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?

The PM really has learned nothing from the last few days

One of the delicious things for Mrs Badenoch is that there is an encyclopaedia of sanctimony from Sir Keir’s time as leader of the opposition when he would try and paint himself as having the morals of a Methodist tea lady compared to the great Satans of Johnson, Truss and Sunak. Specifically, she brought up a claim he made about his profound loyalty to his staff – in a week where No. 10 has resembled a particularly merciless abattoir for Starmerite apparatchiks.

Again and again, Sir Keir clucked and made his horrible own-brand spammy gargles at Mrs Badenoch, accompanied by insinuations that things were as bad with the Tories. The problem with this defence is that most people in this country have the moral compass to discern that repeatedly promoting the known associates of paedophiles is actually several degrees more problematic than eating a cake, albeit an illegal one. That the PM thinks he can sell the nation some sort of myth of moral equivalence here is a huge part of Labour’s credibility problem.

It was a very lame attempt at deflection which shows the PM really has learned nothing from the last few days. It did not go down well with the Labour benches, who sat there like lanyarded Easter Island heads. At least one Labour woman left the chamber, seemingly in disgust at the PM’s answers. ‘How dare he criticise us’, stormed Mrs Badenoch in response to this, ‘we weren’t the ones stuffing government with hypocrites and paedophile apologists.’

‘Matthew Doyle did not give a full account of his actions,’ came his explanation for a second paedo-pal hitting the headlines. Poor Sir Keir has all the worst luck; he seems unable to employ anyone without them turning out to be pathological liars and associated with child sex offenders. And that, apparently, is someone else’s fault.

Even Ed Davey, whose questions are normally about as taxing of the Prime Minister as a spa day with pedicure and head massage, nailed him with his observation that ‘to appoint one paedophile supporter cannot be excused as misfortune, to appoint two shows a catastrophic lack of judgment’. Expect Davey’s next stunt to be appearing as Lady Bracknell.

The irony is that Sir Keir thinks being easily lied to somehow makes him more morally impressive, rather than raising the question of whether someone so vulnerable to the attentions of the wallet inspector should be allowed near the corners of tables unsupervised, let alone be Prime Minister. As a visibly even-angrier-than-usual Stephen Flynn yelled in his furious question, asking him to release all the paperwork about Doyle, ‘He must be the most gullible director of public prosecutions in history.’ ‘Some of us do read the newspapers.’

While Sir Keir made his unconvincing cluckings, the cabinet looked funereal. Pat McFadden – who had been sent out by the PM to do an embarrassing pro Morgan McSweeney news round on Sunday just before the PM sacked him anyway – looked at Sir Keir with a perfect mix of pity and contempt, Rachel Reeves increasingly resembled a wax model in a sauna and Wes Streeting had genuinely gone a shade of green.

Towards the end of PMQs, the city of Birmingham featured heavily. Independent MP Ayoub Khan claimed ‘rubbish is building up under my nose’ whilst looking down at the Reform bench. Messrs Tice and Farage seemed to find it funny; Sarah Pochin, however, turned to stare daggers at Khan for the rest of his question. On the way out, Khan and Farage laughed and shook hands.

Much more embarrassing, however, was a question from Preet Kaur Gill of Edgbaston, who, like a Japanese soldier holding out on a remote Pacific island after the end of the second world war, was determined to ask one of the last toadying Starmerite backbench questions which we’ve come to know so well, specifically about the wonderful changes his premiership has made.

‘What is his message to my community about how politics is a force for good and how he will never walk away from the country we love?’ An honest answer would have been to tell them that if any of them are close friends with a noted wrong ‘un, to just pop their CV in the post, write ’10 Downing Street’ on the front, and we’ll see what we can do.