When I tell people I write parliamentary sketches, they often look a bit blank. Even political people can be confused – one person I met at Labour party conference thought I might be like a courtroom artist. But sketchwriting has a long tradition in Britain. It’s a way of writing about what’s going on that aims to convey how events felt, as well as what happened. Very often in politics, events feel ridiculous, and so sketches tend to have quite a few jokes. If you still can’t imagine what I mean, below are my recent sketches for The Critic magazine.

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• You reap what you sow

  We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land. But then it’s confiscated by Rachel Reeves’s hand. The farmers were furious. Well, farmers are always furious. It’s a life that combines…

• Pandæmonium

  “The task that stands before us is tough.” We were in a basement room of a central London hotel. Outside it was a grey November morning, but we had gathered for the greatest show on earth: the…

• Autumn Reeves

  “Finally…” Rachel Reeves was only 12 minutes into her Budget speech, and we wondered if we were about to catch a break. Might she have decided that brevity is the soul of fiscal wit? Was she going to…

• Riddle of the Pylons

  “Lincolnshire faces an invasion!” Sir John Hayes had come to the House of Commons with grave news. Not since the publication of The Riddle of the Sands had the Fens faced such a threat.

• Humble pie?

  Ric Holden, sitting alone in a large room in Parliament, bent over to tie his shoelace. He was waiting to raise an issue of national importance: pie and mash. A few months ago, Holden was the chairman…

• Ministry of Silly Thoughts

  “The best ideas aren’t going to come from politicians in Whitehall!” It was a Monday morning in October, but Wes Streeting, Britain’s perkiest secretary of state, was full of zip. He had a plan to fix…

• Strictly Come Tory

  And so, with the happy inevitability of a tax bill, we approach the end of the Conservative leadership contest. To mark the occasion, GB News was hosting a not-debate. “Who will win the hearts of the…

• Soporific Starmer

  There is a school of thought that Prime Minister’s Questions is the most important half-hour in the week of our democracy: an opportunity to hold the government to account as it steers the ship of…

• Office politics

  It tells you a lot about the state of politics that the best Prime Minister’s Questions joke about FreebieGate, the scandal that we keep being told has destroyed the government, came from Keir Starmer.

• Boris the Innocent

  “It was one of his family’s birthdays that day and blah blah fishcakes.” We were listening, of course, to a Boris Johnson interview. He was talking, I think, about Dominic Cummings and the Barnard…

• Don’t Cry for Me, Diego Garcia

  “This abject surrender of British sovereignty!” Mark Francois was in full flight, feeling perhaps the relief of one whose enemy has now revealed himself. He had known of course that Labour was full of…

• The Tory beauty contest

  “What a contrast!” Richard Fuller, who claims to be the Conservative Party chairman, and may well be for all anyone knows, was striding across the stage. “Between the upbeat mood of our conference and…

• Look on our works, ye voters, and despair

  We now go live to Birmingham, where four of the Conservative Party’s best and brightest are vying for the honour of being knifed by colleagues after the next election. “Frankly Camilla…

• Rime of the ancient Tory mariner

  Sitting behind us in a small hall at the Conservative conference was a group of what appeared to be schoolchildren. This is a worrying new front in the battle against youth delinquency…

• Non-euclidean Toryism

  “I had a really good media round,” Kemi Badenoch announced on Sunday afternoon, which is certainly one way of looking at a day that ended with her rejecting the position she’d appeared to be taking in…

• BoJo’s Life of Johnson

  From not sending the SAS to snatch Covid vaccines from the Dutch to not persuading Prince Harry to stay in Britain, Boris Johnson has got the nation gripped with his new memoir Unchecked…

• Fabian fry-up

  “I’m a Labour student who enjoyed the disco a bit too much last night.” Finally, Labour conference had found someone who spoke for the entire hall. Wednesday morning had a distinct air of the morning…

• Sausage to fortune

  Up on the screen over the Labour conference stage, the names of the constituencies the party now held scrolled away from us, like the opening crawl of a Star Wars film. Basingstoke. Bournemouth East.

• Party in the U.S.S.R.

  The Labour conference was, as one former leader might have put it, ram-packed. There were queues to get in, snaking back from the security checkpoints for hundreds of yards across the Liverpool docks.