There will have been plenty of Conservatives nursing some painful hangovers in the last 48 hours - without even being at a party or having so much as a ladle of punch.

The leak of some excruciating video footage that will have induced a feeling of nausea was the sight of party activists letting their hair down at a ‘social gathering’. Nothing wrong with that, you might say.

The problem: it amounted to a flagrant breach of the government’s rules introduced to help stem the spread of Covid. Oh, and it was taking place at Downing Street.

Yes, ‘Party-gate - the sequel’ - was proving a viral hit, with an audience of nervous Conservatives and horrified viewers in general struggling to make sense of the stupidity of dim-witted Downing Street staffers cheerfully ignoring the very rules they had created to curb the pandemic.

Does it matter? We all now know there were dozens of ‘events’ in Downing Street and Westminster, so what does this add other than there seems to have been a preponderance of special advisers and aides who were doing the exact opposite of what they were telling us mere mortals?

It is a fair question but the leak converges with today’s debate at Westminster over the controversial Privileges’ committee report which had recommended sanctions against the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

He has evaded that humiliating prospect by the ultimate political Kamikaze - resigning with immediate effect as an MP, and thereby also evading the possibility of sanctions.

This ought to draw a line under a period in which we have seen the worst side of politics, a period in which the ‘them and us’ divide has cast MPs in a poor light.

That is brutally unfair to a lot of MPs - and councillors - who work their socks off for the benefit of their area and the people they represent.

It has been a period which was reminiscent of the early 1990s when there was a steady stream of Tories caught up in one sexual scandal or another and exposed by the tabloid press.

At the time, these escapades were exposed and justified because the then-Prime Minister John Major had invoked the slogan ‘back to basics’ to capture his vision of a morally upright government.

Looking back, Labour’s landslide victory under Blair was nothing - or very little - to do with that.

It was more the fact that for many voters, it was - after 18 years - time for a change, or at least time to see what another government could do.

And it is that that is worrying Conservative Party chiefs more than anything. Rishi Sunak may well be doing a half decent job in the eyes of some. But there is a growing sense that whatever he or his party do, it is not going to change the outcome when the next general election is called.

When your time is up, it’s up. And maybe that is why Boris has fled the scene of a political pile-up.