One wonders what Priti Patel, whose personal brand borders on sociopathic cruelty, makes of her own shortcomings

Shall we begin our latest rove into the post-shame world of Priti Patel right back at the beginning? 

It starts 10 years ago, when the younger, but by no means less idiotic, MP for Witham was a guest on Question Time. This kind, empathetic lady, as she has now been described by more than 40 Tory MPs on social media, because the prime minister told them to do so, was arguing for the return of the death penalty, when it was explained to her that, wherever and whenever it has existed, it has led to the accidental execution of innocent people.

This was a point that she did not merely disagree with; she was simply unable to understand it. It’s on YouTube. Have a look. The jaw lowers, the eyes begin to gaze in different directions, a look known in America as “checking first and third”. It’s just too complicated for her. It can’t go in.

Still, a decade on, she has at least finally been provided with a practical lesson on the subject of the punishment being taken by the wrong person.

The report into allegations of bullying conduct towards her staff has found her to be in breach of the ministerial code, and the person who’s now out of a job is not her, but the guy who wrote the report.

Sometimes these scandals are too wordy to explain; not this one. So here goes. Priti Patel bullies staff. Bullying is investigated by adviser on standards in public life. Patel is found in breach of those standards. Boris Johnson decides not to apply those standards, so as not to have to sack her. Adviser, Sir Alex Allen, to give him his full name, decides he has no choice but to resign.

Even in a world that has been fully auto-parodic for some time now, where the role of the satirist is merely to write down events in chronological order, the Patel saga takes some improving upon. Here goes a politician whose own carefully cultivated personal brand is a toughness on wrongdoing that borders on sociopathic cruelty, who has presumably examined her own shortcomings and I imagine has found only great reserves of personal moral cowardice that would be enough to shock even her most dedicated detractors.

She has publicly conceded that, if she had bullied anyone, it was done “unintentionally,” and should therefore be overlooked. That’s the actual home secretary saying that, just so you’re clear. The actual home secretary arguing that some of the most basic principles of the law, things like ignorance not being an excuse, should not apply to her.

It’s not merely that she shames herself. She has been a post-shame person for some time. She has already been forced to resign from the cabinet once after being found to have endangered national security by setting up secret meetings with, among others, the Israeli prime minister, while on a family holiday.

It’s the shame that must be foist, gladly we must assume, on others. No sooner had Boris Johnson decided not to bother upholding the ministerial code, and so forcing his adviser on the subject to resign, than he had issued instructions to his MPs to “form a square around the Prittster”.

An egregious turn of phrase, perhaps, but if one wishes to extend the benefit of the doubt, a kind of chummy loyalty is no bad character trait. But towering naivety is. This would be the second time in recent months that Boris Johnson would compel his colleagues to humiliate themselves in a failed attempt at the public rehabilitation of a loyal ally, the first being Dominic Cummings, and well, that did not end so well.

There are many absurdly craven messages to choose from, but Andrea Leadsom claims the victory in a crowded field. “I have never seen her bully anyone,” she said, long after the report into the subject had been published, which found the direct opposite. Ms Leadsom has spent years doing universally commended work on bullying and harassment in Westminster, winning over legions of Brexit-hating detractors. And yet here she was, happy to turn a blind eye to reality with a witless phrase, for no reason beyond Boris Johnson having told her to.

No one wins, when this is the level to which the public realm so easily and repeatedly descends. When the rules of the game are to do what you like, to take no responsibility, and brazen it out till it goes away.

Naturally it should so happen that the events should come at the end of National Anti-Bullying Week, and the government is again behaving in a way that forces parents to “form a square” around their own children, so that the simple moral lessons they are trying to teach are not undone by an accidental glimpse of what their actual leaders are up to.

Where we go next is anybody’s guess, though the government-by-reality-TV-show happening on the other side of the Atlantic offers many lessons, in that it’s also unsafe for kids to watch.

The playground bully tends to grow out of it, in the end. More often than not, that old cliche – you’re better than that – turns out to be the truth. It’s not altogether clear what happens when it’s not. When they really can’t do any better.