It was the last Prime Minister’s Questions of term, and there was a distinct air of festivity. Nobody had brought in board games, but on the backbenches five female Tory MPs had decided to sit together wearing bright pink, giving events a distinct Barbie air. Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, nearby in a dark suit, was clearly Team Oppenheimer.

This is the kind of land-grab of which his new best friend Tony Blair approves, a full-on role-reversal

The Barbie movie is the story of an immaculate plastic doll who leaves a fantasy land of endless wealth to experience the misery of human existence. On an unrelated note, Rishi Sunak had decided to visit the House of Commons.

The prime minister’s attendance in the chamber has become a subject of some tension. He has missed PMQs six times in his nine months in the job. It usually takes a prime minister a couple of years to notch up that many sick notes. Keir Starmer makes jokes about it, but what should worry Sunak much more is that so does the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle.

“The prime minister likes to get away early,” Hoyle told noisy Conservative MPs who were heckling the Labour leader. “The more you stop me getting on with the questions, the more I’m going to keep him here!” Sunak didn’t look even slightly amused by that — he clearly finds jokes at his expense quite annoying.

Starmer took the gag up. “We don’t get any more answers when he’s here than when he’s not,” he said. Indeed, Sunak was more interested in asking questions, repeatedly demanding that Starmer tell doctors they shouldn’t strike. Hoyle didn’t think much of that, either. “It’s not Opposition Questions, it’s Prime Minister’s Questions.”

“I think with his time away, he’s forgotten how this works,” Starmer told Hoyle. It wasn’t exactly Morecambe and Wise, but it’s not a good thing if your opponent is swapping jokes about you with the umpire.

What happened next was also significant. The subject was Sunak’s plan to recruit more NHS staff. “Where is the money coming from?” asked the Labour leader.

Suddenly, Starmer’s refusal to commit to spending money on things, even on removing the two-child benefit cap, got some context. He is not simply trying to defend Labour against charges of irresponsibility, he’s actually trying to position them as more fiscally responsible than the spendthrift Tories. This is the kind of land-grab of which his new best friend Tony Blair approves, a full-on role-reversal.

Who knew the SNP was against one-party states?

Starmer explained that his own NHS plan would be funded by taxing wealthy non-doms. Sunak replied that this tax rise is paying for “five different things”. He was, he said, a fan of making everyone study maths to age 18, but Starmer “makes a very strong case for doing maths all the way to 61.” His own side loved that. The prime minister’s reluctance to attend PMQs is surprising, because he’s not bad at it.

Although anyone can be caught out by a bad bit of briefing. “If the prime minister is so good at maths, he will know that I am 60, not 61,” Starmer replied. Let’s call the exchange a score-draw.

Stephen Flynn, for the SNP, challenged Sunak about his party’s true enemy, Labour. In the morning his team had distributed mugs to journalists with the Labour design and the slogan “Controls on family sizes.” “They’re made in China,” Flynn’s accompanying note read. “Just like Sir Keir Starmer’s latest policy.” Who knew the SNP was against one-party states?

And then we got to the great issue facing the nation, Nigel Farage’s bank account. This was the subject of questions from both Rees-Mogg and David Davis, outraged that Farage has been dumped by posh people’s counting house Coutts. The former Brexit Party leader had, marvellously, forced the bank to release 40-odd pages of emails revealing that however polite they were to his face, they spent an awful lot of time going through his tweets and discussing what an awful person he was behind his back.

The worst thing about this story is that it forces us to sympathise with Farage. It is obviously hard to disagree with the Coutts assessment that their former client is a “disingenuous grifter”, a “useful idiot” admirer of Vladimir Putin and “at best” someone who is “pandering to racists”. Nor, of course, would very many of the common folk whom Farage claims to speak for be allowed even to set foot in Coutts’s plush headquarters on the Strand.

Nevertheless, if banks are going to start closing people’s accounts because someone in the office doesn’t like their tweets, it’s all a bit thin-end-of-the-wedge. Apart from anything else, what does it mean to contravene Coutts’s “values”? This is a bank that has, certainly until quite recently, numbered Prince Andrew among its clients.

Do all banks do this? Are Barclays reading my sketches each day as they decide whether I’m allowed to keep my overdraft? “Not sure that gag about Jess Phillips really landed. Let’s cut him off.” Safest, probably, if I don’t write any more for a few weeks.