We must now turn to the most damning allegation Boris Johnson has faced in at least half an hour

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A third consecutive session of Prime Minister’s Questions in which the Prime Minister will not answer any questions as he still needs an official to tell him whether or not he attended a party in his own garden (while ‘he already admitted he did) stretches the format just a bit.

There are only so many times you can ask someone who should have quit a long time ago whether or not they are going to quit and have them say they are not. But what other choice do you have but to keep trying?

It was the same old thing. Whatever the question, he likes to call Keir Starmer Captain Hindsight. On that occasion, Starmer at least pointed out that the man who brought you these lines, there were no parties / I didn’t attend any parties / I attended some parties but I didn’t know that they were parties is probably better suited than him to wear the Captain Hindsight armband.

Arguably the most interesting thing that happened during PMQs is what happened elsewhere. One of the various almost forgotten outrages that has somehow been drowned out by others is that Johnson personally intervened to evacuate dogs from Afghanistan in front of Afghan civilians who had been assisting British forces there, putting their lives in extreme danger.

Johnson called that claim complete nonsense on live TV. When he did, he gave no explanation as to exactly why his parliamentary private secretary, MP Trudy Harrison, emailed Afghan dog handler Pen Farthing to say he was allowed to travel to Kabul airport with his pets.

And as he dithered and dithered around the outbox, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee quietly tabled its report into the case, which contains leaked emails that appear to show the Prime Minister indeed intervened directly in the case. ‘case.

The emails are one of many reasons, but certainly the main one, that prompted a Foreign Ministry staff member involved in the Kabul evacuation, Raphael Marshall, to resign. There was a direct trade-off between transporting animals from Nowzads and evacuating British nationals and Afghan evacuees, including Afghans who had served with British soldiers, he said at the time.

Prime ministers willing to be idiot advocates have long since been reduced to having to go on TV and lament the fact that there is so much going on in the world, and all the media wants to do, c is keep talking about cake. It’s not worth pointing out that this isn’t a cakewalk; it’s about the prime minister who broke the law and that there needs to be a criminal investigation into the events that happened in his house. But at least, for a few hours maybe, they got their wish.

There is something else to discuss and it is what the Foreign Affairs Select Committee considers reasonably clear evidence that Boris Johnson personally intervened to expedite the release of some dogs from Afghanistan at the expense of people who risked their lives for the country of which he is the first. Minister. (At least one of these Afghan citizens is known to have risked his life in this way, again, as he failed to evacuate from Kabul, but drowned and died off Calais in November when his dinghy capsized.)

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I don’t say those words lightly, but it’s probably the most damning allegation Johnson has faced in at least half an hour. And naturally, as with all allegations against Johnson, the firing of the allegation itself is quickly followed by the prosecutor that he very blatantly and very publicly lied about it.

We have to wait and see how this one plays out. There were no dogs. Nobody told me about the dogs. I knew about dogs but I didn’t know they were dogs.

In the meantime, we are told, Johnson is touring the antechambers of the House of Commons, chatting with his backbench MPs, seeking to shore up his support. He is, according to one of these deputies, telling his colleagues that this is a witch hunt and that he has survived worse before.

That, you won’t be shocked to learn, isn’t entirely true. On previous occasions when he was found to have lied, he lost his job, once at the Times and once from the shadow cabinet. On this occasion, he is simply told that he should probably resign for lying. But it is also true that on those occasions he responded not by enduring but by going and then failing upwards. When you’re prime minister, it’s hard to keep failing at the top. The only way, in the end, is down.

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