The current scandal of No 10 partying while the country was in lockdown is as shocking as it is banal. I cannot conceive of it happening under any other Prime Minister.

If Tony Blair had found people having a party in Downing Street or the Garden he would have sent Aliaster Campbell who would have insulted each participant to their face then sacked them.

Brown would have insulted them and sacked them himself, and then thrown things at them, and then sacked them again just to make sure

Cameron would only have allowed people to attend a party if they had donated to Tory Party funds. And were Russian

No parties took place while May was PM. She didn’t know what a party was.

Boris allowed parties to happen, and attended them himself, because he is incredibly needy. He has a desperate need to be liked and craves attention. We have never had someone with such a feeble and malleable character as PM before. He is an incredibly soft target for a foreign spy agency: venal, desperate for money, sexually incontinent, no moral boundaries. He is the kid in class who always exaggerated – if you had been to Tenerife, he had been to Elevenerife, If your dad had a new job his dad was James Bond. People who tell such daft stories always have a secret sadness at the heart of them – they tell a lie to hide it, and then another lie to hide the first, and pretty quickly everything is lies. For most people life and hard knocks ground you and stop the confabulation. Boris, and Trump, are what happens if someone grows up so privileged and indulged that they never learn those life lessons and reach adult life with no sense that lies have consequences.

Boris’s rise to power would have been impossible without the Leave vote. Brexit was based on lies and cheating, and the only way to get Brexit done was to bring a liar and a cheat in as Prime Minister to promote a deal that promised to be oven ready, but was in fact a turkey. Brexit was the lie born from a deep sadness, and people would rather see more lies piled on top than confront that harsh reality.

It seems likely that Boris’s term as chief liar and cheat is over. The questions is whether the people who backed Boris and Brexit are ready to embrace reality, or simply seek a slightly less crass fantasy.

My guess is that they will go for a classier but nastier fantasy rather than engage with reality. Boris almost certainly is finished, but the fantasy that brought him to power isn’t.