When the going gets tough, the tough go missing. It’s one of Westminster’s timehonoured traditions.

If there are questions that can’t be answered, you never answer them yourself, you send somebody else.

George Osborne very much liked to “uncork the Gauke”.

But no one, to the very best of my recollection, has dared something quite as audacious as Sir Keir Starmer. All you’ve got to do is make sure you’re nowhere to be seen. But when the House of Commons came to discuss the latest revelations with regard to Lord Mandelson’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the prime minister could be seen, very clearly, legging it toward the exit.

When Kipling wrote of filling the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds’ worth of distance run, he did not feel the need to specify the idea is not to run in the opposite direction.

In Starmer’s place came Darren Jones. He is the chief secretary to the prime minister, a job created especially for him. What does he do? Well, now we know. Jones disowns.

Jones disowns Mandelson.

Mandelson, no longer a minister, no longer an ambassador, had resigned his party membership.

You’d expect nothing less of the grand master, just keeping a little something back, so you can resign again when the moment requires it.

Resigning your party membership is a real “break glass in case of emergency” resignation. All you have to do is cancel the direct debit.

Where will Mandelson go next? Once you’ve resigned your party membership all you’ve really got left is your Blockbuster video card. Well, there’s also the peerage.

Jones seemed unfazed. “It is incumbent upon those of us who hold ministerial office to behave in such a way that builds trust in politics and upholds the standards voters rightly expect from us,” he said. When was this time that voters expected those in high office to uphold high standards? I did British political history for A level, all the way back to 1850, and it didn’t come up then.

The statement happened at five o’clock and, fittingly, Jones arrived with a five o’clock shadow that was mesmerising. It was as if he’d somehow taken off his bonnet but kept the chin strap in place. He looked like a 14-year-old boy who’d gone to Scout camp without his Gillette Mach 3 Turbo. As the statement wore on, it seemed to visibly thicken. By the end he was almost hiding behind it.

If he seemed unbothered, it was because he knew he had nothing to say. “Peter Mandelson must account for his actions and conduct,” he said.

This is true, but there is also the question of quite how Mandelson came to be appointed His Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States. It’s hard to see how that can also have been entirely Mandelson’s fault.

Whenever Jones was on the ropes, he had a new variation on a theme of bafflement. “Can I make clear that neither I nor the house are here to defend Peter Mandelson,” he said.

The Conservatives, Reform, the Lib Dems, the SNP, and plenty of Labour backbenchers wanted to know why the government won’t bring legislation to remove his membership of the House of Lords.

At one point, Jones told his opposite number:“The process for appointing ambassadors was set up by the previous government, and we have since updated it.” This was surely a new high watermark of absurdity. I’ve watched it back a few times now and, yes, he really did stand there, with a straight, albeit furry face, and blame the Tories for Labour giving Mandelson a job.

Starmer had been running from the end of a statement on his visit to China. Three times he said the Tory policy on China was “to buy a bag of sand and put your head in it”. That sort of repetition sadly does compel us to point out the cliché has its origins in the behavioural practices of the ostrich. Ostriches do not buy bags of sand. Even in the age of contactless payment, they wouldn’t get far at B&Q.