Everyone loves a redemption arc. The British media is no exception. It makes a habit of rescuing people from the pits of history: the liars, the cheaters, the war criminals. If these figures have something to offer the establishment — a condemnation of the Left; a bolster to the Right — the press that represents its interests will sponge away their crimes and bring them, renewed, back to their seat at the table.

Following the events of this week, this system has a task on its hands. Boris Johnson’s reputation, as Zarah Sultana wrote in Tribune yesterday, was well-known ahead of his premiership. He is racist and homophobic; he is an enthusiastic liar; he is entirely self-serving. He was never interested in running the country for the good of the people. This character has not suddenly appeared in the last six months: he has always been that way, and that way was condoned by all those colleagues who backed his bid for the highest office in the land.

In a functional political culture, the reputations of those who supported and enabled him, many right up until the final scandal, would therefore be shot. In practice, because those MPs had the wherewithal to recognize the threat he had begun to pose to their political careers, and to the stability of a status quo that serves them, they will be made the saviors of civility. The pace of their change of heart — most notably that of Nadhim Zahawi — has not gone unnoticed (or unmocked), but it’s their role in getting rid of someone who had become a symbol, the sole representative of an antidemocratic impulse that in reality infects British politics much more broadly, that will endure. He didn’t want to go, but he will. That they pushed him out of unbridled self-interest soon won’t matter to the media, because the media is operating in exactly the same way.