Looks very much like ‘honest’ John’s memory is starting to go.

Fair’s fair, he has a point with his observation that:

“It does point out the hypocrisy of what they said at the time: ‘purer than pure’, ‘whiter than white’, ‘tough on sleaze; tough on the causes of sleaze’.”

Sure enough, there’s been Mandelson, Vaz and Blunkett plus Byers telling porkies to a select committee plus a bit dodgy stuff with Ecclestone and the ban on tobacco sponsorship and some iffy stuff with peerages and donations.

Against that we have - just from memory…

Stephen Milligan - death by auto-erotic asphyxiation plus self bondage and cross-dressing.

Jonathan Aitken - perjury and perverting the course of justice, sentenced to 18 month imprisonment

Jeffrey Archer - perjury and perverting the course of justice, sentenced to four years imprisonment

Neil Hamilton, Graham Riddick, David Tredinnick, Ian Greer and Tim Smith - cash for questions.

And that’s without getting into the nocturnal activities of David Mellor, Tim Yeo and dear old Steve ‘Shagger’ Norris.

All of which puts to the sword his comment that:

“This Government has not only had more of what loosely one might call ’sleaze’, than the previous government - or any previous government - it actually has been much closer to the prime minister and most of the people who have been in difficulty would be those who call themselves Blairites rather than Old Labour.”

By my count that still puts us two prison sentences and a death straight off the pages of the collected works of the Marquis De Sade short of own government’s record.

And what of John himself - while he was lecturing the country of getting ‘Back to Basics’ it later transpired he’d been getting down to basics with Edwina Currie and possibly, if Max Hasting’s comments in ‘The Editor’ are to be taken as gospel, Sarah Hogg, a colleague of Hastings at the Daily Telegraph.

Remind me again of that saying about people in glass houses…