Has Boris finally shaken off cake gate?

This was it. Boris’s career was on the line at PMQs. Would he finally beat cake-gate or would he get hit in the face with a huge cream pie? As soon as Sir Keir mentioned cake, Boris brushed it aside.

‘I think he’s in a Dr Who time-warp,’ he said. ‘We had this conversation yesterday.’ He added a trite expression of regret about his fixed penalty notice. And he shortened it to ‘FPN’ which sounds obscure and harmless.

It was a big risk to mention Dr Who and time-warps. Sir Keir had the chance to punish this flippancy by leaping on his high horse and claiming that the PM was treating breaches of Covid rules as a joke. But Sir Keir stuck to his scripted plan and asked the PM to confirm that he’d broken the law. Boris spoke carefully: ‘I humbly accept what the police have said’.

Another chance for Sir Keir to unpick the wording.