Partygate is shameful – but Boris shouldn’t resign

I feel torn on partygate. Like most other people, I have flashes of rage over the vision of government ministers living it up with booze and birthday cakes while the rest of us risked arrest if we so much as popped round to our mum’s for a cup of tea.

But there is something in the pushback against partygate that grates, too. It feels opportunistic, possibly even anti-democratic, with Boris’s legion of loathers among the media elites clearly hoping that this scandal will do what they so spectacularly failed to do at the ballot box – get those pesky Brexity Tories out of Downing Street.

This is not to downplay the seriousness of what has happened. That the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have been fined for breaking laws that they constantly warned the rest of us to obey is extraordinary. That Boris and Rishi have made history by becoming the first PM and Chancellor to have broken the law while in office is just mortifying.