After lunch we had first sight of the new Commons: hundreds of gleaming faces, scrubbed pink with hope or maybe just weathered by six weeks of traipsing constituencies in the open air.
For any last few Right-wingers in denial, here was the brutal new reality. Lefties, sah, hundreds of ’em!
In my time the elected chamber has never been so demonstrably lopsided. The Labour benches were packed, overflowing, most of its occupants unrecognisable to Westminster’s old hands.
There was so little room for them that lots had to sit upstairs, one even crouching in the press gallery just over my shoulder.

Even among the Conservatives there were a few new faces, earnest, eager, a little nervous
And on the Opposition benches? A puddle of thrashed Tories, blue-suited and rather male, alongside a weird mismash of Lib Dems and Greens and a few gnarled Reform blokes plus other odds and ends.
Even among the Conservatives there were a few new faces, earnest, eager, a little nervous. And next to them was the gaunt, rigid figure of Sir Desmond Swayne (Con, New Forest West) who looked utterly sick to be back in opposition.
Sir Keir Starmer, proudly perching in his prime ministerial position, was flanked by Angela Rayner and Yvette Cooper, who kept shoving her glasses up into her hair. Little Wes Streeting, the new health secretary who so nearly lost his seat, was a long way down the bench.
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Proceedings were initially overseen by Gainsborough’s Sir Edward Leigh, the new Father of the House, i.e. the longest-serving old tusker. He was in tails and spongebag trousers that may have been run up by a tailor in the 1940s.
Across the table Rishi Sunak looked shrunken – not that he was terribly big in the first place – in the Leader of the Opposition’s place. Rishi made a commendably generous speech. He wished Sir Keir and his family well and once more he wrung his hands and said ‘sorry’. But it must sting.
The occasion was the re-election of Sir Lindsay Hoyle as Speaker, a matter never in doubt for Sir Lindsay. At 2.59pm, duly reinstalled, he said ‘I now call the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer’ and there was a big yelp from the Labour side.
Our new helmsman, already looking greyer, made a prosaic speech in which he claimed that the most important thing about this Commons was that it now has ‘the largest cohort of LGBT members of any Parliament in the world’.
That’ll put the frighteners on V. Putin, just you see. Sir Keir earned ironic smirks when he went into treacly words about Diane Abbott (Lab, Hackney N), the new ‘Mother of the House’. It was lost on nobody that Sir Keir and his stooges tried to stop Ms Abbott standing for election yet here he was smarming on about how ‘we welcome her to her place’ and how it was ‘time to put an end to politics that has too often seemed self-serving’. Ms Abbott listened to this roughage with a serene smile. In her own speech she did not mention him once.

Nigel Farage (Reform, Clacton) also got to say a few sentences in the Commons earlier today

Sir Lindsay, left, had been dragged to his seat, as is the custom, by two MPs, including Cat Smith (Lab, Lancaster and Wyre), right
Her one-time beau, Jeremy Corbyn, now an independent MP, sat across the chamber with one of his shirt collars sticking up at a priapic angle.
Sir Lindsay had been dragged to his seat, as is the custom, by two MPs, one Labour (Lancaster and Wyre’s Cat Smith) and one Tory (Goole and Pocklington’s Sir David Davis).
It was not a day for party politics but the Lib Dems’ Sir Ed Davey, who has become immensely pleased with himself, made a cheap, partisan speech.
Nigel Farage (Reform, Clacton) also got to say a few sentences and complimented Sir Lindsay on being an improvement on his predecessor – ‘the little man who besmirched the office so dreadfully in doing his best to overturn the biggest democratic result in our history’. Cue tuts and sighs from the Labour hordes.
I hear, by the way, that a couple of Commons officials got into trouble after posing for selfies with Mr Farage. The authorities did not approve.