“This is not a Zombie Parliament,” Penny Mordaunt told the House of Commons on Tuesday afternoon. It’s always hard to tell whether the Leader of the House is being deliberately rude about her own side. It’s almost a year since she reassured us that Liz Truss was “not under a desk”, a line that helped to seal her rival into her coffin. Mordaunt by name, mordant by nature.

She was replying to Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, who had complained, not unreasonably, that after months of doing nothing, the chamber was being asked to scrutinise the 328-page Energy Bill in just three hours. Rees-Mogg has been a stickler for constitutional procedure almost his entire life, with the sad exception of the two-and-a-half years when he was doing Mordaunt’s job and it was actually his responsibility. In this period when he discovered he was capable of an approach to the rules so flexible that circus contortionists crowded into the public galleries to stare at him in awe. Now, returned to the backbenches, he has hardened again, to the point where you could use him to poke a fire.

And, whatever Mordaunt said, Rees-Mogg is far from the only walking stiff in the building. Two days into the new parliamentary term, there is already a feeling of doom about the government. It’s not just that the consequences of their actions are queueing round the block to have a word. There are the unforced errors.

It feels like the politics of the living dead

Over at Conservative Headquarters, they had begun the day keen to get some fresh young faces out in the media defending them, and texted Christian Wakeford, one of the 2019 Tory intake, to ask him if he’d be willing to go on Sky News and talk about wind farms. Had they only read as far as the second sentence of his Wikipedia page, they’d have known that he crossed the floor to Labour in 2022. Meanwhile the Department for Education, anxious to set people’s minds at rest over the collapsing buildings scandal, earnestly tweeted: “MOST SCHOOLS UNAFFECTED”. Which, however true it might be, is not the boast officials seem to think it is.

Which brings us to Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, on Day Two of her tour of broadcast studios, where she has two key messages: everything is going terribly well, and the nation’s insistence on banging on about a few dozen potentially lethal schools sickens her. Keegan has an engaging manner, and in a way it’s refreshing to hear a Cabinet minister just come out and tell us that we should be grateful she’s come to work at all, the way we treat her.

“I was a bit frustrated,” she told Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine, explaining her sweary outburst at an interviewer on Monday. They had, she said, been asking “why haven’t you done this, why haven’t you done that, why haven’t you done the other?” There’s a lot of talk these days that our education system is creating snowflakes who can’t bear to be challenged. What none of us had guessed was that this goes right to the top.

We did though get some insight into who it is that Keegan feels has been “sat on their arse” in all this. Some schools, she told Vine, have yet to reply to the survey her department has sent round to find out if they’ve got dangerous concrete. “Hopefully all this publicity will make them get off their backsides,” she said, demonstrating that, even if she can’t take it, she can certainly give it.

Back in the Commons, Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick was talking MPs through the summer’s “Stop The Boats” campaign against asylum seekers crossing the Channel. This, contrary to any impression you may have picked up elsewhere, turns out to be another triumph. Arrivals were down for August, he said, and all sorts of wicked people – bankers, landlords, lawyers – now face terrible penalties if they so much as look at an asylum seeker.

And then he used a curious formulation, describing the situation the government was presented with “when taking office last year”. Some of us were under the impression that these guys had been in power for rather more than 12 months, but Jenrick referred to asylum claims made before last summer as a “legacy backlog”. Who exactly he had inherited them from he never explained.

Governments often talk about having a “reset”, but this is Year Zero Toryism: new broom Rishi Sunak heroically clears up the mess left for him by the awful Conservatives. Perhaps it will work, but it feels like the politics of the living dead.