ALTHOUGH we are told that the birthday cake in question might have been Colin The Caterpillar from M&S, other cakes are available. Here are a few suggestions.

How about Other People’s Dough Doughnuts, as Boris Johnson does like blowing our money away. Or Millionaire Mate’s Shortbread, as there’s always a rich friend around when he’s forgotten his wallet while ordering gold wallpaper.

And then – sorry, I stole this one from somewhere – there is the plain old Flan B, ready for when  Flan A has flopped.

You know something has  changed when anger turns to ridicule. That point was reached with a sugary squelch last night when a friendly Tory MP tried to stick up for Boris Johnson over the partygate affair.

The lockdown parties, the birthday parties, the cheese-and-wining ‘business meetings’, and the suitcases full of booze are all now being investigated by senior civil servant Sue Gray and the Metropolitan Police.

The Tory MP Conor Burns thought he would help his boss by telling Channel 4 News that Johnson had been “ambushed by a cake” at that birthday party he shouldn’t have been having.

Twitter virtually broke down under the weight of sour hilarity. A lighter moment saw Nigella Lawson joke that she would use Ambushed By Cake as the title of her next book, only for the tone-deaf Mr Burns to say that she could have that one on him.

All this painful news has caused the Boris-backing Daily Mail to have conniptions today while flouncing out this front-page headline: “A nation that’s lost all sense of proportion.”

Well, yes. Or a newspaper that’s lost all sense of what a newspaper is supposed to do: report what’s going on, not dress up blatant views as news.

Yes, it could be cake and wine that do for Johnson, and that would in one sense be ridiculous. But the anger is real; the anger from those who stuck by the rules, sometimes at great personal anguish, won’t be washed away by the pained bleating we hear from Johnson’s supporters.

Jacob Rees-Mogg seems to be the first choice of bleater. And you have to say that’s a tricky role to fulfil when you look less like a natural cheerleader than a high-end funeral director who is about to hand over the bill with a whispered threat about paying by next Tuesday. A man of such thin-skinned condescension is just who you want covering your back on Newsnight.

A fellow Tory who appeared alongside the coffin-follower was not impressed with Rees-Mogg’s argument that this was all just about cake.

The Conservative peer Lord Finkelstein said: “Jacob Rees-Mogg says both inaccurately and intellectually offensively that this is a row about cake ­– this is a row about whether governments are subject to the laws they set, which is a far more profound question than about birthday cake.”

Quite so. It’s about people mostly playing by the rules, either gladly or with a leaden heart; it’s about people doing what they were supposed to do, only to discover that those making the rules were having a high old time.

That may yet turn out not to be the case, but it seems unlikely, and sometimes leaders are undone by perception gone deep. There has always been something deeply off about the way Johnson conducts himself, and that has now infected the government. And don’t whine about the media being in cahoots with the Labour Party, especially not if you’re a member of the party that’s normally in cahoots with the media.

If Johnson falls, it will all be his own doing, an arrogant clown tripped up by shoelaces he couldn’t be bothered to tie, because tying shoelaces is for little people.