It’s no part of the Sketch’s job description to bring about the destruction of the Conservative Party and the personal ruin of its leader – consider it a voluntary extra. No charge.

That’s the good news. And in further good news, the Prime Minister is in even better shape than the King. Whatever fettle means, Sunak’s has never been finer. When Starmer publicly welcomed Labour’s latest MP to his backbenches, a defecting Tory medic, the PM said with a comedian’s ease, “Glad to actually see him” with an inaudible “for once”.

He got a louder shout of backbench laughter than Jimmy Carr at the joke’s first outing. “What do you do, sir?” “I’m a plasterer.” “Good of you to turn up.”

How the Tories think they can do any better than their Mighty Mosquito is one of politics’ great comic narratives. He’s across all briefs. He can sting. He can wallop. He can avoid and evade questions as well as any premier in recent memory.

How is he going to pay for the abolition of National Insurance? Keir was told he has no idea how the tax economics works.

Why will he never give a straight answer? For goodness sake, he’s sick and tired of repeating his straight answers.

Is going to fund it by halving the state pension?

“No.”

That straight answer produced a second shutter-rattling shout of laughter.

Will he rule out abolishing the Winter Fuel Allowance?

“We doubled it.”

Tory joy, real or simulated.”No, we aren’t plotting against our leader,” the noise meant. “We love our nimble little pixie!”

And then a re-run of the best parliamentary joke of the decade. Keir leading on pension policy sets up the punchline of Keir’s personal pension plan. “It comes with its own special law,” Sunak began. His backbenches squirmed with pleasure as for a favourite bedtime story. “It was called The Pension Increase Scheme For Keir Starmer.”

It’s a joke that age does not weary. Which is just as well.

LOTO finished on what sounded like a sour note, saying that the PM’s colleagues were queueing up to dump him for their own political survival, that they don’t want to be seen anywhere near him.

It sounded quite rude, in fact.

Notice that Keir didn’t bring up the subject of Rwanda. There was a reason for that.

“We can see the Rwanda deterrent is working,” that noisy Tory with the beard said. “We have deported our first illegal migrant.”

Including the sunk cost, the unfortunate deportee is the single most expensive traveler in the history of civilisation.

However, that desperado Tim Laughton has reported back from northern France saying the deterrent is already working over there. The news from Dublin’s tent city confirms it. “If he carries on like this, he’s going to win the election,” Bill Wiggin claimed.

No one laughed. Perhaps it created a shiver of alarm among his colleagues.

Because this is how the Government destroys its party.

It does so by winning the election. And it does that by achieving a total, unignorable collapse in boat crossings by the weekend.

How?

By sending tomorrow’s landings directly to a reception centre at an RAF base and thence to Rwanda the following day.

This will have the power to stop the boats at once and for all, flip public opinion, cause a surge of interest in the Conservatives, create an environment in which tax cuts will affect voting, followed by a very narrow majority.

And that’s the end of the Conservative Party. This is the election the Tories must lose. Five more years of a Tory government will wipe them out, and cause a catastrophic development in the Sunak family’s domestic arrangements.

Will such a catastrophe happen?

Luckily, on past form, Rishi will not pull of such a daring executive action.

The Sunaks will live happily ever after following their patriarch’s mid-career sabbatical running a country,

And the tree of liberty, in need of that great manure, will be refreshed with the blood of 150 Tory MPs.

Labour’s deputy, flame-haired and dressed in a blazing red smock sat in her place, as for a funeral pyre. She looked as if she could go up at any minute. Obsessives will know all the trouble she’s in and expected her immolation imminently.

Deputy Dowden had brought faggots and a match and had never looked more pleased with himself. What a magnificent beadle he will make, if ever the office is brought back.

Angela Rayner rose from her place to Tory shouts of More! More! Attack being the best form of attack, she plunged into the crowd with two broken bottles and laid waste to Tory expectations. “I know the party opposite is desperate to talk about my living arrangements but the public want to know what this Government is going to do about theirs.”

