Sketch: Keir Starmer writes a song while Anas Sarwar bakes a cake

Keir Starmer is turning his hand to songwriting, it seems. The man must have plenty of time now to pursue his hobbies.

Recent prime ministers have enjoyed drinking wine from suitcases and writing books and pretending to like football while holding office, so how hard can it be? And so the man that could write the next Britpop hit has penned his first verse.

“Things will only get worse,” he writes. It’s got a certain ring to it, dontcha think? A downbeat version of the Labour anthem, to match the downbeat times. Instead of a D:Ream, he’s creating a N:Ightmare.

Speaking from a sunny, garden-based press conference, Starmer test drives his to-be-much-repeated chorus of ‘I beg your pardon, I didn’t promise you a rose garden’ on a group of voters and the press.

He did promise 'change'. We all just assumed Labour meant change for the better. More fool us.

“I promised this government would serve people like you,” he begins. Then, taking a deep breath, he reveals that what his government will actually serve is “short-term pain”.

He “didn’t want to release prisoners early”, he says, and he “didn’t want to means-test the winter fuel payment”. Unfortunately, the work of government means doing things you don’t want to do. But really, it’s all the Tories’ fault because they “failed to be honest”.

“They offered the snake oil of populism,” he says. But he’s a man cut from a different cloth – he is willing to making “unpopular decisions”. Is un-populism a vote winner?

Well, he did promise “change”. We all just assumed Labour meant change for the better. More fool us. Instead Starmer is offering a change in communications strategy. Yes, everything is rubbish and everything will continue to be rubbish, but at least he’s being honest about the rubbish. And that’s one up from the last lot.

He highlights the fact that the press conference is taking place in the Downing Street rose garden, the site of the infamous lockdown parties. And in case we missed the link, he asks everyone to “remember the pictures, just over there, of the wine and the food”. He then goes on to attack the last government for having “relied on easy gimmicks”, which is a bit rich.

The PM continues with his grave warnings, saying October’s budget will be “painful”. His bean-counter Rachel Reeves has “no other choice”, he says. Because “we can’t go on like this”, he says, with suspicious minds. He really is excelling at the songwriting.

“I know that after all that you have been through, that is a really big ask and really difficult to hear. It is not the position we should be in; it is not the position I want to be in. But we have to end the politics of the easy answer that solves nothing,” he declares.

But, he promises, that “hard work” will be “rewarded a dozen times over”. Just in the future. There will definitely be jam tomorrow. He’s really taken the saying about under-promising to heart, but did he not read the second part of that aphorism? Forget that decade of renewal, how about 10 years hard Labour?

Can we expect the party to follow the SNP’s lead at the last election, pledging free things like iPads and bikes, only this time it’s a Victoria sponge?

Meanwhile, at the exact same time in Edinburgh, Anas Sarwar traps a bunch of Scottish hacks in a dingy room in the parliament and tells them how terrible everything is in Scotland too. But the problem isn’t only the Tories, so he takes lines from his boss and simply changes a couple of words, hoping no one will notice. The Tor… err, SNP has failed people.

His solution is, just like his boss, do nothing. He’ll stand by and watch as Reeves removes winter fuel payments from pensioners and refuses to lift the two-child cap. Even though he definitely, really opposes that policy. He’s just doing all his opposing in silence.

But with a Scottish election less than two years away, Sarwar knows he can’t go into the campaign warning it will be all doom and gloom. Save that for after the election, like the prime minister has. No, he insists that Labour is actually feeling pretty optimistic for the future of the nation. And that’s because his party has a plan.

Labour will “grow the size of the cake”, Sarwar insists. Cake? What cake? Is this something to do with the right to food? Can we expect the party to follow the SNP’s lead at the last election, pledging free things like iPads and bikes, only this time it’s a Victoria sponge?

He’s talking about the economy cake, stupid! Scottish Labour’s version of Rachel Reeves, Michael Marra (they seem to like their alliteration in finance roles), says the SNP has created a “hodgepodge mess” as they failed to cook the books. But Labour will follow a recipe.

Sarwar then talks about ending the “sticky plaster approach”, which creates some rather unsavoury imagery about biting into a cupcake and finding Shona Robison’s missing Band Aid.

Asked whether he thinks Starmer’s warning that things will get worse will damage his own prospects of becoming first minister, Sarwar simply says it is important for the PM to “recognise the inheritance”. And he argues that, actually, it might do his party a favour. People will find it “refreshing that politicians are being upfront”, he says.

“This is a very different, serious, grown-up government,” he adds. Sarwar and Starmer are to politics what the newly reunited Gallagher brothers are to music: the self-appointed grown-ups in the room. Maybe that is something to sing about – Definitely, Maybe.