COWARDICE is courage. Chaos is stability. Questions are against the national interest. Got it? This is the brave new world the Tories want to convince us we’re living in. And by “brave” I mean spineless, timorous and lily-livered.

The Prime Minister wasn’t cowering under a table yesterday afternoon, according to Penny Mordaunt, but I didn’t hear a specific rebuttal of the shouted-out suggestion that she might have been in a cupboard.

We had about a dozen versions of the question about why she hadn’t bothered to turn up before MPs really started to press her stand-in. Perhaps some were initially hesitant just in case a Tory minister was actually telling the truth for once.

Perhaps Liz Truss had suddenly fallen ill, or was trashing Number 10 before she could be dragged out. Maybe someone was capitalising on the instability of the UK by launching a terror attack that she was in the business of single-handedly averting.

Maybe she was trying to figure out how to start a nuclear war, reasoning that if she was going down, she would damn well bring the rest of us with her.

Keir Starmer’s urgent question was scheduled less than an hour before her new Chancellor was due to give a statement to the House about his decision to tear up Truss’s economic policy, and when word spread that she would arrive alongside Jeremy Hunt, the MPs lost patience.

No really, they asked, what on earth was her excuse for skipping scrutiny? The more Mordaunt emphasised that the Prime Minister had a “genuine” (but secret) reason, but that she’d be along shortly, the more insistently they demanded to know.

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When Truss finally arrived alongside Hunt, she opted to simply stare straight ahead, with only the slightest hint of a smirk on her face, moving her facial muscles just enough to open her lower jaw and emit “hear hear” on cue.

Perhaps she was trying to rebut the suggestion from the SNP’s Brendan O’Hara that Kwasi Kwarteng was the Lord Charles to her Ray Allen, by acting like a dummy herself.

Maybe she’d rather we believe she’s had a lobotomy than that she is quite simply incapable of defending her bizarre behaviour and erratic decision-making. Jeremy Hunt did say at the weekend that he’d had his own leadership ambitions “clinically excised” – what if that was a cry for help rather than a joke? What if the men in grey suits are working alongside the men in white coats to control the very minds of this diabolical crew?

Mordaunt clearly has not had her leadership ambitions excised and has surely had brass plating surgically implanted into her neck. She seized the opportunity to defend every Truss U-turn as brave and principled while condemning every change of position by Starmer as evidence of weakness and incompetence.

The Labour leader may have wished to point out that the Tories have shamelessly stolen his six-month energy price cap policy (minus the windfall tax element to pay for it, of course), but dared not do so since voters will hardly be delighted to hear that their bills will be shooting up again in April.

The bold Penny went on to suggest that it was in the national interest to move on swiftly from Starmer’s time-wasting question to Hunt’s statement, which UK citizens needed to hear about in detail. All this repetitive grilling about why her supposed boss had ducked out was simply holding up important proceedings.

According to this Tory logic, the “genuine reason” for Truss’s absence must have been that she was waiting out in the hall with Hunt, ear pressed to the door as they awaited their cue.

Speaker Lindsay Hoyle was happy to allow the PM to sneak in while the questions were being put to her stand-in and then simply move on to the next item on the agenda as if nothing outrageous had just occurred.

“Just get up and tell us!” an MP cried out to Truss, at which point there seemed a real risk that the entire class would be given detention. God forbid anyone violates the rules of such a hallowed institution as the Westminster parliament. Much better that the Prime Minister be allowed to spectacularly take the piss out of every single person in the UK.

It’s genius, really, the logic of the Tories’ latest position – they have caused so much economic turmoil, caused so much uncertainty and anxiety, that they can now argue there simply isn’t time to go over what happened yesterday, or last week.

The scale of the shit-show is such that we cannot possibly have a General Election now, or indeed a change of Prime Minister (at least not a formal one). They have governed so very badly that they simply must be allowed to continue!

Why haven’t previous governments tried this tactic? Whenever things were going badly – when polls started to turn against them, and media commentators began calling for an early election – they should have just set about making them ten times worse.

Then it’s just a case of branding anyone wasting time by asking questions at such a time of crisis an enemy of the state. And when the worst is over? Simple – the villains can be declared the heroes.