It’s Groundhog Day, the theme of the film where Bill Murray is destined to repeat the same day over and over again. It was also a terrible day for Labour – of course that doesn’t narrow things down either – you could be reading this at any point over the next three years and it’ll still be true. Bill Murray woke up every day to ‘I Got You Babe’, we woke up to a remix of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ and the immolation scene from Götterdämmerung.

There was a ghost in the room: the Paedo’s Pal, Captain Underpants himself, the Lord Mandelson!

Still, even by the standards set in the field of repeated shoddiness by the current government, Monday really was a bad day for Labour. Their erstwhile MP for North East Somerset was arrested for a second sex offence (he ‘vigorously’ denies the allegations against him), another doctor’s strike is on the way, and it’s become clear that the Lord Mandelson story has moved on from simple nonce-adjacency. As the Prime Minister is wont to say: ‘that’s the difference a Labour government makes.’

With his ministry increasingly resembling a fire at ‘Dunblobbin’, Mr Blobby’s abandoned horror house, it’s no surprise that Sir Keir chooses to spend most of his time on planes. He has of course recently returned from the Far East and was eager/had been forced to come and tell the House of Commons all about it.

It was a sort of ‘what I did on my holidays’ slot. Though, I suspect, if members of the House wanted a more accurate description of what Sir Keir had actually been up to, they should have contacted his Chinese handlers, or found the ‘play’ button on the........

© The Spectator