THEY were all at sea at Prime Minister’s Questions as proceedings took on a markedly maritime flavour.

Tie an anchor round your neck then and join our leaders on an illegal boat with former PM David Cameron navigating – his rubicund cheeks still stinging with Old Spice – as, three sheets to the wind, they sail up Twit Creek without a paddle, while the poop deck becomes awash with bilge (or indeed vice-versa) and the crew makes a futtocks of everything.

After the Supreme Court’s unfavourable ruling on the Government’s Rwanda plan for migrants, Rishi Sunak, the man who puts the PM into Qs, averred: “Let me assure the House my commitment to stopping the boats is unwavering.” Not wavering but drowning.

As it turned out, to save himself, he’d donned a rubber ring called Dave, the aforementioned Cameron, whose appointment prompted Labour opposition leader Keir Starmer to ululate: “The Prime Minister obviously thinks so little of his own MPs that he’s had to peel David Cameron away from his seven years’ exile in a shepherd’s hut and make him Foreign Secretary.”

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Given an inquiry’s finding about Dave’s role in an investment possibly engineered by the Chinese state, Keir called for “full public disclosure” of the posh Tory’s Chinese interests.

Though Keir had Cameron by the prawn balls, Rishi refused to kow-tow to the Labour leader, instead conjuring up an image of Mr Cameron, presumably in a junk or dhow, helping Britain to “navigate an uncertain world”.

Then it was time to float some classic whataboutery: Labour, said the PM, had taken £700,000 “from an alleged Chinese agent”. Tory chorus: “Ah-ha!”

Sir Keir in turn asked if Rishi wanted to apologise for “wasting £140 million of taxpayers’ cash” on his “ridiculous, pathetic” Rwanda scheme.

Rishi boasting of reducing small boat crossings by a third, and summoned up the memory of that old swashbuckling freebooter, Jeremy Corbyn. Keir had wanted the alleged Hamas hobnobber to become PM. “Does he want to apologise for that?”

This tat-for-tits apologising probably explains why the country’s in such a sorry state. Somebody smiled or tittered. Mr Speaker: “Are we serious?” Voice: “No.”

The Herald: Stephen FlynnStephen Flynn (Image: PA)

Keir talked seriously of “a changed Labour Party”. Yes, and changing ever week. Soon, we were all at sea again, with Mr Starmer pointing out that 615 people arrived by small boat last Sunday. He called on Mr Sunak to drop what sacked Home Secretary Suella Braverman had waspishly called his “magical thinking”, and start treating small boat crossings seriously.

Rishi said the number of illegal Albanians was down 90%, but by now it was clear the two legal Englishmen were going round in circles, their pedal boat sinking into a whirlpool of its own making.

Thankfully, Keir bailed out and changed the subject, accusing Rishi of having found the time “to fan-boy Elon Musk”. You know how innocent I am. Is that a euphemism?

Mr Starmer said Mr Sunak liked to think himself as “the country’s first AI PM … turning the Government on and off” in the hope it might start working. “Is he starting to feel,” asked the Labour man, “that, as somebody once said, he was the future once?” That was Mr Cameron to Tony Blair.

Rishi’s head was spinning so much from all this that he talked of Tory policies benefitting “countries up and down the family”. Oh, my giddy aunt!

The SNP usually has much to say about small boats, virtue-signalling madly along the lines of: “Just let a’body in. Come in yir millyins. We dinnae care. Naebody comes tae Scotland anyway because it’s ayeways pishin doon and your bairns have to change gender when they turn 11.”

However, the party’s Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, chose instead to remind the assembled mob that, when he was PM, Mr Cameron had described Gaza as an open-air prison. That prison could now become a graveyard.

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As this was “a question of values and a question of conscience” – sound of dictionary pages being turned – Mr Flynn said there should be a free vote on an immediate ceasefire.

Among other contributors, Labour’s Kevin Brennan most unfairly asked Rishi to name Mr Cameron’s most notable foreign policy achievement.

The PM hummed. He hawed. He averred there’d been “many, many to pick from”, but only instanced one: a successful G8 summit. Yes, people still talk about the catering to this day. Chinese apparently.

And that was that. Off they sailed off into the sunset. All together now, sing along with Rishi: Row, row, row your boat/Illegally down the stream/Extraordinarily, slightly mentally/Here’s my new regime (loosely based on the old one).