Classic last PMQs before a by-election: rancour, raspberries, general dudgeon. Sir Keir Starmer was super-miffed at all his assailants, clawing right and left, Mr Indignant on a pogo stick.

He was so angry about Kemi Badenoch’s questions on student debt that he yelled she was ‘utterly irrelevant’. Soon he was laying into Nigel Farage for lacking ‘any decency or backbone’. As for the Greens with their liberal drug policy? ‘Absolootly disgosting’.

Yes, disgosting. That’s how Sir Keir says it, with a tight little bite on his lip as prim moral superiority settles on his grey cheeks. Our prime minister is never happier than when absolootly disgosted.

Sir Keir Starmer was super-miffed at all his assailants, clawing right and left, Mr Indignant on a pogo stick, writes Quentin Letts

Roar, roar, went Labour MPs, to cackling laughter from the Opposition. Reform MPs were repeatedly given the bird, Labour men beyond the gangway doing football-terrace chants at them, throwing their arms as they pointed.

The Speaker lost his rag. A man from Burton was nearly ejected. Labour grande-dame Dame Emily Thornberry, a second target of Mr Speaker’s discipline, fluffed her lip right back at him, a portrait of snooty impertinence: Lady Wishfort after Botox, vieille truite swimming in butter.

Rachel Reeves had the rise taken out of her by Mrs Badenoch – some pricking reference to the Chancellor’s time in the customer accounts department at the Bank of England. Rather than chuckle at the insult, Ms Reeves bared her teeth like a PG Tips chimp.

Wes Streeting beamed, plump as a basted capon. An increasingly grizzled David Lammy seemed shrunken. Is he on the fat jabs? Bridget Phillipson shook her head crossly and contemplated fresh ways of stamping on ants.

Overhead the electric lights blazed, heat levels rose, steam vents tooted. What terrible things greed for electoral success can do to the human body. Opium is nothing compared to power as a behaviour-altering substance.

The most bracing moment of the session was arguably when Mrs Badenoch talked about a Labour MP having been arrested for child-sex offences. She claimed that Sir Keir’s lot were now known as ‘the Paedo Defenders’ party’. Government supporters SCREAMED their fury. Those of us upstairs in the galleries could barely hear a word being said, even by our neighbours.

The parliamentary clerks almost swallowed their Biros in horror at any legal implications of Mrs Badenoch’s barb. Members of the Speaker’s staff flew in all directions. Sir Lindsay Hoyle himself thrashed his head from side to side as he tried to pick up what was being said via the loudspeakers in the upholstered sides of his great Chair.

Mrs Badenoch claimed that Sir Keir’s lot were now known as ‘the Paedo Defenders’ party’, writes Quentin Letts

Amid this bedlam, on the government front bench, Brussels-renegotiation minister Nick Thomas-Symonds struggled to lift his heavy-bagged eyes from the floor. When he did finally raise his head we could see the poor lad was so exhausted, he had developed a twitch.

Upstairs the Speaker of the parliament of Fiji watched, eyeballs agog, and the President of the European parliament leaned forward, astonished by the beery braying. Mind you, one of her aides leaned back, head lolling while he caught up on forty winks. Perhaps he and Mr Thomas-Symonds had spent Tuesday night out on the thrash.

On and on it went. Huffer-puffer Imran Hussein (Lab, Bradford), no stranger to hyperbole, tried to come over all statesmanlike about a foiled attack on a mosque. He overdid the theatricality by at least half.

Mr Farage was given a question and chose to use it on the Chagos Isles but an obliging Labour stooge had teed up Sir Keir in the previous question. Farage thus rose to a bellowing chorus of ‘apologise! apologise!’ for a gaffe by some Reform councillor in Lancashire.

Sir Keir did not have it all his own way. ‘Wot, wot, wot a nerve,’ he spluttered after one of Mrs Badenoch’s sallies. Behind him a new Labour MP, Claire Hazelgrove, shook her head in sorrow – sad face, children – when Mrs Badenoch denounced ‘this useless government’.

Vanity and pretension in every cartooned frame, I give you, ladies and gentlemen, the wriggling, hog snorting panoply of parliamentary politics.