Not flailing but Grayling. The leader of the house must be sick of the sight of the green benches, as almost every time he comes to the Commons he ends up embarrassing himself. His statement on Lord Strathclyde’s report into changes to the House of Lords was worse than usual, as it was an embarrassment piled on to a previous embarrassment. Having tried and failed to sneak cuts to working tax credits through parliament on secondary legislation after the bill was blocked by the Lords, Chris Grayling was now faced with trying to persuade an understandably sceptical chamber that making it impossible for the Lords to block any further secondary legislation was a complete coincidence.

Amnesia is normally one of Grayling’s stronger suits – largely because there is a genuine possibility he might actually suffer from severe memory loss – but even he was struggling. It had just come to his notice, he plodded, that the Lords was an unelected upper chamber which had no business making life difficult for a democratic lower chamber.

If he’d left it at that, the only thing he could have been accused of was being slow off the mark. But Grayling just had to make it worse. It would obviously be wrong to reform the House of Lords, he continued, as the prime minister was busy filling it with friends and party donors. Therefore it was best just to stop the Lords from stopping the government trying to finesse unpopular and ill-considered legislation through parliament without scrutiny. Thank you and goodnight.

The contest between Chris Bryant, the shadow leader of the house, and Grayling is one of the most one-sided in the Commons. Then again, the contest between Grayling and anyone would be one-sided. Bryant had a field day. When in opposition, Lord Strathclyde had been happy to block the government on 390 occasions, now he seemed to think that doing so was a disgrace. The Strathclyde report had nothing to do with constitutional change and everything to do with the government sulking because the Lords had responded to the will of the people on tax credits. He didn’t see fit to mention the obvious irony in the unelected chamber operating as the de facto democratic opposition. Perhaps there wasn’t time.

“Where there is dissent, they crush it; where a body opposes them, they neuter it,” he said, coming over all Margaret Thatcher on the steps of Downing Street. “In the words of Benjamin Disraeli, this is nothing less than ‘organised hypocrisy’.”

“I wish you to withdraw that last word,” said the deputy speaker, Eleanor Laing.

“Disraeli said it,” huffed Bryant.

“Well Disraeli was wrong.” Laing huffed back.

The pair would have been better quibbling about the word organised. Disorganised was more like it, as Grayling was anxious to prove. By diluting the powers of the Lords, he was actually making them a great deal stronger, he insisted. The homeopathic approach to politics. Prince Charles would have approved.

If Grayling was hoping for moral support from his own benches, he was in for disappointment. “The government couldn’t have chosen a safer pair of hands to conduct this report,” said Bernard Jenkin, ice coating every word with ice. “The noble lord has done a very workmanlike review,” observed Andrew Murrison, lowering the temperature still further. The chamber reached absolute zero when Tim Loughton asked for total reform to make the Lords democratically elected.

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” said Grayling lamely. “The prime minister has appointed some very able peers.”

Labour’s Gisela Stuart cut to the chase. The government had been looking at the wrong issue. It should have been asking why it didn’t use primary legislation for the important and sensitive issues. “Oh no,” said Grayling serenely. “George Osborne didn’t ditch cuts to working tax credits because they had been defeated by the Lords. He had done so because he had found an extra £27bn down the back of the sofa.” Not Grayling but failing.