“Lincolnshire faces an invasion!” Sir John Hayes had come to the House of Commons with grave news. Not since the publication of The Riddle of the Sands had the Fens faced such a threat. Was it the Angles again? The Dutch? You will have to wait to find out.

Hayes was speaking at the end of Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions, a joyous, historic occasion, as it was both Angela Rayner’s first session in the hot seat and Oliver Dowden’s last on the front bench — there will be a new deputy Tory leader soon. Keir Starmer was mid-air, heading to the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, and Rayner beamed at the Speaker as she announced she would be taking his place.

Rayner made a heart shape with her hands

She had warm words of welcome for Dowden, too: “Today is our first exchange since he pushed for a July general election, and if his own side has not offered him a peerage, I certainly would have.”

Dowden’s main line of interrogation was to push for a definition of “working people”, which matters because Labour promised not to raise taxes on this group. Rayner wasn’t going to fall for that. “The definition of ‘working people’ is the people who the Tory party have failed for the past 14 years,” she replied. Did it include small business owners, Dowden asked? Small businesses had suffered under the Tories, she replied.

Both of them were clearly enjoying themselves more than their bosses do. “I will miss our exchanges,” Rayner told Dowden. “The battle of the gingers, the late nights voting.” She gave him a little smile that verged on the patronising.  He replied in kind: “Our Commonwealth family is brought together by historical and cultural ties, much like the pair of us.” At this, Rayner made a heart shape with her hands. There were limits to her warmth: she still read out her scripted attack on the Conservatives in reply.

With their exchange at an end, other MPs tried to get called. On the Conservative benches, passionate and completely authentic Essex man Ric Holden bobbed up and down in the hope of catching the Speaker’s eye. Perhaps he wanted protected status for Ford Transits. We never found out.

Stehen Flynn of the SNP had better luck. Like Dowden, Flynn is a victim of the electorate. Once he got two questions every week, which he would use to suggest to voters that there existed in one part of these isles an Eden where all the decisions were just, all the public services excelled, and all the ministers were above average. The last couple of years of Scottish politics tended to make these quite funny, if only unintentionally.

These days the SNP are a diminished band, and he gets a single question now and again, which he has to use like a border reiver, striking to maximum effect before disappearing into the night, or at least the distant opposition benches. It quite suits him. “In the spirit of today’s cross-party working,” he began, the slightest trace of sarcasm dusted across his words like cinnamon over porridge. “Will the deputy prime minister join me in applauding the brave Labour staff members who travelled across the Atlantic to campaign against Donald Trump?” The “brave” part was an especially nice touch.

The Trump campaign’s complaint about the British invasion of door-knockers had, predictably, sent Westminster into a tizz. “His lawyers have sent a letter!” the BBC gasped. “It’s a diplomatic car crash!” trilled John Lamont, for the Tories, a little later. “We do not expect the potential winner of the US election to be making formal complaints about a British political party.”

Well, and perhaps this has escaped Lamont, we don’t expect the potential winner of the US election to be doing quite a few things that one of them is currently doing. Indeed, if we were to list all the things we don’t expect the potential winner of the US election to do that one potential winner of the US election has done just in the past month, I’m not sure that a grumpy press release about Labour would even make the top 100.

Will the brave folk of Spalding and Boston be able to fight off these towering steel hordes?

After close on a decade of Trump’s incarnation as a politician, some are no closer to learning that he does not behave as others behave. The same people who are saying we don’t need to take him seriously when he talks about using US troops against US civilians feel we need to assume that as much thought goes into his lawyers’ letters as went into Abraham Lincoln’s. It’s not that a Trump presidency wouldn’t be a problem for Starmer, but the prospect isn’t measurably more of a problem because a couple of Labour party members are leafletting in Pennsylvania.

Rayner was keen to put the fire out. “People in their own time often go and campaign,” she told Flynn. “It happens in all political parties. They do what they want to do in their own time with their own money.”

To most of the rest of the questions, friendly or hostile, her response was a variation on the theme of “14 years of failure”. Although Chris Philp, on the Conservative front bench, affected outrage at this, most of his colleagues couldn’t be bothered. They barely even managed a groan when Lib Dem James MacClearly referred to their “failed Brexit deal”. It’s striking how much the chamber has changed from the recent years when any suggestion that leaving the EU had been less than a triumph was treated as treachery.

Finally, we got to Hayes. “Lincolnshire faces an invasion,” he said. We held our breath. Was it Vikings? Locusts?  “Of giant pylons!” Will the brave folk of Spalding and Boston be able to fight off these towering steel hordes? Or has Hayes become confused by an old episode of The Tripods? Tune in next week.