A list of all the unsavoury stories the Government tried to bury as they went off for summer recess

Brexit's going badly – but look: Boris Johnson's shaking a robot's hand in Tokyo!

Theresa May et al are off on their holidays – but which stories would they prefer you didn't see? (Carl Court/Getty)

It’s traditional, as the summer recess for Parliament draws nearer, for politicians to attempt to bury bad news or rush through a few pieces of unpopular legislation in between packing their suitcases for walking holidays in Switzerland or Ibiza raves. And I’m happy (read: more tired than I’ve ever been) to say that that tradition still has a strong following in 2017. For your own personal masochistic enjoyment, I’ve outlined some of the better examples of this convention here.

We’ve just seen the biggest crime rise in a decade (and falling rates of police officers)

ONS figures this week show that police-recorded crime has shot up this year, with the biggest annual rise in a decade. Particularly alarming is the fact that violent crime is at the top of the table, with an 18 per cent increase. Robberies and rapes at knifepoint have seen particularly high proportionate rises.

Of course, the number of police officers in England and Wales has gone down for the eighth year in a row, but that shouldn’t matter considering that according to the Conservatives we can keep on getting “more for less” (what I like to call the “homeopathy theory on crime”.)

The university dropout rate is up, probably because of the cost of living for poorer students

The national dropout rate has been steadily rising, with London’s rate now at 9.3 per cent (the highest in the country.) The Social Market Foundation found that those from disadvantaged groups, such as students whose parents work in less well-paid occupations or students who come from places where the majority of people don’t go to university, have the highest rates of dropping out – and it’s probably to do with the cost of living, considering that almost a third of London-based university students now choose to live at home.

Young people are the worst, aren’t they? I like to think that, as with Brexit, if they would only take more of a positive approach to a lifetime of eye-watering debt imposed upon them by people who didn’t pay a penny in fees, then they wouldn’t have to quit their studies so often and it would all work out just fine.

State pension rules have been made so generous to older people that they’re unsustainable

The Government announced this week that six million people will now wait a year longer for their pensions than they thought they would, and people under the age of 40 will most likely end up facing the worst deal: a collapse of all the protections older people are being promised by the Tories and a retirement age of about 97 (a number I did admittedly just make up, but don’t consider to be impossible.)

Not only will intergenerational inequality increase under this system, but the hardest hit in the older age bracket by the pension changes will be women (also, of course, the hardest hit group by austerity cuts.)

It’s OK, though, because, as our dear, wise pensions minister Guy Opperman says, those women can just take up apprenticeships instead.

Japan thinks Brexit is idiotic but Boris Johnson shook a robot’s hand so it’s all OK

Boris Johnson – who I’m sure everyone in Britain is happy to have personally represent them in any and all areas – flew out to Japan this week to talk diplomacy with Japanese officials. Yes, they’re the same Japanese officials who released a letter last year stating: “There are numerous Japanese businesses operating in Europe, which have created 440,000 jobs. A considerable number of these firms are concentrated in the UK… We strongly request that the UK consider this fact seriously and respond in a responsible manner to minimise any harmful effects on these businesses”, later suggesting that they would be forced to “relocate their operations from the UK to existing establishments in the EU” if trade deals with the same tariffs weren’t able to be worked out.

This week, Japan’s business group Keidanren (whose membership includes Toyota, Hitachi and other genuine big deals) is said to be keen to take issue with the whole “no deal is better than a bad deal” thing, almost as though they’ve interpreted that sentence as the complete declaration of insanity that it is rather than the brave roar of independence a small minority of people believe it to be.

None of that matters, of course, because Boris did a photo op with a robot and little else has been revealed to the media about his visit.

A bill trying to ban unpaid work was proposed in Parliament and found no Tory supporters

In an effort to curtail unfair internship culture and some workplaces which require new employees to do up to 40 hours of unpaid “training” shifts before they actually get offered a job (or ditched in favour of someone cheaper), the Unpaid Trial Work Periods Bill (which is sponsored by Stewart Malcolm McDonald of the SNP) would ban unpaid trial periods in “certain circumstances”. It won’t include work experience or volunteering, for obvious reasons.

So far, it has no support from any Tory MPs – shocking, really, when you consider what champions for social mobility they usually are. Still, maybe they’re saving all their campaigning for after the summer holidays.