Boris will never recover from partygate

When a political party is hit by a crisis, the tendency these days is for both the politicians and their supporters to pretend that there isn’t a crisis at all, hunker down inside a comfortable state of denial and blame it all on a hostile media. To a degree, this has always happened — but social media has unquestionably exacerbated the process, to the extent that at any one moment a vast number of people are living under a bizarre delusion from which only much later do they emerge blinking into the sunlight. The polarising effect of social media and its echo–chamber properties have led to it becoming little more than a vast conduit for confirmation bias, and this informs the way in which politicians react to crises. This is certainly one reason why Labour, under Jeremy Corbyn, resisted the charge of anti-Semitism for so long (another is that quite a few of its members were, er, anti-Semites, of course).