Just after midday on Wednesday, the section of the nation that has Prime Minister’s Questions on in the background was united in a single thought: who’s that chap in the glasses?

Keir Starmer was on his way back from one of the summits that have crowded his diary in the last couple of months, and so his place was taken by his deputy, Angela Rayner. Opposite her was… well. Kemi Badenoch has decided against choosing a deputy — with so much talent in her shadow Cabinet, how would she pick one person out — and declared that she’ll choose stand-ins on a case-by-case basis. This time it was the 47-year-old MP for Brentwood and Ongar, Alex Burghart.

Burghart is the sort of floppy-haired Tory that you wouldn’t much mind marrying your daughter, a genial historian with a PhD in the Mercian Polity, whatever that is. In the gallery, we wondered, possibly too loudly, whether there were many jokes in Anglo-Saxon charters. At this he looked up and gave us a big smile. He is probably used to being teased: his has long been the woad less travelled. 

It was a big moment, and he could be forgiven for nerves. There’s a danger of coming across like a complete Cnut. He took a deep breath and puffed out his cheeks before beginning with a question about inflation, which had risen that morning. 

Rayner swatted that one away: Burghart had been minister for growth under Liz Truss. He gave a little modest smile and rose to reply. Economists said inflation was going up as a result of government policy. “Real economists!” he added. 

This was a reference to the ongoing Tory investigation about whether Rachel Reeves exaggerated her LinkedIn profile. If you haven’t followed this emerging scandal, all you need to know is that the campaign to bring Reeves down is being masterminded, if that’s the term, by Essex-man-come-lately Richard Holden. In the last parliament he ran a similar campaign to expose Keir Starmer for having eaten a curry on a lockdown visit to Durham. You remember that: it led to Starmer resigning as Labour leader and the Tories winning the election. We are about a month away from a weary Yorkshire police force announcing that it is opening an investigation into whether the 14-year-old Reeves really won a chess trophy. 

Burghart was getting over his nerves. “High tax, high inflation, low growth, low reform — there is a word for that,” he began. But his inexperience was also showing. Faced with the loud heckling from the Labour benches, he leaned ever closer to his microphone and bellowed “Starmerism!” into it. On TV, it was distorted. In the chamber, it cut out, meaning that we had no idea what he’d said. 

His next questions were on Tuesday’s farmer protest. Rayner replied that the government was putting billions into the sector. “Perhaps,” Burghart replied, Rayner “thinks that everyone came to London yesterday to thank the government.” It’s possible she thinks they should: she later told the Liberal Democrat Daisy Cooper that the protests were the result of “scaremongering”. It will be really interesting to see how far ministers get with the slogan: “Your accountant is lying to you.”

Graham Stuart, a Conservative, had another shot at Reeves’s LinkedIn-polishing. Rayner dismissed it: “In the last four months our chancellor has shown more competence than the last four chancellors.”

Notwithstanding the enormous pleasure it gives the Tories, there is a danger in politicians declaring open season on each other’s CVs. Many of them will have exaggerated some aspect of their lives in order to gain favour with local associations or voters. For instance, Ric Holden’s own recent speech about pie and mash left many of us wondering if he’d ever even seen the foodstuff. In the meantime, there is a danger of appearing trivial. It’s quite possible that Reeves will lose Labour the next election, but if she does, it will be because of decisions about tax and spend, not because she overstated her role at the Halifax.

The real star of the session though was, once again, new Tory MP Lincoln Jopp. The After Eight heir and hero of Sierra Leone has now had a question at three of the last four sessions. That’s more than the leader of the SNP, Stephen Flynn, has had since the election. 

Jopp has used them to complain about David Lammy and to ask about Sue Gray, but on Wednesday we got to the real nitty gritty. “The Spelthorne Litter Pickers,” he began, “is an outstanding organisation of 1,000 volunteers who do great work up and down my constituency, come rain or shine. Would the Deputy Prime Minister, the government and indeed the whole House like to join me in congratulating the Spelthorne Litter Pickers and thank them for all they do?” By this stage, he was barely audible over the cheers from all sides, some possibly ironic. 

It was a triumph. If Badenoch is looking for someone else to hold the government to account in her absence, she should look no further than Jopp. Although there’s a danger in being overshadowed. Perhaps she should stick with that nice chap in the glasses.