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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Politics
Mark Steel

'Resignation of PM's ethics adviser shows the Government is falling apart'

This is astonishing news that Boris Johnson’s ethics adviser has resigned. Who would have guessed he had an ethics adviser?

That must be the most disheartening job in the world.

It’s almost as pointless as being a ­vegetarian diet adviser to a lion.

Every night you’d sigh: “I made a lovely aubergine bake, but the lion went straight out and ate a zebra.” Then you’d console yourself that at least you were not Boris Johnson’s Ethics Adviser, like Lord Geidt.

The idea of ethics goes back to the ancient Greeks, when philosophers wrote on how to behave in a way that was moral.

Maybe one of them wrote: “The person who is noble within their soul, shall instruct their neighbours that on no account must they meet with others, not even their relatives.

Boris Johnson may not recruit a new ethics adviser (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

“Then, if they are truly filled with goodness and love of their fellow man, they will themselves have a series of bloody great parties with cake and all sorts. Then they shall lie and say they were at work. Then and only then, can a man claim to be truly ethical.”

So what would Johnson be doing WITHOUT an ethics adviser? The adviser must have spent all day saying: “No Prime Minister, you can’t send asylum seekers into space. No, you can’t have a party in the garden where you set fire to a panda. No, it isn’t ethical to sell orphans to raise money for a hot tub in Downing Street.”

Now the Government seems to be falling apart, as one by one they give up on defending the Prime Minister.

This week it will be reported that the Tsar for not telling Blatant and Obvious Lies has resigned, saying: “The Prime Minister wanted to announce he was the world pole vault champion.

“When I suggested this was a blatant and obvious lie, he flew into a rage and said Michelle Obama made him say it.”

If they try to excuse him, they sound marvellous. The Conservative candidate in the Tiverton by-election was asked if she thought he was honest, and said: “I think Boris thinks he is an honest person”.

That’s very modern, to suggest we should accept someone is honest, if they were born dishonest, look and sound dishonest, but identify as honest.

Michelle Obama blamed by Boris Johnson (ITV)

The candidate in the other by-election, in Wakefield, said: “We should still trust Tories, as we still trust doctors despite Harold Shipman.”

That makes sense, as long as doctors still voted for Harold Shipman to be their leader, after all his murders were revealed. And many doctors said he had every right to murder who he liked because he’d been working hard.

Eventually Boris Johnson will tell us “the reason I have not always been ethical, is because of a shortage of ethics, caused by the war in Ukraine, that I can do nothing about.

“But we are working extremely hard to secure a new ethics deal, buying a record amount of ethics from Saudi Arabia, which would not have been possible if it wasn’t for Brexit.”

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