Left to its own devices, the government would have let Worboys walk free – and at PMQs Corbyn didn't even mention it

As he spoke, text messages blipped around between Conservative special advisors and spinners and MPs, in sheer incredulity that the prime minister really was going to be let off the hook in this fashion

At half past ten on Wednesday morning, the High Court decided one of the most notorious serial sex attackers in recent British history should not, in fact, walk free from jail after just 10 years.

The High Court decided it agreed with a case brought jointly by two of what police believe to be more than a hundred of John Worboys’ victims, by London mayor Sadiq Khan and The Sun newspaper, was victorious.

And why did it fall to these people to bring this action, known as a judicial review? Because the Justice Secretary, David Gauke, decided in January that if he brought a judicial review himself he would stand no chance of winning.

In other words, left to its own devices, without The Sun and Sadiq Khan’s help, the government, this Conservative government, led, by the way, by a woman who spent six years running the Home Office, would now be allowing John Worboys needlessly to walk free from jail.

There are not many things worse that can happen, with such immaculate timing, before Prime Minister’s Questions at noon. Ninety minutes is plenty of time to prepare for a decision that had been in the pipeline for weeks.

It is why David Gauke squirmed and stared skyward at the end of the government benches. In a past life, two years ago, it used to be his job as chief secretary to the treasury, to come to the despatch box and face down awkward questions whenever his boss, George Osborne, didn’t fancy it. What he suddenly knew is that sitting in the same room as the prime minister, as she is forced to squirm her way out of your cock-ups is an order of magnitude worse.

Or, of course, it should have been but it didn’t actually happen because Jeremy Corbyn didn’t ask a single thing about it. Not once. Indeed it wasn’t until 43 minutes in that Zac Goldsmith of all people mentioned the name John Worboys, eliciting a hastily pre-prepared and entirely unsatisfactory answer from Theresa May.

We are in the middle of one of the madder weeks in British politics. There’s been an antisemitism protest against the opposition in Parliament Square, Theresa May appears to be leading some sort of international diplomatic march against Vladimir Putin. And a small cabal of computer geeks have blown a serious hole in the EU referendum.

Corbyn has been struggling. May has been winning. And here, in plain sight, was an open goal. He didn’t miss it. He didn’t turn round and blast it into his own net from ninety yards, as was his way in early 2016. He simply stood there and refused to kick it. Refused to send it even on the gentlest roll in the direction of the net.

Instead we got six carefully prepared questions on mental health funding. We heard again about the terrible deaths of two mental health patients at the hands of Southern Health, in 2012 and 2013.

As he spoke, text messages blipped around between Conservative special advisors and spinners and MPs, in sheer incredulity that the prime minister really was going to be let off the hook in this fashion.

It’s happened once before, this. When the work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith resigned from the government over cuts to disability benefits, an attack designed to sustain maximum damage on Cameron and Osborne. When it fell to Corbyn to ask about it, the words Iain Duncan Smith did not pass his lips. Months later, it would transpire that a documentary crew from Vice were in the room when Corbyn made this decision, when he now infamously told his adviser Seumas Milne: ”It’s not up to me to say more than a couple of lines about ‘the government’s in a mess’.”

Jeremy. Jeremy Jeremy Jeremy. It is truly painful to say it, all these years later, but that is exactly your job. You’re even paid out of the public purse to do it. Saying “the government is in a mess” when the government is in a mess, is the very first and indeed last thing on your to do list.

When the government has required The Sun newspaper to step in and sort out the early release of a notorious rapist, well, we need more than the couple of lines we didn’t even get this time.

Of course there is a tendency, amongst pundits and politicians, to see it all as a grand game, about who knew what and when about x, and whether z should therefore sack y. Normal, functioning people might be of the view that mental health funding, or rather the lack of it, affects real people more than David Gauke’s decision not to bring a judicial review that, clearly, he could have won.

The mental health crisis isn’t going away. The opportunity to hold the prime minister to account, at the only point in the week when anyone pays even the remotest bit of attention, has now been and gone.