is three minutes after 10 and you are listening to James O'Brien on LBC where I should probably

begin with an apology. Well, I don't know if I have to. I have to apologize. You decide whether

I have to apologize to you or not. Richie Zunex speech yesterday offered a brief and it turned

out temporary salve to our battered sensibilities. When he spoke, as he did in terms, I shall remind you in a

minute, of a government that would have integrity, professionalism and accountability, I breathed

a sigh of relief. I genuinely did. And I shall tell you why. I breathed it because although

many of his policies were likely to be pretty

toxic or repellent, I felt that those words, those three words, integrity, professionalism and

accountability, spoke of a return to a pitch upon which we can all agree the dimensions.

Do you see what I mean? Under Boris Johnson, we were not playing by

any rules, any recognisable rules. It was very difficult for Kirstama to land a punch on

someone, on him, because it was like trying to nail a blamonge to a wall with rubber nails. The absolute breach of all standards, regulations and requirements

was tragic to observe. And I appreciate some people who fell for his stick and are perhaps

still under his spell, will struggle to appreciate that the sheer scale of the disaster

visited upon democracy by a man who would lie as comfortably as the rest of us breathe.

But not just lie, of course, actively seek to undo the requirements of parliamentary democracy, the standards, the ethics that are an unwritten constitution, but nonetheless the ties that bind our civilisation or certainly our parliamentary democracy.

So Johnson ripped it all up. He would defend bullies. He would not just defend liars. He would amplify their lies.

He became elected upon the back of egregious calumnies and proven nonsences. And so it continued until it could continue no further. Oddly, the lie that finally did for him was the one about not knowing that a bloke he'd promoted had a record of inappropriate sexual behaviour.

That oddly did for him, but it was a culmination.

It was a classic case of the straw that broke the camel's back. But whatever your politics might be, if you dare in any circumstances to describe yourself as patriotic,

you have to want the game to be played on a pitch that everybody agrees about, rules that everybody must abide by. A Labour MP is found

to have behaved inappropriately. Kirstama suspends him immediately. You would want to conserve, even if you had

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