It was a neat trope and delivered with her characteristic flare.

It’s true her flame wavered occasionally. Her demand to know when the Government was going to do something to reform the rental market was answered with the words, “This afternoon. Renters (Reform) Bill: Remaining Stages. Until 7pm.” She shouldn’t attempt tongue twisters and her distinction between the freehold ban on houses rather than on flats was nice but niche for this level of PMQs.

The final twist in Dowden’s face of her broken bottle (backstabbing on behalf of a pint sized loser) will be remembered for days. So, she survived. Which is more than can be said for Frank Field (see below).

Mhairi Black put the mass grave of Gaza onto the Floor of the House without seeking moral profit from it. Why is the Government not designating the 300 executions a war crime and withholding arms for Israel? The way she asked the question meant that reasonable people could try and answer it.

Iain Duncan Smith described something closer to home and apparently less significant. Yes, it occurred in Essex, and true, it concerned Boots the chemist – but future historians might find it a greater factor in the death of western civilisation than all the atrocities of this century. It was the casual, unhurried looting of a high street Boots, without fear of being caught, or even criticised. It’s happening more and more, what with the police now working from home.

Labour’s Sarah Wood criticised the Tory mayoral candidate – commentators better informed than I will put a name to that person. Apparently, the candidate has said, “The Black community has a problem with crime.” Moans of Shame! Shame! around her. Perhaps she’ll be arrested before the polls open.

At least the increase in the Defence budget, welcomed by John Baron, will bring the DEI regiment up to fighting strength.

We heard of a Gay Tax that is pricing gay couples out of having a family – the state is refusing them free fertilisation facilities. There are other ways of going about that, of course. And what with school fees, the cost of healthcare and the price of preschool smart phones – heterosexual couples are being priced out of having families probably rather more.

Labour backbencher made a shocking claim, that the Tories had “given away the future of the children of Teeside”? That really made the blood boil. To give away children’s future – have you seen the Net Present Worth of a child? These people are Conservatives in Name Only. No wonder the public finances are as they are.

And on that perhaps depressing note, it must be reported that the death of Frank Field produced a shower of quite unforgivable remarks in the Chamber. What a nice fellow he was. How he worked to make the world a better place. What a tireless campaigner he was. It really takes the shine off dying to hear these things said out loud. And him no longer here to defend himself.

Frank was deeply ashamed of his hubris, thinking he could win as an independent in the constituency he had worked for decades. He never said a thing your sketchwriter disagreed with, which makes his survival in the Labour party a marvel. He campaigned energetically against the disadvantaged, dispossessed and disenfranchised designating them as Neighbours From Hell. He advocated removing their benefits and housing them in cages underneath the southern flyover. As a young and affectionate sketchwriter, I thought it better for his sake not to report that modest proposal he gave me in his 2001 campaign. To his credit, he never forgave me.

What important thing he knew we shall never know now, but it must have been pretty good to have got him into the Lords. Ave atque vale, Frank.

In the speed skating Winter Olympics of 2002, the racer coming in dead last won gold when, on the last lap and in sight of the finish line, everyone in front of him fell over.

He had kept up. He was still racing. He shimmied through the carnage and pipped it with a puffed-out chest.

If, in the last lap before the general election, Labour all fall over, Rishi will be right there, still racing, shimmying his pixie hips to the finish line (imagine how angry his family will be!).

It’s not impossible. Although it having happened before in 1992 makes it less likely in 2024 – but whether or not he is in the race, he is still in racing form at PMQs.

Keir Starmer, relaxing into the role of PM-in-waiting a little too thoroughly, fluffed his joke about Liz Truss’s book (the “rare unsigned copy” joke from the film Notting Hill) and left the PM to comment on her statement that her budget was “the happiest moment of her premiership” asking, “has he met anyone with a mortgage who agrees?” (Silky delivery followed by knowing laughter).

