I didn’t think I had much in common with Kemi, but therein lies a tail

It’s not every day I feel empathy for Kemi Badenoch. But watching the video of her interview with Robert Peston my heart didn’t just go out to her, it got on the phone to pest control. (Peston control is a whole different department.) For while the Tory leader was demanding that No 10 releases files relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador, a mouse scuttled along the skirting boards behind her, upstaging Badenoch where Starmer failed in PMQs earlier this week. Impressively, she didn’t flinch.

For we too are in the middle of an infestation (mice, not party leaders, that would be really uncomfortable). I’ve been there, Kemi – whether it’s during a children’s play date or a dinner party: it’s always best to pretend you haven’t seen the tail disappear behind the radiator and hope no one else has.

I am laissez-faire, which is the problem – crumbs are left on the worktop, fruit exposed, manna for sharp little teeth. It’s mouse Liberty Hall. Plus, we have a large dog, but one so submissive she hides from our Mickeys and Minnies – and we’re allergic to cats. Anyhows, I was nurtured on Mrs Tittlemouse and John Burningham books where mice wear pinnies and just want to keep their babies warm and fed; those who thwart them are adult assassins who have forgotten what it’s like to be a child/mouse. Our kids clearly didn’t get the memo as they are campaigning to get in the professionals to reduce the numbers.

Trying to make mathematical sense of nature is one of the themes of Tom Stoppard’s famously head-scratchy play Arcadia, revived in a magnificent production by Carrie Cracknell at the Old Vic in London this week. “I loved it; no idea what he was on about,” was the major vibe of the foyer at the end of last Wednesday’s opening night. Luckily, the programme came to the rescue: afterwards, on the tube, I edified myself with explanations of Fermat’s Last Theorem and Newtonian physics. I arrived home feeling about 20% cleverer but also wondering, as Sir Tom is gone, who will firm up our mushy brains now? James Graham, Mike Bartlett, Lucy Prebble… are all impressive but so very… understandable!

Out of the tube and walking through the streets of north London I felt the presence of a different cast entirely – ghosts. Earlier that day I had finished Lottie Moggach’s novel Mrs Pearcey. It tells the story of a famous Victorian murder: Mary Pearcey is said to have murdered her lover’s wife and toddler in the kitchen of her rooms in Camden Town, stuffed their bodies into a large pram and pushed them for miles (the pram is now in the Chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussauds). Moggach tells the story through the eyes of an aspiring female reporter: she conjures up the filthy streets of London brilliantly. Moggach has said that the murder obsessed her as a child. Her granny lived in Pearcey’s house and, until it was exorcised, would tell her granddaughter that she heard strange noises. But here’s the rub: when Pearcey was accused of the crime, at first she fobbed the police off saying the specks of blood on the walls of the kitchen were from the mice she had dispensed with.