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Whatever Johnson was apologising for yesterday, it wasn’t for the holding of an illegal party in Downing Street, an event which he still claims never happened, despite it having taken place just a few yards from the office where he was allegedly ‘working’ at the time, and despite the increasingly detailed reports, including this one (from a Tory-supporting newspaper, the Times) saying that the party started at 6pm and ended with people leaving “rat-arsed” shortly before 2am. I’m not even sure that he was apologising for the jokey way in which his staff tried to work out how they would handle questions if the press ever found out about it. I suspect that what he was really ‘apologising’ for was the fact that the recording had become public. It’s a misdirected ‘apology’ if ever there was one.

He also said that he was furious. I believe him on that, but given his past record and the nature of the man, it is entirely reasonable to conclude that his real fury is directed at whoever leaked the recording. And more time will probably be spent investigating that than investigating whether a party was or was not held, the latter being a question to which they already know the answer. In the meantime, the first person thrown under a bus by the PM is someone who wasn’t even at the non-party; and it seems likely that other staff will shortly suffer a similar fate.

Leaving aside the jokiness in the video, which inevitably looks callous and unsympathetic in the circumstances, the question asked of Stratton at the rehearsal was a clear sign both that the staff knew how damaging the party could be and that they needed to have answers ready if it did come to light. It would have been better if, knowing that, they hadn’t ploughed ahead and held it anyway, but there is a sense in which preparing a response in advance is a sign of a residual degree of professionalism. It makes the eventual handling of the response when it did come to light look even more clumsy and incompetent. They had 12 whole months to prepare their answers and they botched it. The reason for that comes back to the man at the centre: preparation and sticking to an agreed script is not exactly one of his better known character traits. He much prefers to ‘busk’, to fly by the seat of his pants, to make up whatever answer he thinks will deal with the immediate question, and then stonewall and bluster until the media get fed up and the issue goes away. Professional staff are wasted on him.

It’s too easy, though, to see this whole saga as being about what happens when a lying and incompetent clown gets elected to an office where there are no real checks and balances. The questions we should be considering are how he ever got into a position for which he is so obviously unsuited, and why there are so few checks and balances that his ultimate downfall lies in a sufficient number of Tory MPs becoming convinced that his continued occupation of the role makes them more likely to lose than to hold their seats. The answer to both of those questions is that we have a political system which is arcane, broken and unfit for purpose, and which neither of the two main English parties seem to have any motive to fix. Any sincere unionist, who really believed that the UK as an entity was worth preserving, would be giving serious thought to the questions but they prefer to close their eyes to reality and preside over the continuing decline and rot. No matter what Welsh or Scottish politicians think, only English politicians can solve this. We don’t have to remain part of it, though.