Rishi’s answer created a record for this Parliament. “All I can say is, he should spend a little less time reading that book and a little more time reading his deputy leader’s tax advice.” Tsunamic Tory laughter halted proceedings for 32 seconds (roughly a week in parliamentary time).

It wasn’t a complete answer to LOTO’s question, it wasn’t exactly spontaneous wit, but what a wallop. Keir’s equally prepared counter – “a billionaire smearing a working class woman” – lacked chivalry, some thought, but it produced counter-cheers and a pointing contest which everyone enjoys.

The PMIW proceeded with a well structured series of questions introducing “the Tory obsession with unfunded tax cuts”. He declared that’s what caused Truss’s budget collapse and subsequent interest rate hikes. It’s what people think, true or not. He then asked more than once how the PM’s “unfunded £46 billion promise to scrap National Insurance” was to be paid for. Was it to be by cutting the NHS budget, cutting the state pension or by “another Tory tax rise”?

The PM found a number of different ways of saying, “if you think I’m answering that you’re more of a noggin than you look.” Among them – Keir habitually sides with our enemies. That he twice tried to make his own Trident-denying, NATO-sceptic, anti-Semitic predecessor elected Prime Minister. That he, Rishi, had campaigned on the dangers of Liz Truss’s approach. That the triple lock had been promised for the next Parliament and NHS funding was at record levels.

The PM didn’t mention the third option, so it might well be that they are planning to pay for the tax cuts with tax rises.

Whatever the merits of the arguments, there hasn’t, with the partial exception of Cameron, been such an accomplished Conservative Leader at the despatch box since Mrs. T. Light on his feet, quick, deft and well prepared, he can even talk and think at the same time – a talent usually exercised only by angry wives – which he will need if Labour does fall over, he does squeak the election and he does have to have that frank conversation with Mrs. Sunak.

P.S.: The most memorable parliamentary stoppage your sketch writer has witnessed was caused by one Brian Binley after Gordon Brown had seen private polling and failed to call the snap election in 2007 that might have given him his mandate. Binley rose for the first question in PMQs to ask in a pleasant, cross party sort of way if the PM would visit his constituency where a record investment had created a world class, state-of-the-art bottling factory.

They say there are corners of the gallery where echoes of the consequent laughter can still, oh so faintly, be heard.

What a feast for the furious it was.

Diane Abbot stood up every time the PM sat down, but she wasn’t called. Two male leaders spoke up in her stead, to make the patriarchy proud.

“The man bankrolling the prime minister said that the Member for Hackney North should be shot.”

It sounded pretty bad, said like that, in the House of Commons. “Should be shot,” are words that are really better left unsaid. Yes, of course by the man who first used them but equally by anyone else. They are words that excite the excitable, they reinforce dark thoughts in the heads of the suggestible. Said like that, out loud, and with passion, they add to the danger that is being deplored.

On the plus side, Keir was doing better than he has for a long time, the festival spirit was strong in him. “What racist, woman-hating threat of violence would he have to make before the PM plucked up the courage to,” (and here followed something so unthinkable as to make Keir eligible for a prize of some sort) “hand back the “ten million pounds he’s taken from him.”

It would have been the only part of the session that Frank Hester enjoyed.

Rishi was on the spot but had had 48 hours to develop his anti-racist defence. He had discarded the more daring line that the remarks were nothing to do either with race or gender. He moved his ground to “the most diverse government ever,” and his own ethnicity as its leader.

Alas, it went over poorly. The words lacked heart, they lacked humanity. It was committee language, a sociological calculation. And he might have turned the whole thing on its head by following his old school motto – Manners Makyth Man. A gentlemanly apology to Ms Abbot across the despatch box – something heartfelt, genuine, sincere, something that formed a collegiate connection beyond the realm of party, beyond politics – that would have absolutely infuriated everyone on the other side.

