Is Jess Phillips okay? I can’t be the only one wondering. The safeguarding minister’s increasingly erratic, shirty performances at the despatch box would suggest she is crumbling under the scrutiny. Scrutiny that she and her government have brought entirely on themselves.

This week, she lashed out at Tory and Reform MPs for daring to criticise Labour’s woeful handling of the grooming-gangs inquiry, which is disintegrating following the resignation of five victims from its liaison panel, some of whom accuse Labour of trying to engineer a ‘cover-up’ . She dismissed this as ‘political pointscoring’ and told Lee Anderson to ‘question his own morality’ .

Despite Jess Phillips’s supposedly unimpeachable feminist credentials, her principles have abandoned her at the darndest of times

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