies they like? If schools did that, they might just see an improvement in pupils' grades and their happiness levels as well.

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Young people are turning away from Labour in their droves. Youth membership of the Labour Party has plummeted from 100,000 to 30,000 since Starmer became leader, and a YouGov poll in July found net favourability among 18-24 year olds for Starmer was minus 30.

In comparison it was plus 18 for Jeremy Corbyn. There is a wonderful irony in Starmer giving the vote to 16 year olds - which was all about gerrymandering the next election for him - only for them to have turned against him and be flocking to other parties instead, like Corbyn's new party, the Greens and even Reform. Starmer probably wishes he could flip-flop on this now as well!

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In the latest sentencing outrage, Henry Newey - the 18 year old who "tortured" a cat by repeatedly smashing it into a wall using a noose - has avoided prison. Why?

The District Judge said there was evidence of "sadistic" and "deeply troubling behaviour". The Forensic Research and Criminology International Journal points out that 25% of aggressive prison inmates had committed multiple acts of animal abuse as children, while 45% of school shooters have had histories of alleged animal cruelty and 21% of serial murderers have admitted to childhood animal abuse.

Newey was caught red handed on video, recorded on a ring doorbell. He needs to be locked up. No doubt if he had just tweeted about it, the judge would have come down on him like a ton of bricks.

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Beautiful model and actress Kelly Brook, 45, has said on TV that her time to have babies has probably passed, and that she would be devastated if her husband left her to have children with someone else.

I know better than anyone it's a strange feeling to realise you can no longer have children when you haven't had any. Like Kelly, I don't have children. My biological clock never ticked. From her interview it seems Kelly's didn't either, until it was too late.