Towards the end of last month two incredibly idiotic things happened, one on each side of the North Atlantic.

One was when reports emerged that the British Chancellor Rachel Reeves had accepted free tickets to a popular music concert which had taken place earlier in March. 

That this news broke during the week of her Spring Statement wasn’t a good look. The poor optics were exacerbated by the fact that she would be making significant cuts to benefits budgets – and specifically to budgets for disability benefits.

You might think that taking luxury freebies as perks of high office while cutting the benefits lived on by those most in need was very much the exclusive province of the Conservative Party – as many of her dismayed Labour colleagues no doubt had previously believed.

So, this might look like a pretty stupid thing to do. What made it worse, though, was that it came only a few months after her boss had been obliged to pay back thousands of pounds for a range of free gifts he’d accepted since coming to power – including (as now seems inevitable) a set of tickets to a popular music concert.

It doesn’t look great for Labour politicians to be taking luxury items from wealthy donors – such as the designer clothes and glasses Keir Starmer had received.

Nor is it particularly convincing when they say they’ve had to accept gifts of expensive tickets to sports and music events because they can no longer sit in the cheap seats due to security concerns.

Our more affluent readers may be surprised to learn that football matches and Taylor Swift shows aren’t actually a requirement of the UK premier's job. Next time, Sir Keir, act like the statesman you clearly want to be – and put the national interest ahead of your own little treats, and stay home.

Especially if you’ve just cut universal winter heating allowances for the elderly, as he and his Chancellor did shortly after arriving in Downing Street last year.

For Labour ministers to take one set of concert tickets could be considered a public relations misfortune. To take two sets looks like willful carelessness, a brazen insult to their core electorate.

Mr. Starmer’s PR blunder was dumb. His Chancellor’s repetition of that gaffe was even dumber. History once more repeats itself as a Whitehall farce.

But of course, as always, if we’re looking for the truly dumbest political error of the month, we have to look across several thousand miles of ocean to Donald Trump’s Washington.

Related News

News from Nowhere: The French Connection

How MI6 helped HTS seize Syria

Yes, it's Signalgate, the latest in the sequence of comic turns performed by the orange goon and his minions, the people who brought us their plans for the Gaza golf resort and the curative properties of intravenous bleach.

It’s one thing to share highly classified material during discussions of national security issues in a chat room on unsecured mobile phones. After all, we’ve surely all done it, haven’t we?

No, you haven’t? Oh well, maybe not quite all of us then. Indeed, even Boris Johnson’s notorious WhatsApp conversations at the height of the Covid-19 crisis were rarely quite so absurd.

But, as we all know, there are different rules for the likes of JD Vance.

Assuming that you’re a senior member of the Trump cabinet, and you’ve decided to flout all security protocols and share details of imminent military operations on such a platform – and to use that platform too to make snide remarks about your nation’s closest allies – it’s probably not a great idea to inadvertently invite a journalist (and a hostile one at that) into the chat.

And then, when you’ve done that, and when he’s inevitably gone public with the story, it’s also not the smartest move to call him a liar – and in doing so to force him to publish the full text of your sordid conversations.

Nor is it brilliant, after that’s happened, to try to dismiss the whole thing as a politically motivated hoax, to fall back on that old cliché of fake news, a defense which sounds exhausted even on the lips of the most loyal White House press officer.

There’s dumb, dumber and dumbest. And then there’s that.

Let's not forget that these are the people who are trying to run – or is that “ruin”? – the world. 

But, back in the UK, at the end of last month, we did our best to beat our American cousins at their own crazy game. 

Riding high in the opinion polls – neck and neck with the governing party – the radical right Reform UK declared that its leader, Nigel Farage, would be Britain’s next Prime Minister. This is the man recently ridiculed by one of his few MPs as a “messiah” – a similarly self-promoting close associate of Donald Trump – a blustering braggard who, like his hero and mentor, swings randomly between bonhomie and boorishness.

Those who think British politics has reached its lowest possible point should just look to the United States before choosing to vote for its chaotic president’s best friend this side of the Atlantic, less bulldog than lapdog, and plummeting us even deeper into this spiraling pit of insanity.

Starmer, Reeves, Vance, Farage... Dumb, dumber, dumbest. And then some.