WHERE was the debauchery? Where was the bacchanalian excess? Where was the sex and drugs and sausage rolls?
The photograph of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak standing next to a depressingly huge flask of orange juice and a tragic spread of supermarket sandwiches will haunt my dreams.
The way the Boris haters have been deploring Downing Street depravity, it was frankly disappointing to see they both had their trousers on.
BBC’s Nick Robinson had gleefully reported that a Downing Street cleaner had died of Covid after being infected by wicked Conservative Party animals.
Totally untrue — and the chrome-domed presenter was obliged to make a grovelling apology.
But still they bayed for blood. “When are you going to resign, Prime Minister?” shrieked one of those reporters who shout from the Downing Street shadows.
This just in — never. Boris is never going to resign because of Partygate. He is never going to resign because of lockdown-bending revelry in his place of work.
He is never going to resign because Labour, the BBC, Remainers and the SNP’s permanently outraged Ian Blackford fervently wish it.
If they want to get shot of Boris, they are going to have to beat him at a General Election. And you know what? Perhaps they will.
For Boris and his entitled, fun-loving flunkies do not come out of this sorry mess unscathed.
From the Red Wall to the Tory shires, working men and women will not forget that staff inside Downing Street were treated like dirt by all those tone-deaf toffs.
If we remember Partygate at all when we are in that polling booth, then we will recall the vomit that cleaners were obliged to mop up, and the security guards who were told to eff off and laughed at when they raised objections about gatherings getting out of hand.
But my guess is that most people now believe that the Partygate investigation was a shameful waste of public funds, especially at a time when a rogue state is repeatedly threatening us with nuclear weapons.
Even Rishi Sunak got a fine! And the boyish Chancellor doesn’t drink.
“Today is the day the Prime Minister is safe,” whispered an anonymous Tory MP when Sue Gray’s 37-page report was finally published. “Today is also the day the Conservatives lost the next election.”
LOVE MACHINE
I am not so sure. Sunak just poured billions into people’s pockets and may have single-handedly saved us from recession.
After all of Starmer’s hypocritical ravings about a “culture of criminality” inside Downing Street during lockdown, there was something comically mundane about Sue Gray’s revelations.
Because we already knew that there is one law for them and another for us.
Matt Hancock, draconian Health Secretary and undercover love machine, taught us that cruel fact when he was caught on CCTV groping his aide.
Michael Gove taught us that when he avoided isolation after a trip to Portugal to watch last year’s Champions League Final because he was part of a “pilot scheme” that was never offered to the peasants.
And Sir Keir Starmer taught us that when he guzzled his own potentially lockdown-busting brew.
But the next General Election will not be decided by elite knobs thinking the rules don’t apply to them.
It will be decided by how poor you feel when you step into that polling booth in 2024.
And if you really trust Sir Beer Korma with your wallet.
CAT-kicking Premier League prat Kurt Zouma and his brother Yoan both admitted animal cruelty when they appeared at Thames Magistrates’ Court in Bow, East London.
All sentencing options remain open — including a jail term of five years. The footage of Zouma drop-kicking his cat became public after his brother sent it to a woman he was attempting to impress.
How thoughtless are these idiots?
It is not just their cruelty that is so distressing.
It is that they believed it was something to brag about.
WHY THE RACKET ABOUT EMMA’S FASHION SHOOT?
EVEN as she exits early from the French Open, Emma Raducanu dazzles in Elle magazine.
Emma rocks her Dior kit. She makes her Tiffany jewels sparkle and gleam.
“While she’s doing this sort of thing, her opponents are practising!” scolds my wife — Elle reader, Wimbledon fan and mother to another high-achieving 19-year-old.
True, but then very few tennis stars are photogenic enough to be invited to model in glossy magazines.
If Andy Murray was ever asked to advertise male moisturiser in GQ, then I must have missed it.
And if Emma makes it to the second week of Wimbledon, nobody will complain about all her distracting sponsorship deals.
