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.

Tellingly, the devolved administrations have not done the same thing; the Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar staged a press conference, calling on Starmer to go, while the Welsh First Minister has gone mysteriously quiet. Both face electoral oblivion in May and probably know that putting pictures of Sir Keir on their literature will have exactly the same effect on their chances of victory as piping hot cat sick through voters’ letter boxes.

Endless procedures, but all done with no actual consideration of moral probity

Labour’s day of internecine briefing and counter-briefing obviously had some hilarious moments. The ominous sight of David Lammy prancing into No. 10 to offer his support was a highlight of the day. Most amusingly of all, Darren Jones, the government’s very own Pee Wee Herman, had been sent out to make a statement on ‘standards in public life’. Jones adopted his best moralising tone, repeating all the boring statements we’d heard all day from his colleagues about ‘a landslide Labour majority’. The reheated sins of the Tory party five years ago were once again regurgitated as a reason why this no less corrupt and incompetent prime minister should be left alone from all the nasty accusations.

The Labour benches were desolate; you’d expect better attendance at a Drag Queen Story Time in Kabul than there was from Labour backbenchers who had clearly been briefed to turn up to support the PM. There were, however, plenty of opposition MPs of every political hue – you know things are going badly when Rupert Lowe, the Greens, the independent Gaza MPs and Esther McVey are all basically on the same page.

There was a gloriously to-the-point question from Katie Lam that exposed the farce at the heart of the entire affair:

Why did the Prime Minister need ‘process’ to tell him not to hire someone who’s been a nationally notorious crook for over 25 years?

Good question – but it was a love of process that Jones had come to defend. ‘This goes to the heart of who the Prime Minister is. It’s why he became a human rights lawyer in the first place,’ he gushed, in response to another question. The invocation of human rights lawyers drew repulsed noises from the House, as if Jones had said ‘and that’s why my right honourable friend chose to stop washing his hands after going to the lavatory’ or ‘that’s when my honourable friend started licking door handles’. The penny is beginning to drop in some quarters that the dominance by the space law brigade is part of the problem, not the solution.

Not, however in all quarters. Jones said that many ways Labour had done the job of ensuring this wouldn’t happen again already, by ‘strengthening the role of the independent advisor’ and ‘setting up the ethics and integrity commission’. Another quango which sounds like its job is to send dissident authors to a gulag – that’ll definitely solve it! Apparently, more legislation is to come.

A committee on standards is also said to be investigating ‘second jobs’ – a classic displacement activity if ever there was one. The problem wasn’t that Mandy had a side-hustle as a firefighter or a barrister or an artisan currant-bun producer, it was that he was best pals with the 21st century’s pre-eminent nonce and that the PM knew this but didn’t seem to care. That’s an inherent problem of judgement, not something to go on an agenda between ‘what biscuits shall we order next time’ and ‘any other business’.

This is always the solution for these people: another set of procedures, another committee, another list of rules: what of course, is becoming tragically clearer is that it’s precisely this attitude that got the government into its problems in the first place. Endless process, but all done with no actual consideration of moral probity. It’s the Labour version of not seeing the wood for the trees: not seeing the paedo for the procedures.