If Newsjack’s crystal ball, powered by parliamentary arithmetic, is correct, Monday will have seen a Cameron egg-faced not so much by having had to give his MPs a three-line whip against a petition’s call for a referendum on EU membership, but by the unlikely circumstance of being outflanked on the right by both his MPs and the over 100,000 public signatories. “Golly gosh, they want a referendum on Europe? My word George, Europe will be my decision! And it is awfully good if my ‘deputy’ thinks we’re leaving him a few scraps..”

Belated governmental support for the EU is unlikely to promote much gratitude from the much-maligned union. The European Commision is demanding a BBC apology after Jeremy Paxman failed to stop the commentator Peter Oborne on Newsnight repeatedly calling its spokesman “that idiot in Brussels”. Meanwhile the UK mission to the UN has thrown away a temper tantrum and is blocking joint EU statements – more than 70 so far – on the grounds that they should be presented “on behalf of the EU and its member states” rather than just on behalf of the EU.

The usefulness of this ‘policy’ is unknown to all but Hague and Cameron, who have dictated it from London, but with crisis in Greece and the Eurozone it seems no-one in Whitehall has come up with any better way of spending Britain’s political capital. Maybe cabinet will soon decide in the interests of pedantry to use their UN veto to block Security Council statements until the UN refers to itself as the "Not-Always-So-United Nations". While they're at it, maybe they can find an alternative to the "United-Unless-Salmond-Has-His-Way Kingdom".

Meanwhile the reverberations of Number 10’s experiment with direct democracy will rumble on, as they will now consider for (non-binding) parliamentary debate any petition with more than 100,000 signatures. Topping the e-petitions list with almost 250,000 signatories is a call that “Convicted London rioters should loose [sic] all benefits”.  Creative interpretation of this would be interesting – letting convicted rioters out on the streets with wads of cash to distribute to claimants may be risky,  though perhaps not more risky than using benefits assessors Asos, whose decisions are so unreliable that up to 70 per cent of them are being overturned on appeal.

Politicians who months ago gleefully proclaimed a petition might ‘force’ them to debate a return of the death penalty will be disappointed however – a petition to retain the ban on capital punishment is out-running it by over 10,000 votes.