One would imagine that Boris will need to go very soon.  It must be remembered that many of his backbenchers have distrusted him for years: ‘Boris will always let you down’, as a retiring Tory MP told me was the almost universal feeling among his colleagues before the last General Election. (I may have quoted this before.)

We’ve all known about his enormous failings of character and of personal morality, which indeed were noticed when he was a boy, and reported to his parents by one of his masters at Eton (I’ve quoted that, too). There are at least half-a-dozen books about his flaws, especially his penchant for lying. There’s no excuse for the cognoscenti (who include Conservative politicians) not being aware of all this. ‘The people’ may have remained ignorant, and seduced by what many have described as his ‘PG Wodehouse’ characteristics. It was this supposed appeal to the populace that persuaded the Tory Party to select him as their leader and prime ministerial candidate in 2019, in the belief – quite justified, as it turned out – that an older and fatter Bertie Wooster might appeal – more than the slimmer and deadly serious Corbyn – to the politically unlettered and to the aficionados of TV comedy programmes.

Having won the election for them, but with his obvious stupidity, superficiality, lack of judgment and gross immorality only now clearly affecting both his appeal to the people (‘one law for them…’) and his direction of the country, many Tories know that it’s time for him to go; having done his job for his party in 2019. Of course he has weathered personal crises like this before, generally by ladling on the ‘charm’. But can that take him any further in 2022?

I’ve written before about Johnson’s personal flaws, especially the lies. Then I wondered whether personal immorality, generally speaking, could really be a determining factor when it comes to national politics. Soon we may know.