If you understand why politicians no longer resign over scandals, you understand how democracies slide into autocracy.

Lord Peter Mandelson has never displayed much integrity. It can have come as little surprise to those who knew him that he was as closely engaged with Jeffrey Epstein as he was. Nor can it have surprised many that he would behave with such cavalier disdain for the “rules”. Or indeed the laws regarding the alleged dissemination of “insider information”.

But Mandelson’s fall illustrates something much more dangerous than merely the entertaining spectacle of a man’s well documented fall from grace. It illustrates the all too frequent absence of integrity in today’s political circles. And its replacement with the pursuit of personal gain. At almost any cost.

In 1963 John Profumo lied to the house regarding his relationship with Christine Keeler. In 2021 the “right honourable” Boris Johnson was found guilty of repeatedly misleading the house in relation to “Partygate”. Profumo resigned and spent the remainder of his life working at a London based charity. Johnson merely swatted the accusations away like a summer mosquito, describing the findings as “deranged” and the committee as a “kangaroo court”. Little wonder Mandelson – “a fighter not a quitter” - felt that denial and poor recall would be a sufficient response.

Our politicians are described as “the honourable” for a reason. That they are not undermines the entirety of our rather too gentlemanly system. So much is clear, but what is profoundly disturbing is that this lack of integrity extends to actively altering the rules that impede politicians or facilitate criticism of them.

In 2019 Boris Johnson’s government’s attempted to prorogue Parliament to facilitate the Brexit agreement. The Supreme Court later ruled this to be unlawful. In 2021 the same government attempted to overhaul the Parliamentary Standards Committee system in an effort to prevent the suspension of a Conservative MP guilty of breaches of lobbying rules. The “Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act” in 2022 increased police powers to an extent that threatened fundamental freedoms of assembly, speech and privacy in response to criticisms of immigration policy. Politicians have labelled Judges “enemies of the people”, and there have been regular attacks on human rights law and the process of Judicial Review.

These and other rules like them provide us with the basis for our security and freedoms.

Moves to subvert them are the first, barely perceptible steps on the road to autocracy.

They are often irreversible.

Take a close look at President Trump’s merely one year old administration. Then look at where Putin’s Russia started. The evidence is glaring.