I’m grateful to Bendor Grosvenor for the helpful suggestion that the dripfeed of revelations about misdemeanors could actually be deliberate on the part of Downing Street as each revelation tends to blunt the disgust at the last one.

So, we are now in danger of forgetting that just before Christmas it became clear that the Prime Minister had told Lord Geidt an absolutely obvious and barefaced lie that he had forgotten that he had asked Lord Brownlow for £80,000 to do up his flat because he had had to change his telephone – a lie so obvious that it would shame a ten-year old. The first lesson in asking for money from major donors is to keep a record of it. And he didn’t forget to arrange a meeting for Lord Brownlow with Oliver Dowden in exchange for the cash, a double transgression, which Lord Geidt was too polite to point out.