One of the curses of hanging around social media is finding out exactly how broken and how dysfunctional our politics has become in the Increasingly Not United Kingdom, and today is no exception. Today was Dominic Cummings Day in Westminster. Today the man once vaunted as the Machiavellian mastermind behind the Prime Minister’s rise to power, who left Downing Street clutching his cardboard box in December, returned to play spectre at the feast, shaking his gory locks through seven hours of evidence.

At any other time in this country’s political history his evidence would have been eviscerating. Charges that the Health Secretary had lied through his teeth on numerous occasions, that ‘VIP channels’ for the procurement of government contracts had resulted in health workers not receiving necessary equipment and that untested and infected people had been placed in care homes would normally, and rightly, place that Health Secretary’s head on the block.

At any other time in this country’s political history, evidence that a Prime Minister had adopted one policy - herd immunity - while proclaiming its polar opposite, that he had failed to take a mushrooming pandemic seriously and that he had refused to close the country’s borders against a deadly virus out of pure bravado and hubris would normally, and rightly, lead to demands for his departure.

At any other time in this country’s political history the evidence we heard today would lead ineluctably to resignations. This evidence came from a man who was in the room when decisions were made; was in the room when Johnson proclaimed that the pandemic was unimportant because it only killed the elderly; was in the room when advice was ignored and science was sidelined. This evidence came from a man who was at the heart of decision making when decisions were made that led to one hundred and thirty thousand deaths.

Yet I suspect that, among the general public, there will be little clamour for Johnson’s head. There will be little outrage at the discovery of dishonesty and incompetence and sheer bull-headed stupidity at the top of government. There will be little rage that the people of this country have been so let down. Why?

Because this country has lost its soul.

It has lost its pride.

It has lost its sense of decency.

It has become decadent and amoral, without values, without principles and without honour.

Like a fish it has rotted from the head down. That is why, across social media today, we have seen hordes of supporters of Boris Johnson rushing to rubbish Cummings’s testimony on the grounds that he’s ‘a liar’. They know fine well that Johnson, too, is a liar, but he’s ‘their liar’ and that is all that is left of politics in this country: a fierce tribalism where we defend ‘our’ liar against somebody else’s liar. 

Somewhere along the way this country bought into the idea that lying is just par for the course in Parliament; that all politicians lie and that somehow made it OK for the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to stand at the dispatch box in the so-called ‘Mother of Parliaments’ and debase it by telling lie after lie after lie with, it seems, no one to hold him to account. 

This is why, I fear, the evidence provided by Dominic Cummings today will gain little traction. However incompetent, however dishonest, however venal the government may have been, however many people may have died unnecessarily because Boris Johnson was too busy playing “Mayor of Jaws” to make difficult decisions, the truth doesn’t matter. What matters is the narrative woven by the government, parroted by the BBC and trumpeted by the most partisan press in the world: that “Boris got the vaccines” and that “Boris did his best” - as if he were a primary school pupil handing in a substandard project rather than the Prime Minister dealing with a lethal pandemic.

However damaging - or not - Dominic Cummings may have been today it is as nothing to the damage that Boris Johnson and those who support him have wreaked on this country. By normalising lying as part and parcel of politics, by creating a political culture in which truth is tribal, they have created divisions in this country that can only deepen. If we cannot agree that facts are facts then there can be no political dialogue. If there are no standards in public life to which we hold our politicians to account then we invite corruption, ignore incompetence and debase democracy. And when our country becomes little better than Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe we will have only ourselves to blame.