It tells you a lot about the state of politics that the best Prime Minister’s Questions joke about FreebieGate, the scandal that we keep being told has destroyed the government, came from Keir Starmer.

It was right at the end of a session that had largely served to remind us how much Parliament has been changed by the election. The government benches are so packed that some Labour MPs were unable even to get into the chamber, instead crowding outside the doors leading in. Looking down at the new faces I could see people who used to bring round press releases and are now suddenly allowed to vote on laws.

His heart, one senses, is elsewhere, probably several thousand miles further west

When a Labour MP rose to ask a question and turned out to be from Cornwall, we saw again how complete the devastation of Tory seats at the election was. At the start of July you could walk from Land’s End to Scotland entirely in Conservative seats. Now they hold only patches here and there. The only living former prime minister whose old seat has a Conservative MP is John Major. Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge seat is Labour, and his Henley seat is part of a chain of Lib Dem seats running from Devon to Sussex that would make a lovely cycling route, if Ed Davey is looking for a stunt.

Other things are familiar, but subtly different. Starmer is still telling everybody that the country is in a terrible state, but now he’s doing it as prime minister. Conservative MPs also say this, but they were pretty much saying it before the election — indeed, a big clue that they were in trouble was how pessimistic they were about the state of the nation.

As for Rishi Sunak, he is getting the hang of asking the questions, but his joke delivery remains at the don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you level. “When did the prime minister first become a convert to fire and rehire?” he asked, in a joke about Sue Gray that sort-of worked. When Starmer ignored that, Sunak tried again: “When the prime minister talks about security at work, once again it is one rule for him and another rule for everyone else.” After a further Starmer swerve on National Insurance, we had another scripted gag: “I don’t think even Lord Alli is buying any of that nonsense.” It was fine, but it wasn’t great. His heart, one senses, is elsewhere, probably several thousand miles further west, where the Pacific laps at the California beaches.

It was interesting to see Starmer trying out the full set of prime ministerial evasion tools. He ignored every reference to his recent troubles, he demanded to know why Sunak wasn’t asking about recent government successes — always the whiniest response a leader can give — and again and again and again he blamed the previous government for everything. There were four references to the “£22 billion black hole”.

Sunak had adopted a trick Starmer used in opposition, of asking a final question on a point on which both sides agree, so as to deprive the prime minister of the chance to deliver his final scripted attack on the opposition. Starmer, in reply, used a Boris Johnson trick, of just reading out the attack anyway.

Whoever loses, the sketchwriters will win

The rest of it was largely Labour MPs asking if the prime minister thought he had been left a dreadful mess and Starmer saying he did think that. For all the turmoil, most of them are glad to be there and content to take the view that Starmer got them in.

Dawn Butler finished with a question about Black History Month, noting that Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, a Motown fanatic, is hosting an event with a Temptations tribute band. Starmer smiled. “I’m not sure that something labelled ‘Temptations’ is quite where I need to go at the moment,” he said. After a tricky few weeks, they’re still laughing.

The real excitement of the day came from the latest dramatic twist in the Tory race. At 3:30pm there were gasps of astonishment as we learned that James Cleverly, the sure-fire-definitely-going-through-got-the-momentum winner in the race to lead the Conservative Party, had been knocked out.

At the time of writing, the best guess is that Cleverly supporters, certain their man would win, decided to try to ensure he faced Kemi Badenoch, and instead accidentally knocked him out. I have no idea if that’s true, but I’m choosing to believe it. In 2005, George Osborne, then running David Cameron’s campaign, explained to me that Tory MPs were “the most sophisticated electorate in the world”. They are certainly the funniest. Whoever loses, the sketchwriters will win.