Wee Ginger Dug: This is where the real proof that UK politics is broken lies

For the perennial favourites of ITV’s Saturday night light entertainment to openly criticise the government of the day is way up there in the top ranks of implausible and unlikely political developments, along with Michael Gove being honest and sincere or Priti Patel being kind to migrants. It is a sign that the story has cut through to the politically uninvolved.

If you could go back in time to the 1980s and tell your younger self that a British prime minister who commanded a huge majority in the House of Commons might end up being brought down by PJ and Duncan, you could only conclude that the UK at large was going to ignore the injunction from the wholesome pair and the rest of the cast of Byker Grove to Just Say No to drugs.

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The Downing Street Christmas party row is by no means the worst or most egregious example of Johnson failing to uphold the standard of behaviour that might be expected of the leader of a democracy, he has presided over a regime and a party which is constantly surrounded by the stench of corruption, he and his ministers lie repeatedly and habitually and are taking alarming steps to neuter what few checks and balances the British constitution (which isn’t worth the paper that it is not written on) places on the absolute power of a prime minister who commands a large majority in the House of Commons even though that huge majority can still be obtained by winning a minority of the vote.

Despite the rumblings of discontent from some within his party, Johnson will almost certainly survive the public outrage that the Downing Street parties have generated. This is because a very large part of the Conservative Party is far more exercised about minor inconveniences being imposed upon entitled and privileged middle-class people than it is about Johnson’s corruption, his cronyism, the almost 150,000 deaths from Covid he has presided over, the international embarrassment created by Brexit and his jeopardising the peace settlement in Northern Ireland.

To Tory MPs these are all perfectly acceptable. Instead they are planning to rebel over some perfectly sensible and moderate public health measures that are already far too little too late. The Anglo-British nationalists who have taken over the Conservative Party seem a lot more worked up about losing the freedom to cough over other people in Tesco than they were about losing the freedom to live and work in any country in Europe.

Johnson is able to avoid scrutiny for now as he is off on paternity leave following the birth of his daughter, a child who is either blessed or cursed by the fact that Johnson acknowledges she is his. It seems there is nothing Johnson can do without exposing yet another layer of his multi-faceted hypocrisy and the closest that he has to an over-arching political principle, which is that he himself should not be inconvenienced by any rule or regulation that he is happy to impose on the public.

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For years in his columns for The Telegraph, Johnson was a stringent critic of the entire concept of paternity leave, saying in a column published on March 27, 1995, that paternity leave and minimum holidays would “palpably destroy jobs”.

He has also denounced paternity leave as a “socialist delusion”and “part of a politically correct agenda”.

The following year, he slated leave for new fathers as “ridiculous” and the year after that described it as a “right-on” concept which was “picking on business”. He even went so far as to liken it to “Stalin squeezing kulaks out of the economy”. Although if it were possible to send Johnson off into exile in some godforsaken part of Siberia where he was cut off from contact with the rest of the world, or at least one of those towns in the north of England that doesn’t have a reliable rail service, the rest of us would be very happy indeed.

Owen Paterson

The coming week will be a challenging one for the Conservatives. The by-election caused by Owen Paterson’s resignation is on Thursday. It was Paterson’s resignation after being found to have inappropriately lobbied ministers on behalf of companies he was working for which sparked a series of scandals and controversies which the Conservatives have been unable to escape. It is thought Paterson’s formerly safe Tory seat is now too close to call. If it falls to the

LibDems, Conservative backbench jitters will only increase and the murmurings and rumours of plots against Johnson’s leadership will intensify. Johnson’s behaviour has made the deeply flawed nature of democracy in the UK all too apparent. However, the most recent scandal is the Christmas party straw that broke the camel’s back and made the public realise his entitlement, lies, contempt, and his utter lack of concern for anyone’s interests but his own, are not an aberration, they are part and parcel of his nature.

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Whether Johnson hangs on until the next election or not, his time in office proves that the Westminster political system, hailed by its apologists as the gold standard of democracy, is deeply and fundamentally broken.

It was this system which allowed such a manifestly flawed and unprincipled character to ascend to the highest office in the first place, an office which as we have seen enables its holder to wield immense power unchecked and uncontrolled. Westminster cannot be fixed, it cannot be reformed.

It is a salutary lesson in the importance of a written constitution and a proper separation of powers of the different branches of government. Johnson’s regime proves democracy in the UK is in danger when an amoral and unprincipled chancer is in charge. Scotland can’t change this failing UK, it can only escape it.