During the Tony Blair years, resignations after minor disturbances seemed to occur with alarming regularity: Tessa Jowell; Peter Mandelson (twice); Estelle Morris; Robin Cook; Peter Kilfoyle; and many others. Yet when David Cameron assumed the premiership, his approach differed — members of parliament involved in scandals were kept in place until the press forgot about their transgressions. And it worked. The only two sackings were Amber Rudd, essentially taking the blame for the wrongful deportation of the Windrush generation, and Priti Patel, who had used her holiday to Israel to meet and attempt to broker deals with Israeli politicians.

Cameron’s approach differed sharply from Blair’s by refusing to accept wrongdoing: the prime minister believed that the newspaper headlines would pass with few noticing, and those who did notice would be distracted by the next headline or scandal, without the public demanding accountability for government transgressions.

By and large, he was right — and now Boris Johnson has adopted his strategy, in fact pushing it further. The complete flouting of lockdown rules by Johnson’s aide, Brexit guru Dominic Cummings, has been one of the most widely covered stories in the press since it was first broken by the Mirror and the Guardian. People care deeply about it because they are confined to their homes and cannot see friends and family. For all Cummings’s railing against the elite, he feels the rules don’t apply to him. Many are cooped up in tiny, overcrowded flats; Cummings’s father owns an estate with three houses. His wife’s dad owns a castle. The idea that the family isn’t elite is ludicrous.