What, precisely, is the nature of the government’s “crackdown on rip-off university degrees”? I only ask because I’ve read the prime minister’s article about it in the Daily Telegraph, gone through the press release, and listened to the Education Secretary’s statement in Parliament on Monday afternoon, and I’m still none the wiser.

The “Crack Down” graphic released by the Department for Education made it all look quite serious, with a sledgehammer smashing into the concrete edifice of what were presumably supposed to be degrees in media studies and art history, the sort of thing we’re told leave you qualified only to be a burger flipper, or possibly Princess of Wales. It was the kind of ad more usually used for campaigns against drug dealers and welfare cheats. “Do YOU know a university lecturer? Could there be one on your street, pushing sociology courses on impressionable teens? Call DegreeStoppers now – if your tip leads to a conviction, you could receive a postgraduate diploma!”

All this was greeted with outrage from academics, who have long feared that Conservative ministers, with an eye only for the bottom line, were coming for any course that didn’t leave students with a BSc and a job in “cyber”.

We had the nostalgic joy of watching Brexiteers rising in anger

Listening to Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, things began to sound rather more nuanced. There was nothing about limiting student numbers. Indeed, right at the end, she said the government was dropping the idea of requiring students to have minimum levels of educational attainment to qualify for a student loan. The main focus was on ensuring that universities were not overselling substandard courses.

Some students, Keegan explained, are “being sold a promise of a better tomorrow, only to be disappointed”. Personally, I think this sounds like ideal preparation for adulthood, but the secretary of state disagrees.

Labour’s Bridget Phillipson opted for mockery, asking whether Rishi Sunak was the victim of a rip-off education. “The prime minister has a degree in politics from one of our leading universities, and yet his government lost control of almost 50 councils this year, he was the second choice of his own party, and now he is on track to fail to deliver on the pledges he set himself,” she noted, before asking Keegan whether she believed Sunak’s Oxford Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree “was in any sense, a high value course”.

The minister played it with a straight face. “The prime minister is a world class leader,” she replied, to considerable laughter. Presumably this is in the same sense that our track-and-trace system was “world class”.

Talk of university crackdowns is supposed to be red meat for Tory backbenchers, but it was notable that many of them had reservations about whatever it was the government was proposing. Peter Bottomley, very much on the wet end of Conservatism, pointed out that earnings aren’t the only assessment of a person’s value. More interesting was Kit Malthouse, who is perfectly capable of being a bruiser when he chooses, but revealed a hitherto unnoticed sensitive side, asking for “protections” for non-commercial degrees “like theology or philosophy or the study of poetry”. Poor Kit, all those years as a Home Office minister, when he longed to sit beneath a bough with a book of verse and a jug of wine. Who knew?

For the Lib Dems, Munira Wilson suggested that this was all old hat. “Not all of the things I brought forward today have already been announced actually,” replied Keegan, implicitly admitting that many of them had.

After the statement was finished, we had the nostalgic joy of watching Brexiteers rising in anger. Some regulations are on their way through parliament to implement Sunak’s Windsor Framework Brexit triumph. They will implement an Irish Sea border on postal packages, to the outrage of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionists. These were meant to go through a committee on the nod, but the Tories appointed to the committee tasked with doing the job turned out to include too many Brexiteers, including Sir James Duddridge, who explained what had happened after he told the whips he wouldn’t be able to support the regulations. “I was asked whether I’d like to be replaced, I said no,” he told the chamber. That morning he’d found he’d been replaced anyway, as had anyone else likely to cause a fuss, for what they were told was their convenience.

Mark Francois rose. “This basically a sixth form politics stunt,” he said. “Why has our government been reduced to this?” It was a good question. Maybe those hunting for rip-off courses really should take a look at the Oxford PPE.