Partygate got full coverage in the Swedish media again today, with scenes in the Commons shown on SVT delighting those here who always suspected that Monty Python was fact. In tomorrow’s Dagens Nyheter Katrine Marçal, the paper’s excellent London correspondent, bemoans the fact that it all seemed to be about Johnson, and none of it about politics, which is what the Swedish parliament usually concerns itself with. She also thinks it won’t matter much to Johnson, because it plays to people’s fond perceptions of him in any case. He relishes the role of ‘distraction’.

Which made me wonder whether in fact he might be the latest and most cunning of  Lynton Crosby’s ‘dead cats’, thrown on to the table deliberately (see https://bernardjporter.com/2022/01/14/a-line-of-dead-cats/), in order to take our attention away from the direr things going on underneath it: especially Priti Patel’s dismantling of our liberties, and Nadine Dorris’s threats to the BBC. Now that would be clever. Is Boris aware?