BORIS JOHNSON is possibly the worst, most damaging prime minister of the modern era and the mounting scandals could yet force him from office. 

There is even a (unfortunately, much smaller) possibility that it could do in this government as a whole. 

Whatever the immediate outcome, and however it unfolds, the overwhelming majority of society has a strong interest in seeing them all gone as soon as possible. 

And whenever they go, we have a huge task ahead of us in fighting for what is necessary, undoing the colossal damage that has been done for over a decade now in the fight for a decent society.

Because there should be no doubt that this government is trashing every institution and law that makes for a decent society. Essentially, this flows from two different visions of society. 

The progressive view of society is largely informed by the post-World War II settlement. By contrast, this government’s view is the culmination of more than 40 years of Thatcherism. Once their project is enacted, this country will look much more like Trump’s United States than Attlee’s Britain.

It may seem strange that this government should falter at the hurdle of Christmas parties, even illegal ones. After all, it has a truly appalling record on letting our own people die, on driving down living standards, of setting the financial vultures on the NHS, of clamping down on dissent, the right to protest and even the right to vote should fall at the hurdle of Christmas parties.

But in politics sometimes there really is a straw which breaks the camel’s back, and this scandal, on top of all the sleaze and corruption scandals seems to have had that effect. 

Labour has been edging closer and even nosing ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls for some time. Johnson’s personal approval ratings have plunged. So the effect of the scandals did not come out of a clear blue sky. 

The public has been increasingly dissatisfied with the government’s catastrophic handling of the pandemic. Some may have been reassured by the claims that all the restrictions were behind us and that the economy would return to normal.

The reality is that both of those promises were untrue. And far from returning to normal, Covid-19 cases and deaths are already rising once more even without the effects of the new variant. 

At the same time, the Office for Budget Responsibility shows that living standards are currently falling and forecast that this will fall further in coming years.

Inevitably, the level of popular disaffection has risen and it is rightly directed at this government and this Prime Minister. 

Once the public learnt that the lockdown rules were only for the rest of us, not the rule-makers, and that they were being laughed at too, the mood has turned much angrier.

It is also no surprise that the government pressed ahead with its truly dreadful Nationality and Borders Bill last week. It is a Bill in the spirit of Enoch Powell, putting into practice his overtly discriminatory rhetoric. 

Under the Bill, asylum-seekers can be processed overseas, they can be pushed back if they are on the Channel, and the rest of us can be subject to deportation and the removal of our citizenship, making up to seven million of us effectively second-class citizens in our own country if our parents were not born here. There are many more, thoroughly reactionary provisions of the legislation.

People rightly talk of being a distraction from the scandals. But more fundamentally this should be seen as part of the government’s permanent campaign against migration and migrants. This is itself thoroughly objectionable. 

Many of us have also made the point that all the aspects of the “hostile environment” are imposed on people who are already established as citizens in this country, as many of them “look foreign” because of their skin colour or dress code.  

The government responded to this criticism by consciously widening the scope of its discriminatory legislation and now specifically includes all those who are currently mistakenly included in their hostile environment policies. They are threatening to replicate the Windrush scandal, but on a much larger scale.

Of course, one of the motivations for this type of legislation over several years and many different governments is to distract from its own unpopularity. 

The increasing unpopularity of government and the Prime Minister meant that they were always going to press ahead with this type of legislation. They will no doubt have been disappointed that it did not get them off the hook.

But the legislation is now on statute book, and we will have to find other ways to oppose it through the courts, through campaigning, and in attempting to get the Labour leadership to commit to reversing it. 

The same is true of almost the entire legislative agenda of this government. All the repressive measures against the right to protest, or vote, or hold the government to account are now in place. 

We are now a country where both police officers and members of the armed forces operating overseas have immunity from the law on matters including rape, torture and murder. 

The government has already passed legislation that will pave the way for a larger and accelerated privatisation of the NHS.  

As already noted, they are intent on driving down living standards. Money can be found for nuclear weapons that breach our international treaty obligations, but not to maintain the universal credit uplift. 

Finally, the government’s unwillingness to take the correct measures to combat the virus, or even to act in a timely way, is once again having disastrous effects. 

It is no use blaming other countries (almost all of the scapegoats being African countries) for the failure of our government to take measures at the airports for testing and quarantining travellers, including British travellers returning home. 

They let omicron seed here, if it was not here already. This is on top of the deepening crisis in the NHS, where long-term underfunding, understaffing and the terrible handling of the pandemic have seen both the unsupportable lengthening of waiting lists, cuts to GP services and delays in treating patients in ambulances.

So this is an all-round attack from a deeply reactionary and now deeply unpopular government. They must be opposed on every front. 

There must be no equivalent of the Blairite acceptance of the Thatcher “reforms.” We must have a commitment to reverse all of these attacks as soon as possible. The people we aim to represent, the overwhelming majority of society, depend on it.

Diane Abbott is Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.