Patrick Grady of the SNP must be relishing his mayfly life in the spotlight. He won the Oscar for the stupidest question asked in parliament since 1275.

“Is the PM saying there’s something wrong with Rwanda? What does the PM think is wrong with Rwanda that makes it a deterrent? Why wouldn’t people want to be sent there?”

That the PM has been suffering from betrayals, resignations, defections, poll blight and public ridicule makes his ability to think on his feet all the more remarkable. “Because it isn’t Britain,” he replied. Brevity is a virtue only available to the resolute.

So, the latest polling on our diminutive champion characterises him as “spineless” – which is not just rude but wrong.

We all remember him seeking election by his party’s membership when he was brave enough to seek inspiration from Rehoboam’s inaugural address: “Whereas my predecessors did lade you with an heavy yoke, I will add to it!” Tick that box. “And whereas my predecessors did chastise you with whips, I shall chastise you with scorpions!”

While a little scorpion-whipping goes quite a long way – I think I speak for most Conservatives – we can’t accuse Rishi of failing to keep his promises.

And while reasonable people disagree on this, Rishi is still the most impressive Conservative PM at the despatch box since David Cameron. His command of policy is such that he can quote macro and micro, the conditions for an unconditional ceasefire in Gaza, and the interconnectivity of the railway station at Old Oak Common. He was also able, en passant, to dismiss a jibe on private jets with a curt, “I think her leader might have something to say on that.” And when there is no answer to a question (Keir Starmer’s: Where are the 4,250 failed asylum seekers who have disappeared into the general population?) he has the footwork to nimble away that we haven’t really seen since Tony Blair.

Bear in mind Rishi’s own yoke has been laded like billy-oh these last 24 hours even while being absolutely thrashed by scorpions. And yet he betrays not a whit less verve, vitality or virility in front of the 400 haters that fill the benches in front, behind, to left and right and above.

Not sure the Speaker’s that keen on him, either, cutting his mic off when he waved a pamphlet with Keir Starmer’s name in it, from Keir’s former legal life defending Hizb ut-Tahrir. “I ban them, he invoices them!”

That his party has suffered a total political collapse has been coming for so long he couldn’t have stopped it. Allison Pearson in this morning’s Telegraph listed the horrible catalogue of civic and cultural failures “and under a Conservative government”. The two irreconcilable Tory tendencies have combined to form a Beast With Two Backs and the whole endeavour has been thoroughly copulated.

Nonetheless, their leader’s spirits are high enough to tempt him into one last heroic roll of the dice. Let his Rwanda Bill be torn to pieces in the Commons or the Lords and let him call a general election on the slogan Get Rwanda Done.

“The boldest course is the safest,” as Orde Wingate, the famous jungle-fighting general used to say. He did die in an overloaded aircraft crash, but his point is a good one. And it would certainly make a fitting end to the final triangulation.

*In terms of “weaponising the vulnerable” (SNP cant) Keir opened his remarks with a dead child. A Tory’s “My dad’s got dementia” was trumped by another Tory’s “I had a heart attack”. Every cloud has a silver lining: no matter how grievous the affliction, it can be put to good use in the House of Commons. Might be a good time for lepers looking for a seat – another of the benefits of diversity.

Guido is glad to see his continued coverage of the OBR’s credibility deficit brought up in the Commons. Tory backbencher Greg Smith challenged Sunak at PMQs to give us a “better system of financial modelling so we can get taxes lower” instead of relying on “habitually wrong” OBR forecasts. Smith is right that “accurate and robust modelling is required” to plan policies. Just last week the OBR chairman blamed Sunak and Hunt for inaccuracies in forecasts and warned the next set might swing again by a whopping £30 billion. Meanwhile Labour pledges to give it the final say on economic policy…

Despite a Downing Street insider only this week telling Guido that they recognised there was a problem with the groupthink of the OBR’s self-selecting personnel, Sunak decided to swerve criticism of the OBR and praised its “transparency and independence” before patting himself on the back for his Autumn Statement. Politicians are still bending over backwards for their quango overlords…

