This man's not for changing ... should we mind?

The Prime Minister insists people are "sick of hearing about me and the things I'm alleged to have done wrong" and that his ethical conduct "doesn't matter".

Boris Johnson is a juicy target for knockers of the Bullingdon Club set and the era of Toryshambles politics, but the myriad failings of British politics are deeper and more long-standing than the perceived shortcomings of one individual, however significant and emblematic in this unlovely respect our current PM may be. But should we care?

The late British Prime Minister Harold?Wilson?said of?disgraced Labour politician John Stonehouse, “I never thought he was a spy, but always thought he was a?crook”, which reveals a level of moral certitude sadly lacking in British politics for many decades now. Instead, we find ourselves in the early 2020s unerringly - notwithstanding two disastrous by-election results - voting for incompetence, naked cupidity, and utter stupidity. We shrug our shoulders over our Prime Minister's many very public failings. His failings were, after all, as that ugly saying goes, "priced in" from the very start. For those who watched the Eddie Mair car crash 2013 interview with Boris?Johnson on BBC1's Andrew?Marr Show , and witnessed Mair confront him with the observation that, "you're a nasty piece of work", we now know, nearly a decade later, that Mr Johnson is capable of slipping out of the tightest of binds. Binds that would have surely sunk any number of politicians half a century ago.

The reason for this is that British politics appears no longer to function on the basis of true representation, and political parties seemingly are no longer aligned with strong societal interests or belief systems. If, as the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Michael Gove, once said “the people of this country have had enough of experts"? then the political ambitions of all the major parties have now grown similarly inchoate, unstructured, and, yes, well, uncaring. Indeed, so self-serving is today's political community that no one, and no party, seems to represent stable interests or values. As the University of East Anglia's Professor Alan Finlayson wrote in The Guardian Sleaze is just a symptom – democratic politics in the UK is dying , "Public political engagement is intense but unstructured. Triggered by terrible events, and catalysed by social media, we swarm around issues – posting, petitioning and protesting. But, disconnected from civic institutions and with nowhere to go, energy dissipates rapidly, leaving only a bitter residue of resentment."

Could it be, that we are on the cusp of moving beyond the sensibilities of our stale two-party system? Sensing this change, but not knowing yet how to effectively respond to it, we are perhaps witnessing the "too solid flesh" of the political class "melt,?thaw, and resolve itself into a dew".

Writing in the Financial Times , social researcher and the director of the British Foreign Policy Group Sophia Gaston, believes that, "Britons are also resilient and pragmatic, tending to see economic and political fortunes as cyclical. The debate around whether Leave voters had willingly chosen to be financially worse-off missed the point: a tough decade is generally expected to be followed by a more buoyant period."

This brings us back to Boris Johnson and his resolve to continue to be the man he is. Unkempt and ironically detached, a whirlwind of geniality, he is perhaps the acme of our times, muddling on without conviction, but with heaps of short-term pragmatic determination. After all, on the thorny issue of the Northern Ireland protocol, Johnson called for “more pragmatism” and “less theology”.

To paraphrase the late poet Philip Larkin's bleakly amusing This Be The Verse, 'politicians fuck you up, they may not mean to, but they do.?They fill you with the faults they had, and add some extra, just for you'. The modern genius, if genius it truly is, of Mr Johnson and his acolytes, is a firm grasp of the certain knowledge that there are no longer matters of great import anymore, just as much bread and circuses as we all can get our hands on.