The candidate is a transy Goth with needle tracks, slit wrists, and a pierced tongue to help with her fundraising behind the dumpster in the alley. She has betrayed her upbringing, abandoned her principles, turned tricks with predators who despise her, and who don’t pay. She hates both herself and most of those who loved her once. Do you nonetheless vote for her, the Conservative Party?

Rishi Sunak is the carer for this damaged, deluded disaster. It can’t be easy. She betrays him freely, steals from his capital, fornicates his future and yet he comes to Commons every week to defend her from obloquy.

“The more they slag him off behind his back, the louder they cheer him in here.” Keir Starmer said. That was well observed. He may have a career in counseling.

Keir elaborated. His government crumbles around him. His party is only talking to itself. It’s all a complete sh*t show.

That was a surprise to hear from the despatch box. Those of us with pearls clutched them.

By way of return, Rishi landed a flurry of well-crafted punches: Starmer takes the knee, he wanted to abolish the monarchy, he still doesn’t know what a woman is, backs teaching white privilege in schools, represents terrorists, campaigned against deporting foreign criminals, and supported Jeremy Corbyn.

That was quite a combination of blows. The prime minister punches above his weight but the problem seems to be he just isn’t heavy enough.

Rishi lacks deadliness. It is the one quality missing from his portfolio of business management skills – the special evil that lines up an adversary and penetrates him psychologically before reaching into his chest cavity and pulling out a throbbing heart to eat it in front of his victim’s face. Its what we call leadership, and is an attribute that can’t be taught, only learnt.

When he responded to Layla Morgan’s excellent question (excuse the note of surprise) about Thames Water’s criminal uselessness (they’ve been flooding Oxfordshire rivers with sewage and charging customers for it), Rishi assured her that the Environment Agency “wouldn’t hesitate” to prosecute.

That’s not political leadership. That is a professional response. Rishi is a creature of the system. He knows that if you don’t play by the rules you can’t get anything done. But has he realized that this being England, if you do play by the rules you can’t get anything done either?

An Environment Agency listening to a leader gifted with deadliness would feel a sparkling sense of danger in their chest area and would have issued writs against Thames Water before the end of PMQs.

He did land one very effective wallop. Tahir Ali had given him a homily on humanitarian law, and said how South Africa’s case at the International Criminal Court had revealed the scale of Israel’s war crimes (Tory discontent). “Is not now the time for the prime minister to admit he has the blood of thousands of innocent people on his hands?” (Tory protests drown him out).

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves at his side were both registering shock at this departure from their New Look Labour. “I have changed my party, he is bullied by his,” he had said earlier in the session, reprising a line from nearly 30 years ago.

And Rishi, hearing one and observing the others, paused. He weighed it up. He reached across the aisle, grasped the Member’s vital organ and yanked. “That’s the face of the changed Labour Party,” he said.

The shout of approbation this produced was quite unlike the normal chorus. To change the metaphor, it was a kill shot that went through three of them.

Theresa May stood up to give the House a lesson in her own brand of deadliness. She asked one of the duller questions of the year. She might have been reading from the Diabetics Phone Directory. But what a silence descended on the chamber as she spoke. That sharp-edged voice, fraught with suppressed pain – it laid out for us all her troubled self, and created such an atmosphere around her it silenced a multitude.

So much of it is in the voice.

Her slatternly party was shamed into respectability for almost ninety seconds.

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.

“Where izzy,” they asked (“where wazzy” we still ask).

Big Lee Anderson put it to the PM that as Ed Davey the Disappearing Democrat had in the last few years called for 30 leaders’ resignations, his Post Office performance should be cause enough for his own impalation. With a flourish that makes your sketchwriter proud to be a Londoner, Mr Anderson declared, “He should clear his diary, clear his desk and clear off”.

The PM refused the flippant gambit and took the matter gravely, with a view to shaming the opposition leader.

But Ed’s place in the upper backbenches was empty. A note had been left there instead of a prayer card. “We tried to deliver the leader of the Liberal Democrats but you were out”. He was lost in the mail. Will he ever be recovered? Has anyone got a tracking number for him? Will they try again to deliver him next week?

