Boris Johnson will get away with the Jennifer Arcuri scandal – we’re already letting him

Do we still expect our servants to follow the laws governing their use of power? Or are national sensibilities so degraded that his scandals only elicit a weary murmur of ‘Ach, it’s just Boris being Boris’?

I must say, it’s a slice of luck for Boris Johnson that he has nothing else on his prime ministerial plate right now. If he did have a serious major political distraction, you’d worry about him being overwhelmed by the oncoming storm.

Early on Monday, Jennifer Arcuri, the prime minister’s “friend” and, according to Johnson, “legitimate businesswoman”, will give her first TV interview to Good Morning Britain, while Tuesday is the deadline for Johnson to provide the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) oversight committee with details of their relationship.

If he ignores it, the GLA has the power to summon Johnson, and compel him to hand over relevant texts and emails from 2012, when this sprightly American was giving the Luddite mayor of London “technology advice” at her Shoreditch flat.

Johnson’s ability to retrieve such communications will offer a useful guide to the quality of her tuition.

No one other than the pair themselves can know if “technology advice” deserves to replace “Ugandan discussions” as the Private Eye euphemism of choice for political extramaritals.

Six of Arcuri’s friends say they were at it, or at least that she said they were. For now, Arcuri is claiming otherwise.

What we do appear to know is that Johnson couldn’t do enough to help the then 27-year-old student with her embryonic career.

The Sunday Times has a letter he wrote recommending her for a £100,000 per annum job, leading the government quango Tech City.

Nothing in her CV, which included spells as a model and a sushi bar manager, makes the mayoral support for her candidacy less fishy.

Johnson wasn’t the only blond alt-right pin-up to back her application. Milo Yiannopolis, then a Breitbart tech journalist working for another dear friend of Johnson’s, Steve Bannon, also supported it. But he thought her “hopelessly underqualified”, and did so only “to mock” Arcuri and “the shallowness” of the UK government’s approach to the industry.

Like him, Arcuri found the caper amusing. “I still have the letter from Boris,” as she later wrote. “Hahaha. To think that we asked him to write us a recommendation for the CEO of Tech City is just hysterical”.

Isn’t it though? Does hilarity know a higher apex than a public official using his influence to land a woefully ill-suited candidate, with whom he may have been sleeping, lucrative work on the public dime? Hahahahahahaha. And ha.

Some, of course, aren’t so tickled that they are in serious danger of summoning Matron and her trusty ribcage repair kit.

One such could be Johnson. He may not share Dominic Cummings’ conviction that he’ll emerge from this scandal more popular than ever, in the style of the post-impeachment trial Bill Clinton.

Yet the two cases are plainly different. As Arcuri told the Mirror last week, when adducing the absence of electronic evidence (“If I was banging the dude and there was some kind of like trail or sex tape ... but there’s nothing”) as proof of their chasteness, “this is not a Monica Lewinsky”.

It certainly isn’t. Clinton received a BJ on the Oval Office carpet, but never lifted so much as a foreskin, much less a finger, to advance Lewinsky’s career.

Whether BJ had a clinch on a Shoreditch bed, he probably tried to help Arcuri get a job comically beyond the range suggested by her CV. He also appears to have taken her on official mayoral trips, and assisted her in getting an entrepreneurial visa – a document seldom doled out according to previous experience in the field of sashimi.

At the very least, his efforts to promote Madam Arcuri establish him as a blithe spirit so far as the proprieties of public life.

At worst, he could be guilty of malfeasance in public office, an offence carrying a maximum sentence of life.

But welcome as the light relief from the gruelling miseries of Brexit might seem, this story is no longer about him. It is about us and our willingness as a collective to investigate and, if required, punish corruption.

Him we know all about. On the streets of Uxbridge, an admirably laconic elderly woman spoke for many. #FilthyPieceOfToeRag is trending on Twitter as I write.

Us we still can’t be sure about. Does a majority of the public still expect its servants to follow the rules and laws governing their use of power? Or are the national sensibilities so degraded that all the scandal elicits is a weary shrug and a barely audible murmur of “Ach, it’s just Boris being Boris”?

If we had a free press, mass outrage would be inevitable. But we don’t. We have a partly free press and a largely enslaved press, the traditional brand of British corruption being the relationship between billionaire proprietors and right of centre politicians that silences proper reporting and commentary in the cause of mutual interest.

If we had an honest Conservative parliamentary party, Johnson’s survival would be in peril. But the Tories in the Commons are eerily precise replicas of the Republicans in Congress – and hats off to Nicky Morgan for morphing so quickly into our very own Lindsey Graham – who privately loathe and fear Trump, but defend or refuse to condemn his blatant corruption to keep their jobs.

The only force powerful enough to break their formation is public opinion. Only when their career survival depends on honesty, as with Republican senators during Watergate, will they have a sudden collective epiphany about where their duty lies.

As long as British newspapers continue modelling their journalistic values on Fox News – and assuming the police are terrified into inactivity by the revelations of their indescribable idiocy during another investigation involving the political class – Cummings’ prediction might well be proved right.