Water has stopped lapping against the bows. Westminster is becalmed. Thanks to Donald Trump no one knows what to think, what to say, whom to attack. Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down.

An albatross circles the mast. The ocean looked never more vast.

At PMQs Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch clung to each other like shipwreck survivors. It had been, Mrs Badenoch said, ‘a challenging week’. Translation: jeepers, what just hit us?

Labour MPs may have cheered Sir Keir’s arrival in the chamber just before midday, for they have an inchoate sense that he is creating a diplomatic personality for himself and that that may be an electoral asset; yet the exchanges between him and Mrs Badenoch about Ukraine were heard in near silence.

Cabinet ministers formed a row of shop-window dummies, frozen in plastic poses. Anneliese Dodds, who quit last week over aid cuts, quivered behind the Speaker’s Chair. Poor Anneliese. A tree fell in the forest and no one heard.

Sir Keir opened by reading a list of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan. This was presumably a quiet rebuke to Vice-President Vance for his slack words earlier in the week. In the rest of the session there was only one moment when argy-bargy ruptured the tomblike silence.

It came after Sir Oliver Dowden (Con, Hertsmere) complained about the private-education tax and Sir Keir claimed Tories were uninterested in state schools. ‘Liar!’ shouted Victoria Atkins (Con, Louth). She was obliged to withdraw the remark.

David Davis (Con, Goole) would have been justified in yelling the same after he raised ‘partisan parodies of justice’ as ex-soldiers are pursued through Northern Irish courts. Sir Keir: ‘I just haven’t seen the details.’

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch speaking during the weekly session of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs)

Oh come off it. One moment the PM wraps himself in the heroism of our Afghan war dead, the next he declines to defend SAS heroes from his human-rights lawyer friends. Sometimes I am almost overwhelmed by my hatred for politicians.

Mike Tapp (Lab, Dover) tested gorges with some sycophancy about Sir Keir’s ‘moral courage’ in recent days. Mr Tapp – good name for a gusher – added that ‘all MPs must appreciate that everything we say could impact diplomacy’.

Yes, imagine the headline in the Washington Post: ‘International peace deal wrecked by loose words from MP for Boghampton North during speech to local Women’s Institute.’

Sir Keir, rather than blush at this rubbish, talked of ‘this vital time’. But at Westminster it just feels a stunned, shaken, inert, tim’rous time.

Earlier a House of Lords committee heard from four former ambassadors to DC. Karen Pierce, newly returned from her duties there, was refreshingly optimistic. Beside her sat Sir Peter Westmacott (anguished, earnest, quoting Thucydides), Sir Nigel Sheinwald (pouchy-eyed smoothie, probably useful in a French restaurant) and Sir David Manning (crabbed, hunched, vinegary that his old order of global institutions and EU power was kaput).

The peers included yet another former ambassador to Washington, Lord Darroch. He stirred the air with his wrists while spluttering in circles, indignation topped by a tweezered fringe. You can see why he sent Trump nuts.

Sir Keir Starmer opened PMQs by reading a list of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan

This committee of shrivelled, Europhile declinists gawped at the enormity of a world in which Nato may be pointless, the UN could go next and Mr Trump might (so Sir Peter thought) be tempted to have a whack at Iran.

Lord Soames, grandson of Sir Winston, lashed out at the ‘awful ghastliness’ and ‘rubbish’ about the Oval Office statue of Churchill being somehow significant. There’s life in Soamesy yet.

The rest just sat there with jaws sagging, Lord Grocott staring out life via two eyeballs that may have been borrowed from Samuel Beckett.

Bloodless Lady Blackstone (Lab), her mouth opening little wider than some vault in a crypt, claimed there was ‘a lot of restiveness’ among Labour MPs and peers over Mr Trump and it could grow ‘if there’s not enough toughness from our PM in dealing’ with the White House.

Maybe there is. But at present it is hiding.