For those confused by the difference between Angela Rayner and Jess Phillips, Angela is the Jane Austen one. She is Nancy Mitford to Jess’s Beth Rigby. Beside Jess Phillips, Angela’s the smooth one, the Angel Delight. But considering Phillips is an angel in the other place it leaves Rayner to be as brutal as her talents will allow.

Burning with – blazing with – exalted by – moral energy she laid into deputy Dominic (the principals were away at a funeral) as being the reason women don’t feel safe on the streets.  If Raab were doing his job, 98% of rapists wouldn’t be evading charges, courts, convictions.

If Raab wasn’t spending so much time defending his collapsing position what with the 24 civil servants he’s driven to suicide, and the fact he traffics in hate because he’s a Tory and a filthy bully version at that and he won’t even apologise for the rape of women!*

Kindness is the preferred cruelty of those who actually want to hurt other people. Shouting at the deputy prime minister “to apologise” and to have your bench monkeys behind hoot Apologise! Apologise! makes you look like – Jess Phillips.

Raab’s gentle reply – not quite kind, but perfectly good enough for the second division – “I’ve never called anyone scum” got half the hall cheering More! More! He will remember today on his political deathbed.

It’s very difficult asking questions, maybe more so than answering them. Raab feels like a perfectly good minister – tireless, demanding, humourless (thank God). But nothing like a prime minister, when compared with the prime minister. Angela Rayner, on the other hand  looks more like a LOTO when compared to hers, so her position is probably more fragile than his.

Mhairi Black is the new dark star on the SNP front bench. She looks like a movie star, has Hugh Grant quality hair, dresses in a fugue of mysteriously dark shades – none of them quite black – and finishes off with the best polished brogues ever seen in the Commons. Search in vain for any hidden insult in this description. She spoke with a folded order paper casually in front of her, never referring to it. She laid out the five-figure sums demanded by Tory ex-ministers for “consultancy” and asked in a deftly-weighted question what Raab’s going rate would be when the time came. She won the day, and as long as their Westminster irrelevance continues, may she win many more

Chris Bryant made a winsome little pitch for attention, the continuation of his decades-long campaign for the speakership. He asked, with foxy cross-partiness, for celebration of Paul O’Grady, a cross-dresser from the 80s and latterly radio host (recently deceased). Bryant referred to his “kindness”. As a radio presence he sounded quite sharp and a little sour to my innocent ears. Traditional transvestites often were like this: making humour from being nasty. Oh, readers, I have been there myself, before discovering the wounding powers of kindness.

* Some language has been enhanced for journalistic purposes.