With the best will in the world, it cannot be ideal that a prime minister has to go to the House of Commons and plead, in effect, that he has not lied to MPs for the not-entirely satisfactory reason that he didn’t know what was going on in his own government.
Early in his statement, which was being listened to in stunned silence, when Sir Keir Starmer declared that the events he carefully chronicled were “incredible”, laughter broke out. Maybe that was because, in the old saying, if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.
