Ouch! For the first time ever, Keir roasted Rishi in the Commons

It has been a reliable prediction for 13 years that, whenever the government is in trouble and the leader of the opposition faces what is known in our unwritten constitution as an “open goal” at Prime Minister’s Questions, he will miss.

Not this time. Rishi Sunak pushed to his seat looking defeated before the session had even begun. When he started in this job, he would bounce on his toes at the despatch box, looking eagerly from side to side for an opponent to flay. Not today.

Keir Starmer, with the body language of someone who was there to enjoy himself, opened with a laboured joke about the prime minister trying to distract attention by arguing about an “ancient relic that only a tiny minority of the public have any interest in – but that’s enough about the Tory party”.

Then he switched to a short, savage question about immigration. The Tories had promised at the last election to get numbers down. “How’s it going?”

Sunak tried to argue that he was taking the “toughest action” ever, and the effects had “yet to be felt”. Deep gloom settled over the Conservative benches. Labour MPs, sensing weakness, were jubilant.

Starmer devoted his next two questions to the genuine puzzle of why Sunak had been so rude to the Greek prime minister: “Why such small politics?” This forced Sunak to repeat his petulant display at the despatch box, saying that he had cancelled the meeting with Kyriakos Mitsotakis “when it was clear that the purpose of the meeting was to grandstand”.

Which in turn allowed Starmer to adopt a dignified, confident pose, explaining that he had met Mitsotakis and had a good discussion with him about Nato and illegal migration, while telling him that he wouldn’t change the law to allow the Elgin marbles to go to Greece permanently: “It’s not that difficult, prime minister.”

Sunak tried to play the jingoist card, but it is not who he is, so it fell flat. “No one will be surprised that he is backing an EU country over Britain,” he said.

As Starmer said in reply: “He’s just dug further into that hole that he has made for himself.”

At this point, the Labour leader usually loses his thread and ploughs on, head down, reading out questions four, five and six. Not today. He had only just started.

He accused Sunak of “prosecuting his one-man war on reality”, and switched back to immigration. Labour has a clever policy on work visas, saying that they should be refused to workers in shortage occupations unless they are hired at the “going rate” in the UK. The government’s policy, to its intense embarrassment, is to allow workers to be hired at 20 per cent below the going rate. This was inherited from the Boris Johnson government, and it has saved the social care sector, but it is a large part of the tripling of the net immigration numbers since Brexit.

Starmer said he was against this “wage-cutting policy”, but it is also an anti-immigration policy, and the Tories do not like being on the pro-immigration side of the argument. Sunak squirmed. All he could do was say: “I am surprised to hear him taking this new position.” Which admits that Labour has a new position, and that it is quite different from the one that Sunak was about to criticise.

The prime minister read out some quotations from Starmer when he was a junior shadow immigration minister, and one from much longer ago, when Starmer was a quasi-Trotskyist lawyer and called all immigration law “racist”.

But all that did was to draw attention to Starmer’s “new position”, which is popular, including among Tory MPs. They did not look happy, as the one-liners rained down on them. The prime minister was “the only person on the Tory benches without his own personal immigration plan”, Starmer said.

Starmer is still too script-bound, reading out his lines. But today they were good lines, and he read them well, with some conviction.

The Tories had lost control of the borders, the Labour leader said: “He’s lost in La-La Land.” He ended with a fine impression of John Smith, the leader Labour lost nearly 30 years ago. Calling Sunak “the man with the reverse Midas touch” – a line used by Smith against John Major – Starmer built up to a serious critique of a prime minister whose promises seem to turn against him, on NHS waiting lists, immigration and lower taxes.

The Labour leader asked if Sunak could “warn us what he’s planning next so we can prepare for the disaster that will inevitably follow”. The prime minister gave a long, defensive reply, increasingly lost in the hubbub – so much so that the speaker intervened to shut the Labour benches up, cutting off Sunak’s microphone just as he reached his final words: “... Britain isn’t listening.”

Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, who had been sitting next to the prime minister for Starmer’s questions, left the chamber before the session was over. Maybe he had heard enough.