HOW Vladimir Putin must have laughed. He was informed on Monday that the Prime Minister could not after all hold his crucial telephone conversation urging Russia not to invade the Ukraine. Why? Because he had to defend himself in the Commons over a party or parties that, er, didn't take place.

You could hear the guffaws all the way from the Kremlin. “Boris, tovarich. I could give you some good advice on how to suppress parties.”

What a spectacle of democracy as the Gray non-report was debated in the House of Commons. There was Boris Johnson, prattling and gabbling like a guilty schoolboy with his shirt tails hanging out. Sir Keir Starmer like a supply teacher who's just caught boys smoking in the gender-neutral toilets (even though he has been snapped having a fly puff himself during the last staff meeting). Bunter Blackford fit to burst expelling himself from the school assembly to the intense relief of everyone involved.

Why Ms Gray allowed her 12 pages of waffle to be published at all is for her to explain. She should have stuck to her guns and said that any report that did not name names, or broken lockdown rules, was not worth the paper it wasn't printed on.

The top line of her document was that “excessive alcohol consumption is not appropriate in a professional workplace”. Oh really? There should be guidance about this. Oh, and there are “blurred lines of accountability”. You can say that again: most of them were probably too pissed to speak.

What was even more ridiculous was Ian Blackford, prior to ejecting himself from the Commons, demanding that the Government should publish the full report. It's not the Government that’s sitting on it. That was down to the Met's last-minute decision to redact it. One of the most cack-handed exercises in censorship committed by the forces of the law in memory.

We don't investigate such crimes “retrospectively”, said the Met boss Cressida Dick initially, confirming what everyone who has recently been burgled knows only too well. Only we now do because we need to issue some parking tickets. And so the Partygate report was excised of anything worth knowing about until the police have gone through the laborious process of examining it.

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I know they are slow readers in the Met, but the idea that this is going to take weeks or months seems excessive even for them. All the evidence is there, we are assured: photos, CCTV, What'sApp messages.

Like in Line of Duty, DC Chloe Bishop will be drafted in to watch endless footage of clanking suitcases being dragged past the cameras on TFI Friday. Number 10 police winking in appreciation. Civil servants staggering out at 4am, ties askew and covered with lipstick, trying to find their car keys.

And those What'sApp messages: “Whose turn is it to go to the Co-op, Tamara?” “Not me I did it last night.” “ Simon: get off your fat arse – the troops are dying of thirst in here.” “Who the F has nicked Abba's Greatest? Can't dance to bloody James Blunt."

Then there is the unsolved mystery of Cakegate. Was the Prime Minister ambushed by a birthday cake? Or was there no cake at all, as inside sources are claiming? Was it a cake of the mind? Have the police cordoned off the No 10 flat with yellow “crime scene” tape while the forensics in their non-contamination suits examine the flooring for incriminating crumbs?

An even greater question which is agonising the nation is: The Apology. What was the Prime Minister apologising for in his statement to MPs? What was the mirror he said he should look into? And what does it show? TV and radio presenters have been going into ecstasy of indignation over this. How can he apologise for something he said he didn't do?

Further, Mr Johnson said there were no parties, and that no rules were broken. So how can he apologise for breaking them? Ms Gray says there was a failure of leadership. Is thePM apologising for that, in which case he is shouldering blame, or is he talking about the civil service? Where do these “blurred lines of accountability” come to rest?

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Helpfully, Dominic Cummings was back in action last night filling in the gaps in Ms Gray's ludicrous “update”. Sleuths in the press have been trying to persuade us they had inside knowledge on parties that hadn't come directly from the PM’s former senior adviser. As if.

This whole farce has been orchestrated by Boris Johnson's former consiglieri, who has been posting about parties in those eye-popping blog posts which the parliamentary lobby pretends not to read. He will not relent until the “Wrong Un”, as he calls Carrie Symonds, is carried out of No 10 in the shopping trolley along with their assorted brats. What a grudge match.

Never has the advice “never apologise, never explain” been more apt. I haven't a clue what Mr Johnson is apologising for and nor does Ms Gray. The Prime Minister is not the office manager, responsible for poking his nose into drink-stained rubbish bins or opening clanking suitcases. He has moral responsibility for the conduct of the Cabinet and his Government, but disciplinary matters in the civil service are not his direct concern.

This is the issue vexing the civil service unions, and why there is such a tussle behind the curtains. The police investigation is likely to deliver a flurry of fixed penalty notices – summary fines, of the same criminal weight as parking tickets. Are top civil servants in No 10, like the Permanent Secretary Martin Reynolds, going to be sacked for that? The boozing is not in itself a criminal matter, under the vague-as-fog lockdown legislation – only the unjustified gatherings of households.

At any rate, the Prime Minister appears to have wriggled free like the “greased pig” he was famously called by David Cameron. But it will be sick-making to see a procession of Government employees acquiring cardboard boxes – not for drink, but to carry the contents of their desk as they depart for the wilderness of private sector employment.

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