The Sketch: Chief Whip has managed to escape the lash of a cornered Prime Minister

There's an elite group of MPs (Patricia Hewitt, Gerald Kaufman, Hilary Armstrong) who look, when the lights are up, as though they've been dead for 3,000 years. The mystic flame of Westminster has kept them alive but not young.

Surely it will take more than a mystic flame to keep Mrs Armstrong in this world much longer. It turns out that the Government's chief whip advised the Prime Minister to go home before the crucial religious hatred vote as the Government were bound to lose by 10. But the rebels read the order paper the wrong way round and half of them went into the Government lobby by mistake (it's easier than it sounds). So had Hilary not cocked up twice (she'd already paired off 40-odd of her MPs) she would have been saved by the rebel cock-up. Two years ago, this sort of luck always went the Government's way. We must be in the final days.

But Mr Blair's peculiar instincts are anything but punitive. Maybe he will save her face and shift her sideways into some lesser job. Minister of Education perhaps.

Charles Clarke made a statement on the renewal of the Terror Bill. This has to happen every year, and a good job too. We can see the Bill from a different angle now a year's gone by. The control orders (vile constitutional precedent though they be) haven't been used and abused by the state (only one Briton has been "controlled" along with 17 foreigners, if we're still allowed to call them that).

On the other hand, some hundreds of thousands of people have been stopped under the Terror Act for collecting signatures on the street or wearing the wrong T-shirt, and the tenor of the country has subtly but distinctly changed. It's also becoming clear that the state can't actually provide the complete defence it claims and that culture will be more important in the long run.

There were exchanges between the front benches so mature, so poised, so vocabulary-rich that I had to fight hard to jeer. Alistair Carmichael has taken over from Mark Oaten (we'll miss him) and having followed the Bill through Standing Committee he knows it upside down (quite the best way to approach an Act like this). And then there's David Davis, absolutely at the top of his game (something below leader, but well above the rest of the front bench). It makes you believe - or want to believe - in parliamentary democracy. And as for the fight to jeer - in the end, I failed, as you see.

PS: Apologies to comedians who sent in sketches showing they weren't "frigging gutless" about Islamic jokes (I particularly liked fashion parody including a "racy little number from Donna Koran"). The comedians are making the jokes but it's the sheer frigging, middle class, white liberal gutlessness of the commissioners, producers, and executives that means we'll never hear them.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com