Sir Keir got probably the biggest cheer he’s had all year at Prime Minister’s Questions today. Unfortunately for him, it came from the Tory benches.

After all the Mandelson revelations, it now transpires that Sir Keir gave a peerage to his former director of communications (a chocolate teapot job if ever there was one), Matthew Doyle, despite knowing that he helped campaign for a convicted sex offender. To put it simply, becoming known as the nation’s premier employer of the associates of paedophiles isn’t a fantastic way to begin your weekly bit of scrutiny at work. Is there some sort of special nonce-adjacent job centre where Sir Keir goes looking for CVs? Who does he get to fix his sink? The late Cyril Smith? Is the ghost of Sir Jimmy Savile his odd-job man?

The PM really has learned nothing from the last few days

One of the delicious things for Mrs Badenoch is that there is an encyclopaedia of sanctimony from Sir Keir’s time as leader of the opposition when he would try and paint himself as having the morals of a Methodist tea lady compared to the great Satans of Johnson, Truss and Sunak. Specifically, she brought up a claim he made about his profound loyalty to his staff – in a week where No. 10 has resembled a particularly merciless........

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