The troubling truth about Boris’s partygate inquisition

There is something faintly ridiculous about the Privileges Committee’s report on partygate. Sixteen pages in, you encounter the following sentence:

‘We have evidence that trestle tables were set up for drinks to be laid out.’

You have barely caught your breath from this nightmarish vision of a trestle table being erected in the Downing Street garden before you are informed that there is evidence that, at another get-together, ‘a cake and alcohol were provided’.

It gets worse. In the annex to the report we learn of ‘platters of sandwiches’. Was there no end to the Bacchanalian debauchery of the Boris Johnson regime?

Surely I am not alone in thinking this is all a tad absurd? It’s hardly the Marquis de Sade, is it? It’s not even Profumo. It isn’t even David Mellor. It’s such a substandard scandal. Britain has a proud tradition of political intrigue. We gave the world Guy Fawkes, the regicides, the slaying of young princes, beheadings, honours-for-cash, a war minister getting it on with a showgirl.