In the discussions about the current behaviour of the government and whether or not it might be open to investigation by the Commissioner for Standards in Public Life, there is a set of connections which I feel might be open to question:-

1. The Prime Minister, according to Dominic Cummings, describes the Daily Telegraph as his boss, if only in jest.

2. Last Christmas, the Daily Telegraph celebrated the fact that it had a guarantee from government that it would provide the Daily Telegraph with a guarantee of enough funding from government advertising to avoid redundancies.

3. I read somewhere, or was told, that a Russian donor was providing the Daily Telegraph with a big sum (I remember the figure £1.3 million) to enable them to continue to pay Boris Johnson a regular salary of £250,000 for occasional columns.

4. The Daily Telegraph is consistently used by the government and 10, Downing Street for advance information on government policy.

5. The Prime Minister left COP26 by private jet to have dinner at the Garrick Club with his old Telegraph colleagues, including Charles Moore, to discuss what he was going to do to protect Owen Paterson.

I don’t know how much of this is true, but it does seem to add up and if so is – at the very least – open to further investigation, since the Daily Telegraph is unlikely to be doing so itself.