T’was the week before Christmas, and all through the House of Commons, an end-of-term air pervaded. MPs could be seen carrying bags of Parliament-branded gifts, destined for either lucky staff or unlucky children. 

Wednesday turned out to be a series of exercises in the field of Opposition Studies. For the first time in one of these sessions, the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, showed she had mastered the basics: for six whole questions, she managed to stick to her script, to avoid being goaded into other areas, and to punch the government’s bruises. 

She opened by accusing the Labour Party of having “played politics with the WASPI women”, the cohort of retirees who failed to realise that their pensions were coming later than expected, and who have spent the last decade demanding compensation. Angela Rayner, she pointed out, had accused the Tories of stealing women’s pensions. The charge was entirely fair. The WASPI case has never been strong, and MPs would have done much better by these women by telling them that sometimes life isn’t fair. 

This stuff is so tempting. When a campaign group approaches you, there’s nothing easier than to tell them you agree. The Mirror website had a helpful compilation of photographs of Labour MPs, from the prime minister down, posing with WASPI campaigners. It seemed to scroll on for ever. So there was the first lesson for oppositions: easy promises lead to hard moments. Sure, you get a quick hit at the time, but they’re the path of fools. 

Let’s just say hello at this point to Shadow Business Secretary Andrew Griffith, who chose on Wednesday morning to hold out the possibility that the Conservatives would have done something different, a move that couldn’t have been more transparently opportunistic if it had been accompanied by a loud message: “WARNING, POLITICIAN IS MANOEUVRING.”

At least Griffith got his lesson quickly: his attempt to position the Tories as the new champions of the WASPIs didn’t even make it to lunch, killed off by Badenoch’s next words to Keir Starmer. “Now,” she went on, “they admit that we were right all along.”

There would be more questions about the WASPIs, but they were all from the chamber’s permanent oppositionists: Diane Abbott, the SNP and the Liberal Democrats, who tried government once and didn’t enjoy it.

Instead, Badenoch focused her fire on the Winter Fuel Payment, a perfect opposition issue: it is unpopular now, and will be long forgotten before the Tories return to government, meaning that complaining about it doesn’t really commit you to reversing it. From there she moved on to widen her point: “This winter people will be suffering because of the prime minister’s choices. The economy is shrinking, inflation is going up and jobs are being lost because of his Budget.” This is pretty much any leader of the opposition’s ideal message. She should say nothing else for the next year.

But although her message discipline has improved, it’s still far from perfect. On Monday, she announced her support for flat taxes (like a teenage boy band obsession, flirting with flat taxes is a phase all Conservative opposition leaders have to get through). Now she reminded us that on Tuesday she had supported exempting some charities from the rise in employers’ national insurance. That’s a defensible political stance to take, and so is calling for radical simplification of the tax code, but you really can’t do both. But it’s the season of goodwill, so let’s give her points for improving.

The rules are different for parties that will never be in office, at least in Westminster. Which brings us to the SNP. After years in which they were the third party in the chamber, they are now a diminished force, sat behind the Lib Dems. One of the few survivors of the election, Dave Doogan, asked a long furious question, jabbing his finger at the prime minister and yelling that the SNP was ahead in the polls. It was hardly great oratory, but it provided entertainment for that corner of the chamber. As Doogan went on, he was carried along by cheers, some of them possibly ironic, from around him. 

They came even from ideological enemies, including Florida’s Nigel Farage, who had decided to pay Britain a brief visit, taking a break from his ambitious expedition to explore previously uncharted areas of Donald Trump’s colon. He looked very fresh for a man who’d caught the redeye, but perhaps he’s just one of those people who can sleep in Economy. I jest of course: it is easier to imagine Farage visiting his constituency than turning right as he boards a plane. Afterwards he leaned forward and exchanged a joke with SNP leader Stephen Flynn. 

Starmer’s reply to Doogan was hardly Wildean either, but he made up for it with naked contempt: “He is carping right up there at the back, and we can hardly hear him.”

Later in the day we got our final Opposition lesson. Science Minister Chris Bryant was delivering a statement about the government’s consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence. It is a tricky area, an attempt to bring regulation to a technological wild west. Replying for the Conservatives, Ben Spencer was clearly uncertain what to say, and so complained the announcement should have come sooner or been delayed until after Christmas. The Tories have at least learned one of the great skills of opposition: if you don’t know what you think about an announcement, complain about the timing.