Keir Starmer had a wonderfully successful morning. He set the Chamber alight. With care he prepared the set-up. That an MP’s letter had come to light written some years ago, disparaging Boris Johnson’s Rwanda scheme. That it was expensive. That it wouldn’t work. That it was illegal. Did the prime minister know what happened to that MP?

Knowing laughter followed the sly implication.

The PM replied, a little carefully: “The document the hon gent is referring to, I haven’t seen, he hasn’t seen and has been reported second hand”.

Keir proceeded circuitously to his punchline. “It’s hardly a surprise he wanted to scrap the scheme when he was trying to sneak in as Tory leader,” he said. “But he’s been caught red-handed trying to scrap the scheme he’s now made his flagship policy”. And then, with a leap unmatched in daring in modern times, he said, “Which is the MP we should listen to – the one before us, or the one who used to believe in something”.

A moment – a micro-moment of silent incredulity held the House. Then it broke into a thunderclap of hilarity, indignation and a few animal noises. The House was delighted. Keir Starmer – the leader most known for flipping and flopping and U-turning and S-bending and Z-folding himself into contradictory positions was criticizing the PM of his own most obvious fault.

He went on to say that Rishi Sunak couldn’t be honest because he had been taken hostage by his own party.

The mood of the House changed sharply. Labour had been enjoying their leader’s moment of audacity, but this they felt to be an assault on themselves. That Keir was setting himself up as one who leads his party, who controls it, who has crushed its rebellious left and now dominates it.

In this as in much else, not least in Rishi’s quacking voice, the spirit of Tony Blair still haunts our politics.

And it has to be said, there is some truth in Keir’s claim. His flippery-floppery has been purposeful. Without the left he would never have got the leadership, without the centre he’d never get a national majority. He has slalomed his way through the course and kept his party with him. They all hate him, presumably (they are conspicuously sullen at key points in his weekly half hour) but they are still there, as a party waiting for government. And when you consider Keir’s personal qualities, it’s no mean feat.

The season of ill-will, animosity and moral ostentation is upon us, and where better to celebrate that than the Chamber of the Commons?

Both leaders revere the traditions of the House – Keir revived a trope invented by one of the Abrahamic elders of Parliament – possibly someone called William Hague? – who, in the pre-history of modern government, asked the benches opposite to raise their hands if they’d said the PM was a really bad politician. “Come on, who was it?” And, “Who said ‘He really has to go?’” and, “Hands up, there must be some of you?” Arms twitched. Hands were pressed under thighs to keep them hidden. Like Dr Strangelove, the party’s collective arm was longing to spring up. It was a Christmas game everyone enjoyed, and will enjoy again.

The PM in his turn reached back into the ancestral wisdom of Parliament and repurposed a Tory witticism. When young people were calling Churchill a fascist, Dan Hannan said, “Wait til they find out about the other guy.” Rishi Sunak thanked his opponent and said, “He should hear what they say about him!”

His backbenches – who were putting up the bravest show of loyalty – gave the remark a great welcome. It was an old friend.

But all was not winterval banter. There were serious things to be said about compassion, love, children. Keir referred in wither-wringing tones to a heart-rending story. He had heard about a dog, a little dog called Chequers who was facing a Christmas without hearth, home, or a little boy to love because he had been left on the street by Tories and had only a lethal injection to look forward to under a municipal Christmas tree. “All he wants is to be happy,” Sir Keir told a silent Chamber. “If no one in the party opposite will speak for little Chequers,” he said, “it is only Labour who will give the love to that precious little scrap of adorable dogginess, the love he so, so very desperately deserves,” he choked (NB dialogue enhanced for journalistic purposes).

Stephen Flynn took up the theme and developed it with a Middle Eastern twang. To cries behind him of “Shame!” he criticised the UK’s abstention on the UN vote calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Shame indeed, they must be right. How a leader can call for a ceasefire when neither party wants one (an argument made by Andrew Mitchell earlier in the week) – it is to misunderstand shamefully the meaning of care, compassion, courage and other technical terms so common in a certain sort of public house politics.

“How can he explain that 153 nations are wrong and Westminster is right?” he wanted to know. The answer is simple enough (see above).

