This session of parliament is due to end between 29 April and 6 May. Now the government is desperate for an Order in Council to kill it off by 9 a.m. on the 29th to avoid another painful Prime Minister’s Questions. The parliament that reassembles for the King’s Speech on 13 May could hardly, in theory, look more like what Sir Keir Starmer wants. His party has the largest overall majority since 2001. He will have jettisoned all hereditary peers. He has created 65 new Labour peers, thus dramatically altering the party balance in the Lords in favour of himself (although four of them have already, after creation, left the Labour party, including Lord Doyle, the paedophile-adjacent one for whom Downing Street seemed, according to Sir Olly, to have sought the modern equivalent of ‘Go out and govern New South Wales’). Yet to little avail. His weakness is quite an achievement, with the situation made decisively worse by his assault on Olly Robbins. If this were an old-fashioned boys’ adventure book, it would say: ‘With one bound, Keir was all tangled up.’

Sir Olly will have endeared himself to many Spectator readers with his claim that the two books he knows back to front are the Civil Service Code and the Book of Common Prayer. Before I became a Catholic, thus disqualifying myself, I was on the committee of the Prayer Book Society. Now that Sir Olly has more time on his hands, I seriously suggest that........

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