Peak Silly Season
When exactly the peak of the silly season is remains undefined as it is a media construct.
Broadly its somewhere in that gap between Parliament rising for the summer and returning in early September ahead of the Party Conferences. That also coincides with the school summer holidays when many take a break.
In recent times the neo-liberal imperative which hates the idea of holidays has tried to get rid of the summer break:
It is having some success since the world of politics while certainly not adverse to holidays doesn’t particularly require six weeks to take them.
Tony Benn commented on the silly season in his Diary on 30th July 1977 when he complained that a story that Harold Wilson thought MI5 were bugging Downing St would be debated in the ‘silly season’
Silly Season in 2023 has hardly got going with headlines on climate change and war. The Nadine Dorries saga was a little silly but the peak is the current search for the Loch Ness Monster
The silly season was certainly even sillier and better when in 1997 acting Prime Minister John Prescott compared Peter Mandelson to a crab he had found on a beach
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/news/08/0819/crab.shtml
Peak silly season in 2019 was the tweet that the last servings in a marmite jar could be more easily retrieved by standing it on its side and that the jars had flat sides specifically for this purpose.
It is true that if you stand a marmite jar on its side or on its head its easier to get the servings at the bottom out. That is not the reason the jars have flat sides however. The word marmite means pot which don’t tend to be shaped like that.
Compared to that August 2023 has seen a significant decline in silliness
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