The Sketch: Tiger Tone keeps on swinging as even the pygmies pull his tail

"Sad to see someone of Blair's stature being so diminished by these events," I ventured.

"Sadder for some than for others," Michael Howard replied carefully. "But his performance in the House is still extraordinary, he's still swinging away, he's still viable."

I am reminded of something said about Bill Clinton: "So accomplished a performer was he, he could cry out of one eye." Posterity will be grateful for such a line, I thought I should pass it on.

The impudence! It's getting out of hand. A Welsh MP urged him on to defend workers' rights and not listen to "the Tory toffocracy or to the dysfunctional policy wonks in Number Ten". Imagine such a pygmy pulling such a tiger's tail!

Kate Hoey gave him a terrific towelling over the closure of her local clinic. Listing the opposition to it, she asked of Hewitt: "What does she know that they don't?"

Then we had one of Labour's Ulsterman asking about MI5 involvement in sectarian murders (forget it). And Tony Wright produced one of his epigrammatic questions: "We paid a lot more money to doctors to do a lot less, now are we going to pay them a lot more to do the work we paid them to stop?"

Opposition questions were more insulting. Alex Salmond compared him with Richard Nixon. David Howarth, for the Liberals, asked: "Why has he refused to answer questions on cash-for peerages? Is it because anything he could say would incriminate him?"

Blair's answer to that was worthy of a hereditary peerage: "It's perfectly obvious why I don't," he said.

Likewise, Lord Lambton had replied to the question of why he had rented prostitutes. "I should have thought it was obvious," he said.

There may be a practical reason for hanging on until the investigation is over. As a prime minister he has more sway over Lord Goldsmith than would a private citizen. It is he after all who will decide whether to allow any prosecution to happen.

Personally I doubt it will. The idea that a policeman (no offence) could get admissions out of Tony Blair that Lord Hutton, Lord Butler and Michael Howard failed to get is ridiculous.

David Cameron told Blair to go: "It's all over. Why can't he see it?" The Government's treading water. Authority's draining away. "It's in the national interest for him to go."

Back he came with whirling punches: "I'll tell him what's in the national interest..."

Remember how Blair defeated Hague by stepping out of operatic style, becoming sensible and conversational? Cameron needs something like that, and to say serious, sympathetic, magnanimous things. Then we'd all think what a serious, sympathetic, magnanimous person he was.