In a voice thrilling with significance, Stephen Flynn wondered how the PM could put “money before morals”. Flynn speaks so well it doesn’t matter he hasn’t anything useful to say: he’s like Carla Bruni, whose singing gives us an opportunity to look at her.

Up Diane stood every time Rishi sat down, looking smaller than she used to. None of us are getting any younger, and hate speech isn’t what it was, now that MPs are actually being attacked. Who could want to wish her harm?

What else?

Ed Davey (very unlike Carla Bruni) created an apple pie question out of a children’s cancer hospital. Ruby-red Edward Leigh had Keir nodding along with his question that started, “There is only one party of government that has the will, the inclination, the determination to…” to do anything, really, Keir was thinking. A Tory lady noted that her government was proposing to pay failed asylum seekers to go to Rwanda (what a pull factor!) and that the only way to prevent more of the same was to pull out of the European Court of Human Rights. Rishi wanted to be very clear about that, but wasn’t. Mark Francois felt the hand of history on his shoulder as he warned us of the dangers of appeasement. And Liz Saville Roberts called attention to the National Theatre’s play condemning “austerity” that had slowed the increase in national longevity.

It makes you want to hate actors. They all ought to be shot.

“Tommy Macavoy has gone,” Keir Starmer told us before commencing hostilities. The legendary Labour Whip and master of the art of persuasion. Keir didn’t mention the phrase associated with him: “I will make you want to be dead.” He is greatly missed.

Lee Anderson had left his party, his friends, friendly foes, colleagues and co-conspirators. He removed himself to the remoteness of the furthest opposition backbench below the gangway next to George Galloway. There was an empty space beside him, left perhaps for Andrew Bridgen. Lord, but politics is hard.

Towards the end of the Chancellor’s budget, Keir Starmer’s internal pressure gauges were running hot. He was pumping himself up for what might be the biggest speech of his leadership – his address in reply to an election-year Budget. Jeremy Hunt had caused several bursts of uproar, the House had been fluffed to a point just shy of climax. The atmosphere was dense, Keir was to be the thunderclap – and then the SNP spoiled everything.

The Chair read out a formal Motion designed to authorise any announced taxes that were to have immediate effect (there never are any). All those in favour? (Roar) All those against? (As loud a roar where there is always silence).

Eleanor Laing patiently explained to the claymore-waving clans below the gangway that this was a formality, it was a provisional motion, it was a preliminary motion, it was never voted on. The real Motion would be voted on next Tuesday and that a division now would be pointless before the Leader of the Opposition’s reply to the Chancellor – and so, she re-ran the question.

All those against? The SNP roared again: Nooooo! (with base notes of See You Next Tuesday).

Division!

These things take 20 minutes. The narrative of the debate collapses. The mood of the House evaporates. The drama is derailed. The SNP had read the rule book, identified Standing Order 51 and were quite entitled – and highly motivated – to ruin the Labour leader’s big moment. It was his fault the House hadn’t been allowed to vote on their Gaza amendment, so the House would be forced to vote on the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act (1968) and wreck his moment in the spotlight.

No wonder Scotland has such dental problems, this sort of revenge is very sweet.

In the previous PMQs, Stephen Flynn confessed – and I’m not sure he quite realised it – that Scotland was now a victim of Tam Dalyell’s West Lothian Question (that following devolution, Scottish MPs in Parliament could vote on English education but the English couldn’t vote on Scottish).

In a pleasing inversion of that, the leader of the SNP lamented that Westminster was taxing Scottish energy resources in order to pay for English tax cuts.

He is right. It is one of the advantages of being a colonial overlord, and a small recompense for shouldering the burden of that resentful outpost of humanity – once the home of Mill, Smith and Enlightenment.

Rishi had just been laying out the realities of and some of the reasons for our own sad national decline (it’s a steepening of our previous sad national decline, with added decline).

