PERHAPS we’re nearing that point where those whose task it is to preserve the correct ordering of British society will decide that Boris Johnson has outlived his usefulness.

Perhaps there really is a tipping point where an establishment which is kept afloat by lies decides that this is one lie too many. Yet, rather than feel a sense of affirmation that even the right-wing press are condemning the British Prime Minister, perhaps we should be suspicious.

Yesterday, HM Daily Mail was the only newspaper in the UK which decided pictures of Boris Johnson drinking at a Downing Street party he’d insisted hadn’t happened were not front-page news. Instead, they blamed it all on Dominic Cummings and his thirst for vengeance.

Throughout the partygate convulsions, the Mail has stuck rigidly to the line that little of this matters in the grand scheme of things. There’s a country to run and most voters – even if they did once care about the government’s lockdown hypocrisies – have now moved beyond it all and begun focusing on how they can survive the cost of living crisis.

The Mail is probably right and is at least being honest about its instincts. Those who think this matters in England and that Johnson’s psychotic tendency to lie will somehow presage a sea change in the direction of travel of Great Britain PLC are deluding themselves.

If Johnson is forced out of office, it will be at the hands of a shadowy group of Tories and those whose interests lie in their continued preservation. This won’t happen because they feel Johnson has failed a morality test and that he’s a thoroughly disreputable chap. They’ll have simply decided that he must go if all the other more subtle corruptions and malfeasances that form the spine of this party are to continue unopposed and concealed.

Johnson will be sacrificed to placate the masses and those who fought to protect him will begin to refuse those daily 6am entreaties to defend him on a tour of the early morning news studios. And, sensing that their time has come, a cast of Tory leadership hopefuls will begin to assemble. Right now, they’ll be telling the usual 6am fall guys to switch off their phones when Johnson’s spin doctors come calling if they want to find favour with the new leadership.

Liz Truss, anyone? Priti Patel? Ben Wallace? Dominic Raab? These are the scourings left over after Johnson banished all those who disagreed with his hard-line Brexit and his attempts to suborn the will and the processes of the UK Parliament.

Truss, the UK Foreign Secretary, visited Russia and effectively made Vladimir Putin seem reasonable. This was after she said the UK would never recognise Russian sovereignty over two regions which were already Russian. The Russians, realising that Truss was ill-informed and plain ignorant, had set a trap for her.

Patel, meanwhile, is hellbent on making the UK a pariah state by compiling a suite of laws that will send refugees fleeing terror back into the sea and criminalise those deemed guilty of having helped them. Wallace is the UK’s Defence Minister, a title which must gladden the heart of all of Britain’s enemies.

Earlier this year, Ukraine was forced to slap him down after he said diplomatic negotiations with Russia had “a whiff of Munich” about them and demanded that Russia attend a summit within 48 hours. He is a toy soldier of the type that gains advancement in the British army and British politics despite having no discernible aptitude for anything.

All you need to know about Dominic Raab – apart from the fact he once said that men were discriminated against more than women – is that Truss is considered to be smarter than him.

The Conservative Party king-makers must be secretly delighted that so much heat has been caused by Johnson’s partygate antics. Much more serious questions remain to be answered about how the entire party high command was complicit in the PPE corruption throughout the pandemic.

It deliberately risked the health of frontline NHS staff by commissioning protective equipment from firms specifically created for the personal enrichment of friends and family who were then fast-tracked into multi-million-pound contracts. The corruption and callousness that lay at the heart of make the Downing Street Covid parties seem almost normal.

This week’s headlines make it seem that lying to the voters and the House of Commons is the unforgivable sin of British politics. The press and broadcast media are groaning with grave commentaries suggesting we are living in an age where all sense of decency has departed and been replaced by cynicism and opportunism. Aye right.

Tell that to the miners whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed following the 1984-85 strike after Margaret Thatcher unleashed all the horsemen of the British state at them, including a violent police force which acted as her personal militia. And tell it, too, to the innocent civilians killed in an illegal war in Iraq after a serving British prime minister persuaded Parliament and the judiciary to look the other way as we went to war on a lie.

The victims of the Windrush scandal might also have a view on how serious these partygate revelations are. More than half-a-million people moved from the Caribbean to the UK to help rebuild the country after the war. A generation later they were rounded up, denied legal rights and threatened with deportation.

Almost 100 of these people were wrongly deported by the British Home office, a scandal whose hallmarks are present in Patel’s decision to relocate asylum-seekers and refugees in Rwanda, contrary to international law and the UN refugee convention.

And let’s not forget the massive rise in food bank-users who have been propelled into poverty by the punitive measures of the DWP, specifically designed to cause hardship. And this at a time when British politics was being corrupted by the dark money of Russian oligarchs who bribed the Home Office to give them golden passports.

In Scotland in 2014, the entire Better Together campaign was built on lies and false guarantees, all of them devised by the fiction factory at Tory Central Office and helped along by the useful idiots of Scottish Labour.

If you think that another British Prime Minister caught telling lies is uniquely iniquitous then you’re part of the reason why the Conservatives are the UK’s most successful political party. There aren’t enough committed Tories in Britain to return a Tory government. They must always rely on successfully doping the rest of us. Partygate is part of this process.