Forget Boris and the blonde Tory aide; what really scandalises the political Establishment is the Telegraph columnist’s use of language.

Boris is to English what my poodle Maisie is to a tennis ball; bouncy creatures both, neither can resist being playful, picking up a thing and running with it in delighted circles.

In sharp contrast, most MPs are dedicated to using what George Orwell identified as phrases “tacked together like prefabricated sections of a hen-house”. Dead words from which life and soul has long drained away.

Desiccated, dreary paragraphs delivered by “strong and stable” speaking clocks who are terrified of saying anything colourful or interesting lest they upset the vast and growing army of the Waiting to be Offended.

On the vanishingly rare occasion when a senior politician expresses something the general public actually agrees with, it is immediately called a “gaffe”. The offender, ticked off for “inappropriate” behaviour, grovels obediently.