Tomorrow Gordon Brown is set to release his latest messianic tome. Grandly titled Seven Ways to Change the World: How to Fix the Most Pressing Issues We Face – presumably from some of the problems he first caused – it is set to be released exactly one week after his successor Ed Miliband published a rival guide: Go Big: How to Fix our World . Mr S wonders whether actually winning an election could be the answer to any of these questions?

Other Labour books out include the ironically titled The Dignity of Labour by Jon Cruddas and Jess Phillips’s Everything You Really Need to Know About Politics – a surprising title for a candidate who had to withdraw last year from the Labour leadership race after 18 days owing to a lack of support. The never knowingly undersold shadow minister has promised a ‘no-nonsense, highly entertaining manual’ in which she ‘will explain the process of running for government’ – a process incidentally Phillips herself has tried and failed three times.

Her frontbench colleague Lisa Nandy meanwhile managed to hold onto her foreign affairs brief in Starmer’s botched reshuffle, despite some hostile briefings. Her publisher will no doubt be pleased given she is currently writing a book on that very subject titled Finding Our Place in a World Falling Apart – a familiar feeling to all those Labour veterans of the Corbyn years.

Mr S wonders whether Nandy et al might want to fix their own party first before focusing on the rest of the world.