QUENTIN LETTS: Punctured maybe past restore, Sir Keir Starmer was deflating earlier than our eyes. Kemi stored bayonetting him. From Labour MPs, a chilly, sinister silence

Punctured perhaps beyond repair, Sir Keir Starmer was deflating before our eyes. The prime minister had nothing to offer. He prostrated himself before the Commons, begging for mercy, but there was no appetite for that. There just came a slow, ceaseless ‘phhhhht’ of air leaving a balloon.

Kemi Badenoch kept bayonetting him. All the fight had left Sir Keir, the one-time star prosecutor who so piously berated Boris Johnson over… a goddamn birthday cake. This scandal was nastier: sexual pressures, the betrayal of Cabinet secrets, greed for dollars (or Kremlin roubles), and a diplomatic foul-up in Washington DC. Labour backbenchers watched their flailing leader and they made not a sound. There just came this cold, sinister silence.

A few, among them Matt Turmaine from Watford, bellowed support for Sir Keir when he arrived at 11.59am. Now that Mrs Badenoch had the nasal knight in trouble, admitting he knew all along how mottled Mandelson was, Mr Turmaine shut his goofy trap.

Through the whistling stillness came Mrs Badenoch’s insistent interrogations. She was cool, shimmeringly superior. For a third time: did the official vetting of Mandelson disclose the Epstein dirt? Sir Keir could no longer dissemble. ‘Yes it did.’

To see the head of our government so helpless at the despatch box was goolie-shrivelling. Sir Keir’s allies did not know where to look. The Treasury’s Lucy Rigby, his latest favourite, threw her gaze sideways, away from him. Wes Streeting stared hard at the Tory front bench. Yvette Cooper maintained an uncomfortable, almost side-saddle pose, not moving a muscle. Trade Secretary Peter Kyle tried to engage Mr Streeting in chit-chat. Wes ignored him.

On the Labour backbenches, decent Torcuil Crichton (Western Isles) rubbed his beard, used-car salesman Peregrine Moon (Camborne) frowned and Jess Asato (Lowestoft) glowered at the ceiling. Arch-loyalist John Slinger (Rugby) had turned scarlet. Graeme Downie (Dunfermline) squeezed his hands between his thighs. Sir Keir’s newish parliament aide Jon Pearce could not stop jiggling his legs.

At PMQs Sir Keir Starmer said Peter Mandelson’s ‘lying’ was ‘beyond infuriating’, but behind him sat a sullen parliamentary party of Labour MPs

Through the whistling stillness, writes Quentin Letts, came Kemi Badenoch’s insistent interrogations – she was cool and shimmeringly superior to the prime minister

Sir Keir said Mandelson ‘lied and lied and lied‘. The task of a prime minister – and, surely, star prosecutor – is to be worldly and see through such deceits. It was ‘beyond infuriating’, spluttered Sir Keir. ‘There was a process.’ And again, with constipated desperation: ‘There was a process!’ Behind him sat a sullen parliamentary party going through the process of mourning.

After PMQs came points of order. Sir Keir, scalded, skedaddled. Soon we were into the Conservatives’ opposition-day debate calling for all the Mandelson papers to be published. Sir Keir had tried to insist on a limiting amendment. That position was soon abandoned.

Angela Rayner, slender and in feline isolation, joined the rebellion. She read her intervention from a prepared script. What a business politics is. They slink back and slide the stiletto between former comrades’ collarbones. Mrs Rayner betrayed no emotion, no excitement. There was a bloodlessness to her that chilled the neck.

Minister at the box was Nick Thomas-Symonds, Paymaster General. Would-be Labour interveners assailed him, bees swarming a lion. At one point six of them were on their feet, all shouting ‘will he give way?’, none helpful. The government had lost control. The decks were being overrun by mutiny.

Dame Emily Thornberry was in shiny new bovver boots. Dame Meg Hillier was in no mood for obedience. The Speaker told the minister not to hide behind any police investigation. Mr Thomas-Symonds’s distinctive neck twitch was soon working triple-time.

The Leader of the House, Sir Alan Campbell, invited Mrs Rayner outside for a conflab. Ministers started urgently to consult mobile telephones as the wording of the government climbdown reached them. The Corbynites turned feral, Richard Burgon (Lab, Leeds E) accusing the Starmerites of ‘a nasty factionalism’. Ha! The Left was on the rampage, recolonising tracts of territory long held by moderates. New Labour was on fire, Blairism dead.

Paula Barker (Lab, Liverpool Wavertree) said of Mandelson that ‘his nose was firmly in the trough’. So long as it was only his nose, m’dear.