Wednesday evening was a busy one.
In Parliament, Rishi Sunak was preparing to face down more rumoured rebellions from his painfully divided party over immigration.
Whether it's on television or in the newspapers, it is hard to avoid talk of Tory division right now, particularly over its deeply controversial and hugely divisive plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Of course all the bluster and bloviation of the right-wing blowhards in the lead up to the vote resulted in just 11 Conservative MPs voting against the government's plans. A typically pathetic display.
The preposterous situation was summed up rather acutely by Lee Anderson, who had resigned as deputy chairman of the party in preparation to vote against his government - only to change his mind and abstain because, and I quote, opposition MPs were "giggling and laughing and taking the mick."
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Now if that is not a conviction politician at work, then I don't know what is.
For those of us who have grown tired of the manner in which our national politics works, this whole fatuous spectacle will have come as no surprise.
It becomes even more farcical when you add in the reality that the Rwanda bill is cruel, inhumane, incredibly expensive and unlikely to result in any change to immigration numbers in this country.
Don't take my word for it. On Friday the senior Tory Peer and former Scottish Conservatives leader Ruth Davidson said there are "dogs in the street" that know deportation flights to Rwanda are "probably never going to happen."
But this, as is so often the case with our political culture, isn't really about immigration anymore. It's about the battle for the soul of the Conservative Party, a battle that has done untold damage to this country for decades now.
Not only is this painful and exhausting to watch, but it sucks up so much oxygen from huge issues that matter to so many, issues that have been created by the same people now ignoring them in favour of their petty squabbles.
At the exact same time that the Tory rebels were electing not to rebel in Parliament, a landmark meeting was taking place inside Liverpool Town Hall.
Now don't get me wrong, I have sat through plenty of petty squabbles in that political arena as well, but on this occasion, things were different.
The council was discussing an enormous piece of work from the city's public health director Matt Ashton which revealed in stark, unflinching and horrific detail how poor the state of the city's health is - and how much worse things could become.
The numbers are as remarkable as they are terrifying. 1990 Liverpool residents die young (under the age of 75) each year and 1100 of these deaths are preventable.
People living in the city's poorest areas are living on average 15 years less than those in the most affluent places and live 18 years longer with poor health.
Liverpool's infant mortality rate is higher than the national average. Every year 26 babies in the city don't make their first birthday.
If these numbers aren't shocking enough, Professor Ashton has projected how much worse things could get by 2040 if major and urgent interventions aren't made. If nothing is done, it is predicted that life expectancy in the city could go into reverse for Liverpool women.
That's a staggering projection when you place it in the context of advancing medical developments and the fact that, in general, people are living longer.
The report makes it absolutely clear where these terrible health outcomes are coming from. They are coming from poverty.
In Liverpool, the third most deprived local authority area in the country, right now, 24,000 children, that's nearly a third of all children are living in poverty. That is a truly appalling figure for a city in the sixth richest country in the world.
As a city Liverpool has suffered badly through the austerity agenda of the past 14 years. Huge cuts to welfare and the slashing of council budgets have meant that more and more people have been pushed into poverty which, as we now know very clearly, is harming their health and shortening their lives.
You would hope that a government of the day would be appalled at the prospect of its own citizens dying early, preventable deaths or of huge numbers of children growing up in abject poverty. You would hope they might want to do something about it.
Based on the evidence of this week, you would be wrong.
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