Back in the Cold War, Kremlinologists used to analyse the seating plan at the May Day parade to establish who was in and who was out, and who had simply disappeared. In the House of Commons on Wednesday, we played a similar game.

The salt mines of the back row

Comrade Rees-Mogg, who had so successfully navigated September’s revolution, had been caught out by October’s. He was sat at the far end of the government benches, writing notes in a folder whose contents are destined to be passed in samizdat copies among members of the European Research Group. Next to him was Comrade Malthouse, who had, over the summer, briefly reached the dizzying heights of the Politburo, but was now one step from exile.

There in the salt mines of the back row was Robert Buckland, who had attempted to play the great game of power, switching his support from Rishi Sunak to Liz Truss in the hope of staying on as Welsh Secretary. It was an audacious manoeuvre that won him an extra six weeks in office, and the undying loathing of all the people now in charge. It profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world, and Buckland had done it for a month in the Wales Office.

Meanwhile the front benches were stuffed with former dissidents who had found themselves summoned back from the gulag to run the country. As so often with such people, delight was mixed with surprise. It will be interesting to see how they readjust to life at the top. Will Dominic Raab’s weeks as an unperson mean he now hordes his Pret baguettes even more suspiciously? Has Oliver Dowden stopped waking-up screaming?

Confusingly, the current purge was still ongoing, and had yet to reach the more junior ranks of the Party. So Andrea Jenkyns, one of the ministers appointed by Boris Johnson in July after everyone competent and decent had resigned, was helping to answer Equalities Questions. At the time of writing she was still in the Department for Education, on her third Secretary of State. But her days are surely numbered.

Of the previous two leaders there was no sign. Liz Truss is rumoured to be under guard in her dacha in Greenwich. Johnson, we can only assume, has fled back abroad after his attempt to return and seize power ended in humiliation. As I write, wealthy supporters are paying to move him from beach to beach for his own safety.

Sunak, who has emerged on the top of the pile, walked into the Commons to loud cheers, rather more convincing than Truss was getting last week. At the far end of the chamber, where the Truss loyalists huddled together for warmth against the bitter Siberian chill, there was perhaps a little less noise.

On the whole, though, the mood was terribly jolly on the Tory benches. When you see how much they enjoy a new leader’s first PMQs, you start to understand why they keep having new leaders. It’s so exciting: have they finally found the one who can sock it to the wokerati and get back ahead in the polls?

Sunak’s duel with Keir Starmer was pretty much a score-draw, both men trying out lines to see what might work. The Labour leader went in first on the mystery of Suella Braverman, sacked last week, back in her job this week as the price of her support for Sunak in the leadership struggle. But the new prime minister wasn’t going to say that. “The Home Secretary made an error of judgement, but she recognised that, she raised the matter and she accepted her mistake,” he said. “That’s why I was delighted to welcome back into a united cabinet.” If that doesn’t sound like it quite makes sense, well, it didn’t.

This is not the boast he thinks it is

Starmer pushed on the question, asking how Braverman’s rapid recall was compatible with Sunak’s pledge of integrity. Sitting in the aisle a few feet from the new prime minister, Tory MP Richard Holden jeered angrily at this. Holden spent the early part of the year trying to get Starmer imprisoned for having held a bottle of beer, and was now arguing that a security breach at the Home Office wasn’t worth asking a question about.

Sunak tried, as Truss had done last week, to deliver a bit of Boris-style bluster, saying that Starmer had wanted to stop Brexit and make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister. But you need Johnson’s shamelessness to pull this stuff off. Sunak’s voice is wrong for it, too, going higher and reedier when he tries to deliver the lines that Johnson would boom out.

Starmer asked about Sunak’s now notorious video telling the people of Tunbridge Wells that he’d got money diverted away from inner cities towards them. “I know the right honourable gentleman rarely leaves North London,” Sunak replied. “But if he does, he will know that there are deprived areas in our rural communities, in our coastal communities, and across the south!” After a decade in power, this is not the boast he thinks it is: “Britain — Terrible Everywhere Under The Tories.”

PMQs was followed by an urgent question on Braverman, who demonstrated the limits of nominative determinism by fleeing the scene. In fact, the chamber pretty much emptied of Conservatives before we heard from Jeremy Quin, an MP of whom none of us had previously been aware. He is one of those apparatchiks who has risen by attaching themselves to a coming man, and whose moment has finally come.

He explained that the Home Secretary had admitted her fault and been punished with six whole days in exile. “I don’t think that means that a mistake should hang over someone for the rest of their career,” he said. Or even, as it turns out, the rest of the week.