Towards the end of Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, I was woken by a message on my phone from a minister of the crown, asking what on earth I was going to write about.

It was a fair question. The session had been drab. We had hoped that Nadine Dorries, the Wronged Woman of the Commons, would march into the chamber to denounce Rishi Sunak and all his works, but there was no sign of her. 

PMQs is supposed to be the highlight of the parliamentary week, but the awful secret is that it can be terribly dull, both sides going through the motions and the audience struggling to stay interested. This had been one of those. 

Keir Starmer focused on the Boris Horror Peerage Show. Why were the Tories obsessing about who got to go to the Lords when the country was in a mess?

Sunak, interestingly, didn’t dispute the assumptions of the question, but replied that Boris Johnson’s honours list was nothing to do with him: he had simply passed the list on to the King. “I followed a process to the letter,” he said, “in convention with long-standing process.” 

Did he, though? Number 10 clearly wants credit for blocking a knighthood for Stanley Johnson, so it sounds like there was a certain amount of interference. Perhaps they thought they could keep everyone happy by letting Johnson have most of his list while getting rid of the very worst names. Instead, everyone’s furious. Sometimes the amazing thing is that the Conservatives are only 20 points behind in the polls. 

Starmer asked if Liz Truss’s honours list would also be waved through, and Sunak pretended he hadn’t heard the question. Instead he raised Labour’s plan to stop all new oil and gas drilling, which he said would simply mean importing energy from dubious countries. He quoted Gordon Brown’s pledge of “British jobs for British workers”. Starmer, he said, wanted “British jobs for Russian workers.”

It wasn’t a bad line, but the Conservative backbenches were muted. Usually Starmer has to deliver his questions in the face of a barrage of noisy protests. This time no one on the government side seemed anxious to defend the Johnson List of Shame. At the other end of the chamber, “Sir” Jacob Rees-Mogg fiddled intently with his pen. 

In all, the exchange had definitely lacked lustre. Indeed, at the point at which my phone pinged into life with the minister’s message, I had been wondering whether I could just hang a sign on the sketching office door reading: “No Jokes Today — Too Hot”.

But I had lost faith too soon. Rescue arrived in the unlikely form of Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley. “One of the socialist landmines that the Prime Minister has inherited from the former Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip,” he began, and on the press benches we all looked up, our hearts suddenly full of hope. We wouldn’t be disappointed. 

“I am sure the prime minister remembers him,” Davies went on, “he is the one who said that we should be more Conservative; if only he had had a majority of 80 and been Prime Minister, he might have been able to do something about it.” Oooh, sick burn, as the young people say. The opposition benches and even some Tories laughed. Up in the gallery, it was all we could do not to cheer. 

The object of Davies’s ire was the proposed ban on buy-one, get-one-free offers on unhealthy products. “At the best of times,” he said, “that is an idiotic triumph of the nanny state, but during a cost of living crisis it is utterly bonkers.” Davies was packing a lot of anger into a short question.  

On the front bench, Sunak and Health Secretary Steve Barclay were in anxious discussion, presumably the prime minister trying to remember what his line was. Davies sailed on. “Will the prime minister intervene, pursue a more Conservative agenda — as the former member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip would want him to — and scrap this ridiculous policy?”

It was a brutal drive-by on Johnson, from a man he might once have hoped to have on his side. And it was a straw in the wind, too. For all that some MPs and news outlets like to pretend that Johnson is a King Over The Water for True Conservatism, others were paying attention while he was in charge, and have drawn some conclusions. Nor are they afraid to mock him. 

Sunak’s reply, of course, was equivocal. Davies had offered him a chance to do something his own side would like, but he can still find a way to balls it up. “No final decisions have been made,” he said. The sketchwriting community will miss Johnson, but as one door closes, another opens.