When I first knew Boris Johnson, the man who became Prime Minister had a terrible reputation for never standing his round.
I took what was later described as a “benign” view, telling his biographer: “I don’t think it was meanness. He just didn’t know the rules.”
Not knowing the rules and breaking them at every turn has been the story of Boris’s life, personal and political.
Getting away with it has been his extraordinary, though not admirable, habit. But not because he didn’t know. He just doesn’t care.
As another colleague remembers from when Boris was a reporter in Brussels, he had a “contempt for people he considered inferior in any way. He has a profound sense of class and hierarchy”.
Nothing exemplifies that more than the vile anti-working class rant revealed this week, in which he dismissed workers as “drunk, criminal and feckless”.
Ignored
In a column for a right-wing magazine from before he became a politician, Johnson described single mums as “irresponsible” “uppity” and “ignorant”.
It is this standard that sets the bar for his premiership and the behaviour of his party and ministers. The Tory Party is free to unleash its nasty side again.
Theresa May, who first identified it, failed to rid the party of its deep-rooted loathing of the “inferior” classes or those simply in need of social justice.
This week’s treatment by Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab of the parents of Harry Dunn, the 19-year-old killed in an accident with an American diplomat’s wife, is an example of the party Boris Johnson now presides over.
He refused to spare them the time of day when they turned up at a meeting in his posh Esher and Walton constituency to ask what progress was being made on extraditing the suspect driver.
As Harry’s father Tim said: “We were treated like we were dirt on the bottom of your shoes. He just ignored me as he left.”
An organiser of the public meeting said the Dunns were barred for “fire safety” reasons.
A spokesman for Mr Raab said his door was “always open” for the Dunns. Except when he’s behind it.
A lack of morality and respect lies at the heart of a myriad of cases where Tory candidates have had to resign when found out.
Such as the selection by Norfolk Tory members of an election candidate in spite of his expressed view that women “should keep their knickers on” to avoid being raped.
High morals are infamously not the strong point of a charlatan PM who once warned that Nelson Mandela was moving Africa “towards the tyranny of black majority rule”.
Whose philosophy is summed up in his own words: “The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.”
It demeans our nation that he is now. And it is high time he was dismissed.
