I wasn’t really planning to write anything more about the vexed question of the Downing Street Christmas Party – or parties, as it now appears, of which it is easy to lose count, not just the one on December 18th. pre-arranged, but an endless round of champagne and quizzes, with the cameras conveniently covered by dustbin bags in case they were being recorded: so they knew they were doing something wrong.

But now I read that a report will be produced by Simon Case ‘as soon as we reasonably can’. We, not he. I thought that the whole point was that the Cabinet Secretary had been asked to produce an independent report. But now it is apparently a co-production, written jointly by the Prime Minister. A whitewash in other words. Well, we guessed that, but he might have had the grace not to make it quite so obvious.