While yesterday may not have been great for Dominic Raab, at least he can take solace in the fact he had a better reshuffle than Robert Peston. ITV’s senile senior political reporter spent all day tweeting every thought process, speculation and briefing with the acumen and insight of a first-year politics student. Some of the highlights included:

• Assuming Dowden would be new education secretary. He became party chair.
• Speculating Mark Spencer would be DEFRA secretary. This isn’t just any cock up…
• Implying Priti Patel was going to get the sack.
• Claiming Dowden “may be the last member of the cabinet who campaigned against Brexit”. Apart from Sajid, Truss, Shapps, Spencer, Sharma, Wallace and Brandon Lewis…

Early yesterday afternoon, Peston’s show account asked ordinary Twitter punters for their reshuffle predictions, the replies to which proved only slightly less accurate than Robert’s own dribbling…

Peston’s incessant tweeting hasn’t been limited to the reshuffle, however. Co-conspirators will no doubt remember the time he admitted confusion over the concept of mirrors:

This is flipping weird. The phone cable should be visible in the mirror descending from @BorisJohnson’s watch, in this official Downing St picture. It’s not. What is going on? https://t.co/aRsrMSc0DT

— Robert Peston (@Peston) January 24, 2021

Or the time he couldn’t be bothered to call a press office, so just admitted to scientific illiteracy:

Can a scientist explain to me how the Lancet can identify an "adverse event classified as possibly related to a vaccine" in a person who was in the "control group" and therefore was given a placebo rather than the Oxford vaccine. Seems logically impossible

— Robert Peston (@Peston) December 8, 2020

Or the time he said DUP sectarianism would “drive unaligned voters to Sinn Fein”:

return NI’s biggest unionist party to religious sectarianism, and arguably thereby drive large numbers of unaligned voters to Sinn Fein, or will the new leader continue Foster’s drive to reposition the DUP as a centrist party of unionism? What happens matters not only to...

— Robert Peston (@Peston) April 28, 2021

Or the time he caused outrage by saying we were “paying teachers for not very much teaching”

The other important way of looking at this is that output was surprisingly robust in the first three months of the year - since much of the so-called inflation was (eg) the phenomenon of the government paying teachers for not very much teaching, when lockdown closed schools

— Robert Peston (@Peston) May 12, 2021

These are just the tip of the Twitter iceberg, into which ITV’s reputation crashes on an almost daily basis.

2012 Peston Twitter was more on the money…