There is a plant that grows in the mountains of southern India which the Tamils call the Neelakurinji. It blossoms just once every 12 years, an event so rare that the locals use it to measure their age. And in Parliament on Wednesday, Nigel Farage turned up.

He was sitting on the bench that Reform MPs have claimed, next to the DUP, in front of Jeremy Corbyn, wearing a blue suit and a tan that we are supposed to believe he picked up in his constituency of Clacton, the Palm Beach of Essex. 

In the press gallery we craned our heads for a glimpse at the sight, knowing we would one day tell our grandchildren of the time he came along to do his job. We wondered how he had got there, before realising that the likeliest explanation was a pioneering extraction operation by Donald Trump’s proctologist.

It was Kemi Badenoch’s second outing at Prime Minister’s Questions, and she’s not really got the hang of it. She asked how much more money care homes will need to pay for the rise in National Insurance, and whether council tax will have to go up, which is a fair enough line. Keir Starmer responded by listing the things the money will pay for: the NHS, schools, houses. “If she is against those things, she should say so.”

This was a political point so obvious that it can’t really be described as a trap, but that didn’t stop Badenoch from walking into it. “I am not against any of those things,” she said. Labour MPs were delighted. “Aaaaah!” they all cried, the standard response for an admission from an opponent. She tried to recover: “Of course not! None of us is against any of those things.” Which is true, but also the problem every Conservative opposition leader faces: if you don’t like the taxes, what would you cut? 

Starmer couldn’t believe his luck. “Let me get this straight: the leader of the opposition does not want any of the measures in the Budget, but she wants all the benefits?” he asked. “The magic money tree is back after two weeks in office!”

One of Badenoch’s MPs had a little more luck. Lincoln Jopp, the new member for Spelthorne, asked about Sue Gray’s decision not to become Starmer’s special envoy unto the nations. If it wasn’t “an invented job on taxpayers’ money for one of his cronies”, would the prime minister be hiring a replacement? Starmer replied in two words: “It wasn’t.” We await the job ad.

(Jopp is the stepson of John Horam, a former MP for Orpington whose career could provide an entire round of questions for a pub quiz: he worked on the After Eight mint, then sat in Parliament for Labour, the SDP and finally the Conservatives; and was a minister in both Tory and Labour governments. Jopp himself shows promise as a source of political trivia: a former commander of the Scots Guards, he has both shrapnel in his head and a Military Cross from an action in Sierra Leone, and his wife was, sort-of, portrayed by Kristin Scott-Thomas in the film Military Wives, about an army base choir.)

Finally, we got to Farage. “I am sure the Prime Minister and the whole House would wish to congratulate Donald Trump on his landslide victory last week,” he began, before being interrupted by Labour heckles to the effect that, had he turned up a week earlier, he could have heard Starmer offering these congratulations himself. When Farage resumed his question, it was to suggest that Britain could suck up to the Great Orange Helmsman by proscribing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. 

Later, Farage would ask the Foreign Office an urgent question about the Chagos Islands, which was predicated on the idea that the new US administration may not like the deal Britain has done on their future. Excitable people who ought to know better keep suggesting that Farage should be Britain’s ambassador to Washington, but he currently seems to be working as Trump’s ambassador to us. 

Back at PMQs, Starmer rose to reply. “I am glad to see the honourable member making a rare appearance back here in Britain,” he began. “He has spent so much time in America recently that I was half expecting to see him in the immigration statistics.”

Farage, of course, loved it. Like Mr Toad, he covets nothing so much as attention. He had been visibly pleased with his own joke and was positively ecstatic to see that the prime minister had gone to the trouble of having a joke prepared about him. This was what it was all about! Everyone was looking at him and thinking about him and, let’s face it, writing about him. He waved his arms with delight. He enjoyed it so much that we may not have to wait 12 years before we see him again.