Tom Peck's Sketch: Chris Grayling's Criminal Courts Charge is scrapped, but he fled the chamber just in time.

The mark left by Christopher Stephen Grayling on British public life was never likely to be more permanent than the glare off his head as he stood at the despatch box. And as he addressed the house with his trademark luminescence this morning, he was no doubt already aware that Michael Gove had again been switching off the lights.

So many and varied are the Grayling policies his successor as Lord Chancellor has now reversed it's conceivable that, when he was told of the plan to scrap the criminal courts charge, it came as some relief to him to know that making a stupid mistake will no longer cost you hundreds of pounds.

His day had begun with the comparatively minor indignity of his opposite number, Chris Bryant, asking the Speaker that the Leader of the House of Commons be asked to straighten his tie.

It was, in the Member for Rhondda’s defence, quite spectacularly wonky. Unsurprisingly, it remained thus. There was pride at stake, and Mr Grayling must now take his victories where he can, however lopsided.

He faced a number of difficult questions, not least from Oliver Colvile MP on his campaign to create suburban super highways for hedgehogs. He congratulated David Cameron on his imminent ten year anniversary as leader of the Conservative Party, an achievement he less than ingeniously yoked together with Rosa Parks’s refusal to stand up on the number 2857 bus sixty years ago on Tuesday. He scurried from the chamber at 12.04pm, the tracer from the chandeliers still fixed upon his glabrescent summit.

The Justice Department waited fully twenty minutes to make its announcement, the perfect length of time to confirm beyond all doubt it had not been a coincidence. The criminally misconceived criminal courts charge was, they informed, to go the way of the ban on books for inmates, the repeal of the Human Rights Act, the superjail for children and the contract with the Saudi prison service, and become a Grayling idea of which his ministerial colleagues are unconvinced of the wisdom.

There is nothing mighty about the Member for Epsom and Ewell, but his fall has been so. There is a concept in management theory known as the Peter Principle. That people are continually promoted until they arrive at a job they are not capable of doing, and then remain there, thus rendering the entire apparatus dysfunctional. It is a principle Mr Grayling has now been living in reverse for some time, and it does beg the question whether, if he is still to be seen around the Palace of Westminster for many more years to come, it will be required to include his ‘Right Honourable’ title while ordering a large Americano.

There is much speculation that Mr Grayling’s next move will be to resign from the government to take a leading role in the Leave EU campaign, a course of action which, given his track record, will be as widely celebrated in the higher ranks of Tory Party as it will be by industrious Romanian roofers from Basingstoke to Bucharest.