Kemi Badenoch rose in the House of Commons to challenge the prime minister with a vast range of possible targets. The cost of government borrowing had risen to the highest level since the financial crisis. Labour’s anti-corruption minister was in the middle of a corruption investigation. Winter had come and pensioners faced rising fuel bills. Showing the judgement that has made her the toast of the sketchwriting classes, The Conservative leader put all those aside and asked six questions about grooming gangs.

Keir Starmer’s response wasn’t so much righteous fury as righteous snippiness. “Reasonable people can agree or disagree on whether a further inquiry is necessary,” he said. He had met victims of the abuse scandal that morning. “They were clear with me that they want action now, not the delay of a further inquiry.”

Badenoch denies that she is only pursuing this cause because Elon Musk has been tweeting about it, but it’s hard to escape the sense that she has outsourced her research effort to Captain Ketamine. Musk’s criticism of Starmer is predicated on the idea that he suppressed investigations into grooming when he was Director of Public Prosecutions. The reality, as we saw over a painful few minutes for the opposition benches, is that he has a far better understanding of the issue than they do.

The prime minister talked us through the approach he’d taken when the Rochdale case had come to him. Badenoch, he said, had never raised the issue in Parliament before that moment. He offered her the chance to correct him. “The prime minister is being very specific,” she replied, which is parliamentese for “correct”. Afterwards, her spokesman told us that Badenoch hadn’t met any victims, and didn’t see the need to. She really is a gift.

Ed Davey asked if the government would act to stop Musk from interfering in British politics. After the last week, sophisticated Labour thinkers may be pondering that there are some advantages to having the Twitter boss pushing the Tories around. Starmer replied that “we all had a smile on Sunday” after Musk, so assiduously courted by Nigel Farage, announced that the Reform Party needed new leadership.

Farage laughed at that. He can afford to. It’s not clear by what means he could be removed as Reform leader. The two most likely routes are a heart attack or him leaving to form another party. 

Just along from him sat Rupert Lowe, the man identified by Musk as a potential successor. For Conservatives anxiously awaiting the Tesla man’s instructions about what to do next, this really should be a massive red flag. The only situation in which Lowe should be considered as Reform leader is if every other member defected, was deselected, or set up their own rival provisional Reform, and even then I’d urge the party to take its time with the decision.

By stunning good fortune, Lowe was down to make a speech after PMQs. It was about banning quantitative easing, which he blames for our “moral decline”. Britain is, he argued, in a state comparable to that of Weimar Germany. Fortunately, he went on, the German economy was turned around after “the dismissal of many civil servants”. It’s hardly my place to offer advice to Reform, but if I were them, all things being equal, I’d avoid speeches on the economic miracle that was pre-war Germany.

The big event of the afternoon was the debate on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. Here too was a subject on which the Conservatives might have focused their fire, as it aims to unwind many of their education reforms. Instead this had been subverted by Badenoch’s decision to make it a debate about grooming. You could tell what Laura Trott, the Shadow Education Secretary, thought about this from her speech, which mentioned the call for a public inquiry only at the very end, and with the observation that “there are legitimate arguments to be had in this area”, pretty much exactly what Starmer had said an hour earlier.

The ensuing debate bounced back and forth between discussions of school structures and arguments about grooming. But two hours in came a moment that took the breath away. 

Many of us have doubted the idea that any public inquiry could be “quick”, as promised by Badenoch. It fell to Farage to explain how this could be achieved. He said the inquiry Reform wants is one “that looks specifically at to what extent were gangs of Pakistani men raping young white girls”. (Did he mean to include men whose parents or grandparents were from Pakistan, and indeed people of Bangladeshi and Indian heritage? Perhaps he felt it went without saying.) It would certainly save time for the inquiry to ignore the rape and torture of brown and black-skinned girls and boys, and grooming by white men.

Nadia Whittome, for Labour, replied that abuse is “perpetrated by members of every social caste, every race and every religion”. Farage and Lowe shook their heads in disagreement. Have these crusaders for child protection somehow missed the scandals that have ripped through the Catholic Church and the Church of England, and some of the country’s most expensive schools? Apparently so. Minutes later Lowe rose to call for a pause of visas from Pakistan, and the deportation of the families of perpetrators. 

Reporters are often accused of exaggerating politicians’ words to overstate their positions. Less discussed is the temptation to downplay what someone has said, to make them seem reasonable, to moderate language that felt like a flashback to the 1970s and 1980s.

But Farage and Lowe were making speeches in the House of Commons, and we should take them at their words. For days those calling for an inquiry have been dancing around their language, insisting that their only concern is the protection of women, and the punishment of their attackers. Reform’s position is now clear: the inquiry they want is about white-skinned women and brown-skinned attackers. Is that the position of the Conservatives as well?