A PORTRAIT of the Queen painted by a humanoid called Ai-Da Robot has been unveiled for the Platinum Jubilee.
And as Her Majesty herself might murmur — interesting!
Er, was Ai-Da, a robot that also paints and sculpts, completely sober during the work?
Because it looks like Ai-Da had one shot of WD-40 too many.
THE number of war crimes committed in Ukraine went past the 13,000 mark this week.
When Russia swept into Germany at the end of World War Two, its barbaric conduct — mass rape, looting, murder of civilians — was attributed to revenge for Nazi Germany’s conduct in Russia.
Now the drunken Red Army rabble are behaving in EXACTLY the same way in peaceful Ukraine as they did in war-mongering Nazi Germany in 1945.
What’s the excuse this time, comrade?
BUTLER SERVES ELVIS
ELVIS impersonators inevitably tend to gravitate towards the later years.
It is tough to capture Elvis at the moment he changed the world.
But in Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming Elvis film, Austin Butler pulls it off.
“This ain’t no nostalgia show!” screams Butler’s Elvis, and the genius of his performance is that it gives a sense of what it must have been like to hear that sound and see that face for the first time.
Austin Butler doesn’t impersonate Elvis.
Butler inhabits him.
TEN years ago, a 20-year-old maniac shot dead 26 people at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, including 20 children aged between five and ten years old.
President Barack Obama spoke movingly about his “overwhelming grief” and the lives that had been so cruelly stolen from those “beautiful little kids”, swearing to do “everything in my power as President to help”.
It was Obama’s greatest speech. Angry, passionate, full of grief and pain.
Yet America did not change. And ten years on from Obama’s passionate pledge, President Joe Biden is vowing to change America’s gun culture after another teenage psychopath murdered 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
But if Obama in his prime could not change America’s murderous gun culture, then Biden in his dotage surely hasn’t got a hope in hell.
MOUTHY students at Loughborough University bit off more than they could munch when they taunted boxer Anthony Joshua from a window in their halls of residence.
AJ objected to their sneering suggestion that he had ducked a fight with Tyson Fury, and went upstairs to confront the students in their dorm.
“Watch your mouths,” Joshua growled.
I bet they dropped their Pot Noodles.
Another Tyson — Mike — recently dealt with a heckler who was sitting behind him on a plane with flying fists.
Those gobby students are lucky that AJ is a gentleman.
HABBY EVER AVATAR
WE did not watch Abba grow old.
Their last live concert was in Tokyo in 1980. The last live performance was on Noel Edmonds’ Late Late Breakfast Show, warbling Thank You For The Music, in 1982.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are 80 next year. Somehow that is not a shock as their faces are as familiar to us as the Queen’s. We have watched the Rolling Stones age. But when Abba did that last gig in Japan, Agnetha Fältskog was just 30 years old.
That is why Abba’s spectacular new show, Abba Voyage, performed by CGI avatars — Abbatars! — of our Swedish chums in their golden, silky-skinned prime feels like such a revelation.
The technology itself is brilliant, even revolutionary — it surely means music lovers could be watching the Stones in Hyde Park or the Beatles in Shea Stadium 100 years from now.
But even more than this, Björn, Benny, Anni-Frid and Agnetha look exactly as they would look if passing time was not so merciless.
Remember them this way.
MEGHAN and Mr Meghan rabbit endlessly about compassion.
It is all over their Archewell website.
“What is compassion?” they rhetorically ponder.
Yet Meghan’s old dad, Thomas Markle, languishes in a hospital bed after a massive stroke, still estranged from his daughter and her royal ginger whinger.
Thomas is a man who has never even met his son-in-law. Who was denied the chance to walk his daughter down the aisle.
Who has never met his two grandchildren, Archie and Lilibet.
If ever a soul needed a morsel of compassion from his daughter and son-in-law, it is Thomas Markle.
Yet Harry and Meghan show no sign of reaching out to this seriously ill 77-year-old man.
What a shame Meghan and Harry didn’t save any of their organic, fairtrade, fully recyclable compassion for her father.