There was a temptation this week to write this column about the psychodrama that is the Tory government’s attempts to appoint a new leader and hence a new Prime Minister, but things are moving so quickly that it probably would have been out of date by the time you got to read it.

You won’t be surprised to hear I really don’t care who takes over. The Conservatives have lurched so far to the right it’s academic which one finally gets the nod from less than 200,000 mainly elderly Tory Party members.

What is clear from the early runners and riders is they are all promising tax cuts, especially for business (with the exception of former Chancellor Rishi Sunak, he of the US green card and non-dom status multi-millionaire wife who says now is not the right time).

Just a pity they are not letting us know at the same time as the promised tax cuts exactly what services they won’t be funding as a result.

To be honest, whoever stands for the leadership, I hold them all in contempt and I will happily detail exactly why.

They were silent when Boris Johnson illegally prorogued Parliament. They were silent when Johnson allowed Covid-positive elderly people to be discharged from hospital into care homes without testing, allowing the virus to claim tens of thousands of lives.

They were silent when he said he had ‘got Brexit done’ despite the fact that it patently hasn’t been ‘done’ – just ask the people of Northern Ireland.

They were silent when Johnson ignored a ruling on Priti Patel’s ‘bullying’ and they were silent when he declared he would rather ‘let the bodies pile high in their thousands’ than call another Covid lockdown in the autumn of 2020.

They were silent when lucrative Covid contracts went to Tory allies, with billions of pounds worth of deals handed to associates of ministers and officials. The High Court eventually ruled that a so-called VIP lane to hand out PPE contracts to two firms was unlawful.

They were silent when Johnson refused to sack Dominic Cummings when the former aide was found to have travelled to Durham during the first lockdown, including the now infamous Barnard Castle eye test.

They were silent when Johnson broke his manifesto promises not to increase National Insurance and to maintain the triple lock for state pensions. (They also continued to support the lie that the Tories were introducing the biggest tax cut in a generation when the effects of the NI increase were mitigated somewhat with an increase in the NI threshold – so the Tories put up NI in the first instance then partially reduced the increase and claimed a tax cut.)

They were silent when he tried to tear up Parliament’s ethics rules to save his friend and supporter Owen Paterson who had been found guilty of breaking ‘paid advocacy’ rules and was given a 30-day suspension by Parliament’s standards committee.

They were even silent when Paterson resigned and the LibDems overturned a huge majority to win what had been a previously safe Tory in North Shropshire.

They were silent when Johnson tried to get Tory donor Lord Brownlow to pay for a lavish revamp of his Downing Street flat, a reported £110,000-plus makeover.

And when it comes to the Downing Street lockdown parties – so-called Partygate – they went much further than mere silence, going on the TV media rounds and actually defending Johnson.

Don’t forget, Boris Johnson is the first Prime Minister to commit a criminal offence in office when he was fined £50 by police for attending his birthday party in June 2020, in breach of his own Covid laws. He has also been accused of lying to the House of Commons about Partygate on four separate occasions and is being investigated by Parliament’s committee of privileges.

Remarkably, after years of ‘backing Boris’ (who is still Prime Minister at the time of writing) it was the Chris Pincher affair that finally did for Johnson, forcing the Prime Minister to admit Pincher’s appointment as deputy chief whip, ‘was a mistake’ and ‘in hindsight the wrong thing to do’.

You will recall Pincher resigned his government post (but has not stood down as an MP) after he was accused of groping two men in a private members club, but it later emerged he had already been investigated for his conduct three years ago.

I have no idea why it was this particular scandal that finally prompted more than 50 resignations from the government but all those leadership candidates who have publically defended Johnson in the past now talking about a need for truth, honesty, integrity and trust in politics and politicians need to take a long, hard look at themselves.

Where were truth, honesty and integrity when they were defending the indefensible over the past three years?

This has more than a whiff of hypocrisy about it and they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.