Why Keir Starmer didn’t pursue his forensic deconstruction of Rwanda is less easy to explain. His backbench MP Beth Winter – part of that violently pacifist movement Stop the War Coalition – asked a question he would have done well to commandeer himself. The MP for Aberdare had noted an application for a tender from the Home Office worth hundreds of millions to cope with refugees up to 2030. Even the Home Office don’t believe he’s going to stop the boats!

They ended their session with a tribute paid to all key workers in Britain. Though not quite all. Those who toil ceaselessly in Guido’s vineyard to keep the lights on and the home fires burning – we were noticeably excluded from the great inclusivity. We don’t work for thanks, though, and perhaps it’s just as well.

Reasonable people disagree on the category Tory Story IV falls into. Some say it’s a tragic farce – others incline to farcical tragedy. It’s hard to distinguish which is what and where anyone is. In post-modern terms it’s not a mess it’s a mash-up. Sir Keir added to the whirligig this afternoon, mashing with the best of us after his weekend exertions sucking up the ancestral spirit of the Conservative party.

Michael Fabricant welcomed the Labour leader to the Tory inner circle as “Mrs Thatcher’s latest fanboy” (Tory delight). Stephen Flynn pointed out the PM was about to lose an election to “a fellow Thatcherite” (desperate Tory cheers). Keir laughed with his ho-ho-whole upper body – more Heath than Thatcher – but he couldn’t bring his party to the party. They faced their front, as glazed as a Terracotta Army. First Israel, now this: was there nothing their leader wouldn’t say? It’s as though he could utter the words ‘Daily Mail’ without spitting three times and throwing salt over his – Good God, he just did that as well. “Daily Mail readers” he said, without the least hint of revulsion, almost as if they weren’t the genocidal world-exterminators of a boiling planet.

If the purpose of Rwanda was “to solve a political headache of the Tories’ own making; to get people out of the country they simply couldn’t deal with – then it’s been a resounding success. After all, they’ve managed to send three home secretaries there.” The essence of humour is surprise, so when Keir makes a pretty good joke the effect triples. “So, apart from his own cabinet, how many people has he sent to Rwanda?”

The tragic farce began to unfold under Starmer’s prosecuting points. The Government was going to send tens of thousands to Africa. Then it was hundreds and now under the latest court ruling, it’s a maximum of 100 (one hundred – one). “The number of people sent there remains stubbornly consistent: zero.”

Rishi accused the opposition of a deal with France to accept 100,000 (so, a huge reduction on current numbers). But he wasn’t doing well. Starmer was – unexpectedly – hitting his stride.

“Article 19 of the Treaty says the United Kingdom shall make arrangements to resettle a proportion of Rwanda’s refugees  in the United Kingdom.” (Low, moaning cries of Ohhhh! From both sides of the House). “So how many refugees from Rwanda will be coming here to the UK?” He had to raise his voice above the turbulence he had caused. The PM’s foes – for brevity’s sake, the House of Commons – were uniformly, but for different motives, delighted.

“It’s a point of pride that we are a compassionate people and welcome people from around the world,” he began, losing at once the sympathy, respect and attention of those of us paying any attention.

Starmer doubted the PM had actually read the Treaty. He must have, he is master of all detail. “Article 4 caps the scheme at Rwanda’s capacity. That’s 100. Article 5 says Rwanda can turn them away if they want. Article 19 says we have to take refugees from Rwanda. And how much did this fantastic deal cost us?“

“Annexe A says on top of the £140 million he’s already showered on Rwanda – when we send people there under this Treaty, we have to pay for their accommodation and their upkeep for five years. And anyone we send there who commits a crime can be returned to us.”

After this shellacking, Sir Keir’s successes went to his head and his questioning fell away into obscurities of football references and hermetic humour.

But he had delivered the most wounding series of questions of his leadership. The Daily Mail could not have put it better. It will have the important electoral effect of discouraging Tory supporters from supporting a confused, culturally corrupt and tragically comic government.

One of the Government’s few successes was postponing Suella Braverman’s personal statement. Normally these come directly after PMQs to a packed Chamber and the Prime Minister suffers in public. Today, the Government put in a statement on Hillsborough first, and even while that was being made, they put in another statement on Gender Recognition.

The loyalist benches were very sparsely sat upon for Suella Braverman’s personal statement. If for no other reason her remarks lacked the resonance necessary for a lethal strike at the PM.

But she’s certainly still in the game. Even the ceramic figure of Liz Truss was there, immobile in support.