He lamented, for instance, the presence of violent rapists and other sex criminals working their way up the police forces. Rishi was able to announce a rather brilliant detective innovation – the police were now undertaking to check what criminal records serving policemen currently had. Apparently when people commit sex crimes, it gets written down somewhere, and now the police have discovered where those records are kept and are in the process of looking at them. Rape is actually contrary to the police service’s Code of Conduct, that’s how they know they shouldn’t be doing it.

This didn’t satisfy Keir Starmer. “I’m familiar with Codes,” he said and got the first good laugh of the session. He was not pleased. “This is too serious a matter for that,” he said. “There is a world of difference between a code and binding standards.” That got an even better laugh.

Keir was the Director of Public Prosecutions, the PM pointed out, when rape went virtually unpunished. Now a full 2.4% of rape trials today happen within a year of the crime being committed. It doesn’t sound a very high number, looked at in cool reflection.

Why that is so is a great mystery but some light on it was shed from another question. A Tory asserted that organising alliances to counter the threat of apocalyptic nuclear war with Russia was very difficult and slow and constantly stalling. Rishi told the Commons they were looking at “how we can unblock the bureaucracy” that is preventing meaningful action.

We will be looking at that from the ashes of our smouldering offices, as we crackle with radioactivity. Never mind democracy, or whatever is said in the the Chamber, we are actually  governed by that blocked bureaucracy.

So, when Jeremy Hunt announced a plan to revolutionise the NHS, to drive productivity dizzyingly up to 1.9% a year (the head of the NHS has promised to do that, in return for a multi-billion pound funding rush), some of us remembered Rishi’s words and wondered what erematic extravagance would be deployed to unblock the calcified monster.

It’s all to do with apps and AI, it seems. The NHS is going to be “the most digitally integrated health service in the world.” Keir pointed out in his turn that Jeremy Hunt as Minister of Health had promised “a paperless NHS by 2018.” That made his party very happy. But on a serious note – remembering the computerised “Spine” that was going to digitise  all patient records in the early 2000s (it was a forerunner of HS2 in that it cost £12 billion and was never built), an exciting opportunity is being offered to the public. Find the companies with the contracts to deliver this NHS revolution and buy, buy, buy their shares. And don’t get cancer because a share spike is the only positive way to make a killing out of the NHS.

As Budgets go, Chancellor Hunt put on a pretty good show for such a nice young man. He had an attractive rabbit in the form of a cut in the “tax on jobs”. Who knows he might suggest abolishing it altogether in their manifesto. There was also the new Treasury financing model based on the idea of claiming future spending reductions by preventive spending now. That could have got a good laugh, and may yet do. He also caused a very decent uproar half a dozen times,

“Lower taxes means higher growth.” went down so well with Labour that he used the line again in different forms. That Conservatives understand how lower taxes release economic energy which is why they were lowering taxes  (uproar). That Conservative  “governments bring taxes down” (uproar). That Rachel Reeves’ “thespian skills had her “acting like a Tory but we all know how that ends – with higher taxes!” Enormous uproar.

The biggest uproar he caused was by pulling Angela Rayner’s leg about her difficulties in the rental property market (Guido passim). Whatever he said, it caused Ms Rayner to flare up magnificently, cheeks shining, eyes blazing, fingers pointing, long red hair flowing down her front  like something out of a Bob Dylan song. I hope I am old enough and sufficiently past it all to say she is a magnificent example of femininity, with all the best qualities of Queen Boadicea and the Lady of Shalott. I’m not sure Keir Starmer nor Rachel Reeves entirely agree, they quite ostentatiously ignored her.

Chancellor Hunt left us with his thought that Britain was to become the world capital of creativity, the next global SiliconE Valley, the international leader in financial innovation, the highest growth in the something or other and a place where all working people could rely on the full expensing of leased assets.

Oh, if only the Conservatives hadn’t put up taxes to the highest since World War Two! Oh, if only immigration wasn’t running at a million a year! Oh, if only they hadn’t spent £380 billion on lockdown! Oh, if only they hadn’t created the cat’s cradle of regulations and codes and directives that mean that nothing can be done – then what an election year budget speech it might have been.

