THIS is where we end up if we rely on the Tory Party’s sense of shame. Crooks in Downing Street apparently determined to brazen out their law-breaking — and getting away with it.

The Conservative Party, once trading as the epitome of bourgeois probity, is indulging Boris Johnson for disregarding the very laws he wrote.

The morality of his behaviour seems of marginal concern to the one group that can remove him from office, Tory MPs and the Cabinet in particular.

That is a good deal less than shocking. A group prepared to ship desperate refugees off to Rwanda is not going to be swayed by ethical appeals.

The only thing that will persuade them to get shot of Johnson will be the belief that he has become an electoral liability that will cost them their seats — or at least their ministerial limousines.

Perhaps he will be proved so in the forthcoming local elections. People are certainly angry that Downing Street partied while they were locked down, often denied contact with family and friends, including those marrying or dying.

But when it comes to voting, there needs to be an alternative, unless one is content with abstention, as most people are in local polls.

Here’s the difficulty. Johnson’s problem is that for him life seems to be one long party, his own rules notwithstanding.

Keir Starmer on the other hand looks like a man who wouldn’t go to a party under any circumstances whatsoever. Nor is he the sort of guest anyone would put at the top of their invite list.

That wouldn’t matter perhaps — this is a country which gave John Major more than 14 million votes after all — were it not that his blancmange personality aligns exactly with the character of the one party he is welcome at — the one he leads.

Labour does not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity under his benighted misdirection. If anything Johnson has done, from the pandemic to the Ukraine war, would have been done differently under Starmer, other than profligate partying, it is not clear what.

I suppose that is what happens if you have to run every policy initiative by Peter Mandelson.

Time was, Mandelson had plenty of ideas, albeit often bad ones. When New Labour Mark 1 was fresh as a daisy, he was writing books setting out what it would do.

Today, his agenda could comfortably fit on a postcard: socialism is a very bad thing; the left must be crushed and be seen to be crushed and trade unions should be excluded from the Labour Party. His lordship has got less interesting as he has got richer, which is not unusual in my experience.

He is not, however, even now as dull as Starmer. We are going to discover if Johnson can be bored out of office or not.

Solidarity is great — but war isn’t popular

The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign demonstration on April 9 appears to have been a flop. Despite the official endorsement of several unions, barely a few hundred people showed up.

That is not surprising. Most people surely sympathise with Ukraine and oppose Russia’s invasion and its accompanying brutalities — but they do not want the war prolonged, preferring to see it ended as soon as possible through negotiations.

They understand that the longer combat continues, more civilians will die and more of Ukraine will be laid waste.

People also know that escalating conflict raises the likelihood of war spreading, by accident or design, into a direct Nato-Russia clash, even if some liberals seem intensely relaxed, to coin a phrase, about such a development.

The policy of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, mainly motivated by the pro-imperialist Alliance for Workers Liberty, is to dismiss negotiations, urge still greater arms deliveries to Ukraine and fantasise about Vladimir Putin being overthrown.

It would be fine if the war could end tomorrow with Russia giving up and withdrawing. But, to put it at its mildest, a diplomatic solution is more likely. That is not the same thing as a Ukrainian capitulation.

The outlines of an agreement are in view — but there are powerful Nato forces who do not want a deal. Starmer and the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign support them. At best they are completely aligned with Johnson’s government, at worst they are to the bellicose right of it.

The divide in the labour movement today is between those who urge such a peaceful resolution and want the British government to help work towards it and those willing to see Ukrainian people suffer and risk a wider war, as long as the Russians are being held militarily.

Most trade unionists know what side they are on given such a choice. They can recognise dangerous posturing when it parades down Whitehall shouting “arms, arms, arms.”

Hopefully the unions which have allowed understandable sympathy with the Ukrainian people’s ordeal misdirect them into an alliance with the pro-Nato crowd will reflect on the feeble turnout.

Iraq war: no free speech in Murdoch’s world

I have a sneaking regard for Piers Morgan. He took a courageous campaigning stance against the Iraq war as editor of the Mirror and got punished for it, unlike the authors of that calamity.

But he is not Nelson Mandela, as he appears to imagine. For one thing, Rupert Murdoch would never have given Mandela a job, which he has done for Morgan.

Morgan has alas succumbed to the tiresome habit of high-profile pundits of claiming that free speech is imperilled every time they lose a particular job, or even are just criticised.

But if he is on that high horse he could ask his new boss — “If I had been an editor of a Murdoch paper during the Iraq war, would I have been allowed to take the anti-invasion line I did at the Mirror?”

The 70-plus editors of Murdoch’s papers at the time know the answer. On an issue which divided world opinion as few others, all of them had to be in the Bush-Blair camp. Now that really is “cancel culture.”