At the far end of the House of Commons from the Speaker’s chair are a set of benches where MPs or their honoured guests can sit. On Wednesday, as midday approached, the seats were occupied by a strangely immobile man with huge black hair and orange skin. He was wearing sunglasses, and looked for all the world like an ancient version of Gene Simmons, familiar to Critic readers as the lead singer of US glam rock band Kiss. It turned out this was because he really was Gene Simmons.

It’s hard to know what he made of what he witnessed, because he remained utterly still throughout, like a waxwork, or a particularly baffled American. Why was he even there? Perhaps word has reached Los Angeles of Sir Bill Cash and Sir Desmond Swayne, and he had come to get a look at our crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy knights.

Or perhaps he had been told that Prime Minister’s Questions was the greatest live show Britain has to offer. Kiss gigs involve huge pyrotechnic effects, smoke bombs and occasionally actual fire-breathing, so we’ve got to suspect that the sight of Orpington’s Gareth Bacon asking about Labour Party donors was a bit of a disappointment.

Opposite him was Angela Rayner, whose hairstyle may have stirred Simmons to envy

Even worse, Rishi Sunak had fled the country again, so it was Deputy PMQs, featuring new boy lickspittle Oliver Dowden. One doesn’t want to be mean about Dowden. He’s a man with simple desires: to be liked and accepted and to sit at the Cabinet table. You think of the bullying he must have endured from  crueller, posher men like David Cameron and Boris Johnson as he pursued his goals, the insults he must have sucked up, telling himself that one day it would pay off. And now here he is, standing in for the prime minister in the House of Commons while Gene Simmons looks on. Does he feel it was all worth it?

But the show must go on. Simmons, performing for fifty years, could tell you that. And so, metaphorically if not actually plastering on his make-up one more time before striding out to tell the crowd that God gave rock and roll to them, Dowden rose to inform the Commons that, if Labour were in power, Britain would be a basket case of high interest rates and failing public services. Thirty years ago, it used to drive the crowds wild.

Opposite him was Angela Rayner, whose hairstyle may have stirred Simmons to envy. Last time she faced Dowden, her questions were far too long. This time she kept it short. Why was the government taking its own covid inquiry to court? Dowden replied that the inquiry had been buried in documents, 55,000 of them. Besides, he said, they weren’t having an inquiry in Wales. The Tory habit of getting Wales into every answer is like the two-finger hand gesture that rockers of the Simmons vintage always do in photos: no one knows what it means any more, but apparently it’s expected.

Rayner tried again. How would voters feel when they found out that  the government had spent hundreds of thousands on “loophole lawyers” for this court case? Well, replied Dowden, if Rayner cared so much about value for taxpayers, why had she claimed not one but two pairs of headphones on expenses?

His own side cried “aha!”, in a half-hearted way. The price of Rayner’s earpods is eclipsed by the cost of the first minute of any of the prime minister’s helicopter rides.

There’s a nervous brittleness to Dowden’s performance, accentuated by the way his voice gets higher as he becomes more agitated. He should spend the week before his next appearance chain-smoking Capstan Unfiltered, in an effort to match Rayner’s throaty growl. Behind him, Tory MPs were bored. David Jones picked at his teeth. Theresa May chatted to Steve Brine. They made supportive noises, but they were going through the motions.

Late the previous evening Simmons had been on stage in Newcastle, on what the band promises is its final tour. Wearily banging out greatest hits for fans trying to recapture a lost past, the Conservatives too are assumed to be at the end of the road. But still Dowden at least holds out hope for the Tories. Folk try to tell him they don’t belong, but he replies that’s all right, they’re millions strong. Let’s not spoil things for him just yet.