Robert Jenrick just delivered his speech on the Rwanda Bill. Apart from delivering robust lines on its problems and calling immigration “one of the defining issues of the twenty-first century”, Jenrick sounded as though he wouldn’t vote against the bill tonight. He concluded that “this is not a bad bill, but it is not the best bill“, and called for MPs to “make it better, let’s make it work“. That sounds like amendments down the line…

On Sunday Jenrick specified the plan is a “weak bill that won’t work” and said he won’t be “supporting” it. Enough threatened abstentions could still cause a headache for the government into the evening. Stay tuned for the results at around 7 p.m…

Alex Cunningham, MP for James Cleverly’s favourite constituency of Stockton North, has tried to get topical question selected at Home Office questions this afternoon to bring up last week’s s**ithole controversy again. Failing that, Cunningham got up at the end of the session to deliver a point of order – only to get shot down by Deputy Speaker Eleanor Laing. No doubt he’ll keep trying…

UPDATE: Cleverly has returned to the chamber to apologise for using unparliamentary language in front of Cunningham, who wasn’t having it. Laing has shut down further comment.

Tories have a special relationship with this time of year. The lazy days of summer are gone, the temperatures are beginning to bite, it’s back to work, time for tweeds, the season of country sports and the thrill of the hunt.

Was there any thrill in the Hunt we saw just now? Proper Tories will have their own reactions but for Gallery Guido the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement was crushingly autumnal. Even as he spoke, you felt the nights drawing in and a rush towards the longest night.

He announced this and that, and at each announcement one felt a little life draining away. The small business multiplier is to be frozen for another year. Class 4 National Insurance contributions are being reduced by a full percentage point.

And these details are in his power, he can affect them with his signature. Other proposals are entirely fanciful. He is going to reduce access times to the national grid by 90 per cent. Where it takes 15 years to get your wind farm connected to the grid it’s now going to take just over a year. It takes a year to get the department to answer its phone. The best of British luck with that essential little ingredient for Net Zero.

The Chancellor is also going to increase public sector productivity by 0.5% a year.

He is attempting to penetrate one of the great administrative mysteries of modern times. The NHS was recently the beneficiary of Britain’s largest fiscal settlements – a £50bn Workforce Plan. Post-pandemic they now have 10% more nurses and 15% more consultants – and yet hospital activity has fallen. And no one knows why. NHS England even refuses to admit the mystery exists. Does the Chancellor know what he’s up against?

The only reliable way he could do that is by firing 30,000 public sector workers a year which – in modern parlance – is an act of genocide.

The Chancellor finished by telling us that his new approach amounted to the biggest package of tax cuts since the 1980s. This may be so, but the achievement isn’t so remarkable when you’ve presided over the highest taxing parliament in history.

To be fair, they probably had to, to make a dent in the £300bn bill incurred by paying the nation to take a year off work – but that’s not something Labour or the Tories can ever say in public.

The PM sat behind his Chancellor with a lively face, smiling cleverly as if we should understand that the announcements were largely his idea. Odd that the puppeteer should be smaller than the puppet.

The deeply autumnal sense increased with the shadow chancellor’s reaction. We all know Rachel Reeves. Suffice it to say, she is as God made her.
If it’s springtime for Labour it’s getting very wintry for Britain.

In the preceding PMQs, MPs made efficient use of the recent media-friendly supply of dead children. The ones without political significance were used to demonstrate MPs’ human qualities. The ones in Gaza became blood donors for Stephen Flynn. He dabbled his hands in their wounds, took a draught of their suffering to lubricate his Caledonian keening. He said that a five-day ceasefire was merely a stopgap and he, the PM, was endorsing “a return to the killing of children” whereas he, Stephen Flynn, wanted “an end to the killing of children“. This miracle would be effected by taking power from the actually genocidal Hamas and given to the actually genocidal Palestinian Authority.

Yes, winter is definitely on the way.

Lord Cameron has kicked off his maiden speech with jokes aplenty as he speaks in the Lords for the second reading of the CPTPP Bill. The “infamous” shepherd’s hut got an early mention from Cameron. Thus killing the joke forever…

Cameron said he wasn’t waiting to come back to politics like a “latter-day De Gaulle… asked to take back control“, or a “Cincinnatus hovering above the crowd” and that he leaves “all classical allusions, and illusions for that matter, to another former prime minister“. It took a while to warm the crowd up, though they got there in the end…