Fairy tales and lies from Government paint picture of degraded political standards - David Behrens

But it wasn’t the incident itself that did for the PM; it was his clumsy, characteristic attempt to spin his way out of it. He had forgotten, he insisted, that he’d been warned about the conduct of his former whip, Chris Pincher, before promoting him through the Tory ranks.

On that particular point, let me say just this: there have been a handful of times in my professional life – mostly during my TV years – when I’ve heard about the unusual sex lives of esteemed colleagues, and the details are etched in my memory even now. I couldn’t unremember them if I tried. So the PM’s claimed memory lapse, and his attempt to write off the affair as just part of the Westminster rough-and-tumble rang false from the beginning.

But Mr Johnson is not the only person in power to have lost his grip on reality – and some of the other fairy stories perpetrated by his underlings recently raise the question of just how gullible the Government thinks we are.

Sometimes these are big lies; empty promises of jam tomorrow that are meant to deflect our attention from not being able to afford jam today. Others take the form of reports from some committee or other pretending they’re working hard to solve a problem they have not begun to grasp.

Here’s an example of one of the more transparent pieces of misinformation perpetrated on the public in the last week. It began with the Home Office and filtered down to an NHS “clinical commissioning group”, which announced it was setting up a “bespoke health service” to dispense medical, dental and optometry treatment to the 1,500 male asylum seekers due to occupy the former RAF base at Linton-on-Ouse, near York.

This raised the question of how they could magic up a service for one group of people when most of the rest of us are being denied access to a GP, let alone a dentist, and when there is an acute staff shortage across the NHS.

The CCG argued that its new service would prevent existing medical resources from being overloaded by the sudden increase in the local population. But where were the new doctors and nurses going to come from? The CCG did not say. It recorded only that it was still “some way from commissioning a compliant service”. So it’s to be a health practice with no practitioners – a piece of double-talk worthy of the Prime Minister himself.

It’s far from the only example of obfuscation around the base at Linton, where the locals are understandably beside themselves at having their safety compromised by the influx of hundreds of single men in their 20s and 30s.

The Home Office’s handling of the situation – foisting the centre on the community, brooking no discussion and supplying as little information as possible – owes more to the style of government in some of the countries the new arrivals have left behind. It certainly has no place in ours.

The exodus to the back benches of so many former ministers this week signals an acceptance that we can’t go on like this. As the recent Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, noted, “the problem starts at the top” – but it doesn’t end there. Behind the big lies about parties and MPs with their pants down are endless false narratives about policies large and small, and they have in common the unwillingness of those in power to accept responsibility for their actions.

Read: Johnson's resignation as Tory leader not enough, he must leave Number 10 immediately - The Yorkshire Post saysIf the day ever dawns when we can listen to what our politicians and their officials have to say without instinctively disbelieving them, some good might after all have come from Chris Pincher’s ignominy. One thing is sure: unlike Boris, we won’t quickly forget about him.