The Tory Mortgage Penalty is Labour’s new communications objective. and probably the best bruise to be punching at the moment. Keir kept at it, left and right, finishing with a big swing and miss on account of his friend, or contact, or voter – James from Selby whose mortgage is going up by £400 a month.

Unfortunately, for Keir, James doesn’t come from Selby.James comes from Jarrow. Or… Jacksdale. Or – scrub that, almost nowhere in England begins with J, and James isn’t a Labour name. If Selby is the important Middle England demographic they’re after they’d need a Scott, or a Shawn or at a pinch, a Sam. Sam from Selby could be a standard-bearer for Labour’s lower mortgages. Scott from Scunthorpe  has children who now have to share bedrooms.Shawn from Shoreditch is having to move to a smaller house in Shadwell. Or Shoreham (very nice, too).  Sheepwash is nice at this time of year – any reasonable listener would ask. “Why don’t they move to Sheepwash?”

No, it all lacks credibility.

Come on chaps, get the basics right! This ignorance at the highest levels of our political apparatus is actually shocking. James from Selby!

It’s as bad as when they talk about modular nuclear reactors, and solar generation and vast new wind farms that will bring energy prices down – but they have no idea it takes 15 years to get connected to the grid. All they’d have to do to find out is to ask Nellie from the National Grid and she’d tell them. Fifteen years! And the 80,000 new pylons they’re going to need to carry the power – Fenella from the Future Systems Operator says that there may be local resistance, that’s what Desi from DESNZ and Dizzy from DSIT said, tearfully on the Today programme.

They’re just as flaky on the reasons behind our current fiscal woes. Keir told the House it was the result of 13 years of Tory misrule, Liz Truss and the “kamikaze budget” of fond memory. The actual reason is, of course, the £300bn of borrowed money that funded lockdown (money spent at the same rate as the early years of World War Two). Keir can’t say so because he voted for it, and Rishi can’t say so because he implemented it, and the establishment can’t say so because it was all their idea, and they loved it.

Kevin Brennan – perfectly likeable, lively, droll, an equal-opposite to the Tories’ Philip Davies – started a line of cumulative insults but finished with something of a wet flop calling the PM “weak”. It’s another Labour communication objective, but it isn’t really taking hold.

By every public measure, Rishi is wily, assertive, attentive to his audience and capable of raising a cheer from his backbenches when he cries out that Labour policy is “dangerous, inflationary and it is working people who would pay the price!” A cheer for that is a sign of sheer loyalty.

Keir’s other persistent line is that  says a multimillionaire can’t relate to the “lived experience” of the electorate. “Lived experience” is a technical term for the illusions, delusions and hallucinations people take for reality. If you start relating to people’s lived experience you starting accepting their feline pronouns and a need for trebling their benefits.

How would you attack Rishi? What obvious deficiency does he manifest?

From the distance of the press gallery, he seems to have every quality that a prime minister needs, except something unidentifiable. He leaves your sketch writer at a loss.

He’s impossible to characterise, the pixie that is our prime minister.