Osborne in power as George is born

It’s not entirely obvious who is running the country right now.

Last week all the party leaders fled abroad. The PM’s gone to Portugal, his deputy Nick Clegg to Spain for another summer with the in-laws and Ed Miliband has nipped over the channel to France.

George Osborne is the most senior minister still in the UK but he spent Wednesday night baking bread and fixing a motorway instead of practising running the country.

He joined a series of nightshifts to meet hardworking Britons ahead of the announcement that the economy grew 0.6% in the last quarter.

If the bakers he was with saw their loaves rise by just 0.6% there would be some pretty soggy toast on the breakfast tables of Britain.

Given the variety of hats Osborne sported during the various overnight photo opportunities, he looked more like he was trying out to be a one-man Village People tribute act than auditioning to be Prime Minister.

He was missing the headdress, however there wasn’t much call for Native Americans overnight.

In his Conservative conference speech last year Osborne divided the nation into strivers and skivers, the latter being readily identifiable by their “closed blinds” while ordinary folk went off to work.

Yet on Wednesday night he met people who are strivers who’d have their blinds closed in the morning because they’d been working or being kept from their work by the Chancellor all night.

It was a rather silly stunt, made all the more so by the fact there’s one group of people definitely not hardworking right now MPs knocked off 10 days ago.

However, all is not idle in parliament. The House of Lords continues to sit right through till the end of the month.

Meet any peers in the corridors of power and they’re keen to impress that they are still employed while their Commons counterparts are away.

They don’t tell you so swiftly that, unlike MPs, their lordships aren’t coming back in September when they finish up this week they won’t be back until mid-October.

Which means more than two months without the sort of very important debates held in the Lords last week including one on the contribution of the English Premier League to the economy and another on the value of atheists and humanists.

The former was a chance for peers to mention their favourite football team in the hope of getting some complimentary tickets (which they would, of course, declare) before the new season kicks off.

The high point of the latter was Baroness Flather taking the art of stating the obvious to a new level by saying “so many things have come about through religion”.

There was some low-level pomp earlier in the week when the Lords offered a humble address on the occasion of the arrival of Prince George.

Basically that means they publicly congratulated the Queen and Prince William on the new arrival.

Leader of the House Lord Hill channelled Johnny Mathis with musings on the wonder of when a child is born. Speaking for the Opposition was the aptly-named Baroness Royall.

Lib Dem Lord McNally gave a perfunctory contribution while the Bishop of Birmingham explained he was the Church of England’s representative because his boss, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was at a funeral. Life and death in the Lords!

The Upper chamber may often appear outrageously outmoded but, at times like this, it does offer some sort of tangible evidence of the thread of British history.

Prince William’s baby may only be newborn but, one day, King George will sit on the throne at the core of the House of Lords just as all his regal predecessors have done.