Keir Starmer asked, “Honestly, what is the point of them?” And it was hard to find an immediate answer.

For the first PMQs since last week’s Opposition Day of Rage, and Keir Starmer’s intervention on the Order Paper followed by 87 signatures on an anti-Speaker EDM – your sketch writer was concerned that Lindsay Hoyle’s era of a kinder, gentler politics was in danger of passing.

However, before the session started, there were indications of a humanitarian pause in hostilities. Keir stood beside the Chair giving off an air of nonchalant humility, chatting with the Speaker’s staff, awaiting the Speaker’s signal to proceed along the front bench to his place. He was acknowledging the authority of the chair.

The Tories who had signed the EDM might have disrupted proceedings with barracking, stamping and a concert of disorder. They have before – but perhaps mindful of the consensus (“We let ourselves down badly, last week”) they too made no move towards mutiny.

And most powerful in the circumstances, the Scottish Nationalist Intifada could have pursued its theme of a Chair contemptuous of legitimate aspirations to sovereign nationhood, and the colonial oppression of a genocidal government stealing the talent and resources of a conquered nation. But no – Flynn talked about Gaza. With Caledonian eloquence he made the five-month death toll – modest for the region – sound awful enough that the PM should vote for a ceasefire at the UN. He received the answer he always receives and he seemed content.

The Speaker is probably going to be all right. Lion taming is more psychology than violence and for the time being at least, the great beast of the Commons is back under control.

To show there were no hard feelings, the two main leaders put on a crowd-pleasing display of mutual abuse.

Mocking Liz Truss’s description of an ‘administrative state’ frustrating politicians’ directives, Keir asked, “When did the Tories become the political wing of the Flat Earth Society?”  It made his party laugh. Will they laugh so heartily in government when they try to discourage the Home Office working from home? We – and they – shall probably see.

The PM was at his ease in this environment, returning the Opposition’s arguments with Spineless! Helpless! Utterly hopeless! And if they were talking former leaders – a deft segue – what about the loathsome anti-semitism of Labour’s previous leader?

Keir ploughed on with: Tin foil hats! Enoch Powell! Rivers of Blood! And then, most eloquent of all, Nigel Farage!

He asked whether the PM would let Farage back into the Conservative party? As Nigel is the founding father of the challenger party most properly called Revenge UK, it is  unlikely he would ever want to join a party of lepers, liars, fraudsters, charlatans and multi-purpose morons (his words, with some additions).

Rishi is too dignified to say such things out loud. He responded that the diverse and progressive Tories had for over 100 years chosen all sorts of exotic minorities as leaders, including women and himself.

He also gave one of the best prime ministerial responses ever heard at the despatch box. When asked how he could have attended a meeting in Wales dominated by climate change deniers, conspiracy theorists and other seditious  idiots, he said: “That’s no way to talk about the Welsh farming community,” and sat down. What fabulous, furious noise he produced.

I was by chance sitting in the gallery next to the Speaker of the Swedish parliament and very proud at that moment to be British.

When Rishi declared, “We will always  stand up for British values!” he got such roaring support from his back benches you might have thought they actually had a chance at the next election.

PS: One slight misfire on LOTO’s part may or may not be significant. He chanelled Tony Blair from the 1990s and said. “I changed my party for the better!”

His bettered MPs sat behind like the monkeys who neither saw nor heard anything. It will be interesting to watch when they come to life.

PPS: The tribute to courteous and even-tempered Patrick Cormack might have been fuller. The late and lamented peer created one of the memorable moments in the Commons of last two decades. He was the only Member who reacted manfully when Otis Ferry’s gang invaded the Commons Chamber to protest some damn thing or other. The Serjeant at Arms – actually armed with a sword – did nothing. Patrick launched himself down the gangway, grabbed the ring leader and wrestled him towards the exit. He was a substantial presence when roused and inspired by the violation of the established order. He was a proper Tory, RIP.