Madeline Grant

Sir Keir got probably the biggest cheer he’s had all year at Prime Minister’s Questions today. Unfortunately for him, it came from the Tory benches. After all the Mandelson revelations, it now transpires that Sir Keir gave a peerage to his former director of communications (a chocolate teapot job if ever there was one), Matthew Doyle, despite knowing that he helped campaign for a convicted sex offender. To put it simply, becoming known as the nation’s premier employer of the associates of paedophiles isn’t a fantastic way to begin your weekly bit of scrutiny at work. Is there some sort of special nonce-adjacent job centre where Sir Keir goes looking for CVs? Who does he get to fix his sink? The late Cyril Smith? Is the ghost of Sir Jimmy Savile his odd-job man?

Ever wondered what Custer’s last stand would have been like if the dashing but judgement-phobic cavalry general had in fact been an adenoidal human rights lawyer? Wonder no more! The long-drawn-out fall of Sir Keir took another twist today as he tried to marshal his troops in a last desperate defence of his position. The cabinet have had to rally round Sir Keir by going to the monumental effort of copy and pasting a supportive tweet onto their official X accounts. While their social media posturing is all protestations of loyalty, I suspect that their WhatsApps read more like the burn book from Mean Girls. Except probably not as well-spelled.

It was always going to be a good one wasn’t it? There was almost a sense of guilt watching today’s PMQs. My fellow sketch writers and I felt like the people who slow down to get a good view of a particularly horrific pile-up on a dual carriageway. Confirmation of this came when the Prime Minister dispensed with his usual embarrassing self-congratulatory monologue at the start of PMQs and simply told the House he’d had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. One hopes that the latter category includes the Metropolitan Police. We started with a little hors d’oeuvre of Labour incompetence. A nondescript Scottish MP had been primed to talk about how the SNP were the enemy of the high street. ‘She’s a superb champion for Paisley’, droned Sir Keir in reply.

It’s Groundhog Day, the theme of the film where Bill Murray is destined to repeat the same day over and over again. It was also a terrible day for Labour – of course that doesn’t narrow things down either – you could be reading this at any point over the next three years and it’ll still be true. Bill Murray woke up every day to ‘I Got You Babe’, we woke up to a remix of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ and the immolation scene from Götterdämmerung. There was a ghost in the room: the Paedo’s Pal, Captain Underpants himself, the Lord Mandelson! Still, even by the standards set in the field of repeated shoddiness by the current government, Monday really was a bad day for Labour.

David Lammy’s last appearance at PMQs resembled a multi clown-car pile-up: both tragic and hilarious. Indeed, it was such a disaster that one wondered whether Lammy would ever be allowed near PMQs again. However, Sir Keir’s obvious contempt for being in the country even a second longer than he has to had got the better of him once more and, while he’s making sure that president Xi has the cleanest shoes of any despot, we were treated to another Lammy PMQs. It was a pretty lame effort all round. Neither man really asked, nor answered questions Opposite him was Shadow Business Secretary Andrew Griffith, who unfortunately has the demeanour of a depressed mortgage broker.

A doe-eyed Andy Burnham has appeared looking sad across media outlets, hurt that he has been politically outmanoeuvred by Sir Keir Starmer. Burnham has positioned himself both as the wronged victim of Starmer’s Stalinist instincts and the only hope for a foundering party to find its popularity again. A cross between Bonnie Prince Charlie and Bambi’s Mother. ‘To decide is to divide’, Mr Alexander said. We were in deep Blairite doublespeak territory now Appropriately, for what seems to resemble a community theatre production of Macbeth, the government wheeled out a Scottish MP for the media round.

One of the least successful operas in history received a revival at Westminster this week. ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’ – the woman without a shadow – tells of betrayal, moral weakness and a mad emperor, all taking place around a group of southern islands, and was not a hit for Richard Strauss. Its revival at Westminster had a new title, however: ‘The Man with No Shame’. Inevitably, given the news, the Chagos featured heavily at PMQs, as did the situation in Greenland. The betrayal of south sea, or rather Indian Ocean, islands, no longer seems to be the preserve of opera, or even operetta, but instead the active policy of the man squatting in Downing Street. ‘The future of Greenland should only be decided by the people of Greenland’, began Kemi Badenoch.

This government has many faults, but one really cannot fault them on their comic timing. On the very day when the Americans withdrew support for the Chagos ‘deal’, partly on the grounds that it showed weakness in the face of China, the government also gave approval to a massive new Chinese embassy complete with access to sensitive underground cable systems and an unspecified subterranean complex that definitely won’t be used to torture dissidents.  Inevitably, this provoked questions in the House of Commons. Answering for the government was Security Minister Dan Jarvis. Clearly aware that he was about to get a barrage of difficult questions from unimpressed opposition MPs, Mr Jarvis had deployed a classic Labour two-pronged strategy.

Westminster has its faults, but if you’re looking for a good old-fashioned day of mistakes, backbiting, and last-minute drama, there really is nowhere like it. Today it was there in spades: Titus Andronicus by the cast of Rainbow. The Jenrick sacking had everything – apparent incompetence by a junior aide, wild conspiratorial accusations and a hastily convened press conference. Never mind tea or pomp or sarcasm, nobody does this sort of clattering political cock-up quite like the British. Reform had always planned to have a press conference today. In fact, they had two. Spare a thought for Lord Offord, unveiled as Reform’s leader in Scotland but destined to be only the bridesmaid and not the bride.