“The budget is driving up productivity, prosperity and living standards!” blurted Sir Keir at PMQs this afternoon, all exasperation and self-righteousness. Good gracious he’s going to be on the naughty list for that whopper.

Of course whoppers are fast becoming the imprimatur of this Government and especially our beleaguered knight of the realm - who we learned yesterday is more unpopular after five months in Downing Street than any Prime Minister since the 1970s.

Go figure.

Oddly, in a strangely underwhelming performance, Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch failed miserably to effectively point this out, or to make much capital from it at all, leaving it to a rag-bag of MPs to fill in the gaps where she signally failed.

Even more oddly the most powerful of this rag-bag of Government critics was Diane Abbot, slicing and dicing Starmer with the steely calculation of a hired assassin.

Ms Abbot was attired head to foot in a black dress, as if on her way to someone’s funeral.

Not a woman overly-renowned for having her political finger on the nation’s pulse she nevertheless today captured the public mood perfectly - pinning her leader to the spot with a genuinely moving appeal on behalf of the waspi women, women who by any measure have been treated dreadfully over the pensions scandal.

In calm and measured, almost melancholy, tones she said: “The waspi women fought one of the most passionate and sustained campaigns for justice.

“We did promise we would give them justice.

“I understand the issue about costs but does the Prime Minister really understand how let down waspi women feel today?”

For the umpteenth time this PMQs the PM quickly batted the question away saying the country couldn’t afford it, end of. Thing is, he actually looked peeved, like the whole issue was starting to annoy him, and who were these bloody women anyway?

This, on such a sensitive issue (the waspi women WERE shafted by successive Governments) this was not a good look.

The issue has not gone away and will, you may count on it, come back to bite this Labour Party.

Elsewhere, in the vacuum left by Kemi Badenoch’s thin gruel of missed opportunities, the rag-bag did their best to hold Keir’s feet to the flames.

Perhaps the best of the bunch was the SNP’s Dave Doogan who weighed in with a fantastically aggressive: “He said he would lower energy bills but since he took office they have gone up.

“He said he would protect winter fuel payments, but now he is in power he has stripped it from our pensioners.

"He lined-up for many photos for Waspi women, and he’s just betrayed them in the most scandalous way possible.

"This is now the defining characteristic of this one trick phoney prime minister, who says one thing and does another.

"Does he understand why the people of these islands, especially those of us in Scotland, treat him with such contempt?"

Starmer tried to laugh it off claiming he couldn’t hear the MP - but if he’s not listening, he really should be.

Again the optics were of a PM who really couldn’t care less. Very bad optics indeed for a Government already lurching from one crisis to the next. A Government whose amateurish handling of the economy is forcing inflation back up, whose attempts to pass off Marxist politics of envy as sound economic policy is causing misery to millions of families, and whose twin calling cards are fast becoming arrogance and mendacity.

The Festive Prime Minister’s Questions is traditionally a slightly lighter, jokier event than usual (something taken a little bit too literally by the Leader of the Opposition) but today the atmosphere was leaden.

One gem did lighten the mood though - when Amand Martin (Lab Portsmouth North) asked for a blue plaque to commemorate 1970s Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan.

Sir Keir called Lord Callalghan (funny how ennoblement seems the lot of all true egalitarian socialists innit?) “a legend of the Labour movement and a great public servant.”

And so he was, but more fittingly, Jim Callaghan is really remembered for taking Britain’s begging bowl to the IMF after Harold Wilson’s capitulation to the all-powerful unions had reduced Britain to tin-pot banana republic status.

Now, I’m not saying history always repeats itself, I’m just saying that Starmer paid off the rail unions with your money a few weeks ago without a second thought, claiming to have solved the problem.

The sharper-eyed among you will have noticed Avanti West Coast workers and the RMT announced this morning they will be staging mass strikes through Christmas, New Year and at least until May next year.

Doesn’t really sound like a union brought to heel that does it.

Might need to start looking out where we put that begging bowl…

Merry Christmas everyone.