We’ve arrived at one conclusion with regards to the Conservative party. Boris Johnson’s ability to ride out this crisis immersed government is matched only by the single fact that Tory MPs cannot see a better electoral bet amongst them.

Currently, there are 359 Conservative MP’s and something north of 100,000 party members – and yet, there isn’t one that any of them can think of who might make a better Prime Minister than a charlatan.

Given the state of the country right now, the opportunity to reinvigorate the economy and make people’s lives a little better is being squandered by experts in scandal management and little else. Immersed in alcohol and drugs, power-hungry psychopaths are having a party while the suffering escalates. And if they had as much talent for firing up the economy as they do for wriggling out of their wrong-doing, the UK would be racing ahead of the G7 and crushed Putin with a single stare.

However, the Queen’s speech a couple of weeks ago said it all. Meant to relaunch Boris Johnson’s shocking record of malfeasance in office during the pandemic and appalling negotiation of Brexit – a “bonfire of red tape” was their latest sloganised wheeze.

Freed from the shackles of the EU, the first announcement of our newfound freedom is that the government has introduced a bill to Parliament, on the same day as the Sue Grey report consumes all the column inches, to pave the way for genetically edited plants and animals to be grown and raised for food in England – without labelling. This is peak USA folks. All we need now is an election loss and the storming of Downing Street.

The NHS is cratering before our eyes, the economy is spinning southwards, Brexit is making everything so much worse and the flagship policy of ‘levelling up’ is one of the bigger deceptions in a long list of betrayals of electoral and democratic faith. At least it matches the mirage of sunlit uplands.

There will be a day of reckoning. But by then, it will take a generation to repair the damage.

There are some things this government promised in its sunny uplands policy. A new British bill of rights. That’s turned out to be an excuse to keep one of its favourite culture wars burning, the battle against “lefty lawyers.” And then there’s the selling off another profit-generating public asset with the privatisation of Channel 4. This is the red meat being thrown to appease the right-wing jihadists of a political party accelerating the decay of ‘Mother of all Parliaments’.

Two-yearly MOTs was another but is surely a sign of absolute desperation, of a government scrabbling around for some new ideas. Is there nothing better that they can come up with than increasing the death toll on our roads?

We’re stuck with the mob, for the time being. It’s painful to witness. But these are our modern times and if this is it, I, like the generation before me, I will soon hanker for the good old days. After all, Thatcher only destroyed British manufacturing and sowed the seeds of privatisation, Major blew the starting gun on Brexit with his ERM debacle, Blair blew up the Middle East and Cameron managed to tear the country apart.

Sue Grey’s report is perhaps one of the most damning statements on the state of modern British politics. And to survive it, this government has used desperately needed taxpayers’ cash in a massive PR exercise to defend the indefensible. And yet, cabinet ministers have lined up in support of their Emporer with no clothes, demonstrating their own moral authority, whilst wrapping themselves up in a flag of a union falling apart on their watch.

Is it not the time to prepare the United Kingdom for the challenges of the 21st century? Is it not time to do away with the relics of an empire long gone and truly reinvent our country? Boris Johnson does show us that there is a possible route out of all this by demonstrating exactly what this country does not need in Downing Street.

Proportional representation and ridding ourselves of a hereditary upper house would be a good start. A written constitution would be another to save us from another political hustler.