Rishi Sunak stood up for Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons just as, a couple of hundred yards away, Justin Welby was sitting down in the House of Lords.

Fresh from his anointing of Charles III, the archbishop had come to Parliament to denounce the government’s illegal immigration bill. Clad in robes and surplice as though for morning communion, Welby wasted no time. “We need a bill to reform migration,” he began. “We need a bill to stop the boats. We need a bill to destroy the evil tribe of traffickers. The tragedy is that, without much change, this is not that bill.” 

His hands shook as he spoke, perhaps from the consciousness that he was taking the established church into battle on one of the hottest political issues of the day. But he pulled no punches. The government’s approach of cutting aid while hoping that the world’s poorest countries would deal with the global refugee crisis was, he said, “morally unacceptable and politically impractical”. 

Will any of this have bothered the prime minister?

Will any of this have bothered the prime minister? Very little does seem to upset him. He walked into the chamber to cheers so loud that we suspected Labour wags of joining in, celebrating the prime minister’s triumphant loss of 1,000 council seats last week. We are now at the stage where media contrarians are trying to explain why, in a sort of funny way, this is a good result for Sunak. Presumably the only thing better would have been to lose 2,000. 

PMQs opened with a tale of an army veteran who, unable to see a dentist, had pulled out 18 of his own teeth. This sounds excruciatingly painful even to those of us who have sat through multiple Liz Truss speeches, but Sunak was unfazed. “There are record sums going into dentistry and indeed 500 more NHS dentists working today,” he replied, full of the joys of orthodonty. 

Truly the prime minister is a modern Dr Pangloss. There is no piece of bad news that can depress him or knock him back. And who can blame him? For other people, mistakes like “endorsing Boris Johnson to be prime minister” and “losing a leadership race to Truss” would be career ending. Sunak, however, has managed to fail upwards all his life. It’s possible he really does think his latest defeat is only another step on his path to glory. 

Taunted by Keir Starmer over the lost councillors, the prime minister produced what sounded at the time like a great “Gotcha” quote from Tony Blair, saying that local elections were no guide to general elections. This went down well in the room, but the Blair quote was from 2007 and addressed to David Cameron, who went on to win the 2010 election, so if anything, it proves the opposite point. 

Starmer had his own lines prepared. Sunak, he said, had lost to Truss “who then lost to a lettuce”. The prime minister, he added, “keeps entering a two-horse race and somehow finishing third”. 

Neither man seemed desperately bothered by anything the other said. Starmer accused the Tories of having wrecked the economy, and Sunak did a jolly little “not me” wave. It will be interesting to see if that approach works in any TV debates.

There was one change of minor note in the chamber. Andrew Bridgen, the potato-magnate-turned-Brexit-Spartan-turned-vaccine-sceptic, whose views turn out to be too extreme even for the Tories, had formally crossed the floor to joined actor-turned-singer-turned-anti-woke-crusader Laurence Fox’s new party. This is called Renew, or Review, or probably Reclaim, and isn’t to be confused with property-developer-turned-Brexiteer-turned-anti-woke-crusader Richard Tice’s new party, which used to be UKIP and then was the Brexit Party and is now Reveal or Repeal or maybe Reform. Only Tice and Fox can tell the parties apart, and it’s far from clear that even Bridgen knows which one he’s joined. 

He had gone to sit on the opposition benches, plonking himself at the end of the row where the Lib Dems and the Greens usually sit. This went down with them as well as you can imagine, and even in a crowded chamber, Bridgen found there was a gap between himself and the Green’s Caroline Lucas, a sort of personal quarantine zone.  

Later, Bridgen entertained Fox on the Commons terrace. They gathered staff together for a photo, and realised they had no one to take it. When a nearby journalist offered, Bridgen replied that he was going to find “someone competent”. Fox looked over. “Still an arsehole,” he said, cheerfully, of his new champion. I have high hopes for this party.