Another day, and another morning staring down the barrel of the ToryDiary writers’ conundrum: lots of rancid stories, most of them recently covered.

Rachel Reeves potentially hitting drivers of electric vehicles with a new levy to try and make up falling Fuel Duty revenue? Treading very similar ground to Sunday’s editorial, although there is perhaps an angle in there about the total hollowness of any government claims that the green energy revolution will save you money – unless and until we fix the runaway spending, the State will still desperately need the cash and extract it some other way.

Junior doctors rejecting the Government’s pay offer and preparing to go on strike, again? Not much to add to what we wrote back in July, although its remarkable that even now Wes Streeting apparently cannot or will not consider letting junior (sorry, ‘resident’) doctors train at private hospitals, despite a chronic shortage of NHS placements for them.

Meanwhile Bridget Phillipson’s latest assault on two decades of cross-party school reform seems to be the only thing to have got the Conservatives into this morning’s papers via two op-eds… from Michael Gove and Nick Gibb, neither of whom are on the shadow education team or even currently MPs. But we covered the Tories’ disappearance from the media’s radar two days ago.

So let’s talk about David Lammy, I guess. Haven’t done prisons in a while.

The scandal du jour doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know about the state of the Prison Service. Mere weeks after accidentally releasing the foreign sex offender at the heart of this summer’s protests over the Home Office’s use of hotels to house migrants, they contrived to do it again.

Brahim Kaddour-Cherif was “due to be remanded in custody for another offence”, the Times reports, “but was allowed to walk free because of a “complete breakdown in communications”.” More remarkably, nobody noticed for six days, until he was due to appear in court and nobody could find him.

If you want to get across what on Earth has happened to the prison system, the best read remains Ian Acheson’s Screwed. But there is a fresh angle on this latest fiasco: the Justice Secretary’s bald refusal to inform the House of Commons about it.

Lammy knew about Kaddour-Cherif’s accidental release when he stood in for Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs yesterday. He even had a prepared statement, which had been drafted for him to read, per the Times again, “once the news broke“. So he wasn’t even being asked to actually tell the nation an embarrassing truth – merely to do the House of Commons the basic courtesy of informing it of something the press already knew.

But despite repeated and pointed questions from the James Cartlidge, he failed to do even this. Instead, Lammy offered only the blustering belligerence which is his stock in trade, lambasting the Conservatives for the state of the prison service and boasting of various things Labour has done since last July.

Now such criticism of the previous government is by no means entirely unfair – the Conservatives did serious damage to the Prison Service between 2010 and 2024, first by paying the most experienced guards to retire early as a cost-saving measure, and then by shutting a load of perfectly serviceable prisons in 2016 as another cost-saving measure. If Rishi Sunak hadn’t called the election early, his government would have had to start another round of early releases.

Sadly, however, being in office means the buck stops with you. There is normally a window in which ministers can get away with blaming their predecessors, but for Labour that window has more or less closed already. Once again, Starmer is paying the price for his timorous conduct before the election; David Cameron spent several years selling his narrative before the 2010 election, and the public is much less willing to be generous with blame if you spent the run-up to your own election insisting everything would be fine.

But there’s also a question of constitutional propriety here. Lammy refused to tell the Commons something which he a) knew and b) was already in the public domain. Even after PMQs, he apparently refused Sir Lindsay Hoyle’s request that a Justice minister return and give a statement to the Commons, on the grounds that it would be “career suicide”.

Labour is by no means breaking new ground in not treating the House with the respect it has traditionally been due. But Starmer and his shadow cabinet used to love getting on their high horses about such matters in opposition, so that is hardly a defence.

The Justice Secretary did not technically lie to the House, except by omission. Demanding that ministers resign for lying by omission would probably make staffing a government impossible after a few years. But it does feel as though there ought to be some sort of penalty.

If nothing else, Lammy has once again revealed the changing place of the Commons in our de facto constitution: as a stage, upon which ministers play to the cameras that should never have been put in there. The most important thing for the Justice Secretary was not the Commons, or the Speaker, or any other formal part of the institution – it was the lenses, and the audience waiting behind them. The necessity of a statement came second to the optics of giving it.

This capture of an institution by the television would be no surprise to Neil Postman. But it is nonetheless a real problem, and Lammy is far from the only culprit. Too many MPs treat the Commons as a platform on which they can make statements which they can clip for social media; the latest generation of Labour MPs are indignant about having to waste time sitting in it when they’re not speaking.

If we want to restore the proper function of the lower house (not least to reduce Parliament’s modern dependence on the House of Lords, to which the Commons sends ever-higher volumes of poorly-drafted legislation), the first step would be to stop it being a television set – and in the meantime, to impose some sort of sanction on ministers such as Lammy who treat it as one.

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