The Daily Mail has sneaked into my consciousness again. I only ever see the front page, but maybe that’s enough to leave a stain.

Today’s edition has a blurb asking where readers stand on the great debate dividing Britain.

This is not the morally knotty one about whether the prime minister is a flagrant liar and a scoundrel who broke his own Covid rules, got fined by the Met over partygate, and had yesterday to drag his sorry arse to the Commons to say sorry-not-sorry yet again.

No, this is the ‘shoes off indoors’ debate, one that seems to have passed me by.

Johnson is nowhere to be seen on the Mail’s front page, although his muddy footprints are all over the other papers. The Mail’s loyalty to Johnson knows no bounds. A bit like those ministers who are sent to clean up after their boss while carrying a big shovel and telling lies to cover up his lies, while heading ever deeper into a fabricator’s maze with nothing at its centre.

Johnson says sorry all the time these days without ever appearing to be sorry at all. What’s telling is what came next.

Once he was out of the Commons, Johnson met his MPs, and immediately went into typically combative mode, laying into the BBC and two archbishops for ‘misconstruing’ his plans to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, preached at the weekend that the policy was “the opposite of the nature of God”. His counterpart in York, the Most Rev Stephen Cottrell, said he was “appalled” by the plan, adding: “I think we can do better than this.”

I am not sure what the BBC did wrong, other than reporting what the archbishops had said.

A man without religion approaches archbishops with caution, and sometimes a sharp stick. But the churchmen are right on this terrible, inhumane, duplicitous plan.

Nothing was being misconstrued here.

What the government wants to do, in a shoddy deal stitched up by home secretary Priti Patel against the advice of her most senior civil servant, is to fly some asylum seekers to Rwanda. From where, reportedly, they will not be allowed to return.

The argument for this bizarre idea is that it will cut dangerous Channel crossings, although how that might work is anybody’s guess.

Incidentally, to tap into the warped logic used to excuse this policy, the home secretary insists that if you can afford to pay for a crossing, then you have money and don’t need to come to Britain.

What a disgrace. One of the richest countries in the world is passing the buck to one of the poorest, sending desperate people to Rwanda on a one-way ticket.

Would such an idea even work? Here is the view of that noted complaining lefty, Theresa May ­– “I do not support the removal to Rwanda policy on the grounds of legality, practicality and efficacy.”

And that from the architect of the hostile environment policy that spawned the Windrush scandal.

Of course, the Rwanda plan may never happen, and it may be just the latest diversionary tactic in the endless culture wars, another nasty squabble in the basement. It’s quite possible that what Johnson wants is for this scheme to be dragged through the courts, allowing him to rant and puff about “lefty lawyers” and “the people’s priorities”.

Ah, the people.

Many people volunteered to take in Ukrainian refugees, only to find that the system was bogged down with cruel bureaucracy. The enthusiasm to help suggests a country that is more open to migrants and asylum seekers than our own government likes to believe. As that man of York said, we are better than this.

Boris Johnson wants to appeal to our lesser nature, and the way to stop that is to be better than him. Not that it’s much of a moral yardstick.

As for those shoes, downstairs wear is allowed as we have hard floors, but shoes are removed before ascending the stairs.