PMQs drove up a cul-de-sac today. Sir Keir’s team of researchers have discovered a crime blackspot where ten houses have been burgled in the last 18 months, but only one of these offences has ended up in court. This delighted Sir Keir as it gave him a chance to remind the world that he once worked as a prosecutor. Even better, the benighted cul-de-sac happens to be in Yorkshire where Rishi Sunak’s constituency is located.

Crime dominated the session because Sir Keir brought up Baroness Casey’s end-of-term report on the London police force. The cops have fluffed it, according to the baroness, and their ranks are now overflowing with sexists, racists and homophobes. Sir Keir focused on his specialism, conviction rates, and lambasted the government for exposing the public to wave after wave of crime. ‘Burglars and rapists walk the streets with impunity!’ he cried with so much vigour that it sounded like a proud Labour achievement.

Hoyle suffers from the misconception that he’s a wit who deserves to bask in the limelight every Wednesday

Rishi told a different tale and boasted that his party had hired an extra 20,000 cops. But if every new officer is a woman-hating, gay-bashing, right-wing extremist, it would be wiser to halt recruitment rather than increase it. Flooding the streets with an army of anti-social bullies is unlikely to improve our lives.

The debate turned on the issue of responsibility. Sir Keir blamed the ‘sheer negligence’ of the Tories for leaving Britain’s policing ‘shattered’. Rishi quoted the word ‘dysfunctional’ which Casey used to describe Mayor Khan’s relationship with the Metropolitan Police chief. Rishi advised Sir Keir to take Khan to one side and force him to get a grip. The question is who runs London’s police. Is it the mayor, the Met Commissioner or the Home Secretary? No one knows. Over-governance erases accountability. The more politicians we hire, the more easily they can shirk responsibility and blame each other for failure. Abolishing the useless mayoralty would be a good start but governments tend to behave like fecund absentee fathers. They keep engendering needy new bodies and forcing the taxpayer to fund them.

The most conspicuous performer today was the man in charge. In a debating society, the chair should be like an actual chair: solid, supportive and silent. For the speaker in parliament, the measure of success is how little he speaks, not how much. But Lindsay Hoyle has turned this principle on its head and he wants to run PMQs as an amateur talent show for comedians with no material. Or rather for one comedian.

Hoyle suffers from the misconception that he’s a wit who deserves to bask in the limelight every Wednesday. He jumped up and down constantly today, interrupting both leaders mid-speech, and wasting the House’s time by lecturing MPs about wasting the House’s time. He refused to let the debate develop at its own pace and he kept fiddling, tinkering, micro-managing. Several times he reprimanded members by name and toyed with the possibility of disciplining them formally. But he didn’t follow through. Result: his authority fell while his decibel level rose. His favourite sally, which no one finds amusing, is to threaten a rowdy member with banishment to the tea rooms. Rishi helped him out by supplying a punchline. Hoyle was on his feet, for the umpteenth time, scolding a backbencher with his habitual quip.

‘You’ll be buying the teas in the tea room if we’re not careful,’ said Hoyle.

‘They’ll be Yorkshire teas, Mr Speaker,’ added Rishi.