THERE are many infuriating things about the government of Boris Johnson. There are of course the constant self-serving lies, the corruption, the deceit, the contempt for democratic accountability, the sheer malignant incompetence, and the alarming descent into jingoistic authoritarianism. However, possibly the most infuriating of all is the way in which senior Conservatives treat the public as though we are idiots and can't even be bothered to come up with halfway plausible lies and excuses when evidence of their rule-breaking and bad behaviour comes to light.

A case in point is the latest instance of a Downing Street social gathering in apparent breach of lockdown restrictions which has come to light. A photo of what appears to be the Prime Liar and his staff enjoying a cheese and wine party in the gardens of owning Street on 15 May last year has been leaked to the press. Restrictions in force at the time prohibited outdoor social gatherings of people from more than three households and required the observation of social distancing with those present remaining more than two metres apart.

The photo shows Johnson and his wife and their baby at one table with two other individuals, further away was another table around which four people were seated while behind them on the lawn was a third table around which nine individuals were clustered. All the tables had alcoholic drinks on them, plus what looks like cheese and crackers on the table where Johnson and his wife were sitting. There was no evidence of laptops, work papers, or anything to suggest that this was anything other than a social event.

Yet despite the evidence that we can all see clearly with our own eyes, Downing Street has insisted that this was not in fact a social gathering but was actually a work event, and the fact is that it took place outside normal work hours meant it was within the regulations for them to be drinking wine, which leads to the alarming conclusion that the British Government conducts its business when its leaders and senior staff are half cut. Which would certainly make the events of the past couple of years much easier to understand.

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Given the utter lack of anything in the photo to bolster the claim that this was really a cheese and wine work meeting, Justice Liar Dominic Raab made the, ahem, interesting claim that this meeting was obviously a work meeting and therefore within the rules because those in attendance were wearing suits. This is a claim which raises more questions than it answers, and which must come as a shock to all those people who had weddings and funeral gatherings cancelled but who now realise that all they needed to do was to claim that they were really work meetings because the men present would be wearing suits.

It seems that restrictions on social gatherings only apply to those whom middle-class cabinet ministers deem not to be sufficiently smartly dressed. Even if all the men in the photo were indeed wearing suits and ties, Raab's pathetic attempt to explain away the obvious would be an insult to everyone's intelligence, but what makes it so infuriating is that it is blatantly obvious from the photo that the men who were present were not all wearing suits. One of the individuals standing on the lawn appears to be wearing a t-shirt. Who knows, perhaps it's a formal t-shirt.

We can now add this to the list of important things that we've learned from Dominic Raab. It's possible for the sea to be closed. The ferry ports on the south coast of England are surprisingly important. And now we know that a party isn't a party if someone is wearing a suit. The revelation that you are not actually breaking the law if you are wearing a suit at the time certainly explains a lot about the Conservative party.

They're not even trying to hide their contempt for us anymore, are they?