Sunak’s one decent joke lost in field of thorny PM’s questions

“Ooooohhhhhhh ……. wwwwhhheeaaayyy!” How else do you transcribe the noise?

As Conservative MPs approached the bar of the house before prime minister’s questions, each one became the subject of a very specific type of very childish chanting; the one that is usually heard at goal kicks in lower-league football.

All morning, there’d been talk that Labour was about to complete a hat-trick of defections, that a third Tory MP in as many weeks would be crossing the floor of the Commons. It had even been noted that a de facto government defeat on a motion on Monday had occurred with the assistance of eight Tory MPs, one of whom was Theresa May, so it would probably be her.

Was the chamber about to become her very own very public wheatfield? It did not come to pass. Instead, every new arrival was subjected to an excited drum roll of a cheer, daring them to turn right to the opposition benches and join the Labour Party. When they even did it to the Tory chief whip Simon Hart — which really would have been a story — the Speaker decided he had better intervene.

Yes, it’s all extremely juvenile, but when this is as seriously as you’re being taken, you’re in serious trouble. The Palace of Westminster has a real last-day-of-term vibe around it now, except that the last day of term could last six months. Imagine the state of it by then.

Keir Starmer had clearly been reading yesterday’s parliamentary sketches. He had noticed, as others had before, that a prime minister choosing to start the week with a big scary speech on security might look a bit ridiculous if another member of his government is simultaneously declaring war on woke lanyards.

The war on lanyards has taken on a life of its own since it began on Monday morning. It’s now not clear whether the wearing of rainbow lanyards has or hasn’t been banned, not least as the guidance that was meant to ban it didn’t actually mention them at all.

Banned or not, the prime minister came armed with a sharp answer. “Civil service impartiality is something we are proud to uphold,” he said. “He can ask his chief of staff about that.”

For the uninitiated, that would be Sue Gray, who defenestrated Boris Johnson over the parties scandal while working as the country’s second highest ranking civil servant, and then with her next breath, broke the civil service code by trotting off to join the Labour Party.

About 15 of Sunak’s MPs let out a modest laugh, which seemed desperately unfair. This was the rarest of things — an actually decent joke, leaving the prime minister’s lips at prime minister’s questions.

It went downhill from there. Starmer had a whole load of very difficult questions lined up, about the government’s early prisoner release scheme, which had done exactly as described, but had released early from prison at least one prisoner who had been deemed “a risk to children”.

Spluttering for an answer, Sunak couldn’t seem to decide whether this had been an accident or had been done deliberately, which didn’t really matter all that much because both are equally bad.

What he alighted on instead was a second run out this week of his brand new attack line. “They’ve had 14 years to think about the future and all they want to do is talk about the past!” he said.

It’s not a great line, given that Sunak is about to try to win a general election mainly by pretending it’s still 2019, and that Keir Starmer is really Jeremy Corbyn in disguise, which nobody truly believes he is.

But more specifically, it’s hard to think of any worse time to deploy it than while talking about the early release of dangerous criminals. Sometimes the past matters more than the future, however unfair that might seem.

Sometimes, the public care rather more about what someone has or hasn’t done already than what they might do next.

It is yet another injustice that criminals and politicians alike must learn to live with. It never ceases to amaze just how much they have in common.