When Suella talked about “young men many with values and mores at odds with our own, who’ve paid criminal gangs thousands of pounds to break into Britain”…. There was a glimpse of the genie that may or may not emerge from its long captivity.

Mrs Thatcher was the last who rubbed that lamp the right way and released the accumulated rage of a long suffering middle class. Maybe it will happen again?

She’s certainly abrasive enough but has Suella got the polishing skills to coax and entice and ultimately to summon that towering, blazing genie we in the middle classes strive to suppress in ourselves?

She was far from alone. She had 75 supporters or fellow travelers or absent-minded Tories sitting with her below the gangway. What she said, it’s not clear the Daily Mail yet dares to say. But there’s a good bet to be made that her time is yet to come.

Having said that, her grand proposition Who Governs Britain? wasn’t asked by Thatcher. When Edward Heath put that question to the country the answer came back “Not you, old cock.”

But she’s still clearly still in the game. She nearly lost her audience when she told them they’d have to sit over Christmas to pass the legislation she wanted. But there’s plenty of mischief they might yet get into.

Perhaps she and her group will side with Labour on a confidence vote on some Rwanda Bill and bring the Government down before they’ve a chance to present an election budget?

Let’s put a February election into the maelstrom of possibilities.

Those young men with values and mores at odds with ours may well have the last laugh.

By some cyber super-villainy, the parliamentary media passes were disabled today. Doors that normally opened submissively blocked and barred even the grandest of us, even the BBC. It was as though they were members of the public.

Nonetheless, we are journalists, we have our ways, we will not be denied access. Through the sewers, principally, and up through the drainpipes we swarmed the press gallery, nothing could keep us away from PMQs.

To begin with a sketch scoop – the back of Rishi’s head. Through a cleavage in that thick, pitch thatch is emerging a glimpse of scalp. We plant a flag there, to claim the territory for Guido. A patch of skull was the first sign of the pressures of office felt by David Cameron all those years ago – it is surprising, considering his circumstances, that the PM isn’t as bald as a billiard ball.

Jeremy Wright introduced his visiting 110-year-old constituent to the House and commended him to his party leader as an example of “surviving against the odds”.

Yes, thanks, mate, cheers for that, Jeremy.

Rishi had just had the ultra-loyalist John Hayes (it’s never been entirely clear to whom John is ultra-loyal) saying, “That 1.3 million migrants over a period of two years is a catastrophe for Britain is obvious to everyone apart from guilt-ridden bourgeois liberals.” He is the chair of the Tories’ Commonsense Group and it is a mark of his political ability that “everyone” agrees with what he has said, but not when he says it. He makes you search out the good points of Hamas. And Hitler, even, who had interesting ideas on opera house architecture.

Mr Commonsense asked in a commanding sort of way that the PM follow the instructions of his immigration minister “exactly”. The PM said he was grateful as always for the hon Gent’s advice – probably a more insulting response than anything James Cleverly could come up with. Rwanda was going to be designated safe by an Act of Parliament and the courts would not be able to declare the flights there illegal. Let’s see how that goes.

Sunak was making a very daring defence of his immigration record based on the importance of keeping one’s word and acting on one’s commitments and doing what one said one was going to do. A good prosecutor might have taken the PM apart bit by bit and left him naked, limbless and looking round the room for his vital organs.

Keir contented himself by saying the PM is “in lala land” and that he is “waging a one-man war on reality”.

In the event, his indolent abuse was assisted by the AV authorities in their cabin at the back because even as the PM taunted Starmer with the words, “Britain isn’t listening to him” they cut his mic off, meaning Britain wasn’t listening to either of them. Tulip Siddiq – she has the prettiest name of any MP and exemplary comic timing – quoted one of the senior cardinals in our scientific papacy who recently testified to the Covid Inquiry, “Rishi thinks, ‘Just let people die, and that’s okay.’”

Against a rising Tory hubbub she called out: “How is it that the Prime Minister is okay with people in our country dying?” Is there no end to the power of politics in the socialist world view? Their core value is “the audacity of hope”, in Barack Obama’s preposterous phrase. Conservatives are by contrast coming to the end of their struggle session in re-evaluating their politics and are starting to rally round their own core value. In this case, despair.